How to Reinvigorate Cute Girls Doing Cute Things: Or, A Review of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

The first time I ever knew there were adult male fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, I had wandered onto a classmate’s Facebook page and discovered that his feed (or whatever it’s called; I don’t Facebook) was full of My Little Pony porn. Our genius professor had decided Facebook was the perfect way to disseminate class announcements, and this classmate of mine had joined the class group from his personal account. The Pokemon avatar picture he was using caught my eye and induced me to click over to his personal page, where I discovered the existence of My Little Pony porn.

After getting over the initial shock, I read some articles about the so-called “bronies”, and it made sense to me. In fact, the bronies felt like kindred spirits. After all, I was the guy who giggled over the banal daily lives of high school girl bands and girls training to become gondoliers in 24th Century Martian Venice. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was basically a cute girls doing cute things show, but with ponies instead of human girls. So I instantly sympathized with the guys who were into it, because I understood both what they were getting out of it and the shame and isolation they probably felt over the mockery that society would heap on them for liking it.

Now, several years later, I’ve cooled a bit on cute girls doing cute things. I thought maybe I was entirely over the genre, but that doesn’t seem to be true. After all, I checked out a few episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and after a false start when I enjoyed but wasn’t bowled over by the first few episodes, I’ve come to really appreciate the show. And yes, it is just a cute girls doing cute things show with ponies.

I still don’t get the porn, though. They’re ponies. It feels too much like being sexually attracted to Minnie Mouse.

The Boring Reviewing Part

Even though I’m about to heap a lot of compliments on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, the show isn’t perfect. Sometimes the story payoffs or the jokes’ punchlines are way too obvious. Sometimes characters act out of character or forget they have certain abilities for the convenience of the plot. Some episodes are extremely light on story content and are basically extended musical numbers. Sometimes the denouement of an episode seems contrived or rushed, as if a few extra scenes were needed to develop the plot threads. (The worst offender on both of the last two counts is probably Magical Mystery Cure, the Season 3 finale, which brings about a vital change in the show within the confines of a rushed episode made up of a cursory setup followed by a pair of long musical numbers.)

I’m also not a big fan of Flash animation. The show does a decent job varying the shots from the typical sideview and establishing a realistic sense of a physical world, which is something Flash animation seems to have a lot of trouble with; most of them end up looking not like a three-dimensional world but like multiple two-dimensional planes superimposed on each other, like a pop-up book or a puppet show or the cutscenes from Disgaea. My Little Pony comes closest of the Flash shows I’ve seen to actually creating a world that feels like a 3D space. I sometimes wish the color palette were a bit more subtle, but that’s just the nature of the My Little Pony toys. It’s not all bad on the art side: the ponies’ expressive faces lead to great reaction shots, and physical artifacts like houses, trains, household objects, jewelry, and clothes are all uniquely designed and feel like an organic part of the world. But I prefer the more realistic and subtle style of anime or Renaissance-era Disney.

Still, it’s pretty amazing what’s been achieved. A show conceived purely as a giant toy commercial for little girls was so well written and designed that it managed to attract hordes of adult male fans (and probably no small number of adult female fans) who personally identify with the characters, and to not only sustain the quality but actually keep getting better across six seasons and 143 episodes so far. The more I read about Lauren Faust, the creative force behind the show’s conception and showrunner for Season 1, the more I respect her. She worked as a writer and director on The Powerpuff Girls, which would definitely go in my top ten of American animated television alongside Batman: The Animated Series, Gargoyles, and Freakazoid. She clearly identified the problems with children’s programming of her era, such as the vapid, stereotypical characters and overly simplistic stories, and created a fun, unique direction for Friendship is Magic that would let it sell toys while also telling genuine stories. She even fought back, with grace and dignity, against an elitist culture critic who was determined to make out Friendship is Magic as racist, homophobic, and “smart-shaming”. (It’s funny that that last accusation would be lobbed at My Little Pony, of all shows aimed at girls. I’ve seen a lot of these shows with my younger sister; it is the only one of them in which I’ve ever even seen any of the characters pick up a book and read it, and it is one of the few that portrays being bookish or nerdy in a modern way, as a positive trait that can lead you to great things and won’t preclude a healthy, balanced life, instead of lazily recycling old clichés like Spock-speak and big thick glasses.)

The strong plot and character writing is the chief reason for MLP’s success, but it stands out creatively in other ways too. Every few episodes there’s a musical sequence, and I give huge credit to the writers and composers for choosing to go with a classical style for the songs instead of trying to do something more modern-sounding. Other children’s shows that I’ve seen also feature music, but they always try to make it sound current, which often means it sounds dated just a few years after the show first aired. The music of My Little Pony is, in the main, strongly influenced by the Disney musicals, but it experiments with various genres—pop, country, a capella, European folk music—which gives it a timeless sound. It’s a big deal to me that, watching Season 1 seven years later, I’m not wincing at a bunch of music that sounded trendy in 2010 and now sounds like bad music from 2010.

The Fanboying

Whenever I watch a cute girls doing cute things show, the first thing I do, after I’ve watched enough to get to know and love the characters a little, is decide who’s my favorite. Like most fans of this sort of anime, I have a type. I like the weird ones, the earnest and serious ones, and the shy ones, more or less in that order. Extra points given for smartness or sarcasm. Execution matters; in a given show, the shy character might speak to me more than the weird character and end up my favorite. Bonus for combining: Azusa of K-On is sarcastic while also being earnest and serious; Kagami of Lucky Star is sarcastic while also being smart; and Alice of Aria is weird while also being sarcastic, plus she’s a little serious and earnest and sometimes a bit shy. Naturally, all three are my favorite character from their respective shows.

By great good fortune, My Little Pony has a weird character, a smart character who’s earnest and serious, and a shy character. I went for the shy for number one here: Fluttershy is my favorite. She’s adorable. The writers’ American cultural background also means that Fluttershy ends up in the same kind of predicaments that I did and sometimes still do as a shy person in America, so she’s easier to identify with than a lot of the shy characters in anime, who live in a land where shyness is regarded differently. It’s refreshing, too, because it’s been far too long since I saw an anime with a good shy character. They used to be a mainstay of 90’s and early 2000’s anime, but the type didn’t evolve and the only two characters that come to mind when I try to think of good shy characters from recent shows are K-On’s Mio Akiyama (my third favorite from that show, after Azusa and Mugi) and Shiori Shiomiya of The World Only God Knows. There’s a whole other essay on what makes a good shy character, but Fluttershy really hits the mark. She has a personality beyond just being shy (unlike, say, Naru Sekiya from Hanayamata); she has to deal with real, ridiculous situations that only seem to happen to shy people; and even though others, especially Rainbow Dash, get frustrated with how shy and timid she is and try to teach her to be more assertive, there are also plenty of episodes that focus on the positive side, the kind and gentle nature that her shyness is part and parcel of. Fluttershy is content with who she is, and there’s no arc in the show about her opening up or becoming someone different and supposedly “better”, unlike, say, the aforementioned Naru Sekiya. Sometimes she has to step outside her comfort zone and speak up, but this doesn’t mean she has to change herself. There’s also never any suggestion that only Fluttershy needs to do this; all of the main characters (known punningly as the Mane Six among fans) have to step outside their comfort zones and learn new things. In a world where every shy character is just a setup for an arc where they either become assertive and outgoing or lose their minds and start flipping out and killing people, I love the way the writers approach Fluttershy’s character.

I’d like to say that earnest, bookish Twilight Sparkle is my second favorite and spastic joking party planner Pinkie Pie is my third, but fashion designer Rarity is a confounding factor. In the earlier seasons I considered her my second favorite, followed by Twilight and Pinkie Pie. She makes me laugh. Her Transatlantic accent and accompanying swank slang always make me chuckle (in one episode she sorts good apples from bad apples and proclaims them “lovely” or “horrid”). Her terrible date with a rich guy she just met in the Gala episode towards the end of Season 1 evoked the perfect mix of laughter and pity. She’s the closest thing the show has to a sarcastic character. (Pinkie Pie’s sister Maud doesn’t count, though she definitely makes me laugh.) I also love how hardworking she is, always bent over a sewing machine making something for someone.

Pinkie Pie has become some sort of meme in certain circles due to her ability to occasionally break the fourth wall. There was even a video about a death battle between her and Deadpool. Of course, they didn’t fight, but instead became best friends, broke the fourth wall together, and celebrated Deadpool’s birthday. What made that video great was how true it kept to Pinkie Pie’s character: she’s wacky and crazy and can be annoying sometimes, but she cares a lot about others, always going out of her way to make friends and to try and make sure everyone has fun and feels included. She’s cartoonish and chaotic, but also compassionate, and even feels realistic and fleshed out as a character, gaining depth by sometimes struggling with the more straightlaced and haughty parts of society, or the more immature parts of her own personality. It takes a long time to get to this point, though. In the earlier seasons Pinkie seems to just flash in for a joke or a song, then flash out. She’s usually not even visible in serious scenes. It isn’t until later that she starts to feel like a three-dimensional character.

I personally identify with Twilight Sparkle probably even more than Fluttershy, at least in the early seasons. When the series starts she’s got her head so far into books that she barely acknowledges anyone. Across the events of the first episode, she learns to value her connections with friends and what she can learn from friendship, but she also stays smart, studious, book-loving, and a bit tightly wound. Even in Season 6, where the story has conspired to force her to lighten up a little, we don’t lose track of that basic part of her personality.

No matter how you slice it, Applejack and Rainbow Dash are at the bottom of my list. Not that I don’t like them; I just like them less than the others. Both get several great episodes where their characters get expanded beyond “pony who says ‘tarnation’” and “brash tomboy pony who loves speed”. I’d probably give Dash the slight edge over AJ because she was at the center of two of my favorite episodes in the series. The first is “Read It and Weep”, in which a hospitalized Rainbow Dash learns to enjoy reading and becomes a huge fangirl of the Daring Do books, which star an Indiana Jones-like female pegasus named Daring Do. I especially enjoyed a scene where Rainbow Dash says reading is for eggheads and all the other ponies, including the not at all bookish Applejack and Pinkie Pie, laugh and tell her that everyone enjoys reading. The second is “Stranger than Fan Fiction”, in which Rainbow Dash attends a Daring Do convention and meets a fanboy named Quibble Pants. They get along swimmingly at first, sharing their obsession for the character, but later start to argue since Quibble hates the later books and Rainbow likes them. (All the ponies in My Little Pony have an emblem on their flank called a cutie mark that signifies their special talent; Quibble’s is a speech balloon emoji, signifying that his special talent is complaining on the Internet. Even though Equestria doesn’t have Internet yet.) The episode packs in a ton of fun references to fandom and fan culture, my favorite being the creepy Daring Do body pillow cover that flashes by in a montage, without feeling either condescending or exploitative about it.

It’s kind of a toss-up between AJ and Dash, though. As good as several of her episodes were, Rainbow Dash has a self-absorbed, arrogant, and callous side to her that makes her harder to like than the others. Applejack is the opposite: she’s very likeable, but as far as I can remember she never starred in a good story. She’s extremely hardworking, competent, ethical, loves her family, is involved with her community, is grounded and knows who she is. That seems to have made it very hard to write stories for her, so most of the stories that center around Applejack involve her acting in some way that seems inconsistent with how she is in other episodes. (My least favorite example is “Applejack’s ‘Day’ Off” from Season 6; it had an obvious setup for a message about not working yourself to death, which is such a vital message in this day and age that I would’ve forgiven it for being the same message as Season 1’s “Applebuck Season”, but instead they went for a payoff that was strange and hard to swallow.) The best Applejack episodes are the ones where she goes up against Flim and Flam, a pair of carnival barker ponies who show up in town every so often with some sort of snake oil scheme. These are episodes that don’t usually involve her learning anything or growing as a person/pony; they’re tests of her existing character, not transformative. They also work because the somewhat bland Applejack has the flamboyant Flim and Flam to play off of.

The Quintessence of Cute Girls Doing Cute Things

If you don’t believe that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a cute girls doing cute things show, let’s strip away all the trappings, the art style, the voice actors, all of that, and just look at the premise. A cute girl, a powerful student of magic who loves reading and being organized, is sent by her magic teacher to live in a rustic town. She meets a girl who is shy and quiet and loves animals; an athletic tomboy; a wacky, crazy girl who lives in la-la land; a tough, straightforward farm girl; and a high-class girl who loves fashion and making dresses. The six of them soon become best friends and discover the power of friendship, after which they spend their days having tea parties and sleepovers at each other’s houses, organizing and attending festivals to celebrate various holidays, enjoying hobbies, and learning lessons about friendship.

That sounds like a cute girls doing cute things show to me.

Of course, they’re not at a school or in a goofing off club, but those are far from necessary elements. A raw, stripped down minimalism is an essential part of cute girls doing cute things, which imposes constraints that can make the genre hard to write well, but watching MLP: FiM, I’ve realized that the minimalism can also be liberating because it means there are fewer constraints than average on the world you can create or the kind of personalities and relationship dynamics you can explore. Earlier cute girls doing cute things, like Aria, Azumanaga Daioh, and Ichigo Marshmallow, felt more creative and open to possibility than the newer shows. Then K-On came along and solidified the “in a school in a goof-off club” paradigm, and constrained the genre in a way that eventually became stultifying. As Eren Jaeger would put it, the genre became like livestock in a pen, instead of being like starving wolves roaming in the forest looking for stuff to kill. (“Kill” is to be understood as a metaphor for “overwhelm with cute and gentle feelings”, and the starving wolves are really more like adorable bunnies. Or unicorns. Or pegasi. Or alicorns. Or earth ponies.)

I’ve touched on what makes a cute girls doing cute things show previously, but let’s codify it a bit. It turns out there are six elements which come together to make a harmonious expression of cute girls doing cute things. I like to call them the Elements of Harmony. All six are abstract qualities that can’t be boiled down into a formula, but have to come from a place of feeling on the creators’ parts.

A cute girls doing cute things show is fun and has a lot of laughter. The most successful ones all have a festive atmosphere, whether it’s celebrating the small treasures of daily life like Aria, highlighting the good times of youth like K-On, or showcasing the characters’ unique way of looking at the world like GA.

A cute girls doing cute things show is kind and gentle. The characters don’t have to be perfect, but they’re good at heart and soothing to be around. The world may have dangers, but the characters aren’t under constant threat and for the most part live quiet, happy lives. If the humor gets too cruel or the stories get too chaotic, the show slips into being a wacky comedy, which can be a fun genre but is definitely distinct from cute girls doing cute things. (For me, this was the main failing of Anne-Happy as cute girls doing cute things.)

A cute girls doing cute things show is honest. Most important is emotional honesty: we should always be able to relate to the joys and the travails of the cute girls on some level. A lot of anime that I’ve seen recently fail to connect with me because they lack emotional honesty. The characters’ emotions are illogical, strange, unrelatable, or just not there, either because of bad writing, because the situation creating the emotion is too rarefied, or because the writers are relying too much on clichés. (I just watched the first episode of Eromanga-sensei, the all new, no different series from Oreimo creator Tsukasa Fushimi, and really felt disconnected from the characters due to the bizarre, unrelatable situation and overreliance on clichés.) Honesty means that sad and unpleasant things are given their due as well. The senpais have to graduate; the best friends have to split up; the concert has to go badly sometimes. The characters can’t wave a magic wand and make it all go away, but they can face the situation with optimism and try to find the good in it in spite of their sadness. It’s also important that the show feels genuine; if there’s even a hint that the show was just a cynical money grab or that it was written by people who don’t respect the characters and the work, it will fall apart.

A cute girls doing cute things show is generous with showing us the characters and their lives. When I was first getting into anime, I always loved the slice of life portions of anime that were about something else. There was an episode of Dragon Ball Z, for example, where Goku gets a driver’s license. He doesn’t fight any planet-destroying monsters or anything, he just tries to pass a driving exam despite being a barbarian and outcast from society. I really enjoyed that episode. It was a fun break from bashing each others’ heads in and hair that got progressively bigger and blonder. There was also an episode of Evangelion where Shinji and Asuka have to sync up their movements to be able to fight off an Angel that can split itself into two. The episode has a couple of fight scenes and some loud comedy that hasn’t aged very well, but it also has a lot of quiet moments where we just learn things about the characters, and I loved that. Pretty much every show back then would have a couple of episodes like that, but because the main focus of the show was something else, the quieter character moments were doled out in miserly little dollops across multiple episodes of a long series, and I never got enough to feel satisfied. That’s why Tenchi Muyo was such a happy discovery; whatever other weird stuff was going on, most episodes managed to include at least a couple moments like this for at least one character. Cute girls doing cute things is extremely generous with these moments. They’re not a brief diversion from hunting youkai or engaging in high-stakes mahjong battles; they are the show, and anything else is the brief diversion.

A cute girls doing cute things show is loyal to its cute girls. As we learn about the girls and see them in new situations, we need to be surprised and delighted by what we learn, but surprise should never come at the expense of delight. We should be delighted because what we learned is surprising but also not unexpected based on what we know so far about the character. A cute girls doing cute things show can have character arcs where the girls grow and change as they story goes on, but these arcs should never involve betraying a character’s essential nature. A character should not change into an entirely different person.

Finally, a cute girls doing cute things show needs magic. When the ingredients are all just right, they combine into an alchemical reaction that creates a particular dynamic that makes the show magical.

The Lessons We Can Learn From the Ponies

So, going back to My Little Pony, what exactly about it feels so fresh and interesting? It’s a bit hard to pin down, and partially I have to fall back on vague arguments about approaching the genre with fresh eyes. My Little Pony is an American production whose creators had most likely never heard of K-On or any other cute girls doing cute things. (Though some of the in-jokes in later seasons suggest that someone on the staff was an anime fan.) Their aim in creating the series was just to sell toys. It could only have turned out so well because of the creative integrity of Faust and her team; most shows created to sell toys, and this includes anime, are soulless. But a creator with talent and integrity can make something worthwhile from even an unpromising start, and that seems to be what happened with MLP. Since it’s a convergent evolution of cute girls doing cute things, it retains enough familiar elements to be recognizable, but does enough things different to feel fresh.

The most important part of cute girls doing cute things is the characters—the cute girls—whose virtues were enumerated above, but my current best answer for why the show feels so reinvigorating is the second most important part, the setting. My Little Pony takes place in a fantasy world of ponies, unicorns, dragons, and other magical creatures. The main characters live in a rural village called Ponyville (yes, all the placenames are horse puns), but we also see big cities, enchanted castles, frontier towns, and a city in the clouds where pegasi live. The world isn’t as artistically striking or detailed as the Neo-Venezia of Aria, but it has the same kind of feeling, a mixture of fantastical strangeness and homey nostalgia that comes from the blend of familiar and unfamiliar elements.

The world of Equestria gives the MLP writers a freedom that isn’t to be found in a school in a goofing off club. The main characters are all of indeterminate age, still young enough to be learning but old enough to be independent and supporting themselves. Most episodes are slice of life and focus on one character or a pairing of characters interacting, learning a lesson, and having fun, like most cute girls doing cute things shows. Some episodes combine slice of life with fun worldbuilding that fleshes out Equestria and the pony society, the same way Aria would slip in episodes like the visit to Al’s underground gravity control center or Akatsuki’s floating island so we could learn more about how Aqua works. Season openers and closers are usually bigger stories with full struggles against villains. We haven’t seen anything like this in cute girls doing cute things that I can think of, but harem shows like Tenchi Muyo and early Negima use a similar structure. Three of the villains so far have reformed and become interesting characters in their own rights, again like Tenchi Muyo and Negima have done. Thanks to the setting, the Mane Six can have the special abilities they need to fight these villains while allowing those abilities to be a natural part of their world. They aren’t special abilities in this world, they’re just facts of their biology. Rainbow Dash’s speed is just her world’s form of training to become an elite athlete, and Twilight’s magic is just her world’s form of studying to become a scholar, and both have developed these abilities as part of their careers. This is hard to make natural in a more realistic setting; most anime try to justify the existence of powers with some sort of threat that necessitates them. Probably the closest any anime I’ve seen has come to pulling off this sort of mundane magic as an organic part of the world is Someday’s Dreamers, with Kiki’s Delivery Service a close runner-up. I give Someday’s Dreamers the edge because it had actually worked out how magic had changed society, whereas in Kiki’s the wider world is still pretty much oblivious to magic. Flying Witch also had a good go at it, with similar results to Kiki’s; it struggles early on to keep reminding us that Makoto is a witch, but in the later episodes starts to capitalize more effectively on it.

The freedom to do these stories helps keep the series from feeling stale or stuck in a rut, unlike some shows I could name that had to cram in two visits to the exact same beach house. The Mane Six’s independence, the fact that they’re leading their own lives somewhat freely instead of being constrained to a school or a training program, also helps open up the story possibilities. Rainbow Dash can run off and join the Wonderbolts for a few episodes, while Rarity opens a boutique in the city and Pinkie Pie clones herself in a magical lake, because they’re all autonomous quasi-adults in a magical fantasy world instead of human teenagers in the real world who have to be doing things that human teenagers do in the real world.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has achieved something that feels like a combination of mainstream cute girls doing cute things with the potential for worldbuilding and story variety that we get from a fantasy slice of life story like a Haibane Renmei or a Flying Witch, to the great benefit of both genres. I’d love to see some great fantasy cute girls doing cute things anime along the same lines, perhaps something like Komorebi no Kuni but with the deeper writing of MLP. But even more than that, I’d love for the people making these anime to learn to take more risks, try new things, expand the genre, instead of immediately locking themselves in a school in a goofing off club without taking the time to explore the options. I don’t believe we’ve seen everything this genre can give us yet.