By that I don’t mean that Twilight has her wings ripped from her, Discord is turned back into stone and everything goes back to how it was pre-Season 3. “Princess Twilight Sparkle”, the two-part season premiere, then, acts almost as a reboot of sorts. Oh, yes, this show knows how to do creepy villain transformation sequences. These were tentative baby steps, but they were (80% of the time) high-quality baby steps, those of a show evolving without losing sight of its original ethos or what made it so unique and alluring in the first place. The show tried to create plots and touch topics that were slightly beyond its usual reach and which could be resolved in a slightly different way than the usual “FRIENDSHIP IS THE BEST!” It also tried to shake up the status quo (reforming Discord), called back to prior seasons (THE GREAT AND POWERFUL TRIXIE’s triumphant return) and fleetingly attempted to set-up an overarching plot (and by “fleetingly” I mean “it showed up in the premiere and the finale”). Season 3, at half the length of the prior two seasons, attempted to drag the show towards something slightly more mature than in prior seasons. It’s a very, very fine line to walk but it’s one that everyone involved with the show is extremely adept at pulling off season after season. Much like Disney Channel’s Gravity Falls, which is the only other show on television that I feel comes close to the same wavelength that My Little Pony operates on, Friendship is Magic backs up the happy with consistent, strongly-defined and well-rounded characters, a great knack for crafting and expanding the world of the show, a very sharp sense of humour (this is a show that knows how to time every line and pratfall for maximum comedic effect) and, every so often, being surprisingly badass. Of course, it’s not sickly and asininely sweet, where the schmaltz is laid on so think you could drown pastel-coloured horses in it and sell the remains as glue. A feel-good show that makes you happier by watching it. There are enough shows elsewhere on TV that are incredibly serious and take great pleasure in putting its characters through the ringer, Friendship is Magic acts like an antidote to that. It loves its characters and its world and is endlessly optimistic about what each new day brings. Speaking from experience, I’d have to hazard a guess that it’s down to how nice the show is, by which I mean the tone. ![]() ![]() But as to how it’s become so popular, popular enough to spawn a giant fanbase with their own slightly off-putting nickname (“Brony”, which is at least seven-million miles better than “Avatard”), a vast network of artists, animators, writers, VAs and musicians that pump out so much brand-new fan-made content every day that the leading fan website, Equestria Daily, has to put most of them in separate roundup posts, a convention program that stretches all over America and the calendar year and is a large enough periphery demographic that the show’s network, The Hub, and the show itself has actually started pandering and selling to it (whilst, key factor here, never once losing sight of the original demographic)… that remains a relative mystery. If you watch an episode of the show and are able to get on its wavelength, it makes perfect sense as to why it became popular: it’s a damn, damn great show that appeals to the older animation fan just as the cartoon-loving kids it’s targeted at. Trying to explain exactly why My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is so popular is one of life’s great mysterious paradoxes.
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