I like My Little Pony.

I liked the Generation 5 Movie- they made legitimately good characters.

But I don’t know why I made myself watch the G5 CGI TV show. I think I’ve been pretty blue with some health stuff and disability making me feel hopeless, so I needed something to beat me over the head with sunshine and rainbows.

But boy, was it painful to watch. Its clear that everyone actually cares, from writers to animators to the music cast, but they’re so damn rushed, the animations felt like keyframes with autogenerated in-betweens. (One character literally has NO EARS because they weren’t afforded time to correct reference sheets!!!)

But the worst part is that the entire pitch of Generation 5 was basically “Something went wrong in the time after Twilight Sparkle and her friends. (the previous series’ protagonists) And we have to fix it.”

…And then they never explained what went wrong. But because the writers haven’t inspired confidence outside of individual character writing, its probably an embarrassingly bad reason, so maybe it was actually good it got cancelled?

The narratives have the bones of good plots, but needed a real writer’s room and, like, five more drafts.
I’d like to write picture books one day, so I like critiquing this kind of thing, and it hurts me how basically every script could have been as good as a good episode of an older My Little Pony show with some time.

So then, presumably knowing they’re getting cancelled, they rush to defeat the main antagonist in a pretty unsatisfying way… (And… I think she fuckin’ died??? In this more juvenile followup to Friendship is Magic???)

And then, because they have toy quotas to meet, they spend the runtime of an entire special- the very last thing they produced for the CG series -off in a winter wonderland, instead of using that to better resolve the final conflict.

It was really cute, honestly. Got my quota of “Sunshine and Rainbows” met, and had some of the best everything in the series. But I really should have just watched this and some classic 80s MLP and been done.

https://youtu.be/qoUwjBVdFas?feature=shared

I mean, just look at that, its just so damn pleasant and adorable and happy, and colorful, but in a way that doesn’t make your eyes bleed. The animation is legitimately good, and the song is a pleasant tune that isn’t going to ruin your day if it gets in your head.

…Except even this adorable, very classically MLP snowy romp still (completely pointlessly) evokes the time in G4 where that one character had a legitimate cult and then caused the apocalypse like a dozen times because it just can’t shake the shadow of its predecessor.

Why did I do this to myself?

I should have stopped watching when the animation of the first season was literally making my toes curl.