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V/R,

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Welcome!

I assume it's great, but I don't have Netflix or whatever,

Oh, man, you just triggered a rant. I'm gonna nerd out on you, even though it's embarrassing that I care this much.

The show varies wildly in quality. Most bronies agree that the first two seasons were mostly great, though I think the season openings and endings (the first 2 and last 2 episodes each season) all suck, all 18 of them, because Faust decided those would always be high-stakes good-versus-evil adventure stories, and MLP G4 was designed to argue that evil doesn't exist, and friendship is always magic, so those shows never work and have painfully corny endings.

There's divided opinion on the third season, made mostly after Lauren Faust, the show runner, quit in protest at interference with the scripts by Hasbro's legendarily incompetent toy division. Faust's management style was feudal; the show depended on her to keep track of continuity. There were no writer's meetings; nobody but Faust to make sure every writer was writing the same characters the same way, or using the same technology level, or assumptions about how pony society works. The story world stopped making sense. The show's mythos was razed to the ground; characters might be god-like in one episode, and in another be overpowered by minor characters. Characters went thru character arcs and then were reset in the next episode. Luna was a wildly different person in season 3. Characters' capital was spent on making them more-extreme for laughs, and on scenes that were supposed to be funny because the characters acted utterly unlike themselves, so you couldn't be sure who they were anymore. The show repeatedly used the "rich people are snobs" trope, using only unicorns, to make Equestria overtly systemically racist.

Most bronies still like the 3rd season, but most agreed it jumped the shark at the end of that season when Twilight became an alicorn. Maybe half agree the show was bad by the 5th season, when Jim Miller, a guy who responded to complaints about stupid plots and inconsistencies with "It's just a kid's show," took it over. It only got worse from there; the writers of the 8th season didn't know how to story. The whole team stopped caring about anything but the animation and the toys. Just for example, if you try to make a map of the School of Friendship, introduced in the 8th season, it has no map. Each room always has the same doors, but there's no consistency about which doors connect to which rooms.

And let's not even talk about G5, the "return to our roots as a show for dull children" generation.

Yes, I'm bitter. Not so much because a good show was ruined, as because the best writers here on fimfiction are much better than the writers the show had after season 3, and would have been elated to be given a chance to save the show; but Hasbro always regarded them with complete disdain.

Here's an even nerdier and more-writerly analysis, which I basically agree with: What's Different In Later Seasons: It's the showrunners, an essay. The author, whoever it was, understands story. The one sentence "There's no emotional payoff because there's no conflict with Rarity's nature" is worth more than an MFA in creative writing.

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Hi! Turns out, I am actually new. I found my way here via that one comment on that one page of that one chapter of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which lead me to Friendship is Optimal, and then the Optimalverse, and then everything else.

Eventually I realized that I'd been reading so much fanfiction, I should make an account so I can upvote the stuff I like. I discovered that the site is well-designed and so much more convenient for reading & keeping track of stuff, compared to what I was doing before! Which, y'know, was just leaving a slew of open tabs on my phone's browser. :)

So yeah, I am just a regular random stranger, and a newbie. Never even seen the show, TBH. I assume it's great, but I don't have Netflix or whatever, and I've been able to infer most major plot points from context in various fics.

Thanks for the welcome, and thanks even more for writing cool stuff!

I'd guess you aren't, because nobody would join fimfiction for the first time in 2023, and start following Blueshift, Eakin, & me.