There's Always Someone Eviler · 6:56pm Sep 27th, 2021

(Caution: Spoilers for My Little Pony: A New Generation further down.)

In The Land Before Time VII: The Stone of Cold Fire, Littlefoot’s gang has to contend with Petrie’s narcissist uncle Pterano. Unlike the nameless carnivores that served as antagonists in most of these squijillion dinosaur kids’ movies, Pterano is actually sapient and gets to have dialogue expounding upon his personality and motives. Even more unique about him, a trait only shared with the bully dinos in the third movie (and Daddy Tops, I guess), is that he’s presented as a somewhat sympathetic character with goals that aren’t as simple as feasting on Longneck steak. Sure, he’s got a big problem with ego and accepting responsibility for his actions, but it’s made clear that he has regrets about the harm that he caused and that he doesn’t want the children meddling with his plans to get hurt. It’s a fairly complex situation to have in a movie for eight-year-olds.

But also, because it’s a movie for eight-year-olds, they really need to hammer it into your head to prepare you for the face turn at the end of the movie, so the kids sing a song called Good Inside which is all about how everyone has good inside them, yin and yang etcetera etcetera.

Everybody has a lot of good inside them
and everybody has a little bad
Everyone is going to make you happy sometimes
and everyone is going to make you sad
They will trip on your tail, or tromp on your toes,
or knock you in a puddle
It is not that they mean to be mean, no, no
They are only in a bit of a muddle

It’s an okay thing to have in a kids’ movie. I don’t think that Pterano is exactly a bad person who has a hint of good inside him—a jerk with a heart of gold—rather that he’s a reasonably decent person but he has this one really bad personality flaw that he can’t get over. People can’t always be concisely sorted into good or bad, and people like Pterano may need a lot of help to get over their harmful negative traits.

But then when Pterano falters upon reaching his goal at the eponymous stone of cold fire, his cronies Rinkus and Sierra take over the villain spotlight, and the kids don’t have any problem with leaving them to die when the volcano they’re on erupts. So much for whatever good they had in them, I guess (I mean, not really, they just get comically singed and flung away, but still).

I feel this is a line that gets toed with a lot when it comes to situations that involve redeeming villainous characters. It can’t be enough for a character to just have a reason to be doing bad things and see the error of their ways, there always has to be someone else for the role of villain to be passed off to now that the original holder has decided to have a change of heart. Understandable, to some degree, there certainly are some people who really are just irredeemable, but when the story is trying to pass off some narrative about friendship or being good inside it feels like it falls a little flat when it presents another character as being beyond that redemption. There always needs to be someone who is acting as the antagonist. And the example of Pterano and his cronies is a rather tame one, it’s not like Rinkus and Sierra have any meaningful presence after the moment when they oust him for being too much of a wimp because the movie is basically over at that point.

This is something that has happened with painful regularity in the recent years of My Little Pony. They did it with Garble by introducing a random new dragon to become the head of his old trio of bullies after he decided to come out about being a beatnik. They did it with Diamond Tiara being abused by her mother. They did it with Neighsay getting sidelined by Cozy Glow (who herself is basically a replacement for Diamond Tiara) and deciding that racism is bad without any prompting. They did it with Flim and Flam being pitted against each other by the casino owner (before they went back to their old ways immediately). They did it with Coloratura having an asshole manager so there could be no complicated thoughts about her wanting to be a pop star instead of doing heartfelt traditional music as is clearly proper. They did it retroactively in the comics with Discord being goaded into acting cruel by Cosmos and also everything about Siege of the Crystal Empire before that presumably got retconned itself, thank fuck.

And the reason I’m pushing myself to write this now is that it just happened again in A New Generation. The movie makes you think right from the beginning that Phyllis Cloverleaf is going to be the main antagonist with her pushy xenophobia and running a company entirely devoted to keeping earth ponies safe from the supposed threat of pegasi and unicorns. She’s a shameless megacorp leader who seemingly has effective control over the town of Maretime Bay and you’d think she’d have plenty of reason to keep the status quo for as long as possible—after all, it doesn’t matter how clearly ineffective her products are, ponies are going to eat them up because they’re afraid and they don’t know any better. But, no, partway through the movie Phyllis seems to develop an allergy for the spotlight and lets her son Sprout take over with his newfound fascist regime. Phyllis ends the movie seemingly having decided to recant her ways and she comes together with the other “leaders” of the pony races (to be fair it’s better than Neighsay at least), while Sprout is left to sulk after he used his wunderwaffe mecha to wreck Sunny’s home and nearly kill several ponies. Boy I can’t wait to see this character get into wacky shenanigans and be made to learn friendship lessons when the actual show comes out.

When it comes to stories involving complex conflicts of morality, the example that always comes to mind for me is Princess Mononoke. The viewer is led to assume early on that Lady Eboshi and the people of Irontown are the ones in the wrong—they’re destroying the forest, they’re the ones who attacked the boar Nago and caused him to become a demon, making them the indirect cause of the curse that’s placed on Ashitaka. But then it turns out that, no, the people of Irontown are just people, they just want to make a living, and for all her hubristic ambition Eboshi is a benevolent leader who offers positions of power to both men and women and gives safe haven to the sick, and she seems to regard San with pity more than contempt. You want to root for the wolf-wannabe girl and her wolf ~~milf~~ mom, but even though they are defending their territory they are also going out of their way to terrorize Irontown and disrupt their trade routes. It is only through balance that the inhabitants of both the town and the forest can be made to coexist with each other.

But I’m sure you’re thinking “Non, don’t you think it’s a bit unfair to compare children’s media to Studio Ghibli?” Perhaps. Let’s look at another example then by going back to a land before time.

In The Land Before Time III: The Time of the Great Giving, Littlefoot’s gang has to contend with the dual dilemmas of a group of teenaged dinos bullying them and a drought which prompts Daddy Tops to do what he does best, being a self-important asshole. Daddy Tops’s attempts to assert himself as leader of the valley creates a rift between him and Cera and nearly results in both of their deaths when a wildfire breaks out. Hyp, the lead bully, is taking out his frustration on the gang because of his strained relationship with his own father, and he has his group set out to try to find water to hoard all for themselves. All these plot lines converge in the climax as Daddy Tops sees how harsh Hyp’s father is to him, realizing how cruel he in turn had been to Cera, and they all come to the conclusion that they need to work together to remove the debris blocking the source of water for the Great Valley, and that they need to be better dino-people. Sure, it’s on the basic side and more than a little clumsy—much like the situation with Diamond Tiara and Spoiled Rich, Hyp’s father and their relationship aren’t seen at all until right before their resolution is made. Also a pack of velociraptors comes out of nowhere because the climax needs to have some kind of tension. Still, it all contributes to the series’s overarching message of the importance of working together as the dinosaurs cooperate to survive after the widespread destruction of the Great Valley, putting aside their differences and grievances.

I guess the gist of all this ultimately is that it feels rather lame to have an antagonist turn face only to have another character step in to fill the exact same role. Why even bother with having the antagonist in the first place if you’re going to make them interchangeable like that?

Why yes, I have been watching the entire The Land Before Time series. Hope you’re ready for a needless deep dive on that in the future.

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