MLP: Immanetizing The Equestrian

Of course, music and animation need something worthwhile to adorn; you can have individual elements of music, animation, kindness, honesty etc., but what is the final element, the element of magic? What is it about MLP—what seeds were latent in season 1–2 which could make MLP such a phenomenon? I would identify two major factors: the first is the pervasively optimistic growth & progress of the series, and the second is the utopian construction of a more fulfilling modern society.

After watching two seasons, it hit me: I was wrong. MLP isn’t a “slice-of-life moe anime”. It’s a shonen anime! It’s more Nanoha & Haruhi than K-On.

No, seriously. The hallmark of a shonen anime is that it is a bildungsroman in which a protagonist grows in tandem with friends and allies (frequently made by “befriending” them with giant laser beams) as they experience life and overcome challenges, building up skills & powers as they explore & affect the wider world. The shonen nature is hidden in Season 1, whose episodes often suffer from slowly-developing, single-threaded plots; lacking a “B plot”, they feel like they drag on & little happens. (This apparently was partially due to trying for a “E” TV rating, which guidelines turn out to be much more restrictive than I realized. When they settled for “PG” ratings, much more natural and active episodes became doable.) But this becomes increasingly clear in season 2 and on. To quote the leaked 2009_17ya “show bible” (proposal?) for “My Little Pony Adventures”:

…all too often the worlds created for girl properties are left vague, ambiguous, and generic. But I do not think this has to be so. A girl world can be set up in the same manner, it is the intentions that must be different.

Rather than set the stage for epic, dramatic adventure stories like the examples above [“Transformers and G.I. Joe”], a girl world should set the stage for friendship, heart and laughter as well as adventure—adventure that is more fun and exciting than dramatic and epic, but adventure nonetheless. With only that alternate intention, the same strong history, mythology, back story and even the alternate logic and physics of an alternate world will serve the same purpose to endear you to the characters and make the stories memorable.

…Our ponies, though independent, have the emotional range of anywhere between 10 and 15, with most seeming about 12…Secondary Audiences… Boys (believe it or not). They won’t admit it, but they’ll watch. When their sister’s watching it, they’ll balk and act like it’s dumb, then they’ll sit down and watch it. For the same reason Moms will find My Little Pony interesting enough to happily share with their daughters, the compelling conflicts, the strong characterizations, the silly humor and (most importantly for boys) the ADVENTURE, the boys will watch, too. Really. Moms. We’ve got a few good points going for us when it comes to Moms. First, the original buyers of My Little Ponies are in their late twenties to mid-thirties and are likely to have daughters within the target age range, 3–11. Bringing back elements of the original ponies from the 80’s (original characters like Applejack and Spike, strong sense of classical magic like Dream Castle and the Waterfall, and a pinch of legitimate pony play) will nurture a sense of nostalgia, something that is not difficult to do with Gen-X-ers. Second, compelling storylines (ie. truly engaging conflicts, both external adventure and internal relationships), characters with depth and complexity, clever and silly humor that doesn’t talk down to kids (pony puns like Fillydelphia, a regular supply of slapstick and character-based jokes and gags) and even a few jokes that might go over the kids’ heads will all engage Mom enough that watching My Little Pony will become a fun thing for Mom to do with her daughter. Not only will Mom be sharing her favorite childhood toy with her little girl, but she may actually enjoy watching too!

There is quite a bit of action, leading to whiplash, as Chris Sims puts it: “…the downside is that this is a show that opens with a massive thousand year-old conflict for the fate of the world and then moves into bake sales and apple harvests, but hey, that’s life.”—and then it moves on to “plague and famine, more famine, slavery, mind control, plague again, more mind control, recreational infanticide, and slavery again.” (I discovered that it is indeed not a great idea to watch it on psychedelics. The social lessons are also too slow and spread out over 25 minutes, so one would have to use boiled-down edited episodes to get a few in during a trip.) I would be hard-pressed to defend season 1 as the best or second-best season, though it benefits from the novelty of worldbuilding and some of the best MLP songs; it is closer to the price of admission, which comes with a promissory note of growth.

MLP is often described as being enjoyable because it’s “optimistic”; optimism could be defined as the attitude that things will turn out well (if bad now) or will get even better (if already good now), but I would disagree that this is what is meant by saying “MLP is optimistic”. A show can cop a mere optimistic attitude and say all the right things, but that is unsatisfying & rings hollow—“jam tomorrow”—unless one also then shows that optimism in action. This is precisely what unfolds over the 8 seasons of MLP. What is most striking is the extent to which the characters and world grow & develop. Many start off as responsible young adults, some running their own businesses, before the series starts; this is excellent, a reminder that school is only a transition to real life, “it gets better”, and should not subsume the totality of your identity and self-worth, but they go on from there.

Rarity opens multiple shops; Fluttershy copes with her social anxiety, befriending the dangerous Discord for the good of Equestria, and eventually founds an animal refuge; Rainbow Dash progresses from a bored surly anti-intellectual overly-competitive weather control Pegasus to devoted adventure reader & the most talented member of the elite Wonderbolts military force; Twilight grows from an isolated grad student to respected magician to the alicorn-ized Princess, suddenly “adrift in the meritocracy” having aced all the exams only to realize being a mere princess was unfulfilling & empty, eventually discovering her purpose as Princess of Friendship & the widely respected founder of the friendship university formally teaching friendship. The song “True True Friend Winter Wrap-up (Ultimate Mash-Up)” may seem bizarre, as the two songs are so musically different, but I think it works because it embodies Twilight’s character arc, season 1–3. (The Cutie Mark Crusaders, who often mirror the Mane Six, undergo their own growth and after they find their cutie marks, discover a new mission of teaching other ponies to find their cutie marks.) Along the way, Twilight goes from suffering from neuroticism (barely managed with OCD checklists) to a confident competent leader. Indeed, her growth appears even in small things like the teleportation spell she practices in season 1–2 or learning to fly after being an alicorn: at first she can only teleport with great difficulty a few meters, such as across the room, but by season 8, she can casually teleport to Canterlot & back; her flying is disastrously clumsy initially but after several seasons she is an adept flyer.

The world expands with them as they take on new responsibilities: the once cozy-feeling Equestria, a few pony cities like Manehattan or Las Pegasus, overseen by Canterlot, has discovered multiple large countries on its borders, from the yaks of Yakyakistan to the distant Changeling hive to the Griffons to the Hippogriffs to the Crystal Ponies of the Crystal Empire (note: they look like crystals and there are a lot of crystals there), and the ‘mane’ characters have become unofficial ambassadors to them, challenged to maintain good foreign relations among their other responsibilities and pleasures. Indeed, the primary role of the friendship university is simply taking in children of allied elites and teaching them about friendship and pony culture.

A case in point would be Twilight’s side-kick/assistant, the baby dragon Spike. Everypony’s annoying bratty little brother, Spike starts off as irritating, lazy, dangerously incompetent, and insecurely self-aggrandizing, antagonizing many viewers. But as time passed, he, well, grew up, and developed a sense of self-worth by helping save the Crystal Empire and then open up relations with the dragons, serving as a calming counterbalance and advisor to Twilight, and even going through dragon-puberty to get wings & learn to fly. Another striking case was the introduction of Starlight Glimmer in season 5 to serve as a foil and inversion of Twilight Sparkle: an equally smart magically-talented who inverts friendship and whose scheme ultimately defeats Twilight Sparkle; after her redemption, instead of being relegated to a rarely-appearing side character, she became an increasingly central protagonist, to the consternation of many fans.

Even the writing becomes gradually more willing to throw in a mess of allusions or parodies with a wink to the viewer, and more sophisticated in form & content.

D&D allusions and even playing D&D? Check. Are those pony versions of Ranma ½/Evangelion/Sailor Moon/Utena in “Scare Master”? Check. A Speed Racer homage song in “Derby Racers”? Check. Gilmore Girls’s “Sire’s Hollow”/“Star Hollow” reference? Certainly. Was that really Pinkie Pie dressed up as Josephine Baker? Yes. In the Daring Do episode with the Daring Do fan convention, were those dakimakura pillows with Daring Do tied up on them being sold by the vendors, and the episode is a critique of fans/head-canons? Yes & yes they were. Discord’s “Glass Of Water” song-skit would not be out of place in the slightest in a Disney comedy like Aladdin, and the “Wonderbolt Rap” is a pitch-perfect parody of “cool” ’90s kid show hip-hop raps, complete with lovingly-rendered CRT/VHS blur—yes, really. Rick & Morty or an escape room episode? Sure, why not! And was that—the XKCD roller-coaster meme‽ YES, IT WAS.

One episode is an extensive demonstration of the problems with a barter economy caused by the need for double coincidence of wants, the difficulty of arranging transactions organ-donation-ring-style to get everypony what they want, and the role of money as an numéraire, which would not be out of place in an economics course; the episode “Tanks For the Memories” is perhaps the best treatment of the death of one’s pet I’ve seen in a children’s show yet, while “A Rockhoof and a Hard Place” is unmistakably about suicide (while another almost dealt with TBIs), and the death of Applejack’s parents shadows her from season 1, leading to the hard-hitting “Perfect Pear” 156 episodes later; the character Maud Pie is one of the most sympathetic depictions of Asperger’s in American TV (and infinitely better than the loathsome Big Bang Theory); “The Mysterious Mare Do Well” successfully tricked me; the inevitable Rashomon-style episode “P.P.O.V. (Pony Point of View)” provides fun opportunity for satire of each character, while “The Saddlerow Review” plays with flashbacks from multiple perspectives and “Games Ponies Play”/“Just for Sidekicks” run simultaneously; “The Cutie Map Part 1”/2 is an extended critique of egalitarianism & communism run rampant, complete with cheerful but sinister song lyrics like “you can’t have nightmares / if you never dream” (earning it a Rabid Puppies Hugo nomination of all things); the episode “Crusaders of the Lost Mark” aired on MLP’s 5^th anniversary and closed out the 5-season-long Cutie Mark Crusader subplot which had built up the CMCs as a parallel to the Mane Six, with a similar ascension, featured no less than 3 musical numbers, while redeeming their long-running antagonist in a single episode (said antagonist who caused the Cutie Mark Crusaders to form & whose redemption also earns them their cutie marks), and the episode end segues into the end of the opening animation! Just on the formal level it’s a feat. And if you’d told me that a season of MLP would focus on secondary characters—with Starlight Glimmer teaming up with Trixie, Discord, and the Changeling defector—and that this would in fact be the sole focus of the season finale with hardly any appearance by the mane characters, finishing Starlight Glimmer’s own redemption arc & acceptance of her responsibility as a leader in order to save Equestria (“To Where and Back Again—Part 1”/“2”), I’d’ve said you were high from huffing fan-speculation fumes—but they did it anyway. And there is loss along the way: Applejack’s parents, we slowly realize, aren’t coming back; the handicapped Scootaloo finally admits she’ll never be able to fly; and Twilight Sparkle lives in a treehouse-library (living out the dream of many geeky kids) but after 4 seasons it is destroyed, permanently, with only the roots left for memory. Overall it’s amazing that they were willing to keep changing things the way they did when it would have been so easy to settle down in a Simpsons-style rut; and at times it cost them (witness the swivet over the end of Season 3, where many fans quit—foalish, as it meant they missed many of the best episodes).

It’s not all perfect. Some episodes are indeed sickly sweet. A few wind up flubbing their Aesops (case in point, “The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000”—as most people watching it wind up asking themselves, didn’t the Flim-Flam Brothers actually win the argument by demonstrating their cider-making machine was superior to the Apples’ inefficient traditional manual-labor methods?) Season 1 has deathly slow pacing and single-threaded plots; but the later seasons tend to suffer from pacing that jams in the resolution or can’t be done in one episode (Discord’s redemption simply can’t be done in a single episode convincingly). This can lead to endings where all the aftermath is disposed in a quick montage or song, or where the episode simply—ends, abruptly cutting to credits (eg. “Sounds of Silence”). Longer episodes like the “Best Gift Ever” special show how MLP stories can benefit from more space to breath instead of rushing to a conclusion. The episodic approach sometimes suffer from a lack of foreshadowing/world-building—season 2’s finale, “A Canterlot Wedding—Part 1”/2 was great, but would’ve been better if we had had any idea before the finale that Changelings, Princess Cadance, or Twilight’s brother existed, much less that the latter two were getting married, and as good as “Crusaders of the Lost Mark” is, it also would’ve benefited from more hints anytime in the previous 5 seasons that Diamond Tiara was so unhappy or struggling to discover positive ways to be a leader. Some apparently important themes are simply dropped without further elaboration: Twilight’s niece, Flurry Heart, is built-up as the first-ever alicorn child, unique & specially powerful, targeted by Equestria’s greatest enemies, but then is relegated to a tertiary character for the rest of the series; Twilight’s pet owl from season 1 disappears for entire seasons thereafter; and the Elements of Harmony or “Rainbow Power” likewise wind up being dropped, damaging the logic of later stories (since one has to ask why they aren’t resorting to their best weapons). These are annoying since the viewer becomes doubtful about what will be relevant in the future and unwilling to suspend disbelief or emotionally invest in characters/events: why care when something may not go anywhere or be resolved by authorial fiat? Later seasons do seem to get better in planning things out to create satisfying foreshadowing and establishing possibilities rather than pulling them out of nowhere (while I didn’t find season 7’s finale particularly interesting, it was at least extensively foreshadowed and logical, and season 8’s finale was both good and also cleverly built up with misdirection keeping one speculating). The downside to the later seasons is that while overall plotting generally improves, individual episodes remain locked into a plot paradigm which mandates a conflict which can be resolved by the end of an episode, often forcing characters to regress into mistakes they’d previously overcome (to such an extent it is lampshaded in “Fame and Misfortune”); even shonen anime will take breaks from such a predictable set of beats and engage in some worldbuilding or iyashikei.

So, that’s the basic package: clean attractive animation, catchy music which works perfectly in sync with the episode, a cast of characters who grow & develop in an also expanding world & lore (for which I wrote an analysis of pony genetics), and entertaining plots.

This is all well and good, but where do the bronies come in? The bronies, I think, are an expression of a New Sincerity. They are the positive flip side of the exhausting nihilism & cynicism so often on display on 4chan or among alt-right “Frog Nazis”—often white males, discomfited by an economy and a society which has no jobs, no place or value for them, rendering them hors(e) de combat, and no advice other than to become more like their sisters. (Like the respect that lying pays to the truth, cynicism depends on an ability for optimism.) But instead of giving up, they continue hoping that someday things can be better, that there’s some way to a brighter future, one with friends. The old social contract with men has been unilaterally ripped up by society, and nothing has replaced it, but subcultures like MLP offers a glimpse at what a new one might be. I don’t think it’s an accident that comparisons to Plato’s Republic keep popping up in disparate MLP discussions over the years, although on the other hoof, so do Marxist perspectives as well as the aforementioned fascist ones. (“/…We will dance through the country / And the night and the day will be one; / Holding hooves, we will unite / As one mind, as one soul, the name of Equestria… /”)

At the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion, Shinji Ikari is surrounded by his friends & relatives. “Congratulations” each one says, as spring cherry petals fall, and the series ends: “And to all the children… Congratulations!”

If we asked what many nerds wanted most of all, deep down, perhaps it would be no more complex than a wish to be able to hang out with friends like in Genshiken. Takashi Murakami remarks (Earth In My Window) of the DAICON IV [videos] fan-film’s ending:

In this film, the animators discovered an affirmation behind total annihilation that had nothing to do with the politics or ideology of the atomic bomb. This is why they were able to portray the end of the world, without hesitation, as a kind of revolution, and follow it with a “blizzard” of cherry-blossom petals. Hideaki Anno, who later directed Neon Genesis Evangelion, created the explosion scene, and it is almost painful to watch his pathological obsession with it, as an atomic whirlwind destroys the city.

At first glance, this scenario for Japan’s recovery from an atomic bomb seems offhand, but the creators’ compelling message is deeply felt in the urgency of the production values. In a way, otaku sensibilities have much in common with those of American hippies in the 1970s. A lifestyle that seems to turn its back on the world is founded on a nearly groundless obsession with peace and happiness, tremendous curiosity for the internal world of the self, extreme sentimentality, and keen sensitivity, all of which contribute to futuristic creation. The fact that Japan’s IT industry is built on otaku is also significant, as it suggests a parallel between the hippie movement and otaku culture. One indication of the filmmakers’ obsession with quality and concept was their use of a then-rare personal computer, which enabled them to calculate planetary orbits and thus design the solar system that appears in the last scene. The complexity of this design process offers further evidence of the filmmakers’ obsession with realism.

Surprisingly, it turns out that the ultimate dream of otaku aesthetics, scrupulous yet fanatically obsessed with reality, is a happy party, a peaceful festival.

Similarly in Touhou, the scenes that the games and fandom return to endlessly is that of drinking parties at the shrine, all the characters reconciled after the fights and gathered together. MLP is compelling because it offers a simple vision of a good life (which you Kant critique from a transcendental perspective as it is so grounded in immanence): guided by tradition & family, working together, if you try hard and never lose hope, you can make friends, enjoy the finer things in life together (like cakes), and grow—not relegated to some distant tomorrow or afterlife. My Nationalist Pony (“My Nationalist Pony: An Interview with Buttercup Dew”) makes some good points in his analyses of MLP analyses (eg. “Friendship is Transcendence”/“A Very European Hearth’s Warming’s Eve”/“Applejack Expects Her Own Greatness”/“I didn’t learn anything! I was right all along—On The Crystal Empire”; see also “Why Bronies Are Superior To The Neo-reaction”), but I would disagree that there is any particularly fascists or nationalist meaning to MLP, even subconsciously (I would be surprised if any of the show writers were conservative in the least, and I don’t take My Nationalist Pony as suggesting they secretly are but that it’s more in the nature of a Freudian slip). Noticing what people have always wanted and claiming credit for them is a lie told by all ideologies, but it does not mean the good things are themselves vindication of that ideology. To the extent that MLP appears fascist, it is simply that fascism also draws its appeal from promising things deeply desired by many people, like community and belonging and having healthy ambition and a society which is unified & yet not gray.

One of the ways in which MLP is unusual is, in addition to episodes criticizing communism or egalitarianism, its implicit capitalist economy (in contrast to most media where markets or capitalism are portrayed negatively when any attention is paid to them); Equestria is not post-scarcity by magical fiat but is capitalist to the core, and its prosperity is due the capitalism and competition. And this capitalism contributes to the self-actualization of ponies: to gain a sense of self-worth which is genuine and grounded in reality, one must discover something one does well (finding one’s cutie-mark), which is of value to one’s peers and society, and said value is only honestly expressed when freely expressed against a background of genuinely competitive options. The Cutie Mark Crusaders know they are good at what they do because so many ponies seek them out. The Apples can compare their apples to the rival Pears. Twilight Sparkle has her grades. Pinkie Pie earns a living with her cakes & pies. And Rainbow Dash, of course, has her flying records. When, in “The Cutie Map”, everypony must buy Sugar Belle’s gross standardized muffins & no other food, the fact that they do buy them with their false smiles can only demoralize Sugar Belle further (pace Graeber’s “bullshit work”); when the town is liberated from Starlight Glimmer, she is freed to make apple dessert pastries competing with the Apple farm and other confectioners, and, her baking talents proven by popular demand, can self-actualize. Or, in “Canterlot Boutique”, when a marketing stunt works too well and Rarity is inundated with orders for a “Princess Dress”, the success nearly burns out Rarity—because the customers no longer have high standards or knowledge, and cannot appreciate nor critique Rarity’s work, and the demand undermines Rarity’s standards; Rarity has no competition in providing the Princess Dress, and that’s the problem. (Who wants to play a video game which consists of a screen flashing “You Win” endlessly?) This is how MLP demonstrates how to make a life in a capitalist economy and integrates competition into its utopia: if you can find no niche that suits you and provides validation and self-worth from providing genuine value to others, then set out to make a niche by discovering your (metaphorical) cutie-mark. For happiness, one must have something to strive for which comes from within but is tested against without.

Is it an accident that Jordan B. Peterson appeals to a similar demographic as MLP, or that he conveys a similar message in his books like 12 Rules for Life (see also Peterson2008)? He retells the cliches with conviction inside a societal vacuum. There is still hope, you can always change, if you start now, you can “clean your room”, and tame the chaos (Discord?) in your life to find a talent or niche and develop into a valued social role that can provide a sense of self-worth… There are some people who need to hear that specific message, just as there are people who need to read Atlas Shrugged (while there are other people for whom that’s the worst book possible—the right book for the right person). Both Peterson and MLP provide specific recommendations (if not necessarily flowcharts). But the key step is to simply start. Sometimes it takes just a word, an admission to oneself that one has made a mistake up until now, to reach out: “I’m sorry”. “I was wrong.” “I can’t do this any longer.” Saying that it’s “too late” or that “a leopard can’t change its spots” is an abdication of freedom and personal responsibility; when there is a choice to which one has always said “no” before, the next time, one can say “yes”. The tragedy of Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is he succumbs, like Walter in Breaking Bad, to the deadly sin of pride: not that he was a neglected child or that his soul is mutilated by murder, but that at the end, when he’s already lost, Harry gives him a final chance, and in front of everypony, he is unable to swallow his pride and surrender, and cannot, will not, choose to stop being Voldemort and become only Tom Riddle again; that is when he is truly damned and the end of his story. Gene Wolfe was asked once what he thought literature should do. He said:

I would like [my readers] to better understand human beings and human life as a result of having read [my] stories. I’d like them to feel that this was an experience that made things better for them and an experience that gave them hope. I think that the kind of things that we talk about at this conference—fantasy very much so, science fiction, and even horror—the message that we’re sending is the reverse of the message sent by what is called ‘realistic fiction’. (I happen to think that realistic fiction is not, in fact, realistic, but that’s a side issue.) And what we are saying is that it doesn’t have to be like this: things can be different. Our society can be changed. Maybe it’s worse, maybe it’s better. Maybe it’s a higher civilization, maybe it’s a barbaric civilization. But it doesn’t have to be the way it is now. Things can change. And we’re also saying things can change for you in your life. Look at the difference between Severian the apprentice and Severian the Autarch [in The Book of the New Sun], for example. The difference between Silk as an augur and Silk as calde [in The Book of the Long Sun]. You see?

We don’t always have to be this. There can be something else. We can stop doing the thing that we’re doing. Moms Mabley had a great line in some movie or other—she said, “You keep on doing what you been doing and you’re gonna keep on gettin’ what you been gettin’.” And we don’t have to keep on doing what we’ve been doing. We can do something else if we don’t like what we’re gettin’. I think a lot of the purpose of fiction ought to be to tell people that.

Indeed, in a sense, there are “bronies” inside MLP - the creatures from allied countries, like the Griffons, who hate each other, or the dragons, always on guard against betrayal and striving to be hard and able to live on one’s own. As much as they might deny it, the lure of pony life is strong and “friendship” gradually seeps into their own cultures, accelerated by the friendship university. Pony culture, in other words, is a universal culture: it presents a “soft” “decadent” set of norms which, as much as traditionalists might deny it, is deeply appealing. To not fight Equestria is to admit defeat; but to fight Equestria only leads to faster defeat as they ‘befriend’ you.

So, this is what happened: take a bunch of drifting young men; tell them that things don’t have to be like this; show them the better life they secretly dream of; show them growth and development of flawed characters, advancing through challenges upwards, with lessons; wrap this all in a deceptively simple & attractively produced package with something for everypony, and release it at a fertile time, sparking a fandom which produces memes & songs & art drawing more curious viewers in… The brony phenomenon looks less inexplicable viewed from this angle.

I’m not really in the brony demographic anymore, but perhaps I was in 2013_13ya. I would be lying if I said I didn’t understand the appeal. If you need something to watch, you could do worse than watching the adventures of some small pastel horses. (Although you probably shouldn’t go as far as creating pony tulpas.) After all… What’s the alternative?