My Little Pony

This article or section is about something oldschool - and awesome. Make sure your rose-tinted glasses are on nice and tight, and prepare for a lovely walk down nostalgia lane.

The original 1980s series was widely regarded as shit....

My Little Pony (MLP for short) is a toy and cartoon series created by Hasbro with a long and tortured history. Originally noted for being a particularly shitty series back in the 1980s during the Dark Age of Cartoons, it was notable for having characters with no actually definable points, little in the way of conflict, and very little in the way of character development. Like Transformers, the show came into existence to support a line of toys. Unlike its counterpart, however, My Little Pony show was horrible, even by 1980s standards, and it died - as expected, and we were richer for having lost it.

....Or so we thought.

Then, nearly 2 decades hence, it saw something of a revival - and of a most.... Unusual sort. Done by a completely new team and with a completely new cast, a new show, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic emerged, and managed to leave everyone who watched it in a state of stunned silence - it was actually reasonably good.

...Whereas the re-release is heralded as mildly awesome.

How the series went from complete shit to not-complete-shit is something many familiar with the series have wondered. In truth, it owes most of its revival to a combination of factors: extremely clever writing (it has the same writers as the Powerpuff Girls), much better animation than most other shows, and remarkably-enjoyable characters. Which is hilarious when you consider that the show is directed at little girls. Whilst hardly the best show ever to grace television, the new series stands head and shoulders over 99.95% of the drek that's on network TV, which is kind of unique.

The charm and appeal of the various characters has caused huge portions of the general populace to develop an affection for the show, seemingly in the face of any and all logic. Even /tg/ has not been immune to this, with the show inspiring works of concentrated hilarity and win such as Don't Rest Your Hooves, Ponyfinder, and joking setups with the cast of the new series playing D&D and Warhammer 40,000. It seems like almost no community can resist the combination of d'aaaaw and humor.

Wait, Seriously?

"FUCK OFF!!!"

It's sort of incredible how a show that was widely regarding as being some of the worst fail ever to fail could be revamped into something so widely-accepted and praised, but there you have it. The pony-show has inspired many, both on /tg/ and off of it, so in spite of the series being so aimed-at-little-girls, it has achieved humorously high acceptance, even among fa/tg/uys and ca/tg/irls. Posting MLP-related will invariably produce biblical-level firestorms on /tg/, as the few holdout haters of the series bitch and troll whilst the rest of /tg/ rushes to defend the original posting. It's rare that anything on /tg/ outside of he who must never be mentioned brings about this kind of righteous indignation, but there you have it. To the credit of the Show's producers, they know that chan-goers are a sizable chunk of their audience, and make shout-outs often. Several memes, including Chocolate Rain have already been referenced in episodes.

Yes, it's a show for little girls, but the bulk of the audience doesn't care; it's blinded by the Awesome. Yes, things in it make no sense, such as the fact that they have somehow constructed a village without actually possessing hands or opposable thumbs - but the audience will put up with it, because it still makes more sense than Matt Ward's fluff and is hilarious to boot. Yes, it's childish and silly, but the audience doesn't give a shit. It is accepted nowadays for the same reason Touhou was, and whilst there's a number of fa/tg/uys who will take up arms against MLP content on /tg/, the bulk will defend it to the death.

Characters and Such

blah blah blah original ponies: 1982, legs without feet like psuedopods, as many characters as the Chinese sweatshops could pump out. 24-minute Saturday-morning cartoons commercials. Second wave: 1997, poseable heads, Mary-Sue pegasusicorns, sales were good in Europe but tanked in USA, so let's hear it for Boxcar Willie syndrome. Third wave: the start of writing actual fluff instead of shitting on a typewriter, and making ponies for manchildren womanchildren adult collectors.

Wave three-point-five, or "core 7", 2008, is what /co/ would recognize as MLP. The water-caste Tau working for Hasbro figured the cartoons were getting more dollars in than the normal 30-second commercials, so they cut the pony models down to just seven: Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Star Song, Sweetie Belle, Toola Roola, Cheerilee, and Scootaloo. The toy molds were changed to make the toys more weeaboo: smaller bodies, larger heads, freakishly wide eyes.

Wave four is 2010, with the "Friendship is Magic" cartoon on teevee channel The Hub. This is where the MLP starts to infect /b/, /tg/, even /v/ like a four-legged syphilis. All the reaction image shit you see comes from MLP:FiM. The new "core 7" are:

Twilight Sparkle, the nerdy main character. She's a unicorn and is really good with magic, she also writes a letter to Celestia every week to explain her findings on friendship. If she somehow fails to do this, she turns into a goddamn pedo. She has a baby dragon as a familiar, which I think we can all agree is pretty cool. She's a bookish shut-in voiced by the same woman who played Raven in Teen Titans, so yeah.

Rainbow Dash, a awesome pegasus (Pony with wings, duh) who is one of the best flyers in all of Equestria. She is also a lesbian, according to the internet. She employs violence as a first, second, and final solution; and only the watchful eye of Hasbro has stopped her from TPK'ing the party every episode.

Fluttershy is also a pegasus, but unlike Rainbow Dash has a timid and shy personality and likes to take care of little critters. That said, she is the pony version of the hulk. She will wreck your shit and/or mind control your ass with The Stare.

Pinkie Pie, an earth pony (means they have no skills like flying or da magicz) who is the super happy party pony of the group, and has a tendency for being random and irrational. She is the comic relief and is also prone to mental breakdowns that transform her into her alter ego Pinkimina Diane Pie who will fucking cut you.

Applejack, another earth pony. She's either a Southern stereotype or a Western stereotype, depending on who you ask. She co-owns an orchard with her brother and is generally relatively level-headeds dangerously obsessed with profit.

Rarity is a fashion designer and owns her own store in Ponyville. She is simultaneously generous and too greedy for her own good and in the same episode she might give out her products like she doesn't know what capitalism is and endanger her life and the lives of others for the sake of some shiny loot. In other words, typical PC.

Princess Celestia, the god-empress of Equestria who raises the sun and, after banishing her sister to the moon for a 1000 years, the Moon. She is also Twilight's mentor and being a giant troll. She is known by the fandom - well, the portion that isn't 7 years old - as Trollestia.

/tg/'s entire expeditionary force risked going into diabetic shock just from doing this research for you bastards.

It should be noted that Celestia is voiced by none other than Nicole Olliver, who voiced Farseer Macha, Farseer Caerys, and star of Love Can Bloom, Farseer Taldeer. Another character, Chief Thunderhooves, is voiced by the ever and extremely awesome Scott McNeil (A.K.A. Davian Cool, Sindri Myr,Neroth, Firaeveus "MEHTAWL BAWKSES!!!" Carron and Indrick "Spess Mehrens" Boreale). Suffice to say, hilarity has resulted.

Of Course, Mods are a Thing

With fragile egos in hand, the mods on /tg/ do, as ever, decide what is and is not considered traditional gaming. As a result, depending on who might be online at the moment, MLP is liable to result in a ban even if the ponies are discussed in the context of gaming. It really comes down to the fact that just about anything can be traditional gaming in the right hands, since interactive story-telling is older than genital warts and can easily be applied to anything, but it's always about the folks in power in the end.

Gallery

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  Even /tg/ has not been immune.

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  In the grim darkness of the far-future, there are only ponies.

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  Ridiculous amount of ponies, that is.

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  Nor Pazio. Ponyfinder is your new RPG.

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  Venerate the God Princess of Ponykind or else

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  -4 Str

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  and Celestia as the DMNPC

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  This as Hesperax ? Dark eldar would find that sick...Yet strangely erotic.

See Also

• Ponyfinder - the Pathfinder splatbook for MLP races and classes
• Don't Rest Your Hooves - the horror of Saturday-morning cartoons
• Ponibooru - Oh god, 73,000 images and growing
• ClopClop - (nsfw) there is no god. We are damned.