Similar to Twilight, there are two other ‘strong’ ponies. Right off the bat, the show has told young girls that A) it’s ok to be a nerd, and B) be proud of your brain, and FILL it with knowledge. Rather than prancing through fields of flowers and singing, she’s mature and she wants to better herself through her education. The main protagonist, Twilight Sparkle, is a bookish, learned, and altogether nerdy girl who will actually call her friends out in their less-than-reasonable moments. And not only that, but our main characters were not collectively girly. Needless to say, I was quite surprised and quite impressed when I pulled up the first episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and discovered that not only did it have a plot (at least for the first two episodes), but it also had memorable and identifiable characters who were actually developed. The “conflict” in every episode seemed to stem from petty social drama and little else, because surely anything more would be too much for little girls to handle! Nevermind that its release overlapped the likes of She-Ra. I wouldn’t call the main characters ‘protagonists’ so much as just ‘reoccurrances’ they weren’t developed, they weren’t memorable, and you couldn’t tell them apart. The problem with the old My Little Pony is that it didn’t have a plot or a purpose, which I suppose is fine if you just want to sell toys. What is it about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic that can charm fully-grown male and female nerds alike? So, I thought, let’s go see what the big deal is. And it’s not just the comics, either: Pony memes from “Derpy Hooves” to YouTube remixes have sprouted all over the Intertubes and reached the attention of the series’ creator and its artists, many of whom have begun to join in on message boards and insert subtle meme references into the show. Nevertheless, the prevalence of these comics got me wondering if perhaps there was some seriousness to them after all. Granted, I’ve since matured into a different beast and my all-male group of gamer friends has kindly begun informing me that my gender is now “bro”, so perhaps it’s best to take my opinion with a grain of salt. I mean, the original My Little Pony was too sugar-coated for me when I was a little girl, and my room was full of enough pink and stuffed animals to give a goth a seizure. I always found this pretty hard to believe, and dismissed them as a running gag. Every couple of days or so while browsing Reddit’s “f7u12” section, I happen across a comic wherein a grown man watches the new My Little Pony reboot and becomes addicted to it. ![]() If you spend more than thirty minutes a day on the Internet, chances are sometime, somewhere, you’ve chanced across a rage comic - those badly-drawn (on purpose, of course) image macros that hail from the likes of Reddit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |