Why My Little Pony Generation 5 Failed

… Wow, I think that’s the nerdiest thing I’ve ever typed on this blog. Hopefully this essay will lay to rest all doubts about my geekiness.

As I’ve been trying to get my nieces into My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, I’ve been thinking a lot about the MLP franchise as a whole lately, and I guess I wanted to put into words my thoughts about why Friendship is Magic has been so phenomenally successful, why the succeeding generation fizzled, and what Hasbro can learn from this about handling its franchises moving forward.

And then I’ll go outside and touch grass, promise.

 

I guess I should start by writing about my experience with My Little Pony Generation 4 (Friendship is Magic and associated media, hereafter usually referred to as “FiM”). I got into it around season 2, when a friend urged me to watch the show and I was immediately hooked. I was in college at the time, but FiM really appealed to me with its sleek design sensibilities, tight writing with genuine morals and values, talented production, and how it tried – in ways that worked – to appeal to both kids and the adults watching with them (or even watching without them). I’m still a big fan of FiM and I kinda push it on my younger nieces in a “I think you’ll really like this show but also secretly I’m looking for an excuse to watch it again too” sort of way. I’m one of those aunts.

So when FiM’s run concluded and Hasbro started producing a new toy line and media series (usually referred to as Generation 5 or “G5”), I was not impressed. And I was not surprised when the Netflix series got cancelled after the first season. And I want FiM back. (Also, why does Netflix currently only have the first four seasons of FiM?!?! You’re missing out on crucial stuff like the resolution of the Changeling conflict and Starlight Glimmer!!!! /nerdrage)

I feel that Hasbro made a number of big, key, critical mistakes in its handling of Gen 5, and failed to recognize and build upon what made FiM such a cosmopolitan success, the elements of genius that elevated FiM from simply being yet another iteration of toys and the media created to sell them, to being a standout work of fiction with heart, intelligence, and respect for its fanbase.

I guess I should drop the biggest bombshell first and get it over with—I feel that Gen 5 was way too pushy and preachy with its main (arguably its only) message: diversity and inclusion. Before you start throwing things at me, I want to clarify that I am in no way opposed to the overall idea of diversity and inclusion. I think anybody with their head on straight would agree with the importance of making sure everybody feels loved, welcomed, and like they belong and their contributions have worth. I just hate having it shoved down my throat the way anybody would hate anything else being shoved down their throat.

The genius of FiM in this regard was twofold. First, the show does not relegate itself to one-note promotion of a current societal movement. That not only makes it timeless, but much less obnoxious. (Go back to late 80’s/early 90’s kids’ shows and how hard they pushed saying no to peer pressure and anti-drug campaigns and you’ll see what I mean.) FiM digs deeper and explores the core values that are integral to socially functional human beings, the values that all other values are built upon.

Kindness, generosity, honesty, loyalty, and the importance of being a good friend, good family member, and good community member aren’t socio-politically-charged buzzwords or campaigns—they’re what our civilization is built upon. While each generation tends to emphasize one particular social crusade or another, I believe you can’t make effective and lasting change in the world without understanding and internalizing eternal human values—otherwise you’re just going around finding things to be angry about and exasperating people who would rather focus on ways to get along. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that”.

FiM just really seemed to get that fixing interpersonal and societal issues is ultimately about people and the choices they make, not abstract –isms and treating anybody who disagrees with you as your enemy. I think the episode “Stranger Than Fan Fiction” actually did a better job in 22 minutes of teaching kids (and adults) important truths about diversity and inclusion than all of G5 did, because it realistically addressed the fact that people have differences of opinion, you can’t force someone to change their opinion just because you disagree with it and experience a strong negative emotional reaction to it—but you can still be friends with them and build healthy relations based on common ground, it’s extremely important to realize that someone else’s opinion reflects their core values in the same way your opinions reflect your core values, and you need to give them the same level of respect you would like for yourself, no matter how much you disagree with them.

(Actually, can the whole Internet and every politician please just go watch “Stranger Than Fan Fiction” right now? 2016 called—they have your therapy session.)

And, on top of that, FiM incorporated its values in really organic, engaging, relatable ways. While it started out as edutainment with a focus on “Friendship Lessons”, and although it dropped that premise after the first few seasons when The Hub rebranded it as a general family show, the show’s writers were consistently really smart about using all nine seasons to thoughtfully explore different facets of friendship, but doing so in the context of the characters simply living out their lives and tackling the inevitable issues that emerged along the way—just like in real life. (In fact, one of the things I really like about the show is that, unlike most fantasy fiction, the overarching premise is not “gotta figure out how to defeat the bad guys!” but “a group of friends go through ups and downs together and learn a lot along the way, and also magic and dragons”.)

Another thing I really appreciate about FiM is that it treats these friendship problems on a much deeper level than most kids’ edutainment does. While a lot of TV with a similar premise stops at banalities like “it’s important to share” and “don’t make fun of people”, FiM doesn’t shy away from digging deeper, reaching farther, and exploring issues that even many adults struggle with—which is probably part of why it is so popular with adults.

As a few of my favorites of many, many examples (including the aforementioned “Truth is Stranger Than Fan Fiction”):

The episode “Boast Busters” examines the sometimes fine line between bragging and displaying your talents, and why a healthy sense of confidence in something you can do well doesn’t annoy people like boasting does.

“Griffon the Brush Off” excellently portrays the dangers of toxic friendships and how to tell your true friends apart from dysfunctional friends who are making your life worse.

“Suited for Success” is an ode to the importance of artistic integrity, the importance of respecting others’ artistic integrity, and the importance of not complaining or criticizing if somebody was nice enough to labor for hours making you a bespoke gift with no thought of repayment, even if it’s not exactly what you had in mind.

“Lesson Zero” is a great take on how vital it is to understand the spirit of the law and not just the letter—and also why you need to communicate your needs and feelings to others before you go insane.

“Over a Barrel” addresses similar issues as “Stranger Than Fan Fiction” and underscores the fact that conflicts aren’t successfully resolved by force—they’re resolved by both sides having the humility and understanding to talk things out and reach a mutual agreement instead of assuming you’re 100% right about something and the other person is 100% wrong.

And “Scare Master” takes a good hard (but also frankly hilarious) look at the consequences of unhealthily forcing someone out of their comfort zone simply for the sake of for your own amusement (in contrast to the situation in “Dragonshy” which was about healthily leaving your comfort zone because there’s something only you can do and people need your help).

All of these episodes spoke to things I was dealing with at the time and were really affirming messages that I needed to hear, and I suspect other people have their favorite episodes for the same reasons. FiM helped develop a viewership who emerged holistically smarter about their relationships with themselves and with others, not a viewership who simply got the message “unity!!!!” and then still can’t figure out how to practically get along with people.

On a less heavy note, let’s talk art style. One of the (many) things I feel FiM really had going for it was its very distinctive aesthetic, and its choice to use Flash at a time when most other cartoons had begun to opt for 3D CGI. I prefer 2D animation over 3D for a number of reasons that I don’t feel like going into now, so I really enjoyed how FiM stood out from the crowd and did its own thing. FiM really has that hipster, “we don’t care what’s trending” vibe that – as all savvy artists know – is what made it so irresistibly trendy. It’s deliciously ironic.

On the other hand, I just find the G5 animation and designs so ugly. The pony faces really verge into uncanny valley territory with their weird blend of equine and human features that doesn’t work nearly as well in 3D as it did in 2D. The textures lack the visual panache that FiM possessed, opting instead for weird fuzzy bodies and too-shiny manes and tails with overly intricate hair modeling that is more distracting and design-muddling than appealing.

And I also just don’t find the character and color design as smart as FiM’s. FiM’s characters are really visually distinctive from each other in their coloration and mane/tail styles—in the Mane Six alone, everybody has unique shapes to their mane/tail style, and common colors among them were kept to a minimum (Fluttershy’s body is the same color as Applejack’s mane/tail, and Fluttershy’s mane/tail is the same color as Pinkie Pie’s body, and that’s it). You can easily tell any member of the Mane Six apart from each other based on silhouette alone, which is a fundamental of good character design.

On the other hand, G5’s main characters tend to cluster around a palette of oranges, purples, and pinks, which doesn’t make them stand out from each other enough. And most of the male ponies (and one female pony) have really similar manestyles for no in-universe reason, which is also very problematic in character design. The G5 ponies just don’t have the visual panache that the FiM ponies do, which makes them more difficult to get attached to.

The sad and frustrating thing about this is that the concept art for the G5 characters actually makes them look more distinctive (the main protagonist has goggles which is always an excellent design choice), and uses an art style that would look fantastic in 2D animation (at least, a different type of 2D animation than the overexaggerated cartoon style G5 used for its series of short videos). I suspect that Hasbro kinda, well, dumbed the designs down because it was aiming G5 more at small children who (supposedly) don’t care as much about sophisticated and engaging character design, and opted for 3D animation because it’s cheaper than 2D and (also supposedly) kids these days are so attention deficit that the technical limitations of 2D animation just can’t hold their interest anymore (I could write a whole other essay about that).

On that note, let’s discuss another of G5’s fatal flaws—its decision to narrow its demographic. FiM succeeded wildly in appealing to both kids and adults because it was one of those rare, glorious shows that actually decided from the onset that it was going to try to appeal to both kids and adults. It tipped its hat to both age groups while alienating neither. And it succeeded in pulling in a huge fanbase of adult men – despite the fact that on a surface level it seemed to be trying to appeal to young girls with its associated toy line, female-forward cast, and “cute”, feminine aesthetic – because the writing and production were just that good.

FiM respects its viewers’ intelligence in a way that only a minority of kids’ shows bother with, and as a result it’s entertaining for younger kids, and engrossing for not just adults, but older kids who crave sophistication in their media. FiM’s multidimensional cast, deep lore, thoughtful morals, and intricate interplay of plot, world, and characters produce a rich experience that intellectually stimulates viewers of any age.

I also have to give FiM high praise for coming up with a team of all-female main characters with really strong – and really distinct – personalities. They’re not all girly like Rarity, they’re not all tomboyish like Rainbow Dash—they represent real and valid personality types in girls and women, and those personality types aren’t reduced to mere stereotypes. I think the Mane Six make just about every girl feel heard in ways that most girl-oriented media doesn’t bother to put in the effort for.

For example, I personally really love the fact that Twilight Sparkle – ostensibly the main-est main character – is an egghead bookworm who tends to solve her problems through research and intellectual prowess, and who is also prone to anxiety, perfectionism, and a touch of OCD. Growing up, I suffered through one TV show and movie after another where nerds were generally reduced to social-reject comic relief, relegated to providing tech support for the on-trend hero (Q from James Bond, Scotty from Star Trek, Wade from Kim Possible*, etc.), or even pigeonholed as villains (which sends some questionable messages about intelligence being regarded as threatening by society at large). So it was really nice to see a TV show about a very nerdy main heroine whose nerdiness is embraced and celebrated by her friends, her mentors, and her community. I’m sure nearly every other adult FiM fan can tell you about a particular character who speaks to them and made them feel like the show was “theirs”.

That’s why, when Hasbro saw it was attracting an adult fanbase, it did the right thing in acknowledging and catering to them and respecting them as a large part of its consumer base. Hasbro helped foster a community of fans that created an experience larger than the show itself, a community that continues to this day and shows no signs of fading. And it’s really excellent that it’s a community everybody can enjoy, kids and adults alike.

Which is why I think G5 committed a huge misstep in placing its media in the same universe as FiM, but an unspecified amount of time in the future… where everything has gotten messed up. It’s one of my fiction pet peeves when franchise writers, seeking a novel source of conflict in a fictional universe, time-skip to a new troubled era so a new generation of heroes can rise. Yes, it sounds good in the writers’ room, but I think I speak for a lot of fans when I say that I really don’t like seeing the old heroes’ efforts wrecked like that.

Twilight Sparkle and her friends labored and fought through nine seasons to make Equestria a place of peace and harmony—it’s kind of a slap in the face to them to undo all of that and make the ponies start from scratch. I don’t like the idea that they’ve regressed socially to the time of the founding of Ponyville. (And speaking of that, didn’t “Hearth’s Warming Eve” establish – and the series finale reinforce – the fact that disunity among ponies summons the Windigos? Why isn’t G5 Equestria frozen over? Gaaahhhh I hate continuity holes.)

(If we’re getting into continuity holes, I also hate the fact that Sunny Starscout became an alicorn arbitrarily – even accidentally – through magic when it took Twilight Sparkle three whole seasons of hard work to have alicorn status bestowed upon her. Becoming an alicorn in Equestria is a privilege only awarded to exceptional heroines who have proved their mettle, so I was really annoyed that Sunny got handed alicorn-ness on a platter as a deus ex machina. To me, that’s not sending the best message to kids who are already growing up in a culture of entitlement. I hate to break it to you, kids, but life isn’t going to hand you anything just because you self-identify as a special snowflake main character.

Also, the whole idea of magic disappearing from Equestria in G5 makes no sense whatever because it’s very firmly established in FiM that magic is an integral part of a unicorn’s lifestyle, to the point where all unicorns use telekinesis on a daily basis just to function. You can’t just take away magic and not have it profoundly affect the unicorns.)

In the G5 media, Hasbro made a lot of nods to FiM, presumably in an effort to garner interest and loyalty from FiM fans, but they neglected to understand that G5 is not FiM and will never be FiM. And while I definitely did not want FiM to continue indefinitely and die that slow, painful death of shows that run out of ideas and jump the shark way too many times and get cancelled, you also can’t pretend like G5 is a continuation of FiM when it’s drastically different and lacks all the appealing elements of FiM. If G5 was inevitable, I would rather Hasbro have reinvented the franchise from the ground up instead of trying to shoehorn radically different characters, ideas, and lore into a preexisting universe. I really don’t like G5 leaking into my G4.

(Honestly, if you asked me to come up with a concept for G5, I’d like to see a show where the Cutie Mark Crusaders are now the age of the Mane Six. Keep the universe and continuity and overall tone, but just update the cast slightly to refresh the writing. Also that would mean Flurry Heart would be about the age the CMCs were during FiM, which is a pretty terrifying prospect.)

So there are my thoughts on why G5 was not successful and why it was a step back for the franchise as a whole. I think FiM succeeded because it had the hallmarks of any good media: timeless values, intelligent writing, talented production, respect for its fanbase, and a heaping dose of originality. G5 failed in all those regards.

… Yeah, I should go touch grass now.

*Can I just go on a rant for a second about everything that annoys me about Kim Possible? That show first aired when I was in high school, and I watched about an episode and a half of it before I was done. I know it’s got a huge cult following among people who were tweens when it aired, but it just doesn’t do anything for me. The episodes were so formulaic (“Kim foils the villain’s convoluted plan yet again, manages to be attractive and intelligent and athletic at the same time, Bonnie tries to cause teen drama, and there’s probably some romantic tension between Kim and Ron”) that I felt like once you watched one episode there was no point watching the rest because you knew exactly how it was going to go. (That said, my younger sisters watched it so I ended up being exposed to it quite a bit anyway.)

I also really felt like Kim’s character was not handled well. On paper it sounds like a fun idea to have an action hero who’s a teenage girl with a bunch of character strengths, but that sort of character is so painfully unrelatable to actual teenage girls who are awkward, feeling unattractive, struggling to find things they can succeed at, and have a way worse handle on their emotions than Kim seems to.

Maybe junior high kids enjoyed the very idealized picture of adolescence that the show painted, but I was old enough to know that high school is absolutely nothing like how it’s usually portrayed on TV—it’s not the convenient backdrop for your coming-of-age story, it’s a madhouse where you have to fight to keep your head above water until you graduate and can escape to college. Whoever decided it was a good idea to stick several hundred teenagers in the same space for six hours at a time, five days a week, must have been criminally insane. I have a real thing against kids’ shows that inaccurately portray the junior high and high school experience and set up false expectations in kids.

And on a final note, I was so annoyed with Kim’s and Ron’s “will-they-won’t-they” relationship. It was an emotional roller coaster that I never asked to board, and, like the high school thing, wasn’t true to life (I’m also of the opinion that people shouldn’t even bother dating until college). In that sort of situation, you don’t spend multiple seasons trying to figure out whether or not you want to be in a relationship with somebody. You talk to them and communicate about your feelings and what you both want to do moving forward. (But I guess the writers decided being realistic about relationships wouldn’t sustain viewer interest.)

And I got so mad when Kim and Ron ultimately ended up together even though Wade had a huge crush on Kim. Didn’t the writers feel the slightest bit sorry for Wade? He was the best part of the show, and arguably the most multidimensional character—the hyperintelligent techhead who offscreen lives a very lonely life holed up in his bedroom with his electronics, and feels insecure because of his height. He’s so much more sympathetic and relatable than Kim and way more interesting than Ron (whose entire personality can basically be boiled down to “goofball who somehow ends up being useful”). Give Wade his due, man. Short nerdy reclusive guys need love too.

… I’m so glad I spent an entire morning writing this. You’re welcome, folks.