Pony Thought of the Day: Wildly Speculating on Favorite Shows

If Equestria had TV/Netflix, what would each of the Mane Six watch?

Twilight is easy: PBS, Science Channel, and so on. She gets really mad when she channel flips past History channel and they're showing their usual bullshit... she misses back when they showed history.

Pinkie Pie is also easy: Cartoons, cartoons, and more cartoons.

Rarity is addicted to trashy telenovellas, the trashier the better, even though she doesn't speak a word of Spanish. Don't ask me why, it just feels like it fits.

Rainbow Dash would watch a lot of sports, you'd think, and she does, but after watching a couple of the Daring Do movies she's gotten addicted to old adventure serials, too.

Applejack doesn't have much time for watching TV, but when she does, it's cooking shows and home improvement. She's the only one of the Mane Six who watches TV news, and as a result knows less about what's going on in the world than even Rainbow Dash.

Fluttershy watches nature shows, of course, and soccer. She says it's because Angel likes it, but truth is she does too.

None of them are particularly fannish, or at least none of them watch the big Tumblr-dominating shows. The CMC, on the other hand, are nuts for Doctor Who, and Sweetie Bell has recently discovered Supernatural. (Which she probably shouldn't be watching at her age, but nobody's stopped her so far.)

This is a Wild Speculation post, so feel free to comment with your own opinions on what the Mane Six would watch!

Pony Thought of the Day: Is Everypony in this Town Crazy?

So, I've mentioned before that Fluttershy is the best portrayal I've ever seen of someone suffering from avoidant personality disorder, and Twilight Sparkle is, according to Spoilers Below's comment on my "Lesson Zero" post, a pretty good depiction of an OCD sufferer, at least in that episode.

But this leads naturally to the question of the other ponies. Do any of them suffer from any recognizable mental disorders? And the answer is, well, no. Not really.

Pinkie Pie is the obvious choice, because (as I discussed at length in my "Party of One" post) she clearly has some serious issues. But as near as I can tell (not being a professional therapist by any means, not that any doctor worth their degree would be willing to diagnose a patient based on a single 20-minute recording) Pinkie's issues don't actually map onto any one known disorder. Either she's got something new, she's suffering from a complex combination of multiple disorders, or (most likely) the creators were just messing around and made her generically "crazy."

The other ponies don't seem to have any recognizable disorders either, at least nothing that approaches the "danger to self or others" criterion. So no, Twilight, you're wrong: Everypony in this town is not crazy.

Hello everypony! Did I miss anything? (Luna Eclipsed)

OBJECTION! TAKE THAT!

It's October 22, 2011. Adele still owns the pop charts, and the top movie is Paranormal Activity 3. We're in for a long stretch of awful on the movie front, honestly; I peeked ahead and, except for one bright weekend of Robert Downey, Jr., there's nothing good in the top spot from here until late March.

In real news, crazy rich person Richard Branson opens a spaceport, utterly transforming manned space exploration from a publicity stunt Cold War nations used to remind everyone they had rockets capable of dropping nuclear warheads anywhere on the planet into a publicity stunt Richard Branson uses to remind everyone he's crazy rich. The Libyan National Transitional Council ends a month-long siege of the city of Sirte, kills deposed dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and consolidates their control of the country. And the European economy is struggling, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the austerity measures they passed despite every economist on the planet screaming at them that it was economic suicide.

On TV, we have "Luna Eclipsed," written by M.A. Larson and--in a first for the series--not directed by James Wootton, but rather by Jayson Thiessen. Thiessen co-directed "The Return of Harmony" with Wootton, and will co-direct every two-parter in the second and third seasons with him, along with solo directing half the episodes in the second and third seasons and taking over as Supervising Director in the fourth season. Also, he's the voice of Snowflake.

This is a great episode to bring him up in, because this episode has a lot of crowd scenes, and Thiessen excels at them. Take a look in the backgrounds as Twilight or Luna walk around town; they are full of ponies doing things. Too often in animation--and sadly, this includes some episodes of Friendship Is Magic--background characters either don't exist or just stand there. Here, even when the characters aren't moving, they active.

Consider the first shot after the opening credits: We open on Nightmare Moon's face as the music makes this creepy high-pitched howl. The we pan over to a long shot where Twilight and Spike walk and talk. What's interesting is that there are three separate planes of motion here--the two ponies dressed as a lion and a bee in front, then the top-hatted pony pulling the hayride quite a distance behind them, and then Twilight and Spike quite small in the back. It's a very interesting choice, since it means we have to look past all this other action to watch Twilight. In turn that means we can't focus on any one of the several actions going on, giving the impression of a bustling, lively evening. It's impressive, especially considering the shot lasts a matter of seconds before it switches to one that keeps Twilight out in front; it lasts just long enough to give the impression of a street festival but not long enough for the viewer to count how few ponies there are.

Throughout her first speech in this scene, Twilight moves quickly from scene to scene, and in each one she's in a different layer, meaning the viewer has to keep looking around the town, ensuring they catch all the little details the animators put in. In turn, that means those details all work to full effectiveness, actually reducing the number of ponies needed to make this seem like a massive event. All told, there are maybe a couple of dozen ponies shown actually attending Nightmare Night; compare the numerically much larger, but much more static and statically shot crowd scenes in "Super Cider Squeezy 6000" (probably the Wootton solo episode with the best crowd scenes) to see what a difference there is between using framing and carefully placed details to suggest a well-attended event and just pointing a camera at a large number of ponies. Which is not at all, of course, to say that Wootton is a bad director, just that Thiessen is astoundingly good at crowd scenes.

There's also a ton of great background and sight gags, musical puns, and really clever jokes in this episode, to the point of almost being distracting. My two favorite examples come in the first few minutes of the episode--the fact that the music at the start of the cold open is extremely reminiscent of In the Hall of the Mountain King, and the "amniomorphic spell" gag (which, despite the etymology being off, is almost certainly an impressively subtle Harry Potter reference).

On a story and character level, the primary function of this episode is to flesh out Luna's character a bit and set her up as a way to show how far Twilight has come. The Moon, in addition to being a feminine symbol and a symbol of dreams, is also the lesser light, a reflection of the Sun, and thus it's fitting that Luna in this episode is a lesser version of first-episode Twilight, a newcomer who doesn't fit in and is strikingly ambivalent about whether she wants to.

Though the cause of Luna's problem is that she is time-lost and missed a thousand years of social evolution, her problem itself is one virtually everyone has experienced, that of being new to somewhere or something, and being rejected by more experienced peers. Luna is, in other words, every kid who's ever started a new school, every newly minted fan who's ever been called a noob, every traveler who's found themselves trying to live in a new city or a new country. She tries to behave the ways she's used to behaving, what her experiences have taught her is the right way to be, and everyone around her rejects her. Is it any wonder she lashes out?

By contrast, we have Twilight, once the noob, now become the forum diplomat who takes noobs under her metaphorical (for now) wing. Freed from the requirement of learning a friendship lesson every week, she can now begin sharing them with others, guiding and teaching Luna in the basics of relating to other ponies--which Luna has clearly never done, as regardless of era the Royal Canterlot Voice seems designed to create a distance between the ruler and her subjects. Twilight has, in academic terms, moved on to graduate work, and with that comes her first teaching assignments. After all, they say the best way to truly learn something is to try to teach it to someone else.

But what's best about this episode is that, unlike most fish out of water comedies, it doesn't put all the burden of change on either side. There is no message here that Ponyville has been unaccepting and needs to change while Luna stays the same, or conversely that Luna needs to change to fit in and the ponies were right to reject her. It stays exactly where it should be, which is acknowledging that most conflict between people requires some change on both sides.

To the children, it says "Yes, sometimes you have to make a little effort to fit in, but don't change who you are." And to the bronies, it says, "Yes, those people who picked on you were mean, but that doesn't mean that you are a flawless saint. You could do a better job of relating to people."

Because look around you. How much of the trouble in this world is because of people rejecting others who are weird or different and therefore scary? How much of it is because people go among strangers and expect not to have to change the ways they're used to behaving?

And what could a generation of kids raised to know better do? What could an army of fans learning it, better late than never, do?

Because that's another great secret of Friendship Is Magic: True alchemy, true transformation, isn't a flare of light and a new pair of wings. It's a process, bit by bit, tiny incremental changes, almost unnoticeable. Drops in the bucket, until one day suddenly the bucket overflows and the change seems to happen all at once, even though it was really happening all along.

Next week: Surprise guest post! I'm taking my birthday off, so in my place Spoilers Below has an article for you all. I've read it, and it's a cracking good one. No spoilers beyond that--if zie wants to give you hints about what it's on, zie can do so in the comments. Anyway, the week after that I'll be back to talk about sisterhood, solidarity, and noobs.

Pony Thought of the Day: Let's Be Clear

I don't hate Equestria Girls. I haven't seen Equestria Girls, therefore it would be completely irrational to hate it.

I do have low expectations for Equestria Girls based on finding neither the premise nor the trailer remotely appealing.

There's a big difference there.

Pony Thought of the Day: Upset Fans

I've discussed this before in my articles on the episodes, but some of the comments on the Pony Thoughts of the Day this week make me think it's worth reiterating:

There are basically two kinds of fan: People who are fans of something because they like it, and people who are fans of something because it's important to them.

(Yes, there are people who are both, and other ways to categorize fans, and what I'm doing here is constructing a binary and I've already pointed out the problem with binaries. Still, for the discussion we're about to have, it's a useful binary.)

When things change in Friendship Is Magic, there are always people who like the change and people who don't. If someone really strongly dislikes the change, and they belong to the first group, they may stop being fans of Friendship Is Magic. But if they're in the second group, that's a problem, because Friendship Is Magic is important to them. They can't just leave it behind just because it made a change they don't like, at least not without a lot of thought and emotion and, yes, trauma.

This is the important bit: It is neither right nor wrong to like a show. It is neither right nor wrong for that show to be important to you. And if you feel bad that something you like is no longer likeable, or that something important to you has changed in ways you dislike, you have every right to express that you are upset.

That's not "being butthurt." It's not entitlement or weakness or anything of the sort--as we just covered with "Lesson Zero," nobody gets to tell anyone else what "should" be important to them or what they "should" feel.

All of us have things that are important to us. And no matter what it is, for every single thing that is important to you, there is someone somewhere who thinks it's a trivial concern. And for every single thing that you think is trivial, there is someone somewhere who thinks it's important.

And every single one of them is right, because everything is trivial and everything is the most important thing in the world. It's all a matter of perspective.

What matters, in the end, isn't what you feel, it's what you do with those feelings. Any feeling can be expressed creatively and constructively. Don't like Equestria Girls, and feel too strongly to do nothing? Write an essay on why you don't like it, or draw some fanart of humanized ponies done right, or post to your Facebook wall or Tumblr that you don't like Equestria Girls. But don't go around attacking people who think Equestria Girls is a great idea or people who work on the show. (Same goes for people who don't like that other people don't like Equestria Girls--feel that way all you like, but express it creatively and constructively!)

tl;dr: The problem isn't that some people care about something too much, or that some people care about the wrong things, or that some people have the wrong opinions. The problem is that a small number of people are choosing to express their feelings destructively instead of creatively.

Pony Thought of the Day: Father of the What?

Rewatching "Luna Eclipsed" for the upcoming article, I started thinking about when Twilight refers to Star Swirl the Bearded as "father of the amniomorphic spell," and specifically what "amniomorphic" might mean. Now, it's not actually a word, but it's comprised of two roots that do have meaning:

-morphic means "having to do with shape." A spoomorphic spell would therefore be either a spell that in some way is shaped like spoo, or a spell that makes things spoo-shaped or turns things into spoo.

Amnio- has a couple of possibilities.

The one that's gotten popular in the fandom is that an amnion is a kind of bowl, which eventually results in the joke that Star Swirl is Harry Potter. There's just one problem--the Greek word for pottery isn't amnion, it's keramos. Amnion was the Greek word for the placenta. Etymologically, yes, it comes from another amnion that was a bowl used to collect the blood from animal sacrifice, but in all modern words it refers to the placenta. The amniotic sac is the membrane that develops into the inner lining of the eggshell in egg-laying animals and the placenta in placental mammals, amniomancy is the art of predicting a baby's future by examining the afterbirth, and so on.

So, basically, amniomorphic spells? Whatever they are, they're gross and you probably don't want one cast on you.

Pony Thought of the Day: "Keep Calm and Trot On"

I don't have much to add to this EQ Daily post pleading with people to stop harassing DHX employees, but here's a couple of things. First, I'm quite confident it's a small number of people being jackasses, because it's always a small number of people being jackasses. "Small numbers of people being jackasses" is the second-most powerful force in human history, responsible for pretty much every war, every massacre, every horrific crime, and the reason we can't have nice things like anarchy and have to have nasty things like laws instead.

Second, the post kind of conflates the small number of jackasses harassing DHX employees with the rather larger number of people who are not happy about recent development in the show. It is entirely okay to be unhappy about Twilight becoming an alicorn (I mean, I find it silly, but Lesson Zero and all) or apprehensive about Equestria Girls. But that unhappiness has to be expressed appropriately. Want to bitch and moan on your own blog or a discussion forum? Cool--but make sure you're bitching and moaning about the work. Even, if you like, criticize the people who make it--to share something you've created is to invite criticism of your skill at making it or the ideas that appear to underly it. But--and this is key!--there's a difference between criticism, which is based on a reasoned argument that uses evidence and suggests or implies a path to improvement, and insults or harrassment. Learn the difference, and try to stay on the criticism side of the line.

Finally, the most powerful force in human history is a small number of people doing their best to oppose and heal the damage done by jackasses. If you have Twitter, maybe you could say something nice about the show or the people who make it under the #thankyouDHX tag. Tell them I sent you, if you want--I don't have Twitter, so it's the best I can do.