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// Chapter 1 
// Story: Millennials Are Killing Cutie Marks 
// by Third Wave 
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The cutie mark.  For countless generations, it’s been the symbol of a pony’s special talent and their ultimate role in life.  It is a beautiful symbol of each and every pony’s purpose, shared among earth pony, unicorn, and pegasus alike.  In this, it is a unifying quality of ponykind, and yet is it paradoxically what makes each and every pony their own individual.  Unique to everypony, the cutie mark is our individual identity, envisaged with a picture on a pony’s flank.  But these days, some young ponies are casting doubt on the purpose of the cutie mark.

To being a quest of why young ponies are considering abandoning the idea of a cutie mark, we first went to Twilight Sparkle in Ponyville.  “It’s very concerning to me as a pony,”Twilight Sparkle said when we spoke to her.  The Princess of Friendship has long held the value of a pony’s cutie mark close at heart.  “Your cutie mark is integral in who you are, you can’t just throw that identity away like that.  I will never forget that magical day when I got my cutie mark.  That six pointed star was given to me as a sign that I was destined to be good at magic, and gave me my first friend.”  Princess Twilight rubbed her dragon assistant Spike’s head as he brought us a plate of cookies.  “To outright deny yourself that journey of discovering who you are and the joy of finding out… I can’t fathom it.”

However, many foals lately do not seem to see things the same way as Princess Twilight and, frankly, all of us ponies do.  Many colts and fillies in the millennial generation, so called because they came of age in the years during and after the thousandth year of the Summer Sun Celebration and the return of Princess Luna, claim they are feeling pressured by older generations as well as their peers to get their cutie marks as quickly as possible.  For many of these millennials, it seems, this is too much of a burden, and they have resorted to outright rejection of the idea of earning a cutie mark.  This idea of course is ridiculous.  Getting a cutie mark is a sign of a pony growing up, a natural occurrence in every pony’s life.  Discovering your true talent is not something imposed on you by other ponies.  It is a fact about yourself that you discover on your own.

Additionally, many business owners say the increasing number of blank flanks has had a detrimental effect on hiring practices.  Potomac Falls, a pegasus who manages a cloud factory in Cloudsdale, says he has been especially hit by this trend of young ponies rejecting the idea of searching for their cutie marks.  “I used to get a number of ponies coming in to just try out working in the factory, see what it’s like to craft clouds.  I would usually be lucky enough to get one or two a month who would get their cutie marks in cloudmaking or some other weather related field and I knew they would be a good choice to work with me in the future.”  But now, Potomac says, many millennials aren’t even giving his business a first glance.  “I try to go out and find good young workers nowadays, but with these millennial ponies it’s getting so hard to tell even with older millennials.  You used to be able to take one look at a pegasus’s flank and tell right away if they’re a good fit to work in cloudmaking, storm delivery, or things like that.  But now?  Nothing.  I asked some of these blank flanks once and they told me they were afraid to try cloudmaking because they might be good at it and get their cutie mark in it.  Imagine that, a pony who’s afraid of getting their cutie mark!”

In the interest of exploring the matter, we went to Ponyville, where studies have found the highest concentration of a delayed rate of cutie mark acquisition, and talked to some of these younger ponies.  One pony, a bright green thirteen year old earth pony named Avocado Toast, told us it was about an anxiety for the future.  “You don’t know what it’s like growing up today.  Ponies don’t have the freedom to discover who they are like they used to.  There’s just too much competition.  LIke, say I get my cutie mark in farming.  So will hundreds of other ponies!  And there’s only so many farming jobs to go around, and a lot of my generation can’t afford to move to other towns.  So we’re stuck here, watching ponies better at what we’ll probably got our cutie marks in pass us by, and you start thinking maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.  You know?”

Avocado Toast brings up an interesting point.  Even before the current millennial generation, there were cases in previous generations of ponies rejecting or turning their backs on their cutie marks.  Some even went so far as to join communes out in the edges of Equestria, where they could magically remove their cutie marks.  In our talk with Twilight Sparkle the Princess confirmed this, though she cautioned against it.  Princess Twilight told us cutie mark removal had strong adverse psychological effects, and was best avoided.  “Nothing is worth going through that, and it is extremely hard to reverse, believe me.”

However, also in Ponyville, a young pegasus colt named Rumble has started a small group of ponies in opposition to the idea of even seeking out a cutie mark in the first place.  Rumble said he started the group after his family tried to pressured him to seek his cutie mark.  “I’m the only one in my family who doesn’t have their cutie mark yet.  When my brother and my parents talk to my, it’s just about the only thing they want to know.  I can’t get away from it,” he told us.  “Everywhere you go if you’re a colt or filly, it’s just the prospect of a cutie mark being forced on you.  Society wants you to fit into one neat little box with one image on your flank, and when you don’t, ponies just don’t know what to do.”  Rumble says the group he founded, Blank Flanks Forever, is a rejecting of the norm that there is a box for each pony to fit into.  Not every pony can be identified by one label, Rumble told us, and to do so is simplistic and overly generalizes a pony’s individual skills and talents.  “You can’t be confined to a box if your realize there is no box.”  Currently, Rumble said he has recruited seven other ponies into his Blank Flanks Forever organization.  He avoided the question when we asked what the organization actually does.  “Doing things is how you get your cutie mark,” he pointedly told us.

These arguments against gaining a cutie mark may seem appealing to those millennials with a short-sighted outlook on life, but in the long term, I think we can all agree that an adult pony is nothing without their cutie mark.  Overall, cutie mark acquisition rates are down alarmingly among ponies in the millennial generation.  In a recent study conducted by research firm Gallop of two thousand ponies across Equestria, those aged 16 to 30 had cutie mark acquisition rates of one hundred percent.  However, the percentage of ponies who had gained their cutie mark was only 98% among ponies between the ages of 12 and 16.  Millennial ponies’ cutie mark acquisition rates have dropped by a staggering two percent!  The study found no significant incidence of rejection of cutie marks in any particular group of ponies, with similar rates of rejection being found among earth ponies, unicorns, and pegasi.  With Ponyville as the area with the highest cutie mark rejection rate, this could point to the irrational magic of the nearby Everfree Forest as the cause.  However, the increased level of rejection was not statistically significant compared to other areas.  Even so, Princess Twilight told us she would investigate the matter.  However, in the short term, it looks like the mystery of why millennials are turning a blank flank toward cutie marks will thus remain a mystery for some time longer.  Maybe there is some sinister magic at work, or maybe the millennials just need to grow up.  Hopefully this next generation of ponies will someday learn the benefits of a cutie mark so they can readily contribute to Equestrian society.