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.”
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.
Read More
I’ve talked a fair bit about writing fanfics in this blog, but to a large extent, good fanfiction is written just as good fiction is. Words are strung together the same way whether it’s a fanfic or an entirely original story. Good dialogue is still good dialogue, good description still good description, and so on. But there’s one area where fanfiction differs in a significant way that can make it much harder to write:
A good percentage of your readers are not going to even THINK about reading your story unless they know exactly what goes on in it. What the tone is, what the genre is, which characters are in it, etc. So fanfiction tends to be categorized in an exhaustive way so that no one has to read something they don’t like.
Shipping is a particularly good example of how this affects stories. Readers (myself very much included!) often have strict pairing preferences where they don’t want to read any pairings they don’t like, and so stories tend to be labeled with which ship they’re sailing.
The positive effect of this is I don’t have to read Twixie or Rarispike. The importance of this cannot be overstated. The negative effect is that I’m never going to be surprised by AJ and Fluttershy falling in love, because I know that’s what’s going to happen from the beginning. And that’s kind of a bummer. It’s also a huge pain for the writer to deal with, because not only can they not surprise me, but it really weakens the story’s tension when I know they end up together in the end. It’s a difficult position to be in so I wanted to talk about some ideas I have for how to work around that.
Read More
kyronea:
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.
Read More
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.
I think some of the most successful fanfics are those that take a ridiculous premise and earnestly follow it through to its most extreme conclusion.
I’m thinking, in particular, of The Combinatorics Project. The premise of the fanfic is to explore all 15 possible main six ships, with each of the five chapters taking place in a different alternate universe where all the main six are paired off. Normally my feeling is that, in a shipfic, if you do more than one pairing then you’re going into questionable territory. Like, if I read a Twilight/Pinkie fic and then at the end Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash get together too and by the way Applejack and Rarity have been together for years, then I tend to groan and wish the story had ended a few paragraphs earlier. It just always feels forced, like the author wanted to say “BY THE WAY THESE ARE THE OTHER SHIPS I LIKE” and they got a bit too excited and they couldn’t hold it in long enough to finish the story.
So why does TCP work? It’s at least as ridiculous as that story I just described. I think the difference is in the expectations and in how they affect my suspension of disbelief. In a Twinkie fic I go into it accepting that some breaks from reality might be made in the process of getting those two ponies together (I prefer if such breaks don’t happen, but I’m always aware they might and I can accept some). But when contrivances start forcing other ponies together then it goes beyond those expectations and my suspension of disbelief is broken. With TCP, on the other hand, I know from the start exactly what I’m getting. If I go into that story and then think “Wait, all the main six are paired off? That’s silly,” then I didn’t read the introduction very carefully.
Read More
I’m still processing the season finale. I’m sure I’ll have many more things to say about it later, but I wanted to point out one thing in it that I felt it did really well.
Many of us, when the episode premise was revealed, wondered about Shining Armor and why we had never heard about him before. It seemed like he had been pulled out of nowhere. So I know some were skeptical about this aspect of the story, myself somewhat included. I figured they’d make it work, but I wasn’t sure how.
My assumption had been that he and Twilight were just estranged, and that would be how they explained his absense, and that the plot of the finale would revolve around working through their issues. Obviously they didn’t go in this direction. But what I think is a bigger issue than “why haven’t we heard about him?” is “why should we care about him?” You can explain why a new character wasn’t there before pretty easily. But making the audience care about them is harder.
This is why I liked that they took the time to give Twilight a song about him and give him some emotional importance. That little one-and-a-half-minute song turned him immediately for me from “I am skeptical of this obvious last-minute addition to the cast” to “OH TWILIGHT YOU AND YOUR BROTHER HAVE SUCH A BEAUTIFUL RELATIONSHIP.” It was convincing enough that Twilight had these strong feelings and so I was able to care about him through her. This let me share in Twilight’s feelings at the sudden news of his marriage instead of just waiting curiously to hear why we haven’t seen him before.
Ideally, in telling an ongoing story you shouldn’t have to pull important characters out of your ass at the last minute. But things aren’t often ideal. You can’t necessarily convince your audience that you’d been planning it all along and it makes perfect sense either. So while it’s good to fill in plotholes that arise in such a situation, it might be even more important to make the audience feel something for that character so they see them as more than just a plothole to fill.
Something I mentioned in my first post on making a new main six was that each of the main ponies can be portrayed in both a serious and a silly way. But this is something I hadn’t really written about specifically, so I wanted to take a bit of time to address it before I attempt to put it into practice.
First, I should clarify what I mean by seriousness and silliness. I’m not talking so much about the characters’ personalities, but more how those personalities are treated. Compare Fluttershy’s inability to say “Yay” above a whisper in Sonic Rainboom with her inability to fly in front of a crowd in Hurricane Fluttershy. One of them is a joke where we don’t really go into her feelings much, and one of them is the main plot of an episode and involves a lot of tears (both from her and me!), but her basic personality is constant between the two.
I think this is important because it’s part of how the series does such a good job of combining drama and comedy. Certainly it’s a comedy most of the time. But it has some pretty great dramatic moments too, which I’ve written about plenty of times before. And it’s important that each character be allowed to participate in both sides of that. As a writer it’s just good sense to give yourself that leeway. Make a character’s role in the story too narrow (as in, they’re always silly or always serious) and you’re going to have difficulty writing around that later when you want them to be different. Plus that’s just going to be a boring character. It’s good to balance between those two aspects because that makes them more real and interesting.
But as I write this, it’s probably quite obvious that FiM doesn’t exactly balance these aspects perfectly across all the characters. If I told you Pinkie Pie was equal parts silly and serious, and that she was no less serious than Applejack, then I rather doubt many people would continue reading past that point.
Whether or not the characters should be perfectly balanced in that regard is a different question though.
Read More
creatorworks:
howdoponieswork:
I mentioned in my last post that I disliked the message of Feeling Pinkie Keen. I’m going to go into that in this post, but I want to make one thing clear first:
“I disagree with the message of this story” is not, on its own, a valid criticism of a story. People disagree with one another, and people on all sides of an issue are still allowed to write stories. It’s fine to say “this story has themes I disagree with, so I don’t want to read it.” Or “so I don’t like it.” If you’re reviewing a work from the point of view of a reader, to advise other potential readers, then it’s probably something you’ll mention and that makes sense. But if you’re critiquing a work form the point of view of a writer, then whether or not you agree isn’t really important. What matters there is how well it argues for and communicates its theme.
Read More
In this post you put forth the idea that Pinkie and Twilight were set up as Faith vs Science, when really they were Science vs Faith. But *really* really, they were set up as blind faith vs empiricism, and that dichotomy can have science and faith placed on either side of it and work equally well.
There are plenty of people who, if confronted with a real miracle, would refuse to accept it as anything other than smoke and mirrors. Blind faith in the nonexistence of magic, which would hold no matter what evidence might be shown to the contrary. And there are those who have faith in the supernatural not because someone told them to, but because it is active and present in their daily lives, and they have come to trust in it.
And that’s what I saw in that episode; Twilight as blind faith in science and Pinkie as empirical belief in the supernatural.
Read More
First, let me say that my post was not about science vs. religion. This is a blog about storytelling, not philosophy. The post in question was not about why the themes in Feeling Pinkie Keen are bad. The point was that the stated themes did not match the emergent themes of the story, and that Twilight was being used as a strawman to represent a scientific/rational ideology that she was not actually representing.
Indeed, as you say, Twilight acts out of blind faith and Pinkie acts out of empiricism. This is not the problem I was arguing against (as I said, I can see both of them behaving in this way). The problem is that they make it very clear that they’re talking about faith, not the supernatural empiricism you describe. Pinkie says “sometimes you just have to believe in things,” and when Twilight is being chased by the hydra Pinkie tells her “you have to take a leap of faith.” I don’t think it’s credible to claim that they didn’t intend to promote faith with this story.
If all they did was argue “supernatural stuff can be empirically-based too,” then I wouldn’t mind. What they actually did was show empiricism, call it faith, and then use that to argue for faith. This is what I object to, because it’s dishonest and bad storytelling.
I mentioned in my last post that I disliked the message of Feeling Pinkie Keen. I’m going to go into that in this post, but I want to make one thing clear first:
“I disagree with the message of this story” is not, on its own, a valid criticism of a story. People disagree with one another, and people on all sides of an issue are still allowed to write stories. It’s fine to say “this story has themes I disagree with, so I don’t want to read it.” Or “so I don’t like it.” If you’re reviewing a work from the point of view of a reader, to advise other potential readers, then it’s probably something you’ll mention and that makes sense. But if you’re critiquing a work form the point of view of a writer, then whether or not you agree isn’t really important. What matters there is how well it argues for and communicates its theme.
This is something that’s particularly relevant in a show like FiM, where teaching a lesson is a core aspect of its stories. If you don’t have a stated theme, then your theme is whatever follows from the events of your story. It’s whatever the reader gets out of it. But if you state (or even suggest) a theme, then you have to be careful to make sure that it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of your story. This is where I think Feeling Pinkie Keen fails.
Read More
kyronea:
Firstly, thank you to the seven people who started following me since yesterday, especially TwilightSparkle’sharem! I’m rather flattered
I typically try to watch an episode at least twice before I offer up my thoughts. With these thoughts I try to analyze and point things out, oddities of the plot or other things that might have escaped notice. This episode, in particular, was much more enjoyable the second time I watched it than it was the first time, since the first time I watched it I was constantly interrupted.
Read More
I’m not too bothered by things happening at the speed of plot, personally. But that’s because I look at it from the point of view of the writer. I want to keep things flexible so I don’t have to worry about things like “oh, I can’t do that story because it takes exactly X hours to get from Ponyville to Canterlot.” It’s definitely something you want to keep from being too obvious though. We know absolutely that they left Ponyville on carriage and arrived in Canterlot the same night, because they said as much in The Best Night Ever. The only way I can attempt to explain that is that the carriage route is MUCH shorter and more direct than the train tracks. Or maybe Twilight’s magical carriage warps spacetime. Actually… I said that as a joke, but knowing Twilight I can’t help but make it headcanon. It’s what she would do.
I noticed the contrast with Feeling Pinkie Keen as well. I don’t think it’s necessarily an “apology.” Perhaps a balance though. Twilight Sparkle should be more open-minded to new ideas* while Pinkie Pie should be more grounded and think things through more.
*Which I actually think is true in Feeling Pinkie Keen, even though I dislike the episode and its message in general. I’ll go into that in more detail another time though.
