Concerned Bystander

Discord and Starlight Glimmer were both great villains, but the writers seemed to struggle to find anything good to do with them post-reformation. In my humble opinion, both of the Discord episodes in season 5 were dreadful, precisely because they wanted to bring Discord back because he was popular but he just didn't work as a supporting character to the mane 6. Maybe he was just too powerful and couldn't be placed in any situation where the mane 6 needed his help because there basically wasn't a single problem that he couldn't solve with a simple click of his fingers. They did manage to redeem him somewhat in 'To Where and Back Again', but only be benching the mane 6 and completely nerfing his powers. Starlight had a similar problem in that she was great as a villain, but once she was redeemed the writers seemed determined to make her a new addition to the mane 6 and she was just shoehorned in everywhere with a sort of 'we'll keep shoving her in your face until you like her' mentality and she just never really gelled with the rest of the cast because the history and chemistry just wasn't there. Again she was made better use of in 'To Where and Back Again' where she actually had to stand on her own as a protagonist instead of being an accessory for Twilight. In both cases I would liked to have seem these characters either petrified or sent to Tartarus, that way there is always the possibility that they might appear to disrupt the harmony once again because let's face it, they were both far better as villains than as heroes. P.S. Cozy Glow got what she deserved.

It has to be a thousand years between G4 and G5. It is written into cartoon law that the previous historically significant event took place one thousand years before the pilot episode of the new series. That's just the way it is.

I never saw any adverts for the show. When I first became aware of it I'm not even sure if it was showing in the UK at all, we just used to find the episodes on youtube for my daughter to watch, back in the days when that was possible before they were all nuked by Hasbro. My awareness of the fandom came not from those episodes themselves, but rather from another video that kept showing up in the searches that piqued my interest and which I eventually ended up clicking on to satisfy my curiosity. The adverts may very well have been cringe-inducing, but whether or not they were it didn't make much difference to me.

Last thing I bought was this rather lovely set of Fallout Equestria books.

It's clearly meant primarily for kids, at least it was to begin with. However, it was made in such a way that adults could watch it along with their children without wanting to claw their own eyes out.

Like many people that have already commented I would begin by saying 'hate' is maybe too strong a term. I'm not sure I could go so far as to say I legitimately 'hate' any episodes, but for me the definite lowlights of the series were 'What About Discord' and 'Make New Friends But Keep Discord'. I loved Discord in 'The Return of Harmony' but the writers seemed to really struggle to find a way to use him after his reformation, leading to these two fairly dreadful episodes. They managed to get him back on track again for 'To Where And Back Again', but that doesn't undo the fact that in season five they really wanted to use him but just had no idea what to do with him.

I have a few that I picked up from Build-a-Bear, I quite like the size of them and the quality seems pretty good.

Wow, Google bots being completely unfit for purpose, who could possible have seen that one coming

Izzy is definitely the top pick for me at the moment, with Sunny trotting at her heels.

MLP has been one of Hasbro's headline franchises since the 80s, they own it and it has been successful for decades. They might be making more money from Disney's properties like Star Wars and Marvel just now but those properties are only available to them under license and they will always need to keep something of their own for when those licences expire. Having just started with a new iteration of one of their own franchises it's extremely unlikely that they will pull the plug on it before the cartoon has even had a chance to generate sales for them.

It's pretty apparent now from watching the film that they are childhood friends, I mean, we literally see them playing together as children. There is also nothing at all to suggest that they are siblings, that whole introduction scene wouldn't make much sense if they were. The shippers will of course do their thing, but I doubt there will be any romantic involvement between the the two going into the series.

It's not the only girly thing I like. I've also watched quite a bit of Winx Club, and I'm rather fond of Disney's Tinker Bell films. Also, I've have been a collector of figures for quite some time, mostly action figures and statutes, but more recently I have even included a small amount of dolls in my collection, such as a couple of Mattel's 'Barbie x Star Wars' series.

Every film is edited, so I doubt this one is any different in that regard. They were probably instructed to keep the runtime around the 90 minute mark because films that are primarily aimed at children tend to be on the shorter side as it's more difficult to keep children's attention if a film runs too long.

Watched it once so far, and my initial impression was pretty positive on the whole. That being said, It's easy to overlook failings the first time you watch something, they tend to become more apparent on subsequent viewings so it remains to be seen how well it will hold up in the longer term. The story was fairly simplistic, and more than a little predictable but it was serviceable enough and one must take into account who the target audience is. The simplicity of the plot was quite well compensated for by the characters who were generally pretty good, and Izzy and Sunny in particular were absolutely adorable.

I don't think 'The Journal of the Two Sisters' is canon in the strictest sense, but it is an official publication and was written by Amy Keating Rogers, so I guess that it's a reasonable resource as long as it doesn't contradict anything established within the cartoon.

In 'The Journal of the Two Sisters' it is heavily implied that they were not only born Alicorns, but were part of a race of a whole race of Alicorns. It mentions that Alicorns age differently the other pony races but never says what, if anything, happened to the other Alicorns.

It is true that comics have always explored political themes, as all good fiction does. However, what is a more recent phenomena is comics becoming actually party-political. It is entirely possible to explore politics without becoming partisan and alienating half of your audience. Additionally, the entertainment industry as a whole, and especially comics, have been ruined by social media, and twitter in particular. There is an old adage that you should never meet your heroes, because they will only ever disappoint you in person. Social media has unfortunately allowed us to see something of the people behind comics that you would never have seen before, and it turns out that a lot of comic creators are just the most horrible people imaginable, vicious bullies that seem to revel in destroying people's lives and livelihoods.

If the show was different to the show that I started watching, would I even have started watching it? Who knows. Basically I was first drawn to the cartoon as it is, and I enjoy it as it is so I have no wish that it had been other than how it is.

Lauren's primary concern may not have been to sell toys, but MLP belongs to Hasbro, not Lauren Faust, and you can bet that Hasbro were very much thinking about selling toys. However, it doesn't have to be either one or the other, the two are not mutually exclusive. Something can be both a toy commercial and a good cartoon.

I don't think there was ever any question about the comics being canon, they were always just their own thing. A good example is the 'Nightmare Rarity' arc which, in my opinion, undermined Luna's character development by attributing her transformation into Nightmare Moon to possession by an external entity instead of being a result of her own jealousy. We know that this story arc in the comics cannot be canon to the cartoon because if it was, it would be utterly inconceivable that the 'Nightmare Rarity' incident would not have been brought up at all during 'Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep'. Just to caveat the above, I absolutely love the comics, probably even more than the cartoon itself, and that absolutely includes the 'Nightmare Rarity' arc, even if I do think that it weakens the character development of my favourite pony.

EQG was never canon (to FiM). The influence between the two series was only ever in one direction, FiM had an impact on the events of the EQG films but nothing that happened in EQG was ever referred in FiM with the exception of the overall shared lore. There was always an effort made to keep EQG at arms length from FiM. In before "but someone said on twitter that..." It doesn't matter what the writers say on social media, canon comes from the events in-universe, not from social media, if they didn't write it into the series itself, then it didn't happen.