Thoughts on My Little Pony: Then Vs. Now
Before I got into the show, I had a document where I planned to review and critique "girly" media and pick apart my feelings toward them.
This is going to be difficult, but I'm going to introduce the next example of girly media in the least pansy sounding way I can. This means I'll have to avoid the title of the cartoon completely, because it could hardly sound worse.
My little Pony. It's all over my Reddit history and youtube history. I tried to hold it back. I tried to fight it. It won.
Next, I tried to distance myself from the fandom, before emphasizing that what I enjoyed about the show was its subversive nature, which is true, but as I'll get to later, it was hardly the whole story.
There are a number of people, mostly little girls and internet geeks, who enjoy the show and sure, some amount between a fraction and a majority may like it for the love and tolerance and magic and friendship, but for me? Fuck that.
There's a robot chicken parody of care bears in which they have the care bears commit genocide, which is cool, because it's really fun to see childishly innocent and pure things get corrupted. But that's just a robot chicken parody, anybody can write these sorts of characters as dark and edgy and evil, outside of canon.
But what if there were a version of care bears (and btw, care bears is only an analogy for the show I'm referring to) that was a straight, honest installment to its franchise, but at the same corrupts the characters and setting and repeatedly mocks or fixes the pet peeve cliches of its genre. It wouldn't be as self aware as Shrek is to fairy tales, or even as Scream is for slasher movies, but it would beat up the characters with the slapstick of non-wimpy cartoons and repeatedly make some characters lose their mind or otherwise corrupt their innocence one way or another.
In the show I'm talking about, the characters can't take for granted that they're in an idealistic sugar bowl without risk of tempting fate. A character fantasizes about falling in love with a prince at a ball? How big a self-centered ass can the writers make him turn out to be? A character tries to solve a feud by singing some sappy song about sharing that would makes me want to punch puppies? Those feuding agree with me and the song just makes them go back to war. A character wonders openly what kind of cute, fuzzy, adorable little animal she just woke up-SNAKES! Then bats, then a beehive drops on her head.
I am going to say this in the most sappy way possible;
Friendship is magic. By that I mean . . .
I went my whole life hating musical numbers, and felt like my feelings were made out to be nonsensical. "How could you not like them, they're so positive and happy. That's why I started my review of "girly" media.
Then My Little Pony came along:
Pinkie: When I was a little filly and the sun was going doooowwwnn
Twilight: Tell me she's not . . .
Pinkie: *The darkness and the shadows, they would always make me frooowwwwn.
Rarity: She is.
When the show had moments like that, it was like a reassurance from the "other side". It was like a friend, or someone I honestly kind of looked at like an enemy, sitting down with me with a wink and a smile and saying "Hey. I get it. It's okay to hate musical numbers. I know they're kind of ridiculous. I get you. It's okay to be critical." My Little Pony of all things, for all its association with New Sincerity and optimism, sends a message alongside it all that it's okay to be cynical.
That particular message has repeated through the series from vindicating Twilight in Canterlot Wedding to Pharynx in To Change a Changeling.
Continuing my old essay;
What it lacks in intensity and darkness it makes up for in that the corruption involves sincere, played straight sugar bowl characters and is not a pure parody. This makes me curious to get to know the characters in ways I don't usually. When was the last time I wondered what sort of fiction is written inside a cartoon universe? I wondered here, and other than the references to fairy tales in one episode, they have their version of Indiana Jones, James Bond, The Terminator, ninja movies and (presumably Romero-style) zombie movies as well as all the universal horror films from The Wolf Man to Bride of Frankenstein. One background character dressed as the devil in their version of Halloween, which raises an interesting question. This world is home to many monsters of Greek myth as reality, does that mean christian concepts like Satan are classic mythology in this world? This universe doesn't have gods, instead the characters in the show manipulate the sun, moon, seasons, etc.)
I think here we get a glimpse of why there's so much fan content of the show. The show just came along blew everyone's expectations out of the water to the point that inspired their imagination. "There are more things in the world of Equestria than can be imagined in your philosophy." It said. "Look deeper." It said. "OPEN UP YOUR EEEEYYYYYYEEES." And then we were all caged at the show's command.
I enjoy this show the way I enjoy horror movies; I sit through a lot of average material that I don't really mind for the gems in the ruff. For horror movies, I watch a lot of average and alright movies for the 15% of horror films I REALLY like. For this show, I sit through the alright and surprisingly tolerable episodes for the moments where I stop and go-Hey! Trainspotting reference! And that there looked like a reference to a Twilight Zone episode but I don't know if it's on purpose! Hey, that moment was funny, or that backstory was surprisingly interesting, or that's a cool monster. Such moments happen almost every other episode.
I think I sold the show short in this paragraph. I don't enjoy horror movies nearly as much as I do MLP. And I certainly don't care about the stock human cast of a horror film as much as I do the mane 6.
I don't think I was trying to short change the show at the time though. Firstly, when I first got into the show I binged it like a fun-size bag of Cheetos. My actual first experience of it was a blur of animation an intangible feelings. The gems I describe stood out to me in my memory and was easier to describe than the simple sense of enjoyment and curiosity I got watching an episode unfold.
And perhaps moreso, I think I was just caught up in the initial novelty of the show . . . Speaking of which . . .
*But really, the reason I enjoy this show is ironically because I'm so damn cynical about shows like this. I think "shows like these are filled with characters that are such over-the-top sweetness and purity they would probably oppose Halloween like a fundamentalist christian." And then I hear this show has a Halloween episode and go "Really? I've got to see how this goes."
And my unwavering cynicism that never learns continues to be part of why I enjoy it. I see the title "Sisterhooves Social" or "A Wedding in Canterlot" and no lesson learned from the show's previous surprises I go "Damn, that sounds so boring and girly, I've no idea why I'm even giving it a chance." and than one's title refers to an athletics competition and the other gets overrun by rampaging hell-horse looking changelings.*
The phrasing of this part implies I care the least bit about athletics competitions. This would be misleading.
*And I go "Not bad at all, I'll see what the next episode is." *
That was my reaction to Canterlot Wedding. I remember I was in a bad mood before watching it because my computer had crashed, costing a passion project I was working on. I almost didn't watch A Canterlot Wedding until I looked up the first sentence of the TVtropes recap of part 2.
Me: I'm not sure I'm up for watching it.
TVtropes: Twilight wakes up alone in a dark room-
Me: -Okay, I'm intrigued . . . .
I remember Queen Chrysalis reminded me of Vexus from My Life as a Teenage Robot.
I wrote of season 2
*In fact for a good portion of the run of the last season I was on the verge of no longer watching, just barely continuing to watch each consecutive episode. Sometimes the plot summary looked interesting, sometimes the episode was disappointing, But I'd always end up finding a reason to check out the next one *
The show was still growing on me during season two. I remember the episode Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000 was the first time I listened to a musical number instead of skipping it, followed by listening to The Perfect Stallion in Hearts and Hooves Day.
Despite my initial reaction, by the time season 3 was upcoming I had binge-watched the show again and was hyped up for more.
*There's something a bit Disney-esque going on here actually. For all the disdain I'd give the girly Disney princess movies, I'd only ever leave the room to avoid the songs and always come back in as soon as the number was over. This show has songs to, but if you excluded the theme song and ran 90 minutes of this show and a Disney musical, this would have fewer musical numbers).I'd always watch, if only with the excuse that I would find it interesting to mock and dissect what I dislike about the movie (as I did with Snow White), and that's excuse I use to watch the girlier episodes of the show. It's a show that exists with Disney movies In a careful balance; anything much girlier than this I wouldn't watch because it would be too intolerable, but Disney princess movies and this show have girliness but mostly in comfortable, balanced out quantities, so that you can digest it (and mock it) at your leisure without it being overkill.
*It's not as good as Disney movies though. I'd compare it to another show but it's hard to find a good comparison; it's closest to a mix between My Life As A Teenage Robot and the average episodes of As Told By Ginger and Hey Arnold, while not, in my opinion, as emotionally exciting as the peaks of any of those. Usually. *
I like My Little Pony better than all the things I just compared it to in this above paragraph.
Last time I tried to watch Beauty And The Beast on my own, without excuse of wanting to review it or of watching it with someone else, and ignoring everything I considered "girly" . . . I just didn't connect to it very much. Maybe I've seen the movie too many times. Maybe the characters just don't interest me. But there was no spark.
And there gives away the lie in this old essay I wrote. 'Cause Disney does have its darker elements, its creepy castle, its sea witch being impaled in the stomach, it's poisoned apple and spooky forests. But all those elements mean nothing if I don't feel good watching the whole thing.
One time I left a youtube comment that if Barbie movies had mental breakdowns and a bee's nest falling on Barbie's head, I'd watch them to.
Would I though? Sure, I'd probably look up the specific scenes on youtube where these things happened, but if the rest of those movies didn't connect to me, the interesting moments would really have to be super interesting to get me to stick around.
As for "girliness", this show, and the fandom, have made me re-think "girly" things.
It's not whether something has rainbows and princesses that makes it cringe-inducing, but what it lacks. It's all in execution and substance.
Then there's specific topic like make-up and fashion. Where I used to think of them as inherently conformist and done for insecurity and for the appeasement of others, it's actually a fanfic about Rarity that started thinking about how it can be meant as a legitimate form of self-expression, about wanting to bring out one's own beauty rather than seeing oneself as ugly.
My perception of romance changed too, thanks again to various fan content. Where I used to think of love stories as not only relying on some hand-waved "love at first sight" but reliant on some one-sided element, either celebrating helpless obsession or featuring white knights serving distressed damsels. Obviously, there was always more to love stories then these things, but it was through My Little Pony that I took notice of couples where neither partner felt weak, and through ponies where I first took notice that romance could be about much more than how great romantic love supposedly was, but about things like smashing boundaries, even though I was already familiar with such stories elsewhere (Beauty and the Beast).
And lastly, musical numbers. It was getting into My Little Pony that I learned why I disliked them, and why other people enjoyed them, and learned to enjoy them myself. There were many reasons I didn't like them: I didn't connect to the emotions or the stories and that made many of them annoying, I couldn't follow the words, I hated getting them stuck in my head, I viewed them almost like they were "sugar-coating" and deflating the emotions of a movie with whimsical breaks from reality that bash character's emotions over your head.
Seasons two and three of My Little Pony, especially Magical Mystery Cure finally made me face musical numbers as a vehicle for story telling rather than a WTF moment, because I sure wasn't skipping any of the songs in the season three finale.
My Little Pony is in a category all its own. Like any product with an active fandom, it's not just a TV show, but an interactive experience that can become a part of your life, something you can contribute to, that can make you think or learn. I don't even know how to rate it as a TV show without the fandom, because the fandom has been such a huge part of my experience with it.
As a show, it's always been like watching a wrestling match, but the opponent is everything the show attempts to defy; seasonal rot, executive meddling, and of course my own prejudices. I haven't just watched this show, I've rooted for it, I've awaited new seasons with the tension of wondering whether it will be another victory or if it will lose.
Other cartoons have received critical acclaim in recent years, but none have held the same promise to challenge me as My Little Pony has. None have promised to tell me I'm wrong, to smack me upside the head and ask me to change how I think.
Or maybe it's just that none of them have animation that instantly draws me in. Or . . . honestly, there is no one thing that makes this show magical. That's not how magic works.
Magic is connections, multiple entities in harmony, like friendship.
Submitted February 21, 2019 at 07:07AM by Crocoshark
via reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/mylittlepony/comments/at3j6u/thoughts_on_my_little_pony_then_vs_now/?utm_source=ifttt
No comments :
Post a Comment