What do you think of MYM?

[CastletonSnob 3,025]

If Chapter 6 is really the end, what do you think of Make Your Mark overall? Was it a worthy follow-up to ANG and FiM?

I ask this because the YouTube MLP reviewers (Dr. Wolf, Mad Munchkin, etc) don't like G5 very much.

[Misty Shadow 7,085]

This show was so good, I love it, I am in full support of it getting renewed/revived/followed up by another show of a similar nature. The G5 critic community is definitely exaggerating with their critiques as a whole. They're obviously, in general, faltering MLP fans who need to roast something to get views because "cringe roasting" is what the YouTube algorithm loves. Perfect example is that beatfox guy. Praising MYM didn't get him jack all views, and when he started trashing it again with his "review" of MYM Chapter 6, telling his audience what they wanted to hear even when it didn't even make any sense (Opaline is a sympathetic villain...and Secrets of Starlight is filler...is this a satire?), KA-CHING.  

[Iforgotmybrain 3,517]

I’d say I enjoyed MYM about as much as the later half of G4. Which is to say it wasn’t perfect but I still got a good amount of enjoyment out of it! I know it’s a bit controversial to say but I like the 3D animation, most of the time. There’s some hit or miss scenes but that happens with every show. The ponies look so fuzzy and huggable, and I’ve said this before but I love how the hooves are more horse like. They use them more as hands in G5 vs G4 but honestly it’s a cartoon involving magical talking horses I can excuse hooves working as hands sometimes. And I love the mane characters, and even Opaline, who I think was better than most G4 villains.

My main disappointment comes from the length it ran, having only 27 episodes makes it only as long as one season of FiM. Which is kinda lame if it ends up being the only long form content we get for G5 aside from TYT specials. If we get a second season or another 3D series I’ll forgive this.

I also kind of wish we would’ve gotten more side character and background character development? That’s being a bit nitpicky though since it’s not like we got heaps of side character development in season 1 of FiM from what I recall. I haven’t rewatched the first season of FiM in a while.

I haven’t really watched any of the YouTuber essays about MYM because honestly from my past experiences they all kinda tend to say the same things. Social media in pony bad, G4 better because I said so, I don’t like G5 because it is connected to G4, G5 ruins all the lore of G4, blah blah.

[River wisp 90]

It was good. Not perfect, but it found it's stride eventually. I am sad to see it go, and I hope tyt will be as good

[North Star 4,540]

20 hours ago, CastletonSnob said:

If Chapter 6 is really the end, what do you think of Make Your Mark overall? Was it a worthy follow-up to ANG and FiM?

I ask this because the YouTube MLP reviewers (Dr. Wolf, Mad Munchkin, etc) don't like G5 very much.

MYM and TYT have fun chars and VAing - much of it is enjoyable pony. But FiM tried to do a little more - create a fantasy universe, a bit like Harry Potter but with ponies :3 MYM tries to have a story, but Dr Wolf manely hits the nail on the hoof by saying that MYM feels directionless, story-wise. MYM and TYT and the movie have made me genuinely enthusiastic about Sunny and the gang, and I'd love to see these ponies form card games and RPs in the same way the Mane 6 did, and I think making such likable chars is a huge achievement. But the sense of MYM as a living world, like the FiM world was, just never came for me

[FirePuppy 627]

Nowhere as good as Friendship is Magic, obviously.

[Misty Shadow 7,085]

2 hours ago, North Star said:

Dr Wolf manely hits the nail on the hoof by saying that MYM feels directionless, story-wise

A plot-focused show...directionless, story-wise...isn't that an oxymoron? 

[Props Valroa 26,050]

The show was good, and was way more watchable than TYT. I loved the characters, and the plots - but Sparky was by far the most annoying bit of MYM for me. Would have been better off without him, or the awful designs of the dragons.

[Silly Druid 6,144]

For me, MYM can be divided into 2 parts.

Chapters 1-3 aren't really that interesting, except the beginning of Misty's character arc. The storytelling is pretty chaotic and incoherent. Even the voice acting is not as good as in later chapters.

Chapters 4-6 are enjoyable to watch, and contain interesting lore and character development. Not as good as FiM, but still very good.

[North Star 4,540]

16 hours ago, Misty Shadow said:

A plot-focused show...directionless, story-wise...isn't that an oxymoron? 

it was that he didn't know what point it was going for - not that each episode lacked a plot (I mean even Pony Life had mini-plots and Gen 5 has an overarching story, more so than Gen 3 and and Gen 1). But if I was to ask myself "After watching MYM all the way through, what did I feel?" I would say "Well Sunny, Hitch, Pipp, Zipp and Izzy are fun ponies, and Maretime Bay, Zephyr Heights and Bridlewood are interesting places." That's a fine answer - if I was a creator I'd be happy if my audience felt that way (that's the way I felt after watching the surprisingly fun G1.5 (MLP'n'Friends) and is also how I feel about TYT), but after FiM eps and when FiM ended I tended to feel like a point had been made, like at the end of Fall Weather Friends, I felt "I like this Dashie and AJ, and while challenging each other is important, don't let ego get in the way of the friendship".

Another thing, which isn't so much about direction, but scope - I think I've mentioned before - is that FiM didn't feel like a story or a mini-series, it created a world and it felt like the chars did things off screen. That's what was so intoxicating and got me to nervously poke by muzzle into the fandom in the first place. It's a shame MYM didn't feel like that, but fans can always step in with their world-building. (Do you have any G5 fics you recommend?)

[Rachel Cloverleaf 17]

Not enough Sprout!

 

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[CastletonSnob 3,025]

Would you call chapters 4-6 an improvement over chapters 1-3?

[Steve Piranha 28,782]

I must say MYM started with the wrong foot. Animation and color were a big downgrade, it was expected as we are going from a film to a show, but the difference is abysmal; same with the voice acting and writing. This last one seem to take forever going anywhere. While slice of life is expected from a pony show, it suffered the opposite problem of TYT, longer episodes going nowhere, and contributing little to none to the overarching plot with Opaline, introduced at the stinger of the VERY FIRST CHAPTER, WHICH WAS A MERE SPECIAL .

However,  its second half saw a massive improvement in animation, visuals, and plot. Despite earlier concerns of less episodes per chapter compared to chapter 2, the writing improved a lot. Now it was more focused. It mostly stuck with slice of life a big deal of the time, but each handled the immediate slice of life problem, while notoriously contributing to the overall arch. All that in spite still mostly focusing in the core main characters, and seldom in the world around them.

 

Still, it isn’t nor I was expecting to reach levels of FIM, but I must say the last second half made me look forward to G5, and hopefully make a little world building here and there to also contribute to G4’s world building by extension 

[Iforgotmybrain 3,517]

6 minutes ago, CastletonSnob said:

Would you call chapters 4-6 an improvement over chapters 1-3?

I would! I feel like chapters 1-3 were mostly low stakes slice of life episodes. They were decent, and helped develop the mane cast, but they didn’t have as much of an overarching plot as 4-6 did. With Misty turning away from Opaline, getting her cutie mark, rediscovering herself and her past, and then defeating Opaline. There was a pretty clear and obvious path the series was taking in those last chapters when compared to the first few. And it worked a lot better, I feel.

[Misty Shadow 7,085]

11 hours ago, CastletonSnob said:

Would you call chapters 4-6 an improvement over chapters 1-3?

Yes. However, Chapters 1-3 were great, even Chapter 1 had its moments of genius. I appreciate the early chapters even more when I see what they were building up to. The foreshadowing with that end scene in Growing Pains was brilliant. 

[BritishBrony2012 719]

I love it, shame Chapter 6 it on it's last. 

[Rock-O-Jello 136]

i didn't like Make Your Mark at all. the characters were pretty flat and uninteresting (except for maybe Izzy), and Hasbro's decision to make the show a continuation of Friendship is Magic instead of a reboot created more plotholes than anything else (changing how Cutie Marks work, making Spike survive for 900+ years, etc.) 

[Casey Pones 48]

I absolutely hate it.

A New Generation gave me hope for the future of the series but that hope has been dashed!

It left us with so many unanswered questions but they could have used that. The series could have followed the new ponies as they sought to uncover the past by finding clues, relics and visiting old locations. Instead they just info dumped it in the slumber party episode seemingly having the ponies pull this info out of nowhere!

We all speculated as to what could possibly break up a nation like Equestria and how they lost their history and I think we were all expecting something epic. Turns out two ponies got into a fight, everyone just turned on each others kind and then they just decided to stop teaching history in school. That is one of the most pathetic explanations they could have written!

And then there are the NUMEROUS plot holes, lore disrespecting and continuity errors that G5 has not only with G4 but even with itself. So many that I can't be bothered to name them all here.

But what really pushed me over the edge was the arrival of the dragons. Spike is dragon lord now? What happened to Ember? Since when has the dragonlands been a lush tropical island? Dragons have cutiemarks and specific magic now? But what really boiled my fan-blood is that DRAGONS ARE QUADREDPIEDAL NOW?! As mad as continuity errors make me, there is NO EXCUSE for completely redesigning a specie's physical form, doing it without explanation or expecting fans to just go along with it! It's not like the artists and writers could have missed the fact they were bipedal in G4! And what's worse, SPARKY IS BIPEDIAL! You can't redesign a fantasy species to quadrupedal AND have a bipedal version at the same time! Whoever adopted this show from the G4 team, they've done a worse job then Disney adopted Star Wars from Lucas. At lest they knew not to tinker with the overall physical form of any of the species!

And on top of all of this, the new show was supposed to cover functioning with other cultures outside your ow. But personally I have seen very little of this in G5 and G4 actually seemed to cover this better.

Make your Mark is such a mangled mess that I think the only way to fix it would be to declare it all non-cannon and start it over agaon from the end of A New Generation. 

[The Nth Doctor 652]

Yeah, it's...not great, and my rewatch wrapped up with the absolute whimper that was Secrets of Starlight

Good god what happened to...literally anything from the movie - magic's treated like it's always been around (and in a flashback in TYT, set during Misty's childhood, we see unicorns using magic, so...)

Urgh...what a waste of a generation

[Props Valroa 26,050]

@The Nth Doctor

There is a lot of wasted opportunity to be sure. I've seen all of it and MYM is leagues better than TYT, but there is a lot they could have improved on. Didn't like how they connected it to G4, that's for sure. The Movie was really golden.

[BirdsBooksBrownies 37]

I have mixed feelings about G5. Some good stuff and some that was rather meh. 

I think the biggest problems were when they tried too hard to connect G4 and G5, and putting the big movie before the show (a cart before the horse situation). 

Some ideas I had when G5 was still mostly speculation:

-G4 was to G5 the way Ancient Greece and the rich mythos are to us. 

-a completely AU/AT

-Sunny learns about The Queen the way most people learn about the President, in school but never actually meet her or if they do she's a much older wiser figure than she was in G4.

[Props Valroa 26,050]

@BirdsBooksBrownies

Would have been better for it to be a completely separate timeline. G5 doesn't live up to G4 in my opinion. G5 would be fine as it's own separate universe. That'd solve most of my problems with it. 

[BirdsBooksBrownies 37]

49 minutes ago, Props Valroa said:

@BirdsBooksBrownies

Would have been better for it to be a completely separate timeline. G5 doesn't live up to G4 in my opinion. G5 would be fine as it's own separate universe. That'd solve most of my problems with it. 

At the time some of the leaks suggested that G5 was going to be a G4 2.0, with the same characters and everything only minor cosmetic changes like Pinkie being the Pegasus instead of Fluttershy. Hence me looking for ways that could potentially blend the two without treating the past decade like a joke. Obviously what we got isn't exactly prime-time golden globe material but it had some decent moments. But truthfully I feel the same way about G4, it was good and I am glad that I was able to go on the ride, but it wasn't a perfect show either.