In Part 2, I’ll be looking at Equestria Girls and the IDW comics. This will be less positive than last time as I feel both have some pretty deep flaws compared to the show. But since I watch My Little Pony because it’s relentlessly happy and positive, and have always watched cute girls doing cute things for the same reason, I tried to remain as positive as I could, and in the end, I did find a lot to like at least in Equestria Girls.
Equestria Girls: Making the Best of an Unnecessary Spinoff
When I watched Equestria Girls, I was expecting the worst from it; making the Mane 6 human and in high school seemed like an obvious setup for the kind of story about swooning over cute boys, singing catchy pop songs with an R&B flair and driving bass, and trying to be queen of the school that's common in other shows but was completely avoided in the Friendship is Magic TV show.
As it turns out, that's exactly what Equestria Girls is. Most of the music has your standard teen pop sound and Twilight Sparkle has a crush on some dreamy boy. The character designs freak me out a little; they all have skin the same color as their pony form's fur, so the world is populated with purple and blue-skinned people, a bit like the 1990’s cartoon Doug. They still have their pony names, so we've got a “human” girl with blue skin and rainbow hair named Rainbow Dash running around this world. (Equestria Girl Applejack is the only one who has a natural human skin tone; EG Fluttershy is close but just barely makes it into the uncanny valley.) They also all wear giant knee-high boots for some reason. I can’t figure out if this made animating their legs and feet easier or if it’s just a style thing.
However, all four Equestria Girls films also have redeeming qualities: a good song here, a good scene there. Their major strength, like the main show, is the characters. My first time watching the films, I had a hard time seeing past the weird character designs, the contrived plots, and the terrible concept, but as I was trying to write about them I kept remembering moments that were good despite themselves, because the writers understood the characters so well. I ultimately watched all four movies twice so I could get a better view of both the good and bad.
Equestria Girls
The first movie’s plot is kind of ridiculous and contrived: our Twilight, the pony we all know and love, has to go through a portal into the human world, turn into a human, and become homecoming queen or whatever. (Oh, that’s right, homecoming “princess”; queens are evil, after all, as Disney taught us.) To help her, she enlists the alternate universe human versions of her friends, who help her becoming homecoming “princess” and then turn into magical pony humanoids to defeat Sunset Shimmer, Celestia’s evil former student. Twilight also develops a crush on a dreamy boy named Flash Sentry, only to go back to the pony world and discover that the pony Flash Sentry is one of Cadance’s guards, and apparently also dreamy by pony standards. She proceeds to forget he exists, except in the Equestria Girls movies.
The ending is really weird, and that was even more obvious after the next three movies repeated it beat for beat. After an entire movie centering on a campaign to become princess of the school, one that contains nothing magical or weird whatsoever, and no conflict other than Mean Girls stuff like spreading rumors, the movie suddenly goes off its nut. Sunset Shimmer seizes Twilight’s crown with her Element of Harmony in it and is able to harness its magic and turn into a demon lady who reminds me of the demon chicks summoned by Matthew Patel in Scott Pilgrim. She hypnotizes the students, intending to lead them into Equestria as her evil army to take over, kind of like the army of hypnotized parents in the classic 1995 film Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie. (This plan has a bit of a flaw in that, even assuming Celestia and Luna couldn’t come up with some way to lift the hypnotism, they could still just blow up the hypnotized teenager army with their magic that can move astronomical bodies.) The Humane 6 harness magic to turn into magical pony humanoids, while Twilight makes a Sailor Moon speech (she even stops using contractions, saying “You do not understand friendship!” and such) and they all shoot out a big rainbow beam that blows up Sunset’s demon form.
Equestria Girls also has good ideas and fun moments that reference the series without being overly beholden to it. It recreates the first meeting of the Mane 6 back in the first episode of the series and winks back at that with bits like Fluttershy mumbling her name inaudibly when she meets Twilight, but also creates fun new moments that still feel true to the original characters, like the soccer game that Rainbow forces Twilight to play against her before agreeing to join. I also liked the idea of the Humane 6 being estranged and Twilight having to bring them back together, but it was a good idea that went by too fast and wasn’t explored thoroughly enough. One of the persistent problems with the EG movies is lack of runtime; each movie is an hour and thirteen minutes, about as long as two and half episodes, and each one has to orient the plot, introduce the villain, check in with all the major characters, set up the conflict, set up how the Humane 6 will defeat the villain, and conclude with the actual final battle with the villain, while also packing in plenty of musical numbers and crowd scenes full of human versions of the background ponies from the show and human-only background characters. The first movie also had to establish a reason for pony world Twilight to come through to the human world in the first place, so it had even more plot to get through; it’s not that surprising it didn’t have time to fully explore some of its ideas.
Rainbow Rocks
Equestria Girls benefited from a second viewing, but not nearly as much as the next movie, Rainbow Rocks, which I did not like at all the first time I watched it, in part because it relies so heavily on music. Unlike the series, which rests on a foundation of Disney-style show tunes and gets out the occasional pop ballad (“The Magic Inside”), rock tune (“I’ll Fly”), or a capella number (“Find the Music in You”) to mix things up, the music in Equestria Girls is almost all teen pop, with a little variation in the third and fourth movies. I enjoyed some of the songs, but most of them are pretty forgettable, and Rainbow Rocks has a lot of them, so there’s a lot of time to fixate on how empty the plot is. It feels oddly like the plot for the non-canon My Little Pony: Equestria Girls rhythm game with dance mat and guitar peripheral. It focuses on a Battle of the Bands that ends in a strangely similar way to the one in Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness. The battle pits the Humane 6’s band, the Rainbooms, against the Sirens, who I originally called the worst villains in any Friendship is Magic property so far, due to their lack of personality, a compelling backstory, or clear goals, as well as their incompetence, which makes them not at all threatening. Watching the movie again, that’s still sooort of true...but I do have to give them some credit. They try the same shtick that Discord does in “The Return of Harmony” in the show, but it’s handled much better here. The Sirens’ magic exploits existing cracks in the relationships to set people at odds, instead of magically reversing everyone’s personality traits. Also, their magic doesn’t affect the Humane 6; when our heroes do end up fighting, it’s purely out of frustration with each other and the situation, and not because some spell is making them. I still don’t think the Sirens are great villains, but their plan and motivation makes more sense than Sunset Shimmer’s did in the first movie.
With that kind of adversary, the character arcs in Rainbow Rocks are actually a lot more complete and satisfying than I gave them credit for the first time I watched it. Twilight, who is once again our Twilight from the pony world, gets an arc where she learns that she doesn’t always have to have all the answers. At the beginning of the movie, she still isn’t entirely comfortable around Sunset, who reformed at the end of Equestria Girls, but as the story goes on she realizes that Sunset really has changed and has become dependable and competent. Sunset spends most of the movie struggling to overcome the mistrust she spent three years sowing, unable to convince everyone that she’s changed, which was a better written and more powerful arc than I had noticed on my first viewing. The rest of the Humane 6 get their fun little scenes, but they also fight with each other and then make up before the final battle, each getting a satisfying part.
I especially liked the sleepover scene at Pinkie Pie’s house. It leads to a great moment where Twilight, who’s having trouble figuring out how to write a song spell to defeat the Sirens, gets up in the middle of the night to sit in the kitchen and keep struggling. Sunset follows her into the kitchen and they have a short conversation about what they’re going through where they seem to really connect and understand each other. Human Maud interrupts their conversation when she comes down to grab a box of crackers to feed Boulder. As Sunset is going back to bed, Twilight calls her back, but then says it was nothing and lets her go. It was a great, subtle scene where Twilight connects with Sunset after acting wary around her earlier on, and almost chooses to trust her and ask her for help, but decides not to out of pride. It plays really well into the climactic scene where Sunset whips everyone into shape to fight back the Sirens and assumes her part as the new main heroine of Equestria Girls.
Friendship Games
Since I hated Rainbow Rocks the first time I saw it, I was expecting to hate Friendship Games even more, but I couldn’t resist Sci-Twi, the alternate version of Twilight from the human world. She’s so cute. Even with her freaky purple skin, the bun and thick glasses are irresistible. Her personality is sort of a mixture of Fluttershy, Starlight, and mane universe Twilight as of Episode 1, so we get to see her grow and learn about friendship just like our Twilight did, with Sunset as her guide. Her arc is more poignant than our Twilight, though, who was happy and fulfilled despite having no friends. She had Princess Celestia looking out for her, and she did still have Spike and Shining Armor as companions when she wanted them, plus her poor abused Canterlot friends Minuette, Lemon Hearts, Twinkleshine, and Moondancer. Sci-Twi doesn’t have anyone. She has her Spike, but he's a dog who can't talk (until partway through the movie, a touch I found kind of lame), and she's stuck at a school full of elitist jerks who ignore and bully her, with nothing to keep her company but her research. Unlike our Twilight, who just saw no use for friendship, Sci-Twi is being antagonized by the other students and wants to escape into an independent study program where she won't have to deal with anyone else.
Unlike the first two movies, the plot actually broadly makes sense: Sci-Twi's school, Crystal Prep Academy, competes in the Friendship Games every four years against Canterlot High School, and always wins because of being all fancy and rich and stuff. Principal Cinch wants to keep it that way, because she's obsessed with status and reputation, so she bullies Sci-Twi into entering the games by promising to get her into the independent study program she wants to join in exchange, and ruin her chances if she refuses. Sci-Twi has been monitoring the crazy magical energy signals coming from Canterlot High during the first two movies (she first appears in a post-credits scene in Rainbow Rocks, like something straight out of a Marvel movie) and has built a pendant that can absorb magic somehow. Of course, once she arrives at the school, she meets the Humane 6 and Sunset Shimmer, who have discovered that they now turn into pony humanoids when they do something related to their pony counterpart's Element of Harmony. Sci-Twi's pendant sucks the magic out of them when this happens. At the finale of the Friendship Games, after finding out about the magic, Principal Cinch pressures Sci-Twi to unleash it so they can win the games. Sci-Twi does and turns into Equestria Girls The Soul Taker, but Sunset Shimmer manages to absorb some and also turn into Equestria Girls The Soul Taker, and they have a The Soul Taker battle where they shoot beams at each other until one beam triumphs.
Principal Cinch is by far the best villain of any of the Equestria Girls movies. She's menacing and evil, but she's menacing and evil in a way that fits the Equestria Girls quasi-human world, and she doesn't even need to turn into a demon hipster chick to earn her title as best villain. She also has a great villain song, "Unleash the Magic", where she, backed by the other members of the Crystal Prep team, egg Twilight on to open the pendant to use magic to win the final event against Canterlot High. It says a lot about her character that she's so obsessed with status that, just a couple hours after discovering that magic exists, she's already coming up with ways to use it to further her own petty ends. She's scary because she's exactly the sort of grasping, dull, unambitious evil that you see so often in real life: determined to stay on top and clever at twisting a situation to her own advantage, but laser-focused on that goal and otherwise utterly without imagination.
I liked the music in Friendship Games better than the first two movies, too. The opening is still teen pop, but two of the big songs during the film, Twilight's "What More Is Out There" and the aforementioned "Unleash the Magic", are closer to the show's musical style. “What More Is Out There” is definitely my favorite song in any of the EG movies, and undeniably great both for its music and for how it conveys Sci-Twi’s aimless feeling that something is wrong with her situation and that she needs to go out and look for something else. I also liked Dean Cadance, maybe even better than Princess Cadance in the show. She's the only one looking out for Sci-Twi other than Spike. I didn't like human Shining Armor, though. In his very small appearance he comes off as another elitist ninny. He apparently appears in the specials, so hopefully he develops into something more interesting.
Legend of Everfree
The fourth movie, Legend of Everfree, is less interesting than Rainbow Rocks or Friendship Games, though it does improve on the first movie, with a better plot and music more to my liking. It was also nice to see the characters get outside Canterlot High at last; the movie takes place at Camp Everfree, a summer camp where the Canterlot High students go to get away from the school and rest. The forest and lakeside of Camp Everfree surprisingly look really good. Something about the trees and the geography makes it feel more like a real forest and less like the fantasy forests we see in the show. I liked the new style of magic, too. In the previous movies, the magic would just be a random eruption of power that would blow away the villains in a burst of friendship. In Legend of Everfree, each of the Humane 7 gets a unique power that fits her personality. Sunset, for instance, gains telepathy, which ends up being key to the plot. Sci-Twi gets telekinesis, Rarity force fields, Rainbow Dash super speed and Applejack super strength, and Fluttershy of course gains the power to talk to animals, which she can’t already do like her pony counterpart. Pinkie Pie kind of gets screwed, though. She gets the power to make things blow up when she throws them, like Gambit from the X-Men, and uses it to turn her cookie sprinkles into mini bombs. But it’s easy to activate by mistake, since Pinkie Pie takes up the hobby of randomly hurling things. (Other than Rarity and Sunset, everyone seems to get powers that their pony counterparts already have, so Scarlet Witch’s powers would have been more fitting for Pinkie Pie than Gambit’s. It also would have made more sense for Rarity to have her pony counterpart’s Green Lantern powers from “Power Ponies” or instant fabulositizing powers from “Inspiration Manifestation”, though it would have made her too overpowered.)
These new powers made the final action scene the best out of all the movies. The battle at the end of Equestria Girls felt like a Sailor Moon fight, where the main character makes a big speech and then everyone unites and shoots out a beam of love and friendship that nukes the villain. The end of Rainbow Rocks felt like the end of some strange rhythm game, where the characters play music against each other and the end result is a big beam that nukes the villains. The end of Friendship Games was like a Soul Taker battle, where the two combatants shoot out beams that collide and push each other back and forth until the hero’s beam triumphs and nukes the villain. These all have in common shooting out a big beam that nukes the villain, without much effort or conflict. In Legend of Everfree, the characters actually have to do things to win. To continue the comparisons, it’s more of an X-Men fight.
Sci-Twi is much less interesting than in Friendship Games, and the other Humane Sixers are pretty much supporting characters, with no real arcs and nothing interesting to do. But Sunset’s arc alone makes it better than the first movie, at least. She’s fully integrated with the group, accepted and beloved by the other students, using her skill at understanding others to help Sci-Twi learn and grow, and has even been forgiven by Flash Sentry, who she manipulated and used back when she was evil. Legend of Everfree is really Sunset’s story. Sci-Twi might be the one who meets an obnoxious new love interest, a scab named Timber Spruce who thinks he’s cute and clever, but Sunset is the one who actively moves through the plot and handles situations, acting as the leader and guide that pony Twilight did in Equestria Girls and fulfilling the role she took on at the end of Rainbow Rocks. Sunset is now mature, competent, able to command respect, and able to persuade others because of her empathy and the trust they place in her. Sunset is the one who has all the good scenes with the other Humane Sixers in this movie, too. I liked the scene where she reads Pinkie Pie’s thoughts. She also gets the best song, “Embrace the Magic”. Since Sunset is from Equestria, she’s used to the idea of everyone having magic and magic being a useful and positive thing, and in “Embrace the Magic” she manages to convince Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, and Rarity that their new X-Men powers could be useful even when there aren’t any demon hipster chicks to fight.
I can’t make up my mind on Gloriosa Daisy, the closest thing the movie has to a villain. She’s an admirable attempt at another villain who fits into the world of Equestria Girls, like Principal Cinch, but she’s not quite as interesting as a villain because she really isn’t a villain, but a good person who makes a mistake out of desperation, so the way her arc plays out is more predictable. As a character she is likable, more interesting than the Sirens and better motivated than villainous Sunset in the first movie. Like Principal Cinch, she shows a shocking lack of imagination when it comes to figuring out ways to use magic to solve her problems, but with Principal Cinch it actually fit into her character that she would lack that imagination, whereas with Gloriosa it feels more contrived. Good character, not the best villain, but still respectable. She also makes Timber Spruce almost tolerable in some scenes, where he’s showing concern for her instead of being an obnoxious little scab who thinks he’s clever.
The shorts and the specials
Rainbow Rocks and Friendship Games both had tie-in shorts, and while one or two were badly written (the Rainbow Rocks short that focuses on Fluttershy, sadly, was not good), they were mostly a lot of fun. The Rainbow Rocks short about Applejack was particularly fun, even if human-form Flim and Flam freak me out with their green skin. One of the Friendship Games shorts flirts heavily with canonizing the Lyra / Bon-Bon yuri love relationship, about as heavily as Lyra and Bon-Bon flirt with each other in it.
There's now also a trio of Equestria Girls specials, "Dance Magic", "Movie Magic", and "Mirror Magic". I haven't seen them, but from what I've heard, they sound pretty good. "Mirror Magic" has Sunset Shimmer meet up with Starlight Glimmer (pony form), which ought to be interesting; they're both former villains who were reformed by Twilight, but their personalities and motives are actually really different. Sunset Shimmer was ambitious and used her understanding of human (and pony) nature to manipulate others for dominance. After reforming, she becomes a mature voice of reason and uses her empathy to help others work through their problems. Starlight, on the other hand, didn't really want to be dominant at all; she wanted everything to be orderly, controlled, consistent, and always the same. She took power over her village because it was the only way she could be sure things would stay that way, and after she reforms she still has trouble understanding the messiness of social interactions and can’t always accept that she can’t control everything, seen most strikingly in "Every Little Thing She Does". So I'm looking forward to seeing them meet and how they interact.
Equestria Girls Overall
The Equestria Girls movies in aggregate have some problems that keep me from liking them as much as the series, even once you get past the surface stuff that I complained about in the opening. Since I'm a petty person, I'll start with the small stuff and move on to the larger stuff, and here's the smallest thing of all: they keep on using “alumni” in the singular. Dean Cadance calls Shining Armor an “alumni”, and Gloriosa claims that Filthy Rich is an “alumni” of the camp. People (or whatever you are), the singular is “alumnus”. If you want to get all fancy, you can use “alumna” for a female alumnus. “Alumni” is the plural. You can also use “alumnae” for a group of all women, but in English it’s permissible to use “alumni” as the plural all the time. Shining Armor is an “alumnus”, not an “alumni”, unless he is in fact more than one person.
Slightly larger in impact is the teen romance. Ugh. I hated how they set Twilight up with this random crush on Flash Sentry. It fortunately doesn't occupy much of the first movie, and in Rainbow Rocks he's too angry at Twilight because of the Sirens' influence to spend any time making googly eyes at her, but that almost makes it worse because then it becomes pointless. The only time Flash contributes to the plot of the first movie is when he brings Vice Principal Luna the proof that Sunset framed Twilight for smashing up the party decorations, but that didn't need to be him; it could just as well have been the other members of the Humane 6, or the human Cutie Mark Crusaders, or human Trixie, or human DJ Pon-3, or basically anyone. Flash is also just not an interesting character. He has very little personality beyond looking dreamy and being charmingly awkward, and Twilight develops a crush on him out of the blue right after she complains about how weird her human form looks. Dammit, Twilight should feel as unenthused about human porn as I do about My Little Pony porn, yet she immediately falls for a human. Then she goes back to Equestria and discovers pony Flash Sentry, but apparently never talks to him or mentions him again. (Unless they're secretly boning offscreen? Maybe when the camera's not on, Twilight is running around banging everyone like the cast of Sex and the City? No, I don't need to see fanart of that!)
The idea of Sci-Twi having a love interest doesn't bother me since it avoids all the annoying details that come up when pony Twilight has a love interest, but that one was ruined on execution. Flash Sentry was boring, and I hated the idea of pony Twilight having a flash-in-the-pan love interest just for the movies, but I didn't hate him; Timber Spruce was a filthy little scab who I actively hated. The major male characters in the mane series—Spike, Big Mac, Discord—are just as well written as the girls, so if they wanted to give Sci-Twi a love interest and devote that level of skill and effort to writing him, I'd be okay with that, but Timber Spruce is a smarmy little bastard who will probably grow up to be his world’s Martin Shkreli. Even Sunset sees it. Look how eager she was to prove that he was evil, even though it should've been obvious that Gloriosa was the evil one, since she was so goddamned peppy. Sunset even says she can’t trust anyone that peppy, yet she still jumps to the conclusion that Timber Spruce must be the evil one. She’s very perceptive about people, so there must be something there. Sunset agrees with me that Timber is a scab who will go on to raise the price of cutie pox treatment to 3000 bits per dose.
I also keep on having more and more questions about the world as the movies go on: why has no one in authority noticed that Canterlot High keeps getting blown up? Why haven't there been reports of massive rainbow explosions in the night? (The opening scene of Rainbow Rocks shows the Sirens in a diner witnessing the massive rainbow explosion from the end of the first movie, but apparently no one else saw it or thought it worth reporting?) We know this sort of thing is notable in this world because Friendship Games ends with Principal Cinch threatening to go to the school board and everyone else laughs at the idea of her telling them a crazy story about magical explosions and demon hipster chicks, but no one ever notices these very hard-to-miss displays that end each movie and seem to have all happened within the span of a few months. I usually don't sweat this kind of stuff—I’m even willing to ignore the question of where Sunset Shimmer lives and how she survives without a job or any money—but it's so pronounced in these movies that it bothers even me.
On to larger issues: while the movies do an admirable job juggling so many cast members, the three later movies have seven heroines to deal with, and sometimes some of them feel too cursory. Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy had enough good scenes in the first three movies that I didn't feel like they were being sidelined, though I wouldn't say no to more, and like her pony counterpart, Pinkie Pie is good at being a supporting character and still manages to stand out, but Applejack has pretty much only had one good scene in four movies (where she helps Sci-Twi with archery in Friendship Games), and I don't know that I'd say Rarity has had a single good scene all to herself in any of the four movies. No one gets a really good scene in Legend of Everfree other than Sunset and maybe Sci-Twi. The deeper problem is that none of them actually grow or develop in these movies, because there just isn't enough time to focus on them in a one-hour movie while there's a plot going on. Pony Twilight in human form got some good characterization in the first two movies, but it ended up being pretty meaningless because she went back to Equestria afterwards and forgot it all. The other five had bits and pieces of good arcs, mostly in the first movie and Rainbow Rocks, but none of them ever gets a complete, satisfying arc in a movie.
The plots for the movies have fallen into a strange rut. They keep on repeating the same pattern as the first movie: some magical villainous force appears in the characters' normal lives, the characters discover they have magical powers, they have to learn about friendship, the main villain turns into a demon hipster chick from Scott Pilgrim, or possibly the Soul Taker, and then they use the magical friendship power to blast the villain back to normal. The plot elements of an Equestria Girls movie are so set that when I watched the “Top 10 moments” videos for each of them on the Youtube channel WatchPony, I noticed that the analogous moments from each movie were ranked in the same spots on all four lists. For instance, all three movies have a mid-film musical montage that moves the plot into the next stage: the cafeteria song and dance number in Equestria Girls, the battle of the bands set to “Under Our Spell” in Rainbow Rocks, “ACADECA” and its academic decathlon in which Fluttershy misspells “immigration” (for shame, Fluttershy) in Friendship Games, and “Embrace the Magic” in Legend of Everfree, and that moment was ranked number one on all four lists. This repetition stands out a lot because, as I mentioned, the plot of the first movie is actually really strange, and when you make a story that was already strange into a formula for other movies, it just gets stranger.
Both of these problems stem from the restrictions of the EG world and of the format, which are both a lot more limited in story potential than the mane universe. Since the EG world doesn’t inherently have magic or fantastic beasts like Equestria does, all the magical stuff has to come from Equestria, and the characters can’t know anything about it beforehand. So you can't have a story like "The Crystal Empire" or "Twilight's Kingdom" that depends on magic being an established part of the world that the characters know about. And since each story is a one-hour movie released once a year, they all have to feel like big events—it’s as if the FiM TV show were all season openers and finales. You can’t open or end a season on a story like “Green Isn’t Your Color” that only focuses on Fluttershy and Rarity, or one like “MMMMystery on the Friendship Express” or “Rarity Investigates!” that’s just silly fun, but the show works so well exactly because of episodes like those that establish character and let us play around and have fun when the world isn’t at stake.
Someone seems to have realized how the format was restricting the stories, since they did three half-hour specials instead of a one-hour movie for the most recent batch of Equestria Girls material. The shorts were also a good idea for adding some extra characterization and fun. It’s encouraging that someone seems to have noted they were running out of ways to do demon hipster chicks and decided to try and change it up.
So, to sum up, I came in to Equestria Girls expecting the worst but hoping for the best, and what I got was somewhere in the middle. The character designs oscillate between cute and freaky. A lot of the music isn’t to my taste. I hate the introduction of teen romance—this is a topic for another time, but I find romantic relationships one of the least interesting types of relationship for a story to explore, and too many stories assume that all they have to do is toss in a romance and the interesting content will write itself. The best I can really say for the romance in these movies is that it’s brief; it was longest and most painful in Legend of Everfree but reasonably de-emphasized in the others. The stories are overstuffed, with too many characters to serve in too little time, and constrained to a particular bizarre formula by the demands of the format in which the films are published. On the other hand, there are some good character moments throughout the four films. The characters are mostly well portrayed and feel true to their counterparts in the main show, and when they aren’t the same it usually feels intentional and adds interest. The villains have overall been pretty good, and Principal Cinch from Friendship Games was a villain written to actually take advantage of the differences between the show and the EG universe. Sunset Shimmer is a great character who adds a different and interesting dynamic to the group. Some of the songs are actually pretty good. Some of the references to the show are fun.
Overall, I don’t think Equestria Girls needed to exist, but since it does, I’m glad that they put in the effort to make it good.
The comics
Equestria Girls and the comics are sort of mirror images of each other. Both so far have the same problem of focusing too much on big event stories to the detriment of the fun and character-building material that the show does so well. Where Equestria Girls panders too much to the younger audience with its focus on boyfriends and makeup and school spirit, the comics pander too much to the older male audience for my taste. I’ve only read the first two volumes so far, but both read like fan-made sequels to episodes of the show, the first volume focusing on Queen Chrysalis and the second on Nightmare Moon. Both volumes show a deafness to the intricate characterization that I loved about the show, spending more time on attempted worldbuilding and action scenes. That was the biggest strength of Equestria Girls: the movies do understand the characters and do a good job both at portraying them accurately and knowingly diverging to make the alternate human version of the character seem different. Probably because the show writers are at least somewhat involved with EG, whereas the comics writers are unaffiliated with the show to the best of my knowledge.
The comics, as a mirror image of EG, have the opposite problem with format: comics are designed to go on forever, so they could have fit in plenty of little character scenes and fun dialogue. They choose not to; instead they’ve mimicked the Marvel / DC story structure of four-issue arcs, so just like Equestria Girls, every story has to be a big event and there’s never time to just focus on the characters. One problem the comics have that EG doesn’t is that they’re not canon, and they’re dealing with the actual characters from the show instead of alternate versions, so nothing that happens in the comics can actually stick. It’s easy to imagine that Twilight only writes in her magic journal to Sunset off screen between episodes, and whatever happens to the other characters is safely insulated in another dimension where it can’t affect the story of the show. The only awkward part about this setup was Twilight having a crush on Flash Sentry that is never mentioned at all in the show. (Though once they’d decided to include Flash Sentry in the movie, I was just as glad he was never mentioned on the show.) On the other hand, the comics are all supposed to be things actually happening to the Mane 6 between episodes of the show, so it’s weird when the comics have Queen Chrysalis kidnap the Cutie Mark Crusaders, forcing the Mane 6 to go on a big journey to rescue them, and the show never brings it up.
For me, the first story arc about Queen Chrysalis undermined her menace. In the show, she’s a scary adversary who only shows up for two stories, both huge events where she executes a plot that nearly defeats the main characters. Going by her show appearances, she’s a competent, frightening villain who first manages to imprison Cadance, a powerful alicorn princess, and then fool all the people closest to her so she can weaken Shining Armor’s protection spell, then later manages to capture all four alicorn princesses and the rest of the Mane 6 and is only defeated at the very last minute because of luck. (And more indirectly because of something brave that Spike did nearly a season ago.) When you throw in the first comics story, she becomes a comical incompetent villain like He-Man’s Skeletor or Thundercats’ Mumm-Ra who comes up with blithering plans every week and is defeated by the heroes, but then suddenly becomes vaguely threatening during sweeps week so we can advertise the big event story where the villain becomes actually scary for one episode and avoid being cancelled. She shows a small amount of real menace towards the end when she forces Twilight to turn to her side, but that’s only after three and a half issues of letting the Cutie Mark Crusaders irritate her. (Also, I have a pretty low opinion of the Crusaders’ intelligence, but even I don’t think they would be dumb enough to try and irritate a villain as imposing as Queen Chrysalis seems to be in the show.)
The second story arc has some creative ideas about the moon and how that whole “imprisoned in the moon” thing worked, but it undermines Princess Luna and Nightmare Moon and concocts a weird new character trait for Rarity seemingly out of nowhere. In this story arc it’s revealed that Luna became Nightmare Moon because of some sort of moon-dwelling smoke monster that embedded itself in her psyche and preyed upon her fears and doubts. The monster returns and takes Rarity as its new host, turning her into Nightmare Rarity and making it impossible for the Mane 6 to use the Elements of Harmony. They follow Rarity to the moon to rescue her but end up getting imprisoned. There’s a weird finale where Princess Celestia teams up with the ponies of Ponyville to fight off the invasion of evil moon creatures. Then the Mane 6 realize that Rarity has self-esteem problems and bring her back by remembering all the times she did something that they loved her for. (Some of the scenes they remember actually look like stories I’d like to read: in particular, Twilight remembers a time that Rarity took care of her when she was sick, which would make an adorable story.)
So, where to begin with this? To start, I don’t like it when reformed antagonists are revealed to have been doing evil things because some creature was controlling them. It fits better with what we saw of Luna and Nightmare Moon in the show than if they’d tried to say that, for example, Discord was being controlled by some other entity to be evil. But I would have much rather gotten a real exploration of what Luna was feeling and what parts of her personality came into play that made her go so far that she became Nightmare Moon. Luna hasn’t been handled that well by the show either (mostly because she isn’t handled nearly enough, not because any of the small amount of material we get on her is bad), and the comics are not helping here.
But at least the Luna parts of this fit in to the show’s canon. The Rarity parts came utterly from left field. There’s never been any indication on the show that Rarity has self-esteem problems. It felt like they chose Rarity purely to play up Spike’s role, but nothing Spike did would have been that out of place if someone else had been taken by the nightmare fog. Spike may be quickest to leap to Rarity’s aid, but he’d do what he could to help any of them. Speaking of Spike, the one character who does consistently have low self-esteem issues on the show is Spike. This comic was written sometime in the Season 1-3 period (Twilight isn’t an alicorn yet), before episodes like “Equestria Games” that focused on that part of Spike, but we’d still had episodes like “Owl’s Well that Ends Well” and “Dragon Quest” that hinted at it. I get that it had to be one of the Mane 6, though; if it’d been Nightmare Spike, they would’ve ended it in five minutes with the Elements of Harmony. But it wouldn’t have been hard to write a believable story about self-esteem problems with Pinkie Pie, not after seeing how quickly Pinkie jumps to the conclusion that her friends don’t care about her in “Party of One” (and later in “Pinkie Pride”), or Fluttershy, who gets bagged on a lot in the early episodes (it could be done in full acknowledgment of the scene in “The Return of Harmony” where she tells Discord that she appreciates her friends’ constructive criticism; the criticism isn’t always entirely constructive, and even constructive criticism can get old when it’s constant).
I’ve read synopses of some of the later volumes on the wikia to see if I want to continue, and they also read like total fan service; there’s a bunch of stories focusing on shipping the background ponies, and a story about how Shining Armor romanced Cadance, in which it is revealed that Shining Armor was a D&D nerd (I think this predated “Dungeons and Discords”, so it probably wasn’t the same game Spike and Big Mac were playing there), and overcame some jerk jock that Cadance was dating at the time to win her heart. I like the idea of a story about how Cadance and Shining Armor fell in love, but that scenario sounds like it was stolen from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, and it doesn’t fit Shining Armor’s characterization in the show at all. Shining Armor hasn’t gotten a whole lot of development, but from what we have seen, he’s collected, confident, and competent. He was able to become captain of the royal guards, after all. I’d potentially buy that he had self confidence issues he overcame to get where he is today, but you’d have to really convince me. We don’t know a whole lot about Cadance either, but you’d also have to really convince me that she would date a jerk jock, even temporarily. She seems too classy to be taken in solely by looks or raw feats of athleticism, too perceptive not to notice that the jerk jock is a jerk, and too compassionate not to be bothered by the fact that he’s a jerk.
Once you get past the stories, I also don’t much like the art style. Something about the character designs just looks gummy and gooey, almost like Ren and Stimpy, and not cute and crisp like in the show. I prefer the guest artists they bring in to do the bonus art in the back of the books. There were so many interesting directions they could have gone with a comic that they chose not to pursue. Even exactly replicating the art style of the show probably would’ve been feasible; if anything, I’d say the comics art is more detailed and probably took more effort to achieve a worse look that doesn’t fit the atmosphere as well.
If I got my fantasy team-up for a new My Little Pony comics series, I would probably elect The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl’s Ryan North for writer. I have no idea if he knows or cares about My Little Pony, but he brings so many laughs to Squirrel Girl that he’d at least know what to do with Pinkie Pie. I don’t know of an artist off the top of my head whose style would fit—maybe Jill Thompson, or possibly Unbeatable Squirrel Girl’s Erica Hernandez. (Can you tell I like Unbeatable Squirrel Girl?) Or fantasy comics editor me might try to convince Lauren Faust to come draw comics for me. But there are also lots of talented artists with great style in the online fandom who I bet would love a chance to draw professional My Little Pony comics.
Conclusion
The story of Friendship is Magic has always been a story of a group of writers and artists who took what should have been a crappy toy commercial that died after three seasons of shameless cash grabbery and turned it into something great through the power of creativity and artistic integrity. As cash grabby and terrible as Equestria Girls ought to have been, the writers and artists managed to turn it into something...well, I won’t call it great, but it’s enjoyable, and definitely better than it should be. The comics are unfortunately not great, but hey, they’re tie-in comics. Even Madoka had some pretty awful tie-in comics.
