Note: like all my reviews, I discuss spoilers where relevant.

Of course, music and animation need something worthwhile to adorn; you can have individual elements of music, animation, kindness, honesty etc, but what is the final element, the element of magic? What is it about MLP—what seeds were latent in season 1–2 which could make MLP such a phenomenon? I would identify two major factors: the first is the pervasively optimistic growth & progress of the series, and the second is the utopian construction of a more fulfilling modern society.

“Is it so small a thing

To have enjoy’d the sun,

To have lived light in the spring,

To have loved, to have thought, to have done;

To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes…” Matthew Arnold, “Empedocles on Etna”

“‘The situation is exceedingly difficult’, Son said at a briefing discussing the results on Monday. ‘Our unicorns have fallen into this sudden coronavirus ravine. But some of them will use this crisis to grow wings.’” Bloomberg News

After watching two seasons, it hit me: I was wrong. MLP isn’t a “slice-of-life moe anime”. It’s a shonen anime! It’s more Nanoha & Haruhi than K-On.

No, seriously. The hallmark of a shonen anime is that it is a bildungsroman in which a protagonist grows in tandem with friends and allies (frequently made by “befriending” them with giant laser beams) as they experience life and overcome challenges, building up skills & powers as they explore & affect the wider world. The shonen nature is hidden in Season 1, whose episodes often suffer from slowly-developing, single-threaded plots; lacking a “B plot”, they feel like they drag on & little happens. (This apparently was partially due to trying for a “E” TV rating, which guidelines turn out to be much more restrictive than I realized. When they settled for “PG” ratings, much more natural and active episodes became doable.) But this becomes increasingly clear in season 2 and on. To quote the leaked 2009 “show bible” (proposal?) for “My Little Pony Adventures”:

…all too often the worlds created for girl properties are left vague, ambiguous, and generic. But I do not think this has to be so. A girl world can be set up in the same manner, it is the intentions that must be different. Rather than set the stage for epic, dramatic adventure stories like the examples above [“Transformers and G.I. Joe”], a girl world should set the stage for friendship, heart and laughter as well as adventure—adventure that is more fun and exciting than dramatic and epic, but adventure nonetheless. With only that alternate intention, the same strong history, mythology, back story and even the alternate logic and physics of an alternate world will serve the same purpose to endear you to the characters and make the stories memorable. …Our ponies, though independent, have the emotional range of anywhere between 10 and 15, with most seeming about 12…Secondary Audiences… Boys (believe it or not). They won’t admit it, but they’ll watch. When their sister’s watching it, they’ll balk and act like it’s dumb, then they’ll sit down and watch it. For the same reason Moms will find My Little Pony interesting enough to happily share with their daughters, the compelling conflicts, the strong characterizations, the silly humor and (most importantly for boys) the ADVENTURE, the boys will watch, too. Really. Moms. We’ve got a few good points going for us when it comes to Moms. First, the original buyers of My Little Ponies are in their late twenties to mid-thirties and are likely to have daughters within the target age range, 3–11. Bringing back elements of the original ponies from the 80’s (original characters like Applejack and Spike, strong sense of classical magic like Dream Castle and the Waterfall, and a pinch of legitimate pony play) will nurture a sense of nostalgia, something that is not difficult to do with Gen-X-ers. Second, compelling storylines (ie. truly engaging conflicts, both external adventure- and internal relationships), characters with depth and complexity, clever and silly humor that doesn’t talk down to kids (pony puns like Fillydelphia, a regular supply of slapstick and character-based jokes and gags) and even a few jokes that might go over the kids’ heads will all engage Mom enough that watching My Little Pony will become a fun thing for Mom to do with her daughter. Not only will Mom be sharing her favorite childhood toy with her little girl, but she may actually enjoy watching too!

There is quite a bit of action, leading to whiplash, as Chris Sims puts it: “…the downside is that this is a show that opens with a massive thousand year-old conflict for the fate of the world and then moves into bake sales and apple harvests, but hey, that’s life.”— and then it moves on to “plague and famine, more famine, slavery, mind control, plague again, more mind control, recreational infanticide, and slavery again.” (I discovered that it is indeed not a great idea to watch it on psychedelics. The social lessons are also too slow and spread out over 25 minutes, so one would have to use boiled-down edited episodes to get a few in during a trip.) I would be hard-pressed to defend season 1 as the best or second-best season, though it benefits from the novelty of worldbuilding and some of the best MLP songs; it is closer to the price of admission, which comes with a promissory note of growth.

MLP is often described as being enjoyable because it’s “optimistic”; optimism could be defined as the attitude that things will turn out well (if bad now) or will get even better (if already good now), but I would disagree that this is what is meant by saying “MLP is optimistic”. A show can cop a mere optimistic attitude and say all the right things, but that is unsatisfying & rings hollow—“jam tomorrow”—unless one also then shows that optimism in action. This is precisely what unfolds over the 8 seasons of MLP. What is most striking is the extent to which the characters and world grow & develop. Many start off as responsible young adults, some running their own businesses, before the series starts ; this is excellent, a reminder that school is only a transition to real life, “it gets better”, and should not subsume the totality of your identity and self-worth, but they go on from there.

“Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified…He that labours in any great or laudable undertaking, has his fatigues first supported by hope, and afterwards rewarded by joy; he is always moving to a certain end, and when he has attained it, an end more distant invites him to a new pursuit…That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem” Samuel Johnson again, “The Adventurer” #111

Rarity opens multiple shops; Fluttershy copes with her social anxiety, befriending the dangerous Discord for the good of Equestria, and eventually founds an animal refuge; Rainbow Dash progresses from a bored surly anti-intellectual overly-competitive weather control Pegasus to devoted adventure reader & the most talented member of the elite Wonderbolts military force; Twilight grows from an completely isolated grad student to respected magician to the alicorn-ized Princess, suddenly “adrift in the meritocracy” having aced all the exams only to realize being a mere princess was unfulfilling & empty, eventually discovering her purpose as Princess of Friendship & the widely respected founder of the friendship university formally teaching friendship. The song “True True Friend Winter Wrap-up (Ultimate Mash-Up)” may seem bizarre, as the two songs are so musically different, but I think it works because it embodies Twilight’s character arc, season 1–3. (The Cutie Mark Crusaders, who often mirror the Mane Six, undergo their own growth and after they find their cutie marks, discover a new mission of teaching other ponies to find their cutie marks.) Along the way, Twilight goes from suffering from neuroticism (barely managed with OCD checklists) to a confident competent leader. Indeed, her growth appears even in small things like the teleportation spell she practices in season 1/2 or learning to fly after being an alicorn: at first she can only teleport with great difficulty a few meters, such as across the room, but by season 8, she can casually teleport to Canterlot & back ; her flying is disastrously clumsy initially but after several seasons she is an adept flyer.

The world expands with them as they take on new responsibilities: the once cozy-feeling Equestria, a few pony cities like Manehattan or Las Pegasus, overseen by Canterlot, has discovered multiple large countries on its borders, from the yaks of Yakyakistan to the distant Changeling hive to the Griffons to the Hippogriffs to the Crystal Ponies of the Crystal Empire (note: they look like crystals and there are a lot of crystals there), and the ‘mane’ characters have become unofficial ambassadors to them, challenged to maintain good foreign relations among their other responsibilities and pleasures. Indeed, the primary role of the friendship university is simply taking in children of allied elites and teaching them about friendship and pony culture.

A case in point would be Twilight’s side-kick/assistant, the baby dragon Spike. Everypony’s annoying bratty little brother, Spike starts off as irritating, lazy, dangerously incompetent, and insecurely self-aggrandizing, antagonizing many viewers. But as time passed, he, well, grew up, and developed a sense of self-worth by helping save the Crystal Empire and then open up relations with the dragons, serving as a calming counterbalance and advisor to Twilight, and even going through dragon-puberty to get wings & learn to fly. Another striking case was the introduction of Starlight Glimmer in season 5 to serve as a foil and inversion of Twilight Sparkle: an equally smart magically-talented who inverts friendship and whose scheme ultimately defeats Twilight Sparkle; after her redemption, instead of being relegated to a rarely-appearing side character, she became an increasingly central protagonist, to the consternation of many fans.

Even the writing becomes gradually more willing to throw in a mess of allusions or parodies with a wink to the viewer, and more sophisticated in form & content.

D&D allusions and even playing D&D? Check. Are those pony versions of Ranma ½/Evangelion/Sailor Moon/Utena in “Scare Master”? Check. A Speed Racer homage song in “Derby Racers”? Check. Gilmore Girls’s “Sire’s Hollow”/“Star Hollow” reference? Certainly. Was that really Pinkie Pie dressed up as Josephine Baker? Yes. In the Daring Do episode with the Daring Do fan convention, were those dakimakura pillows with Daring Do tied up on them being sold by the vendors, and the episode is a critique of fans/head-canons? Yes & yes they were. Discord’s “Glass Of Water” song-skit would not be out of place in the slightest in a Disney comedy like Aladdin, and the “Wonderbolt Rap” is a pitch-perfect parody of “cool” ’90s kid show hip-hop raps, complete with lovingly-rendered CRT/VHS blur—yes, really. Rick & Morty or an escape room episode? Sure, why not! And was that—the XKCD roller-coaster meme‽ YES, IT WAS.

One episode is an extensive demonstration of the problems with a barter economy caused by the need for double coincidence of wants, the difficulty of arranging transactions organ-donation-ring-style to get everypony what they want, and the role of money as an numéraire, which would not be out of place in an economics course; the episode “Tanks For the Memories” is perhaps the best treatment of the death of one’s pet I’ve seen in a children’s show yet, while “A Rockhoof and a Hard Place” is unmistakably about suicide (while another almost dealt with TBIs), and the death of Applejack’s parents shadows her from season 1, leading to the hard-hitting “Perfect Pear” 156 episodes later; the character Maud Pie is one of the most sympathetic depictions of Asperger’s in American TV (and infinitely better than the loathsome Big Bang Theory); “The Mysterious Mare Do Well” successfully tricked me; the inevitable Rashomon-style episode “P.P.O.V. (Pony Point of View)” provides fun opportunity for satire of each character, while “The Saddlerow Review” plays with flashbacks from multiple perspectives and “Games Ponies Play”/“Just for Sidekicks” run simultaneously; “The Cutie Map Part 1”/2 is an extended critique of egalitarianism & communism run rampant, complete with cheerful but sinister song lyrics like “you can’t have nightmares / if you never dream” (earning it a Rabid Puppies Hugo nomination of all things); the episode “Crusaders of the Lost Mark” aired on MLP’s 5th anniversary and closed out the 5-season-long Cutie Mark Crusader subplot which had built up the CMCs as a parallel to the Mane Six, with a similar ascension, featured no less than 3 musical numbers, while redeeming their long-running antagonist in a single episode (said antagonist who caused the Cutie Mark Crusaders to form & whose redemption also earns them their cutie marks), and the episode end segues into the end of the opening animation ! Just on the formal level it’s a feat. And if you’d told me that a season of MLP would focus on secondary characters—with Starlight Glimmer teaming up with Trixie, Discord, and the Changeling defector—and that this would in fact be the sole focus of the season finale with hardly any appearance by the mane characters, finishing Starlight Glimmer’s own redemption arc & acceptance of her responsibility as a leader in order to save Equestria (“To Where and Back Again—Part 1”/“2”), I’d’ve said you were high from huffing fan-speculation fumes—but they did it anyway. And there is loss along the way: Applejack’s parents, we slowly realize, aren’t coming back; the handicapped Scootaloo finally admits she’ll never be able to fly; and Twilight Sparkle lives in a treehouse-library (living out the dream of many geeky kids) but after 4 seasons it is destroyed, permanently, with only the roots left for memory. Overall it’s amazing that they were willing to keep changing things the way they did when it would have been so easy to settle down in a Simpsons-style rut; and at times it cost them (witness the swivet over the end of Season 3, where many fans quit—foalish, as it meant they missed many of the best episodes).

It’s not all perfect. Some episodes are indeed sickly sweet. A few wind up flubbing their Aesops (case in point, “The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000” - as most people watching it wind up asking themselves, didn’t the Flim-Flam Brothers actually win the argument by demonstrating their cider-making machine was superior to the Apples’ inefficient traditional manual-labor methods?) Season 1 has deathly slow pacing and single-threaded plots; but the later seasons tend to suffer from pacing that jams in the resolution or can’t be done in one episode (Discord’s redemption simply can’t be done in a single episode convincingly). This can lead to endings where all the aftermath is disposed in a quick montage or song, or where the episode simply—ends, abruptly cutting to credits (eg “Sounds of Silence”). Longer episodes like the “Best Gift Ever” special show how MLP stories can benefit from more space to breath instead of rushing to a conclusion. The episodic approach sometimes suffer from a lack of foreshadowing/world-building—season 2’s finale, “A Canterlot Wedding—Part 1”/2 was great, but would’ve been better if we had had any idea before the finale that Changelings, Princess Cadence, or Twilight’s brother existed, much less that the latter two were getting married, and as good as “Crusaders of the Lost Mark” is, it also would’ve benefited from more hints anytime in the previous 5 seasons that Diamond Tiara was so unhappy or struggling to discover positive ways to be a leader. Some apparently important themes are simply dropped without further elaboration: Twilight’s niece, Flurry Heart, is built-up as the first-ever alicorn child, unique & specially powerful, targeted by Equestria’s greatest enemies, but then is relegated to a tertiary character for the rest of the series; Twilight’s pet owl from season 1 disappears for entire seasons thereafter; and the Elements of Harmony or “Rainbow Power” likewise wind up being dropped, damaging the logic of later stories (since one has to ask why they aren’t resorting to their best weapons). These are annoying since the viewer becomes doubtful about what will be relevant in the future and unwilling to suspend disbelief or emotionally invest in characters/events: why care when something may not go anywhere or be resolved by authorial fiat? Later seasons do seem to get better in planning things out to create satisfying foreshadowing and establishing possibilities rather than pulling them out of nowhere (while I didn’t find season 7’s finale particularly interesting, it was at least extensively foreshadowed and logical, and season 8’s finale was both good and also cleverly built up with misdirection keeping one speculating). The downside to the later seasons is that while overall plotting generally improves, individual episodes remain locked into a plot paradigm which mandates a conflict which can be resolved by the end of an episode, often forcing characters to regress into mistakes they’d previously overcome (to such an extent it is lampshaded in “Fame and Misfortune”); even shonen anime will take breaks from such a predictable set of beats and engage in some worldbuilding or iyashikei.

So, that’s the basic package: clean attractive animation, catchy music which works perfectly in sync with the episode, a cast of characters who grow & develop in an also expanding world & lore (for which I wrote an analysis of pony genetics), and entertaining plots.