A Combo Platter of Anime Reviews

After the Last Exile debacle, I decided not to commit to watching another show all the way through. Instead, I just watched a few episodes of a bunch of shows to see if they would catch my attention and induce me to keep watching. This is everything I checked out.

Kore wa Zombie Desu ka?

Based on the first episode and the episode descriptions I looked ahead to, this is a pretty by-the-numbers 2012-era harem light novel anime. The main character was murdered and brought back to life as a zombie by a demanding cute female necromancer. He meets a “masou shoujo”, who dresses like Sakura Kinomoto but hacks up monsters with a chainsaw. Apparently he meets a ninja later.

The first episode made me chuckle a few times, but after I watched it I felt like I’d seen everything I wanted out of this world and these characters, so I chose not to continue.

Kaleido Star

I had big ambitions to carry this one all the way to the end. I made it to Episode 7, I think. It’s a cute shoujo-style story about a girl who dreams to join Kaleido Stage, a Cirque de Soleil-style prestige circus. The star of the show doesn’t believe in her and gets in her way, but with the help of her friends, she manages to succeed.

The tone reminded of a more lighthearted Gakuen Alice, but the characters were nowhere near as strong. Even when Gakuen Alice had some boring plotlines, I kept watching it because I was invested in Mikan, Hotaru, Natsume, Narumi-sensei, and the other characters. Kaleido Star had reasonably solid plots, aside from the contrived drama in Episode 5, but I just didn’t feel as invested in the characters as I wanted to be. The animation is sometimes janky, and the humor is inoffensive but repetitive and uninspired. The show is good enough that I’d probably watch it under other circumstances, but right now I really want to erase the taste of Last Exile, and this didn’t leave a strong enough impression to do it.

World Conquest Zvezda Plot

I lost interest about halfway through the first episode and started looking at Twitter. Yes, that is mostly a testament to the mind-corroding power of Twitter, but World Conquest Zvezda Plot also just failed to really grab my interest. At some point I might go back and try to watch the first episode again to give it a fairer shot.

Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo!

I watched the first four or five episodes of this. A few years ago I probably would have enjoyed its mockery of the isekei genre’s “real life RPG” tropes and jokes centered around cute girls who get horny about weird things, but I’ve seen too much of this style of humor now and it’s worn off. The gratuitous ass shots come off as skeevy, not funny, and I groan whenever the show resorts to jokes about the main character being mistaken for a pervert, which it does pretty much whenever it can’t figure out how to end a scene. It’s easy to watch and inoffensive enough (as someone who’s used to anime skeeviness and cliches) that I probably could have made it all the way through, but I wanted to aim higher.

Yuru Yuri

I watched about half of Season 1 a couple years ago, and also read the manga pretty extensively. Watching Episode 1 again, it kinda failed to get me, and the humor seemed really clunky, but I remember the same thing happening the first time I watched Episode 1 a couple years ago, and then again when I read Chapter 1 of the manga after that, so I think Chapter 1 just wasn’t very good and the series took some time to hit its stride.

The Ancient Magus’s Bride

This is where I finally hit it. I am enjoying this a lot. Very beautiful art, interesting world, and lots of feels.

Thoughts on “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" Season 7

I don’t think there’s been a season since Season 2 that was as focused on character development and life lessons as Season 7. Seasons 3, 4, 5, and 6 all started off with a big adventure story followed by a run of high concept stuff. Season 7 has been 100% hardcore character development from the get-go, starting with the low-key “Celestial Advice”, in which Twilight consults Celestia over her worries about Starlight’s future. I’m wondering if the imminent release of the movie has anything to do with this; maybe they’re saving all the adventure stuff for that. Regardless, it’s been really enjoyable for the most part. We’ve gotten to see the characters just settle down and go back to living their lives, instead of going on huge adventures, parodying zombie movies, getting sucked into comic books, turning into bats, going on disastrous boat trips, or anything of the sort. All of the Mane 6 have gotten a really solid episode focusing on them, along with satisfying supporting roles in other episodes. We’ve also gotten episodes focusing on Maud in “Rock Solid Friendship”, and Big Mac and the Cutie Mark Crusaders in “Hard to Say Anything”, and one where Starlight plays a main role, “All Bottled Up”, where she’s paired with Trixie, as well as two others, “Rock Solid Friendship” and “A Royal Problem”, where she plays a strong supporting role. Season 7 also follows up on the dragon and changeling stories that began in Season 6, with “Triple Threat” showing Dragon Lord Ember and Thorax, now leader of the changelings, meeting for the first time, and “To Change a Changeling” showing us how changeling society has evolved now that they’re out from under Chrysalis and no longer have to steal love.

The first three quarters of Season 7 pay off a bunch of plot threads from Season 6 (and earlier in some cases)—Starlight’s tutelage in “Celestial Advice”, Starlight’s friendship with Trixie in “All Bottled Up”, Celestia and Luna’s still not always harmonious relationship in “A Royal Problem”, the new leadership for the changelings and dragons in “Triple Threat” and “To Change a Changeling”, Pinkie and the yaks in “Not Asking For Trouble”, and Fluttershy’s new assertiveness in “Fluttershy Leans In”. Sprinkled in are slice of life episodes, which make up most of the last quarter of the season and are almost all really fun. “Secrets and Pies” gives us another full episode of Pinkie wackiness, which I feel like we haven’t gotten since “Too Many Pinkies” back in Season 3. “A Flurry of Emotions” and “Once Upon a Zeppelin” show us how things are in Twilight’s family now, and also give us an idea of what she actually gets up to all day in her castle.

The less good

It’s not a perfect season; we get a few “bad” episodes, in the usual Friendship is Magic sense of “bad”, a perfectly well constructed episode that lacks some je ne sais quoi compared to the best of the series.

Three episodes so far have fallen in this category for me: “Hard to Say Anything”, “Campfire Tales”, and “Daring Done?” The worst of the three (but nowhere near the worst of the series, let alone actually “bad” in a general sense) is “Hard to Say Anything”, which follows the Cutie Mark Crusaders’ efforts to help Big Macintosh with his crush on Sugar Belle, the baker pony from Starlight’s old village. He has a rival, Feather Bangs, a boy band pony who competes for Sugar Belle’s affection. The episode is just sort of tedious, and the Cutie Mark Crusaders got up to the sort of shenanigans that I thought they’d left behind them at this point. (I’m a little biased towards the Season 2-era Mane 6, but for me, the Cutie Mark Crusaders’ best is all during and after getting their cutie marks.) The episode does have good parts, though; most of the Feather Bangs scenes were really funny, and he surprisingly turned out to be a likeable character. Seeing Sugar Belle again was also nice; I’d forgotten how cute her voice is.

“Campfire Tales” is about the Cutie Mark Crusaders and their big sisters; trapped in a cave by insect attack while on a camping trip, the big sisters each tell a folk tale to pass the time. With the framing story and three folk tales to get through, there isn’t enough time to develop any of the folk tales in a really satisfying way. Rarity’s came closest, though; it had a real emotional arc and a Chinese-inspired aesthetic that I liked.

“Daring Done?” is another Daring Do episode. I’m not a huge fan of these in general (except for “Stranger than Fan Fiction”, which is hilarious because of Quibble Pants). This one adds Pinkie Pie and a more emotional Captain America: Civil War-style character arc for Daring Do, so it is better than “Daring Don’t”, but the good ideas somehow just didn’t come together for me. Maybe I’ll appreciate it more on re-watch.

These three were the episodes I enjoyed least from this season, but they were still pretty good compared to the worst of other seasons—stuff like “Power Ponies” or “Applejack’s ‘Day’ Off”—and I have a feeling when I do a full re-watch of the series, with Season 7 coming straight after Season 6, these three won’t seem too bad at all.

Favorite episodes

Three of my favorites so far have been “Rock Solid Friendship”, “A Royal Problem”, and “Triple Threat”. I love when stories combine established characters in new ways, and all three of these episodes, along with some of my other favorites in Friendship is Magic, do that.

“Rock Solid Friendship” combines Pinkie Pie, Maud, and Starlight, as Pinkie pressures Maud to make friends with Starlight so Maud will move to Ponyville, without realizing that Maud and Starlight are already becoming friends on their own. Maud is always hilarious, and watching her interact with Starlight is a lot of fun and makes both characters more interesting. Pinkie was also utilized well and got to be a driver of events and learn a lesson even as a supporting character.

“A Royal Problem” combines Celestia, Luna, and Starlight, as Starlight takes on her first assignment from the Cutie Map and quickly realizes the friendship problem is between the two alicorn sisters. At this point, there’s no plot reason to have Celestia in the show at all, but that also frees the writers to fill in details about her character that wouldn’t have come up when she was Twilight’s wise and all-knowing mentor, and both this episode and “Celestial Advice” do a great job of it. Both this episode and “Rock Solid Friendship” show that Starlight has found a niche where her social tactlessness is an asset; only Starlight would have the audacity to do what had to be done to force the princesses to see things from each others’ perspectives. I also liked that Celestia gets to be nurturing again at the end, helping soothe Starlight’s fear of failure.

“Triple Threat” combines Spike, Ember, and Thorax, as Spike realizes he invited both leaders to visit him in Ponyville on the same day and tries to keep them from meeting each other, since he’s afraid the gentle Thorax would mix badly with the fierce Ember and the result could be a war of dragon vs. changeling. This sort of plot can get old fast for me, but Ember and Thorax find out about each other just as I was starting to think the jig was getting old, and I enjoyed that Thorax and Ember worked out their issues with each other directly, like rational people. This episode is also one of the funniest of the season. It had my favorite joke of Season 7 so far, when Ember can’t tell Twilight and Starlight apart.

“Triple Threat” is a funny episode, but Season 7 overall has been more serious than Season 6, and has one of the sweetest and most adorable serious episodes of the entire series: “The Perfect Pear”, which tells the Romeo and Juliet love story of Applejack, Big Mac, and Apple Bloom’s parents, Bright Mac and Pear Butter. Season 7 hasn’t been great for songs, but “The Perfect Pear” has “You’re in My Head Like a Catchy Song”, my favorite song of the season. It also introduces Grand Pear, the Apple siblings’ maternal grandfather, voiced by William Shatner. William Shatner actually does a great job; he modifies his voice enough that I didn’t even realize it was him until I saw the credits, so you focus on the character and not William Shatner. I hope they’ll bring back Grand Pear for another episode so we can see how he relates to his grandchildren after being out of their lives for so long. (The obvious Grand Pear / Discord meeting is optional for me; I’d rather see real characterization than fan service, no matter how fun it would be. Though I won’t say no to it if they do it gracefully.)

I also really enjoyed “Discordant Harmony” and “A Health of Information”. In “Discordant Harmony”, Discord tries to change himself for Fluttershy’s sake, only to discover that she liked him the way he way, while in “A Health of Information” Fluttershy has to unravel an ancient mystery to find the cure to a plague. They’re not as good as the four episodes I mentioned above, nor are they my favorite Fluttershy episodes, but I thought both had an interesting hook, and I liked seeing Fluttershy have real stories that focused on something other than her being assertive now (which, as I’ll discuss later, I have some minor gripes about).

“Fame and Misfortune”

After spending a fair amount of time reading the comment sections on the My Little Pony wikia and the forums on Derpibooru (and a little bit of /mlp/ on 4chan, so sue me), it’s become apparent that there’s a lot of burnout in the fandom. When people are burnt out on a fandom, they start to get hypercritical and lambaste the writers over weird things, or complain that the show isn’t some other thing that it’s never been but they’ve decided would be more enjoyable to them than what it is. I go through an anime burnout about once every five years, but since anime is an entire medium, I go enjoy something else for a while, then come back and expand outside whatever narrow subgenre I was inhabiting that I’d grown tired of, and that usually does the trick. Recently I got burnt out on moe, and I stopped watching anime and sought out other things, like superheroes and My Little Pony, as a change of pace. Now I’m starting to get back into anime a little, with shows like One Punch Man and Little Witch Academia and Last Exile that are a little different from the stuff I’d gotten sick of. (I have also enjoyed some moe shows—Gochuumon wa Usagi Desu ka? and Gabriel Dropout, for example—but I don’t have the energy to sit through the ones that aren’t good anymore.)

A lot of My Little Pony fans online are showing signs of advanced burnout. They get hypercritical and turn minor storytelling inconsistencies into world-ending flaws that shoot an episode down into negative ratings. They complain that the show should be dark and gritty (Mare-Do-Well: The Dark Pony Knight Returns? Ponystar Equestria? Game of Pones?), or that it needs more worldbuilding (The Ponymarillion?), which would effectively turn it into a different show. Their most common complaints are about the characters, though, especially the Mane 6.

The Friendship is Magic staff are weirdly active on Twitter, and I imagine they see these complaints constantly: Twilight is too boring now that she’s an alicorn, Fluttershy learns the same lesson all the time and just needs to be assertive already, Pinkie Pie is just a dumb joke character who adds nothing to the story, Rarity is annoying and should go away forever, Rainbow Dash is the awesomest perfectest pony and doesn’t need to learn anything because she already knows everything so fuck you for writing an episode where she isn’t treated as the paragon of perfection that she is, and Applejack is there. In Season 7, they chose to write an entire episode addressing these fan complaints. It’s called “Fame and Misfortune”.

I didn’t put this episode in my favorites section because it’s not one of my favorites. The conceit they used of having Twilight publish the friendship journal from Season 4 is clever, and it has parts that I like a lot, and I think its message is important: no one is flawless, and no one can change their personality forever after suddenly seeing the error of their ways during a 23-minute storyline—even when you “fix” issues in your personality, they’ll keep recurring in different ways throughout your life. Before I saw it, I was planning an essay that would have made a lot of the same points it does about why some of these complaints sit on invalid premises. But it’s an “interesting” episode, not a “good” episode like “Rock Solid Friendship” or “A Royal Problem”. That’s why I gave it its own section.

I haven’t looked very closely at how fans reacted to it yet, but the reaction I’ve seen has mostly been negative, which makes sense since it’s an entire episode directly disagreeing with their complaints. I’ve also criticized some of the episodes and creative choices of the show. There is no such thing as a perfect work of art. Even if someone can come along and say “Such-and-such is a perfect show”, someone else can always come along and say (genuinely, not just to be disagreeable) “For me it had x-y-z flaws.” In the next sections, I’m going to criticize some more things. To me, the message of “Fame and Misfortune” was not “Don’t criticize us”. It wasn’t as broad as that. It was narrowly directed at a specific set of criticisms, mostly about the way the Mane 6 are written, that seem to come from an implicit belief that the characters should not have flaws, should always behave correctly (according to some measure of correctness), and should always learn their lessons for now and always after one 23-minute episode in which they learn how wrong they were. I’ve seen other instances where fans seem to think this; ask me about the roasting “Filli Vanilli” gets for how Pinkie Pie acts in it sometime.

At the end of the day, there is a difference between constructive, well-meaning criticism, and misguided or destructive criticism, and the creators are not obliged to take criticism to heart if it would, in their opinions, make the show worse. If they had written episodes like “28 Pranks Later” or “Filli Vanilli” the way some of these angry fans had wanted, the episodes fundamentally would not have worked as narratives. It’s not good storytelling to write an episode where Rainbow Dash’s awesomeness gets praised for 23 minutes. Just as Batman needs to keep feeling angry about his parents’ death, Fluttershy needs to struggle with assertiveness and Pinkie needs to have trouble being serious.

At the end of “Fame and Misfortune”, the Mane 6 find out that two young fillies resolved their differences and stayed friends thanks to the friendship journal, and the Mane 6 decide to be satisfied with that and ignore the riot going on outside. Combined with some statements I’ve seen some of the staff make on Twitter, it seems like they’re implying they’re sick of dealing with the adult fans and have decided to take the attitude of “Fuck you guys, as long as the little girls like us we’re fine”. That’s an understandable attitude to take, especially after they did episodes like “Slice of Life” just for adult fans and are still catching heat over everything. I also sometimes make things, and I totally get how tempting it is to only show things you made to people who will like it no matter what. I totally get how exhausting it is to argue with people who don’t understand what a work was trying to do, yet think they’re the world’s next Derrida and want to “well, actually” the creators on the symbolism, or people who blast the creators because after calculating the length of the Equestrian solar year it turns out there should be a leap second every three and a half seasons but they missed it, or people who will never be satisfied with anything because they’re actually burnt out on the show and would rather be watching Westworld but haven’t realized it yet. I see all these types and more. I struggle with the thought of putting my work out there for all of these reasons and more. But adult fans didn’t start watching Friendship is Magic because it was aimed at them; they started watching it because they found it good, despite not being aimed at them. I don’t know about all the adult fans, but for myself, I don’t need anything special from the staff. I just want them to keep making the best thing they can. Things have changed a little from Season 1 to Season 7, but in my opinion, every season has had more good episodes than bad, and the good episodes have been brilliant, and the bad episodes have been more “Eh, there was this small story element that kinda didn’t work for me, it wasn’t awful but it could’ve been better.”

“Shadow Play”

“Shadow Play” is like the Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice of Friendship is Magic season finales. It’s a huge, sprawling, ambitious story that maybe, kind of, juuuust a little escaped the capabilities of what could be told in the time it had with the amount of backstory that had been established.

I was genuinely surprised and genuinely delighted that all the episodes we’d seen across the season about legendary figures of Equestrian history were actually leading to something. I liked the concept a lot. I also liked getting to learn something about how the Elements of Harmony came to exist. This was a very continuity-heavy, lore-heavy episode by MLP standards. I like the show we have and I definitely don’t want it to turn into the aforementioned Ponymarillion, but it’s nice sometimes to learn that these things have a history in this world and aren’t purely plot devices.

Part 2 of the episode, once the story has been established, was really good. Twilight is torn between listening to her idol, Starswirl, and her student, Starlight. She knows Starswirl’s path goes against her own beliefs, embodied in Starlight’s presence among them, but she listens to him because she spent so long idolizing him that she has a hard time accepting he’s also a pony and isn’t perfect. It was a great conflict, and all the more powerful because of what we saw in the movie with Tempest Shadow.

Unfortunately, the wind-up in Part 1 is where you can see the seams showing. It’s way too abrupt. They squeezed five scenes of the Mane 6 minus Twilight retrieving their legend’s relic, each of which probably could have been an episode concept all on its own, into about ten minutes. I wish this had been structured more like the story arc in Season 4, with each pony getting her own episode to establish her relationship with her legend and finding the relic at the end, then realizing in “Shadow Play” Part 1 that the relic could be used to summon the legends back to Equestria. At least setting up enough in the episode so that retrieving the relic didn’t require so much context would have helped; Fluttershy’s and Pinkie’s missions are the shortest of all, probably fitting into about 30 seconds apiece, and that’s because they each had entire episodes–“A Health of Information” and “Daring Done?”–to set things up beforehand. The season was pretty full of great episodes, but if I were supreme pony story dictator, I would’ve cut “Hard to Say Anything” and “Marks and Recreation”, along with “Campfire Tales” itself, so we could fit in episodes about Applejack and Rockhoof, Rarity and Mistmane, and Rainbow and Flash Magnus. (Rainbow and Spike’s race with the jerk dragon Garble, which ends with Rainbow tricking and robbing Garble to get Flash Magnus’s shield, would’ve made a perfect ending to the episode, teaching kids the lesson that it’s okay to deceive and rob someone, as long as they’re a jerk and deserve it and you really need what they have.)

Among all the two-parters in the series, I’d probably put “Shadow Play” in fourth place, behind “Twilight’s Kingdom”, “A Canterlot Wedding”, and “The Crystal Empire”. It was about as good as “Princess Twilight Sparkle” in the end. “Princess Twilight Sparkle” was a less ambitious story that stuck its landing, whereas “Shadow Play” is big and ambitious and doesn’t quite make it, but I’m giving it extra points for its ambition. It’s also interesting how “Shadow Play” is a total brony-bait episode, even though there’ve been signs from the staff that they’re sick of catering to bronies and want to focus on their original target audience of children. I’m sure children will also like the episode–I know when I was a kid I was capable of appreciating ambition in storytelling–but this is the sort of thing bronies online are constantly asking for. Stop sending us mixed messages!

Random Observations

“Fame and Misfortune” is the most obvious example of the rising number of meta references in Season 7 compared to earlier seasons. My favorite joke of the season from “Triple Threat” is another example: on one level, it works because Ember isn’t used to looking at ponies, so it makes sense that she’d have some trouble telling Twilight and Starlight apart. But out of universe, Starlight is intentionally similar to Twilight, so the joke also has an extra meta level to it.

I went back and forth on Starlight in Season 6, but she’s really come into her own in Season 7. Even though she’s superficially similar to Twilight, her arc as a character has interesting similarities to both Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash. Pairing her up with Trixie and Maud and Thorax helps her a lot too; while I’m a little disappointed that we never get a really strong connection between Starlight and any of the Mane 6 other than Twilight, I’m glad they found characters to mix her in with that could create an interesting dynamic. It’s no coincidence that two of my four favorite Season 7 episodes had Starlight in a major role. She’s not going to blow up my character rankings, but I’ve enjoyed watching her a lot.

Pinkie Pie has surprisingly gotten some good material in too. Her funny scenes at the start of the season weren’t that great, but she had a great subplot in “Rock Solid Friendship”, and she actually got to be a serious character again in “Not Asking For Trouble”, where she becomes the first pony to go inside Yakyakistan after reaching its gates in “Party Pooped”. Then we got another funny episode in “Secrets and Pies” towards the end of the season. Overall, Season 7 was a good season for Pinkie, even if we don’t count the movie.

I disagree with other fans who complain about Fluttershy in Seasons 1 through 3. I feel a strong personal connection to Fluttershy, and that has dwindled a little in Seasons 5 and 6 as she got more assertive and less shy and quiet. (There’s a scene in “Fame and Misfortune” where an angry pony in the crowd outside the castle yells “Fluttershy is just so painfully shy, it’s hard to relate! I mean, come on!” and another pony in the background wearing a Fluttershy T-shirt and hat, named White Lightning according to the wiki, looks down in shame and slinks away; White Lightning is me.) So I’m not thrilled with the direction she goes in Season 7, starting with “Fluttershy Leans In”, which seems to have the narrative message “This is Fluttershy now, she’s assertive”. I didn’t list it under “bad” episodes because it’s not bad. Nothing about the direction the writers have taken Fluttershy is bad or wrong; it’s a valid decision, even if it’s one that has made me feel less close to the character. What I’d like to see, now that “Fluttershy Leans In” has firmly established her new assertiveness, is some episodes that focus on her gentle and quiet side again, and show that it still exists even though she’s now assertive. “Buckball Season” did this really well (for Pinkie as well). Some of the other Season 7 episodes—“Discordant Harmony” and “A Health of Information”, for example—show her being kind in an assertive way, which isn’t quite what I’m talking about, but I’ll take it. Another nice direction would be to introduce another character who is as shy and quiet as Fluttershy used to be (White Lightning?), and let Fluttershy teach that character how to get by in life without giving up her self, the way Fluttershy has learned to.

Thorax has turned out to be a surprisingly good character. He didn’t get much development in Season 6, so I didn’t have a real opinion on him, but watching him in Season 7 has been a lot of fun, both paired with Ember in “Triple Threat” and paired with Starlight and Trixie in “To Change a Changeling”. It would’ve been way funnier if his brother was named “Abdomen”, though.

I still don’t quite get the fascination with background ponies, but I do now appreciate the “cameo” ponies, the ones that appear for one or two episodes or a few scenes, like Coco Pommel or Cheese Sandwich. Season 7 has been more focused on existing characters and less on new characters, but it does introduce Strawberry Sunrise, a pegasus who shows up to go “Strawberries are best fruit, fight me mf”, for a memorable scene in “Honest Apple”.

It was fun to see Iron Will again in “Once Upon a Zeppelin”, and I liked the joke where he says he’s learned from last time and satisfaction is not guaranteed.

Conclusion

Season 8 is coming next year, and apparently Hasbro is happy with all the bucketloads of money they’re still making on the show, so it’s entirely possible there will be a Season 9, and it seems they’re even talking about a second movie. Even though I’m slightly concerned about that mindset, the fact remains that Season 7 was on the whole extremely good. So far the staff has managed to consistently bring in strong writers who understand the characters and are able to bring them in good directions that keep them interesting without changing who they fundamentally are. I have a feeling some of what I consider missteps from Seasons 4 and 5 happened because the fandom was at fever pitch and the writers were trying to do what they thought the fans wanted, whereas their current disillusionment with the fandom may have actually helped them get back to basics in Season 7 and deliver a run of great character-oriented stories. Whatever the reason, I have high hopes for Season 8 and I’m looking forward to it.

The “Last Exile" Diaries

I first watched Last Exile back in the early 2000’s when it was on Anime Unleashed on TechTV (even before it became G4). I thought I had watched the whole show, but when I thought back, all I remembered was a bunch of scenes of Claus, Lavie, and Alvis being suddenly interrupted in the middle of a conversation by the commercial break bumper, and then a really loud commercial for The Screen Savers or some sort of credit adjustment service. Now that it’s on Crunchyroll, I figured I’d revisit it, especially since I’ve heard it gets really good later.

Thoughts on Episodes 1 - 8

Last Exile might get really good later, but my goodness, does it start out slow. The story pacing for the first eight episodes feels really strange. First we spend two entire episodes watching this huge ritualized airship battle while the main characters, Claus and Lavie, try to deliver a message to the airship fleet’s commander, Duke Mad-Thane, from his wife and daughter. After this, the pacing suddenly becomes really fast. Claus and Lavie return home and then, during a vanship race, run into a dying pilot, Ralph Wednesday, who hands off a little girl named Alvis to them for delivery to the Silvana, a legendary ship captained by Alex Row, a tall and dark man of few words with a cool cape. Claus and Lavie’s home is destroyed by star-shaped ships from the mysterious Guild, and they run away and manage to deliver Alvis to the Silvana, but then aren’t confident in how she’ll be treated on board and decide to force their way onto the ship to see her. The ship comes under Guild attack and Claus impulsively asks to be allowed to take out one of their specially modified vanships that has a machine gun, where a Guild noble named Dio observes him with interest and eventually goes out to fly against him. Lavie passes out from the g-forces of one of the crazy maneuvers that Claus goes through to evade Dio, so Claus isn’t able to shoot down Dio because he’s out of ammunition and needs her to reload. Finally, after the battle, the Silvana docks at a floating casino and Lavie and her new friend Mullin Shetland, who helped her and Claus back on Mad-Thane’s ship (the Claiomh Solais, just like the wand in Little Witch Academia) in Episode 2, ends up clashing with the captain of another ship called the Goliath, which brings them into a ship-to-ship duel that the Silvana easily wins, despite the Goliath’s attempts to cheat.

Whew! After the really slow first two episodes, the pacing for Episodes 3-8 goes breakneck, and you just sort of get swept along by it. That means the show stays exciting and made me want to keep watching, but at times I was really unclear on why things were happening. Claus almost seems like a stoner most of the time; he’s half-asleep, barely reacting to anything, doesn’t seem all there, and yet he very suddenly develops a deep and abiding attachment to Alvis, to the point where he risks death and gets the tar kicked out of himself all so he can see her and make sure she’s being treated well. Lavie at first is the more sensible voice of reason, who advises caution, but after acting standoffish towards Alvis, she also suddenly decides that she really wants to get on that ship and find out what’s happening. It also isn’t clear why the mechanics crew decides to beat the crap out of Claus when they later suddenly decide to be kind and helpful. (Tatiana’s influence, maybe.)

I do understand why it’s written like this. The writers needed to set up the world, which is actually pretty complicated. So far it seems like each nation has a ruler, with nobles who finance gigantic airships, and they go to war with each other, but the Guild, which seems to have highly advanced technology and live in the upper atmosphere, prescribes a set of rules for warfare. The nobles also live on floating cities, and the commoners all live down below on the ground, where it’s apparently hard to find good water or decent food. (Though Claus and Lavie’s food looks fresh enough.) The first two episodes are mostly setting up the world by showing us a battle, the rules, the Guild allowing infractions of the rules for mysterious reasons, the Anatoray nobles’ suicidal devotion to chivalry, and other foundational concepts. And with Episode 8 finally stopping and giving us a chance to breathe, I’m hoping we’ll get to learn more about the characters at a slower pace and maybe get some insight in hindsight on why they did certain things that they did.

Aside from the story, I absolutely love the art style. The CG used for the ships is really terrible (I’d like to blame the show’s age–it’s from 2003–but the CG in Fate/Zero looked just as bad, unfortunately). But I loved the steampunk art design and the sepia tone over everything that makes it look like an old photograph. There’s an artist named Range Murata who worked on this that I used to be a huge fan of, and now I remember why. Last Exile is from the early digipaint era, and some of the shows from that era look really awful today, flat and garish, as if they were done in MS Paint. Even Love Hina looks pretty bad compared to more modern shows. But Last Exile, like Haibane Renmei, overcame the pitfalls of early digipaint with an amazing art direction.

Episodes 9 - 14

Things continue moving at a fast pace in these episodes. Claus and Lavie enter a vanship race where they have to fix up a wreck and fly it. Dio enters just to fly against them, but through a series of circumstances he ends up on the Silvana with them just messing around. Lavie decides that she can’t be Claus’s navigator if he’s going to fly a fighting vanship since she doesn’t want to be involved in such a thing, and retires to join the mechanics group. Meanwhile, Alex Row enters into some intrigue against Dio’s older sister, Maestro Delphine, and bids in an auction on a relic known as the gate to EXILE, one of four mysterious items known fittingly as mysterions. Someone threatens his life over this, and he just barely makes it back to the Silvana with the gate.

The emperor of Anatoray demands that Alex surrender Alvis to the captain of the Urbanus, but Alex refuses, so they fight. Meanwhile, a little drama is going on between Claus, Tatiana, and Tatiana’s best friend and navigator Alister, who is getting disenchanted with Tatiana’s constant grumpiness. (She really is a grump.) Alister volunteers to be Claus’s navigator when Alex picks him to fly escort on a parley mission to the Urbanus, and Tatiana gets her back by picking Claus as her navigator during the battle. They end up crashing their vanship in the desert, and we find out that Tatiana graduated top of her class from the military academy and has apparently been lying to her parents about what she actually does, telling them she’s on a normal ship where everything is hunky dory instead of a weird black ops rogue ship that seems to be working to overthrow the government and establish a new world order.

Meanwhile, Lavie has a flashback while lying unconscious in bed, showing us how she and Claus learned to fly from their fathers. Claus’s father was a noble who decided he liked slumming it with the ground peeps, and came down to live next door to Lavie’s dad, who looks like someone you’d find in a sports bar yelling about the Browns on a Wednesday night. They were tasked to deliver a peace treaty to the Disith, but were killed. The episode hints that the Guild killed them on purpose so the war would go on. It also hints that Alex Row knew them and that he was the one who gave Lavie the goat toy that she later gives Alvis.

The show is still refusing to really explain anything, and the shine is starting to wear off. I’m still with the series at this point on the strength of its world, but I’m finding the characters are underwritten and the air battles aren’t nearly as exciting as someone thought they were. I had a rough time with Episode 12, where the Silvana and Urbanus fight for the entire episode. Every battle pretty much comes down to ships rendered in terrible CG flying around a snore-inducing sky filled with grey smoke and fog and clouds. Too often, the show substitutes vagueness for real story and character dimension. Even though Episode 13, which is just Tatiana sleeping in the desert having flashbacks and feeling sorry for herself while Claus actually tries to get them out of there, doesn’t tell us a whole lot about Tatiana; it just gives us random tidbits of her life before the Silvana, without enough details about the world to really understand the import of most of them. The show keeps on doing the same thing with Alex; everything he does is cloaked in a guise of mystery, and yet people keep following him blindly while he does weird, self-destructive things with no explanation. Someone on the writing staff seems to have thought they could make contrived backstory dumps more subtle and interesting by making them incredibly vague, but it doesn’t seem to be working for me.

The relative bright spot when it comes to characters is Dio. He at least is fun to watch, and mysterious in a more organic way, because of his weird behavior. Lavie, who was my favorite of the earlier episodes, has pretty much been demoted to side character. These two are the only characters with real panache. Claus is lifeless as a lead; he’s constantly half asleep, drifting through life without really driving the plot forward, no magnetism or ambition or determination or anything else that would make him interesting to watch. Tatiana is constantly grumpy for no good reason, and Alex is always being mysterious with his awesome cape. Personally, I think Mullin Shetland should’ve been the lead. He’s more lead-like than Claus is.

I really wanted to see more episodes like Episode 8 going forward. That episode was a lot of fun, showed us more about the world, and let us get to know Lavie a little better as we saw her unleash her rage and break a chair over a guy’s head. There haven’t been any more episodes like that. I’m still sticking with the show. 26-episode shows almost always start to drag around this point, near the Episode 12 - 15 mark. Little Witch Academia, which I loved, started to drag around this point. Evangelion had “Weaving a Story”, aka the most boring clip show imaginable, around this point. The problem is that those shows had some amazing self-contained episodes in the first half, like “Orange Submariner” for Little Witch Academia or “Both of You Dance Like You Wanna Win!” for Eva, that were great character episodes or interesting story concepts or just really funny. Last Exile has been a bit of a slog up to this point. I still don’t feel like I know any of the characters, except for Lavie, a little. It almost feels like the show is so eager to get its continuous plot out that it breathlessly charges forward and never stops to let us really feel like a part of the proceedings. I’m still giving it a chance for now, but the shtick is starting to wear thin. If it doesn’t start to pay things off within the next few episodes, or at least hint at how it’s going to eventually pay things off, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stick around.

Episodes 15 and 16

In Episode 15, Claus returns to the ship and everyone assumes he and Tatiana had sex. Lavie can’t look at him and won’t talk to him because, as is becoming increasingly clear, she’s in love with him. (Hoo boy.) Tatiana becomes all lovey-dovey and starts blushing and looking away whenever someone mentions Claus, the exact opposite of how she was before. (Kuudere.) Alex comes clean with Claus and tells him that he knew their dads and their vanship was actually his vanship, not their dads’. Sophia, the motherly first officer, is revealed to be the princess of Anatoray, daughter of the emperor. She is called to take back her position and tries to get Alex to ask her not to go, but he doesn’t care and tells her to leave, so she does. Before she leaves, she randomly kisses Claus on the lips (isn’t he like twelve years old?). We are also informed that Disith has fallen. I think the weird scene at the end of Episode 13 where sticks fell out of the sky was supposed to represent the fall of Disith.

In Episode 16, Sophia returns and becomes princess again. Her father tries to kill her, but her guardian, a former Guild member, stages a coup and kills the emperor first, allowing Sophia to take the throne with the support of the former captain of the Urbanus. They fight off the remnants of the Disith fleet, and the Guild decides to destroy Anatoray. Meanwhile, Alex decides he’s going to go off and kill Delphine finally since she killed his girlfriend / wife Euris, who it seems was also a princess. He gives Claus a chance to leave, but Claus says he’s saying. When he tells Lavie she should leave, she says she’s also staying, because he is.

I said last time I was going to stick with Last Exile, but I honestly don’t think I can do it anymore. The world and art are still amazing, but I can’t beat around the bush anymore: the story structure and character writing are absolutely terrible. I’ve given up the idea of the show actually becoming good; its sins run too deep at this point. The show keeps on dumping all these major events on us in quick succession without motivating any of them properly. Making Sophia a princess all of a sudden comes off as a bunch of writers who have no idea what they’re doing and needed something to happen so they could fill up another 12 episodes. And that’s how everything that happens in the show comes off, at least the things that aren’t needlessly mysterious. Now that we know what Alex’s motives are and what he plans to do, all the mystery seems totally wasted, because what he wants to do and why he wants to do it isn’t interesting enough to warrant all that mystery. If the Guild had actually been set up as a real power, that might have helped, but we know pretty much nothing about them except that they have advanced technology and white hair. We don’t even know what they supposedly did that made Alex hate them.

The way the characterization was handled in these two episodes was inexcusably clumsy. There was no slow build of respect from Tatiana, no decision to start treating Claus a little better; she goes straight from scorn to sopping puppy dog eyes. Since we’ve never seen any kind of relationship between Sophia and Alex, his refusal to ask her to stay has no weight. We don’t know what he’s denying or throwing away by letting her go. We have no idea what they’ve shared or suffered together, what their history is, and so it means nothing that Alex lets her go to us, because their relationship is nothing, and he’s not giving up anything. Subjectively, I also found the payoff incredibly uninteresting: all the female characters are in love with the male characters, and the male characters are oblivious. So we’ve spent 15 episodes of boring air battles and badly motivated plot happenings, watching a lifeless protagonist with no charisma, and in the end what we get is the first five minutes of every harem anime ever. This isn’t something they can just recover from by throwing in a flashback later. You can’t flub what should be large, profound moments in a character arc like this and then make them suddenly work by filling it in later. It doesn’t seem like they even intend to; the summaries of the next few episodes sound like action episodes, with Sophia and her fleet helping out Alex in his fight against Delphine.

I’m trying to remember where I got the idea that this show was good, and it’s not coming to me. If this was the first anime I’d ever seen, I might be transfixed by the art alone, but even that has its warts, with the awful CG ships mixed in with the 2D animation. The only character I was ever interested in was Lavie. I liked her spunk and her slightly cynical attitude. I liked being able to relate to her frustration in Episode 8 at the constant escalation of events. We’ve lost that at this point. There’s no one I can identify with, not even at a general human level, because everyone’s emotions change on a dime, no one has a clear motive for anything they do, and Sophia is suddenly making out with Claus. The story just keeps galloping along, and there are too many times I find myself asking what the hell is even going on. That makes it a struggle to get myself to watch this show anymore. I don’t think I can do it. I’m dropping the show.

“Is the Order a Rabbit?” Quick Thoughts

It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a purebred, dyed in the wool cute girls doing cute things show as much as I have while watching Is the Order a Rabbit? recently. Gochiusa is pretty formulaic, but it has enough charm points, including beautiful art, likeable characters, and absorbing atmosphere, that I had a ton of fun watching it.

The show follows a standard cast of five girls, who live in a town that looks Central European despite being also sort of Japanese, and all work at coffee shops. Chino is an expressionless loli whose father owns Rabbit House and employs the ditzy Cocoa (who also lives with them in their house above the shop) and Rize, a military otaku whose father is super rich and an old buddy of Chino’s father. Chiya is the offbeat scion of Rabbit House’s former rival, a Japanese tea and sweet shop called Ama Usa An, and her childhood friend, the serious and ladylike Syaro, works at Fleur de Lapin, a cafe that specializes in herbal teas. Supporting characters include a novelist named Aoyama Blue Mountain, Cocoa’s older sister Mocha, and Chino’s middle school friends, the tomboyish Maya, and Megu, who takes ballet. There are a few random supernatural elements to the world, mostly revolving around Chino’s grandfather and his Angora rabbit Tippy, which is reminiscent of Aria along with the European-inspired architecture of the town.

I saw Series I back when it first came out, and in my memories it sort of dragged its feet for seven episodes before getting its act together and serving the same kind of dorky but inexplicably funny humor as K-On, as well as amazingly drawn backgrounds and atmosphere that rivaled even Aria, for its last five. That was pretty much how I felt about it this time too. The first seven episodes are pretty and full of anodyne cuteness, but most of the jokes just don’t seem to ever land and the characters don’t develop a whole lot. Then we finally start to learn things about them, starting when Chino gets annoyed at Cocoa for finishing a jigsaw puzzle that Chino wanted to finish on her own. After this, the stories become a lot more character-driven. They’re still slow-paced iyashikei slice of life to the core, but they’re things that happen because of a character’s personality being a certain way, or because of the characters reacting to situations they’ve been placed in, instead of just scenes of the characters doing things the writers have decided would be cute. They’re still cute–painfully adorable, even–but the characters’ parts in the activities feel more distinct in later episodes than in the first seven. I wasn’t sure it would be able to continue into Series II, but it did; while not every episode of Series II was brilliantly paced or written, and some of them had noticeable story problems, they were all at least fun and presented something interesting about the characters.

In my review of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, I mentioned that I have a type when it comes to characters in cute girls doing cute things shows: I tend to like the weird ones, then the earnest and serious ones, then the shy ones, in about that order. This pattern holds again for Gochiusa: my favorite is the weird and spacey Chiya, followed by the serious and misfortunate Syaro, and then the shy Chino, with Rize and then Cocoa bringing up the rear.

That said, Chiya never quite reaches her potential as the weird character. Even though Gochiusa doesn’t need to have character arcs to do what it does, Syaro, Chino, and Cocoa actually have small character arcs anyway, but Chiya doesn’t. (Nor does Rize.) I would have liked to see her behave like the sort of person I imagine when I hear the over-the-top poetic names she gave to the items on Ama Usa An’s menu, but she doesn’t live up to that very often. Her other primary role is embarrassing, worrying about, and generally mothering Syaro, but the show is never entirely self-aware about this. I liked the joke in Series II where she wanted to be cuddled by Mocha, but I would’ve liked it more if the show had pointed out that Chiya has the same kind of motherly presence and gone somewhere with the idea that Mocha considered her an equal in some sense as a big sister.

I do like the characters, but none of them are as well realized as the K-On or Yuru Yuri cast (let alone MLP), which meant even though I had fun laughing along with their lives, I didn’t feel as attached to them, and when the show ended, I was pretty satisfied to leave them. Well, I do feel like I might want to check in on Syaro every so often, just to make sure she’s doing all right. Between her poverty, frustrated crush on Rize, bizarre fear of rabbits, constantly having people get her drunk on coffee just because they think it’s fun, getting perved on by Aoyama, and general misfortune, I worry about that girl.

Gochiusa is also really good about making sure everyone gets paired up so we can see how they get along. We see a lot of Cocoa with Chino and Cocoa with Chiya and Rize with Syaro, but we also get to see Chino with Chiya and Rize with Chino and Syaro with Cocoa. Even Maya and Megu and Mocha get to pair up with almost everyone in the main cast for a scene or two. The only character I didn’t find surpassingly adorable and charming was Aoyama Blue Mountain. She’s not that interesting and doesn’t do much of note, and she’s responsible for some of the worst jokes in the show. In general, anytime the show tried to do a sexual joke, it didn’t work for me, and Aoyama looking up Syaro’s skirt was the worst. It was also the only sexual joke that continued past the first seven episodes, and it made me feel a small dread every time a scene would open on the interior of Fleur de Lapin, where Aoyama did her perving. I wanted to see Syaro quit Fleur de Lapin and go work with Chiya at Ama Usa An, where she could wear a nice concealing kimono, but that unfortunately never happened.

On the big scale of cute girls doing cute things shows, Gochiusa doesn’t reach the top tier of K-On, Aria, and Yuru Yuri, and it’s not revolutionary, but I enjoyed it for its cute characters, charming atmosphere, and beautiful scenery. It was good to know this subgenre can still deliver.

Equestria Girls Summer Specials

I had big hopes for the Equestria Girls Summer Specials. They didn’t live up to most of them, but they weren’t terrible. They at least avoided being the disaster that was the Mahoromatic Summer Special, and somewhat rehabilitated the good name of summer specials.

The best of the three turned out to be “Dance Magic”, a little story about the Humane 7 making a music video to try and raise money for Camp Everfree. The Crystal Prep girls are also making a music video and go at it in the usual cutthroat Crystal Prep way, stealing Rarity’s idea and driving her into a panic, until Rarity overhears them talking and realizes they’re also having a crisis, and offers to join forces with them to make a joint video. This is what I wanted out of the summer specials: smaller-scale, slice of life stories that show what the Humane 7 get up to when they aren’t fighting demon hipster chicks. You know, like the main show. It was also the first time Equestria Girls Rarity has gotten any kind of part in anything. Her deathly white Tim Burton skin freaks me out even more than Rainbow Dash’s Bolian blue skin, and her personality and accent make zero sense on a human teenager, but it was still nice to see her be the focus for a bit.

The other two specials, “Movie Magic” and “Mirror Magic”, form a two part story that ends in a small-scale battle against another demon hipster chick. “Movie Magic” is way too much like an episode of Scooby-Doo for my taste, but I did like the villain, Juniper Montage, a Daring Do fangirl with delusions of grandeur.

“Mirror Magic” is the better of the two. It shows the first meeting of Sunset Shimmer and Starlight Glimmer. Starlight sweet-talks Sunset into letting her come visit the “human” world, where she is the very image of a 2010’s teenager, with her stocking cap, vest, and distressed skinny jeans. Juniper Montage, meanwhile, has acquired a magic mirror that grants her wishes, and eventually uses it to trap the Humane 7 and turn into a demon hipster chick, only stopping when Starlight extends a hand of friendship and offers to forgive her for what she’s done.

I was excited to see Starlight and Sunset meet, but unfortunately “Mirror Magic” doesn’t do a whole lot with that. Starlight helps Sunset learn to stop worrying about the future magic attacks and enjoy her life, but that didn’t seem like a lesson that needed to come from Starlight; it could just as well have come from any of the other Humane 7. Pinkie Pie, maybe. Or Sci-Twi, since she dealt with a similar problem in Legend of Everfree when she was constantly worried about turning into Midnight Sparkle again. Starlight also connects with Juniper over their mutual past evil, but that didn’t seem like it needed to come from Starlight either; it could just as well have come from Sunset, or even Sci-Twi. Basically, Starlight being in the special at all felt superfluous. Juniper was interesting enough to carry the special without introducing another character.

On the other hand, I realized on my second viewing that Juniper is more like Starlight than she is Sunset or Sci-Twi: she has the same kind of social disability and lack of perspective that Starlight does, failing to realize that she doesn’t fit the part of Daring Do at all, even if her famous director uncle was willing to risk a bunch of the studio’s money on such a risky, nepotistic casting choice. Of course, she’s just a teenager, and a lot of teenagers are like that and grow out of it. I would have liked to see this similarity between them bear more directly on the outcome, though. It’s the eternal curse of the Equestria Girls stuff: between the running time and the amount of plot they need to set up, they aren’t always able to play things out in the best possible way.

Starlight acts pretty different in this special from how she normally does, and I’m teetering a little on whether it’s “seeing new sides of Starlight” or “out of character”. We’ve never seen her be as ebullient and excited for new things as she is here. Usually, Starlight prefers orderly, controlled, and predictable, and running off to another dimension populated by weird hairless ape versions of the people you know where you can’t use magic, your chief talent and usual solution to everything, is the opposite of orderly, controlled, and predictable. She is changing, though, so I’m not willing to yell “Out of character!” unambiguously. There were some nice little touches that were very Starlight. She makes a total mess of eating that ice cream cone, and that’s probably because she doesn’t know how to use hands, but she also doesn’t seem concerned about it, and that’s probably because of her lack of social awareness.

I would’ve liked to see Starlight and Sunset clash a little, or at least contrast in a more obvious way. They are very different: Sunset is mature, easygoing, and sociable, while Starlight is nervous, tightly wound, and tactlessly blunt, and I wanted to see those aspects play off each other more than we got. Maybe if Starlight had panicked and mistakenly caused the magical problem, like she usually does in Friendship is Magic, it would’ve made an easier path to that kind of dynamic.

Much more than Friendship is Magic, I feel like Equestria Girls should come to a graceful conclusion in the near future. Friendship is Magic is broad enough in scope and has a good enough track record that, even though I fear it can’t go on past Season 8, I’d also keep faith if I heard they were going for a Season 9. Maybe even a Season 10, depending on how Seasons 8 and 9 are. Equestria Girls, on the other hand, feels like it’s getting pretty close to tapped out. I had a story idea here for a final Equestria Girls movie, but it got pretty long so I split it out into a separate blog.

The Equestria Girls Summer Specials didn’t quite meet my raised expectations, but they were still pretty good, offering the nice change of pace from world-ending demon hipster chicks that I was hoping they would. If the Equestria Girls franchise continues somehow, I hope they’ll move more towards this format.

About Starlight

Starlight Glimmer catches a lot of flak. I agree she’s a hard character to like in some ways, but I don’t hate her, I am glad they added her to the show, and today I’d like to explain why.

Reasons to hate Starlight (that I disagree with)

When I go online and read discussions about hating Starlight, I usually see one or a few of the reasons that I’m going to list here given. I don’t find any of them compelling enough to hate Starlight myself, and I’ll set out why as we go through them.

Reason 1: Starlight was a horrific fascist dictator and shouldn’t have been forgiven

The framing and point of view of “The Cutie Map” make what Starlight does in her village seem horrific. If we take a more objective look at what she actually did, all of it was nasty, but all of it was also forgivable:

• She created a sort of anti-cutie mark cult in a village and installed herself as the cult leader.
• She used magic to take away the members’ cutie marks.
• She inducted the members into a philosophy of extreme equality where everypony is completely the same in every way possible.
• Other ponies came, apparently willingly, and joined the cult, allowing their cutie marks to be taken away.
• Later, some of these ponies started to express discontent. Starlight ruthlessly quenched this by putting them through a reeducation program.
• She forcefully stole the cutie marks of the Mane 6 and subjected them to the same reeducation program to try and get a princess in her cult so it would gain legitimacy.
• She lied to her followers and hid that she still had her cutie mark.

All of this was nasty, unpleasant, and points to a dark impulse inside Starlight. At the same time, people in real life have done much worse things and have been forgiven by those they wronged. Starlight didn’t kill anyone, didn’t grievously injure anyone, didn’t incite violence, didn’t torture anyone, didn’t rape or sexually assault anyone, didn’t foster hatred. She didn’t feed her followers poisoned Kool-Aid like Jim Jones, or order them to murder a pregnant woman like Charles Manson, or marry the fillies off to old stallions like Warren Jeffs. She didn’t electrocute dissenters, like IT does in A Wrinkle in Time. Frankly, I’ve heard of tech startups that are eviller cults than Starlight’s.

Of the members we see in the show, the one most wronged by Starlight seems to be Party Favor, who was forcibly reeducated alongside the Mane 6 for a night and had a minor breakdown. But he didn’t seem to suffer any lasting damage. He had the willpower to wipe off Starlight’s fake equals sign cutie mark and out her to the crowd. And he forgives her as readily as anyone. You could argue that maybe he shouldn’t have, but he did, and there’s nothing unbelievable about it. If rape victims can forgive their rapists and children whose parents were killed in genocides can forgive the leaders who instigated the genocide, then Party Favor can forgive Starlight for making him sit through a really boring book on tape.

Reason 2: Starlight is too powerful and good at magic (sub-reason 1 of “Starlight is a Mary Sue”)

Starlight gets called a “Mary Sue” a lot in online discussions. Reading between the lines, this seems to cover three distinct complaints, one of them being that Starlight is presented immediately as a powerful and talented magic-user.

I agree that Starlight’s incredible talent for magic isn’t the best set up or motivated. It works great when she’s a villain, in “The Cutie Map” and “The Cutie Re-Mark”, because she needs to provide a challenge for Twilight, and she does that well. Of all the villains in the series, none of them matches against Twilight as directly as Starlight does. Then she becomes a hero, and she seems overpowered.

On the other hand, if that makes her a Mary Sue, then Twilight’s a Mary Sue too. Twilight was apparently born with incredible magical talent, and was afforded the luxury of sitting around studying all the time to hone it. If anything, Starlight’s less blessed than Twilight: she didn’t get to be Princess Celestia’s prized pupil or have her own observatory or massive library to spend all her time in. She didn’t get to have indulgent friends who would keep hanging out with her even after getting flaked on time and again like Twilight did. Remember, part of the classic definition of a Mary Sue is that the usual rules of the universe seem to bend themselves to create exceptions, loopholes, and special cases that benefit the Mary Sue—the original Mary Sue was a 15-year-old Starfleet Academy graduate who served on the Enterprise in someone’s fan fiction—and that applies much more to Twilight than to Starlight. Twilight’s such a Mary Sue that she was chosen by the all-powerful Elements of Harmony to be their locus; the other Mane 6 just happened to be there, so the Elements were like “Eh, I’ll make do with what I got.”

So why don’t people complain that Twilight’s a Mary Sue? I think there’s a deeper reason why people complain that Starlight’s a Mary Sue, but not Twilight (or Rainbow Dash, who seems to become an incredible flyer who can join the most elite flying corps in the land by napping a lot). Starlight just isn’t likeable. People don’t enjoy watching Starlight because they don’t like her on a personal level, and they don’t feel like she deserves to be good at magic, or to have any of the other good things that happen to her.

The comparison with Twilight is obvious, but the comparison with Rainbow Dash interests me more, because I find Rainbow Dash unlikeable too, yet she’s well loved by fans, where Starlight is extremely divisive. Part of it is the incumbent advantage that Rainbow enjoyed as an early addition to the cast, but I think it’s partially that Rainbow’s particular pattern of antisocial behavior—constant boasting and arrogance—is accepted and somewhat respected in US culture, while Starlight’s pattern—lack of social awareness and anxiety that leads her to extreme measures to try and take control of her situation—isn’t. Of course, Rainbow has had several episodes where she gets knocked down and has to learn to be more humble, which makes me like her a lot more. Starlight has had fewer, and they were usually played more subtly. But some fans whinge and complain whenever Rainbow gets knocked down, so that can’t be how everyone sees the situation. That leads me back to “People like Rainbow, but just don’t like Starlight” as the reason. We’ll talk about this more later.

Reason 4: Starlight does terrible things and then gets out of it without being punished (sub-reason 2 of “Starlight is a Mary Sue”)

This one’s kind of true. There is one case where I think that Starlight does something really terrible and then seems to get off relatively easy. It’s “Every Little Thing She Does”, where she mind-controls the Mane 6 minus Twilight. I’ll discuss later why I still don’t find this enough of a reason to hate her.

Reason 5: Starlight gets too much screen time (sub-reason 3 of “Starlight is a Mary Sue”)

This one is actually directly quantifiable by counting the number of seconds Starlight is on screen in the three seasons in which she appears so far. But I’m lazy, so I won’t do that. I don’t think it would be that illuminating, anyway; at that level we can’t even comprehend the scale we’re talking about.

Instead, I’m going to count episodes which focus on her as part of an A plot or B plot, or in which she plays a major supporting role in an A or B plot. This is a pretty liberal definition, and will include a lot of episodes that you wouldn’t think of as “Starlight-focused episodes”.

In Season 5 we have four episodes:

1. “The Cutie Map”, Parts 1 and 2
2. “The Cutie Re-Mark”, Parts 1 and 2

In Season 6 we have eight episodes:

1. “The Crystalling”, Parts 1 and 2
2. “No Second Prances”
3. “A Hearth’s Warming Tale”
4. “Every Little Thing She Does”
5. “To Where and Back Again”, Parts 1 and 2

In Season 7, we have nine:

1. “Celestial Advice”
2. “All Bottled Up”
3. “Rock Solid Friendship”
4. “A Royal Problem”
5. “Triple Threat”
6. “To Change a Changeling”
7. “Uncommon Bond”
8. “Shadow Play”, Parts 1 and 2

We can also throw in the “Mirror Magic” Equestria Girls special.

So out of the entire series, we have 21 episodes, plus one summer special, that either focus heavily on Starlight or feature her in a major supporting role. That’s five episodes shy of an entire season all about Starlight, so I can see why that would feel like a lot when they’re all clustered into three seasons, especially if every moment she’s on screen is excruciating to you.

Whether this is too much Starlight or not is a matter of perception. Still, look at some of those episodes. They’re some of the best material in their seasons—“The Cutie Re-Mark”, “No Second Prances”, “A Hearth’s Warming Tale”, “Rock Solid Friendship”, “Triple Threat”, those are all amazing episodes. I’d go to bat for “Celestial Advice” and “A Royal Problem” too. Of course, those are all ones where Starlight is a villain or a supporting player. The ones where she’s the main focus, like “Every Little Thing She Does” and “All Bottled Up” are a bit more equivocal. My favorite element of “To Where And Back Again” is the banter between Trixie and Discord, not Starlight.

The other thing to keep in mind is that everyone else has five seasons of screen time under them when Starlight first joins the main cast. To catch her up, they had to give her a lot of screen time. And I appreciate that so many of the episodes she appears in use her in a substantial role. When I look back on the series, most of the episodes I didn’t like as much were ensemble-heavy, because they dilute everything too much. You can see this with the Cutie Mark Crusaders: they spent two seasons doing everything together, and the episodes that focused on them as a group were middling at best. Everything got better for them once we got episodes that focused on one of them at a time.

Starlight’s personality

I hate psych evals on fictional characters. I never feel like they add anything useful to the conversation. They usually oversimplify by trying to fit a character’s behavior to a list of DSM-V symptoms. They often have this self-satisfied air of “Ah ha, I, a brilliant literary scholar slash psychiatric diagnostician, have just given the definitive scientific explanation of this character!” They’ll reach for hand-wavey interpretations that aren’t supported by textual evidence. And in the end, I don’t think they’re helpful. Okay, Romeo had borderline personality disorder. What does this tell us about storytelling or human nature? That some people have borderline personality disorder, and that you can write stories about them? Psych evals are not a literary analysis technique that I find interesting; they’re a medical technique for helping real people who suffer from mental illness by identifying which treatments might be effective for them. As such I find psych evals on fictional characters about as interesting as an armchair diagnosis of the skin condition pointed to by Mikuru Asahina’s star-shaped mole.

Still, with modern fiction, there are times when a character’s personality is so extreme that it does feel like the writers were intentionally trying to make you think of a certain condition. In Starlight’s case, she fits the pop culture profile of autism to a T. She fails to read social cues, often speaks or acts without regard to others’ feelings, has a need to feel in control at all times, is prone to panic when overstimulated, and has a single interest, magic, in which she excels to the exclusion of everything else. These traits all feed into each other. Some of her behavior reminds me a bit of Friendship is Witchcraft Twilight, who “threw herself into her studies to have the world in [her] control”. She never vaporized the competition, but she has the same lack of awareness that led FiW Twilight to claim that “it’s not evil”, and I could see her, during her dark period, imprisoning Cadance Not-Evil Goodpony in the caves under Canterlot. Starlight, though, doesn’t have the sociopathic grandiosity of FiW Twilight. Plus, I bet she’s still allowed in bounce houses. (There was a bounce house in My Little Pony: The Movie, but we didn’t get to see if Starlight was allowed inside.)

Starlight’s time as a villain

When Sunburst got his cutie mark and left her, Starlight felt powerless: her friend just all of a sudden sprouted this thing on his flank and then was whisked off and left her, and there was nothing she could do about it. She could have blamed his parents or Sunburst himself for this, but instead she blamed cutie marks. She started her cult because she wanted to create a controlled, orderly, sterile environment where she would never be powerless. Since she had this childhood belief that cutie marks made her environment unstable and took her power away, she had to get rid of them to make her perfect order a reality. Letting her cult members get back their cutie marks or leave would render her powerless, so she couldn’t allow that and turned to force to stop it from happening. She initially wanted to get Twilight to join the cult so it would expand; the larger her cult was, the less of the world was out of her control, and the less chance she would get the same powerless feeling she’d had when Sunburst left.

At the end of “The Cutie Re-Mark”, Twilight convinces Starlight that she went too far indulging that avoidance of feeling helpless, and Starlight agrees to make herself vulnerable again by having real relationships, ones where she can’t always control what the other pony thinks or does. The first relationship is her friendship / apprenticeship under Twilight: Starlight lets someone else be in control by handing Twilight the reins for her destiny. This is a good first step to overcoming her issues, but it doesn’t solve them all.

“Every Little Thing She Does”

We see throughout Season 6 that Starlight has problems understanding the feelings of other ponies, and admitting that things can’t always go her way, and giving up the power in some situations. Magic is her chief way of exerting control over situations, so when she feels overwhelmed or panicked, she always ends up using magic in some thoughtless way to try to regain command—not because she desires dominance, but because she feels like the situation is slipping into chaos, which makes her panic and try to get things orderly again.

“Every Little Thing She Does”, where Starlight casts a mind control spell on the Mane 6, is a perfect storm of everything she’s struggled with going wrong all at the same time. The episode starts with Starlight feeling apprehensive about the friendship lessons, and trying to distract Twilight by excelling at her one big interest, magic. Because she’s so literal and doesn’t understand social interaction, she misses the point of the list of activities that Twilight gave her, and she tries to finish them “efficiently” by scheduling everything at the same time on the same day. When the others start objecting to the plan she set—Rarity doesn’t like the lighting in the library, Fluttershy wants to take each individual animal where it will be comfortable, Rainbow Dash can’t find anywhere that suits her nebulous idea of a good “chillaxing” spot, and all of them protest that you can’t do the activity by squeezing it into five minute intervals while running between four other activities—Starlight gets overwhelmed and frustrated and uses a mind control spell so they’ll all adhere to her plan, as usual falling back to magic when she panics.

I won’t disagree that Starlight got off pretty easy for this. Using mind control on someone is a fundamental violation of their right to free will. It’s actually worse than anything we saw her do when she was running her cult, at least on a philosophical level (nothing she made them do was inherently unforgivable, just the idea of taking someone’s free will like that). On the other hand, Starlight always seems to be pretty concerned about what other people think of her, and after this incident she got yelled at by Twilight and shunned by the others for a while, so maybe it was harder on her than it seemed. We’ve consistently seen that Starlight feels emotional hurt very deeply. Her hurt when Sunburst left her, for instance. Or her hurt when she thought Trixie was just using her to get back at Twilight in “No Second Prances”, which was pretty intense for someone she’d just met that day. Or the depth of her guilt for what she did in her village, which is much deeper and more persistent than the guilt we see from the other reformed villains like Discord, Trixie, and Sunset Shimmer, even though I’d argue that at least Trixie did worse things. (Luna is a bit of an exception; she also seems to feel her guilt deeply and persistently. And she also seems to have something of a special connection with Starlight, as seen in “To Where And Back Again” and “A Royal Problem”.) So it’s possible that she got more of what she deserved for this incident than we could see on screen.

“To Where and Back Again” and On

As the series goes on, Starlight becomes more able to deal with situations where she loses control, and uses magic in a panic less often. She still does occasionally, such as in “A Royal Problem” when she switches Celestia’s and Luna’s cutie marks, but that was a more heated and difficult situation than what she’d faced before: her initial plan had failed, the princesses were arguing, Starlight had very few options because they’re princesses and she can’t tell them what to do, and she knew that a past argument had resulted in Luna being exiled to the moon for a thousand moons and coming back to try and kill Celestia and plunge Equestria into eternal night. This is, I hope we can agree, a much more difficult situation than Rarity not wanting to sew in the library.

Starlight also turns her lack of social awareness into a strength. She’s willing to be incredibly blunt with other ponies, which helps keep her from feeling like situations are spiraling out of control and avoids seeding the panic that would lead her to do something stupid with magic. She starts learning how to do this in “All Bottled Up”, and it helps her in “Rock Solid Friendship” and “A Royal Problem”, but in “To Change a Changeling” she almost makes a big mistake with this trait when she nearly tells Thorax that he has to exile Pharynx. Her blunt tactlessness also helps her relate to Maud, who’s also pretty tactless, in “Rock Solid Friendship”. The joke of “Maud Pie” was the Mane 6’s frustration when Maud didn’t understand or respond to normal social conventions; the genius of “Rock Solid Friendship” is the way Starlight and Maud bond over this.

Starlight isn’t likeable…but I still don’t hate her

When I said above that Starlight just isn’t likeable, this is what I meant. Her deeply felt hurt, social unawareness, need for order and control, and propensity for panic when she doesn’t get it make her come off as someone with little empathy who thoughtlessly resorts to extreme actions, and yet has an emotional glass jaw and reacts strongly when hurt herself.

The Mane 6 have sometimes exhibited some of these traits, but there was always some kind of counterweight that made them still likeable even after acting this way. Rainbow and Twilight and Rarity and even Pinkie Pie have done things that were lacking in empathy, but all of them have also done things that were very sweet. Rainbow, for instance, mocked and belittled Fluttershy in “Dragonshy”, but supported and encouraged her in “Hurricane Fluttershy”. Rarity acted selfish and superficial in “Green Isn’t Your Color” and “Inspiration Manifestation”, but helpful and kind in “Filli Vanilli” and “The Gift of the Maud Pie”. Starlight hasn’t had many such counterbalancing moments yet. “Rock Solid Friendship” was probably the closest, but she’s also painfully blunt towards Pinkie Pie, which ruins the effect a little. All six have had moments of fear and panic in the series, but none of them handled it as badly as Starlight. Twilight did use something like a mind control spell in “Lesson Zero”, but for the most part, they might cry or sing a whole freak-out aria, but that was it. And Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy both seem to feel hurt very deeply, as we see with Pinkie in “Party of One” and “Pinkie Pride” and Fluttershy in “Hurricane Fluttershy” and “Putting Your Hoof Down”, but they’re usually the sensitive, empathetic characters, so instead of seeming hypocritical, it seems like part and parcel of who they are: their capacity for deep emotion cuts two ways. They also have never been shown to let their hurt lead them to the kind of dark impulses that we see from Starlight in her very first appearance, starting with her establishment of an anti-cutie mark cult.

I don’t hate Starlight, but I can’t exactly say that I like her either. She’s interesting to watch, that’s for sure. I see some of myself and people I’ve known in her, which lets me sympathize with her, but there are also times where I wince watching her fall apart because I know that I’ve also fallen apart like that, and it’s a little uncomfortable to see it play out on screen with ponies. In Season 7 she manages to get her panic and nervousness under control a lot more, but then she starts playing the role of the really blunt friend who says the bad things that need to be said, and the person who plays that role is also hard to like, even if you appreciate them.

But Starlight was a good addition to the show. Watching her may not always be comfortable or pleasant, but she’s added new character dynamics and plot types to explore. Having her around has also been good for Twilight’s character. After “Twilight’s Kingdom”, Twilight is still working on the smaller issues in her life, but the big stuff is all settled: she’s reached the height of her career, she knows who she is as a pony, she has a job and friends and family who love her. Adding Starlight gave us a character who’s still working all that stuff out to follow; without her, there might have been a temptation to retread “Lesson Zero” or “Princess Twilight Sparkle”, but now those kinds of stories can go to Starlight, and Twilight can just keep honing the small things, like she does in “A Flurry of Emotions” and “Once Upon a Zeppelin”, or supporting her friends, like she does in “A Health of Information”. Adding Starlight also gave Twilight someone to interact with in a way we hadn’t seen before: she gets to mentor someone, and we get to see how she’s matured and why she deserves her title as Princess of Friendship. I’m convinced we’ve seen so few Cutie Map episodes in Season 7 because the Cutie Map was a generator for plots that would show off how the Mane 6 have grown and matured, but the writers realized there were better ways to do that, and Starlight was the way for Twilight.

First Thoughts on “My Little Pony: The Movie”

I saw My Little Pony: The Movie on the Thursday night it opened, at the latest showing I could get. I took time off work to go, proving two things: a) I’m now a huge loser brony, just like I’ve always been a huge loser otaku, and b) I’m old and need my sleep, and I have to take time off work for stuff like this because I can’t just come back from the movies at one in the morning, go to sleep for six hours, and then get up and run off to work.

There were six people in the theater. Three were admiring fans who laughed at all the jokes. Two were hardcore neckbeard types who spent a lot of time complaining about the marketing and discussing the bad reviews. Then there was me, somewhere in the middle. The two neckbeard types saw the emptiness of the theater and opined that opening the movie against Blade Runner 2049 was a catastrophic decision. I have a different take: as vocal as the adult fans are, the core market for MLP stuff is still mostly the kids, and especially the female kids. Female kids, like kids in general, don’t go to late-night showings on Thursday nights. The crossover fandom for Friendship is Magic and Blade Runner 2049 is, I would guess, not that large in the grander picture, so Hasbro and Lionsgate felt comfortable splitting that audience by releasing their colorful animated pony movie with musical numbers against the R-rated art house sci-fi sequel to a movie from 1982, feeling comfortable that their movie, despite the existence of us bronies and pegasisters, would still mostly make its money from children. (I must confess I am part of that small Venn diagram overlap between My Little Pony fans and people who want to see Blade Runner 2049. I took a route that most probably didn’t: I saw MLP on Thursday, and I’m going back to see Blade Runner 2049 on Saturday.)

As a medium-core neckbeard type, I tempered my expectations a little going into the movie. I was expecting to see evidence on screen of the pressure there must have been during scripting to make the movie more accessible to a general audience. My worst-case scenario was fart jokes and references to Caitlyn Jenner that were topical two years ago when the movie was being written. Even in the best case, I was expecting most of the characters to get short shrift and be pushed aside in favor of the new characters, who are, after all, voiced by celebrities like Emily Blunt, Liev Schreiber, and Michael Peña. I was expecting something like Equestria Girls (the first one) that gets so caught up in squeezing all its plot, character introductions, and musical numbers into a too-short runtime that it barely has time to let us get to know anyone. But then I saw that Jenny Nicholson, my favorite YouTuber and co-creator of Friendship is Witchcraft, attended the premiere and liked the movie, and she’s way more particular than I am about pony stuff. So I decided to put my trust in Jayson Thiessen and Meghan McCarthy and went into the movie with an open mind, ready to give it the benefit of the doubt.

I’m glad I did. All my fears were unfounded. If anything, the movie did the opposite of what I was afraid of: it skewed too far away from the general audience, and it spent the end of the second act searching for extra material to fill the runtime—it let some interesting plot avenues go untrodden, but they were all tangential and would’ve been hard to work in anyway. The writers and the studio probably realized there was nothing to be gained by going too hard after a general audience. Their two major audiences were kids and bronies/pegasisters. The bronies and pegasisters are already familiar with the show. Most kids who would want to see this are probably also at least somewhat familiar with the show, but kids are also more willing to roll with something; they won’t get upset because they don’t know all the lore and haven’t read the prequel comics. Even if they do, they’re less likely to write angry tweets at the staff about it. So it made sense to make the movie story reasonably accessible for the kids, but not bother trying to draw in adults who didn’t care about the show. There was no reason to go too far from the spirit of the show by introducing Caitlyn Jenner jokes at this juncture.

The story and characters

The movie really established within the first few minutes that it understood the characters and the world and what made them great, and that it intended to execute on that. Even though some of the jokes made me groan (the “hungry, hungry hippos” line, the “lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” line), that grounding made it easy for me to dismiss those as occasional bad lines that didn’t represent the whole of the movie, a lot like I was able to do with the bad parts of Equestria Girls for the same reason.

I’d resigned myself to an Equestria Girls-style story where Twilight advances the plot and gets all the characterization while the other Mane 6 stand in the background and sometimes tell jokes. But the movie, probably because it’s longer than the EG films, gets in good scenes for everyone except for Applejack. (The eternal problem: Applejack is just a hard character to work into these ensemble stories.) The plot structure is episodic, as the Mane 6 wander through the lands beyond Equestria seeking the Hippogriffs’ help in fighting off the Storm King, a weird baboon creature with unclear motives, and his henchpony Tempest Shadow, a unicorn with a broken horn and a chip on her shoulder. So for the first two acts, the Mane 6 come into a new situation and someone gets the chance to stand out, show how they make friends, and gain an ally for the third act. Rarity’s generosity sways the shifty cat-man Capper, Rainbow’s bravado inspires Captain Celaeno and her parrot air pirates, and Pinkie’s ebullience brings in the fun-starved seapony Princess Skystar. There isn’t enough time for Applejack or Fluttershy to get a piece of this, but Fluttershy still gets a few quintessential Fluttershy moments, like when she sits down with one of the Storm King’s foot soldiers in the middle of a big battle to have an emotional conversation about his feelings. The emotional climax of the movie is Twilight pulling a “Cute Re-Mark” a second time and talking Tempest Shadow into believing in the power of friendship.

The plot was really tight, possibly the tightest of any MLP story I’ve seen. The closest story on the show to this one, as far as theme and scope and structure, is “Twilight’s Kingdom”. As good as “Twilight’s Kingdom” is, there are still weird plot holes that, while they don’t ruin the emotional impact of the story, do stand out a little too much. (Why did the princesses think giving all their magic to Twilight and hiding her was the solution? Why did they then forget to hide the stained glass window, even knowing that Tirek was surely coming to the castle for them? Well, I have a theory that it was all a giant conspiracy between Celestia and Discord and was always meant to play out exactly the way it did, but that’s something for another time.) The movie’s plot does flounder a little at the end of the second act. If you had any illusions left that this was going to be spoiler free, please leave now, because the spoilers are going to get even thicker from here on out.

Everybody gone? Nobody here to begin with? Cool, works for me. So, the end of the second act. The main problem I had with it is that the seapony plot pays off in a weird way. Finding the seaponies at all ends up being kind of pointless. The narrative purpose of the entire seapony sequence was for Twilight to go all Captain Archer and try to steal the pearl, leading to her fight with Pinkie Pie, getting separated from her friends, and getting captured by Tempest Shadow. So the seapony sequence was a setup to the next vital step of the plot, but it ended up being a complete red herring as far as the characters’ actual goals; all that really comes out of it is Skystar reassuming her hippogriff form and joining the final battle, and she’s not even that helpful; Capper and the parrot pirates are far more vital.

It felt to me like there was way too much ceremony around this red herring that ultimately wasn’t going to matter. For narrative economy, they could’ve cut the entire seapony sequence and just had Twilight have a breakdown and yell at everyone, then wander off, when they find the Hippogriff kingdom empty, much as she does later on the beach. She still would’ve been mad at Rarity and Rainbow Dash for their carelessness earlier, so it still would have made sense.

The seapony sequence was a ton of fun, so I’m not suggesting it could’ve been cut out of bias. But it was, in large part, superfluous and wasteful to the narrative, except that it introduces a really interesting conflict: Twilight (and everyone else, honestly) has always taken Pinkie lightly, and towards the beginning of the movie, she does some things that make her seem flighty, unreliable, and dangerous to have in their situation (as she has on the show a few times, such as “The Lost Treasure of Griffonstone”, although nothing she does in the movie is that severe). Twilight decides that she needs to go Jack Bauer to save Equestria just as Pinkie is about to win them the help they need diplomatically, by making friends with Princess Skystar and getting to her mother through her. Pinkie, it turns out, understands the situation perfectly well, and she understands the power that her element, laughter, has to bring ponies together. But Twilight ruins it by trying to steal the pearl. Their argument on the beach afterward just reinforces how lightly Twilight takes Pinkie in particular, although she condescends to all her friends. Pinkie afterwards comes up with crazy schemes that help the group get into Canterlot and then up into the castle to save the princesses, reinforcing the point that she really is someone who can get serious and be useful in a pinch. Of course, Twilight and Pinkie make up, but the movie doesn’t have time to spend on the deeper dynamic between Twilight and Pinkie; Twilight admits she was wrong for trying to steal the pearl and for yelling at her friends, but we never get to explore her view of Pinkie that made her believe Pinkie’s plan wouldn’t work, even though setting that up was the only thing the seapony sequence accomplished that a breakdown in the empty Hippogriff city wouldn’t have.

In the end, I do think the seapony sequence was a net positive. It was a lot of fun; it had a great song; it introduced my favorite movie-original character, Princess Skystar (and her friends Shelly and Sheldon); and it hinted that even after all that’s happened, Twilight still underestimates Pinkie and the power of laughter, which is the basis for an interesting conflict, even if it was never played out on screen. Plus, it means that of all the Mane 6, the one who stands out most after Twilight is Pinkie Pie, and that’s something I never expected (and love). Pinkie also gets to tell plenty of jokes, but Rarity gets all the funniest lines, with her usual sarcastic complaints about roughing it in the wilderness and the non-fabulous nature of the situations the Mane 6 find themselves in.

Aside from my favorite movie-original character, Princess Skystar, Captain Celaeno and the pirate parrots were fun, and Capper was not as annoying as I thought he would be when he first appeared, but the real standout is Tempest Shadow. Her character arc is a lot like Starlight’s, but I have a feeling she’s going to get a lot more respect and love from fans, because she’s a cool, cruel, driven warrior-type. She deserves a place in the top rankings of Friendship is Magic villains. She’s threatening and scary, like Tirek or King Sombra, and there were times at the beginning of the movie where I genuinely thought she was going to murder someone. (She may have actually murdered that fish man in the town where the Mane 6 meet Capper.) Yet she’s also sympathetic once we learn more about her; like Starlight, the story never asks you to agree with the extremes she goes to to get what she wants, but it does let you see how someone could get there. Skystar vs. Tempest Shadow is yet another of those “Twilight vs. Pinkie Pie” things—Tempest has the deeper arc and drives the plot forward, but Skystar is so cute and so much fun to watch.

As I mentioned earlier, my only other disappointment, aside from the slightly draggy opening of the third act where we go through Tempest’s backstory, was that Applejack and Fluttershy didn’t get to have much of a part. I sort of expected Fluttershy to be minimized since she’s just as useless as Rarity in a fight, yet won’t speak up to complain about the plight of non-fabulosity in which she finds herself. So Fluttershy’s few standout moments were a nice surprise that I took gratefully. (And yes, she is uncharacteristically scared of horrific monsters in a few scenes. Forgive her. She’s far away from home in a scary new place.) But Applejack, as far as I remember, didn’t have a single standout moment after her part in the musical number “We Got This Together”. She tosses a rope a few times and says “Tarnation” every so often, but that’s about it. This was something that stood out to me, but I don’t put too much weight on this criticism since I don’t really know where you would have put an Applejack moment in the movie, as full as the plot already was. She’s not a character whose good side comes out well in small moments, so you can’t sneak her in on the side for a joke like you can with Pinkie or Fluttershy or Rarity. And since Pinkie gets the actual serious role out of all the Mane 6, that pretty much leaves Applejack out of luck.

The art

The art and animation style is totally revamped for the movie. It’s partially 3D. I have mixed feelings about this. I like 2D animation over 3D in general, and while Friendship is Magic is hardly the pinnacle of 2D animation, it looks pretty good and its style doesn’t translate well to 3D. I know they couldn’t have put Flash animation on the big screen, and I am glad they didn’t go full-3D—as far as I can tell, it’s cel-shaded, so it’s all CG but it’s made to look 2D. It looks a lot like Sofia the First with a higher budget.

The characters, which are the most cel-shaded and 2D-looking element, look a little weird—kind of shiny and plastic. I did get used to how they look by the end of the movie, though I honestly hope it’s too expensive to revamp the show to look like this. Their motions and expressions were pretty spot-on, though, which helped me acclimate to them. Some of the large moving objects, like windmills and airships, are in full 3D and look kind of terrible. I’m watching Last Exile right now, and the airships in that are also full 3D mixed in with 2D, and they look really terrible, in the same jarring way. On the other hand, the backgrounds are amazing. I loved the ominous look of the grey windswept seas above Seaquestria.

It seems inevitable that 2D animation will die and all animation will become 3D. I hope we’ll still have people preserving the old look with cel-shading, and I hope that cel-shading will get better and that we’ll look back on the cel-shading in My Little Pony: The Movie as a weird sort of transition form, the way we look back on the use of CG in Beauty and the Beast nowadays.

The soundtrack

Another thing I was afraid of before I saw the movie was a really terrible soundtrack full of modern pop garbage. This didn’t keep me up at night quite as much as it might have once; the Equestria Girls soundtracks kinda grew on me, and they did have some genuinely amazing songs, and lot more that really fun ones.

Again, my fears were needless. The music in the actual movie is amazing. You’ve got three classic My Little Pony musical numbers in “We Got This Together”, “Time to Be Awesome”, and “One Small Thing”; a solid villain song in “Open Up Your Eyes”; the catchy “I’m The Friend You Need”; and the pop finale, “Rainbow”, roughly your “Love is in Bloom” or “Make a Wish” or “Let the Rainbow Remind You” that closes out the movie. “Rainbow” is sung by Sia, a pop star who I had never heard of before this (I’m shockingly and infinitely ignorant of music, since I spend most of my time listening to anime and pony music). She sings it through her pony counterpart, Songbird Serenade, the new biggest pop star in Equestria from the escalating chain of them. (Sapphire Shores is the biggest pop star in Equestria! No, wait, Countess Coloratura is the biggest! No, now Songbird Serenade is the biggest! Reminds me of how villains work in shounen anime.) Ending with a big concert is a common trope of kids movies, but I’ve never seen one that set it up as well as My Little Pony: the movie starts with Twilight freaking out as she plans Songbird Serenade’s performance at the Friendship Festival she’s organizing, and ends with the performance. Zootopia is a great movie, probably an objectively better movie than My Little Pony: The Movie (sorry), but even it just sprung a concert on us at the last minute. Songbird Serenade was a Chekhov’s pop star. If there is a pop star in your movie, that pop star must perform a concert by the end. It’s a rule of fiction.

When you buy the soundtrack, it comes with seven other generic-sounding pop songs that aren’t by Sia or the Mane 6. One of them is in the movie—DJ Pon 3 plays it during the ending credits. The other six are just tacked on at random. But the songs that are actually in the movie are great. I bought the soundtrack the morning after I saw the movie, and now I can’t get “We’ve Got This Together” out of my head. (Though my absolute favorite is “One Small Thing”, the song that Pinkie Pie sings to Princess Skystar.)

Conclusion

I really liked My Little Pony: The Movie. It had some story elements that weren’t perfect, or were similar to things we saw in the show, and Applejack and Fluttershy didn’t get a whole lot to do, and some of the new animation didn’t impress me, but those are all minor complaints. Not only did it manage to not suck, it did some good and unexpected things: giving Pinkie Pie a bit of a serious role, introducing a great villain in Tempest Shadow, having Twilight go all Batman at the end of The Dark Knight. It truly did manage to bring the joy, charm, laughter, and lovable characters that I enjoy from the show into a theatrical movie.

So, what have we learned today? That we should always trust Meghan McCarthy and Jayson Thiessen, because they understand these characters and this world at a fundamental level, and they won’t let us down, even if the idea sounds terrible. And soon, I’ll know if the same holds for Denis Villeneuve, after I see Blade Runner 2049. The other thing we’ve learned is that it’s hard and costly to be in the small overlapping Venn diagram segment of Blade Runner fans and My Little Pony fans.