How Do Ponies Work?

I’m in the process of writing up a longer post comparing the three seasons of FiM so far, and I realized a pattern in the sorts of conflicts they had and the lessons they taught. There are exceptions in each season, so it’s far from perfect, but I think it’s there.

Season one was about learning how to live with your friends. The lessons were largely interpersonal, about how to treat other ponies properly. They were all very different from each other and got into a lot of conflicts and they had to sort that out.

I think season two inverted that. I feel the focus shifted more towards the intrapersonal. Learning not to worry so much, to have pride in your home, to be responsible, to believe in yourself, to try new things, to not jump to crazy conclusions. Rather than emphasizing how to treat your friends properly, it emphasized how they help you grow and become a better person.

And season three, I feel, was to a large extent about looking back and seeing how far they’ve come and how much they’ve grown up. Twilight can pass her test and save the Crystal Empire. She can beat Trixie even without being better at magic. Rainbow Dash can show enough vulnerability and kindness to care for Scootaloo (don’t even tell me she could’ve done that in season one). She was in an episode with a brash, thoughtless, overly competetive jerk, and it wasn’t her, because she already learned that lesson. Applejack is taking on more responsibilities, organizing the family reunion and really becoming the leader of her family. Fluttershy had the strength, guile, and compassion to help Discord reform. And we all know what happened in the end. They’ve all come so far, and they’re growing into their place in the world.

It’s sort of funny, realizing this. They told us the theme of season three at the very beginning.

“Turns out you were prepared for this.”

The More the Merrier

The thing about being inactive so long is I feel like I need to come back with a big post that’s incredibly insightful and well-written and way better than anything I wrote before. That’s not likely to happen and I’d rather just get something written and get back on track with what this blog is all about instead of fretting a bunch and not writing.

So this is a small thing, but I feel like one of the things FiM does right is that six is a really good number of main characters. This may sound strange, perhaps that the quality of characters matters more than the quantity. And certainly I would say it does. But I think having a large cast of main characters as opposed to just a duo or trio can help make those characters better.

If you have two characters, it’s certainly possible to make them both detailed and round and three-dimensional. But it’s really easy not to. You can differentiate them from one another with a word apiece. One is smart, the other is dumb. One is mean, the other is kind. One is loud, the other is shy. And so on. It’s trivial to make pairs of characters in this way, and you could many tell stories using no more characterization than that. They’d just be boring and forgettable.

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