Editing My Little Pony (section)

==/mlp/==
[[File:Mlp_in_a_nutshell.png|thumb|180px|right|A short glimpse into the ride that never ends. The dirty bastard didn't even give us the name of the girl!]]
/mlp/ is one of 4chan's more active boards. It's also probably the most tragic.

===Early tragedy===

During seasons one and two of My Little Pony, the board was populated with a huge number of fans discussing the show. A few of /tg/'s old artists, who haven't been seen around /tg/ proper since the great content purge of 2009, were there on a regular basis producing hilarious comics, stories, and drawings for the young fandom. The extreme proliferation of materials led to the creation of a website called Equestria Daily, as well as numerous others, and thousands of Youtube parodies and song remixes which range from very good to inconceivably terrible.

However, in the time between seasons, /mlp/ finds itself struggling to discuss new content. The board was made mainly to satisfy 4chan's moderators, not because the fourth generation of My Little Pony had so much going on that an entire board to itself was really necessary. During these times, the site discusses or sometimes destroys fandom artists, official show staff, or Hasbro's corporate politics. In time, the fandom had also developed a number of ongoing sub-cultures that were entirely sustained by fan artists. Notable examples include or included fluffy ponies, Milky Way, Flutterrape, Anon in Equestria, Ponies on Earth, Satyr Abomination, ass worship, bat ponies, and whatever else can be made into a series during the hiatus. In other words, the board is active, but somewhat starving for material related to the actual show.

The board also had a terrible janitor who was so bad at his job that he became a joke around the site. He was often apathetic, deleted threads inexplicably, and didn't seem to have a purpose beyond wasting everyone's time. Eventually, the board named him "Scruffy", after the janitor from Futurama who seems to have no purpose or positive influence on anything. After that, he was always depicted as the character, and Scruffy's face was sometimes plastered over questionable or NSFW content as a kind of jab at the guy. He wasn't exactly liked, but he wasn't a scourge. Yet.

Eventually, that changed. For unknown reasons, possibly a visit by Lauren Faust, Scruffy began a crackdown and /mlp/ got to re-live the days of bans and fighting for the right to post content on their own board. He arbitrarily chose a number of the generals to die, some because of racy content and others just because he didn't like them and Global Rule #6 allows a mod to delete anything he feels falls outside of "positive contributions". He rapidly went from a character teasingly thought of as someone who couldn't do a job to someone who was actively doing his job very badly. Further outrage ensued when screen caps from the hidden janitor board, /j/, revealed Scruffy to be a total dick hole who obviously kind of hated the board - maybe all of 4chan while we're at it, but that's our moderators for you.

Around this same time, Hasbro realized they were sitting on a money printing machine, and instead of standing back and leaving it alone to just print money, they began hitting it with a sledgehammer in the hopes that the machine would produce some kind of totally new money with a more enticing scent that would be more valuable. 

It didn't.

Lauren Faust left the show by the middle of season two. The exact reasons have been left to speculation, but it probably a variety of causes. MLP has been noted for dealing with constant executive interference, and its writers have complained that there are frequently "too many chefs" in the kitchen. But there's also evidence of some events in Faust's personal life which may have led to her resignation.

===Later development===

Anyway, by the end of season two and all of season three, Hasbro was actively injecting lame ideas into new episodes, culminating with the release of a brilliant plan: clutter the main character up with a pair of goose wings and call her a princess. Disney is making tons of dosh on princesses! How could this go wrong?

Then they took their next step. They introduced a spin-off called Equestria Girls. It was a novel concept in the way that it took a bunch of young adult characters with clear future prospects, an open world full of magic, and a friendly, colorful atmosphere, and then completely obliterated all of that by making the ponies into human, teenage girls trapped in motherfucking high school. It was a movie, and the entire plot revolved around how much the high school basically sucked compared to the pony universe. To the total, utter, unparalleled shock of Hasbro's astounding marketing teams, somehow, a show about pastel girls in the shackles of a tired, stressful cliche of a system did not capture quite the same audience.

Season 4, 5, and 7 were heralded as [[Awesome]] by the show's fans, while Season 6 was much more skubby, as many felt that [[Kaldor Draigo|the creator's OC was taking up too much screentime and wrecking the lore.]]

Season 4 gave us a huge fight between [[Khorne|Tirek]] and Twilight ([[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXXU41qGbPg |viewable here), 5 introduced a [[Communism|cult of equality]] dedicated to erasing cutie marks, [[Advancing the Storyline|the Cutie Mark Crusaders get their cutie marks]], and time travel. Twilight gets a student of her own who is [[Elminster|obscenely powerful and might be the creators' pet]].

Season 6 had several sweeping changes to the Equestria, the biggest being the overthrow of [[Succubus|Queen]] [[Doppelganger|Chrysalis]].

Season 7 has the return of six legendary heroes from pony history, including a wizard named [[Mordenkainen|Starswirl]].

Season 8 and the final one, Season 9, made even more skub as the series came to a close. Season 8 had the main character teach lessons to several students from other lands: a yak, a changeling, a hippogriff, a pony, a dragon, and a blue griffon whose name literally means "[[Derp|chicken]]". Some /mlp/ fans condemned this with the usual complaints of "diversity", while others went on the usual business of fawning over the new characters and doing worse.

Season 9 ended the franchise with a bang: the "bang" being several outbursts of skub that complained about the treatment of the villains.

As for [[Extra Heresy|Equestria Girls <s>2</s> <s>3</s> '''4''']], they were near-universally despised. The pony movie was very much [[Skub]]. Some loved it, some hated it, and aside from being a musical fest, it was almost [[furry]] with some walking cat guy from a shantytown. The Equestria Girls movies were followed by several web series covering the further adventures of the pastel high-schoolers, only to end after a Christmas special because it was not as popular as it used to be. Like its series, there were some fans who still relished themselves with those colourful xenos, but most have moved on to greener pastures.

After the show ended, Hasbro made a new movie that took place some time after the end of season 9. The setting has been modernised, and the pony races were split into three hostile communities. While it led to some RAGE over its alleged leftist influences, much of /mlp/ was rather chill about it.