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

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

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

The less good

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

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

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

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

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

Favorite episodes

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fame and Misfortune”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shadow Play”

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

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

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

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

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

Random Observations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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.

Equestria Girls and the MLP Comics: Part Lower in a Journey of Obnoxious Fanboying

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.

Favorite “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" Episodes: Part Upper of a Journey of Obnoxious Fanboying

Last time I was more focused on connecting My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic with the cute girls doing cute things genre, and only got in a little obnoxious fanboying, so this time I’m going 100% obnoxious fanboy and talking about my favorite episodes, story arcs, and character moments. I’ll be covering Seasons 1-6 since I watch on Netflix and I haven’t seen Season 7 yet.

While there are good episodes (and bad ones, though amazingly few of them) throughout the series, I’ve noticed on my two and a sixth trips through the series that you can block the seasons into three distinct eras. The tenor of the show and type of stories that get told change subtly between the eras. Seasons 1 and 2 focus more on slice of life, small adventures, and character and world building. They feel more like a children’s show, which makes sense, since they were produced before the brony bloc became a known force. Seasons 3 and 4 also have their share of slice of life and character building, but the adventures are more high concept and tended to be weirder—the Mane 6 get sucked into a comic book, Fluttershy turns into a pony-bat, Pinkie Pie clones herself, Rainbow Dash helps Daring Do on an adventure in real life. The character building in Seasons 3 and 4 is mostly deeper and the event stories are more complex, with a strong focus on the Mane 6 and occasional sidetrips to spend time with Spike or the Cutie Mark Crusaders. Seasons 5 and 6 get a little weirder still, with more side characters, more fan shout-outs (though Season 4 was the one that found a way to sneak the Wilhelm Scream into every episode), and event stories that borrow more knowingly from other sci-fi and fantasy stories (though again, Season 4 did a little of this too with its Dragon Ball Z-inspired finale).

While I overwhelmingly enjoy all the seasons, my ideal season would be mostly the same tenor as Seasons 3 and 4, but with less of the high-concept weirdness and more of the down-to-earth slice of life of Seasons 1 and 2. I find that Seasons 3 and 4 are the ones that stand out in my memory as the best, but Seasons 1 and 2 are the ones I want to revisit: both times I’ve watched the Season 6 finale, I find myself wanting to go back and revisit episodes like “Friendship is Magic”, “Dragonshy”, “Winter Wrap-Up”, “Green Isn’t Your Color”, “A Dog and Pony Show”, “The Cutie Mark Chronicles”, and “Party of One”, to say nothing of all the great episodes in Season 2. Still, as we go through my favorite episodes below, we’ll see that all seasons are represented.

Character Bests

These are my favorites among episodes focusing on a particular character. We’ll start with the Mane 6, roughly in the order I like them, and address other characters at the end.

Fluttershy

It’s tough to pick between “Dragonshy” from Season 1 and “Putting Your Hoof Down” from Season 2 as the first great Fluttershy episode in the series, but I give a slight edge to the latter. Both show Fluttershy having trouble being heard and standing up for herself and being underestimated and scorned by her friends, and both end with her managing to stand up for herself when she really needs to, but the setup of “Dragonshy” feels a bit more conventional, whereas “Putting Your Hoof Down” feels original, and I love how Fluttershy’s flat “No” and calm explanation to Iron Will at the close is both a little anticlimactic and a sensible, in-character way for her to assert herself. Plus, Iron Will and his stupid catchphrases make me laugh. “If someone tries to block, show them that you rock!”

“Keep Calm and Flutter On” from Season 3 shows the strength of Fluttershy’s resolve to be kind to others, and brings Discord over to the side of good in a way that seems in character for him and for her. Like “Putting Your Hoof Down”, the climax is very sudden but still feels earned.

I always enjoy episodes that show us another side of the characters, and “Filli Vanilli” from Season 4 does that for Fluttershy. Her reluctance to put herself out there and perform was something I identified with. I enjoyed the pony a capella group, as I always enjoy the variety of musical genres that the show uses. This episode also had one of the best composed shots of the entire series, when Fluttershy is standing on a bridge watching the Ponytones and swaying as she hums to the music, and the camera sits behind her pointing over her shoulder. MLP does a better job with compositional variety than most Flash shows (watching Equestria Girls made this very clear), but shots that artful still feel rare.

Pinkie Pie

Pinkie makes me laugh on a regular basis, but good episodes that focus on her alone are few and far between, which makes some sense—she must be a difficult character to write an entire episode around since you can’t fill a half hour with her usual antics without making her annoying (and that’s something the show never, ever does, which is an impressive feat on its own).

“A Party of One” from Season 1 is the first time we see a side of Pinkie other than happy-go-lucky. She’s childish in both the good and bad senses, which means she’s tempestuous and can be quick to jump to conclusions. Her crazed party with random objects is both fun and frightening. I also love how her mane and tail go flat whenever she’s depressed.

“Pinkie Pride” from Season 4 was an even deeper character-building episode in which Pinkie’s friends learn to appreciate her and Pinkie herself learns not to let her pride get in the way of throwing a great party. It’s a lot of fun and has Weird Al Yankovic playing a pony version of himself.

I also want to mention Season 2’s “A Friend in Deed”, which is one of the most out and out fun episodes in the whole series, even if the plot is a bit forced. They had to cram it all in so they could fit that glorious song where Pinkie sings about how she wants to befriend everyone and make them all smile, showing us how gentle and kind she actually is under all that random chaos and yelling. Plus, felt puppet stop motion.

Twilight Sparkle

Since Twilight is the main character, there are lots of episodes focusing on her, but most of the ones I really liked were in Season 1 and Season 2, before she was the fix-it girl, and focused on her obsession with order, organization, and details. For example, “It’s About Time” from Season 2, which is specifically about Twilight learning to stop fretting about the future. Twilight is the queen of freak-out scenes (only Pinkie even comes close), and her freak-out scene in this episode is both funnier and better motivated than the one in the earlier “Lesson Zero”.

“A Canterlot Wedding” from Season 2 has its problems as an event story, but as character building for Twilight it’s incredible. We find out that Twilight is an oniichanko who has a crush on her oniichan, Shining Armor, the awesome captain of Celestia’s royal guard, and see her get jealous when she finds out he’s marrying Princess Cadance. This inspired my fan fiction, “Ore no Poniimouto ga Konna Ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai!”, known in English as “My Pony Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute!”, which focuses on the time when Twilight was in middle school and became secretive and full of contempt toward Shining Armor, until he discovered that she was secretly a giant fan of the book series Stardust Witch Stardust Witch, in which a young filly named Stardust Witch becomes a Stardust Witch and fights monsters with her magic.

But seriously, I love how “A Canterlot Wedding” develops the relationship between Twilight and Shining Armor. I wish that relationship had paid off more in later episodes, but I love how it’s portrayed in these two episodes and that it explains how Twilight got along without friends in her life before Ponyville. (It does pay off a little in “The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows” when Twilight sets up the room with Shining Armor’s childhood paraphernalia, and goes on the scavenger hunt with everyone.)

Rarity

There are surprisingly few good Rarity episodes—the writers seem to have had a hard time figuring out what to do with her—but for me “A Dog and Pony Show” from Season 1 stands out. The villains are total idiots, but it’s a lot of fun to watch Rarity troll them.

I’m also fond of “Suited for Success” from Season 1, which focuses on Rarity as a creative person (er, pony) and the trouble she has when her clients want to have too much input on the creative decisions in her work, which I’m sure every programmer, designer, and writer for hire can identify with.

Later on, we started to get some really good Rarity episodes; Season 5’s “Canterlot Boutique” stands out for deftly telling a very grown up story about two well-intentioned ponies, one creative and one business savvy, trying to run a business together and clashing over vision. Plus, “Rules of Rarity” is my favorite Rarity song in the series. “Rarity Investigates!”, just a few episodes later, is extremely fun and surprisingly well written, even if the mystery only has one real suspect.

Applejack

Applejack’s personality allows for stories that touch on a lot of unique issues that other cartoons wouldn’t usually deal with. “Applebuck Season” from Season 1, for example, focuses on the importance of not working yourself to death out of a stubborn desire to prove how good you are. Since I live and work in Silicon Valley, the working-yourself-to-death capital of the United States, this message resonated strongly. (As a side note, I’m waiting for the pony parody of Silicon Valley to show up in an episode some day. They could call it Fillicon Valley. A pony with a lambda for a cutie mark would feature heavily in this episode.)

“The Last Roundup” from Season 2 was another good episode about Applejack’s pride that was both fun and character building. In a gripping scene in which Pinkie Pie is deployed as a weapon of torture, it originated the cherrychanga. (Or is it the chimicherry? Chimicherry, or cherrychanga?)

Applejack’s other important trait is honesty. “Leap of Faith” from Season 4 shows how a white lie told with good intentions gets Applejack into trouble, while “Where the Apple Lies” from Season 6 shows the origin of her honesty. The antics get a little too implausible at times, but after sitting through dozens of characters who tell big lies and get into trouble week over week when I was young (and also when I was whatever age I was when I read Love Hina), it’s refreshing to see one who reformed and chose honesty. And it lends weight to Applejack’s decision to always be honest to know that it came from hard experience.

Rainbow Dash

Rainbow Dash is actually not a very likable character when the show starts, but she grows a lot as the series goes on. I particularly like “Read It and Weep” from Season 2, where Rainbow starts reading (you could even say she becomes a reading Rainbow, har har) and becomes a giant fangirl of Daring Do. The message is awesome—not only is reading good, it’s good whether you’re sporty, a farm girl, an egghead, or whatever Pinkie is. And it’s not good because you’ll do well in school, or because you’ll memorize some random fact that will later turn out to be exactly what you need to know to escape the villain’s trap. It’s good because you’ll enjoy it. But don’t take my word for it!

The two episodes where Rainbow comes into ethical conflict with the Wonderbolts, “Wonderbolts Academy” in Season 3 and “Rainbow Falls” in Season 4, helped me like Rainbow a lot more by showing that she does have a good heart after all, even if she’s sometimes thoughtless, overbearing, and conceited.

I like a good episode with the Mane 6’s pets since the pets were pretty obviously invented as add-on toys you could package with the pony, and a good pet episode helps justify the pets’ existence. “Tanks For the Memories” from Season 5 is possibly the best. The climactic scene, where Fluttershy bluntly tells Rainbow Dash the truth so Rainbow will cry and work through her feelings, then ends up crying herself, then ends up dragging in Rarity and Pinkie Pie so that all four of them are curled up in a glob crying together, was adorable, touching, funny, and genuine.

Other characters

It would have been easy to make Spike into a throwaway comic relief sidekick, but instead he’s an interesting character in his own right, sometimes acting greedy or stupid but just as often heroic, supportive, and wise. Episodes that focus on him are, unfortunately, mostly pretty uninspiring, but the ones that focused on Spike’s fame in the Crystal Empire stand out as exception, and “Equestria Games” from Season 4 was one of the best. Spike has to learn to recognize his own self worth and have confidence, even though he’s always getting sidelined from the big action. I also enjoyed “The Times They Are A Changeling” from Season 6, even though the climax felt rushed: it was nice to see Spike use his fame in the Crystal Empire for good, and really nice to see how his actions influenced into a larger plot in the season finale. “Gauntlet of Fire” from the same season is a lot of fun and another episode where Spike gets to have a big impact. I also enjoyed Spike’s small parts in “Lesson Zero”, where he shows how well he knows Twilight and how much he cares about her, and “The Best Night Ever”, an instance where he understands friendship better than the rest of them.

I’m not a big fan of The Cutie Mark Crusaders as a group. Their joint episodes are mostly on the lower end of the scale, but their individual episodes from Season 4 are all good, and “For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils” is my favorite. Sweetie Belle is the least dim-witted and most interesting of the three (highly relative, of course), and this episode has a nice plot about her relationship with Rarity as well as a rare appearance by Princess Luna, who counsels Sweetie Belle on working through jealousy of your big sister without trying to bring eternal night to the land and getting banished to the moon for a thousand years. “Sleepless in Ponyville” is also really good and makes up for how Scootaloo annoyed me in “The Cutie Mark Chronicles” by constantly whining “Rainbow Dash, Rainbow Dash!” (Seriously, get a room! No, I don’t need to see fanart of that.)

“Maud Pie” from Season 4 introduces Maud Pie, Pinkie Pie’s sister. She writes poems. They’re all about rocks.

Since I have roughly as much experience with friendship as Discord, I can assure you that the events of “Make New Friends but Keep Discord” from Season 5 are definitely accurate in regard to the feelings of people who have only had one friend ever when they discover their one friend has more than one friend. I also like how this episode contains evidence for the fan interpretation that Princess Celestia is a troll. She pretty much admits at the end that she invited Discord to the gala to troll everyone. She’s also the only person in the room to laugh when Discord mocks Twilight’s flight skills.

My favorite supporting character in the show (maybe aside from Maud) is Princess Luna, but we got precious few episodes focusing on her, and all of them had flaws that kept them from greatness. “Luna Eclipsed” from Season 2 had a great premise but the resolution felt too rushed. It probably would have worked better if Luna’s problems had gone partially unresolved at the end of the episode and we’d seen her slowly work on them across a few more episodes. “Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?” from Season 5 is a good episode with a very sweet finale. It resolves much more cleanly than “Luna Eclipsed”, but it again felt like we needed more motivation to make it really land emotionally. Luna is one of the most complex characters, definitely the most complex outside of the Mane 6 and Starlight Glimmer, but she never gets the longer arcs she needs to develop since there are so few episodes focusing on her, so when she does get an episode it doesn’t always work as well as it could. It’s a shame, because I really like her, and a few more small appearances like the one in “For Whom the Sweetie Bell Toils” could do a lot for her.

Of the reformed antagonists, Starlight Glimmer gets the most screen time and most intricate characterization. I go back and forth on whether I like her or not. Her incredible skill at magic is not very well set up, unlike Twilight, who’s constantly studying and practicing. She needed to be powerful when she was a villain to be a credible threat, but after her turn to good it makes her seem too perfect. On the other hand, her nervous demeanor and antisocial tendencies make her fun to watch and easy to sympathize with—what person utterly lacking in normal human social facility hasn’t thought it would be so much easier to maintain relationships with people if you could just gather them all in a castle, put them under mind control, and circulate from station to station spending five minutes at a time with each one? So much more efficient than all this natural human connection stuff. That’s why “Every Little Thing She Does” was one of the standout Starlight episodes for me. Plus, I love how neither Spike nor Starlight has any idea what “chillax” means.

I also want to put down “A Hearth’s Warming Tale”, even though it’s good less because of Starlight and more because of “Pinkie’s Present”.

Event Stories

All the two-part events that open and close seasons are solid, top-tier episodes, but the best for my money is “Twilight’s Kingdom”, which closes Season 4. Season 4 was probably my favorite season for its good mix of really fun episodes (“Castle-mania”, “Three’s a Crowd”, “Trade Ya”) and excellent character building episodes, even if it does have a few high-concept clunkers towards the beginning (“Daring Don’t” and “Power Ponies” for sure. I go back and forth on “Bats!”). “Twilight’s Kingdom” was the perfect close to the season. It had everything: a character growth opportunity (Twilight figuring out how she fits in to the princess picture); an amazing song (“You’ll Play Your Part”); a villain, Tirek, who makes up for lack of personality with naked evil; a betrayal and reversal by Discord that both felt in-character and set up his transition to clingy, socially awkward, but loyal friend in Season 5; a great theme that tied together the season; and an awesome pony Dragon Ball Z fight, with Twilight hurling the power of four alicorns against Tirek, wielding the magic he stole from all ponies in Equestria, in a midair duel, followed by all of the Mane 6 turning into Super Ponyans while imbued with the power of the Elements of Harmony.

The other event episodes are all pretty equal in my book. They were overall excellent, but had slight flaws that put them below “Twilight’s Kingdom”. I’d put Season 5’s opener, “The Cutie Map”, next highest for a unique story that really hangs together. It was interesting to see an episode draw on dystopian science fiction, and it introduces Starlight Glimmer. I put it lower than “Twilight’s Kingdom” because it didn’t have a very strong character building aspect. Season 2’s “A Canterlot Wedding” draws about equal. It has excellent character building for Twilight and an exciting story whose one flaw is the halfway comedic pony kung fu sequence during the rush to escape the changeling hordes at the climax.

Season 6’s “To Where and Back Again”, Season 5’s “The Cutie Re-Mark”, Season 4’s “Princess Twilight Sparkle”, and Season 3’s “The Crystal Empire” are all solid event stories too. I could nitpick tiny flaws in them that put them lower, but they’re still in the upper tier of episodes of a consistently excellent show.

The only events that come up a little short for me are Season 2’s “The Return of Harmony” and Season 3’s “Magical Mystery Cure”. They both had story problems and neither did much character building. “The Return of Harmony” bothered me because Discord was able to just cast a magic spell to make the Mane 6 behave exactly opposite to their Element of Harmony. We know he didn’t have to prey on something inside them because Fluttershy resisted his influence, so he just snapped his fingers and there we go, she’s a meanie. It felt too contrived, and no one had character growth because they were under a magic spell, so no one had to grow. “Magical Mystery Cure” also has kind of an illogical plot that raises too many questions for a serious event story. I’ll forgive a lot of “plot holes” and inconsistencies in normal episodes, but I hold the events to a higher standard, and “Magical Mystery Cure” fell short, no matter how much I loved the songs in it.

Next Time…

Since this is getting really long, it’s time to end it. We’ve covered the main series here, but next time I’ll talk about Equestria Girls and the first bit of the comics.