About Starlight

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

Reasons to hate Starlight (that I disagree with)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Season 5 we have four episodes:

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

In Season 6 we have eight episodes:

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

In Season 7, we have nine:

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

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

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

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

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

Starlight’s personality

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

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

Starlight’s time as a villain

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

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

“Every Little Thing She Does”

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

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

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

“To Where and Back Again” and On

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First Thoughts on “My Little Pony: The Movie”

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

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

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

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

The story and characters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The art

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

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

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

The soundtrack

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

“The Dark Tower" is a Mountain of Missed Opportunities

Last weekend, it was 102 degrees (Fahrenheit) where I live. I know some of y’all are saying “102 degrees? Quit whining and call me when it’s 120.” I know, I know, I hear you. I used to live in an area where it regularly hit 115 in late August. But in the area where I live now, 102 is a historically high temperature, so most houses don’t have air conditioning and a lot of them are stuffy and have terrible air circulation. Plus, it can hit 60% humidity at the same time as being 102 degrees, so surviving isn’t trivial.

To survive these temperatures, I spent a Friday afternoon and an entire Saturday at the movies. I saw Wonder Woman for a second time on Friday (just as good as the first time) and hit the re-release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind on Saturday evening, but I needed something to see Saturday morning, and I was pretty much limited to seeing Spider-Man: Homecoming again or seeing The Dark Tower. I went with the latter, and yada yada yada, here’s a blog about how bad it was.

In case you haven’t seen The Dark Tower, I’m going to spoil it right away: Jake Chambers is a kid who sees visions in his dreams of a man in black and a faraway world. Everyone insists he’s crazy, including his concerned mom who is being pressured by his jerk stepdad Lon to put him in the booby hatch. His real father, Elmer, was a heroic firefighter who died and everyone thinks he’s just having issues. One day a man and a lady come from the nuthouse to take him away, but he notices their skin is sagging because they’re actually taheen, creatures with animal heads that resemble the Egyptian gods, but more disgusting. (Villains in Stephen King stories are always disgusting.) He executes an amazing parkour chase sequence across rooftops, similar to the one at the beginning of Casino Royale, except instead of being an international super spy who stops terrorism he’s a random kid who’s kind of weird. He escapes to the house in Dutch Hill where a wood monster attacks him, and then he goes through a portal into Mid-World, where he meets the Gunslinger, Roland Deschain, played by Idris Elba. Meanwhile, the Man in Black has discovered he’s a powerful psychic who can topple the Dark Tower and open the universe to the monsters living beyond reality, which he wants to do for some reason? Not really clear why. After walking around aimlessly for a while, Roland and Jake consult a seer in a village who convinces her entire village to do what Roland says because he’s a gunslinger, even though they all think it will lead to them all dying. It does in fact lead to them all dying, but that’s okay because Roland and Jake get what they need: they get back to Jake’s Earth and find the way to the Man in Black’s fortress, but only after the Man in Black kills Lon and Jake’s mom. The Man in Black kidnaps Jake and straps him into this big chair that makes a skybeam shoot at the Dark Tower. Roland charges in and kills everyone, including the Man in Black, and pulls Jake out of the chair. Since Jake’s family is all dead now, he goes off with Roland to adventure in Mid-World.

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of the books. I like them but they’re not perfect. But there’s two things the books are: they’re original, and they’re ambitious. This movie used exactly none of the really original or ambitious ideas that the books bring to the table. It was unoriginal and unambitious on every level. According to Stephen King, the books were his attempt to combine The Lord of the Rings with The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Guess what movie trilogy won like 50 Oscars back in the early 2000’s? That’s right, Lord of the Rings. Guess what movie is regarded as a classic that defines the entire spaghetti Western genre? That’s right, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Guess what The Dark Tower took as inspiration from either of those movies? Basically nothing. It’s as generic and plain vanilla as sci-fi action comes. More than either of those, it reminds me of the painfully boring 1996 film Crossworlds, starring Rutger Hauer way after Blade Runner, or even Ladyhawke. The visual style isn’t quite as boring as I remember Crossworlds being, but it resembles Lord of the Rings only in the way that every speculative fiction movie nowadays does. (At least, those that don’t resemble The Matrix.) The cinematography is perfectly serviceable but does nothing to stand out or enhance things. The soundtrack is sort of the elevator music version of the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. The Dark Tower books are supposed to be a mystical fantasy version of a spaghetti Western. You know what would’ve been really cool? Make it look and sound like a spaghetti Western, in a way that King couldn’t do with just text. Ennio Morricone is still around—get him to do some epic trumpet music. Don’t just do the kind of boring, generic gunfight that any two-bit action movie has—really bring some tension to these fights, like a good spaghetti Western. Even the books got this right, and doing a good fight in a book is really hard. Good fights are fast and exciting and reach for your hair-trigger reptile brain reflexes. Books are slow and ponderous and engage all your philosophizing frontal cortex functions. But the books still got this right.

That’s just on the technical side; the story was an even bigger waste. The first book was pretty self-contained, so I’m not sure why they felt the need to pull a Hobbit on it and make it more confusing by bringing in all these concepts that didn’t appear until later, like the taheen and the outer darkness. Both Roland and Jake lose a lot of the complexity they had in the books. One of the most significant moments of the first book is when Roland lets Jake fall to his death to get a chance at catching up with the Man in Black. It establishes Roland’s single-mindedness and also helps set the basis for his later relationship with Jake. Nothing like this ever happens in the movie. We never really find out why Roland hates the Man in Black or why he’s chasing him. We never find out what he feels so guilty about in the past, or why he feels so guilty about it. We never get a sense of the weight of tradition Roland was raised under, or the Spartan upbringing he had, and we never get a glimpse of what people in his world do when they’re not going on adventures to save all of existence. I understand that the book character was too complex to be fit in one movie and had to be cut down, but they cut down so much that there’s almost nothing left. Similarly, Jake in the books wasn’t just an average kid who was seeing weird visions while his concerned mom and his jerk stepdad wondered what to do. His parents were rich and so caught up in their own lives that they barely had time for him. He attended an upper-class private school that he hated, because his parents wanted to be able to brag to their friends about it. Jake found a new home in Mid-World and new family in Roland and the others not because his real family was all dead, or even because they didn’t love him, but because they weren’t really there for him.

This movie being so terrible pretty much wrecked any chances of seeing Eddie and Susannah on the big screen, or other interesting elements from the books like Lud, the Wolves, or Blaine the Monorail. Apparently they’re still pressing ahead with a TV series that will be based on the fourth book, Wizard and Glass, so there’s still a chance we’ll see Alain and Cuthbert, and maybe the people working on the TV series will have more sense about both technical and story elements, instead of trying to play it safe with one of the weirdest and most ambitious fantasy stories around.

I watched One-Punch Man. So there's that.

Since I’m so done with shounen action, I pretty much ignored all the buzz around One-Punch Man when it came out, but recently I finally deigned to watch it after talking with a big fan, and enjoyed it a lot.

I’d previously read the first volume of the manga, but the things that make One-Punch Man fun don’t come across well in black and white still images. It’s a wild, over the top parody of both typical shounen action and superheroes, but also manages to be a pretty competent shounen action / superhero series in its own right. The only similar show I’ve seen is Bobobo-bo-Bobobo, but One-Punch Man is funnier, easier to watch, and has better characters and action.

If you’re reading this (you’re not, I know), you probably know what One-Punch Man is about: an egghead baldy named Saitama who is so insanely powerful that he can take out any threat with one punch. Saitama is a refreshing take on the rock-headed, youthful heroes with a dream we see in a lot of shounen series: he’s got the same kind of airheaded nonchalance as Goku, but he’s already 25, didn’t start training until he was 22, pretty much fell into the whole hero business, and he has no idea why he’s so powerful and no particular end goal in his life. He does have a sort of moral code—in one scene, he sacrifices his own reputation so a group of people will honor the other, weaker heroes who died or took serious injury protecting them before he arrived. But his moral code isn’t what drives him. When the series starts, he’s a dilettante who saves the city from giant monsters and then rushes off to catch the sales at the grocery stores because he’s poor and doesn’t have a real job. His attitude and lifestyle remind me of someone living a hard-scrabble, rock-bottom life on purpose while trying to make it as an artist or a musician, except his art is punching the guts out of giant monsters.

A bunch of other heroes also make brief appearances: there’s Saitama’s sidekick Genos, a cyborg who is searching for the evil cyborg that murdered his parents. There’s a ton of others who work for the Hero Association, which ranks heroes and pays them with donations made by the people. Most of them are absurd. The most absurd, but also the one with the most oddly touching arc, is Mumen Rider, whose power is riding a bicycle. A lot of the other heroes are cowards and opportunists who duck out of taking on the tough challenges, but Mumen Rider is courageous to the point of idiocy, and the show achieves one of those classic manly tears moments that are the holy grail of all shounen fighting series when he throws himself at a monster that’s already taken out tons of far more powerful heroes just to buy some people a little more time to escape. Nearly as absurd is Puri-Puri Prisoner, a comedic gay stereotype who would no doubt be the subject of numerous outrage-pieces about how homophobic Japan is if anyone in the outrage media watched One-Punch Man. (Outrage media journalists: I charge a 10% finder’s fee on stuff to get outraged about. Call me if you’re interested in getting outraged about Puri-Puri Prisoner!) On the actually cool side, there’s Tornado, a green-haired loli with a bad attitude and telekinesis. The first time we see her in action, a Godzilla-like monster brags that it would take a meteor impact to kill him, so she grabs a meteor from space with her telekinesis and slams it into him.

One-Punch Man is actually surprisingly brutal. When Saitama punches something, it explodes in a giant fountain of guts and bones. The higher level heroes always fight to kill. The villains usually warrant it; more than one intends genocide against the human race, and the Sea King runs around the city killing indiscriminately and eating the victims. Combined with how the fluid animation creates a sense of speed and intensity, the fights recall the savage, beautifully animated battles that used to be common in 80’s anime.

Saitama’s overwhelming power and his impatience for lengthy villain backstories means that the story arcs are usually very short. Where Naruto or One Piece could easily blow through 12 episodes on a single fight between a minor villain and one of the B-team members, One-Punch Man makes it through five major villains and several minor ones in the same number. There’s a lot of action and enough dialogue to keep things fun, but not enough to get wearing. The snappy pace helps prevent the fatigue that can set in after watching two side characters alternately trade backstories and fight inconclusively for 17 hours.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed One-Punch Man, especially after being unimpressed with the manga. It’s just not a series whose virtues come across well in static black and white panels. The medium of manga is suited to extremely long form stories, preferably ones with lots of expository dialogue (anything too clever or flashy benefits a lot from being spoken by an actor) and not a lot of action. The main strengths of One-Punch Man are action, which benefits a lot from the anime’s incredible fight animation, and funny dialogue that’s best delivered by a good actor. I’m glad I gave the anime a chance; it was funny, cool, and even had some feels, like Mumen Rider’s stand against the Sea King.

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.