My Little Po-Mo: Unauthorized Critical Essays on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Season One

By Jen A. Blue

Grown men and women watch a show created to sell toys to four-year-old girls. Are they confused deviants? Rebels standing bravely against repressive social norms of gender and age? Or a circle of friends just trying to have fun?

This first volume of essays, now fully revised and updated, combines a critical study of the first season of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic with ethnographic examination of its adult fans to explore these questions and the show which inspired them.

This volume includes:

-Critical essays on every episode of the first season
-An examination of the series as a whole as a feminist work
-A brief history of the last fifty years of American animated television
-Essays on the psychology and experiences of adult fans in general, and the experiences of the oft-overlooked adult women in particular
-And more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jen A. Blue
• Release date: Aug 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301609970

Jen A. Blue

Jen A. Blue is a third-generation geek and lifelong animation buff. She has a degree in English from George Mason University, and lives in Baltimore, where she is studying to become a therapist. She is proudly trans, gay, and Jewish, and starting to be pretty Buddhist, too. Her favorite pony is Fluttershy, her favorite captain is the Sisko, and her favorite Doctor is Peter Capaldi. You can find more of her writing and videos at JenABlue.com.

Book preview

Forward to the Revised Edition

A lot can happen in five years.

Five years ago, when I published the first edition of this book, I was a dramatically different person than I am now. In some ways I was more optimistic: the world was on a bad path in many ways, but a good one in others, and it seemed plausible we could correct course and make things better. That seems a lot less likely now.

But I was also much more depressed back then. I was so deep in the closet I didn't even realize I was there—I just thought the world was always that dark.

But where this book is concerned, the biggest change is that I thought of myself as a brony back then, and I no longer do. Part of that is just drifting interests; the show eventually grew a bit stale, while shows came along which did a better job of what I liked about My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (most notably Steven Universe, The Good Place, and most recently, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.) Perhaps even moreso, I don't want to be associated with the images brony calls up. Increasingly, I don't even really think of myself as a fan or geek anymore. Because another major development within the last five years is that fandom and geek culture have shown their ugly underbelly. Deep currents of toxicity run through fandom as a whole, bursting into suppurating sores of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and racism expressed in harassment campaigns about daring to make a Ghostbusters movie about women, a Star Wars movie that decentered the white male hero, or having anyone other than white men in comics at all. Worst of all was Gamergate, an active terrorist movement spawned by video game fandom and encouraged by white nationalists who saw geek communities as a fertile recruiting ground. They saw correctly: the stabbed-in-the-back myth of the modern resurgence of fascism is girls wouldn't date me in high school because I was a geek.

In all this, bronies stand out by not standing out. They are not by any means the worst fandom in this respect. But they have also done nothing, collectively, to push in the opposite direction. One can be a brony and participate in brony communities while also embracing fascism and bigotry—and, therefore, my conscience does not permit identifying as one or participating in those communities.

But that brought me to the question of what to do about this book. To put it mildly, my glasses had a decidedly rosy tint regarding bronies in 2013. I thought they would be different, better, kinder, and I was very, very wrong. In combination with the fact that this was my first book, and I've evolved significantly as a writer and thinker in the years since, this book was increasingly embarrassing to me. I had to either change it, or get rid of it.

I chose, as you have no doubt guessed, the former. So the next natural question was how much to change it. If I had unlimited time and universal support for the action, I would replace it entirely: rewatch the entire season, write new entries from scratch on every episode, and eliminate all other chapters. But my time is not unlimited—every minute I spend on this is a minute later I start preparing Volume Four for publication. And I do not have universal support: other people have expressed to me that there are things they value about this book, that they hope the revised edition will retain.

So I have chosen a relatively light touch. I have significantly toned down my criticisms of Spike, and to a lesser extent of Zecora. I have removed or adjusted some of my most embarrassing cheerleading for bronies, and added a new chapter about whether what I saw in them was genuine potential never fulfilled, or an illusion. And I have generally cleaned up and reedited the book as a whole.

But ultimately, I have left the original text as intact as I could. The me who wrote this is a stranger to me now; it would be unfair to erase their work entirely without consulting them. The changes I have made result, I think, in a stronger, better version of the original book, not an entirely new book—and, I suppose, that's what Revised Edition means.

Dear Princess Celestia... (Introduction)

So, there's this kid's show—more of a family show—and it's really popular with adults. It's one of the biggest fandoms out there right now, and one of the best shows on TV. So one day, this woman decided she would make a blog where she goes through every episode and analyzes it as a work of postmodern art, as well as a cultural and historical artifact.

She called it TARDIS Eruditorum (1), and it is quite possibly the most intellectually stimulating Doctor Who fan blog in existence. Elizabeth Sandifer has covered topics as diverse as left-wing utopian thought in 1960s Britain, the influence of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn on comic books, Qaballah, and the French Situationist movement, all through the lens of a television show.

On discovering the blog, I devoured it hungrily. When I was caught up, I said to myself, Hey, I could do this. So, on what happened to be the second anniversary of the premiere of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, I launched My Little Po-Mo (2). Six months later, after I had enough articles covering the first season of Friendship Is Magic, I decided I could add a couple of supplementary essays, expand the episode articles, and release it as a book. This very book you are now reading, as a matter of fact (3).

Why Ponies?

Why not? I loved Friendship Is Magic. It had stellar production values, a great cast, sparkling art, engaging characters, and a fun story.

But thousands of fans already knew that. At its peak, it took little more than a Google search to find large numbers of fans enthusiastically praising the show. What's quite a bit harder—and was harder still when I started this project—was to find anything that goes deeper than the surface. What is Friendship Is Magic? What is it about?

And don't dare say, Nothing, it's a kids' show. Works created for children are of vital cultural importance. They are the first forms of art and entertainment most of us encounter, and thereby help form our notions of what art and entertainment can accomplish. The general societal mandate to protect children usually adds a degree of cultural scrutiny to convey positive lessons and remove offensive content, which in turn can provide insight into what a culture truly values (as opposed to what it might say it values), to say nothing of what it fears. And while some creators of children's entertainment may say Eh, kids aren't picky, I can slack off, at least as many others put in the effort to make their creations as artistically valid and important as anything created for adults.

Second, nothing's about nothing. It's impossible to create work that isn't about at least three things: itself, its medium, and the world in which it was made. So at the very least, digging deeper into Friendship Is Magic will tell us more about Friendship Is Magic, animation, and English-speaking culture at the moment of transmission. Furthermore, all exploration is to some extent self-exploration, and thus exploring Friendship Is Magic should tell us more about ourselves.

Po-What Now?

What do I mean by Friendship Is Magic being postmodern, and how exactly do I plan to approach the content from a postmodern perspective? For that matter, what does postmodern even mean?

Well, that's complicated. Postmodernism is difficult to define; some people even claim it's impossible, preferring instead to give examples of works that fall under the broad heading of postmodernism (4) But if I'm going to be overambitious, why not just give it the old college try?

Postmodernism is rooted in the idea that the way in which we perceive and understand reality is shaped by social constructs—systems of ideas that society collectively creates. Our constructs enable us to draw connections and find patterns in the world around us, but they also make it harder to see different patterns, like trying to hum one song while listening to another. In this it resembles modernism, but with a key difference: where modernism seeks what are called grand narratives—meta-constructs that can be applied universally—or despairs over their non-existence, postmodernism rejects the search for grand narrative as oppressive or overly simplistic. Postmodernism involves an embrace of the multiplicity of narratives, the possibility of having multiple perspectives—possibly contradictory yet nonetheless coexisting. Most of the time, we are unaware of these constructs that shape our reality, so postmodern works try to draw attention to the constructs in play, usually through techniques that strip away or alter those constructs' context, such as subversion, parody, and genre hybridization.

Friendship Is Magic does this all the time.

For instance, one of the simplest types of social constructs is the binary, which splits the world into opposites: good/evil, male/female, light/dark. Binaries are good tools for making quick assessments, but they also blind you to underlying themes, motivations and moral play, as well as obscuring any concepts that lie in between or outside the binary itself. For example, a black/white binary denies the existence of grays, forcing you to pick an arbitrary dividing line between black and white. But, more importantly, it obscures the existence of color: not only is red neither black nor white, but if you draw a line from black to white, red is nowhere on it.

That might not seem like such a big deal, but consider something like the gay/straight binary, which not only denies the existence of bisexuals, but obscures the existence of other types of sexuality that are on a different spectrum entirely (asexuality, for instance). That can be a serious problem if you identify as one of those obscured groups, and have to convince people you exist.

There's a few binaries that Friendship Is Magic likes to subvert, and I'm sure we'll find more as we continue, but the two most obvious are male/female and child/adult. Simply put, Friendship Is Magic is a show marketed toward little girls with large audiences of little boys, men, and women. This is mind-blowing if you're wedded to those two binaries. Read pretty much any article about bronies (the self-adopted term for adult, mostly adult male, fans of Friendship Is Magic) in the mainstream press, and the most common reactions are astonishment (5), contempt, derision, and hostility (6), with some sources adopting an apologist stance (7).

These approaches often assume there is something wrong, either to be criticized or justified, with adults or men consuming media designed for young girls, taking for granted that for children and feminine necessarily meant not for adults and not masculine. Friendship Is Magic rejects these assumptions and thereby interrogate the binaries behind them.

Another way to draw attention to the constructs in a work revolves around playing with genre: stretching definitions, mashing tropes and idioms, pulling ideas from one context and putting them in another. This is Ihab Hassan's hybridization and carnivalization, which as he describes is simultaneously a form of play and a subversive act (8).

Friendship Is Magic loves this approach, as we'll see when explore each individual episode. It is a show that can do a typical sit-com plot (babysitter with no childcare experience bites off more than she can chew), then interrupt it with a horror movie about a monster attack—and then have the resolution to the horror plot solve the sit-com plot, too.

So What Exactly Is This Book?

Let's start with what this book isn't: this isn't a guide to Friendship Is Magic. You won't find much in the way of plot summaries, character charts, or behind-the-scenes production information here. It's possible you might be able to gather some of that information from the articles, but in general this book is not intended as substitute for watching the show.

This also isn't a jargon-heavy deconstruction aimed at an academic audience. These essays are meant to be scholarly in content, while maintaining a tone and diction that is both accessible and engaging for any Friendship Is Magic fan or interested layperson. I have written them with the assumption of a reader who is intelligent, open-minded, and literate, but who may not have read any critical theory before.

So what is this book? As it says on the title page, this book is a collection of critical essays about the first season of Friendship Is Magic. The bulk of these essays are expanded and revised versions of essays originally posted on the My Little Po-Mo blog, but others were originally published elsewhere or are exclusive to the book version.

The essays that originated on the blog include this introduction, plus 22 essays that between them cover the 26 episodes comprising the first season of Friendship Is Magic. Each is titled with a quote from the show, followed by the episode title in parentheses. Most are fairly straightforward critical essays, though one or two experiment with the format a bit, generally to reflect the format of the episode—hybridizing the show with the critical essays with the effect of carnivalizing the latter, one might say, if one were so inclined.

The remaining essays cover assorted other topics relevant to Friendship Is Magic, and are generally placed where they would be most useful in understanding the following articles.

Acknowledgments

Before we start in with the first essay, I'd like to thank some people without whom this book would not exist. First, of course, are my parents, without whom I would not exist, and who did everything in their power to ensure that I would end up the kind of complete nerd who writes books about cartoons about magical ponies. Thanks, Mom, Dad, and Miranda!

Second is Viga Gadson, who, when I told her my impossible dream of doing something like this, answered with the mind-blowing question, Well, why don't you? She also designed the logo for my site and the cover of this book. And of course I've already mentioned Dr. Elizabeth Sandifer, whose brilliant blog and books were the inspiration for that dream.

Then there's Lex Winter, who edited the manuscript; they're the reason this isn't riddled with typos, awkward run-on sentences, and unsourced, sweeping blog-logic claims. Any mistakes or overreach which may remain are entirely down to me, despite their insistence and pleading with me. They also helped out with formulating the fast and dirty (their words, not mine) fieldwork conducted at BronyCon 2013.

I also want to thank everyone who responded to my requests for women's experiences in the fandom, without whom Chapter 24 would not exist, everyone at BronyCon who consented to be interviewed, without whom Chapter 6 would be far shorter and weaker, and Andrew O'Donnell for asking the questions that inspired Chapter 26.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign that raised the funds to pay Lex and Viga for the original first volume, plus everyone who backed the Kickstarter campaign that funded the fourth volume and this second edition of the first.

Chapter 1 | Hiiiiiiiiii Giiiiiiiiiirls... (The Mare in the Moon/The Elements of Harmony)

Before we get to the ponies, let's start by fixing our position in time.

It's Sunday, October 10 through Friday, October 22, 2010. Bruno Mars tops the Billboard charts both weeks with Just the Way You Are. The top movies at the weekend box office are, consecutively, The Social Network, Jackass 3-D, and Paranormal Activity 2. The first of those is going to matter in a couple thousand words. In other news, anti-gay protestors and police clash at Serbia's first gay pride parade in a decade, while President Obama promises to end the don't ask, don't tell policy and allow gay and lesbian Americans to serve openly in the military. The Nobel Prize winners for the year are announced, the U.S. lifts a temporary ban on deep-water oil drilling, which was started in response to the Deepwater Horizon spill six months prior, and the last of the Chilean miners trapped in the Copiapo accident is rescued. And, most importantly for this discussion, Chelsea Manning releases secret documents that reveal U.S. war crimes in Iraq, including the torture and execution of POWs and the murder of hundreds of civilians. No, really, that has something to do with My Little Pony. Bear with me.

Away from all this, in the blissful oasis of TV Land, fledgling network The Hub innocently airs the first two episodes of its new show, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, with apparently no idea of what it has on its hands.

It's worth taking a moment to consider the significance of that day: the Hub was a young network— in fact, it launched the same day that The Mare in the Moon aired. Young networks often struggle to find enough programming to fill the schedule, and generally respond in two ways. First, they snatch up rights to oldie-but-goodie syndicated shows that have fallen into bargain-price territory. Second, they green-light risky or experimental shows which the established networks would pass over (or as some might put it, turn up their noses at). In the Hub's case, the highlights of the former category included Doogie Howser, M.D., The Wonder Years, and a trio of classic forays into Batman—the 1960s Adam West Batman series, Batman the Animated Series, and Batman Beyond. The highlight of the latter category was Friendship Is Magic.

But how can Friendship Is Magic be considered experimental or risky? It's both a revival and a reboot, in the midst of an age of revivals and reboots, backed by a major corporate powerhouse, and tied to an ever-popular toy line with a thirty-year pedigree! What possible risk was there?

The short answer: It was not a financial risk, but a creative one.

Artistically, Friendship Is Magic has all the elements for a complete disaster: it's a blatant cash-grab, remaking a show about a major 1980s toy brand in the wake of a movie series about another popular 1980s toy from the same company, Transformers, becoming a box-office hit despite being panned critically (9). It's a show designed around a toy line, instead of the other way around, a strategy which has rarely (if history is any indicator) produced quality children's programming. Plus, since children's television executives appear to be utterly convinced that interest in dramatic conflicts, action, humor, and varied characterization are all traits of the male gender, cartoons for girls have a historical tendency to low quality, as well (see Chapters 2 and 4 for additional discussion of this phenomenon).

And yet, from the first moments of the cold opening of The Mare in the Moon, Friendship Is Magic announces for all the world to see that it's doing something new. Barely animated storybook images accompany a narrator as she recites the ponies' eclipse myth: the Moon Goddess, angered by the failure of the ponies to show her proper respect and appreciation, becomes a dark and terrible being who briefly imprisons the Sun Goddess and plunges the world into darkness. She is Fenrir devouring the sun, Susano'o shaming Amaterasu into a cave, the primordial terror that the sun has vanished and will never return. She is Nightmare Moon... and she is coming back.

That's not a story that most prior girls' cartoons (such as Jem or Trollz) could ever even dream of attempting. There are some which did—She-Ra, for example, or for that matter My Little Pony: The Movie—but with decidedly mixed results. As daring openings for a cartoon go, this sits up there with Avatar the Last Airbender's depiction of genocide, or Batman the Animated Series' famous opening credits, in which the name of the show is never mentioned and its main character is shown for only seconds. It's a blaring announcement that this is not going to be quite like anything else on television at the time; nothing else will have quite this combination of fantasy and character focus until Rebecca Sugar starts making her presence felt on Adventure Time and Steven Universe.

The storybook opening gives way to a credit sequence that, for a moment, seems like a return to stereotypical My Little Pony form, reiterating the sweet, gentle song from the original cartoon and pairing it with a balloon drifting through a blue sky with white fluffy clouds—but after the first two lines, Rainbow Dash smashes through the clouds and the music switches to a much more energetic, modern pop song that emphasizes fun and adventure. This is a statement of something new, and nobody's ashamed to display it.

The story begins with a short scene of Twilight Sparkle (our group's resident scholar, keeper of arcane knowledge, and main character for much of the first season) walking through the metropolis of Canterlot, ignoring friendly overtures from other ponies while she ponders the myth she just read, not unlike any student of folklore, or inquisitive youth with a thirst for knowledge. Although this scene isn't crucial to the plot, it is vital to what this episode is attempting to create.

As stated in the introduction, one of the necessary topics any work must in some sense be about is itself, and this is particularly true of a series premiere. Part of the job of a premiere is to attract viewers who will stay with the show. Therefore, the premiere has to inform the viewer of what kind of a show they are watching. The first few minutes of Mare in the Moon accomplish this admirably, switching from an eclipse myth to a reference to the original show, then to a new theme song before ending with a small, but very effective, character scene.

In other words, this is a show that can do a grand, mythic scale when it wants to, but grounds itself in its