I yanked this from a blog post titled "Humans Suck". Now I hate the attitude of the people in that blog post but one of them but they made some interesting points that I thought would be good discussion fodder.

Original blog post:

Did you know that humans suck? To many cartoon fanatics this is a fact of life so obvious that for at least three generations it has not needed to be spoken aloud, but some writers of MLP fiction need to be told this obvious truth. The following essay is for those writers who, for whatever sick and twisted reason, turn ponies into humans in their writing.

Consider one of the most well known super heroes of all time: Superman. Superman started in 1938 as a comic and was most recently seen in the 2013 movie Man of Steel. Superman has unexplainable powers beyond what scientists would consider probable in this chapter of humanity's history. Most fans of Superman enjoy Superman stories because of his powers beyond that of today's human, such as: Xray vision, impermeability to bullets and radiation, super strength, and the ability to fly by seemingly supernatural means, but here is the kicker – Superman is not a man. That's right, Superman is not a human, he is an alien from another planet that happens to look like a human.

For some reason, a loud minority of Fimfiction writers enjoy turning ponies into humans who somehow believe that doing so enhances ponies – raises them from a lower state of being to a higher state of being. If the ponies of Equestria were as horses on Earth, then there would be some very obvious benefits such as increased brain capacity, color vision, a better placement of the eyes, a longer lifespan, and better hearing, but Equestrian ponies are not animals of Earth. Equestrian ponies have a brain capacity, color vision, and hearing that are on par or greater than humanity's. Their eyes are optimally suited for their species and they have a lifespan much longer than humans, many writers estimate a minimum of 400 years.

A long lifespan doesn't automatically make a being superior, nor does it necessarily make a character interesting enough to be the main character in stories. However, there are three types of ponies with magical powers unique to each type and any of which beyond the capacity of a human being. Earth ponies seem relatively normal until their strength and stamina are shown. Sometimes insultingly called the “work horse”, Earth ponies seem to have no end to their stamina, working, playing, or bouncing in every step, the Earth pony only ever seems to get tired after twelve or more full hours of constant heavy work. In “Fall Weather Friends”, Applejack, an Earth pony, kicks a strength tester and breaks it launching both the tester piece and the bell an unknown distance away. If the strength tester had the same structural integrity as those of humanity, her kick would have an estimated 4,000lbs of force at the moment of impact. It has been suggested that Earth ponies age better as well, remaining physically active until the week of their death. In addition to these preternatural inheritances, Earth ponies have the magical ability to cause plants to grow faster and bigger than they could in nature. Earth ponies can cause an apple seed to grow the equivalent of 60 days after germination in two seconds by touching it or by being in close vicinity.

Then there are pegasi, the winged ponies who can fly. Compared to the amazing powers of the Earth pony, pegasi seem quite weak. Regardless of weather, pegasi can fly through it, because they are surrounded by a magical force that steadies them and any object to which they are tethered, such as chariots. This magical surrounding acts as a shield toward air and water allowing pegasi to magically control the weather and walk on clouds. The pegasus is most protected from forces of nature because their magical shield toward weather means they have no need of a permanent dwelling, they are perfectly at home in the clouds, and as such protected from any natural predator. Lastly, the magical shield surrounding pegasi grant them the ability to survive compression waves such as a sonic boom or the vortex of a tornado, that would crush or rip a part a human body.

With such a description it's hard to believe that the last of the pony types is actually the most gifted as far as range of abilities go. The unicorn pony can touch the nature of reality directly. In the last two paragraphs I have used the word magic because I wanted to avoid the matter of science until now. In truth, the unicorn pony has the power to manipulate energy on any level. If you happen to be familiar with M theory, unicorns can touch all the way down to string level. What this means is there is nothing that unicorns cannot do, but the individual unicorn is limited by their personal understanding of the energy they manipulate. Unicorns can for example hold objects in telekinesis, they can travel through time, they can teleport either from line of sight or to a relative location in the universe that is known to them, they can change how others perceive reality, and on top of this they can imbue beings or objects with their ability creating magical machines doing a single task or an array of tasks controlled automatically as if a program or by the will of any being given permission to control them. It might be easiest to think of unicorns as computer programmers where life itself is the computer on which they program. In this sense, given enough time, enough dedicated unicorns, along with trust, a team of unicorns could develop a systematic understanding and control of nature that could easily be defined as godhood.

From this perspective it should be easy to see that any type of Equestrian pony has a massive advantage over a regular human being as far as adaptiveness to nature goes. The only possible want of an Equestrian pony to be human is if they were stuck on Earth where everything made is made for humans, however, even this is unlikely because each type could still find a satisfaction of using their unique abilities to help them cope and would not want to lose this part of themselves.

What does that have to do with Superman? Well, you see, besides not being human and loving it, what makes the Superman comics and movies and everything else interesting is that Superman is more than human. Not many people know this, but the english word “super” comes from the German word, “uber”, which literally translates “above”, so Superman's very name explains his claim to fame: “Above (the race of) man”. Both Superman and MLP fall in the genre of Fantasy, and the genre of fantasy is made interesting and is defined by the fact that it surpasses what man can do or currently understand. Some would say it is defined by things that are impossible, however, some of yesterday's fantasy has become today's reality. Returning to the topic of my essay, “why humans suck” the answer is simply because humans are boring compared to ponies, and turning a pony into a human through writing sucks away all of the interesting parts about MLP.

Obviously, I cannot talk about this without bringing up Hasbro's clusterfuck of making Equestia Girls. From everything I have gathered, Hasbro only did this to make money off of the toys and did not think about the fans nor how it would affect the canon of the story... Actually, I am fairly sure Hasbro does not give a flying damn about the canon of the story, but let's have a look at the movie. In order to be interested in MLP, one has to be a fan of fantasy, however, it is no spoiler that most of the movie is spent in a high school setting devoid of any magical elements. This would be like watching a Superman movie where somehow Superman swallows kryptonite in the first ten minutes of the movie and the rest of the movie is spent watching Clark Kent work at his day job devoid of anything that makes him super. It is obvious to see that such a movie could only be labeled as a Superman movie because it briefly mentions the franchise. I have no doubt that the fans of Superman would be outraged for such a cock tease and not only demand their money back but also that the creators of such a monstrosity commit sepuku for their sins. The only reason that this has not happened with Equestria Girls is because an unfortunate amount of fans of MLP are following it for the hype rather than out of a genuine love of the show.

Truthfully, anyone can write anything they want about MLP, but it is only the fan who follows the show out of genuine love that bothers to read any real length of a single work of fanfiction. This can be seen by the favorites of a particular writing that short stories have more views and favorites than long stories, however, a long work of fiction featuring known pony characters as humans will be virtually devoid of favorites because the genuine fans do not even want to imagine their beloved characters being morphed into anything other than who they are. Therefore, I close this essay in a simple request to the aforementioned writers: for the sake of the genuine fans of this show, please stop making our beloved ponies boring.

A Commenter:

I've been planning a four-colour-themed comic series about Clark Kent that is a series of adventures in which Mr. Kent and Ms. Lane have exciting journalistic adventures, including defeating villains... through the power of investigative reporting. The main formula goes like this: they are doing a more mundane story but then find something more interesting by asking questions, poking around and/or just being aware. things escalate, and they uncover a deeper truth and threat to the city of metropolis, some part of if, the future, or the world. The antagonist of the month threatens then in some way, either directly, or legally, or whatever, and then they have to use the powers of investigative reporting to thwart the antagonist. The running gag this whole concept is centred around Clark, every time, doing some variation of, "This looks like a job..." running to a phone booth and then dialling a number, "The city records office!" Or he dashes around a corner, pulls open his jacket and... pulls out a camera, with which to take pictures of the machine. Every time, he's actually doing a very clever thing, because Superman isn't the right person for the job. He has to be Clark in order to beat Lex this time. Of course, the whole reason this works is that he is Superman, and he's making a decision to solve the problems using his more mundane gifts, and also showing how he can use teamwork with Lois and Jimmy, so there's a bit of character development going on there if it's set a precursor to the Justice League.

Please note: I'm not a big superhero comic fan, so I'm ignorant of a lot of this stuff. Hell, I haven't even seen The Avengers. Just a fair warning of my ignorance.

I know what you mean, though, taking Clark Kent and stripping him of his powers just so he can, I don't know, help sell this wacky race thing that has nothing to do with Superman is... dumb. Equestria Girls wasn't doing that so much as it was saying, "Look, here's the girls as humans. Uh, you know we have toys of them like this, too...? Cough cough?" I thought it was good as it could have possibly been, given what they had to work with. There's only so much you can do with a rotting eggplant of a premise like that. I actually admire Studio B more now, having seen it, even though I would have preferred something else had been done instead.

But I digress. Back to the topic at hand and hoof.

There's a few reasons why writers re-imagine the pony characters as humans. The first is that they're writing erotic stuff, and they don't feel comfortable or attracted to non-human characters. I think that it's a waste of time. Why not just write some sweet porn with complete freedom? I guess the bronies are a fantastic and available audience, but they spotlight shines brightest on pony things, understandably. The second is that the writer just thinks it'll be interesting. I've desperately been trying to understand this since the fandom first started doing this. I think it's because a lot of the fandom wouldn't be interested in talking magical horses except that it was Faust writing it, and it turned out as fantastic as the other things she's been involved with. I was... already here. I'm native to the MLP fandom. I like talking magical multicoloured little horses. I LOVE talking magical multicoloured little horses. Not to the exclusion of everything else, but it's what I'm here for. At some point I had to accept that the bronies aren't as enthusiastic about them as we are, so alas, humans in Equestria.

The horrible joke is that the pony characters are fine for talking about a lot of human experience... stuff. There is not need for human characters almost at all in the context of MLP fan-fiction. Excepting crossovers, I guess. And I suppose some topics, mostly political or dark things, or darkly political things, or maybe even politically dark things -- those are hard to discuss with ponies. Somehow, that feels acceptable. I notice some people do anyway. Naturally, a lot of HiE fics end up there anyways. "Y'all little horses sure don't gots a lot of rape and murder here, eeyup." Of course, watch out there, because misanthropy. One of the disastrous side effects of this specific issue is that frank discussions of real-world problems that arise from fics with the human element in them is the backlash against so-called "misanthropy". The Humans Aren't Bastards group is enormous and has had a huge impact on the writing culture. Whether anybody likes it or not, human characters and civilization must always be either entirely "balanced" with the pony civilization and the human protagonists must never have any criticisms of their society or prefer pony civilization in any perceivable way. Human civilization in any form or its history must not be criticized or devalued in any detectable way. Isn't the world of literature wonderful? The next stage of evolution -- which I predicted a full year in advance -- has been that "humans" must now be superior and triumphant over the prismatic little equines. To this end, I'm seeing comments actively encouraging a full "nerf" on pony abilities to make this easier. Just a couple of days ago, I was conversing with an author in the comments when somebody replied to the topic of Earth Pony capabilities hinting that they believe that said species ought to have no special abilities whatsoever. Sure enough, they were not only a member of HAB, but also a group named "Humans Are Superior". It seems to me that those are, in practice, mutually exclusive, but I believe that's a matter of social evolution. One was leading to the other. Thus, in addition to half the stories on this site being about human characters, now half of those are going to be about those characters beating up the pony ones. Capital.

I think, ultimately, we're down to a challenge of imagination. If watching My Little Pony doesn't inspire you to write your own stories with the characters, then perhaps you shouldn't be doing it. Your heart has to be in the right place for this stuff, and if you can't bring yourself to start a story with something like, "Once upon a time in the magical land of Equestria..." then I think this should be the wrong place for you. If you really want to write, but what comes out is, "First Class Sergeant Chamberlain held his XC-3231 magne-rifle to his armoured chest as the VTOL troop carrier pitched like a roller coaster through the planet's smoggy stratosphere," then awesome, but maybe you'd be happier writing something else. I think Sergeant Chamberlain would be happier shooting something scarier and more threatening than unicorns.

I know this response has been rather meandering, but what I really mean to say is that I agree: compared to the ponies, they don't have the kind of appeal that the ponies do. Furthermore, this is a site originally intended to hose fanfiction pertaining to Friendship is Magic. Excluding Equestria Girls, they're ponies, and they live pony lives with their pony powers and have pony adventures. If none of that is interesting to you without transmorgifying them into high schoolers, then only god can help you.

--------------------------

I can definitely taste the "No True Scotsman" fallacy in these posts. Anyways, why would reimagining the Ponies as aliens who engage in First Contact with modern day or "space opera" Humanity be uncreative?

And honestly, HiEs are no more common now than they were in the early days of the fandom. I dare say that the quality of the modern HiEs has improved quite a lot.

1782179 I remember back in 2011, when I was reading some HiE stories, compared to today, they weren't the best (as you already said).

That said, I both agree and disagree with the [Comment] person.

Wow, I could feel my eyes crossing as I read that nonsense.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to underpify myself.

I can sum up this blog post in a few words "WAAAAAAAAAAAAA WAAAAAAAAAA THEY WONT WANK OUT THE PONIES WAAAAAAAAAAA"

Whether anybody likes it or not, human characters and civilization must always be either entirely "balanced" with the pony civilization and the human protagonists must never have any criticisms of their society or prefer pony civilization in any perceivable way. Human civilization in any form or its history must not be criticized or devalued in any detectable way.

This is a bunch of bull. this is the humans aren't Bastards group, not the Humans are Perfect group.

Personally i find both extremes highly annoying and poor writing/plot (human civ as either perfect or dystopia, and same thing with Equestria being perfect or the opposite.) Every society has flaws, but some people either don't want there to be any or they take it too far.

A lot of the OPs so called facts about pony abilities seemed to be based on conjecture and headcanon 400 year lifespan and this little gem.

It has been suggested that Earth ponies age better as well, remaining physically active until the week of their death

Pure headcanon, no sources on that from the show. Neither Ponyville nor Granny's age has ever been set in stone so Granny could be less than 100. You want historic precedence for a town growing that fast? See the gold rush towns of the American West and substitute gold for zap apples.

In truth, the unicorn pony has the power to manipulate energy on any level. If you happen to be familiar with M theory, unicorns can touch all the way down to string level.

magic is a deus ex machina. It can do what ever the hell the writer wants it to do, leaning credence to this.

Besides, we've seen sci-fi tech that can do just as much if not better than this.

The only possible want of an Equestrian pony to be human is if they were stuck on Earth where everything made is made for humans, however, even this is unlikely because each type could still find a satisfaction of using their unique abilities to help them cope and would not want to lose this part of themselves.

Purely opinion and such desire is based solely on the individual. -See Lyra

Naturally, a lot of HiE fics end up there anyways. "Y'all little horses sure don't gots a lot of rape and murder here, eeyup." Of course, watch out there, because misanthropy. One of the disastrous side effects of this specific issue is that frank discussions of real-world problems that arise from fics with the human element in them is the backlash against so-called "misanthropy".

There's always going to be people bringing this kind of stuff into any fandom. If there's one thing that defines humanity without out fail, its Diversity. You're going to see a whole range of topics in the fandom, so these topics are really just a side effect of the human condition.

And with that, i can see there's no real chance of making this guy see that last bit of truth. Not that he'll probably see this anyway.

TL:DR

People write about what they know/ feel. If you don't like, don't read it.

Meh, I agree with some of the stuff the comment said and disagree with other stuff. Equestria girls was certainly a train wreck as they claim, I can tell you that. I don't feel a need to explain my own somewhat different view in a long ass essay though so I'll just leave this comment like it is.

I don't seem to recall "agreeing" on half of those so called "facts". It's practically all fanon and sheer ponywank. Also, turning Equestria into Mary Sue land is just plain old bad writing. Giving characters flaws it what makes them interesting, it's why FiM succeeded where previous gens crashed and burned.

Plus, it's a cartoon with inconsistent...stuff. One episode Twilight can easily lift a giant rock through sheer physical strength, and the next, she can't pull a plow. Also, cartoon physics. Next thing you know, they are going to be arguing that Daffy Duck is far superior to hoo-mans because he take a shotgun to the face.

-Looks at the opening post. Promptly drops mug of tea. Eye twitches.-

. . . What. WHAT. WHAAAAAAATTT?!?!?

Need I even point out the freaking point that Humans made MLP?!

Back on topic though. . .

I suppose we'd do it because we're really fascinated by space right now, and have oodles of Spacy themed stuff to dig into. Mass Effect, Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who. . . The list goes on. Our culture has a thing for space, doesn't it? It is, after all, the final frontier. . . That we know of. Till we go off and open up the fourth dimension AND CONQUER TIME ITSELF!

VIVA LA VIDA!

To any suffeciently advanced species, intrinsic physical capabilities mean little. I mean, we've been to space, we grow far more crops with our machines than the earth ponies can dream of without doing the same. We can fly faster than Raibow Dash in our jets and in our spacecraft. Where we lack in speed, we make up in endurance, in magic; technology.
We can level our entire planet and render it barren, we've been able to for at least half-a-century, and it speaks volumes about us that we haven't. As bad as we think we are, we're not. Let's face it, we are perfectionists. We see something wrong, or something that supposedly cannot be fixed, some task to be undertaken, and we will do everything n our power to fix the problem or fulfill that quest, but when that quest is perfection at the level of whole societies, our nature becomes all the more apparent. The good is the enemy of the perfect, as the maxim goes, and more often then not, we strive for perfection and achieve greatness. Greatness isn't perfect.
Perhaps we were bad once, perhaps we still are, but the nature of man is to strive ever forward into a bright and glorious future. Over history we have increased the quality of life exponentially, and this trend shows no sign of stopping, in fact, this process is speeding up.
And if I may, I shall leave you with a parody on the opening lines of this blog post:
Did you know that humans are actually pretty cool? It is a sad fact in life that too many have the opposite view, and deride it's holder as naïve and foolish, unlearned in the working of our world. This essay is for those who insist that humans are bastards, those whose misery is matched only by a hatred of innocent people and pointless misanthropy.
Consider one of the most well-known, and loved, super heroes of all time: Batman. He is a tactical and strategic genius, and his fighting skill and physical prowess are nearly unmatched. On top of this, he has a remarkable sense of justice and is an amazing inventor, too, but here is the kicker:
He's only human.

1782415, there are a lot of "space opera" type HiE fics now.

-----------

And yes, I agree. Most of this is pure ponywank headcanon. The 4,000 pounds of force figure, where did that come from?

And I should clarify my mention of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

[Commentator] says this:

I think it's because a lot of the fandom wouldn't be interested in talking magical horses except that it was Faust writing it, and it turned out as fantastic as the other things she's been involved with. I was... already here. I'm native to the MLP fandom. I like talking magical multicoloured little horses. I LOVE talking magical multicoloured little horses. Not to the exclusion of everything else, but it's what I'm here for. At some point I had to accept that the bronies aren't as enthusiastic about them as we are, so alas, humans in Equestria.

.

Here, [commentator] is saying that bronies aren't true MLP fan unless they reject the idea of HiE.

Either that, or it's "Moving the Goalposts" from "You like MLP G4? Then you're an MLP fan." to "Oh wait, you also need to reject HiEs to be an MLP fan."

I would also like to point out that G1 MLP had Megan as a main character. One guess as to what she is. Hint, she's a biped and technically an alien.

-------

I think, ultimately, we're down to a challenge of imagination. If watching My Little Pony doesn't inspire you to write your own stories with the characters, then perhaps you shouldn't be doing it. Your heart has to be in the right place for this stuff, and if you can't bring yourself to start a story with something like, "Once upon a time in the magical land of Equestria..." then I think this should be the wrong place for you. If you really want to write, but what comes out is, "First Class Sergeant Chamberlain held his XC-3231 magne-rifle to his armoured chest as the VTOL troop carrier pitched like a roller coaster through the planet's smoggy stratosphere," then awesome, but maybe you'd be happier writing something else. I think Sergeant Chamberlain would be happier shooting something scarier and more threatening than unicorns.

[Commentator] assumes that there is only one right way to write an MLP fic. This is completely wrong. There are multiple ways to write MLP fics — even if there are no Humans in said fic.

1782372 Quite.
Now back we go into our little grub hole.
I sense a flame war on the horizon.
I suggest we retreat to our nuclear bomb shelters.
Ya'know, just in case.

Or we could watch Captain Cosmos.

1782179

Typical "no true scotsman" attitude, and basically an excuse to bash all the HiE fics of the site.

Nothing new, especially when you see who is commenting.

1782179
Can I just offer a suggestion? If you're going to copy-paste huge blocks of text, could you please bold (or somehow highlight) the important parts? I don't want to have to read through several paragraphs of baseless pony-wank just to find a supposed 'good point'. (Edit: Thank you )

As a side note, every time someone wants to say ponies live for 400 years, I imagine that Equestria must have years that only last about 80 days or so.

1782462
I read every last word of that in Patrick Stewarts voice. Impact of the speech was roughly tripled.

If humans suck, does that mean that also Lauren Faust sucks too?

Funny thing is, a trained person can punch with 1260ib's of impact force. A kick is even better, depending on the person, a kick can be thrown at 4000ib's of impact or more.

1783022

Surely they haven't though that, it looks like an idea too advanced for their simple brains.

FFS super comes from Latin, not Kraut.

I think Sergeant Chamberlain would be happier shooting something scarier and more threatening than unicorns.

Boom, there's conflict. Conflict, I'm told, is the most important thing in a story.

Why are they shooting unicorns, anyway? Is the human army run by a mustache-twirling Hitler wannabe? If that's the case, then will Sgt. Chamberlain defect when he realizes that these ponies are no threat to his beloved country?

Do the humans want to plunder pony lands for rare earth metals? Do ponies even have rare earth ores hanging around? What the hell is a pony going to do with a rock made of monazite, anyway? Why aren't they trading for human goods?

Is pony magic the key to restoring the planet's damaged ecosystem? Is this operation just another barbarous raid, or is it the last hope of a dying species?

Or are the unicorns actual enemies? Did Celestia shoot first? Why would that be? Are humans a threat that magic can't subdue, and is she just performing a preemptive strike? Does she fear us because she cannot understand us? Or will basic morality win out in the end?

etc...

You know, for someone who righteously accuses HAB of being censorious, the commenter (and the blogger) have really narrow tastes. They can start to come up with great ideas, but then "four legs good, two legs bad" kicks in, and all they can think of is mindless pastel play dates or something.

1783329, there's a reason why so many people malign G3 MLP. Little to no conflict and bland plots.

As for that example, maybe Sgt. Chamberlain and his fellow troops are helping Celestia against some rogue factions.

1782929, done. Good points bolded

----------

Also, I suspect that Humans would be as interesting to the Ponies as they would be to us.

Hell, All-American Girl mentioned that what Twilight saw on Earth — electronics and magic free science — was the stuff of fantasy in her world.

1783329

"four legs good, two legs bad"

I saw what you did there.

This is the saddest shit I've had the misfortune of reading, Us? Boring? Please.

1782179

The amount of wank in this guy's blog is staggering. How in the bloody hell has he not died of dehydration let alone be able to see though the stains to even submit it.

That was an amusing read. However, I find the inclusion of Superman as an example to be an insult to the character. The Man of Steel would not approve.

1782179
Give us the name of this idiot so we can send him illegal porn or something.

Why can't he see that sometimes writers need the characters to be humans for whatever reason and that no serious writer would project an opinion on such a heavy-handed way?