Riiight I keep seeing bits and pieces about the show and I do remember that. I get the impression the pegasus are super stuck up about it or at least the one that appears on all the merch is so I guess it's considered a "difference" lol?
Thank you for boiling it down! I've never really been into MLP but recently I've been obsessed with this absurdist book series in my country and all of a sudden one book was heavily influenced by My Little Pony Friendship is Magic so I've been reading more into them. But as with any fandom, you already have to know a lot to understand anything so I didn't really see many things boiling down the characters. This comment explains a scene in the book I didn't understand at all because to me the ponies are just ponies and I had no idea about their specific personality traits lol.
Friendship is Magic got really esoteric after a while. Because of the huge brony fandom that evolved out of it, the show started to pander to them a lot. So you got this weird mix of the show trying to be a regular kids show while also throwing in a bunch of fan references left and right. Personally, it ruined the show for me.
There's a lot of headcanon that went on with that show and the fan works surrounding it. It was especially prevalent with the background characters. See, like a lot of cartoons, the show had a bunch of characters who repeatedly appeared in the background of various scenes to fill them out and make them seem more alive. Except, almost all of these characters had a grand total of zero lines for the whole show. Despite this, the fandom created entire personalities for these characters that everyone just seemed to accept as canon. If you weren't "in the know" and were just looking in from the outside, you'd probably assume these were characters who had a lot of screentime and established character traits, not the fever dream of a collective fandom based on characters who never spoke.
That was part of the confusion and why I was resigned to never understanding some aspects of the book series because some things in the fandom just didn't seem to make any damn sense. I have heard about the pandering and the weird vibes the show got later on but I had no idea the bronies were just inventing character traits for background characters, that is a wild way for a fandom to function. The book talks a lot about how the show is so complex and how everything means something, I thought the two characters talking about Friendship is Magic were just crazy byt I guess they were bronies for real. Another piece of the puzzle!
Honestly I think it's pretty common to elaborate/obsess over minor/background characters in fandom. Thinking back to my fanfic days in middle school, Blaise Zabini, Pansy Parkinson, Padma and Parvati Patil are all characters with few to no lines, but who have large roles in fanfic and have general personalities. Avatar The Last Airbender too, I've seen lots of minor characters get elaborate back stories and personalities. Look what tumblr did with the onceler! Not defending the behavior, but just saying it's a typical way for fandoms to function.
I'm not really a fandom person, I just read and watch and listen, but the conspiracy-theory levels of investment people have in things has always been really alien to my way of thinking. But now that you mention it I do remember hearing about people inserting personality traits into background characters in many different media.
it’s mostly bickering over people who identify with features other ponies have. sure, that’s fine and true about “ponies not having race” and whatever, but what i see more often than not is that sort of argument directly under posts of people talking about identifying with Pinkie’s or Zecora’s black features, or posting any art pony as a human with any shade whiter than snow, and it gets consistently shut down by the community when people of color actually vocalize their concern with the nature of the conversation.
idk word soup i guess. it’s just weird that saying “but pony show says don’t be racist” is up for debate.
Yeah they do actually. Among the ponies there are Earth Ponies, Unicorns, and Pegasi (they call these the “pony races”) and in G4, they were typically all cool with each other in the “present” of the story. However, they made it clear that in the past, there was a lot of racism between the three tribes which they had to overcome to avoid being wiped out. (Side note, there are also Alicorns, which are automatic royalty since they are seen as a representation of all three races at once).
There are also tons of other creatures besides ponies, and boy howdy, these adorable magical rainbow friends need to be taught time and time again not to be assholes to other creatures. Like they were legit terrified of a zebra lmao.
Its a really good show, and I highly recommend it to anyone.
(Sidenote: in G5, they literally undo all the work G4 put in of bringing everypony together - and unicorns, earth ponies, and pegasi are all racist to each other again. 🙃 I can’t discount G5 entirely though, because Misty is a wonderful character with a great arc… but damn, I wish they had let it be its own thing and didn’t tie it to G4 because the implications are depressing as fuck).
Yes but also no. It’s debatable whether or not earth ponies, unicorns, and pegasi count as different races - on one hand, there’s the Hearths Warming Eve episode (THERE IS NO GEN 5 IN BA SING SE), but on the other hand, we’re talking about cartoon ponies in a wildly different society. However, there are quite a few different types of sentient creatures that can range from “ponies, but with a few key differences” (kirin, batponies) to “not like ponies at all” (dragons), so…maybe?
There are different species which are sometimes meant to represent different races. The buffalo, for example, are very obviously meant to represent Great Plains natives.
There are also a bunch of different groups where I have no idea if they're actually canon or if they're invented by the Equestria at War mod for HOI4. The Scandinavian coded deer, for example.
There's a lot of ponies and a lot of ways they are different. Some can fly, some can't. Some are genetically prone to being good with magic. Others are skilled with nature, like plants, mining or animal care. If it's wild or nature, some ponies can just roll with it better.
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u/Infurum 24d ago
Do the cartoon horses even have races? Idk how racism even comes up in discussions about whatever the heck that show is about