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.

“Little Witch Academia": Bringing the 90's Back, in a Good Way

In my mind, anime in the 90’s was dominated by this genre of generic action-adventure comedies about special task forces fighting some supernatural threat. There were a lot of these: Silent Mobius, Blue Seed, Gatekeepers, Witch Hunter Robin. They all had the same story structure: a protagonist discovers hidden mystical powers within them and joins an organization of misfits and hotheads to fight evil monsters creeping out of the woodwork to threaten humanity. The series would always start with monster of the week episodes and days in the limelight for each member of the team, then around the halfway point there would be some sort of explosive revelation and a main villain would show up from somewhere to harrass and harry the heroes. As the battle continued, it would always come out there was something rotten at the heart of the organization and the main characters would end up executing the final battle (usually against some kind of planet-ending threat unleashed by the main villain through some convoluted scheme that may or may not make any sense) without the support of the organization.

Even once you leave this narrow subgenre, lots of shows in the 90’s follow a similar plot structure: monster of the week, main villain appears, shocking revelation, escalating stakes and emotion, final battle against planet-ending threat, everyone lives happily ever after except the main villain who is now toast. Outlaw Star, Trigun, Evangelion to some extent. Even Rurouni Kenshin and Yu Yu Hakusho follow it on a macro scale: Rurouni Kenshin is all “rogue samurai of the week” until the Kyouto arc begins and brings us our main villain, shocking revelations, escalating stakes and emotions, and final battle against country-ending threat. Yu Yu Hakusho splits it across three stories: the pre Dark Tournament stories are monster of the week, the Dark Tournament is the intense midpoint, and the Chapter Black saga is the increasingly desperate final battle. (The Demon World arc, at least in the anime, is the poorly thought out ending where Suguru becomes a space bounty hunter.)

Since most anime in the 90’s were 26 episodes long, you can even map the plot structure to episode numbers. Monster of the week and ensemble limelights were concentrated in Episodes 1 to 9. Episode 8 or 9 would usually feature a tougher, more challenging monster; they’d save something to draw back in people who were thinking of leaving the show. It was also common to slip the main villain into a short final scene where he (or sometimes she) is watching the battle from a rooftop with his or her arms crossed and then says something mysterious and foreshadowing, like “I see he’s progressed well…but he still doesn’t know his true power.” The main villain would appear for real in Episode 10 or 11 and up the stakes by hinting at some mysterious larger goal, while also providing a real physical challenge for the heroes. Then we’d get a run of more dramatic episodes. If anyone in the main cast was going to die, this would be where it happened. There would also usually be an episode consisting largely of flashbacks that explained the dark, mysterious past of one of the lead characters. These would all lead up to the main villain unleashing the planet-ending threat and being defeated. The last episode would usually reset things somewhat to the status quo of the early episodes, in case the show was a hit and people demanded a sequel.

My guess is that this plot structure came about because so many of these shows were based on manga. Manga artists often don’t have a grand overriding vision for a series when they start, because they’re pitching a hundred one-shots and hoping one of them gets picked up. When something does get picked up, the mangaka has to quickly start churning out weekly (or monthly) stories. They have to be exciting to hook new readers, and they can’t be too complicated or have too much continuity, or else new readers will have a hard time following them. Monster of the week stories are perfect for this. If the series makes it through six months of serialization, it’s probably going to be around for a while, so then the mangaka can start introducing a more complex, ongoing story arc and know that there are people following the series chapter by chapter who can keep up. A 26-episode anime adaptation has just enough time to get in a few monster of the week stories and then do a treatment of the longer story arc. I also think that’s why we don’t see this story structure quite as much in newer anime: newer anime are usually one cour, not two, and one cour isn’t enough time to do justice to a manga series arranged like this. The World Only God Knows, for example, is a newer series that follows this plot structure, but with “conquests” of the week instead of monsters. It takes three cours plus OVAs to cover the early “conquest” of the week stories and do a treatment of the first long-running arc. They probably could’ve trimmed this down to two cours plus OVAs if they’d skipped some of the less relevant early stories, but there was no possible way they could have trimmed it to one cour and done real justice to the story or characters.

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Little Witch Academia is 90’s to the core. It’s obvious in the art style, which purposely mimics both the cost-cutting shortcuts and thrilling action sequences of hand-drawn animation at the time. The character designs eschew the moe aesthetic that even non-moe shows like Re:Zero use today. The characters’ personalities and dynamics are somewhat cartoonish, and there are clear breaks from the laws of physics casually thrown in everywhere. It’s amazing nostalgia. It even largely uses the 90’s anime story structure that I just spent four paragraphs describing. It’s an incredibly fun, imaginative show that’s simultaneously a throwback to the 90’s, similar to its predecessor Kill la Kill, or Stranger Things for a non-anime example.

Episodes 3 to 13, which form our 90’s-core early monster of the week stories, are an amazing run of episodes that teach us a lot about the characters, introduce us to the world, and show us lots of fun and humor. I could’ve easily watched 25 episodes like this. The second half of the show isn’t quite as strong. Most of the episodes that advance the main plot kinda dragged for me. One contributor: Croix, our villain, a witch who also uses technology and has an army of app-controlled flying Roombas at her command, doesn’t really have a lot of personality. Or at any rate, she doesn’t evince a lot of personality; you can guess at what she’s like based on her actions, but one of the fun things about 90’s anime is the big bombastic personalities that you don’t have to think about too much, and we get that from all the other characters, so Croix doesn’t fit the mood as well as she could and she’s not compelling enough to make an episode, despite being a major focus of several. She’s also a reasonable antagonist for Ursula, whose rival she is, but not for Akko, the actual main character of the show. Diana is set up as Akko’s opposite, but she never antagonizes Akko, aside from yelling at her out of frustration a few times.

The main plot also feels thin in a weird way that I’m having a hard time putting into words. I want to say it feels like it was stretched out over too many episodes, but when I look back I’m not sure what could’ve been cut. Maybe parts of Episodes 15, 21, and 22. It bugged me that they revealed Ursula’s true identity so early and then kept it secret from Akko for the entire series, but when she finally does find out it’s handled well enough that I couldn’t be annoyed anymore.

Whatever the show does wrong from a plot perspective, there’s a ton it does right with the characters. I liked how, from the very beginning, Diana recognizes Akko’s achievements and shows hints of a grudging sort of admiration. When she scolds Akko, she seems to want to help Akko be better, not cut her down. (Her two groupies, on the other hand…) With that motivation, it feels like a reward late in the series when Akko and Diana get closer and even become friends. Ursula was great too. One of the benefits of the early reveal of her true identity was that we could see without having to rewatch the series how much she had given up her true identity and started to live the mask of a put-upon, humble, lowly teacher. Then every so often we’d see a spark of her old self that made us believe in what she used to be. My favorite, and definitely in the running for my favorite moment of the series, was her outburst at the end of Episode 7, where she stood up for Akko and against the other teachers’ snobbery.

Diana and Ursula were great, but my number one favorite is Sucy. She’s too funny, and her dynamic with Akko and Lotte makes them really fun to watch. I loved Episode 8, where we go inside her mind. Sadly, I also hated Episode 8, where we go inside her mind, because after that we know everything about Sucy and the show proceeds to stop advancing her character. It would’ve been nice for some of the things we find out about Sucy in that episode to be revealed more organically, the way we found out things about Ursula and Diana. I was also sad that Lotte and Sucy have so little to do in the second half of the show.

Aside from the characters, Little Witch Academia excels at big action set pieces; the series is full of crazy dodgefests that look straight out of FLCL. I don’t recall even Kill la Kill having this many of them, or ones this well animated. Ending the series with a massive amazingly animated midair fight sequence that takes up most of the final episode was the best decision ever, especially after Episode 24 ended on a bit of an anticlimax.

It’s also great at weird, creative takes on magical adventure. Episode 7, for example, is just a chain of escalating weirdness that made me laugh while also making complete sense within the world, starting with Akko taking a class taught by a goldfish without realizing that the goldfish was the professor or being able to understand goldfish language. Episode 10 was a lot of crazy fun. The Samhain Festival story in Episodes 12 and 13 was creative and weird like Episode 7, had crazy fun like Episode 10, and also had character moments where it more clearly defined characters like Diana and Akko, helping them move from where they were in the first half to where they needed to be in the second half. In a bigger sense, it excels at building a world around a story, instead of building a story around a world. The magical world in Little Witch Academia is not a secret hidden world like in Harry Potter or Negima. Being a witch is a lot like being a lord in modern England: witches still have connections with the rich and powerful because of tradition and former glory, but no one considers them relevant or devotes much thought to them. Some of their patrons hardly make a secret of how little they think of magic, and Luna Nova Academy is always operating on a shoestring budget and doing cheap things like underfeeding the students to scrape along.

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Despite the minor story flaws, Little Witch Academia is the first Trigger series I’ve seen that I can say I wholeheartedly love. Kill la Kill came closest before, but it never quite took its characters seriously enough to get there for me. Space Patrol Luluco felt too much like a bunch of shameless 90’s nostalgia and shallow reference humor. Inferno Cop was, well, it’s funny, but I doubt anyone who’s seen it will argue that it’s a “wholeheartedly love” kind of show. I’m already a sucker for witches, especially little witches, especially if they’re in academia. Flying Witch was good; Someday’s Dreamers was okay; Little Witch Academia is amazing, and gave me exactly what I wanted from a show about little witches in academia.