BornAgainBrony

Wow... owch, burn. Uhh... no. I live in a farm town. I've seen a lot of horses and I'm not into them. Equestria Ponies on the other hand...

Rainbow Dash makes my heart soar... at Mach I.

I'm a pretty basic guy, but always up for a... *gulp* adventure with a bit of excitement and danger, so hey why not? I've let girls play "doll stylist" with me before. I've never seen a design from Rarity that I didn't like. I'm curious to see what she'd come up with. And if she wants to make me a party suit for the Gala, I'm game.

I kind of hope the leaks were actually intentional... as a testing ground to see how it was received. The "Let's do this same thing, but this time let's make X a Y"... is just so... half-flanked. I think about something I've heard from beekeeping which says that if you take a hive and move it far from its original location, the bees will locate it and continue along like nothing changed. If you move the hive just slightly, the bees will become disoriented and ultimately die. It's just lazy thinking to "re-do" everything. It will make a mess of the fandom, something that isn't needed. We'll be seeing hashtags of "NotMy(insert character here)" and G4 and G5 fans potentially at each other's throats, like what has happened with Star Trek or Star Wars. There's SO much more that could be done without trampling over what has already been done. It'll be tragic if they just "erase" G4 and remake it with subtle changes.

I've always dreamed of flying. My first memory of an adrenaline rush was the Death Star trench in the first Star Wars film. Then I got it again in Return of the Jedi. Every game I've played and really loved, and in some cases held a record for were flight-based. Top Gun and Days of Thunder are among my favorite films. I've wanted to live in the clouds since I was into Carebears as a toddler. The superpower I always wanted was the ability to control the weather. I've chased storms. I love racing drones. Dashie is my waifu. I'm definitely a Pegasus at heart.

I'll bring another IP into this just for the sake of discussion. Harry Potter. Their solution to that one was very unique. Grow the characters as the audience grows. It was pretty brilliant, and it worked flawlessly. And now there's new films coming out that are drawing in new fans and... hey look at that... they're not alienating the old ones. Yeah, that's a harder sell for something as fluffy as MLP, but one of the things that makes the show unique are the more serious undertones laying just beneath the surface. Also, the Mane 6 are much more grown up from the very beginning than characters in most shows targeted at little girls. Most shows for little girls have a cast of... well... little girls. The ponies are already matured. They hold jobs. The youngest at the beginning is arguably Twilight, a college student. Yeah, I get that it's a business. I just see others having little trouble sustaining multi-generational IP's. Maybe Hasbro simply has no interest in being that kind of a company, that caters to more than the K-8 demographic (except when it happens marvelously by accident as it did with Ponies G4). With the merchandise, they barely capitalized on Brony culture as much as they could have. Take Nintendo for example. You can find the Triforce or any other Hylian emblem on pretty much ANY product you want, ranging from t-shirts to wallets. If you want the Equestria "2 sisters" flag on ANYTHING, head over to Etsy. Hay, enough people would have shelled out HUNDREDS for an "authentic" full-size gonfalon on real canvas, supported by poles and ropes. Hasbro could have made FAR more money off of FiM than they did, but they mostly ignored the adults... the people who are just as, if not even MORE zealous than the kids, AND have a lot more money to spend. "Cartoons are for children" is an outdated concept and some companies still appear to be struggling with that concept. All of Japan never even had that concept to begin with, but the U.S.A. has been particularly stubborn with getting over that hurdle. We're kind of halfway through destroying that stereotype. Disney and Dreamworks sure have it figured out, and I'm pretty sure Disney realized how powerful animation was, way back when with Snow White. For all of Disney's blunders which I could write a whole book about if I had the time, they have a firm understanding of their adult fanbase and give them just as much attention as the children. I get the feeling that Hasbro hasn't figured this out yet; they don't seem to know what they have. The big exception to the kiddies-only attitude might be Nerf, with the Rival line of weaponry... wannabe "airsoft" guns clearly geared towards older players, and not really suitable for children.

Thing that worries me more than either of these, is the apparent lack of interest in Hasbro diving into... what would you call it? "Deep" world building? All of Doctor Who can be considered to be part of the same timeline. Same went for Star Wars, or the films anyway. The EU... that's another story. Would anyone call Star Trek: TNG "Star Trek G2?" Nope. It's radically different in some ways, but obviously a continuation in others. Same for DS9, Voyager... the reboot (that ripped the fanbase beyond recognition) didn't happen until JJ Abrams got his claws on it. For MLP, I feel like a reboot or a "G5" is completely unnecessary. If they want to make a new show, they would be better off making a spinoff of sorts, a "sequel" series, whatever. Follow different ponies. Keep the backstory, the kingdom. Let the Mane 6 become background characters, maybe with occasional episodes where they play a bigger role. That's what I would do rather than risk causing a total trainwreck. Maybe MLP:FIM isn't a winning show anymore. But it's still a winning universe, with a winning artistic style, with countless stories yet to be told and countless places yet to be explored. Why throw all of that away and risk a massive trainwreck of a reboot? But yeah. Not worried about the websites. They're relatively cheap to run. I'm much more worried about the conventions. BronyCon's announcement shook me to the core.

Heh... this came up in an interactive story I did last year. It was a mishmash of villains in Equestria ala a Kindgom Hearts thingy. Funnily I only alluded to Freddy existing in that multiverse and had no intention of actually bringing him into the story until EVERY other Villain inevitably ended up running away screaming like a child after encountering Pinkie. So Freddie got introduced as a necessary equalizer. Fortunately for Equestria, he was being kept on a tight leash, serving a more powerful entity so he had to play by its rules. But that didn't come into play until after Cheerilee ALMOST got fatally wounded right in the middle class for the sake of getting a good dose of fear energy. Random notes from that story. Luna DID go into the dreamworld to stop Freddie from terrorizing Canterlot one night, and eerily the method in which she did it was identical to the Tantabus episode when she linked with the Mane 6; an episode I hadn't even seen yet. Equestria was a mess though because even though they logically had the power to fight the villains, they kept to the shadows, constantly moving around guerilla-style, and nopony could locate them. Bear in mind, this also happened in the middle of S1-E1/2, which is a very different scenario than if it had occurred months or years later. Luna was just back from the moon, the Mane 6 had almost no idea what they were doing, etc. Freddy vs. Pinkie? It was an even match. Freddy slashed her, she went into one of her rare scary rage modes after a moment of bawling from the shock. If they'd kept fighting, I suspect that would've gone on forever. Just because it was funny though, and a little bit because for some reason this actually made sense in my twisted mind, Freddie actually started liking Pinkie (non-romantically) and saw her as something that was much more entertaining if she wasn't dead. I have little doubt that the Tantabus was inspired by Freddy. It seems to follow the rules put down in the films about how he gains enough power in dreams to eventually manifest himself in the waking world. The idea of Ponyville using their imaginations to fight back the monster is also very reminiscent of the Nightmare on Elm St. "Dream Warriors" film. And just because... the ponified Freddy I threw together for that story.