G5: The Tragedy of Sprout · 3:17am Nov 12th, 2021
So, I've seen the film. I've seen some reviews, some good, some bad. And I've written/am writing stories in that particular sub-universe!
Now, obviously, the movie is not perfect. It's paced too quickly, there are issues with the attempted Aesop that may or may not actually be part of the upcoming series (I'm hoping they are), and they could have explained things better all around. Again, hoping they'll handle some of this stuff in the series in the future!
But Firebrand, of FoBEquestria, had one particular point that I wanted to address:
He brings up that Sprout should have been a tragedy, but he was actually a joke. And I think he missed something pretty important.
The tragedy is that Sprout is a joke. That the pony with every advantage, every possible chance to succeed, with a lifetime of being told that his birthright is to be Somepony Important... is a complete failure. The only pony who believes in him is his mother. Even his best - possibly only - friend has cheerfully left him with a sloppy, misspelled paper tent on his desk, humoring him more than respecting him.
And that's what's at the root of Sprout's hatred. The fact that he's a joke. He started the race just a hair short of the finish line... and everypony else has beaten him across it.He tells himself that it's not his fault that his life kinda sucks. No, it's because Somepony Else has something that he doesn't have, a sentiment that he makes very clear when he asks what Hitch has that he doesn't.
Besides good looks. Charisma. Respect. A real position of authority. A paid off mortgage.
But those aren't the things Hitch has that Sprout doesn't. They're the things Hitch worked for that Sprout wants... but feels like he ought to just have them. He's grown up in a world that told him that he deserved to be a Very Important Pony just because he's him, and as a result, he's never really bothered to do the work to become that Very Important Pony.
Hitch has.
When we first see Sprout, he's tailing Sunny like he was told to - but also stealing smoothies, snagging food, and otherwise being a self-absorbed jerk. He doesn't want Sunny getting into the factory because it would annoy Mommy, because it doesn't look good, and because it challenges the entire basis of his ego.
Hitch doesn't want Sunny getting into the factory because, while he knows she means well, he also knows that a confrontation won't accomplish anything and is just going to upset ponies. And while Hitch, on the surface, can seem (and is) more than a little self-absorbed himself, he and Sprout show how they are completely different during the "unicorn attack."
Sprout, on seeing that there's a unicorn in town, rapidly makes himself useless. His instinct is always to do what's best for Sprout - sure, he may be the town's only "depooty," but how could anypony expect him to actually, you know, defend the town? He "accidentally" triggers a trap to give himself an excuse, and even after that he goes back for additional protection... which is only enough to give him the courage to cower behind Hitch until there seemed to be a whiff of a threat, then he was off again.
Hitch's instincts?
Protect.
He sees ponies panicking? He tries to get control again, despite being woefully underequipped for that. He sees a colt in danger of being trampled? He dives into the path of danger himself, grabs the kid, and makes sure he has an adult to keep him safe while Hitch continues to deal with the crisis. Okay, sure, he picked the wrong adult, but he still tried. His best friend is being an idiot and taking a dangerous unicorn back to her home? He goes, knowing he has no backup or defenses, to try his best to resolve the situation peacefully.
His primary goal is to do his job, keep the peace, and keep everypony safe - even from themselves, if need be, as he feels the case is with Sunny. And yes even, as Sunny smugly pointed out, pegasi and unicorns. The problem is that he thinks his other best friend, Sprout, has a similar motivation. That the biggest threat Sprout poses is incompetence, not malice.
He has no idea that the incompetence is a symptom of the malice. That Sprout secretly harbors a deeply rooted, burning hatred... of Sprout.
99% of Sprout's dislike for unicorns and pegasi is just a general societal predilection to distrust the Other. Assumptions and beliefs that are based off of propaganda and xenophobia. He doesn't really hate them, in that he doesn't really want to go destroy unicorns and pegasi. His racism is a mirror of Sunny's - and oh, yes, Sunny is very much still a product of that racist society at the start. Sunny thinks that it would be cool to have pegasi and unicorn friends because they could do so much more working together, while Sprout fears them because of what they could do to him, his home, his life. He hates unicorns and pegasi as much as Sunny - at the start - loves them. In the abstract, as something Over There that has no traits other than a horn or wings attached to a proper pony body.
What Sprout hates is being the joke. Being Sprout, Mommy's Little Boy, Sprout the town depooty, Sprout, Hitch's comic sidekick.
He deserves to be so much more than that, but he's never gotten the chance because Hitch has always gotten in the way, taking all Sprout's opportunities just as unfairly as he got that paid off house and love from the citizens of Maretime Bay.
Then Hitch goes and gives Sprout the proverbial keys to the city. Keys that Sprout honestly doesn't know what to do with... until Mommy comes and points out that this is exactly the opportunity Sprout has been craving. A chance to prove that he deserves to be in charge, to prove that he is what Maretime Bay needs, that he's just as good - no, better - than Hitch has ever been!
That he can be the Sheriff, and get the praise he's been craving, the attention, the admiration - and then surpass it.
Sprout didn't trust unicorns and pegasi in the past. But he didn't hate them. Hate implied a desire to harm, rather than just a willingness.
No. Sprout, and all the other earth ponies, feared them.
"To be scared is to be prepared." The motto that had built a business empire, that had made him rich (in theory), that had defined the life of an earth pony as long as he could remember.
Hitch had never taken away the need to be scared. Not even Mommy had ever done that, and she was practically omnipotent in Sprout's world.
Sprout would not only take away the need to be scared... he would teach the unicorns and pegasi fear instead.
And that was when fear, distrust, and social upbringing blended together into a toxic stew of true desire to do harm - into true hatred. When he realized that the best way to get to the top was by breaking the monsters... whether they were monsters or not. That he could take the seed of fear his mother had planted, and make it blossom into something that would be beautiful in its sheer ugliness.
He wouldn't be a joke any more. He'd be a savior. From depooty to messiah in the space of a week.
Just like he'd always deserved.
And that's the tragedy of Sprout. That, on a very real level, he's still a foal desperately trying to make Mommy proud of him. Trying to prove that he wasn't a broken failure of a pony. That he did deserve to win, not just because he was Mommy's little boy, but because he was the superior being he'd been taught he was. Because without that... what else did he have?
Nothing. Which is precisely what he had left after he was finished.
"I'll teach them to respect me" - the rallying cry of dictators, mad scientists, and mass murderers alike.
Sprout was all three (or would have been, given the chance.) Sheriff-turned-Emperor... then the creator of a machine that demanded respect... and then the madpony with his finger on the trigger, spraying ammunition randomly around him, completely heedless of who he might hurt in the process of showing everypony that he's in CHARGE!
In the end, the only thing that stopped him was the split second when he realized that he was about to kill the pony he was trying to prove himself to. Sadly, a split second that doesn't happen often enough in our world. A split second that separated him from being a pony who had destroyed everything he had, rather than merely lost it. And he did lose it - when he goes to the one pony who has always believed in him, always respected him, always felt that he would be a good leader... she doesn't have the heart to say it to his face, but he knows damned well that he's lost her too.
Honestly, Sprout is the character I most want to see developed in the upcoming series. I want to see him doing the hard, painful work necessary to come to grips with what he's done and why, and trying to make it better. Trying to stop the next him.
I want him to take his tragedy of a life and turn it around. Not for himself, or earning back the trust of his friend or his mother, but because he's come to realize that it's the right thing to do.
He does that, and he won't be a joke any more - he'll be the sort of pony who deserves the respect he wants so badly. Because he'll have earned it, instead of just having it handed over to him because of the circumstances of his birth.
I wish there were comments to read….
5606301
That's what happens with posts like these, often as not. May put it in a group later on or something.
Interesting analysis, thank you for that.
However, I respectfully think that you (and perhaps also the person you're responding to her) are missing what the real problem with the movie's portrayal of Spout.
You're arguing convincingly that Spout's arc can be a tragedy for him personally, and that this is not inconsistent with him being a joke. However, what Sprout being a joke does prevents is him being as menacing as he ought to be.
Consider that Sprout launches a full-scale demagogic take-over of the town, and is unprecedentedly (for Sprout) successful in that, ending up with the whole array of outward trappings of an autocratic tinpot dictatorship. That is not a joke -- yet the movie continues to play it for one, which means it is hard for a viewer to see it as the tragedy for the community that by rights it ought to be.
In reality, we know that the kind of regimes that supply the imagery for Sprout's tend strongly to be not only externally aggressive but also internally oppressive. When this sort of thing happens in a world not inhabited by talking pastel ponies, there'd be a secret police, and at least vigorous harassment (if not outright persecution) of citizens deemed to be insufficiently loyal. We're not seeing any of that in the movie -- even when Sunny Starscout shows up, we'd expect her to be immediately arrested as a known unicorn sympathizer and probable spy. Instead she gets to address the crowd. And at that point it looks like everypony is in that crowd is cheerfully ready turn their back to Sprout (if not for some fast talking on his part). Nopony looks like they're keeping their tinfoil hat on, out of fear that somehow Sprout will win the confrontation and make life hard for those who were seen to waver.
I recognize there's probably a limit to how realistically brutal a movie for (nominally) a preteen audience can show Sprout's rule to be. But it doesn't stop me from feeling vaguely disappointed that it keeps making his ineptness a punchline even while he has in fact achieved something pretty scary.
Also, it's an interesting suggestion that what caused Sprout's bloodthirst to deflate at the end was how he almost ran over Phyllis.
I had considered his sudden meekness after the lighthouse falls to be somewhere between a mystery and a plothole: He had won the battle at that point, successfully prevented the traitor from arming the enemy with magic (he has no way to know they did manage to bring the crystals together and nothing happened), so why did he then act so defeated?
The moment you point to looked to me like he's simply in sufficient control over the mecha to swerve around Phyllis and still deliberately ram the lighthouse again. It never occurred to me to interpret it as a what-have-I-done epiphany rather than simply bypassing an obstacle.
5606309
K.
5606470
By contrast, I took it more as, seeing Phyllis in danger, he swerves and loses control entirely, only resulting in a sideswipe rather than an intentional collision. Yes, he meant to ram the lighthouse, but when he swerved the collision that did happen wasn't something that "read" to me as intentional, so much as the consequence of trying to not wipe out completely.
You're right that, in reality, we'd have had a much darker side to Sprout's success. I've commented a few times that I suspect bonesaws were in the future for non-earth-ponies.
But to me, for the community, Sprout being a punchline - the surface humor and such - actually underscores the Very Bad Things that are happening.
Yes, Sprout is a joke. His army is largely incompetent. He can't even see over his podium, and what he's saying is so over the top ridiculous that it's obvious things are going bad.
Isn't it?
But by speaking to "his people" on their level, by taking the reins of that fear and panic and pointing it in the right direction, he starts building an empire. Because he's a habitual screwup, nopony takes the threat that he poses seriously until it's *right there*. In the end, everypony is left to wonder what they've become, what went wrong, and how it all happened so quickly - in the space of 3-4 days, *maybe* a week, he's gone from punchline to Emperor. An Emperor who, on the face of it, is still a joke... but who poses a very real threat to those around him.
It would be a lot less scary if we hadn't seen it happen before. Several times, really.
Of course, not necessarily where the writers meant to go. But it's where my brain meanders over time. Sprout didn't have the time to go full-bore fascist, his coronation was just moments before his downfall. But there's a timeline out there that's much worse.
Hmm, perhaps I'm just underestimating the audience.
I mean, no doubt the adult viewers will be able to catch the thickly laid-on references and fill in the blanks themself.
The kids, though ... I suppose, jokes aside, that the cinematography makes it apparent enough that Sprout's regime is bad news, though they won't get the full why of it. I guess that might be okay, there are only so many morals you can hammer home in 90 minutes, and hopefully nobody's moral compass will be formed from a single MLP movie anyway.
5606717
That's the big thing, really. In G4, one of the big advantages was that it worked on multiple levels like that. I don't see any reason G5 can't do the same.