Quote from: Leave a Whisper on January 30, 2024, 05:46:29 PM

Why was G3 the only one without males?

There WAS one male pony in all of G3.

Here he is!

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OMG! Alright, I'll bite, who is this? I'm wildly curious! I recognize Cotton Candy on the left, but that's all I got!

I found it very depressing how quickly Hasbro decided to cater to the bronies after watching this community beg them for literal decades to listen to us. Collectors have gotten meager scraps from Hasbro for years.  To have Hasbro give the bronies whatever they wanted was like Hasbro spitting in our faces.  And they were catering to a community that had a significant problem with some of the worst people imaginable.  Fortunately, the collector community went through its own issues several years ago, and moderation was already in place to mitigate the worst of it here and a few other places.  Still, the bronies certainly befouled the My Little Pony name to the general public.  I still have nothing to do with most facebook groups since they lack a lot of the moderation that keeps things civil here. 

This was a big reason I felt Hasbro should have taken a break after G4.  It would give  the toxic subset of  “fans” a chance to really clear out and give the MLP brand a chance to recover.  You know, give the general public a chance to forget about pony love pillows and plushes with…holes. Maybe get the “alt right” people a chance to find some other more fertile ground to use to spread their hateful messages.   We’ll see how it goes. G5 is already limping.  Maybe Hasbro will take a break at the end of it, and being it back in a few years. 

I totally agree with your stance on the FB groups; I treat it a little bit like walking into an alligator swamp, with the amount of poor behavior and scamming that goes on in there! But I also feel like people who want to be mods would get immediately overwhelmed, since you can't really IP ban anyone from the site, much less your group. The scammers can just make ten more accounts and come right back in! It feels like a losing battle, so I lurk for what I can and block like mad!

I agree, and can't help but feel like, knowing what I know about Hasbro after 'The Toys That Made Us', Hasbro corporate would prefer to be an entirely boys-toys type company anyway. So when boys took interest in one of their (icky) girls lines that is still kicking (Jem who?), they jumped on it, without really doing any research. I did enjoy seeing the takedown of one of the more prolifically gross webcomics (which I won't name since the title itself is offensive) thanks to Hasbro, but I still can't believe that Hasbro just started throwing out 'Brony' on any merch they could without doing any due diligence. So it did give me some satisfaction any time it blew up in their face, which it didn't often enough frankly. The blowback seems to land on the fans - anyone who calls themselves a fan, which includes people who's been fans for years and (checks notes) literal children. I dislike the idea of MLP "taking a break", because I'm selfish like that and enjoy shopping for pretty ponies, but it's sad that it's something that collectors are actually asking for, because so many of us feel like it's necessary.

Personally, I do see people complaining about how 'babyish' and 'poorly written' G5 is compared to G4, and part of me feels like, good! Excellent! Give me the annoying baby dragon! Let it get boring, and let the people who enjoy it anyway keep enjoying it, and then maybe we can get back to enjoying the franchise in peace. Maybe that's more selfish than wishing for a break for the line? Ah well, bring on that Sparky Sparkerooni!

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS!!!!!
All that potential for extra brushable figures & we got, next to NONE!!! Where's our Babs Seed, for one glaring example???

Unfortunately, I think when we look at Babs we can see some pretty glaring issues, toy-wise:

1. Her hair is short, thus making her difficult/expensive to trim/style for a brushable, and if you give her long hair you risk collectors complaining about accuracy,

2. She's brown.

I mean, we're talking about Hasbroken here; the people who took the canonically white Princess Celestia and turned her first toy pink, because 'little girls like pink ponies.' If we can't even get the main figurehead of the series the right color, in a traditionally-unicorn-coded color no less, how are they going to get Babs to pass corporate focus groups?*

I agree with you here, for the record! I'm sad we only got a little Ponyville sized figure, and I'm not even sure I ever found that one! But I'm sure Hasbro was better able to justify a tiny figure that would cost pennies to manufacture, over the potential 'failure' of a brushable brown pony toy. I'm figuring that's similar to what happened to the other background characters. A lot of them are really nice colors, but there's also a lot of bold colors, bright colors, colors that might not have "enough pink" to pass Hasbro muster. Easier to make a bunch of pink-purple adjacent original designs, and not bother, I guess?

I wish we had gotten more backgrounders! It was cool that we eventually got Lyra, and even Bon Bon, but there were so many I would have loved to see! I mean, can you imagine an Apple Family Multipack with like, ten apple family ponies?!

*(I do know that we eventually got several releases of Celestia in white, but AFAIK there was a looooot of backlash from collectors before they changed it!)

"I should definitely buy more baits... I need more project bases! Surely, this one will be 'the one' that I need for a project!"

I recently saw a friend selling off some of her baits, because she realized she just would never have the time to utilize all of the custom bases she had sitting in bins ... and I realized I'd have to make like, a custom a day, and I still wouldn't finish for years! And yet I just bought some new ones last week... SURELY this will be the last one I ever need!

I used to be able to find more variety of MLP at Walmart, for whatever reason; the last time I went hunting before Christmas, it looked like they'd gotten rid of it entirely. Target has only had a mini 20-pack and the extra-long hair set for six months, it feels like, occasionally interspersed with the RV set, which is another mini set. My next closest Target got rid of the pony section entirely.

It really sucks! I know I can't expect an 'everything store' like Walmart or Target to have a massive toy selection, but this feels significantly worse than G4 distribution by miles. Is Hasbro falling down, are the retailers drawing back? I don't want to get all my ponies from Amazon!

Incredible!!! What a beautiful and special piece!
Do you have it up for display during the holidays?

Thank you all so much, you are all so sweet!! You know, it would be a great idea to get it out for the holidays! Right now it's tucked in with the other train cars in a box in my room, only because I'm so afraid of one of the gazillion little bits falling off and being lost in the ornament boxes, LOL!

I totally forgot to post this last year, when I actually finally completed it, and told myself around January that I would definitely post it this December! So, without further ado - the G4 Custom Christmas Train!

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And here's more closeups of the individual cars with what their "before" would have looked like, AKA the stock, unpainted trains:

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And I'll put some WIP pics behind a cut, in case you're curious to see some of the painting detail shots!


I originally bought this train on clearance at Toys R Us, which should tell you how long ago I originally planned to customize this! In 2016, I referenced on my blog that I had been trying to work on this train every December 'for three years', which would make my start date around 2013, which makes this train a decade old! But while the train got shelved and put aside for many (many... many...) years, I continued tracking down various little Christmas decor bits, and I even took a photo of the MASSIVE amount of Christmas doodads and gee-gaws I had been collecting for it in the decade intervening!

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The train, like many toys, has a lot of sculpted details in the plastic that don't really show up because they're not painted! So I tried to highlight as many of the fun little sculpt details as I could (and hide the screw holes), while still changing it enough to feel Christmas-y. For example, I changed the ice cream cone train car into a car with wooden lattice and a snowy mountaintop, complete with glitter and snowmen! I had originally planned to use faux-frosting, but I feared it might just look too chunky and thick, and even more like ice cream. Using glitter made it look more gritty, like ice!

I didn't want to do a full repaint with a full white basecoat, since I worried it might turn out chunky, and also because I also wanted to highlight the original sculpting and color scheme. So that meant I had to get a bit creative with how I would turn each train car into more 'festive' colors! It's still very bright and colorful, but I figure that's more like how MLP would do the holidays anyway! I love to see how much the sculpting work of the original pops with just a little bit of paint to highlight it!

Phew! That's a lot of typing, but it was a lot of work!! I originally got the drive to finish it in time for a 'custom winter collab' last year, and I can proudly say that mine was the only train included, LOL! Thanks for reading!