Friendship Really Is Magic: Thoughts on My Little Pony

I don't know if it goes for all toddlers, but Son One gets into things very intently-- and then moves on. So for a while, he watched Frozen every single day and was particularly obsessed with Sven. (Every time Sven was off-screen: "Where's Sven? Sven needs to come.") Then it was Super Truck, and we were constantly building him Super Truck characters out of Duplo. Then it was Paw Patrol, and Hayley made him a bunch of Duplo pups. ("They are not dogs," he would correct me, "they are pups.")

Now it's My Little Pony. He's actually been low-key into it for a while, and he previously had a period of being into it, but it recently really took off. Hayley has been a big My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic aficionado for several years now, and she has a lot of mini-figures and most of the tie-in comics from IDW, as well as a box full of G1 ponies from when she was a kid. For Son One, he's often really into things when he can draw connections. (It was mind-blowing to him, when about a year ago, he realized the planets in Chris Ferrie's Eight Little Planets were the same planets as in some other book.) The presence of pony toys, pony comics, and a pony tv show means he can always make these connections. "I have that one!" he'll exclaim when recognizing on screen a pony he has a toy of, or "I read a story about that one!"

His tv viewing is limited at home, but his comic reading is only limited by the patience of his parents, so we are constantly being asked to read a lot of pony comics to him. I do enjoy this, but to read a 20-page comic book out loud takes a while, and my commitment to doing all the voices means it also takes a lot of energy. (I am pretty proud of my Fluttershy voice, but I feel like Rainbow Dash never comes out how I would like.)

from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #18
(script by Katie Cook, art by Andy Price)

During his first spate of pony comic reading, he was really into a storyline called Ponies of Dark Water, where the Mane Six turn evil because of magic water from a hot spring. Son One always wanted to read that one. "I want to read the one where they are evil." He would also tell us things like, "I have red eyes because I am evil Applejack." He hasn't asked us to read that one again of late, but he is still into ponies and other creatures that are or have been evil. (It's not entirely clear to me he knows what "evil" is, but he does know that opposite of, say, "good Celestia" is "evil Celestia.") He is especially into Princess Luna and her evil counterpart Nightmare Moon; a passing reference in one comic made me realize there is one episode where Princess Celestia is revealed to have an evil counterpart called Daybreaker, and when he watched that episode, he flipped out with excitement, and often asks if "evil Celestia" is going to be in a particular story. (Thankfully, the other day he told me, "I only like good ponies.")

As long as Hayley has been into MLP, I've known a lot about it. I absorb details about fictional worlds quickly and easily. But now that I am constantly reading these comics, I keep learning more and more. It's a weird experience primarily being exposed to a world through tie-ins, but if you've read as many tie-ins as I have, you know how to recognize the joins. "Ah, this character who just appeared must have been introduced in the show..." and you can even guess pretty accurately what the plot must have been. 

from My Little Pony: Legends of Magic #12
(script by Jeremy Whitley, art by Tony Fleecs)

I am also constantly asking Hayley questions. A lot are about how alicorns/princesses work, but there are no real answers to that. But a lot of questions were raised when I read Son One the twelve-issue Legends of Magic maxi-series; this detailed the lives of a number of ancient heroes of Equestria, and came out in parallel with a season of the television show that also did something similar. I could tell something was going on when I read it; there's a character introduced in issue #7 whose name is never used, for example, until issue #9, and that's because the episode that introduced his character (as a villain) aired between issues #8 and 9.

I was asking Hayley about this story arc... and so she came up with a sequence of episodes that would lead up to this. There are a lot of ongoing plots in MLP, so to understand that storyline, we would need to watch some other episode-- but to understand that, we would need to watch some other episodes, and so on. So when Son One gets his daily dose of tv, all three of us (and sometimes four) sit down to watch with him as we work our way through this sequence. So far we've watched eight episodes, and I'm not sure how many more there are to go.

But what I am realizing is that, like Son One, I am into the evil ponies. Some of the best tv characters are ones that start "evil" but become good. (TV Tropes has an article, of course.) Crais in Farscape, Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Dukat (for a time) in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Blackarachnia in Beast Wars / Beast Machines: Transformers, Astronema in Power Rangers in Space, and so on. (And in comics, there's Megatron in Transformers: More than Meets the Eye.) I think this is because they can often have a little bit of "edge" to them that our heroes lack, but also because they are emotionally complex: they genuinely believed in what they did, even if they no longer do, and so they might regret it but not regret it at the same time.

Because the premise of the show is that friendship is literally magic, MLP has more of these than most shows. You don't win by destroying or imprisoning people as you might most of the time in the above shows-- the characters who switch are very much exceptions in those. In MLP, though, you typically defeat someone by making friends with them... so the show is replete with ex-villains, many of whom go on to become recurring characters (and the ones that don't recur on screen end up doing so in the comics): there's Princess Luna/Nightmare Moon, Starlight Glimmer, Tempest Shadow, Stygian/the Pony of Shadows, Sunset Shimmer, probably others I'm forgetting.

Starlight Glimmer is probably the best of these on screen. In her first couple appearances, she was a unicorn who convinced a town they would live more happily if they had no cutie marks (the unique indication of ponies' talents), because difference is the cause of unhappiness; she then sought revenge on Twilight Sparkle. But Twilight learned that Starlight had been upset when a friend got a cutie mark indicating he was talented at magic and thus left her to go to magic school, and took her on as a pupil. I really like the subsequent episodes I've seen Starlight in, as she struggles with her self-worth.

from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #67
(script by Jeremy Whitley, art by Andy Price)

Tempest Shadow was a secondary villain in the MLP movie; the character never appeared on the tv show, as she was played by Emily Blunt, someone the cartoon couldn't get on a regular basis. But the comics have no such restriction, and there's a great two-part comic story illustrated by Andy Price (the best illustrator of pony comics) where she confronts the tragedy in her past that led her to becoming a villain; it makes a great companion to the issue of the movie prequel comic also illustrated by Andy Price about how she met up with the Storm King. Like there's some legit great art in these things, and thus great character work.

On the show, once Nightmare Moon returns to being Princess Luna, she mostly seems to just turn up to crisis situations alongside her sister, Princess Celestia, who rules Equestria. (One of the only exceptions I've seen is the episode "A Royal Problem," where Starlight Glimmer switches the cutie marks of the two sisters to help them better understand each other.) But there are a number of comic issues that focus on her attempts to readjust to life in Equestria after spending a thousand years as an insane villain on the moon. (And even before she became Nightmare Moon, she was always kind of an outsider.) These are some of my favorite issues of the comics.

The comics even redeem characters the show apparently never does. On screen, Sombra was defeated-- in the comic story arc The Siege of the Crystal Empire, he gets reconstituted from being a spirit, but then is convinced to give up his evil ways. (Apparently, though, the show undermines this by bringing him back in a totally different way later on, still evil. Alas, as it's a great story arc.)

from My Little Pony: Friends Forever #7
(script by Jeremy Whitley, art by Tony Fleecs)

I recently read Son One one where Luna goes to Pinkie Pie to learn how to do comedy, and there's another good one where she teams up with Twilight's dragon spike to investigate arson in Dragontown. ("Forget it Spike. It's Dragontown.") The best one, though, is one (drawn by Andy Price again) where she takes over Celestia's job for the day. The tv show would do something similar later in "A Royal Problem," but this is much funnier, with much more emphasis on Luna's tendency to call other ponies her minions, and on her overall awkwardness. It's not quite how she is in the show... but it's in some ways better, and I always enjoy declaiming stuff in my Luna voice in the stories where she shows up.

Hayley has actually been after me to read her pony comics for years, but Son One is far more likely to throw a tantrum if I don't do it. But as Hayley pointed out to me, I really should be counting them on my reading list!