6863402 And that's what natural selection is all about!

We got some really stupid messages too, but unlike today's kids, we just rolled our eyes and did our own things. We knew better than to rely on a cartoon for life lessons.

6863695
Problem there is: MLP's job is to teach life-lessons. Each episode is designed to teach kids a lesson, especially a lesson on friendship. And if the lessons it's teaching will get kids kidnapped, then it's failing. Miserably!

You're talking as if it's inevitable, that kids' shows will teach bad lessons. But it's not. Kids' shows don't just fall from the sky like rain. They're made by real people.

And really: Normal sane adults don't tell kids to ignore their parents, when their parents say that someone's dangerous. If I told my neighbor's kid that, my neighbor would be very very unhappy with me! Why should big companies like Hasbro get a free pass?

6863706
It was that way once upon a time. There’s only so many morals you can give in 200+ episodes before you give up and just make a cartoon for its own sake.

6863000
In hindsight we know that most jumped ship after "best episode, the season four finale", so at least I am not concerned for people sanity anymore. A group of obsessed fans I can understand, the entire Harry Potter fandom proclaiming in unison that "The Cursed Child" the BEST Harry Potter book ever made is just scary on a foundamental level.

Still, it will always puzzle me that it took the entire season four for people to actually start noticing how bad the show got. I mean, I even remember *you* liking the "Princess Twilight Sparkle" episode!
I mean, while it still was the last episode I somehow liked of this show (some later episodes aside, but those I consider more fanfictions I enjoyed rather than genuine FiM episodes) it was still an enormous red flag!

What was the point of the Luna turning into NMM flashback? What even is that potion Zecora pulls out her ass? Twilight using "alicorn magic" that as the appearence of black magic? Yeah no, I didn't belive for one second that they had big plans for that. And DISCORD, everything about DISCORD was perfectly in character. And that's terrible! Ignoring the fact that he single handendly captured the princesses and almost destroyed Equestria in a matter of hours, everything he did was trying to mislead Twilight, who, as the only princess and had to be responsible, be strong and stay out of trouble, into *feeling left out* and run straight into danger (if I remember correctly, he put enmphasis in their friends having a "deeply bonding experience" without her, not even on the fact that they were all in danger). And so she did! And the vines got her!

And nobody really batted an eye, because Discord was trying to teach them a lesson. By almost destroying a kingdom and killing everyone involved! Who does he think he is, Celestia?

6863735
You don't stop watching after you realize something is bad, you wait to see if it was a fluke. That's why I watched a big chunk of season 4 even though I knew it was mostly garbage until that abomination of a finale cemented it for me.

Also, on the premier, I'm a little reluctant to put quite so much blame on Discord because he does (or at least did) have the power to snap everything better at the last moment if things really go off the rails so I'm not sure how much actual risk there was.

6863706 You can also teach kids that their parents are the most likely people to abuse them! Which is ALSO factual!

Frankly, I wish more cartoons would just focus on their stories and world-building and stop trying to teach kids, since the people writing it are in the entertainment industry, and thus the LAST people in the world qualified to craft morality tales.

6863800
I don't know, I can definitely think of one example of doing it right.

6863796
True.

Anyway, about Discord, there was nothing to suggest that he had any intention of saving the ponies and in fact, he showed disappointment when his vines got destroyed.

6864452
Yeah, bad writing is bad writing and completely expected at this point. I'm simply pointing out a possible theory there that would have held much more water at the time when the vast majority of what had been seen was Faust's work and the problems still looked like they might be isolated incidents like the season 1/2 episodes that came off wrong.

6864364 Yes, those were the best morals ever.

I live by them.

3609084
It became the children's television show it was, on the front cover, meant to be. You've nailed that, by the way. And how applicable it is to everything that has occurred since Lauren Faust's departure, year by year becoming less and less palatable to those who, in the first place, enjoyed its self-aware yet restrained handling of itself. Under Lauren, the show combined and honoured honesty, wit, intelligence and dignity. It has, or so I think, anyway, become a childish distraction more attractive to the childish. Please don't take that the wrong way, anyone who does still enjoy the show. You have your reasons. I'm simply saying that I believe the show is more attractive to a childish personality now than it was when it started, or in other words, its latter seasons would/could not have inspired the widespread, transcending devotion that its first seasons did.

I never came to hate the show, but it did eventually come to disappoint me a bit due to both storyline-level decisions and just having fewer good and more bad episodes.

"Pony Life" is yet, another backside generated brick:
- Calart is a plague *_{(california-art)}. Have you figured out that the characters are basically CALART ? No effort, no originality. Just copy-paste calart design on a computer. The generate OOC animation.
- Environment and background downgrade. Seriously. Look at the artworks on the show. It's as if it was made in under 10~15min, using Paint Tool Sai. Good way to manage your budget. But, how can the viewers get immersed in a story, where the buildings resemble cardboard boxes with splashed paint on top?
- OOC animation... and OOC characters. It's so painful, I thought I was watching the failure that was known as the PowerPuffGirls reboot (remember Bubbles twerking? ).

Welp, I can't recommend this show to little girls in my family.
They would just get more 'stupider' in the process.

7311872
Yeah, just another Teen Titans Go clone with the beanbag mouth artsyle. I'll keep to anime, thank you very much.

I hate what's happened to MLP: FiM simply because it lost the magic that the show's writing and direction had in the show's first few seasons. It began as something that satisfied the fans and ended the episode with a smile, which turned into the show making so many excuses for itself to appeal to the fans who just denied any wrongdoing or mistakes that the writers were making.

What was the start to me beginning to lose trust in the show was during Season 7's infamous "Fame and Misfortune", which the writers were in turn parodying the "critics" and essentially giving the fandom the middle finger. I knew something was wrong, and when Season 8 started, I lost trust completely seeing the writers toss every piece of lore in that foundation that Lauren Faust laid out and practically set it on fire to spite the longtime fans who dropped out from the series from their disappointment from Season 3. (This coming from my own point-of-view, probably long before I found the group.)

Very certain that it was the decline in the show's overall quality in the later seasons that caused the viewership ratings to sink through the floor.

As far as I am concerned, Season 7's finale and the 2017 feature film is the end of Friendship is Magic for me. There's no way I'm going to watch Pony Life. Having to sit through Seasons 8 and 9 were already something that left a bad taste in my mouth. Had I been asked to work on the show's series finale, I would have done it a lot differently and a lot better than how the writers portrayed it.