Video Vednesday: Vlog Review: The Legend of Korra S4E7 "The Reunion"

Sorry this is late everyone. Turns out it's not actually possible to upload a video to YouTube on a shitty Starbucks public connection in the course of a single half-hour lunch break. Lesson learned.

In which I talk about genocidal pie fights. I mean, a bunch of other things, too, but let's face it, you can't talk about genocidal pie fights and expect anyone to remember anything else you said.

Video Vednesday: Vlog Review: The Legend of Korra S4E6 "The Battle of Zaofu"

In which I admit to being really wrong about Zhu Li, talk a little about Kuvira as a mirror of Korra, compare metalbending to bloodbending, and acknowledge how terrifying both airbending and Varrick are.

Video Vednesday: Legend of Korra S4E5 "Enemy at the Gates"

In which I make predictions that are confirmed by the TITLE of the next episode, plus predictions that are proven wrong by the next episode. Also some of why Kuvira is scary, and general ramblings about fascism, imperialism, and bad CG.

As usual, Tumblr folks will need to click through to my main blog to see the video for some absurd reason.

Video Vednesday: Legend of Korra S4E4 "The Calling" Vlog

I typed "The Callening" like four times, I don't know what's wrong with me. Ikki gets an episode, apparently. Was there demand for an Ikkisode? I don't know, I have very little sense of what's going on in any given fandom, even one's I'm theoretically a part of.

MOAR TOPH PLZ.

Video Vednesday: Vlog for The Legend of Korra S4E3 "The Coronation"

And the Korra vlogs continue with episode 3! This is kind of rambly, but I'm mostly rambling about Toph, so it's okay.

(Note for people viewing this through Tumblr: the service I use to repost all my blog posts to Tumblr fubars the video. If you want to watch it, just click the link and go to my main blog.)

Video Vednesday: Vlog: The Legend of Korra S4E02 "Korra Alone"

Patreon backers at $5 or higher get to see these videos weeks in advance, plus like everyone at $2 or higher they get to read The Near-Apocalypse of '09 entries months in advance!

Vlog review of The Legend of Korra, Season 4, Episode 2, "Korra Alone." I talk about structural similarities and references to AtLA episodes "Zuko Alone," "The Storm," and "Appa's Lost Days," how those help set the stage for the return of Toph, and my hopes for a sequence where Zuko, Katara, and Toph fight an entire army to liberate Ba Sing Se.

Video Vednesday: Legend of Korra S4E1 "After All These Years"

The next pony article is done, but since I had this ready to launch, I've decided to hold it until Thursday.

Welcome to a new weekly feature, Video Vednesdays, when I post one of the videos I'm making for my Patreon! For the first dozen-and-a-bit of these videos, that'll be vlog reviews of the final Korra Season!

So, here's my vlog review of The Legend of Korra, Season 4, Episode 1, "After All These Years." I talk about my hopes and concerns for the season, my intense dislike of Mako, and approval of the decision to withhold a certain character until the end of the episode.

Patreon backers get access to these videos as I make them as opposed to as I post them publicly, plus immediate access to The Near Apocalypse of '09!

Pony Thought of the Day: Princess Twilight's First Decree

In a silly mood, so I threw this together.

Enjoy!

Twilight Sparkle. I mean seriously, I can't even work with that. (Owl's Well That Ends Well)

Spike's true colors revealed!

It's April 22, 2011. The top song is still "E.T.," and the top movie is still "Rio." In real news, there's not much going on: Government crackdowns on the Arab Spring protests are getting more violent, Anne Robinson leaves The Weakest Link, leading to its cancellation, and Apple and Google are revealed to be keeping a massive database (presumably called Skynet) tracking the movements of smartphone owners.

In ponies, Cindy Morrow gives us a predictably mediocre outing with "Owl's Well That Ends Well." The episode has some good laughs, an extremely annoying running gag, and a creepily adorable new pet for Twilight.Unfortunately, it's also heavily focused on Spike, who is at his absolute jerkiest until second season's "Secret of My Excess," and while it does a fairly good job of making his behavior laughable and pathetic, there are a couple of odd missteps.

Spike's jerkassery in this episode is most definitely a play on the Nice Guy Syndrome he was displaying in "Dog and Pony Show." As I mentioned in that article, Spike is stuck on a transactional model of relationships: he is "nice" (that is, subservient and self-effacing) to a pony, and expects affection and companionship in return. It's a simple exchange that has the slight flaws of being incredibly passive, easily prone to turning passive-aggressive, and not remotely resembling how real relationships actually work. The advantage for the "Nice Guy" (who should never be confused for a genuinely nice person, but always is in both his own mind and mass media) is that since he never expresses what he actually wants, he never has to deal with being rejected.

The typical progression of Nice Guy Syndrome is cyclical. Its early stages are that transactional relationship; the self-described "Nice Guy" awkwardly and uncomfortably latches onto a woman, continually offering gifts, services, and emotional support, as opposed to taking an honest approach which might allow her agency and thereby risk rejection.. The woman may be aware of how strange this all is, and respond with statements of gratitude but underlying discomfort, or she may think the "Nice Guy" is being genuinely nice and treat him as a good friend, unaware that he has an underlying ulterior motive. Eventually, the woman starts dating someone. Since the "Nice Guy" cannot handle the notion that women has agency, because that in turn implies the possibility of rejection, he cannot deal with the notion that the woman is capable of making good decisions for herself, and therefore concludes that this new person must be a jerk. Any behavior which is less than entirely passive and submissive is taken as evidence of jerkiness. Eventually, the "Nice Guy"--possibly based on repetitions of this cycle or evidence from talking to "Nice Guy" friends--concludes that "women only date jerks" and becomes increasingly bitter and more vocally misogynistic. At this point, they can either grow up and stop being weaselly little passive-aggressive jerks, or they can start throwing money at "pick-up artist" scams and become even more bitter and misogynistic. Sadly, most choose the latter.

"Owl's Well That Ends Well" depicts the point in Spike's cycle where the object of his poorly expressed affections brings a new man into her life, the point where his self-centered and idiotic approach to relationships hits inevitable failure. Twilight becomes close to a new male character, Owlowiscious, and Spike's fragile Nice Guy ego immediately concludes Owlowiscious is somehow evil. The episode mostly does a good job of showing how the exact same behavior is viewed as harmless or neutral by Twilight Sparkle, but menacing and untrustworthy from Spike's, and to that end here's a new My Little Po-Mo vlog showcasing the different points of view.

Unfortunately the scene at the end of the vlog suggests that there is at least some objectivity to Owlowiscious' menace, a suggestion which has no support in the three seasons of the show so far (indeed, after this episode Owlowiscious' appearances can be numbered on one hand). That suggestion of objectivity weakens the depiction, but to an extent that's made up for by Spike cavorting in a mustache, cape, and top hat, making it abundantly clear who the villain of this scenario is. (It's hard to see what other purpose that costume could serve; his retrieval of it is framed like a joke, but it's not actually funny, and endures for several shots too long to be just for that attempt at a gag.)

Regardless of that one moment, it's pretty clear that Owlowiscious is a problem only in Spike's mind. Spike never considers whether Twilight Sparkle might be capable of making her own informed decisions about who to relate with; he projects his own insecurities regarding his position as her assistant and friend into a scenario of being her protector, much as he fantasized about unnecessarily rescuing Rarity in "Dog and Pony Show." White Knight-ism and Nice Guy Syndrome are frequently closely intertwined, so it's no surprise he concocts a way to reframe his possessiveness of Twilight as a need to "prove" to her that she's making a mistake in regards to Owlowiscious' character.

At no point does Spike consider talking to Twilight. He could, in theory, just tell her how he sees their relationship. He could tell her about the fears that Owlowiscious provokes, reveal his insecurity, and be reassured and comforted. He will never do this, however. The reason he tells himself is that it's a "burden" on Twilight, because he likes to envision himself as supporting and protecting her, and sees the support-for-affection and service-for-gratitude relationships as flowing in only one direction. The real reason, however, is simply that he lacks the courage to make himself vulnerable. There is a chance that Twilight might respond in a way that he finds hurtful, or reject him, and he is too fearful of that possibility to risk it.

The result is that he utterly denies that Twilight has any agency in this situation. He does not permit her to make any informed choices about her relationship with Spike, because he doesn't want her to have the power to hurt him. In so doing he sets himself up to forget that she has her own unique interior life, her own needs and wishes and feelings, and tries to engineer situations that force her feelings about Owlowiscious to match his own. In short, he aggressively denies Lesson Zero, and then acts surprised when, on figuring out that he's doing this, Twilight responds with anger and confusion.

As she herself says, in this episode Spike isn't the person Twilight thought she knows and loves. That's because Spike's transactional model is (as any transactional model must be) highly conditional. If Twilight doesn't keep up her end of the bargain she never made and doesn't know about, then in Spike's mind the deal is off and Spike's behavior drastically changes. Unfortunately, while a new unstated bargain forms at the end of the episode, there's little evidence that Spike has learned the underlying lesson, which is the same lesson the series has been repeating for a few episodes now: Relationships require openness and honesty. Don't assume you know how others feel, and don't presume to dictate how they "should" feel.

The series is continuing to build up to something, a realization that is still a few episodes away and in another season, but we can see the shape of it now. There is something underlying all friendships, all healthy relationships with other people. Something without which kindness, generosity, honesty, loyalty, laughter, and friendship become twisted parodies of themselves, and that something has to do with recognizing the interiority of others.

The groundwork is laid for what may be the best and most important episode of the entire series. But to get there will require challenging the structure and premise of the show itself, and in the logic of television, that requires a season break. We must therefore put it aside for a little while, knowing that sooner or later, it must be addressed.

Next week: The ablation of Ms. Pinkamena Diane Pie.

Pony Thought of the Day: I Make Video Sometimes

Too busy prepping for Cloudsdale Congress to come up with a Pony Thought of the Day today. As an apology, here's the intro video for one of my panels.

I'm *probably* going to do something to smooth the transition between the first and second clip, I'm just not sure what. Let me know if you have any thoughts on something to go there.

I'm the monster. (Dragonshy)

Not a level-appropriate encounter... for the dragon.

It's November 26, 2010, and the top song on the Billboard charts is Rihanna featuring Drake autotuning her way through "What's My Name." The nicest thing I can say about it is that it's less bad than the last two top songs we've suffered through. No change at the box office, with Harry Potter still running the show. In non-entertainment news, NATO agrees to start pulling out of Afghanistan, which I'm sure has nothing at all to do with Wikileaks' revelations last month about the war crimes NATO forces committed there, North and South Korea play at nuclear brinksmanship, and the wedding of Prince William is announced (which will matter for ponies in about one and two-thirds seasons). To prove that not all news is war or trivia, the U.S. also creates a polar bear preserve twice the size of the U.K, which is pretty awesome.

Meanwhile in the world of candy-colored magic equines, we have "Dragonshy," the first episode by Meghan McCarthy and, as I mentioned last week, the best episode we've looked at yet.

The big temptation, of course, is to make this post entirely about Fluttershy. She is best pony, after all, at least if we ignore fanworks and fanon, and it would be easy to fill a couple thousand words just talking about how completely awesome she is in this episode. That, however, would be the job of a fan blog, not an analysis blog. A fan I may be, but a fan blog this is not, and so we shall have to reluctantly force ourselves to consider something other than the awesomeness that is Fluttershy. I'll try to keep the post to just being mostly about her.

Let us instead discuss, at least to start with, the awesomeness that is Meghan McCarthy. By coincidence, I happen to be writing this article just a few days after the premier of her first season as story editor, and it's interesting to compare. Two years ago, she was very nearly unknown, having worked on only three shows prior, at least as far as IMDB is aware: Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Class of 3000, and Fish Hooks. Of those, Foster's is the only one I've seen or even heard of prior to writing this article. Now she's The Good Pony Writer, responsible for such stellar scripts as "Party of One," "Lesson Zero," and "A Canterlot Wedding."

Had I written this article a week earlier (note: I write the articles anywhere from several days to a week before posting), we could have left it there. Until a week ago, we lived in a universe where "Call of the Cutie" and "Hearts and Hooves Day" were Meghan McCarthy's weakest episodes, and by my count there were at least ten episodes worse than either. But unfortunately, we no longer live in that universe; we live in a universe where "The Crystal Empire" exists, and (especially mere days after the premiere) there is no way to watch "Dragonshy" untainted by the knowledge of what is to come.

It's too bad, really. The reason I list top songs and movies and news stories at the beginning of each post is to try to locate these episodes in the time of broadcast, in the hopes of approaching them as the viewers would have at the time. This is really, really hard with a show as recent as this, because the differences between 2010 and 2012 aren't that great. It gets really hard when we have an excellent episode by an excellent writer to talk about, and yet the episode fresh in my mind is one that has the fandom calling for her head.

This is particularly an issue with "Dragonshy," because unlike most of McCarthy's episodes, "Dragonshy" and "The Crystal Empire" follow a standard adventure template: The mane six travel somewhere, encounter a monster, and have to defeat it or drive it off. Further, the dragon is extremely similar to King Sombra: both speak very little, have very little actual screen-time, are associated with clouds of darkness, and have their threat primarily demonstrated by means of Celestia describing it to Twilight.

The big difference, however, is that the dragon is an effective villain. We will most likely talk about how and why Sombra fails to be effective when we get to season 3; for now, let's talk about what makes the dragon a good villain.

It's important for an adventure story to have a good villain. A character story doesn't need one; a character story is about getting into a protagonist, learning who they are as you watch them grow or change. The question a character story most needs to answer is who, as in "Who is this character?" and "Who are they becoming?" An adventure story, on the other hand, is about watching a protagonist overcome an obstacle or weather a threat; it's not about who but how, as in "How will they get out of this one?" (Not "Will they get out of this one?" That's a thriller or horror story or maybe a tragedy, not an adventure.)

To answer a question effectively, a work must get its audience to ask the question, so that they care about the answer. If the question is "Who is this character?" then it follows that a character story depends on having an interesting protagonist who provokes the audience to want to know more about them. If the question is "How will they get out of this one?" then it follows that an adventure story must have interesting obstacles that provoke the audience to ask the question; usually, that means an effective villain.

Several elements make the dragon effective. First, we see his threat right from the start, when smoke covers the sky. This immediately has Fluttershy in a panic, and soon after Twilight reads out a letter from Celestia and confirms the threat. It's important that the episode does both; if only Fluttershy panicked, then (given her usual timidity) we wouldn't know that the dragon is a serious threat. On the other hand, if we had only the letter from Celestia, who is a remote character both physically and emotionally, we wouldn't have the immediate connection that a pony we care about is afraid. The two together combine to make the dragon genuinely menacing.

Once the dragon is established to be a real threat, he stays off-screen for most of the episode. This enhances the threat he poses, because the viewer is forced to imagine a being capable of snoring so much smoke it blots out the sky, or roaring so loud it shakes an entire mountain. The danger of this technique, of course, is that he'll be disappointing once we actually get to see him, but this is easily enough averted by having him face and defeat five of the Mane Six in rapid sequence.

Finally, enraged by Rainbow Dash's straight-up attack, he emerges from his cave. However, the dragon does not actually attack; he does something far more interesting, and subtle enough that I didn't catch it until the excellent Samdamandias pointed it out to me on the Lunaverse forum. I've embedded a vlog where I lay it out, but basically the next scene is something straight out of a nature film: the dragon engages in a threat display in an attempt to dominate and drive off the ponies, Fluttershy counters with a threat display of her own, and as her threat display is more effective, the dragon is immediately reduced to a submissive posture.

This is an incredibly significant moment. First, it's the establishing moment for Fluttershy's character: in the words of the inimitable Douglas Adams, "You would have to push through a lot of soft squidgy bits in order to find a bit that didn’t give when you pushed it. That was the bit that all the soft squidgy bits were there to protect." Second, it shows us why McCarthy is able to write the dragon (or Crysalis, for that matter) as an effective villain.

Looking at McCarthy's episodes, it becomes clear that she is more comfortable writing character episodes than adventures. Why, then, would she write an adventure as her first episode for the show?

Let's go back to the distinction we started with: Character episodes are about characters encountering and overcoming or being overcome by elements of themselves. Adventures are about characters encountering and overcoming external threats.

But what happens when the external threat is an element of the character? This is an approach that's gained a lot of traction in televised fantasy in recent years, largely because one show took that idea and ran with it all the way to becoming one of the most popular and most influential cult hits of the 1990s: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In Buffy, classic monsters function simultaneously as villains in their own right and metaphors for typical teen problems; in one of the most obvious examples, the main villain of the second season is a nice-seeming boyfriend who has sex with the female protagonist and turns evil immediately on getting what he wants.


As Twilight points out in "Dragonshy," it makes no sense for Fluttershy to be afraid of the dragon. Fluttershy has shown no fear for monsters before, having walked up to the manticore quite confidently in "Elements of Harmony," and she shows no particular fear of monsters after this episode. She claims to be specifically afraid of dragons, but shows no fear of Spike. True, she explains this away by saying that Spike's a baby dragon and therefore nonthreatening, but it's still a bit of a stretch, since in general Fluttershy isn't afraid of physical threats; Fluttershy is afraid of social threats.

Consider what Fluttershy says about herself in this and later episodes, and how she behaves toward others. She is extremely cautious about new people, and instinctively assumes a submissive posture upon encountering them (as in "Mare in the Moon"). She is so afraid of provoking the disapproval or anger of others, and so sensitive to that anger upon encountering it, that it dominates her life entirely; just as Rainbow Dash almost never touches the ground, Fluttershy almost always positions herself below whatever pony she's talking to. Her experience of others is thus as frightening entities that loom over her and must be conciliated, just as the initial appearance of the dragon is as a vast cloud of smoke, and then later a mountain, both looming presences that hang over the tiny ponies.

The dragon, in other words, is Fluttershy; it is her fear and her imagination of what will happen if she upsets another pony. This is why it is so much fun to watch her finally stand up to it: In an inversion of Applejack's discovery that her greatest strength is a weakness, Fluttershy discovers strength in her weakness. The same hypersensitivity to the attitudes and stances of others that makes her afraid to provoke anger and judgment (and, incidentally, the same hypersensitivity that makes her good with animals, as again note her encounter with the manticore) enables her to instinctively realize the dragon is posturing, not attacking, and that she can posture back and force him to back down.

Put another way, the entire episode consists of Fluttershy holding Fluttershy back. By defeating the dragon, Fluttershy overcomes those parts of herself that are holding her back; she defeats herself, and by doing so achieves victory.

Unlike "Boast Busters," which played with the adventure structure but left the content largely intact, "Dragonshy" sticks to a typical adventure structure, the purest since the series premiere. However, it uses that structure to tell what is ultimately a character story, and manages thereby to become unquestionably the best story we've looked at yet. McCarthy is up to a delicious start--and from our vantage point, just past watching what is probably her worst episode, it's worth remembering just how good she was out of the gate.

Next week: A classic odd couple and a heavy storm; it must be time for a slumber party at Twilight's house!