Pony Thought of the Day: The Book Lineup

So, I've more or less finalized the lineup of articles for My Little Po-Mo Volume 1:

• 26 Sunday articles from this site, everything from "Dear Princess Celestia..." (which will be the book's introduction) to "This day was going to be perfect/The kind of day of which I've dreamt since I was small (The Best Night Ever)." All are revised and expanded for the book.
• Two articles I wrote for other sites, both of which I revised and expanded for the book:
• Fillies for Feminism
• The Brony Effect
• An excerpt from an article I wrote for an essay anthology that hasn't been published yet because I'm the only contributor who turned theirs in on time: A Brief History of Saturday Morning.
• Four brand-new, book exclusive articles:
• Theophrasus Bombastus Twilight Sparkle von Hohenheim
• The Melancholy of Celestia Suzumiya
• A Cutie Mark Conundrum
• Today I Learned... (which will summarize the first season and close out the book)

Feel free to keep suggesting articles, though. Even if I don't put them in this book, there's always the next one--and who knows, if it's appropriate and a good idea, I might put it in this one after all. I thought I had the list nailed down yesterday, but somebody suggested an article to me on Twitter and it was too perfect not to do.

Pony Thought of the Day: Are we appropriating MLP?

Two things before the actual PTOD: First, I finally broke down and got a bloody Twitter account. If you'd like to follow me, I'm @Froborr.

Second, please note, I'm linking here to an article by Amanda Marcotte, a writer and activist I greatly admire. The article in question is not her best work and makes some assumptions about bronies that I think most of us would regard as incorrect. Please don't prove her right with your response; if you comment on the article or message her, do so with the love and tolerance that are the motto of our community.

As I discussed in my Pony Thoughts of the Day on implied viewers, I think the show does offer a space for adult geek viewers of either gender, though the original intent was most likely to make a space for the show’s creators. At the same time, there are a plethora of shows for adult geeks, but as far as I know this is the only currently airing show for small kids that depicts women as full, equal human beings, each of who is an individual. The kids need this show, so much as I love it, if it ever came to a conflict between being good for the kids and good for the geeks, I have to say that the kids should win.

Which makes Amanda Marcotte’s Slate article on Equestria Girls deeply unsettling for me, because she has an explanation for perhaps the biggest question about Equestria Girls: Why?

Turning the ponies into human girls does seem like a baffling choice on its surface. There are plenty of teenage girl dolls for little girls to buy, from the aforementioned Bratz to the ever-popular Barbie, but the Ponies were really holding down the market by appealing to the apparently genetic affinity little girls have for all things equestrian that dates back at least to National Velvet. But what if the change wasn't about little girls at all? What if there was another audience—an older, male, and kind of off-putting audience—that also loves the Ponies and wants nothing more than imagery of them as humans to appeal to their less-than-innocent fantasies about really getting personal with their favorite toys? If there was such an audience, they have a little bit more disposable income than little girls, and selling to them, even if you alienate parents of little girls, might end up being quite profitable indeed.

If true, and it seems plausible enough, then bronies are crossing a line from enjoying Friendship Is Magic to appropriating it. If we are exerting influence on major creative decisions, then something is deeply wrong and we need to find a way to stop it.

That said, I’m not convinced this is actually true. Marcotte makes the erroneous assumption that bronies are watching the show out of a prurient interest. While it’s true that Friendship Is Magic porn exists, it’s unsurprising that a search with the word “porn” in it turned up porn. A better test would be googling a character name with SafeSearch off (I do not recommend actually attempting this); entering a female character from Avatar the Last Airbender or Pokemon produces porn much higher in the results than a Friendship Is Magic character. There’s more than there was a year ago, admittedly, but clop is still controversial—is there any other fandom where porn is debated, rather than an accepted fact?

It’s also a stretch to refer to the Equestria Girls designs as “sexy.” Yes, they all wear skirts (a decision I’ve criticized before), but otherwise there isn’t anything particularly sexualized in their presentations. They are neither realistic depictions of young women nor overtly sexualized; they look, as the mother quoted in the article says, like Bratz dolls. I find it hard to believe, and hard to believe that Hasbro believes, that “people who want to have sex with Bratz dolls” are a lucrative potential market, let alone the subset of that group that are also bronies.

No, I suspect a much more likely culprit is that, after three years, the original members of the target demographic are starting to age out of the show, and Hasbro is trying to find a way to squeeze a few more dollars out of them. They did something similar before, with My Little Pony Tales in 1992, long before bronies. Admittedly those characters were still ponies, but more anthropomorphized than the first incarnation.

So, this probably isn’t an attempt to appeal to bronies. But if it is, or if at some future point Hasbro and DHX start making major creative decisions in an attempt to appeal to bronies instead of little girls, then as I said we’ll know we’ve crossed the line from appreciation to appropriation. At that point, I believe we in the brony community would have a collective responsibility to try to find a way to encourage the show to return to being the best thing on television for little girls.

Pony Thought of the Day: Rariplexity

Is Rarity the most complex character ever to appear in a children’s show? No, not when you consider characters like Avatar the Last Airbender’s Zuko or pretty much the entire cast of Princess Tutu.

Is she the most complex character ever to appear in a show for children this young? As far as I know, yes. Yes she is. While Fluttershy is my favorite pony and probably always will be (unless they do an episode where she’s, like, a bigot or something), Rarity is the most fun character in the show to write about for this blog, by a wide margin.

Pony Thought of the Day: This Comic Made Me Laugh Too

Great, another character with Nice Guy Syndrome that I'll get yelled at for.

Source: Crimsonbugeye's DeviantArt

Pony Thought of the Day: This Comic Amuses Me Because I Am Five

I like this comic. I wish I knew the source; I found it on Tumblr but the person who shared it didn't give any attribution.

Edit: Commenter ppplusplus found the source! Thanks!

http://doublewbrothers.deviantart.com/art/A-show-for-little-girls-349191758

Pony Thought of the Day: Subtext, Shipping, and Space

One of my favorite things about Friendship Is Magic is the near-total lack of romantic relationships. There are very few canonical pairs, and except for Shining Armor and Cadance, they're all far in the background--pretty much just the Cakes and the Mane Six's parents.

There are two things I like about this. One is purely personal: I'm sick of romantic subplots getting shoved into everything, and glad to see something that doesn't have them for once. The other is more for others' sake: it creates a space into which viewers so inclined can insert interpretations of the characters' sexuality and romantic behavior that might not be supported by the text.

It makes shipping easier, in other words.

Now, I personally am not a big fan of shipping; as I said, I'm sick of romantic subplots, so I'm not going to make up my own. That said, shipping does serve a useful function in that it allows people whose sexual interests might be underrepresented or even taboo to find something for themselves in mass media. For example, there is no way in hell Lyra/Bon-Bon could be depicted as a canonical pairing in a children's show in 2013; Western culture has come a long way in combating its rampant homophobia in the past few years, but nonetheless the mere depiction of a same-sex couple is still considered more risque than a heterosexual couple.

By not having much in the way of onscreen romance, the show allows everything from my own "all ponies are entirely asexual, but a small percentage are romantic asexuals" to "everypony is having off-camera lesbian orgies multiple times a day." So I can happily watch knowing that I'll never be contradicted by the show, but so can someone who ships Big Mac/Cranky Doodle or Fluttershy/Crysalis or Angel/Spike. (Do people ship that last one? If so, is it called BuffyShipping or VampireShipping or something like that? Because that'd amuse me greatly. Still wouldn't touch those fics with a ten-foot pole, though.)

You don't have any cutie marks *either*? I thought I was the only one! (The Cutie Pox)

Sweetie Belle bowls WITH HER FACE.
Anyone who dislikes the CMC is OBJECTIVELY WRONG.

It's November 12, 2011. The top song is Rihanna featuring [somebody] with "[stupid title]." As we've come to expect from top Rihanna singles, the song is repetitive, brainless, and cliche, and the video is hilariously pretentious. The top movie this weekend is "Immortals," yet another CG-fest action movie that forgets to have a story, characters, or acting in it. Since last episode, Barnes & Noble released the nook, which will become the number two dedicated e-book reader, a record number of Americans (just shy of 50 million) are living below the poverty line, and the International Atomic Energy Commission reveals that Iran may be working on nuclear weapons technology. The U.S. demands that Iran stop, apparently under the impression that the only country in history ever to use nuclear weapons to kill people has the moral authority to tell other countries whether they get them.

“The Cutie Pox,” written by Amy Keating Rogers and directed by Jayson Thiessen, isn’t a bad episode or even really a mediocre one. It’s just that, from “Party of One” to “Sisterhooves Social,” the show was on fire for seven straight episodes, and now that it’s back to being merely pretty good, it’s a bit of a let-down. It also does not help at all that this is the second episode in a row to focus on a Cutie Mark Crusader, though admittedly “Sisterhooves Social” had too much Applejack and Rarity in it to be considered a pure Cutie Mark Crusader episode.

The episode also features Zecora more heavily than any episode since her debut. I’ve addressed why I consider her a deeply problematic character before, so here I will simply repeat my call for the only cure for tokenism: we need more zebras on the show! There are some problems with the plotting, too, most notably that Applejack and Twilight Sparkle seem to make a huge logical leap when they decide to seek out Zecora to cure Apple Bloom, and then Zecora coincidentally shows up anyway, making it entirely unnecessary. I suppose it’s possible that they thought a five-year-old would need reminding that Zecora was involved, but the show is normally more confident of its audience’s ability to follow along. Also, it doesn’t really matter much, but it’s never made entirely clear whether the effects of the Heart’s Desire plant merely simulated the ancient plague, or the original Cutie Pox was caused by ponies using Heart’s Desire.

There’s also the question of why Apple Bloom doesn’t get her heart’s desire, but that’s easily explained both diegetically and non-diegetically. Non-diegetically, entities that grant wishes are almost always tricksters, and grant a parody of the wish instead. This episode fits neatly into that narrative tradition, but more interesting is the diegetic explanation.

Consider the Mane Six in “The Cutie Mark Chronicles.” For each of them, it’s not simply a matter of doing a particular kind of work and discovering they’re great at it; Applejack and Twilight Sparkle in particular have been doing farmwork and magic, respectively, for years when they get their cutie marks. In every one of the flashbacks in that episode, what causes the appearance of the cutie mark is not discovering their talent, but discovering that they love their talent. That's why Rarity's talent is design and not mining; why Rainbow Dash's is racing and not sky-clearing, and so on.

Apple Bloom doesn't know what it is that she loves to do. She has shown, by the end of this episode, an amazing talent for various kinds of hands-on work, most notably carpentry in "The Showstoppers" and potion-making in "The Cutie Pox" itself. Yet despite demonstrating these talents, Apple Bloom still doesn't have her cutie mark, because she hasn't found--or decided on--her calling.

Which is exactly why she gets the titular Cutie Pox. Since she wishes for any cutie mark, the Heart's Desire gives her every cutie mark. At least, she would presumably have continued getting new cutie marks for the rest of her life if she hadn't been cured. And note that most of the talents Apple Bloom demonstrates are showy, public ones that a performer might have--hula hoop stunts, plate-spinning, tightrope walking, and so on. This is because Apple Bloom's motivation for wanting a cutie mark is her desire for validation (that is, her desire for proof that she has value); she wants the approval and acceptance of others, and she believes that she can get that if she is seen to have a cutie mark. (Interestingly, the precise reasons that Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle want their cutie marks are never revealed; we can presume it's similar to Apple Bloom's reasons, but there's little actual textual evidence for this.)

Our society has a lot of ugly messages about validation floating in it, especially during the prime dating years of late teens through twenties, which happen also to be the prime brony years. The most common is the message that you need a committed, romantic, sexual relationship to be a whole person--that anyone who lacks such a thing or, worse, has never experienced it is somehow lacking. Combined with our culture's general heteronormativity, many of us end up internalizing the message that you need a member of the opposite sex to validate you. Broadly, men get told they need to get laid, and women get told they need to have a boyfriend or get married.

This is a deeply poisonous idea. It both feeds and is fed by the pernicious "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" myth that poisons so many relationships, it aggravates loneliness by encouraging the lonely person to think that they are less of a person because they are lonely, and it is a major contributing factor to Nice Guy Syndrome.

Worst of all, though, it blinds you to other sources of validation. The search for validation is one of the great motivators; once all your basic needs of physical survival are met, which for most of us (alas, not all by any means) is relatively easy, it's the search for validation that drives most of what we do. But the insistence that there is One True Way to Validation obscures the many, many other ways to be validated, or the fact that different possible sources of validation work for different people.

At the end of the episode, typically for Cutie Mark Crusader episodes, Apple Bloom appears to learn nothing. The overt friendship lesson for the kids, about not trying to rush things or be dishonest, seems to be entirely ignored when she waits for a matter of seconds before resuming her crusade with Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle. However, as I've been saying for some time now, the show is increasingly operating on two levels, with an overt friendship lesson for the kids and a subtler one that's applicable to bronies.

There do seem to be hints that Apple Bloom has internalized the other lesson, about not assuming there's only one way to be validated. She doesn't need a cutie mark to feel that she has value; she can achieve that feeling by coming clean about a misdeed, earning her elders' approval with a well-crafted letter to Celestia, or having fun with her friends. Most importantly, because she has lots of ways to feel that she has value, she can start to develop an internal ability to self-validate when the other sources aren't around. Maybe then she can figure out who she is and what she wants, and actually get that cutie mark.

Next Week: Rainbow Dash sings, tortoises fly, and everything is wonderful forever.