Fluttershy. The Element of Kindness. My top-favorite altogether. Shy, timid, not very good at breaking through that shell, but is extraordinary when she is. Like the other Mane Six characters, she is very relatable and extremely well-rounded. She's a character with an extremely wounded psyche and is still doing whatever she can to mend it. Putting Your Hoof Down is a strong limited third-person piece of her cloudy vision of the Equestrian strangers and how she took Iron Will's advice WAY too l
Each of my reviews for a banner will be located here in chronological order, starting with my earliest review to the latest review. If you want to read them, click on the links with their respective titles.
~Cider Barrel~'s "Napping Applejack"
Gone ϟ Airbourne's "Party of Chaos"
Akoura's "Bright Derpy Bubbles"
~Lawful Jordo~'s "Rainbow Crash"
The banner
Rainbow Dash literally crashed the party courtesy of @@~Lawful Jordo~'s banner on Saturday, April 13. With a rainbow trailing behind, the young, fast flyer crashed into the fourth wall. The MLP Forums logo hangs at two mirroring angles, and in the very background is a black-to-blue gradient (something Rainbow Dash apparently feels once she cracked the barrier).
Composition
The most important components are located along the left side — Rainbow Dash crashing into the fourth wall
The banner
On Saturday, April 6, @Akoura's Derpy banner was published atop the MLP Forums. Along the left side is Derpy in a simple yet exaggerated art style. Bright yellow bubbles and the upside-down MLP Forums logo float in front of a grayish blue background and behind white light radiating from above.
Composition
Akoura paid careful attention to the placement of the navigation by shifting all of the important content mostly to the center and left sides. Although it makes sense with the
Author's Note: This essay has been revised April 10, 2013.
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The third season of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is over, and the passionate brony community is out there displaying their dedication to the show, characters, worldbuilding, and so on. Artwork, music, customs, and plushies are being published a lot over the past several months since The Crystal Empire, and it bloomed further with several dedications to the Babs Seed song; A True, True Friend; and What My Cutie Mark I
The banner
On Friday, March 29, @'s Pinkie Pie banner was approved and published on the MLP Forums. Pinkie Pie is her giggly, ecstatic self, having a great time. The chaotic, random mood in the background dances, and Pinkie Pie and Gummy celebrate in the foreground (and for Pinkie Pie, breaking the fourth wall).
Composition
This banner doesn't have anything plastered in the center, relaxing the eyes. The background has many tints, but they are faded enough so the two Pinkie Pies, Gummy, th
Normally, because it's a fan animation, I tend to be much more lenient in my comments. However, Zachary Rich helped produce this whole piece (along with 104 other people) with the intent to graduate from Savannah's College of Art and Design. This fan-made episode is out there to prove to everyone that he is ready to work in the professional field. Therefore, I'll review it as if it truly is a professionally published piece.
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This is a strong animated piece, with lots of action, charac
The banner
Uploaded Saturday, March 23, the administration approved and featured this banner. Designed by @@~Cider Barrel~, it features Applejack reclining and relaxing in Sweet Apple Acres. Mountains fade into the background, with the farm seen in both the middleground and background. A path leads to the farm, and trees on the right create nice shadows in contrast with the rest of the banner. On the left, Applejack naps on the side of the MLP Forums logo, relaxing the rest of the day away.
This is a review for one song, two covers, of The Moon Rises.
Back on February 25, 2012, PonyPhonic splashed in his debut single, The Moon Rises, a slow opera-esque musical. With Celestia revered during the day, Luna yearns for the attention, devotion, and love for her moon, something the citizens of Equestria rarely, if not ever, admire. Her naivety and jealousy solidified a conflicted, wounded heart to be the corrupted and feared Nightmare Moon.
A little more than eight m
On January 23, with singing from EileMonty and MEMJ0123, Jeff Burgess published the original brony song, Home. With EileMonty of Picture Perfect Pony fame voicing a younger Luna and MEMJ0123 doing the same for a more maturely voiced Celestia, the duet shares a yearning relationship with each other and describes their wish to be reunited. This slow rock song executes and explores their relationship so well beyond anything the canon has showed post-Friendship Is Magic, Part II. Via Burgess's lyri
Back when the brony community was still relatively new and still growing into one of the bigger creative powerhouses, one of the growing areas was the brony musicians. Slowly but surely, many of them were getting their names known, sending a message to unknown passersby that their dedication to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic was genuine. Creativity is one of the clearest and best examples to show why, and music was one of them. But it was relatively slow back them. The one who really sent t
Author's Note: This is a more thorough, revised review for season three of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Head here to read the previous version.
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Season three was like a haphazard dinner at a restaurant. You have a decent appetizer, then a scrumptious entrée, followed by an awful desert.
1 & 2. The Crystal Empire: Part one gave the season a great start. There were layers of great characterization amongst the Mane Six, notably Twilight Sparkle and Spike. The backstory of b
Author's Note: This review is a revision of my previous review. If you want to look at it, click here.
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Season three has come and gone with Magical Mystery Cure. Initially, I said the episode was good, but its major pacing problems was why it was really weak. I rewatched it twice, and it's unfortunate to say that this episode is not only easily the weakest finale, but also the fourth out of five clunkers since Apple Family Reunion (even though it's easily the best of the four bad episo
Stories in areas aside from Canterlot, the Crystal Empire, or Ponyville. There are so many places mentioned by name, but aren't given a lot of exploration (Manehattan, Fillydelphia, and Baltimare being three of them). It would be fantastic to see the lives of those cities and see how the citizens there adapt.
New character interactions. One of season two's biggest strengths is putting characters of various personalities into groups of three (and succeeding with them). Putting Your Hoof Down ha
Season three was like a haphazard dinner at a restaurant. You have a decent appetizer, then a scrumptious entrée, followed by an awful desert.
1 & 2. The Crystal Empire: Part one gave the season a great start. There were layers of great characterization amongst the Mane Six, notably Twilight Sparkle and Spike. The backstory of both King Sombra and the kingdom were also convincing, despite being brief. Its most notable drawbacks, however, were twofold (both in part 2):
King Sombra's char
Season three has come and gone with Magical Mystery Cure. Initially, I said the episode was good, but its major pacing problems was why it was really weak. I rewatched it twice, and it's unfortunate to say that this episode is not only easily the weakest finale, but also the fourth out of five clunkers since Apple Family Reunion (even though it's easily the best of the four bad episodes).
Like I did with all of my other reviews, I'll display the strengths first.
1. The songs are incredib
This is the second episode this season featuring Spike. His previous episode, Spike at Your Service, was reviewed rather poorly because Spike was portrayed as incompetent and completely careless in his tasks. He was extremely out of character in SaYS, and with Powell (who wrote Sleepless in Ponyville) at the helm, I expected her to write him brilliantly in character.
Powell and the rest of the team did a great job in almost every part of this episode. What she did well were as follows:
"Don
When entering the MLP Forums, one of the first things you see is the logo on top. The rounded letters, playful positioning of the typeface, and quirkiness of how the logo is placed and played with. Every banner has the MLP Forums logo somewhere, and it easily makes the MLP Forums look recognizable not merely as a forum, but as a brand. Feld0 has stated occasionally here that he treats this forum as such because the way the forum is designed and the thread titles are typed. But the logo itself is
If you want to read my first impressions of the episode, check out the spoilers:
After re-watching it, the episode has since really grown on me, and I began to embrace it more and more. Now I detail a few more things I adored:
Of all the episodes this season that featured the entire Mane Six cast, this is easily the strongest. Each line from the characters worked to perfection. Rarity, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie, Twilight, and Spike had great and in-character lines. Cel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfw1gDVKBfQ
Following the release of Loyalty, AcousticBrony and MandoPony set such a high bar for high-quality songs in this fandom. Loyalty had that action-packed tone, music, and lyrics that capture Rainbow Dash perfectly. It was such a fantastic song and demonstrated their talent in their singing and composing in their brony music. It would be extremely difficult to top Loyalty in the Element series.
Kindness not only met those expectations. It blew thos
As much as I like to say I enjoyed it, I can't. The previous eight episodes have all been good to amazing, but this one is the first (and hopefully only) clunker of season 3.
First, some things I do like:
Rainbow Dash's character. Dash has shown a bit more of her sympathetic side lately, but here is where we saw her cockiness, eagerness, and going in way over her head. Her blurting out her own novel idea as well as Applejack's was hilarious and gave me the most laughs throughout the episode
Apple Family Reunion was a rather tame episode in comparison to the wackiness and adventure-esque episodes we've seen throughout the season, and it doesn't disappoint. Most previous Applejack episodes revolved around her being stubborn, but it was a completely different case. Instead, it was her eagerness to make this reunion the best one it can be. But sometimes, when you try too hard to make things grander, you run the risk of screwing up. This was one hard lesson Applejack learned after her i
With the so-called "end of the word" approaching my doorstep soon ( ), it's time to give my thoughts of 2012 in terms of being a brony.
Two springs ago, I began to notice a huge influx of material related to the family-friendly animated show, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, in the form of avatars, icons, and brief discussions. Seeing all of it bewildered me because I never saw the stuff before, and I wondered why it was becoming so popular at such a quick pace. Curious and the fact that
