Pony Thought of the Day: Season Two Credits

So you know the train that suddenly appears in the opening credits starting in "Lesson Zero?" Do you think they added it when they rebuilt Ponyville after Discord trashed it?

Pony Thought of the Day: Season Overlaps

In a lot of ways, "Return of Harmony" works better as a finale for Season 1 than a premier for Season 2. It's the culmination of all the friendship lessons, using them to save the day, and it balances the Epic Two-Part Battle Against Ancient Evil from the beginning of the season. Meanwhile, "Lesson Zero" actually introduces the new premise of the show.

But I actually think it's better placed where it is, both because it leads well into "Lesson Zero" in ways we'll discuss in the next couple of weeks, and because it is a strong enough episode to be excellent wherever it goes. "Best Night Ever," on the other hand, would be badly overshadowed stuck between "Party of One" and "Return of Harmony." Also, "Best Night Ever" is a celebration and reminiscence of Season 1, while "Return of Harmony" is about closing off Season 1 so that Season 2 can begin.

Pony Thought of the Day: Fan or Fanatic?

What is the line for being a brony? At what point should someone be considered to be taking it too far, and possibly in need of psychological help?

Because, I mean, somebody who dresses up as their favorite pony for a fan event? Clearly quite the dedicated fan, but there's nothing pathological there. Somebody who seriously and without irony declares their intent to marry a fictional character, including setting a date and writing a ceremony? Clearly something has gone very wrong there.

But where is the line in between? Is it just that there's a certain amount of dedication beyond which you are too dedicated (spending an hour a day doing pony-related things is fine, spending X hours a day is too many), or does it matter what you're spending that time doing? For example, is X bigger if you're spending that time creating something? Is X bigger if your pony time is with other people?

Or does it have nothing to do with how much time you spend or what you spend it doing--is it determined by what impact brony-ness has on you?

No answers today, just questions.

Pony Thought of the Day: I cannot WAIT until Sunday...

So here's something I couldn't find a place to fit into the article on "Return of Harmony": Food. It's not at all surprising that the first sign of Discord's return is cotton-candy clouds, chocolate rain, and corn popping in the fields, anymore than it's surprising that Pinkie Pie has a voracious appetite. Food is intimately connected with one of the major literary precursors to both modern cartoons and postmodernism in general, nonsense literature. Nonsense literature (which was mostly a Victorian British thing, and eventually got more-or-less absorbed into later artistic movements in the 20th century; the most familiar examples to modern readers are Lewis Carroll's Alice books and Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat") worked by taking the arbitrary logics of every day life and replacing them with new, equally arbitrary logics.

 For example, consider eating: we have arbitrary rules about which foods are higher-class than others (200 years ago lobsters were considered garbage), arbitrary rules about which foods are eaten when (I love eggs and bacon and so forth, but the idea of eating that before noon makes me queasy--I'd much rather have a salad for breakfast and save the omelettes for dinner), arbitrary rules about how to eat (pasta and lo mein are both noodles with sauce and chunks of veggies and meat, so I use chopsticks for both), and so on. Because of their familiarity, we forget that these rules are arbitrary, and therefore violations of them strike us as weird and funny.

Because it's so fraught with rules yet so familiar, food behaving strangely is pretty much intrinsically funny (or creepy--the line between humor and horror is always thin). Nonsense literature tended to employ that intrinsic humor frequently, which is the real reason Alice keeps ingesting foods that do weird things to her. (Lewis Carroll was alarmingly sober in his daily life, and never did drugs of any sort. He barely even drank.)

Food, to sum up, is a necessity to us all, and one that we wrap up in lots of rules. So of course any invocation of chaos, especially one trying to be light or funny, can violate those rules to show how order is breaking down.

Pony Thought of the Day: Is Bronydom Feminist?

Apologies for the lack of a PTotD yesterday--I actually wrote one, but instead of queueing it I accidentally saved it as a draft. You can scroll down to see it--sorry about that!

Anyway, I've got feminism on my brain. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Friendship Is Magic is a pretty feminist show. I have tended to assume that bronies are therefore also more inclined than the general populace to feminism, though with the caveat that, thanks to consistent and intentional misportrayal of feminism in mass media, there are a lot of people who believe everything feminists believe but recoil from the label.

That said, I've based the assumption on a combination of the nature of the show, the fact that I haven't personally witnessed or heard about any major incidents, and the general self-image of bronies as being an unusually open, welcoming, and non-judgmental fandom. But that's not really a solid basis: it's perfectly possible for someone to enjoy a feminist show while being a misogynist, if either the feminism or the misogyny is subtle enough; I'm a man, so any misogynistic behavior would not affect me directly and therefore I'd be less likely to notice it; and the self-image of a group is generally not a good predictor of its actual behavior.

So, I'd like to ask the people reading, especially any women reading: Is your experience that bronies are more feminist/less sexist than the general populace? Do you feel that the brony community is a safe and welcoming place for women? If so, why do you think it's so overwhelmingly male?

Pony Thought of the Day: Translating Titles

One area where I'm rather less impressed with the Japanese dub is the episode titles. Now, it's possible that the Japanese titles have clever puns I'm not seeing, but at least as translated back into English they're pretty lackluster so far:

1: Welcome to Ponyville (English: The Mare in the Moon)
2: Friendship Is Magic (English: The Elements of Harmony)
3: Whose Ticket? (English: The Ticket Master)
4: I Can Do It Myself! (English: Applebucking Season)

Confound These Ponies (Friendship Is Witchcraft)

Dun-dun dun dudun! Dun-dun dun dudun!

April is Fanworks Month, where we take a break from the show for a few weeks and celebrate the creativity of the brony community by examining fanworks with the same seriousness and critical eye as regular episodes. This week is the abridged series Friendship Is Witchcraft by Sherclop Pones.

I talked last week about the fun of watching new genres emerge, and Friendship Is Witchcraft is an example of another young new-media genre. There’s nothing new, of course, about parody dubs. They go back at least to 1966 and What’s Up Tiger Lily, and probably further. Abridged series, as introduced by LittleKuriboh with Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series in 2006, are little more than a refinement on that idea, with the added element of cutting down (or occasionally adding to) the work being parodied. Nonetheless, it has been quite entertaining to watch imitators multiply and diversify.

What abridged series do, in general, is a process of recontextualization. By taking the visuals of the original work and juxtaposing them with new audio, they create a dissonance that can be exploited for humor. This dissonance can occur as a result of seeing familiar characters behave in unfamiliar ways, or it can simply result from imperfections (intentional or otherwise) in the match between the new story and the visuals, or simply telling a funny story using those visuals. Most abridged series focus on the last two for humor, taking their cue from Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged series, which does not require any knowledge of the original show to enjoy.

Friendship Is Witchcraft, however, relies primarily on the dissonance of seeing beloved characters behave very differently, and as such can be read as a commentary on Friendship Is Magic as much as or more than a standalone work. When Twilight Sparkle takes her friends hostage and forces them to act out her slashfics, or Fluttershy heads an apocalyptic cult, the humor is in part the absurdity of the situation, but it's primarily that the Friendship Is Magic characters would never do anything like that, even though the broad strokes elements of the characters are the same--that is, Twilight Sparkle is still a bossy nerd and Fluttershy is still soft-spoken and self-effacing. The characters, in other words, are not overwritten but recontextualized, just like the images of the show.

The natural question, then, is what does this recontextualization accomplish? What does Friendship Is Witchcraft transform Friendship Is Magic into? Not unsurprisingly, the answer is pretty straightforward: a geeky cartoon comedy with meme depot and cult elements that would be right at home on Adult Swim.

Take, for example, the series' fifth and best episode, "Neigh, Soul Sister," a parody of the second-season Friendship Is Magic episode "Sisterhooves Social." Before it’s even possible to discuss it, we have to cover several elements of continuity from previous episodes: Pinkie Pie is an orphan who dabbled in illegal time-distorting magic in an attempt to bring back her parents. Robots who don’t know they’re robots live among the ponies and will be destroyed if discovered, and Sweetie Belle is one. Rarity and Applejack fought in a war together years prior, as a result of which Rarity is traumatized, Applejack considers her a coward and deserter, and Rarity considers Applejack a war criminal. Finally, as I mentioned previously, Fluttershy leads an apocalyptic cult that worships the Smooze, and Rarity is a member.

The episode itself primarily follows Sweetie-Bot (as the fandom has named her) as the ponies around her repeatedly fail to recognize her true nature despite it being completely obvious. In a broad sense it follows the plot of “Sisterhooves Social,” in that Rarity and Sweetie-Bot fight, Sweetie-Bot latches onto Applejack as her “new sister,” and Rarity takes advantage of a festival celebrating sisterhood to demonstrate that she really does care about Sweetie-Bot.

Alongside this, however, are two running subplots. First, instead of being angry at Sweetie Belle for disrupting her fashion business, Rarity is angry because Sweetie Belle is messing up her preparations to help Fluttershy summon the Smooze during a solar eclipse to usher in the end of the world. Rarity then ditches the eclipse ritual to go to the sisterhood event, because she “wanted to save [Sweetie Belle’s] soul.” Meanwhile, Pinkie Pie’s time-distorting brew in the previous episode is apparently causing parents to return from the dead.

It should be apparent by now that, despite using the actual episode’s visuals, this doesn’t have enough connection to the original show to even qualify as a parody of Friendship Is Magic. At the same time, it is clearly parodic in tone, so what is it parodying?

The answer is actually in the second episode, “Read It and Sleep,” where Twilight Sparkle is depicted as an obsessive fanfic writer who ships Rarity and Applejack. Just as Friendship Is Magic depicts ponies as geeks, usually in a very positive light, Friendship Is Witchcraft parodies geeks, especially bronies. In that light, it becomes clear why it is so much more of a meme depot and cult show, and why it keeps tossing in “dark” and “edgy” elements like making Fluttershy a bunny-burning cult leader or Rarity a traumatized veteran.

Friendship Is Witchcraft, when it boils down to it, is not a parody of Friendship Is Magic; it’s a parody of Friendship Is Magic fans and fanworks. Fluttershy’s apocalyptic cult has nothing to do with her depiction in the show, and everything to do with the fan-character Pinkamena (a psychotic, depressive, murderous version of Pinkie Pie) or the serial-killer Fluttershy in the .MOV series; it mocks these dark versions of the show by making Fluttershy evil without altering her social vulnerability or adorable shyness.

Twilight Sparkle is the main focus of this mockery of fandom and fanworks, with her excruciatingly long, unimaginative fanfic that does nothing but reiterate tired romance-novel clichés with thinly veiled versions of Rarity and Applejack. But it’s the fan tendency to try to read the show as a cult program that gets most viciously (and deliciously) parodied, and nowhere is that done as much as in “Neigh, Soul Sister.”

First, Sweetie-Bot herself is a clear reference to the remake of Battlestar Galactica, a notorious example of a cult show that showcased every flaw in the approach. Much of the plot involved evil robots, the Cylons, infiltrating human society, somehow managing to not be noticed despite being, you know, not made of meat, only having a handful of different physical appearances, and according to the pilot, having spines that are shaped differently from normal humans’ and glow bright red during sex. More to the point, the show blatantly abused the cult approach, clearly having no idea where it was going while emphatically insisting that it was planned out (as fans often put it, referencing a common early tagline, “The Cylons may have a plan, but the writers don’t.”)

As I’ve mentioned before, the inherent problem with a cult show is that it either has to have a pre-planned ending and therefore a fixed expiration date (as with Babylon 5), or else it has to lie to its audience and pretend to a plan where none exists (as with The X-Files or Battlestar Galactica). “Neigh, Soul Sister” plays with this, not only with the recurring robot element (which does not appear again after this episode), but also with Pinkie Pie's spell: Every time it brings someone back from the dead, a counter in the corner of the screen ticks up. The counter displays a maximum of nine, but has not reached it by the end of the episode, suggesting more to come; it also references what appeared to be a throwaway pun in the song that accompanied Pinkie's Spell: "A kitch-en time saves nine."

Like a good cult show, the callback to the pun tells the viewers that there were clues, and if we had caught them and interpreted them properly, we'd know what was happening now--and by extension, what will happen in the future. It's an open invitation to engage in what I referred to as the paranoid viewing style in my article on "Double Rainboom"; Friendship Is Witchcraft is asking us to treat it as a conspiracy, to scour it for clues and hints and try to predict the future. But of course it's not playing fair; despite the ominous build-up Pinkie's revival of the dead has no real pay-off in later episodes. It just causes her parents to come back as the Cake babies in the midst of an episode about something else entirely.

Put another way, where "Double Rainboom" is a version of Friendship Is Magic where Rainbow Dash won the Running of the Leaves and turned the show into a meme depot, Friendship Is Witchcraft is a version where Rainbow Dash won the Running of the Leaves and turned it into a cult show. However, "Double Rainboom" doesn't appear to understand that it's doing something different from Friendship Is Magic, and tries to play it straight. Friendship Is Witchcraft, meanwhile, understands what a terrible idea a cult version of Friendship Is Magic would be, and plays it as ridiculous as possible.

By being an utterly (but hilariously) terrible cult show, Friendship Is Witchcraft turns a parodic spotlight on the fandom itself. As I've mentioned, fandoms tend to be, collectively speaking, kind of terrible at figuring out why they like the target of their fandom. Pony fans seem at times to be absolutely determined to make it a cult show--already, barely two months after Season 3 ended, there are message board threads and YouTube videos speculating about what will happen in Season 4, as if the answer to that question can be found in the events of previous episodes. Friendship Is Magic simply doesn't work that way; it's not a show with complex overarching plots, either on a seasonal level or across seasons. It doesn't seed clues to future episodes in past ones. Simply put, there are no rewards for taking the paranoid approach here--but because that approach has been the norm for geeky television since Buffy (which started, I am horrified to realize, when the average brony was five years old) many of the fans don't know how to watch any other way.

So my advice would be to relax, kick back, and watch some Friendship Is Witchcraft. Laughing at ourselves, and the quirks and excesses of our community, is always healthy. We could probably use some more of it.

Next week: Fanworks month is over! We're back to the show. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Canterlot to be born?