https://twitter.com/MrVectorMV/status/1670973449718706177

I found this tweet and these lines stood out to me.

Seasons 1-3 had this vibe to it where it felt simple, small, not much grand stakes other than the occasional baddie of the week. With fun being it's main focus. Seasons 4-9 however felt like it was trying to get bigger each moment, with lore coming first, but fun coming second.

Was that the problem? They stopped focusing on fun and tried to make it all impressive and epic?

That's definitely what killed a bunch of early-season epic fanfiction. Show did the cute and fun stuff, with hints and teases of the big epic world out there. Authors were exploring that part of things. Once the show started trying to one-up itself with creatures, places, governments, new characters, etc. there was a lot of author burnout.

I might be missing some context since Twitter is currently locking out people without accounts, but it seems to be both right and wrong. It's right that the later seasons were dragged down by trying to get bigger and more epic, but the point about "lore coming first" is 100% wrong. Part of the problem with the later seasons is an utter disregard for lore in the quest to make things bigger. They didn't care if they ran roughshod over existing lore, and for a fandom that loved obsessing over details, that was catastrophic.

The other big thing it misses is character work. What really made Faust's MLP special is the attention it gave to building complex, believable characters and exploring conflict within the group. That's why many of the best episodes didn't even have a baddie of the week, and why everything went to hell when McCarthy got her claws into the show and tried to turn it into a Dragon Ball knockoff with little regard for the characters. Under Faust, Fluttershy was a great character who could power fantastic episodes, but she has absolutely no place in a fight so she tended to vanish into the background once McCarthy got control. On the flipside, the destruction of characterization meant that even characters like Twilight who could deliver in an action show lost what made us love them, and that in turn sapped all investment out of the spectacle McCarthy vomited onto the screen, reducing the new "impressive and epic" show to meaningless flashing lights.