Equestria Girls - Valentines Day

[Trinary]

I was not expecting SF to do a look (or, more accurately, for someone to pay SF to take a look) at Equestria Girls, especially not so soon after his last MLP review earlier this week. I suppose it does make sense seeing as it was (supposedly) the popularity of Sunset Shimmer (following her much better showing in Rainbow Rocks) may have helped shaped the idea of introducing Starlight Glimmer into the show as a regular.

I really enjoyed the review. The best jokes are the reference to Joe Biden’s “dog-faced pony soldier comment” and the “pen is” spellcheck comment.

I saw Equestria Girls in theaters when it first came out, having been a fan of Friendship is Magic since its first season. I admit: I had the same sentiment that a lot of folks did at the time—that this was a cynical attempt to cash in on the Monster High toys and their relative popularity, sell some new toys, etc. But that could just as easily be said of the 2010 relaunch of MLP as Friendship is Magic too. Just because something is made to sell toys or merchandise (and let’s be honest, everything in a capitalist society is geared towards making money) doesn’t mean it can’t have quality and talent behind it.

So I watched Equestria Girls and … it was okay. Thorough-goingly average, I thought. Not bad, but not great. The pacing was not great, especially when it came to the climax, as SF pointed out, and Pinkie’s rushed, forced explanation I thought was a terrible writing decision. The high school setting felt like it restricted more options than opened up new ones so I fully get the dislike for it—but there’s still quality here that can be built up and explored in later works, and it did.

Equestria Girls’ full-length features seemed to follow the Star Trek odd-even rule of quality (I can’t go with SF’s song-based rubric since all of these have songs in them).

Equestria Girls – See above: so average it’s okay. Or so okay it’s average. Either/or.
Rainbow Rocks – the best one, a glorious rock opera that really gets one invested in Sunset Shimmer, making her a much beloved character among fans despite first appearing as a really basic, boring villain.
Friendship Games – A bit of a step back from the last one, it was hard to be invested as this emphasized more ‘high school’ stakes for the most part. I also just didn’t care much about SciTwi and really was not that invested in what was going on with her.
Legend of Everfree – This got me more invested in Sci-Twi, much like it was Rainbow Rocks that sold me on Sunset Shimmer. Not as good as Rainbow Rocks, but still quite good.

The Specials and innumerable shorts and Choose Your Own Adventures are a mixed-bag, some really good (Sunset’s Backstage Pass) and a few that are bad (I outright loathe the last segment in Holidays Unwrapped) with the others being in the middle.

While there’s still a considerable segment of the MLP fandom that refuses to even acknowledge the existence of Equestria Girls, I can tell you that some friends of mine actually found themselves preferring later Equestria Girls productions (namely Rainbow Rocks) to the actual show after Season 5 when the show’s quality began to suffer.

Speaking of that, I wanted to really echo what Chuck said in closing about the connection one develops through fandom and his spider-sense comment. I’ve noticed a different appreciation or outlook on a show can be influenced in a large measure by when and how you started watching.

As I mentioned, I started watching while the first season was still on the air, around the spring of 2011. A lot of my friends, who also started watching in Seasons 1-2, have a different appreciation for what makes for good episodes and seasons as opposed to others. For us (and, it must be admitted, a considerable portion of the fandom) Season 6 was the worst season. Even Executive Producer Big Jim Miller when listing off his favorite season, listed pretty much all the ones he was working on, from Seasons 2 to 9, with the noticeable and obvious exception of Season 6 (and S3).

But when I went to BronyCon and was casually chatting with a fan on a line, he said he started watching the show with Season 5 and he thought Seasons 5 and 6 were the best ones. For my part, Season 5 was the best and Season 6 the worst, so I found it difficult to square that idea.

Then I thought back to other shows I started watching late and coming away with a different impression then longtime fans. I got into Doctor Who during David Tennant’s run and one of the first episodes I saw—one of the episodes that got me to start watching the series regularly as fan—was “Daleks Take Manhattan.” Yes, the one with the pig-men, and the DNA traveling through lightning and Dalek-human hybrids. Yes, the one that is widely hated by most Doctor Who fans. While I can now intellectually recognize many of that episode’s shortcomings, having seen more of Doctor Who since then, I still never quite shared the same disgust or loathing the episode received as compared to others. By the same token, being first introduced to Tennant, I was always a bit lukewarm on Christopher Eccleston’s run when I want back to watch it, and never warmed up to Rose as the Doctor’s one true love or whatever that was about.

Likewise, back before Channel Awesome became a toxic cesspool, the first Nostalgia Critic video I ever saw, one that I thought was so funny and made me start regularly watching him? It was his Let’s Play of Bart’s Nightmare. The video that was widely regarded as one of his worst, one that even he admits is a stinker and in his very next episode, joking repeatedly about how bad it went over. But I thought it was really hilarious and made me start watching him regularly, never having seen anything like it before. While he’s clearly done better videos and I can now see the shortcomings, I never got onboard with level of hate that one received. And it was through that video that I started watching the NC. And through the crossovers he did with Linkara, I started watching Linkara. And because of Linkara’s constant praise for SF Debris (and his cameo in Linkara’s 200th episode) here I am watching SF Debris and Linkara, long past the point where I stopped watching the NC.

At another pony convention, I was in a room with around two dozen other fans and we went around introducing ourselves and the first episode of MLP we saw. One person said their first episode was “The Mysterious Mare Do Well.” There was an instantaneous and collective wince and shudder from everyone else in the room, like the kind you’d get if you announced your birthday was on September 11. Now, as Stan Lee once said, every comic is someone’s first—but still that is the common reaction to that episode.

Having said that, this is not me being some gatekeeping asshole and going “because I watched the show from the beginning, ergo I must know best and the views of anyone who came in later don’t count because they don’t know any better.” That’s nonsense.

One’s tastes are shaped and informed by when and how you got into a series. It’s a very different feeling to watch something from the beginning and wait to watch each new episode as it comes out, week by week, season by season; as opposed to jumping on in the middle and binge watching older episodes en masse to catch-up. I’m not saying it’s better or worse, just that it’s different and leaves, in my experience, to different appreciations for the series.

[MrL1992]

Well, well... We knew this day would come!


When will self-consciousness finally cause Chuck to put his foot down on requests I wonder?

Not throwing shade at the review, the show or anyone who watches it, but as Chuck himself has pointed out, this is like,y not the kind of content he expected to be engaging with when he started the site!

[Seaward]

Ah, the moment I heard that bassline playing, I knew exactly where that joke was going to go and I love it.

I never really had the same visceral sort of reaction to EqG as a lot of bronies at the time had, nor to the idea of Twilicorn. I got into the show in a pretty dark time in my own life, binging the first two seasons during the hiatus between two and three, after having been aware of it (and consumed some fan media like Story of the Blanks and the first two Anthologies) for a little while but not yet been willing to take the plunge. I've always noticed a dip in my enjoyment of the show as a whole in later seasons, but I wouldn't have said it was a dip in quality, just a change in the way things felt.

That said, I've never actually watched an EqG product all the way through. The high school drama angle of the first movie made me abandon it midway through, since it just wasn't working for me, and though I found myself enjoying Rainbow Rocks a lot more, I had to stop watching midway through that one for unrelated reasons and just never quite felt invested enough to go back and finish.

The review was fun, and enlightening. It's always interesting when Chuck talks about enjoying but not being a fan of the show. There's a strange element of disappointment there, but at the same time an appreciation of his appreciation, if that makes sense. It's always worth remembering that not everybody will enjoy the things you do, but it is nice to hear that they understand why you're a fan.

It would be interesting to see how Rainbow Rocks goes down with Chuck. It's pretty widely regarded as a great improvement on the first, especially with how it treats Sunset and the ramifications of her actions throughout the first film, but without Twilight's adaption to the human world would it hold the same enjoyment factor for him? Who knows!

[Cheerilee]

I think it's worth pointing out a few details about Sunset Shimmer. First up, it should be noted that Princess Celestia had been pulling double-duty as the Sun God of Ponyville since her sister had gone darkside, and Celestia was later grooming Twilight Sparkle to be her successor. But now, before Twilight, along comes Sunset Shimmer, and she's got a "Sun" Cutie Mark just like Princess Celestia, but there's a Ying/Yang symbol inside Sunset Shimmer's sun. Celestia started teaching Sunset, but Sunset started becoming power hungry, cruel, and dishonest. And then she disappeared.

The portal only opens for a limited window every three years. Sunset didn't run away, she spent three years trapped in another dimension.

And from the yearly photos on the wall of the school, we see that Sunset in this other dimension shifted gradually from a white-dress wearing girl, flattered to be given the popularity crown, to a dark-dress wearing villain, mad with the power of this world. Twilight's rainbow space cannon blasted all of the evil energy that had been built up inside of Sunset, which is how Sunset was able to achieve such a quick redemption. She had a literal Demon growing inside of her, until she was reverted to a pre-power state, and her innocence was restored (although she remembers all the evil that she did). Later movies would show her power in the form of an Angel.

But I point back to her Cutie Mark. She's got a Ying and a Yang, powering her Sun. She's gonna be the next Celestia, as soon as she figures out how to harmoniously balance the powers of both her Demon and her Angel selves. She needs both to reach her true potential.

BTW, there's a great Sunset Shimmer music video (My Past is Not Today) that goes along with the second movie (Rainbow Rocks).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqnbYUG6Bn8

[Dragon Ball Fan]

related to what I said on the other thread but more appropriate here: I think as this branch of the franchise went on, the writers started fucking with viewers like me with stuff like EQG Pinkie saying "we're a really forgiving bunch" about Juniper and one of the YouTube shorts has a criminal actually going to jail but it turns out to just be an in-story work of fiction.

[Edvarius]

While I enjoyed the MLP:FIM show, I never bothered with this movie. I could recognize that there might be interesting potential there and some of the character designs looked decent enough, but it also seemed a huge step away from the fantasy elements that helped to draw me in to the show.

But with that being said I did, both as a lark and to give me something to rant about on my Tumblr page, try reading the novelization of this. And it suuuuuucked. I swear even though I had a digital copy I could still smell that unique blend of the cheapest ink, paper, and glue you could possibly find. The way Twilight would mentally go on about what the characters were wearing made me wonder if she'd been replaced by Rarity and my eyes had just skimmed over that part, and the story composition itself was pretty much "This scene happened, then this scene happened, then this scene..." with the actual conversations occasionally being described rather than written out. Then there was Twilight apparently not being able to recognize a school or trophies, as though they didn't already have those thing in Equestria. For that matter I was confused about her confusion over hands. I mean yeah, not being used to them I can definitely get, but she lives with Spike. Who normally has hands. They should not have been a new concept to her. Like, was there a line in the movie that got skipped over in the book where she asks him how to use those things? Seems like there really should have been.

So yeah, can't speak much as to how the movie was, but the adaptation was a horrible book. Would not recommend.

[G-Man]

Did anyone else see the magic mirror portal and think "I'm taking you with me - to the FLIPSIDE! You'll be my musical slaves.... FOREVER!"

[rickgriffin]

I find it funny that this was in some pearl-clutching circles considered a semi-official acceptance of the porn, as if people needed to humanize the ponies in order to make porn of them.

[Thebestoftherest]

While I enjoyed the MLP:FIM show, I never bothered with this movie. I could recognize that there might be interesting potential there and some of the character designs looked decent enough, but it also seemed a huge step away from the fantasy elements that helped to draw me in to the show.

But with that being said I did, both as a lark and to give me something to rant about on my Tumblr page, try reading the novelization of this. And it suuuuuucked. I swear even though I had a digital copy I could still smell that unique blend of the cheapest ink, paper, and glue you could possibly find. The way Twilight would mentally go on about what the characters were wearing made me wonder if she'd been replaced by Rarity and my eyes had just skimmed over that part, and the story composition itself was pretty much "This scene happened, then this scene happened, then this scene..." with the actual conversations occasionally being described rather than written out. Then there was Twilight apparently not being able to recognize a school or trophies, as though they didn't already have those thing in Equestria. For that matter I was confused about her confusion over hands. I mean yeah, not being used to them I can definitely get, but she lives with Spike. Who normally has hands. They should not have been a new concept to her. Like, was there a line in the movie that got skipped over in the book where she asks him how to use those things? Seems like there really should have been.

So yeah, can't speak much as to how the movie was, but the adaptation was a horrible book. Would not recommend.

Yeah doesn't Discord and that Minotaur guy also have hands? While she might not know how to used them, she should know about them by concept atleast.

[Thebestoftherest]

Two things one why didn't Twilight just grab and run, two was Sunset bluffing about the mirror? Because if not she be trap as well, and that wouldn't work with her plans.