So my community with season 5 done what are you guys looking forward to the show's future and our future as a community answers your comments right here and have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year for our community
I'm not sure honestly. I'm going to keep watching. Don't get me wrong. But... I HATE Starlight Glimmer and would rather not see her EVER AGAIN. But that's obviously not going to happen. What will I do? That remains to be seen...
Honestly, there's two paths that the show can really take. Clearly, we've departed from the roots of the series, wherein the show was literally just slice of life with occasional adventure elements. In fact, the balance has shifted strongly towards the latter, with more broad stories being told over longer periods of time. So either the show goes back to it's roots, or it continues down this path. Except binaries are whack, yo, etc. So what needs to happen in a broad sense is a return to the show's roots, except featuring a more absurd setting, similar to how DB Super handles it's filler. What's that? Infallible leader with godlike powers? Make them fail to cook an egg in hilarious ways. Of course, another option would be to go full Tumblr. If only because then you get to watch people squirm as they try to reconcile a show that is supposedly becoming more sexist by the day and the new reality such a change would present. And let's face it: It's not like the premise of the show can get significantly more gay.
FiM will keep going until it ends up running out of energy, when it will then collapse and explode. Wait, those are stars. Still the same concept.
I'd say this might be in response to shows like Adventure Time and Gravity Falls where the larger stories spread across an entire series of the show. They're popular, though the amount of excitement and adventure they can build up is part of the reason why people are still watching them. Even with huge, stupid gaps between episodes DISNEY!!! Though, the show was always intended as an adventure show and the 'Slice of Life' elements were apparently being pushed by Hasbro because Hasbro doesn't like having to rethink their marketing for anything, even after asking Lauren Faust to take over their show. So, it's lost that Faust touch but I don't believe the writers are doing anything wrong or bad. Honestly, the adventure episodes are usually the ones I enjoy the most. They're running in their own streak and style. I don't think they've done too badly. Yeah, makes sense. Being able to settle back and world build or character develop makes the adventure episodes a little more exciting! And here's where I disagree. One, you'd be demanding Faust return and I don't think that's necessarily fair. Either that or throwing more pressure on a team that doesn't need it. They have Hasbro trying to get them to help peddle plastic, they have enough people badgering them to also have fans asking them to make it seem exactly like the old days. Two, what does that mean, dude? We only have Slice of Life stuff? Why not have an overarching story to help set up a structure for other episodes? That's what the Crystal Lockbox thing was all about. I'm not sure it was handled in the best way but it helped give some identity to other episodes, which were fine on their own. Or a time travelling lunatic out for revenge, so that eagle eyed viewers could guess and figure out what's going on. They're trying for fun. I think that's reasonable enough. Whut? Posting pictures of cats? Reposting funny comics? Commenting in a witty fashion? What?! What the bloody hell are you on about? First, you're using 'gay' as an insult? Time to do the timewarp agaaaaaain because I'm apparently back in Primary School! Unless you mean it in a Queer Reading context which is...interesting but only seems to have a few interesting characters to work from. Secondly, please explain how the show is 'Sexist'? Is it because it has predominantly female protagonists? Seriously? It's My Little Pony. Of course it will and there's the rest of mainstream entertainment to suit one's lust for manly men doing manly things. What kind of lunatics are you looking at dude?!
It's true, Hasbro has always been a bit on the slow side with new ideas. The plot having to never imply an order isn't an easy caveat to build around, and Faust did handle that well. That's not to say she should become the Eternal President of the show's writing committee or anything. I guess this is the part where I have to start clarifying and actually giving detailed support to the idea. The basic idea is that the way the setting is constructed, a slice of life approach to writing would yield better results, mostly because of the inherent absurdity. Whereas adventure-style plot arcs draw on abnormal events to draw the user, I feel the series would be better off setting normal events in an abnormal context. This has two primary benefits. The first, and obvious one, is that this lets you leave linear time, and instead of having the story focus exclusively on some relevant main cast, it have take the world in with a wider lens. Which, reasonably, is both much more sustainable, and prevents blunders with 2D villains and the like. There can still be an overarching story to piece together, and in fact there should be. An important thing though is that I'm not asking for everything to be S1. That would actually be very boring, seeing as the novelty of decent writing has worn off. The idea is to, in fact, take the opposite approach and instead of trying to have the setting be maximally similar to the real world, it should explore the issues that emerge as soon as you try to think through the setting. Like the lack of grasping ability non-wizards would reasonably have, the whole deal with living god-rulers, etc. Actually, that wasn't meant to be an insult in the least. It's more the fact that a setting with a large gender imbalance is, statistically, going to have a hard time being straight. Kind of like GI Joe, except with less sweaty muscle dudes. And this was me taking a less than subtle poke at Tumblr logic. Clearly, if the show has sexist viewers, it must be inherently sexist! There is literally no other way to explain this. Not at all. No sirree. And, while this kind of mental acrobatics to justify a worldview is pretty sad, it's also fun to watch in the same way regular acrobatics is: You just never know what to expect next.
I too hate her... ...as a redeemed character. Don't get me wrong, I thought she was a decent villain, on par with Tirek (to give an MLP example) or Emperor Palpatine (for a non-pony example). However, after all that she did, after all the lives she's ruined or at least slowed down, after all the violations of the timeline she instigated, does she really DESERVE redemption? No, and even if she did, I would have preferred it be drawn out over the course of the series, or at least a season. My go-to example for this process is none other than Vegeta of Dragon Ball Z. He started off evil (duh) but over the course of Z, he eventually became a good guy, even if he did behave like a 90s comic book reject. He did NOT... Apologize after getting owned by Goku Get immediately forgiven by the main cast (except for maybe Goku, but Goku isn't really the sharpest sword in the armory) Renounce his evil deeds after his defeat Loosen up from the power of friendship (at first, anyway) Nightmare Moon's redemption was okay with me because she was essentially driven by jealous rage. Sunset Shimmer's redemption was okay with me because you could feel that she meant it. Midnight Sparkle's redemption was okay with me because she was dealing with things beyond her own control. Even Discord's redemption was okay with me, because his redemption actually took a while, and is still debatable (it could be argued that Discord's sense of morality is completely alien to the ponies and, indeed, to us, but that's not important right now). Starlight, though? She has shown absolutely no redeemable qualities whatsoever, was fully aware of what she was doing, doesn't seem genuine, and her excuse for why she's evil would make Sigmund Freud facepalm. I'm pretty sure that what she did would be considered "crimes against ponykind," and would warrant a life sentence in Tartarus. There are some villains that just CAN'T be redeemed (Chrysalis and Tirek being examples of this), and Starlight would, in a logical world, be considered one of them. But noooooo, we HAVE to redeem her, because friendship is magic. I'm sorry, but I don't care whether the show is called "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" or "My Mighty Hellspawn: Murder is Fun," when you show a character that basically takes away a pony's individuality and whole point of existence and shapes them into a brainwashed slave akin to 1984 or Brave New World, and then turn around and make that character a good guy, you have achieved the equivalent of making the Force the result of microbes called midi-chlorians or having Superman throw the shield on his chest like some sort of net trap. You haven't so much "jumped the shark" as "jumped the shark backwards on a unicycle wearing nothing but a jockstrap and a football helmet while flipping said shark the double finger and reciting the entire Navy Seals Copypasta backwards."
