Random/off topic pony thoughts

[SpacePinto]

Its interesting to me that previous iterations of the cartoons handled friendship better then fim ever did.

I think it's mostly because whenever the topic of friendship came up in older generations, it was usually done in a more organic way, without obligatory in-your-face recaps at the end and without the whole "We need to educate those uncultured non-pony savages who look suspiciously like 1950s racial stereotypes that all of their problems can be solved with friendship" narrative.

  What episode was that?

I don't know names of individual FIM episodes but from what I've gathered, it seems that the show liked to use non-pony species as stand-ins for African, Native American, Asian etc. cultures, they would usually act in stereotypical fashion (like speaking in broken English, having eccenctric customs etc.) and ponies would have to save them by showing them the magic of friendship. If I am wrong and my sources on that were actually incorrect then I apologize.

[Taffeta]

Its interesting to me that previous iterations of the cartoons handled friendship better then fim ever did.

I think it's mostly because whenever the topic of friendship came up in older generations, it was usually done in a more organic way, without obligatory in-your-face recaps at the end and without the whole "We need to educate those uncultured non-pony savages who look suspiciously like 1950s racial stereotypes that all of their problems can be solved with friendship" narrative.

  What episode was that?

I don't know names of individual FIM episodes but from what I've gathered, it seems that the show liked to use non-pony species as stand-ins for African, Native American, Asian etc. cultures, they would usually act in stereotypical fashion (like speaking in broken English, having eccenctric customs etc.) and ponies would have to save them by showing them the magic of friendship. If I am wrong and my sources on that were actually incorrect then I apologize.

There is at least that one episode where the Griffins (?) have their treasure lost/damaged/broken by Pinkie and Dash who then patronisingly tell them that they now have a better treasure in friendship. Just a touch colonial there. I don't have a good enough knowledge of G4 FIM to know if there are others, but that one sticks with me because it made me feel very uncomfortable.

[Zapper]

Since this is my most hated episode, "Over a Barrel" in season 1 or maybe 2 had buffalo stand in for Native Americans with stereotypical feathers, warpaint and all. The Lame Six taught them that they have to share their land with the intruders (cowboy ponies/settler ponies) who wanted to use their land for their plantations.

Later on other bovines would stand in for Pakistan (Yakistan, come on, lol) and be nothing but screamy brutes who talk like Grimlock and stomp on everything. Do I need to go on?

[Taffeta]

Since this is my most hated episode, "Over a Barrel" in season 1 or maybe 2 had buffalo stand in for Native Americans with stereotypical feathers, warpaint and all. The Lame Six taught them that they have to share their land with the intruders (cowboy ponies/settler ponies) who wanted to use their land for their plantations.

Later on other bovines would stand in for Pakistan (Yakistan, come on, lol) and be nothing but screamy brutes who talk like Grimlock and stomp on everything. Do I need to go on?

O.o.

[Zapper]

Its interesting to me that previous iterations of the cartoons handled friendship better then fim ever did.

I think it's mostly because whenever the topic of friendship came up in older generations, it was usually done in a more organic way, without obligatory in-your-face recaps at the end and without the whole "We need to educate those uncultured non-pony savages who look suspiciously like 1950s racial stereotypes that all of their problems can be solved with friendship" narrative.

  What episode was that?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zKGERhaY-sQ ...and that's just the song. The entire episode went like this.

[Taffeta]

Its interesting to me that previous iterations of the cartoons handled friendship better then fim ever did.

I think it's mostly because whenever the topic of friendship came up in older generations, it was usually done in a more organic way, without obligatory in-your-face recaps at the end and without the whole "We need to educate those uncultured non-pony savages who look suspiciously like 1950s racial stereotypes that all of their problems can be solved with friendship" narrative.

  What episode was that?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zKGERhaY-sQ ...and that's just the song. The entire episode went like this.

I regret that I clicked that from curiosity. Leaving the politics aside for a moment, that's like a song on three notes and some of them are flat ><.
I also watched it thinking that this clip needs Wednesday Addams to make an appearance...>.>

...On topic, ouch.

[SunPony]

Since this is my most hated episode, "Over a Barrel" in season 1 or maybe 2 had buffalo stand in for Native Americans with stereotypical feathers, warpaint and all. The Lame Six taught them that they have to share their land with the intruders (cowboy ponies/settler ponies) who wanted to use their land for their plantations.

I think I watched FiM exactly to that episode and then noped right out of there.  The main bison character was sooooo cute though, wish they had made a toy of her (and made the episode's plot not be just awful)!

[Shiverdam]

Since this is my most hated episode, "Over a Barrel" in season 1 or maybe 2 had buffalo stand in for Native Americans with stereotypical feathers, warpaint and all. The Lame Six taught them that they have to share their land with the intruders (cowboy ponies/settler ponies) who wanted to use their land for their plantations.

Over a Barrel infuriates me. On top of that they had those stereotypical "war whoops" playing in the background of the buffalo stampede through the town.


One episode I watched again recently that left my mouth agape was Bridle Gossip; the Zecora episode. All the things the ponies say about her, even considering it was intended to be in ignorance, is just unbelievable. Rarity said her stripes were garish. It's very obvious that this episode was supposed to have a message behind it about not treating people differently because of their skin colour but the Lame 6 act WAY over the top. They insult Zecora's home and "decor" (which appear to be based on African masks), and say that her "strange incantations" (i.e. a different language) points to her being "bad."

Even the "lesson" at the end is wrapped up in such a way that's like "even if someone is strange or weird, don't treat them differently," iirc. Way to drop the ball, hard. Yikes.

[ChibiMango]

Posting this here because it's a project still in the very early stages, and I might end up scrapping it if I decide I'd rather work on other things.

Another one of my non-pony hobbies is machine learning.  I've never had any formal education on the subject, but I still enjoy it.  I've been playing around with training an AI to appraise pony prices!  It's still a heavy WIP, but it seems possible from the experiments I've done so far!

I give it all sorts of details, like generation, values representing the condition of the pony, and even a few seemingly arbitrary things like pose and race.

Right now I have very little data, but it seems to work okay!  I tested it on this Valenshy listing (that it hadn't seen before), and it guessed that she was worth $11.08.  A little hyperspecific, but not too far off.

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[Zapper]

Even the "lesson" at the end is wrapped up in such a way that's like "even if someone is strange or weird, don't treat them differently," iirc. Way to drop the ball, hard. Yikes.

That Zecora episode was already done in Tales when Brighteyes went as an exchange student to an island that was obviously based on Hawaii. But somehow in Tales that came 20 years before FiM these subjects were done better, at least in my opinion as a whitebread. In that episode I'm talking about no island pony acted weirdly towards Brighteyes, but she was biased and trying to make the island pony customs fit that bias until she was a complete conspiracy nut and assumed the island ponies would throw her in a volcano while said ponies would just go "wtf, what made you think that?"

It's also why I don't agree that FiM had its best run when Lauren Faust was still in charge. A lot of cringe inducing episodes came about under her supervision. FiM has good and bad stuff evenly spread across all seasons, imo.
Also Zecora being othered as an African stand-in and that bufallo ep led to an onslaught of "racist AJ" memes and racist Equestria fanart in the B-fandom. Certainly not the showrunners fault but a good reminder of what impact these badly thought out plots and morals had. I'm sure a lot of kids got to accidentally see all that "AJ as a plantation owner" crap.

[banditpony]

Since this is my most hated episode, "Over a Barrel" in season 1 or maybe 2 had buffalo stand in for Native Americans with stereotypical feathers, warpaint and all. The Lame Six taught them that they have to share their land with the intruders (cowboy ponies/settler ponies) who wanted to use their land for their plantations.

Yeah, nope. That junk needs to never be shown again.

[Leave a Whisper]

I think mini figures and playsets from RAMC would have been amazing!  Although, I will always prefer the brushables, I still kind of crave the kind of awesome statues like in FIM for RAMC. 


As a kid, ponies with really weird or silly names

At the very least it wouldn't be hard to create the mush-romp since those fairy mushrooms with doors are popular.

[Shiverdam]

Also Zecora being othered as an African stand-in and that bufallo ep led to an onslaught of "racist AJ" memes and racist Equestria fanart in the B-fandom. Certainly not the showrunners fault but a good reminder of what impact these badly thought out plots and morals had. I'm sure a lot of kids got to accidentally see all that "AJ as a plantation owner" crap.

Good lord this also reminded me of that one episode where a Fashion-designer unicorn that Rarity has a crush on comes to town. As soon as he sees Applejack he's in love with her, and he says something like "I've always admired the work-ethic of earthponies."

[MJNSEIFER]

Thanks to those who responded, I hope I come across okay with how I respond to this – I am not an expert on the subject, as will be made obvious in my response, but I hope I articulate why.

I don't know names of individual FIM episodes but from what I've gathered, it seems that the show liked to use non-pony species as stand-ins for African, Native American, Asian etc. cultures, they would usually act in stereotypical fashion (like speaking in broken English, having eccenctric customs etc.) and ponies would have to save them by showing them the magic of friendship. If I am wrong and my sources on that were actually incorrect then I apologize.

This has always been a grey area for me - I have no idea how much of this was the intention of the writers and how much of it was how the fandom took it, but I never really viewed it this way, by which I mean, it's not how I would portray it if I was writing them.

Regardless of who came up with it, I never really signed on to the idea that a specific species represented a specific race, and I've always ultimately felt that all the species (including ponies) could be whatever kind of race the writer wants to write them as, though that may come from me not noticing what they were doing in the first place.  I don't really tend to think about racial stuff, nor am I that aware of all stereotypes for better or worse, so a lot of the ideas that they were supposed to be a specific race or whatever tended to go over my head, and I'd even forget that it was even a thing at times (the only one I really got was that Zecora was meant to be "the other race" at least metaphorically, as the episode was about racism, but I wouldn't have thought that zebras in general were supposed to be African in Equestria, and headcanon-wise, I still don't.)

I have realised though, I may have misinterpreted your comment, assuming that by  "1950s racial stereotypes" you meant the kind of stereotypes that were more prevalent in the 1950s.  When I responded to you, I thought there something specifically 1950s about the characters you meant, if that makes sense (like they're not only racial stereotypes, they're also cliché 50s characters.) 

There is at least that one episode where the Griffins (?) have their treasure lost/damaged/broken by Pinkie and Dash who then patronisingly tell them that they now have a better treasure in friendship. Just a touch colonial there. I don't have a good enough knowledge of G4 FIM to know if there are others, but that one sticks with me because it made me feel very uncomfortable.

Racial or not (which admittedly, you did not seem to suggest it was), I will admit that the device was ultimately something I was never really sure of - the idea that an entire species has the same values or whatever, like all Griffins are ultimately the same, barring the exceptions (not just Griffins, but non-ponies in general.)  I do feel, at least at times, that they would have done better to make it "those specific [insert non-pony species here]" who are the ones who are acting the specific non-friendship understanding way, or whatever - it's never really felt right when they make it out like it's the majority of the species.

Since this is my most hated episode, "Over a Barrel" in season 1 or maybe 2 had buffalo stand in for Native Americans with stereotypical feathers, warpaint and all. The Lame Six taught them that they have to share their land with the intruders (cowboy ponies/settler ponies) who wanted to use their land for their plantations.

Later on other bovines would stand in for Pakistan (Yakistan, come on, lol) and be nothing but screamy brutes who talk like Grimlock and stomp on everything. Do I need to go on?

"Over a Barrel" is a weird one for me, because while I took it to be a relatively low (but not bad) episode for completely unrelated reasons (I thought it was more childish and sillier than the rest of the show, and less believable - though some of that could have come from the fact that I was still in the "It's more than just a kid's show!" phase), I missed the whole Native Americans thing, because I wasn't really aware of it.  I'm sorry if this sounds bad, but I'm unfamiliar with what their actual history is (history in general has never really been something I paid attention to growing up) and as said earlier in this response, I don't always know what exactly is a stereotype at times, so I can miss things.  I was focusing on other things when I watched that episode as well, but ultimately I was unaware that the stereotypes were even there, so I probably wouldn't have even noticed them if I was focusing on where they were.  I know they have headdresses and all, but it just didn't click for me - I can't remember what I thought leading up to actually finding out, it just didn't register for me.

It's actually Yakyakistan, which is kind of redundant as a name, or something, but I see your overall point, as the name is at least likely inspired by Pakistan.  I have no idea if the the yaks were supposed to represent Pakistanis themselves, as I didn't notice anything about them that said they were (but again, I can miss things), but I did find it silly that the writers essentially gave the yaks the same personality or way of doing things - I'll admit I have never really been a fan of the yaks in FiM, with the only exception being Yona (I get that she likely has the same format attached to her, but I was okay with her, maybe because I view her more as part of the Student Six than "another yak", or something.)

Over a Barrel infuriates me. On top of that they had those stereotypical "war whoops" playing in the background of the buffalo stampede through the town.


One episode I watched again recently that left my mouth agape was Bridle Gossip; the Zecora episode. All the things the ponies say about her, even considering it was intended to be in ignorance, is just unbelievable. Rarity said her stripes were garish. It's very obvious that this episode was supposed to have a message behind it about not treating people differently because of their skin colour but the Lame 6 act WAY over the top. They insult Zecora's home and "decor" (which appear to be based on African masks), and say that her "strange incantations" (i.e. a different language) points to her being "bad."

Even the "lesson" at the end is wrapped up in such a way that's like "even if someone is strange or weird, don't treat them differently," iirc. Way to drop the ball, hard. Yikes.

I can guess what "War Whoops" are - I forgot they were even in the episode, or if I even noticed them.  I know they are associated with Native Americans, but I never really stopped and thought about it, if that makes sense.

"Bridle Gossip" was one of the first episodes I watched of FiM, so I missed the idea that maybe the ponies were too "forward" with the point of the lesson (which contradicts the idea that ponies are the friendship species, I understand.)  I do remember thinking the episode was a cliché-ish idea, but while I probably didn't find the moral itself subtle, I at least found the episodes handling of it "subtle enough" at the time (I guess...) as I remember thinking the episode ruined the subtleness of it, or at least its ability to not hammer it home for the audience at the end, due to a misheard line on my part.

To explain, I misheard Twilight's line "Friends don't care what you cover is" (she mentioned judging books by their cover before this line) as "Friends don't care what your color is" and I remember thinking that was weird as it came across as "Oh, in case you missed it, this episode was a metaphor for racism" or something, which I found silly because the metaphor with different animals (which is I think is all I really saw it as) was enough, and no one had mentioned color so it seemed out of place (but like I say, I had misheard it.)

And again, I was unaware that they were outright going for African for Zecora, or it simply didn't register.  I get what you mean, but I kind of think it works due to how the episode was written, that it seemed in character for them to innocently think what they thought due to how the episode was set up, but I'll try to have a look at it while focusing on what I know the show to be now, if only in my opinion - I realise it isn't an award winning show, or even a perfect show, but it is my favorite show, so I do have praises to sing about it (while at the same time criticising what I view to be its flaws), but at the time of watching that episode I think I was still expecting a silly guilty pleasure or something, but it ended up being a show I could take seriously enough in a "children's shows can have good writing" and a "nostalgic sentiment" kind of way (though I can still view it as simple fun as well - I just love it, and it fits with pretty much everything for me.)

Also Zecora being othered as an African stand-in and that bufallo ep led to an onslaught of "racist AJ" memes and racist Equestria fanart in the B-fandom. Certainly not the showrunners fault but a good reminder of what impact these badly thought out plots and morals had. I'm sure a lot of kids got to accidentally see all that "AJ as a plantation owner" crap.

I saw that picture last year on twitter if it's what I think it was (and in fairness the general consensus among bronies seemed to be that it shouldn't exist) - this is another example of my unawareness of things, as I didn't even get what  the picture was portraying (litterally only found out tonight) and only knew it was racist because people were saying it was (I'd actually forgotten that the zebras were seen as Africans by that point, so it took time to even register that part of it, and I still didn't get what it was supposed to look like.)

Good lord this also reminded me of that one episode where a Fashion-designer unicorn that Rarity has a crush on comes to town. As soon as he sees Applejack he's in love with her, and he says something like "I've always admired the work-ethic of earthponies."

What's that in reference to?  Is it a reference to a race or something in the real world or is it just because it generalised earth ponies as being all the same?

So yeah, hope I came across alright in what I was saying, but a lot of it was down to me not really knowing about the stereotypes, but the whether they were there or not, they were ultimately always something that I tended not to attribute to a specific species or I didn't really see the whole species as being a specific race as I wasn't looking for that, or always knew what to look for - not saying it wasn't there of course.  Regardless of whether it was intentional, it's not what I would have done, and if I had I would have made it so it wasn't specifically "species equals specific race", but made it so that any species could be any race, including ponies, if I was ever going to even focus on that in the first place.

[ChibiMango]

Good lord this also reminded me of that one episode where a Fashion-designer unicorn that Rarity has a crush on comes to town. As soon as he sees Applejack he's in love with her, and he says something like "I've always admired the work-ethic of earthponies."

What's that in reference to?  Is it a reference to a race or something in the real world or is it just because it generalised earth ponies as being all the same?

I don't think it's a reference to a specific race, but I think it's a reference to how some people come up with """positive""" stereotypes of races that are usually completely incorrect and sometimes even fetishize those people. Like how some people put Native Americans on a pedestal as mystical woodland people of grace and mysteriousness, or how some people think all Asians are geniuses. 

At best, it's very creepy, and at worst, it can actually lead to specific people being bashed for not being exactly like the stereotypes.  Plus it often leads to cultural appropriation, such as people using Native American symbols for the 'aesthetic' and completely misusing them in a way that's taboo to the actual natives.