Seriously though Wonderbolt Academy wasn’t perfect but it was basically Rainbow Dash meeting her old self and going “Wow what an asshole she doesn’t have what it takes to be a Wonderbolt at all.”
Yes give me that sweet sweet character development.
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.”
Inspiration
After drawing that picture of Pinkie Pie I was thinking a bit about how FiM handles inspiration and encouragement in general. I felt that the quote used there typifies Pinkie Pie’s methods and worldview quite well. With few exceptions, she pretty much loves everything. Consider how she happily ate Apple Bloom’s cupcakes in Call of the Cutie, for example. Pinkie Pie is very much about seeing, and celebrating, the good in everything and everypony.
But! That’s not the entire show. Rarity, for example, is absolutely nothing like that. She might be as much the opposite of that as you can get. Rarity has very precise tastes and is frequently critical of things that don’t fit those tastes. Does this mean she’s a jerk while Pinkie Pie is good? Well, sometimes. Consider Sisterhooves Social, where Rarity has to learn to be not quite so demanding towards Sweetie Belle. But it’s not JUST that Rarity shouldn’t be so demanding. In the montage at the end of the episode one of the scenes shows Sweetie Belle filling the kitchen with smoke again, but then pulling out a perfectly lovely pie for Rarity. Sweetie Belle learns something too.
Pinkie Pie would look at Sweetie Belle’s or Apple Bloom’s burned treats and gobble them up and say they did great. And that’s good. Rarity would help Sweetie Belle make something better. And that’s also good. This, I believe, is one of the core messages of the show: Good is not just one thing. There isn’t one singular ideal we must uphold, forsaking all others. If somepony feels like crap about what they do no matter what they make, they probably need Pinkie more than Rarity. If somepony offers up their work for criticism, they probably need Rarity more than Pinkie. And some people just react better to one or the other for personal reasons. Rarity and Pinkie are both good and they both have their place, and we all need a healthy dose of self-love and self-criticism in order to stay sane.
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.
Everyone looks naked when you know the world’s address
Nudity is not a taboo in Equestrian society. All ponies of any gender, age, or social status may be entirely nude in public at any time. Most ponies are naked most of the time, and the majority of the clothing they do wear doesn’t cover up any of the areas we tend to cover in our world.
Speaking as an artist who on one hand, often finds drawing clothes difficult, and on the other hand, enjoys designing elaborate outfits, the appeal of working in a setting where I don’t have to draw clothes when I don’t want to and can still make neat fancy clothes when I feel like it is pretty clear. I’m guessing the ponies’ nudist ways makes it a lot easier to animate them, and it probably makes it easier to make toys of them as well. And the big way to make clothes easy to animate is to have your characters always wear the same outfits, which I’ve always found silly, so making them naked is a good way to avoid that. It also makes wearing clothing a good way to say “something special is going on” to the audience.
Anyway, I wanted to look a bit at how ponies use clothing and what the ramifications of their attitudes might be. I speculate about pony sexuality here a bit so you may wish to skip this post if you feel that’s a secret mankind was not meant to know.
So, yeah, that Fimfiction featured box … how’s about that?
All the parodies and trollfics are just … they’re bringin’ me down, y’all. They really, really are. One of the things I like about ponies is that, to me, it’s been a breath of fresh air in a pop culture filled with irony and meta references and meta irony. In a pop culture that’s refined the art of “it’s so bad that it’s GOOD.”
“My Little Pony” is so good that it’s good. And I really LIKE that about it.
And I’d rather read a fan story that is so good that it’s good than yet another parody or trollfic. ‘Cause our ponies? Our ponies are funny. Really, really funny. And they’re not funny because of an abundance of meta references or because they’re parodying bad shows—they’re funny because the show’s staff created and nurtured these loveable, funny characters and put them into a bunch of really thoughtful, surprising, and amusing plots.
Take a look at Rarity’s monologue at the end of “Suited for Success.” That’s darn funny stuff. And it’s not funny because it’s referencing anything else or making fun of anything else—it’s not funny because it’s purposefully bad—it’s funny because it’s great writing paired with great voice acting and great animation.
I dunno. Maybe it’s just me. I know I must sound like a eighty-year-old stick in the mud and, heck, I kinda FEEL like a eighty-year-old stick in the mud. *shrug* But I wanna see more stories get featured that do what the show does—depict these wonderful, funny, lovely characters in new, entertaining situations. Stories that are so good … that they’re good.
I don’t go to FiMfiction enough or ever pay much attention to the featured stories to comment on that aspect, but I completely agree with your feelings about the show itself.
I can certainly enjoy a “so bad it’s good” comedic work. But I think the issue with having so much of it, for me, is that it’s a negative kind of humor. It’s making fun of something. It’s humor based on pointing out how terrible something is. There are plenty of times in FiM that we see our ponies doing something foolish and laugh at it, of course. But I never get the impression that the show, on the whole, is making fun of the characters. We see too many other sides to them and there’s too much obvious respect and enthusiasm for the material on the part of the creators.
I feel like it’s easier, emotionally, to make something mocking and negative. There’s less personal risk in it. If I make something meant to be so bad it’s good, and someone tells me “Hey, this sucks!” then it’s easy for me to say “Haha, yeah, it does!” If I make something mocking something else and someone says “Hey, I like that thing you’re mocking!” then I can brush them off because who cares if they like something I don’t? Even if it does hurt in either of those cases it’s easy to save face and act like you don’t care, at least. But if I make something I love, that I believe in and care about and think is good, and someone tells me it sucks, that can be really painful.
But for that reason it’s all the more special and meaningful for both sides when someone makes something they love and those of us who see it love it back.
Retrospective: Sweet and Elite
I’ve been meaning to do more episode reviews since old episodes are gonna be my main source of serious content during the summer. Sorry things have been a bit quiet here lately! I’d say I’ve been busy but that would be a lie, mostly I’ve just been unmotivated. Let’s fix that with a favorite early season two episode of mine!
So like two seconds in I already have something I want to talk about. I really, really love the visual style of Canterlot. The white-purple-yellow color scheme is really visually interesting and contrastive. And those colors create exactly the right feeling for the capital, with purple being a royal color of course and the yellow probably representing gold. The fact that these colors are arranged in a variety of striped or swirling patterns on every tower of the castle makes it even better.
Oh, and it’s just a good shot to start the episode with. We don’t really need much of an establishing shot when we’re starting an episode in Ponyville, since if we’re not informed otherwise we as the viewers will likely assume the episode is set in Ponyville, but since we’re elsewhere here it makes sense to show us that. This shot is also a good emotional setup for this episode. Seeing this view of the castle while the majestic music plays in the background does a good job of creating a level of seriousness and grandeur that remains throughout what is in most ways a purely comedic episode. It’s a mood that seems especially appropriate for Rarity. She is at all times very serious, but she is often very serious about very silly things.
Applied Cutie Mark Theory
So once, long ago, I talked about some of my ideas about how cutie marks work. In summary: I believe different ponies can have roughly the same special talent, but they will still have different cutie marks because cutie marks encode much more than just what a pony’s talent or job is. How the pony approaches their special talent, or their style and methods in using it, or even simply their personality in general may be a factor.
I wanted to approach the issue again from a practical standpoint: how can we use these ideas to design interesting, apt, and unique cutie marks for ponies we make?
I like OC ponies and I’m not one to make fun of people for having black alicorn OCs or OCs clearly based on one of the main six or any of that. Whatever’s fun is fun; go nuts and don’t worry about people who don’t like it. But I do feel like a lot of OCs have what I think of as Lyra Syndrome: her name is Lyra, her cutie mark is a lyre, and her special talent is (assumed in fanon to be) playing the lyre.
That’s not categorically bad. Applejack is about the same way. But I think that level of literalness suits her in particular, and it seems like most ponies fall somewhere between her and Cheerilee on that spectrum, with Cheerilee’s explanation for her cutie mark being just plainly nonsense.
A comic about the different types of attraction one might feel. I saw these floating around on tumblr. These were originally taken from a website about asexuality. Although, I think people who are not asexual feel these regularly too. There’s all kinds of attractions for all kinds of people. Enjoy.
Squishes: my new favorite concept. I never knew there was a word for this!
Hm. I should try to find some way to make this post at least a little on-topic.
I think one of the things that really appeals to me in Equestrian culture is the ease with which squishes are expressed. It’s no issue at all to say that you love your friends. This is true to a lesser extent with sensual attraction too. They hug and give each other little nuzzles an awful lot.
On one hand, this is a big part of why we all ship everypony. And that’s tons of fun! But on the other hand, I really like the fact that they can do that stuff without it having to mean anything romantic to them. They love one another, shipping or no shipping, and it’s wonderful to see them express that so freely. I think that’s part of why so many of us interpret Equestria as this utopia where variations in sexuality are a non-issue, because even if they never discuss sexuality in the series they’ve shown a world that consistently accepts and encourages affection.
My Thoughts On “A Canterlot Wedding”
First, let me say this: if you ever get the chance to experience watching a new episode with many other people present in the room with you, especially if you can watch it in high definition with extremely good quality sound, do so. It makes the experience of watching a new episode, especially one as momentous as this one, that much better.
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I agree entirely on your first point. I first saw both episodes of the season 2 premiere at Rainfurrest last year with a huge crowd of furry pony fans. The audio wasn’t great (there were more of us than they expected and they had to upgrade to a bigger room, haha), but it was definitely a neat experience seeing it on the big projector with so many people.
RE: the Queen and her plans, I think it’s fairly undeniable that she didn’t have great plans. For a race of Changelings, invading openly in numbers is poor strategy. They’d do much better if they all did what she did: slowly replace ponies in positions of power. After that they could invade openly and Equestria would be much less prepared to fight them. Or really, they might not ever need to openly invade at all. They’re parasites more than traditional conquerers.
You mention her having seemingly mixed levels of competence, and this is a common issue in villains. A villain needs to be way more powerful than everyone so that they’re threatening. A villain also needs to be less powerful in some way so that the heroes can defeat them. I think the ideal way to do this is to develop your villain in depth and give them identifiable strengths and weaknesses, so that when they have the upper hand it’s explainable through their strengths, and when they lose it’s explainable through their weaknesses. Another way to do it is to make their level of power and competence seem very large, but also so vague that you can’t quite say it’s a plot hole when they lose or do something foolish. I don’t think this is the way to make interesting villains, but it’s probably your best option for a villain who shows up suddenly and has to be immediately defeated.
