Yeah, I'm going back to this, again. And I know everyone's sick of this thing but I thought of a good point so I don't give a crap.

Let me start by saying that I'm neither a hater nor a number 1 fan of Rarity. I like her pretty well, but I'll admit, she's my least favorite of the mane 6. That doesn't mean I don't like her. It just means that somebody's gotta be last.

So, I noticed that Rarity tends to get a lot of shit for not being "true to her element." Many people agree with this statement. Others feel that Rarity is unfairly singled out as all of the mane 6 have deviated from their element from time to time. This kinda bothered me for a while. I knew that other ponies deviated from their elements and I knew that it was probably in relatively equal amounts as Rarity. However, I still felt like Rarity was a worse offender, even though I didn't have any way to prove that. It was all just what I felt.

I think the other day, I understood why I felt that way. I want to look at it this way. We're going to exclude magic because it's not a real worldly phenomenon and we can't easily ascertain the rules and parameters of it. So the remaining 5 are loyalty, laughter, kindness, honesty and generosity.

For most of these, they're expected things in society, but we allow for the occasional deviation. For example, kindness. We expect people to be nice to each other. However, we understand that people have bad days sometimes, and we allow them a little leeway. Laughter: we expect people to be in a generally good mood most of the time, but understand that sometimes people get sad. Loyalty: we expect people to stick with us and while we might get annoyed if they ditch us, if it's occasional, we tend to forgive them. Honesty: we generally expect that people are telling the truth, but we allow for people to tell little white lies to spare someone's feelings.

Generosity, however, basically works in the opposite way. Generosity isn't an expected thing. We don't have a social expectation that people be generous toward one another. We may think it's kind when someone is generous and be very happy for that. But we don't expect it. We do, on the other hand, expect people not to be greedy, and there's a rather strong stigma against that. We look very negatively at someone who's being greedy and tend to feel rather strongly about it.

So the other 4 elements, we expect people display to fair amounts, and because we think of these as common, we also allow for people to deviate from these traits in real life as well. However, generosity isn't one of these expected things. Rather "not greed" is the expected trait in this situation. So when the other 4 deviate, it's normal. However, when Rarity deviates, it's more something that she shouldn't have been doing in the first place. And this is where I feel the unfairness comes in.

Another problem about Rarity's element is that it's not as easily demonstrable. We have seen Rarity being generous in the past. Probably most notably, making a unique, personalized evening gown for each of her friends. Two, actually. However, like I said before, generosity isn't an expected thing. So when Rarity does something generous, it usually has to be a big to-do in order to demonstrate it. However, again, since generosity isn't an expected thing, when it's in smaller ways, like, Rarity giving her unique fabric to Suri Polomare, it can be glossed over and not appreciated because it's a bit of an off-handed thing. So when most people think of Rarity's generosity, they probably forget about the small things such as that.

Additionally, speaking of demonstration and deviation, I think the other 4 do tend to get a pass on their deviance from their elements. I've basically exemplified this in a previous paragraph where I talked about, for example, people being usually in a good mood, but allowing for them to be sad. Also as I've said before, greediness is met with much more of a negative reaction than many of these other deviations are. (Sadness, dishonesty, etc.) Again, the negative emotion is a bit disproportionate to how we often gloss over generosity, but this is how things are. I do think that deviation from the elements is a good thing. As many people before me have said, it makes them more well-rounded characters, and I agree with that. However, when your element is generosity, the only way that you can really be portrayed as deviating from that is to be greedy. I suppose that she could also be portrayed as just not being generous. Like she could do something, but chooses not to. However, that's a lot less obvious and takes more time within the show to set up rather than being out-and-out greedy. It's a little unfortunate, but occasional greediness is probably something that Rarity's going to be stuck with.

It's really more about how we view the assigned elements to each pony. From the start, Rarity is set up to be more harshly judged than the other 4 for the reasons listed above. Does she actually deviate more than the others? I don't know. We'd have to count each account of faithfulness and deviance from each pony's element and weigh that against their appearance in the show.

However, I finally realized that I do agree with Rarity fans. Rarity is rather unfairly pegged for not being true to her element. I don't think this is her fault. And honestly, I don't even think it's the fault of people who don't like Rarity. Nor is it the creators' faults. It's just a culmination of incidental things that just happen to stack things against Rarity.

Realizing this, I think I have a newfound respect for Rarity and like her more than I did previously. I hope when people read this post, they'll take these things into consideration when watching Rarity in the show and analyzing her actions. I believe that if more people realize consciously how we view generosity and greed within our society, it will put the character of Rarity much more into perspective and maybe people will even, like me, like her more.

Those are just my thoughts on this issue.

*edit, 1/31/14*

I know this is a bit late to edit, but I just came up with another good point. It's not very in depth because I don't have time to sit and write an analysis on this point. However, one more thing I noticed is this. Honesty, laughter, kindness and loyalty, you can put very little effort into. In fact, you can do almost nothing and still be considered to fall under all those categories. Except maybe laughter, but out social structure and expectations make it so that most people smile during exchanges, so that's basically effortless. Generosity, however, you really have to go out of your way to exemplify. You're not just considered generous because you haven't been ungenerous, as opposed to many of the other elements. You might be considered kind or loyal just because you've never been blatantly unkind or unloyal. Generosity, however, is more of an active thing. I think it might be weird to make Rarity a character who gives all the time. It would, in fact, make her rather unrealistic. This is another reason I think Rarity's generosity isn't shown as much.

I might write more on that later to tie it up in a neat little bow, but I don't have the time at the moment.