Shagbark

The tortoise hasn't reappeared because it's stupid for Rainbow to have a tortoise as a pet, and the cyborg/steampunk Tank-copter doesn't fit the show and would be incredibly annoying. The show sacrificed being true to the character and to realism in order to make a friendship lesson.

And also like Celestia, if you won't obey him, Jesus will condemn you to centuries of torment! ... I wondered where the show got that aspect of her from. But maybe... Celestia isn't powerful all. It's all a sham. She gets up in the morning and makes grunting sounds while the sun rises to make people thing she did it. All records indicating that the sun and the moon traversed the sky on their own before her have been destroyed.

I've studied writing, and worked in animation (not as an animator - it's a little complicated to explain), and I made a list of some of the artistic choices made by the MLP crew that I think make it stand out, with no real competition in my mind except The Simpsons and Avatar. Briefly: Very few villain-driven plots. Stories featuring villains waste your time developing a throw-away character, and all develop the same aspects of your protagonists over and over, so that we know exactly how Batman throws an uppercut but have no idea what kind of movies he likes. More importantly, the villain sets things in motion and the heroes react to restore things to the way they were. This produces "heroes" with no ambitions and no vision. Characters are built around their positive qualities rather than around their flaws. If you're not a writer, you may not realize how rare this is. Writers constantly give beginning writers the advice to "round out your characters by giving them flaws". This is bad advice and produces characters who are stereotypes. The characters all have their own goals, careers, and/or hobbies. You know what they want to be doing in 10 years. They don't just meet in the Gang Clubhouse for show-themed activities. They don't have endless free time; they have to work for a living. The show invests time in exploring characters, rather than always taking the quick payoff of exploiting something already known about that character. This is rare because the incentives to the scriptwriter are to make their episode - not the series - as entertaining as possible; and this is most-easily done by making use of everything the previous episodes have built, without investing any time in building things for future episodes. Everything that happens on-screen advances story and all on-screen characters at the same time. This is a rule made by Walt Disney, and it's very hard to follow. The G1 My Little Pony breaks this rule continually. If a monster comes to town, and everypony runs away in the same way, Walt would have made the animators do it over until each pony reacted in a way that told you something about them. More than one central character. Stories that depend on one central character often over-build that character until he/she is annoyingly perfect. Not every character is in every episode. Like life. Characters act differently in different contexts. As opposed to pretty much all cartoon characters, excepting the Simpsons. Rejection of Aristotle's theory of story, which holds the rest of the industry in a death grip. Not every story has to be about someone facing a problem because of an inner flaw and then changing so as to overcome that flaw and solve that problem. But that's the dogma in the rest of the industry. Look for it next time you watch Sponge Bob. MLP has a fundamentally different theory of virtue than Western literature - it's about the group, rather than about a collection of individuals. Rejection of Disney's law of one emotion, which says that a character must always be experiencing exactly one emotion - not zero, not two, but one - because viewers are too stupid to understand conflicting emotions. Does not rely on making you alternate between feeling bad/afraid and feeling relieved as its only way of reaching the viewer. Full post is at http://shagbark.live....com/60866.html . Comparing MLP to Adventure Time or South Park, is like comparing apple pie to LSD or amphetamines. They're not remotely the same kind of thing. Comparing cartoons to cartoons is not very productive unless you're an animator; better to compare things that are alike under the surface (e.g., Scooby Doo vs. Buffy, not vs. South Park).