#mylittlepony - #Do you think the Student Six were a good idea?

Do you think the Student Six were a good idea?

Do you think the Student Six were a good idea, especially this late in the show?

This isn't a question of whether or not you like them, you can like the characters and still think they've been poorly utilized, or even that it wasn't a good idea to introduce them.

I want to start off by saying that I was very optimistic about the Student Six after School Daze. Sure, none of them really wowed me, and I was disappointed by how easily they put their differences aside to become friends, but I was willing to put aside those first impressions to see what happened. After all, the series premier ended with the main six all the best of friends, but the rest of season one was spent creating conflict, building and growing the characters, and learning lessons.

Which is what I thought season eight was going to be, a soft reboot of the series, where the main six aren't put in the lesson spotlight, but instead are the mentor figures for the student six as they create conflict, build and grow as characters, and learn the lessons that the main six have to teach. We got nothing like that. We didn't get any episodes focused on them individually or in pairs, instead they learned all their lessons by... watching their teachers screw up. Amazing. We only got two episodes all season eight focused on them as characters, and neither of them delivered what I was looking for. Instead of episodes with internal conflict that challenged their friendships and made them grow as characters, we got A Hearthswarming Club, a cultural exchange and 'feel bad for Gallus, he's an orphan' episode, and What Lies Beneath, where they help each other face their inner demons.

And despite us never seeing them put anywhere near the amount of effort and growth in their friendships like the main six did, they're still chosen by the Tree of Harmony, not just to test them, but to save the day. And we still don't have an explanation as to why the Tree chose them, or how they were able to use the tree's power to release the magic. The entire finale never felt fully explained or even adequately earned.

And now, in the final season, these characters that were supposed to breathe new life into the show are just sort of there. They lack any kind of serious development and remain the basic ideas they started out as: Ocellus is the bookworm, Gallus is the antisocial rebel, Smolder is Ember Jr, Silverstream is an even more air headed Pinkie, Yona is a yak, and Sandbar is... a pony. Even in Season Nine, when we finally get episodes "focused" on them, we still don't learn anything about them.

I could keep going, but I'm rambling around a point I've already made. I don't have any dislike for these characters, that's kind of the problem. I've seen so little of these characters and know so little about them I can't make any sort of serious judgements on them. The Student Six were introduced too late into the show, and if the staff and Hasbro weren't willing to take enough of the spotlight off the main six to truly give these new characters their due, then they shouldn't have introduced the new characters at all, because all we've gotten out of it are barely established, massively underdeveloped caricatures that leave too much to be desired.

What are your thoughts? Do you think think the students are fine? Do you wish that more had been done with them, or do you wish that nothing had been done with them at all?

Submitted August 08, 2019 at 08:53AM by PepperIsCute
via reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/mylittlepony/comments/cnmurg/do_you_think_the_student_six_were_a_good_idea/?utm_source=ifttt