My Little Pony: Friendship Never Ends
Mar. 3rd, 2018 06:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerMy friend Becky got me into the new My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic a few years ago, and I’ve been watching in a desultory sort of way since then. It’s a good comfort show: there may be tribulations in Equestria, but you know it will all come right in the end. The ponies may squabble but their friendships will never end.
But I’m nearing the end of season 6 now and I’m running out of steam on it. The episodes have lost some of their zing (maybe the writers are running low on friendship lessons they can illustrate in 23 minutes or less?), and I’m starting to disagree with more of the friendship lessons, which as those lessons are often explicitly spelled out at the end of the episode is difficult to ignore.
In particular, this happens every time there’s an episode with Discord, who is, well, the personified spirit of Discord. He was an antagonist in an earlier season and now he’s become a friend, sort of.
He’s a terrible friend. He throws temper tantrums when his favorite pony Fluttershy hangs out with other people, and he shows up at parties where he’s not invited specifically to ruin them by, say, summoning up flood to fill the whole ballroom, and he invites himself to a DnD night and then complains that DnD is boring (you weren’t invited in the first place!), whisks the participants off to various activities he thinks are more fun but they have no interest in (THIS IS WHY YOU WEREN’T INVITED), and then vengefully brings the DnD game so that he can send armies of orcs to attack the players who have refused to stop playing a game they enjoy in order to entertain Discord. (The orcs may be illusory, but they’re capable of causing physical pain.)
The show is meant to teach explicit didactic lessons about relationships to six-year-olds. Surely “If one of your friends is really mean and possessive and physically hurts you if you don’t do what he wants, it’s okay to end that friendship” has to be a possibility that’s on the table, at least once every six seasons or so.
This is never the lesson. Discord always gets a 352rd chance. In Equestria, friendships never end.
But I’m nearing the end of season 6 now and I’m running out of steam on it. The episodes have lost some of their zing (maybe the writers are running low on friendship lessons they can illustrate in 23 minutes or less?), and I’m starting to disagree with more of the friendship lessons, which as those lessons are often explicitly spelled out at the end of the episode is difficult to ignore.
In particular, this happens every time there’s an episode with Discord, who is, well, the personified spirit of Discord. He was an antagonist in an earlier season and now he’s become a friend, sort of.
He’s a terrible friend. He throws temper tantrums when his favorite pony Fluttershy hangs out with other people, and he shows up at parties where he’s not invited specifically to ruin them by, say, summoning up flood to fill the whole ballroom, and he invites himself to a DnD night and then complains that DnD is boring (you weren’t invited in the first place!), whisks the participants off to various activities he thinks are more fun but they have no interest in (THIS IS WHY YOU WEREN’T INVITED), and then vengefully brings the DnD game so that he can send armies of orcs to attack the players who have refused to stop playing a game they enjoy in order to entertain Discord. (The orcs may be illusory, but they’re capable of causing physical pain.)
The show is meant to teach explicit didactic lessons about relationships to six-year-olds. Surely “If one of your friends is really mean and possessive and physically hurts you if you don’t do what he wants, it’s okay to end that friendship” has to be a possibility that’s on the table, at least once every six seasons or so.
This is never the lesson. Discord always gets a 352rd chance. In Equestria, friendships never end.
