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Author Topic: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM (SPOILERS!)  (Read 23255 times)

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Offline MJNSEIFER

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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #60 on: February 23, 2019, 12:50:57 PM »
To Zapper: Thanks, I had forgotten about the superhero stuff she did - I actually didn't realise any of it made it past planning, I don't think.  And yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if some of The Galaxy Girls' personalities ended up as her ponies, even though the ponies themselves were based on how she played with the G1 ponies they were going to be (yes, I still say that's true - I hope to get my thread concerning this done as soon as I can.)

Either way, I still hope that one day The Galaxy Girls get a show - I mean, I'm glad they didn't back then, as it lead to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, but I'd like it to be picked up one day, and keep Lauren running it (it might be a good indication of how FiM could have gone if she'd stayed in control, at any rate.)

To Al: I never got the impression that "Dragon Quest" was saying that all dragons were like that, it seemed very obvious that it was just those dragons/that bad dragons exist - it never looked like the whole race/species to me, and it didn't need to be said that it wasn't.  Also, I still don't find Merriweather as bad as others, but she did go down in later seasons.  She was touch and go, but I liked "Dragon Quest", "Hearth Warming Eve", "The Mysterious Mare Do Well" and "Wonderbolts Academy" at the very least.  I'll get back to you on "Bats!"

To Leave a Whisper: Because when you do your own version of established characters, you are allowed to write them how you want.  It's controversial to some, but it's your version of them.  It's up to you how you want to interpret them (and yes, making them exactly the same is allowed too.)  Seriously, the comic book characters get several different versions created for them every now and then.
« Last Edit: February 23, 2019, 01:04:21 PM by MJNSEIFER »
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Offline Al-1701

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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #61 on: February 23, 2019, 02:54:29 PM »
So you didn't have a problem when Spike told Pee-Wee he would teach him how to be a pony?  Not a good dragon but a pony.

Wonderbolts Academy also bugged me because I think we could have done without the rest of the characters and focus on Rainbow Dash exclusively.  Instead of just kicking Lightning Dust to the curb, Rainbow's dilemma is abandoning her and taking a chance to teach her how to be a team player.  Also, why is Spitfire, the leader of a squadron specializing in formation flying only concerned with individual achievement?  They could have made a great episode where Rainbow Dash could show she is truly the Element of Loyalty and inspiration to other ponies by helping Lightning Dust.  Instead we get a rather pat episode about how you need to choose your friends over your dreams only she got both anyway.  Why does focusing on Rainbow Dash make episodes dumber.

And Bats was just ripping off Wallace and Grommet.  Oh, and that one advocated for the rights of an invasive species to destroy an environment.  As someone who watched the emerald ash borer kill every ash tree in my neighborhood, this episode made me hate Fluttershy.  She's one of those faux environmentalists who don't really care about the environment but use it as a platform for their extremist views.

And on the subject of Fluttershy, Fluttershy Leans In reminds me of a poster in my middle school depicting various destructive behaviors.  One of them, (I think it was the one in the middle in fact) was of a person swing a baseball bat labeled "My way" with two people unconscious labeled "Another Way" and "Different ideas".  Fluttershy was the one wielding the bat and the show celebrates it.  Again, and episode that could have been great as Fluttershy learns she can compromise without caving in, but instead is just another demonstration of how assertive she is (and by assertive I mean unreasonably stubborn).
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Offline Leave a Whisper

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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #62 on: February 23, 2019, 03:29:19 PM »
Why would she do that to DC Girls when most of those characters are decades old and well established?   :pout:
Because she can.

And Faust was far from baseless from some really bad decisions in FiM's early days.  Dragon Quest (aka the episode that condoned racism) was encouraged by her.  She wanted it to be a message about the ridicule males get for liking typically feminine things.  However, because they conflated gender to race, the condemnation of the dragons comes off as racism.  The coda was essentially Spike is so lucky to be raised civilized ponies and not that race of brutes.  This is made all the worse that G1 already did this episode with Spike's Search, only the dragons were much more deplorable (burning and robbing a village in Spike's Search compared to what was little more than roughhousing in Dragon Quest), the G1 ponies actually put the dragons in their place compared to the supposedly stronger G4 ponies running from teens, and most importantly Spike's Search made sure to say the gang of bandits Spike ran into shouldn't be cast as an example of all dragons.

I don't know who decided Equestria's origins should be a boogeyman story, but basing their unification on fear of a mutual threat really hurt the feel of the show.  And both these episodes were penned by Merriwether Williams whom I consider the worst hire for this series (not that she's bad but didn't fit the series).

I think the Cozy Glow/Neighsay resolutions really broke what was left of this series' integrity.  An openly racist politician put in a much higher position than he ever should have been allowed is reformed, but a literal child is put in Hell?  What?  Seriously what?

Ugh. Seriously? Hasbro really ought to leave stuff like that out of their shows.
« Last Edit: February 23, 2019, 03:32:41 PM by Leave a Whisper »
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Offline Taffeta

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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #63 on: February 23, 2019, 03:42:28 PM »
I can't (and won't) comment on episodes I haven't seen as I've only seen about 2 and a bit seasons of FIM and then odd episodes that were randomly on Tiny Pop when I used to have a proper freeview connection rather than having to stream everything...

But I'll say that I did see a couple of eps with worrying themes underpinning them.
The problem is that for the most part they fly under the radar. Not because they're necessarily meant to brainwash people or that they're meant to spread bad ideas. The people creating them often have "a goal" and in meeting that goal they completely miss the other problems that goal creates.

Good example of this happened in the Jem series a couple of times.
Spoiler
The one good example of the "goal message" that hugely backfires is in an ep called Roxy Rumbles. Basically it's an episode about getting kids to read. So Jem and co are on this big literacy crusade to get everyone reading. Meanwhile, Roxy, of the Misfits, can't read. The episode as a whole can maybe be forgiven as it happened around the time when awareness of dyslexia etc was still quite patchy. But the whole episode is hugely patronising. Aside from ascribing illiteracy to a social class, ie Roxy and her friends, it implies that not reading is a matter of not bothering and that it can be resolved by someone just showing up and saying, "hey, go read!". Jem and company are pushing the idea so much they lose any sense of empathy for the people they are trying to help. It's only the fact one of the Starlight girls is more empathic that any progress is made.
 The song from the ep is called Open a book and it has a line like, "open a book and open up your mind." But the episode itself is so closed minded because it's pushing literacy and not addressing the problems that lead to illiteracy.

There are other slightly questionable things in Jem which can maybe be put down to the time in which it was made (like when you have four or five grown women on a runaway train and they need a man to come tell them to pull the emergency cord that one of them has already pulled once earlier in the episode). But sometimes things - like theme and song - are so badly mismatched you wonder if they're being satirical. There's another ep in which the FBI spends the whole episode invading the Holograms' lives trying to hunt down and confiscate Synergy as a 'national security risk'. Then they end the ep with a song called Freedom which has as the key lyric, "I have freedom, I live in the USA". The episode and the song should not go together, unless they wanted kids to think that freedom is having the govt steal your computer because it can...

Sometimes these things are hair raising but they're that way because of tunnel vision on a particular idea without seeing the consequences. And the thing is that many times the audience also don't see them either. Also, there is a certain hypocrisy attached to hero characters. I've had this conversation with Jem fans a lot but Jem lies, steals, cheats, encourages her boyfriend to two time her with herself, then two times him with Riot...and tries to kill Pizzazz at least twice. For all the Misfits also do some bad things, the problem is that, to a kid, they're flagged up as the villain. Ie, "this is how not to behave." When the heroine does those things it's more of a problem. If a kid saw Jem stealing the earrings from a museum because they looked like hers (even though they ultimately weren't), then it sets a precedent that that's ok to do. And I don't think it really is. But little details like that often get lost in the bigger picture.

On character. It is mindnumbingly easy to make characters distinct from one another. Even if you're told to make one particularly sporty, or one particularly shy. If the same character templates go from one series to another it just suggests Faust is an artist but she's not a writer. That's fine, but asking her to create the characters was probably a mistake. The thing is, it's hard to know how much emphasis was put on her to make them a certain way too. Just if she has other characters that are basically carbon copies, it suggests she's more an artist than a writer. All that said, the series writers over 9 seasons are also responsible for feeding those stereotypes. I am not a fan of Faust, but she isn't responsible for everything other people wrote. Even if she did create the character bible, they still have to interpret it.

One thing I liked about G1 (and bear in mind I don't love G1's animation) is that there were nuances in characters. There were also some daft characters, like Heart Throb and Truly. But I feel like...in a sense...Pinkie Pie isn't really based on Surprise but rather a warped and damaged version of Fizzy. Fizzy worked very well in the original series, because her bubbly personality wasn't overcooked or forced on anyone. Pinkie Pie's is so extroverted that it becomes obnoxious and one-dimensional and begins to define her. Just like Firefly in RaMC was a daredevil in her flying skills. But she wasn't obnoxious with it. She was brave, she encouraged Megan, she showed all those different aspects to her character along with her love for stunts. In contrast, Dash lacks that subtlety.

I am ok with Twilight being rubbish at friendship, except for the fact they made her princess of friendship. That's the same as someone buying a PhD online and then going to work as a university professor to me! She's got the job because she knows the princesses and one of them is her tutor. That's called nepotism, kids. When you give someone the job that they're not qualified for because you know them or are related to them and therefore give them preferential treatment. The problem isn't Twilight messing up. Her messing up is actually quite natural? Her messing up as the Princess of Friendship now with a school is the problem. Again, pushing the idea, not thinking of the wider implications.

...I don't know who the Merriweather person is, but it's cool they had a writer with a pony's name. ;)
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Offline Al-1701

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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #64 on: February 23, 2019, 04:19:05 PM »
And I think that might be what was most disappointing.  They had the resources, time, and creative freedom to explore nuances with these characters.  However, if anything that got more and more one-dimensional as time went on.  It's such a waste since Friends and Tales were so limited in their runtime they didn't have a chance.

Maybe with a new start they have a chance to go right where they went wrong.  However, I fear they don't believe they went wrong.
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Offline RandomPony

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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #65 on: February 23, 2019, 04:37:09 PM »
Awe! Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it ends....it's sad to see it go!
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Offline MJNSEIFER

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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #66 on: February 23, 2019, 07:06:25 PM »
Quote
So you didn't have a problem when Spike told Pee-Wee he would teach him how to be a pony?  Not a good dragon but a pony.
To be fair, that part flew past me, but then - Spike does the whole "everypony" thing, so he's probably used to saying pony.  Either way it's odd, because Pee-Wee is neither of those things.

Quote
Wonderbolts Academy also bugged me because I think we could have done without the rest of the characters and focus on Rainbow Dash exclusively.  Instead of just kicking Lightning Dust to the curb, Rainbow's dilemma is abandoning her and taking a chance to teach her how to be a team player.  Also, why is Spitfire, the leader of a squadron specializing in formation flying only concerned with individual achievement?  They could have made a great episode where Rainbow Dash could show she is truly the Element of Loyalty and inspiration to other ponies by helping Lightning Dust.  Instead we get a rather pat episode about how you need to choose your friends over your dreams only she got both anyway.  Why does focusing on Rainbow Dash make episodes dumber.
I will try to consider these points, I mostly just enjoyed the episode because it was helpful to me, and I found it interesting, but I can see how the episode idea you have would work as well.

Quote
And Bats was just ripping off Wallace and Grommet.  Oh, and that one advocated for the rights of an invasive species to destroy an environment.  As someone who watched the emerald ash borer kill every ash tree in my neighborhood, this episode made me hate Fluttershy.  She's one of those faux environmentalists who don't really care about the environment but use it as a platform for their extremist views.
I don't really think it ripped off anything, I think they just both had similar stories based on an already unoriginal storyline - I wouldn't be surprised if the Wallace and Grommet one came from somewhere else as well (but if I'm wrong, fair enough, but it's still only one part of it.)

Yeah, the sympathy for invasive species thing can easily be controversial - even if you are sympathetic towards animals, you still have control things like this.  I disagree about Fluttershy though, if you hate her, fine, but I wouldn't view her as an extremist at all, and I can say she definitely cares about the environment, this episode probably wrote her badly.
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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #67 on: February 24, 2019, 04:21:57 AM »
Parts of me will miss this show, as I do have a lot of good memories with it. But I am glad it is ending. I don't want it to go on and on until it falls into complete mediocrity. Arguably it has already begun to devolve in that direction since season 8 wasn't that impressive.

Speaking of which, even though School Raze does have a lot of plot holes, I will still defend the decision to redeem Chancellor Neighsay and imprison Cozy Glow. Keep in mind that Neighsay was a narrow-minded jerk, not really an evil villain. He didn't want to cause harm to the non-pony students, even while he believed they were behind the magical crisis. He simply intended to send them home. Though, granted, Neighsay changing his mind about the students after they rescued him was a little rushed.

As for Cozy Glow, despite being a child, she knew full well what she was doing. She clearly wanted to suck all the magic in the world dry and become the "empress of friendship". She is very capable of manipulation and deception. She truly is evil. That being said, I will agree putting her next to Tirek was a stupid idea. And, unfortunately, we still don't know enough about her to draw any more clear conclusions. We don't know about her family, or if she even has one.

Anyway, I just hope FiM ends on a high note. And I still have some hopes for the next generation.
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Offline Ponyfan

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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #68 on: February 24, 2019, 06:52:57 AM »

I am ok with Twilight being rubbish at friendship, except for the fact they made her princess of friendship. That's the same as someone buying a PhD online and then going to work as a university professor to me! She's got the job because she knows the princesses and one of them is her tutor. That's called nepotism, kids. When you give someone the job that they're not qualified for because you know them or are related to them and therefore give them preferential treatment. The problem isn't Twilight messing up. Her messing up is actually quite natural? Her messing up as the Princess of Friendship now with a school is the problem. Again, pushing the idea, not thinking of the wider implications.







This is what I was trying to say. Becoming the Princess of Friendship implies that she understands friendship better than anyone else but even after she became one there have been many times where she messed up by not giving others a fair chance like Thorax until someone else made her see that Thorax shouldn't be judged just because he's a Changeling.


Speaking of which, even though School Raze does have a lot of plot holes, I will still defend the decision to redeem Chancellor Neighsay and imprison Cozy Glow. Keep in mind that Neighsay was a narrow-minded jerk, not really an evil villain. He didn't want to cause harm to the non-pony students, even while he believed they were behind the magical crisis. He simply intended to send them home. Though, granted, Neighsay changing his mind about the students after they rescued him was a little rushed.

As for Cozy Glow, despite being a child, she knew full well what she was doing. She clearly wanted to suck all the magic in the world dry and become the "empress of friendship". She is very capable of manipulation and deception. She truly is evil. That being said, I will agree putting her next to Tirek was a stupid idea. And, unfortunately, we still don't know enough about her to draw any more clear conclusions. We don't know about her family, or if she even has one.




To me Neighsay illustrates how the show changes its mind from "every creature needs friendship and friendship solves everything" to "Only ponies derserve friendship and can understand it.


You have good point that Neighsay wasn't evil and was only trying to stop the students from draining the magic from Equestria although he did chain them and lock them in the room.

I also agree that Cozy knew what she was doing. It's obvious that Tirek taught her how to use all the magic items to drain magic which makes putting her in a cage right next to Tirek (where they can plot their revenege) not smart. How did they even come to that descion after Twilight and her friends escaped from Tartarus?

I still think Cozy might just look like a filly but either be Chrysalis or an adult pony.



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Offline Lady Frostbite

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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #69 on: February 24, 2019, 04:08:19 PM »
I kept referring to Cozy as Darla Dimple; she is E.X.A.C.T.L.Y. like her.

I hope Sunset Shimmer comes back to Equestria; if not, I REALLY hope her voice actress appears in G5, if there's a cartoon!

I wonder if the last episode will be a leap ahead in time to see adult Flurry Heart or grown-up CMC or something. Or heck, I'd set the brony fandom alight by making all the mane 6 alicorns or reveal never-mentioned-before parents for Celestia and Luna  :lol: I'm still really disappointed by how the Changlings were zapped good and Queen Chrysalis was just completely bad instead of bad-for-a-good reason. At least she's still a villain, unlike almost every other antagonist.
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Offline Leave a Whisper

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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #70 on: February 24, 2019, 04:10:41 PM »
Who is Darla Dimple?
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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #71 on: February 24, 2019, 04:29:15 PM »
I kept referring to Cozy as Darla Dimple; she is E.X.A.C.T.L.Y. like her.

 


I thought this too!   

Darla Dimple is the Shirley Temple-esque villain from “Cats Don’t Dance”, a very cute animated musical about a group of animals (I.e. minorities) trying to break into show biz.

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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #72 on: February 24, 2019, 06:46:35 PM »
I kept referring to Cozy as Darla Dimple; she is E.X.A.C.T.L.Y. like her.

 


I thought this too!   

Darla Dimple is the Shirley Temple-esque villain from “Cats Don’t Dance”, a very cute animated musical about a group of animals (I.e. minorities) trying to break into show biz.

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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #73 on: February 24, 2019, 06:53:59 PM »
She looks very familiar. But I've never even heard of that movie.
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Re: Season 9 Officially the Last Season of FiM
« Reply #74 on: February 25, 2019, 04:21:54 AM »
(...) Fluttershy.  She's one of those faux environmentalists who don't really care about the environment

Lol! I don't think that was evertheir intention but Fluttershy sure comes off that way sometimes. I mean, it is entertaining forme to watch, especially her semi-spiritual side in that episode with Treehugger, her stoner hippie friend. But it's a show that teaches lessons to kids so her hypocrisy is often portrayed as the good thing to do. She just loves animals. Which speaks to the kid audience. But I think the writers do too little research on actual environmentalism so Fluttershy is not supposed to be an environmentalist. She is a catlady. Just look how that bunny walks all over her :lol:
In a better kids show she would be a better activist. She would be the one coming
up with solutions (and sometimes she did, but oftentimes she was just all about liking animals and having teaparties and slumberparties with them).
My least favorite Fluttershy moment was in Power Ponies where she was a useless Hulk parody, having no issues watching her friends nearly getting killed but the moment a little animal was in danger she hulked out and saved them all. That's a good joke to make about her character but a bad thing to use as a moral to kids. Fluttershy cares more about her pets than her friends. That's hilarious to me, an adult watcher, but it makes no sense for the character who is supposed to be protective and nurturing - just not when it comes to her best friends she is linked to via magic bond? Ok.

I guess us adult fans' on the MLPA biggest problem with the show comes back to the wishy washy friendship morals. Without those, would the next show appeal more to you? It would to me. Just tell a story. Of course there can be lessons but they can be integrated in a more organic way. They can come from the characters decisions and actions instead of having to get implanted via Hasbro mandate.

A good adventure story with heart that comes to an end within 3-4 seasons would be my ideal. MLP doesn't lend itself to neverending comedy shows like The Simpsons or Spongebob.

 

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