GuillermoGage

One fear that a lot of us have, now that FiM is confirmed for between 130 and 143 episodes and a theatrical movie that is expected to be something of a wide release.... is the eventual end of the series, especially since we know that successful kid friendly-brands or any successful brand usually doesn't end perfectly with that full artistic integrity. In years past people would make threads talking about the inevitable SpongeBob/Simpsons/what-have-you doom, but now that we are approaching 100 episodes with a fairly small ratio of content that was utter duds (as well as comics and book merchandise that is halfway decent that expands the lore), I think we can actually be more optimistic even tho we have apparently become closer to the "inevitable end" Here's my point: What if instead of faltering starting with Season 7 (post-movie) and becoming a total embarrassment in Season 8 with all of the Mane 6 regressing into caricatures and Twilight becoming some bored advice column guru for other ponies and basically turning into a mortal genie with Spike becoming her pet parrot, and the CMCs getting their cutie marks and becoming adolescents concerned with THE PROM'S TOMORROW!... before finally being put out of it's misery and then five to six years later (possibly even less) A CGI series (Possibly simply called "My Little Pony") will come out, like, on Disney Junior that may or may not care one ounce about the Brony demographic.... What if instead of going down that scenario: (Which many of us have settled on as a real possibility years ago and still today) Friendship is Magic just evolves step by step into follow-up series, using pretty much the same Flash animation and character designs? If it were to do the Pony equivalent of Naruto Shippuden? After the Mane 6 reach a point where it feels to the writers that they have all done as many story ideas as they can do with the girls and have pretty much exhausted their character growth, start to subtly shift to the CMCs, (which by then will have their cutie marks) Be transparent with the existing fans and let them know that, the next time you see Equestria, the Mane 6 will pretty much be full-blown cameo characters by the end of the season, and Sweetie Belle or something will be a major character, with episodes about Spike going out and about doing stuff. Eventually, Twilight Sparkle's adventures will become so mundane to her that they will have to do an entirely new theme song that does not involve Rebecca Shoichet singing "I used to wonder what friendship could be". Perhaps Michelle Creber could sing the new theme song, which will possibly have almost the exact same tune, but have lyrics that are more in second-person (addressing the audience, welcoming them to the life of Equestria). Honestly, the Mane 6 being the embodiments of the Elements of Harmony was really just a plot device and other characters can be solid protagonists without being the superhero knights that the Mane 6 are. After all Equestria is full of celebrities and talented magical ponies and creatures that are somehow more famous than the Mane 6. Remember, the Mane 6 only represent six character archetypes that we've all seen in fiction before. Even with how well-nuanced they are, they are limited in that it would be silly to just tack on new hobbies for them (which the series has already dabbled in) so that they can be more than just "fashion pony" and "country pony" and "athletic pony" and so on. When there are reoccurring characters that already exist that can be fully developed even moreso. What would this do to the adventure aspect of the show? Would it fall more into slice-of-life because of CMC characters not having the ability to make monsters TASTE THE RAINBOW? Maybe there will be a respectable answer to that. Here's the thing. If little kids/little girls get too bored or scared of the show when it dips into TV-Y7 territory in this "evolved incarnation of the same series by name" or "sequel series"... remember that old media is marketed to little kids all the time. Little kids tend not to care if media is outdated or not current so long as they have access to it, and what is currently on live TV hardly matters anymore. MLP can have the potential to grow with the audience the same way the Harry Potter did, hopefully ("even") better. Do you really think that six-year-old girls in 2015 should "grow out" of My Little Pony in a few years,? I think that the series just continue to keep them interested (and without going "teen") to make the issue of "outgrowing" a non-issue. With this approach, I think that they might be able to end "Friendship is Magic" with a TV-Y7 rating a the end of Season 9 on their own terms and do a second movie around late 2020 with hardly any Mane 6 presence at all. Then the whole brand will take a chill pill and be on indefinite hiatus. Meaning, not "reboot" itself in like five or even three years like some superhero thing. The market would do well to remember that there are actually more than just the "little girl" and "Brony" demographics out there. There's shades in between. This journey of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic can conclude respectfully during a time that it happens to be marketing around this area. Remember that people have a tendency to start watching cartoons with established characters and long histories and then travel back to "older episodes", this is a perfectly valid way to enjoy media that was never severely a serial show to begin with and still not that much even now. Even then, even little kids can develop the initiative to watch a series "from the beginning", especially if the current events and entertainment provided from the series as they are seeing it at this future point in time (or even now*) fascinates them enough where they will look into the beginnings of the series. It's only a matter of time before wingless Twilight Sparkle becomes entirely absent from merchandise and promotional material. I don't know how exactly little kids tend to follow TV series (my nieces and nephews tend to select Netflix and will start new series presumably from episode 1), ...but even in the event that a "little girl's" initial perception of Twilight is some sage nerd guru protagonist that just, for all they know, already has these friends by default (probably overlooking the theme song and opening if it remains as it is now)... good material will make them interested in the older episodes and how these characters got to be. okay, I'm done with this post now. Can you see the future of MLP coming up with a solution to its "the characters can only develop so much and there are only so many different decent slice-of-life situation story ideas we can come up with without scraping the bottom of the barrel" issue?

Since I currently am not sure if I will have enough money to buy more episodes after episode 14 with the iTunes balance I have now, I wouldn't mind a break of like two or three months. but I would strongly prefer that the whole season is completed before 2016. That way it can be easy for my mind to comprehend. Season 5 was in the 2015. And hopefully Season 6 will be done before 2017 happens. There is some suggestion that S6 will start before 2015 is even completely over... but that would be bizarrely quick. Littlest Pet Shop Season 3 started barely a month and a half after its Season 2 finale, but that Season 3 was broken in half with a three-and-a-half-long hiatus. I just hope that Hearth's Warming Eve doesn't turn out to be a commercialized holiday in Equestria. It's really more like a winter 4th of July/ Independence Day than Christmas or any holy-day really. MLP is already a commercialized thing enough as it is. There were hardly any Christmas-y motifs in the "Hearth's Warming Eve" episode anyway.

Age-appropriateness ratings, especially for North American TV for children's television, mean hardly anything in terms of "objectionable" content and are nowadays more or less an advertisement suggesting what demographic would be likely interested in it. The average three-year old does not get traumatized by "Twilight's Kingdom" or "The Cutie Map" because they don't have the life experience to process how "dark" the themes are. Sorta like how that one scene in The Lion King didn't faze me as a little kid, how i thought certain scenes were funny in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and how Toy Story 3 was scary for me as a nineteen-year-old. A couch-potato excess of movie, and TV watching and videogame "playing" is way more the bigger issue than being exposed to "violent content". If Cars 2 can be rated G, and two-year olds can see Frozen without it being "too scary", then MLP is not being held back. I wouldn't mind a theatrical movie being rated PG.

I adore the relatively high standards this thread has. Most of the people here are posting full-sized stills from the show, not just cropped images, and are posting them in high-quality. The people here are explaining the screengrabs like they are... cinematography. They kinda remind me more of the film-school artsy people who might post things on Reddit or that one website called Quora, which in many sections is like the thinking man's Yahoo! Answers. Part of it might be because MLPFiM is one of the few cartoons I have watched since the 16:9 aspect ratio started to take over television animation and that I personally don't have much of a reference pool. but.. yeah, MLPFiM is can sometimes, at least sometimes, perhaps more than sometimes, be like the Breaking Bad of animation when it comes to using "cinematography" to help with expressing the setting and expressing the emotions of a scene.

Well, I see that "Season 5, Volume 1" is now on Google Play in the form of a season pass. MLPFiM does provide a pretty fair amount of entertainment for the prices there, especially since the fans sre very talkative and are willing to talk about and ceelbrate and criticize the episodes to continuously give the adventures re-invigorated life after one initially watches any one episode for the first time. I wonder if there are any sales figures for the digital store purchases. I wonder how successful MLPFiM is and it just seems to me that Discover Family is such an obscure channel that people don't learn about FiM through having cable or satellite TV, let alone the correct package.

I'm thinking of purchasing the show on iTunes. I bought a season pass consisting of thirteen episodes a few months ago for a similar show (Littlest Pet Shop), and I figure MLPFiM would be priced the same. ...I'm wondering if anyone else has purchased whole volumes of it, via the known digital stores, (I currenly know of it being available on iTunes, Google Play, and YouTube-which I think is functionally like purchasing it for Google Play since YouTube is owned by Google) ... Does anyone have any clues as to why a Season Pass is not currently available on iTunes or Google Play? When I purchased a Season Pass for my other show, the first two or three episodes had already aired and became available to purchase individually. so maybe that Season Pass availability doesn't kick in until the episode after the premiere. How do you like the visual quality or sound quality, or the way the show is presented in the files? Do you wish the show was more widely available on digital media stores and stuff on other places and services?

...I see that you put a lot of work and thought into this. ... Putting Your Hoof Down has a "Dear Princess Celestia" at the end. So it takes place after lesson Zero. And Twilight appears in Apple Family Reunion very briefly and she doesn't have wings, so it must take place before Magical Mystery Cure, unless you wanna just ignore that / willfully pretend she has wings for headcanon of a consistent timeline.

Well, I can definitely tell that you have animation credentials, and that you took particular attention to the "animation" part of the topic title. Indeed, MLPFiM is a cartoony cartoon, so I can understand things like limbs, faces, bodies compressing and stretching for visual impact, but I don't see how that should impact awareness or lack thereof of where their limbs are located unless they are moving their limbs and muscles around in exaggerations that definitely go farther than what this show usually does. Rigid and mechanical, eh? Well.. well.. I like having a more tangible idea of how the ponies would exist in 3-dimensional space in real life. Like, anatomically, biologically. are their front limbs basically just like human arms but with hooves instead of hands? That pretty much seems to be the case, in that they can perform actions such has hugging, putting their front limbs around their backs, and the "putting up their dukes" action seen at the end of Dragon Quest. http://4e7221.medialib.glogster.com/media/62823e9d406fb85b8aa52d8e2a61fed1f4222d8c9e3e3ff66d1465adbc468125/twilight-sparkle-by-kurosakisoarin-d4mol8q.png The thing that confused me a lot... was me confusing the joint that RD bends backwards (on a real-life equine it is so close to their body as to not allow much room for movement; Imagine if your elbow and shoulder where right next to each other) as being the same joint that bends forwards when galloping(called the knee on an equine). That galloping joint, the equine knee, is actually slightly below the pony-joint-that-has-just-as-much-range-as-a-human's-elbow. But their legs are so stout that it is hard to tell unless both of those joints are bent/folded, either in that cute kitty-like sitting position on the last link (it's the same pose Twi is in while reading when Rainbow Dash crashes onto her deck in Applebuck Season) or during galloping. But the way the pose of Rainbow Dash doing pushups looks, it sure doesn't look like there's a whole 'nother joint below her "elbow" that can fold completely in as easily as we can close our hands. it looks too stubby and little to be able to for that length of limb to be able to fold in on itself, but that is exactly what it is capable of doing. That GIF of Twilight on the bench (during Griffon the Brush-Off) shows off the bending a bit more, but it makes it look like it is no more than what humans can do with their wrists, or about how well we can pick things up off the ground by curling out toes. and yes, indeed, curling their hooves that tiny bit (such as when applejack flips over in the cart and immediately falls asleep in Applebuck Season) is the lowermost joint that they appear to have; not sure if it officially a skeletal joint though or a tongue-like one-ended muscle or something. So... yeah, it looks like the joints that they need to use the most appear to expand a bit and become longer or thinner/less stubby in the art to give them more range, and when they are flexing both, then they average out the lengths. http://secret-pony.deviantart.com/art/Pony-Anatomy-Tutorial-legs-and-joints-308736058 Of these three distinctly colored areas, for many different poses, at least one of these areas has to be shortened. If all three of them were of sufficient length to bend at a full, swift range of motion, then the ponies would be rather lanky. So, they must have bones made out of some accordion-like material that prioritizes limb portion lengths on the fly. That makes me want to look at pictures of taller ponies such as Princess Celestia sitting down and doing stuff. Well, they also do produce granules at the bottom of their hooves for granular jamming, certainly they can have collapsing layered/accordion-like bones.

What do you think of the way the animation and physical anatomy of the ponies? Something about this show that we must admit is that... it uses Flash animation and some pretty basic, large, soft designs for easier animation There's quite a few animations, poses, facial expressions, things that the pony and equine characters do, but especially the pony characters do that... has variable aesthetic appeal visually. Do you ever feel that you have trouble getting a feel for exactly where their limb joints are located? I imagine that the ponies have skeletons and bones, but sometimes, the actions they make with their hooves start to use cheap cartoony anatomical inconsistency and their front limbs in particular start acting like human arms with functioning elbows. The picking up of things with hooves I don't mind, since it is depicted so blatantly that we have to just assume that their is some unspoken granular jamming or some suction mechanism at the bottom of their hooves, but there's quite a few other things with the animation and anatomy. What bugs you, and what anatomical aspects. bodily design aspects do you like? I do like it that she show bothers to animate their manes moving around and bouncing around realistically.

Well I'm pretty sure most of us here know the difference between "general consensus" and something like "univerally regarded as". "General consensus" has the disclaimer of "general" right in there. We cannot possibly know exact pecentages, and most polls we can conduct will be limited to one forum, to whoever happens to see a poll and vote in it, but we can make educated guesses if at least more than half of the fandon thinks some thought. Probably at least 70% of the fandom likes Hurricane Fluttershy. That's a pretty safe guess.

Yeah I didn't know which one it should go into. Sometimes I openly mention that in my opening posts, sometimes I don't. ..So yeah, people g'head and talk about... like, the comics (Now that I think about it, I actually put this in Show Discussion because I was worried that some of the "general consensus" discussion would get into squicky, bitter territory about how we think people outside the fandom see us as, debates about the very nature of the term "Brony", opinions on EqG, opinions on professionally-made documentaries about the fandom, and such. But maybe that won't utterly dominate this thread in a bad way!) It's about both. It's about "how many general consenses do you personally think there are? And how often do you see that phrase get used where you reckon it is false? Indeed, we must keep in mind that, if we have come across increasing evidence that there IS a general consensus about something, that we can differentiate between insisting that "no that is not the majority opinion!" and "well, from what I can see, it probably is the majority opinion, and I am comfortable with myself having the minority opinion" Probably every single one of us has at least one minority opinion in terms of some opinion being at least 75 one way 25 another way.

So where's there a memey image of someone opening their mouth with a big breath, and lifting up their mouth about to talk... then then the next picture shows them closing their mouth? I think there's a SpongeBob or Rage Comic depicting such an expression. But I also reckon that this communicates a similar feeling. After that, I'd probably just settle for giving you a "touché."

Mkay bruh.Name one. Name something that you think is a general consensus in this fandom. The only one that I can think of off the top of my head is "Apple Bloom is particularly cute, even among MLPFiM."

I'm making this thread because just a few minutes ago I was in the "Friendship is Magic" series premiere two-parter and I saw the phrase "general consensus" get used in regard to it. In terms of it being "weird" or "cheesy" and that "well we respect it for being the starting it all". ... Anyone who has been on forums and stuff has probably figured out that hardly any of the even most simple opinions are totally universal. (One example could be "all of the Mane 6 are cute"*) This is true of any large fandom. ... but even a phrase such as "general consensus"? It doesn't even seem to make sense for this fandom. Maybe some... other fandom. One that's more "elitist". * upon people who don't watch the show at a certain level of ... intensity or haven't seen some/most episodes at last a second time... certain more subtle styles/acts/instances of cuteness... they might not have noticed coming from the less "traditionally/blatantly cute Mane 6. This thread is probably already a tense liability, durr hurr.

After watching the first four episodes in the summer of 2011 one day, I either considered adding a deviantART tagline "is probably a Brony now.", and then either didn't do it or did do it and then took it off within a day later. I didn't watch another episode until December 2011, sometime after the 20th. That episode was "Winter Wrap Up" and then I was fully won over into being a Brony, and ended up watching many more episodes over the months.

The Rarity micro-comic, titled "How Rarity Got Her Groovy Back", followed closely by Zen and the Art of Gazebo Repair, the two-part story about Big Mac. I've read the first five volumes worth of mainline stories,(that's the first seven mainline stories), the whole ten of the initial micro-series, and what I reckon are the first four Friends Forevers (Pinkie&AJ, CMCs&Discord, Celestia&Spike, and Twilie&Shining); they are collected in a "Volume 1".

I reckon I did indeed use the phrase "Season 1 and 2 loyalists", but it doesn't strike me as a "passive aggressive" phrase. I'm not sure of what other short phrase to use that isn't inherently divisive-sounding other than the long phrase "people who prefer Seasons 1 and 2". I guess it reminds people of Loyalists during the time of the American Revolution/colonial times? And I did use the phrase "Lauren-Faustian" multiple times... but I personally did not have any real emotion invested in that phrasing.

I'm pretty sure that confirmation bias is when people believe something, and then only look for information that supports that belief. But maybe you are also describing that.. in a roundabout way? As for the first part of what you said, legitimate seeing things another way. CinemaSins sometimes.Because of peer pressure.. indeed I ain't. Outside of FiM, I like Pixar's Cars 2.

But it's hard to not listen to people. What if they have a good point and then I realize how bad something is after the fact? Confirmation bias is the exact opposite of what you are describing. To fight one's own confirmation bias, they would be willing to look at information that challenges their beliefs.

Apparently I'm supposed to hate Rainbow Falls As well as the "out-of-character Fluttershy" in Putting Your Hoof Down.

That's kinda my point as well. MLP may have had been focusing on episodes with good morals and stuff especially at the beginning when the had to work within the e/i label, but keeping up with that is hard. Most sitcoms and SpongeBob-y and Simpson-y cartoons can remain funny while also sticking to the same formula because the don't have to worry about having to enrich a little kid audience. Continuity, character development that actually stays, and stuff challenges kid's minds. The arcs and stuff are every bit as much for them as it is for us, if not moreso. So yeah, these S1&2 loyalists have the choice of ending the show when the world of MLP is just beginning, or come up with more episode ideas themselves or otherwise demonstrate that there's another 26 or even more episode ideas left that have a "Dear Princess Celestia" thing going on.

EDIT: here's a link. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rarity+i+love+being+covered+in+maud&iax=1&ia=images&iai=http%3A%2F%2Ffc03.deviantart.net%2Ffs70%2Ff%2F2014%2F074%2F5%2Ff%2Frarity_i_love_being_covered_in_maud_by_chaoticnote-d7acv5m.jpg I don't feel like looking for it now, but there's a image somewhere of Rarity as that weird hick that she turned into in Simple Ways with the caption "I LOVE BEING COVERED IN MAUD!" with the screenshot of her at that moment being covered with over a dozen tiny Maud Pies. EDIT: I counted twelve Mauds now; it's exactly one dozen. So... five episodes later and whenever that image got made, Simple Ways, while being unfunny in and of itself, it's existence caused the eventual creation of a joke that I laughed at.

She's the Meg Griffin of My Little Pony. Even moreso than Spike on his worst days. Durr hurr.