I recently bought a game off of eBay. Unfortunately, the seller (who is very new) seems to be an inexperienced mess and a frustrating situation has developed.

They accidentally shipped out the wrong item to me. They sent a message informing me of the mistake and asking me to send the incorrect item back when it arrived. Then they sent a followup message that they were sending out the correct item, and one that they had sent it. But it seems my slowness in responding to the messages (along with the stress of the mistake) caused them to panic, because they then sent a message saying they were refunding me until the situation was resolved. By the time I saw any of these, they had already refunded me. And ironically, despite their panic I have yet to hear back from them after replying to those messages.

Which was not a very helpful move and actually makes it harder to resolve the situation, because the refund means I can't open a return request and will have to sort out the return label entirely myself. To make matters all the more annoying, the incorrect item sent was an iPhone 11. Which means it's hazmat due to the battery. And USPS' crappy Click'N'Ship web interface allows you to properly identify package contents as hazmat (and what type)... but is apparently incapable of letting you select a compatible shipping service type for that, so I can't actually buy a label online without repeating the seller's malfeasance of not properly labeling it as hazmat. So I guess I'll be dragging myself to the post office tomorrow...

Argh. What a total headache. Kinda makes me wish you could dispute refunds.

What feedback should I leave whenever this is finally sorted?

That was a good score! What's her name?

A lovely way to end your drought!

Congrats on your delightful win, Gator! Snagging a lot like that is one of the best feelings ever.

That was an amazing haul, congratulations! That is beautiful luck, especially Rapunzel! Cheers!

Well done you! The wonderful thing is they are now in a collector home where they will be properly appreciated, rather than just grabbed and hiked up on ebay to get a quick buck somewhere else.

Agreed

Quote from: ZeldaTheSwordsman on January 29, 2024, 07:27:40 PM

I don't think a "knowing your place" idea was really intended...

Quote from: Taffeta on January 29, 2024, 11:34:27 AM

Also, does it matter if future generations don't get to share MLP? Looking at where it is now, is that really something we want to share with the future? Is it really okay for it just to be there for the sake of keeping the brand alive, even when the soul has long since been sucked out of it? Personally, I'm okay with it fading into the past. I've never loved the hype G4 brought into the pony collecting world.

1. There's always the chance for the soul to return
2. It was the hype from G4 that finally nudged me into actually checking out MLP. And that in turn led to me checking out and falling in love with G1, and meeting the wonderful communities here and on the Trading Post.
I feel kinda unwelcome now...
 

Don't be silly.

 It's pretty obvious that the hype train I'm talking about was the media chaos, the brony explosion, the meme culture and the influx of people whose behaviour damaged the reputation of pony collectors for a long time to come.

That same explosion is what drew me in back in 2011, via a friend who got into it. If it wasn't for that, I might never have met y'all - nor some of my other very close friends. I'm not happy about all the toxicity that hype ultimately brought, but it kinda felt like you were writing off everyone who came on board because of the excitement.

Whether you like it or not, G4's fandom became infested with people whose sole purpose in life is to make other people miserable on social media - and Hasbro marketed towards those people, at the expense of their real audience, which was the kids. The moment MLP stopped being about kids first and foremost, it died

Having seen and experienced the bad side of the G4 fandom, I think I'm entitled to say that I disliked what that hype brought. You would have to be completely oblivious to that impact in order to think my comments were targeting any actual fans, whether they be old or new.

I saw and experienced the bad side of the G4 fandom as well. I tried to get them to be better about how they acted towards people and how they viewed previous generations, but I doubt I achieved much. There are reasons I abandoned any brony spaces aside from Tumblr, and even that's gone inactive for me for various reasons.

Please don't twist my words into something I didn't say. Nobody is making anyone unwelcome.

The thing is, together with something else you said...

Unpopular opinion, too, but I am ok with MLP ending with G5. I feel like we already had 2 generations too many, given the chaos of G4 and then this. MLP doesn't need to be constantly trampled down by repetitive overselling of the same characters. If MLP disappeared completely, well, so what? Those of us who grew up with G1 survived that and we're still surviving it. Will it really make a huge difference if ponies stop being sold? The ones most of us grew up with (G1 or G3 included) haven't been on shelves for years but we're still here for them...

...It kinda feels like you're writing off people who grew up with G4 or didn't come on board til G4. And almost like you're wishing people who grew up with G1 through G3 had gotten to keep MLP all to themselves.

With regards to the other point, does it matter if that was or wasn't the intention when it is the final outcome? Earth ponies do earth pony things. Pegasus ponies do flying things. Unicorn ponies do magicky things. Is that not being categorised into x y and z?

It's unfair to quote that one line without the context I gave it, of how the comic and characters were rendered in the UK and why I feel that jolt. The reality is that when you grow up with a 'ponyland' where the pony species had no impact whatsoever on what they could do, it makes it much more noticeable when ponies are pigeonholed into 'species' in other representations.

1. I was responding in passing because I was sad and tired and mainly concentrating on the other thing.
2. I do understand why you feel that jolt. It's very different from what you were used to growing up.
3. On further reflection, I realized a bit of a wrinkle to this. The backcard stories (and the media they influenced) did attribute magic to Earth Ponies... but only if they were from a special set like the Rainbow Ponies, the So-Soft Ponies (excluding rereleases), etc. So for instance, Parasol has magic (mentioned on both her backcard and Posey's), but "plain" Earth Ponies like the Original Six, Applejack, Bubbles, Tootsie... They got nothing, and I don't think the comics attributed any to them either. The one exception to this is Lickety-Split, whose backcard describes her as turning mountains to ice cream(!) by kicking her heels. But she's an anomaly. None of the other "plain" Earth ponies get anything like that - only the ones from special sets, to make them seem more special.

Of course, by Year Four they had stopped producing "plain" Earth Ponies (at least as far as the US went) and everybody was from a special set.

Going back to that, I think it is interesting that the backcards the US had often informed the UK stories, and that the US often had more detailed backcard stories than the UK (at least early on), but didn't really use them at all. The thing I mentioned about Magic Star being the most magical pony in ponyland comes from the fact file. But I think it's based loosely on Magic Star's card story in the US.

As far as the UK media using the backcard stories goes... the UK backcard stories were all cut down (probably to prepare a shortened version that could be translated multiple times over for the continental release), but Hasbro would have still had the original full-length versions on file to provide to people producing fiction. And of course, comics and the like have much shorter turnaround.
As far as the US media not using them... Well, in the cartoon's case that can probably be attributed in part to when it started. The original specials (which set a bit of a pattern for how the rest was written) were created at a time when they didn't offer much characterization and said little about specific powers for most ponies. When it comes to the movie and series, production lead time (IE, needing to get production rolling before any backcard story was even available) and the action-adventure focus may also have been factors. Also characters' limited screentime from the need to hawk as many toys with the show as possible.
My headcanon is that at least some of the backcard abilities do still exist in the cartoon's universe (since it doesn't outright preclude them in most cases), and just never came up in the events the cartoon showed.

Magic Star doesn't have a backcard story in the UK, because the Movie Star ponies only have a brief one sentence on the backs of their cards for each of them. It's a lovely card but useless for really learning about the ponies. In fact, the one lines there are more in keeping with the actual movie representation.

So there's this beautiful irony whereby ponies like Shady and Magic Star have proper backcard stories in the US (albeit they're SS ponies), that story is then disregarded by the US and used in the UK comics. But Hasbro UK, when promoting our versions of those ponies, connects them to the movie, and thus removes those characterisations that the original backcards (and comics) laid out.

That probably has to do with Hasbro UK trying to give the movie a little extra promotion since it was a big expensive project, the UK releases coming later, and those characters not being part of special sets like they were in the US.

All of that probably ought to be  on the Hasbro's Baffling Decisions thread, because it is nuts, but it's also pretty interesting that it happened like that. It does give the feeling of multiple different narratives around G1 (backcards, comics, animation) and that they didn't necessarily mesh with what else was going on in the same location.

Transformers G1 had a similar disconnect, although to a lesser degree.

In the comic and annual stories, Magic Star could grant wishes. Later on, so could Rainbow Magic, a pegasus pony. But even some of the boy ponies had magic skills. I remember Ice Crystal making ice slides in the 1988 annual. I also am pretty sure Lightning could wink in and out like a lightning flash.

And Baby Lucky had a lot of happy-go-lucky magic going on, which included the random ability to bring drawings of the newborn twins to life.

1. Mind you, a lot of those never even got a chance to appear in the cartoon (and some - like the second set of stallions - were UK-only), so we never got to see what it would or wouldn't have done with them.
2. Who's "Rainbow Magic"? Are they a fiction-exclusive character? I've found an issue by that name, but not a pony.

Compared to that, the "Unicorns do magic, pegasus ponies fly, earth ponies are just ponies" rhetoric just jars with me. It genuinely feels like 'everyone in their place', because it is decided by a pony's species. In the case of pegasi and weather magic, it also feel generic, not individual. And G4 made that even firmer with the cutie marks and their destined meaning. G5 have also not moved away from the idea...although Sunny does break the mould a bit, it's not the same thing.

1. Regarding cutie marks, they never felt to me like a prescriptive "destiny" so much as representing something a pony truly resonates with and feels a calling toward or has a special talent in doing. And they were an effort to try and make the symbols more special.
2. I get more of a sense of "different species are special in different ways/channel magic in different ways" (and hey, weather magic gives pegasus ponies more to do than just fly) or at least an attempt at such, although it's at best underdeveloped with Earth Ponies.
3. G4 does still give ponies their own unique specialties in addition to general species powers.
4. What would you do to balance things so that you don't have the opposite extreme, where a pony's species adds nothing special to them whatsoever?

Hasbro and in particular CEO Chris P. Cocks' stupidity has also lead to sales-killing price-gouging on brands like Transformers that's hurting those brands as well. And I bet the idiot has a golden parachute clause in his contract, too; it would explain why the shareholders haven't fired him in order to stop him from continuing to undercut their value with his idiocy.

Regarding G5... I think starting it up so soon after G4 ended could still have worked.
IF it had been the clean break in narrative and design that it actually needed to be. G4 was exhausted on every level, and retailers and customers alike were exhausted of it and its poorly-balanced assortments.
MLP needed a new setting and a substantial change in aesthetic (like, say, reverting to something more horse-like) that would have actually felt like a new start.
But noooooo, the idiots in charge couldn't bring themselves to fully let go of G4, and so the line basically looks and feels like more of the same thing they were already sick of to retailers.
And wasn't there also a long delay between the movie coming out and the show debuting?

I'm not mad about the obsession with segregating species and then bringing them together, either, it's cliche and hackneyed.

Indeed.

I never bought into G1's fixation with de-magicking earth ponies in US media releases, since in the UK ponies had magic regardless of their species and I liked that better. The factfile states Magic Star is the most magical pony of all of them, so yeah.

In fairness, "My Little Pony and Friends" toned down everybody's magical capabilities compared to the backcard stories. Individual unicorns don't have much variety to what they can do with their magic in that, and the only special thing pegasi can do is fly (although that did make them the cartoon's favorite since the cartoon loved to travel to various locations).
The show does at least make clear that Earth Ponies are still inherently magical - otherwise, their hair wouldn't have been much use in repairing Porcina's cloak.

Maybe because I grew up with it, but I feel like it's not very progressive, having a world in which x type of pony can only do x. It's not quite as strangling as 'your cutie mark destiny', but it isn't great.

How do you feel about G4 giving pegasi weather magic to go with them flying?

Reality isn't like that. I will never understand why Earth ponies should not have magic as an option by default.

I think a lot of people tend to see them as the "normals" of the setting because they're the closest to IRL horses and don't have obvious supernatural features like wings or horns. Hasbro themselves seem to have felt that way in G3 (and it obviously took arm-twisting to get pegasi and unicorns added to the line at all).

Unpopular opinion, too, but I am ok with MLP ending with G5. I feel like we already had 2 generations too many, given the chaos of G4 and then this. MLP doesn't need to be constantly trampled down by repetitive overselling of the same characters. If MLP disappeared completely, well, so what? Those of us who grew up with G1 survived that and we're still surviving it. Will it really make a huge difference if ponies stop being sold? The ones most of us grew up with (G1 or G3 included) haven't been on shelves for years but we're still here for them...

I mean, it will make it harder to share MLP with future generations if it ends, and probably kill throwback stuff like Basic Fun reissues that make getting G1 stuff more accessible for those who didn't grow up with it.

At this rate, maybe it would be better if Hasbro imploded and Takara-Tomy picked up the pieces.