Eat my shorts

Owning a Paradise Estate is all fun and games until you have to dust around the flowerbed and pull hair out of the flowers.




(...post #1000!)

Dinnerware can be soooo cute I don't blame you. Nostalgic for me, I would fantasize about having awesome birthday parties as a kid and I loved looking at party brochures...

You see cute plates, you buy them... now what? You can't just EAT on them... they're too cute, and then they'll get thrown out... gotta keep them safe, obviously. 

One of my very very very first ponies, obtained before I could even remember, though I don't have her in my adult collection... definitely someday I'll have her again!

Right now I feel fine about MYM! I saw some of the bigger spoilers beforehand and thought "oh no, is this going to be more of G4?" and, as far as this special is concerned, isn't. It definitely feels more kiddie which is a plus in my book, I wouldn't mind the adventure being a bit simpler than G4. I saw something saying Hasbro's target audience for G5 is ages 3 to 6, so that's preschool-kindergarten age, which would be grouped in with IPs like PAW Patrol and PJ Masks, right? Those shows don't have evil villains or a Good vs. Evil narrative or big action scenes or stuff, nothing more intense than "kitten falls out of a tree, we gotta save it!". I don't remember where this was from or if it was even from *Hasbro* but I Want To Believe

FiM fell off for me because it was trying to do this big thing with world building and villains and it was just... I lost interest in FiM after season 5 or 6 or so but still continued to watch, I don't remember much of what happened in the later seasons! There are ways I could word this better as always but here goes, at the best of my ability for the moment:

It went from "look at these silly characters doing silly things! I love it when silly characters do silly things!" to "omg what if Rainbow Dash really meant blablablablablbalbalabla when she did blabla and this character is related to this character and blablablablabla". Like "generic geek franchise" level of speculation and whatever, all thanks to the... "generic geek franchise" direction FiM went, favouring world building and conflict over "two ponies have a tea party". Not saying it's a bad concept for a show as a LOT of media do this, but it's the SHIFT of what FiM WAS to what it BECAME. And yes, there was always speculation and analyzing in early FiM, but it wasn't like... "that kind" of analyzing. Like everyone was trying to make MLP so deep and it's affected how people view the previous gens as well as G5. Everything HAS to be connected, everything HAS to be deeper than it first seems, etc. G3 and G2 are bad because they have no lore and conflict. G1 is OK because it has connection with G4, and it has some conflict. And so on.

FiM started out as being a more kiddie show. The adult characters being "dumbed down" a bit to learn lessons as simple as like, "sharing is good" and whatever, and having the moral laid out in black and white at the end of each episode. It went from being character focused, exploring the ponies' relationships with each other and how they get along, you know, actually being friendship related? Social skills or something? And then it turned into friendship *in the show* being this ultimate magical force, and they *talk* about friendship a lot, but never *show* it. Mane 6 lacks in actual chemistry and I don't remember them ever hanging out as *friends* in later seasons.

Granted I've only watched through FiM once while it was airing so I haven't seen episodes in YEARS, but I just don't remember the Mane 6 being really *friends*. So far G5 improves on the actual "friendship" aspect of it, I feel like the Mane 5 all have good chemistry with each other and all of them could hang out and have a good time. I don't think there's any reason why Pinkie and Rarity would be friends, given what was actually shown in FiM without relying on headcanons and fanfic. It also helps that it's not really focused on "friendship", rather simply "getting along" and "racism bad". Friendship is such a personal thing you can't force upon others, and "friendship" and "love" mean different things to different people, but decency, open-mindedness, and respect is something that kids should learn. I can't remember how they worded it in the special but it was probably still called "friendship".

But I guess I interpret FiM's concept of "friendship" as the personal relationship between two or more people, as that was the point of the show in the first few seasons, Twilight learning basic social skills. As FiM went on, I still had this... expectation? That they were still referring to the same "personal friendships" dynamic, which is why a lot of scenarios ended up feeling weird? I bet I could explain myself better if I actually rewatched FiM but I'm so burnt out from it lol. G5 sets expectations, for now, that it's about "getting along", and so far, it's been just that.

I guess these last two paragraphs about what "friendship" is is a more subjective criticism/observation, as I probably view the concept of "friendship" differently from others.

As for their personalities I agree with Zapper, there's more room for the characters to actually do stuff. And we're only so far into the generation where we could explore them even further, and HOPEFULLY. Not "flanderize" them. Pinkie really only had her party thing going on, her past on the rock farm was never really explored. Izzy, while similar, has her art, trouble fitting in, like how she never really had friends before Sunny & Co. came along. That's at least TWO things, instead of ONE. Izzy is more "weird girl" like how I remember S1 Pinkie being, instead of being "SCREAMING IS FUNNY I LOVE BEING UP IN EVERYONE'S FACE SQUEALING ABOUT BEING HAPPY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Even if Mane 5 has similarities to Mane 6, I think, at the moment, they're handled more maturely.

But Pipp is a good character, sorry. Objectively Zipp is the best, but Pipp is... I don't know. I just like this type of character, haha. What Sunny's character is as it stands, no idea. Her only trait in the special was "sorry everypony! I can't control my alicorn magic" and doesn't do much more outside of that. She was more endearing in the movie because she had to work towards her end goal but I can't say her actual personality was strong. In this special she did nothing until the very end. Typical Determined Main Character With No Flaws. Not necessarily in "Mary-Sue" territory. I don't dislike her, and I'm not annoyed with her like I was with late-FiM Twilight.



Edit: Misquoted something :p

Sweet Pop and Speedy have such perfect summer colors

A pro-Speedy message, you love to see it Speedy was one of the first ponies I Needed when I started collecting as an adult, and I still really love her. Very unusual colours for a pony and she just owns it.


Sunbeam is super underrated. I never thought anything of her until I saw her repro IRL at Target, now she's my favourite from that set. Kinda regret not getting her, but at least she isn't impossible to find.

Birthday Pony would be a nice remake, and as a Megan apologist, I'd like her, too.


40th anniversary for the franchise, but it's also the 20th for G3... why not remake all the Celebration ponies? Could technically be different from the ones released already... like the correct navy-blue colour for the eyes and the floor-length hair!

Care Bears is celebrating its 40th this year, following on Instagram, they've done some collaborations, and they plan to release a Care-a-Lot themed bear. I'd like to see something nice like that for MLP. Hasbro hasn't used their ugly retro moulds in a while, maybe we'll see them come back to those.

Not sure if My Little Pony is "My Little Pony" anymore. It's more like "Lauren Faust's Little Ponies" or whoever's writing whatever nowadays. Drop MLP from the title. "Friendship is Magic". "A New Generation". "Tell Your Tale", "Make Your Mark".

MLP G1-3 is YOUR Little Pony. Everyone had a unique experience with their childhood ponies. If you had friends or peers who were into MLP, you probably didn't have the same exact collections, even then, how did you obtain said ponies? How you got the ponies is part the experience. Even if you met someone else with the same pony as you, you probably had a different personality for her, a completely different character. Everyone had their own stories. Not everyone had access to the VHSes or were able to catch MLP on TV, and a lot of people probably didn't even know there was animated media out, or comics. MLP, believe it or not, is a toy, these ponies are dolls. They are no different from Barbie, really, where you make up your own characters and your own stories. Especially when talking about G1 when rereleases of a character were rare and most of the ponies were unique designs and characters, there was no way to fit them all into a piece of media, and a lot of them don't have deep pre-set personalities. You had to make everything up yourself. My experience with MLP is being like "yeah that's a neat idea", seeing it from a story or something, and reenacting something similar. Not 1:1, and that would only be a single story, not everything I did with my ponies was like that.

I see kids online now who grew up with G3, which cool, I was a G3 kid too basically, but it's obvious they grew up with only the DVDs, because they focus on only MLP from around 2007. The era where the main characters were Minty, Rainbow Dash, and Pinkie Pie, and later, the Core 7. We're starting to move away from the "personalized" approach MLP had and going into the "prebuilt" era where everything has to be a certain way. G4 made this worse and worse, and G5 is continuing this "prebuilt"-ness.


Not saying it's bad or wrong, I mean, Care Bears and others have this approach with a single set of characters, but it's not MY Little Pony and it's not YOUR Little Pony. I guess you could say people making fanfics of random background ponies in FiM is more MLP-y than anything else, but I do think being on the internet sours things a bit? Like the closed-ness of having your own ponies in your own room making up your own stories, alone or with a friend, it's different than having a thousands-of-views YouTube video of OCs. MLP is such a nostalgia thing, fueled by whimsy and childhood innocence, adults RPing with their OCs isn't the same.

Again, nothing wrong... just Old Man Yells at Cloud