HereComesTom

Easily Shining Armor. Feats of badassery should've been under his belt, and we should've gotten a chance to see them on-screen! And it would've been nice if they'd explored his relationship with his sister in more episodes... If G-5 has main characters with the same names as the G-4 main characters, I'm crossing my fingers that Shining Armor will have about the same amount of screentime Twilight does!

I can't help but wonder whether G-5 will explore this? I guess it depends on whether G-5 will be set in G-4's far future or not---there's pros and cons to that; the pros involve picking up story threads that G-4 had (e.g. what might happen if Tirek, Chrysalis, and Cozy Glow got free) and exploring G-4's rich, untapped world even more than G-4 did. The cons involve retreading some of the themes that G-4 already had. For instance, G-4 was all about friendship; what if Hasbro wants to explore different themes in G-5---for instance, exploring family? If G-5 is in G-4's world, then friendship is already the ultimate power, so friendship will need to be front and center as a theme in G-5. By contrast, if G-5 is a separate world, then Hasbro has more freedom put other themes front and center. That being said, even if G-5 is set in the same universe, then there's no way they won't get free. Heck, them getting free would probably be the G-5 pilot! But I find it hard to believe they'd reform, even if they did get free. I mean, Cozy Glow is too sociopathic---she'd have to want to remove sociopathy from her own personality after centuries of watching normal ponies and wishing to share in the real joy they have. Tirek thinks friendship is a weakness and would just start eating magic as soon as he broke out---unless he'd learned from Twilight overpowering him as a near deus ex machina. Chrysalis would want revenge, if anyone was alive to take revenge on.

Some things I'd been hoping for in G4 that never happened, which I think could make G5 surpass G4: 1) A season where a majority of the episodes have either their main plots or their B-plots driven by the plans and actions of the season's arc villain. I don't have anything against slice-of-life episodes, but I felt like more adventure-ish episodes, or at least episodes driven by a villain, would be cooler. And I have "or their B-plots" in italics because I think a B-plot would be sufficient to keep a villain front and center---I believe that slice of life episodes could successfully incorporate villains without losing their slice-of-life-ness. 2) Male main characters, preferably with comparable diversity to the female main characters. They'd be much more relatable to the male demographic, and if they succeed in getting boys as well as grown men to watch their cartoons, it could increase their toy sales by branching into new demographics. ...Say...if switching worlds were a common theme, then how would pony->human Transformer toys sound to Hasbro, I wonder...?