The animation improves considerably over time, and it’s striking to compare season 8 with season 1 to see how far it’s come. The clean line style is employed expressively so characters don’t come off as blandly drained of detail, and the vivid oversaturated pastel palette eventually becomes natural.
The animation is limited, but like Samurai Jack 3/ The Powerpuff Girls, the series makes a virtue of necessity and takes a ‘less is more’ clear line approach: even full-screened on my large monitor, the show looks great.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Art & Music The result ultimately exceeded my expectations and I began thinking about why. I’ve been told that watching MLP now isn’t the same without the community aspect, so I avoided spoilers & while watching, I occasionally checked out the / r / mylittlepony episode discussions. I used the season 1–5/ 6 torrents on The Pirate Bay, then switched over to Yay Ponies for seasons 7–8. (I try to avoid watching unfinished works, and was surprised to see that MLP was still running but I excepted MLP because I expected it to be episodic and there were rumors that it would be wrapping up the next season 2.) Getting copies: as the animation is so nice, it’s worth tracking down high-quality copies instead of settling for streaming or low-res mirrors. I felt I needed a break and something more light-hearted-rereading Yotsuba&!, as enjoyable as it is, wasn’t doing the trick since it’s a static manga and I wanted something moving, but a silly Westernized slice-of-life moe series aimed at girls fit the bill nicely, and I could finally see what it was about MLP-I’ve joked in the past that MLP must be “Social Stories”-style skill training for autistic people and perhaps one should experiment with viewing MLP under the influence of psychedelics to see if it could teach basic social skills faster-perhaps the real magic of friendship was the serotonin receptors we made along the way (I was told MLP was too intense visually for that to be a good idea, surprisingly), but it’s unfair to make fun of it before watching it. (I rode horses in high school so I still have a soft spot for anything equestrian.)ĥ years later, I got around to it. (I dabbled in a few others, like the collaborative writing exercise MLP Loops ( TVTropes), even a omake in HP:MoR & a parody by Charles Stross, “Equoid”.) Much of this was powered by the “bronies”, which was also interesting. A family friend sat me down and insisted I watch the 2 pilot episodes, so I knew the basics, but I wasn’t super-impressed: colorful, yes, attractive design, and, unexpectedly, not bad, but not a priority.Īnd then the MLP fanfiction started showing up… Perhaps the most unexpected one was the Friendship is Optimal fanfiction (followed by Friendship Is Optimal: Caelum Est Conterrens) which crossed MLP with science fiction and rather impressively evenly split readers between regarding MLP:FiO as a utopia and a particularly horrifying dystopia (typical reaction: “I think MLP:FiO would be hell, but it’s better than our world today”) That was followed by the 2000-page-long Fallout: Equestria which mixed MLP with Fallout 3 in an action-packed intricately-conspiratorial tale of the exploration & redemption of a post-apocalyptic MLP following a multilateral thermomagical war, and has become its own thing now also worth noting are the Doctor Whooves Adventures radio plays. I wasn’t too into American animation like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic ( TVTropes), however popular in part because I find that American shows tend to be too stupid and too ugly to watch 1 and didn’t pay much attention. Many years back, in my corner of the Internet, in one of those unpredictable pop culture mutations, small pastel horses began showing up. Included are my personal rankings of characters, seasons, episodes, and official & fan music.
What makes it good and powers its fandom subculture, producing a wide array of fanfictions, music, and art? Focusing on fandom, plot, development, and meaning of bronydom, I conclude that, among other things, it has surprisingly high-quality production & aesthetics which are easily adapted to fandom and which power a Westernized shonen anime-which depicts an underappreciated plausibly-contemporary capitalist utopian perspective on self-actualization, reminiscent of other more explicitly self-help-oriented pop culture movements such as the recent Jordan B.
I watch the 2010 Western animated series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (seasons 1–9), delving deep into it and the MLP fandom, and reflect on it.