Just like all the little ponies of days past, Sunny Starscout and her friends just want to be beacons of happiness and hope for you.
My first impressions of G5 were, to say the least, subpar. It was just after the movie had arrived, and expectations were high after a surprisingly-good 3D movie. “Woah,” everyone was saying, “they’re using the same models from the movie for the 3D series! This is going to look amazing!” The 2D series, Tell Your Tale, already had some episodes out by this point. While most disliked its aesthetic and incredibly short runtime of only 5 minutes to Friendship is Magic’s 22, hopes were still high for Make Your Mark, which not only had no such runtime limits, it was going to begin with a special extra-long episode! This was going to be hype!
It…it wasn’t good.
I couldn’t really believe my eyes. This was…horrible. It looked like something you’d put on for your toddler instead of Cocomelonif they had an irrational fear of the word melon, but you still needed to park them in front of a screen. It was the end of the My Little Pony franchise. The end of thoughtful consideration of all audiences, of creativity, of good humor and medium exploitation. It was back to being silly trash.
At least, those were my thoughts at the time when I clicked out after finishing the special, convinced I’d never watch a single episode of this show. Why did they have a literal baby dragon? (At least Spike could talk.) Why was the animation so janky? Why were the colors and lighting so much worse? So many questions that I thought I’d never get an answer to…but oh well. I never really heard about G5 much after this.
Life went on. I found myself affected greatly by the aftermath of COVID-19. Months after restrictions were lifted, I had a MASSIVE panic attack that had me hospitalized because it so strongly mimicked a heart attack. What followed over the years was a long journey from rock bottom, back to…maybe 50% of the stability I’d had before, as I write this. I was scared to breathe at the beginning, and any time I noticed my breathing, I was going to die, simple as that.
But somewhere along the line, I decided, “you know what? I’m going to watch everything that I missed.” By now, Make Your Mark was over (though the fanbase didn’t know that yet!), and Tell Your Tale was still releasing weekly episodes. Armed with an Equestria Daily episode guide to warn me of the potty humor that I’d heard TYT became infamous for, and a Netflix subscription for Make Your Mark, I sat down with some popcorn, ready to ridicule the holes and lament what the series had become.
To my surprise, starting off with TYT, it…wasn’t as bad as everyone had said it was back then. Or even as I had thought it was. I mean, sure, it’s a striking difference in artstyle and pacing, and it took time to get used to. But…it was funny, it was character-driven, and though it was extremely short, it legitimately did the best it could to tell a story in those 300 short seconds it had! I actually laughed out loud at this moment when I saw it, it was completely out of left field:
Make Your Mark was…still as bad as I remembered. But I pushed through it; I had to refresh myself so I could more accurately lambast this 3D hellscape! Yet when Chapter 2 started up (why was Chapter 1 just one episode? Who knows!) I was pleasantly surprised. Immediately the animations were smoother, the colors less nauseating, the lighting passable. Sure, the set-dressing was a little empty, but it was clear that was more for budget reasons than lack of care. The humor was there, the pacing had improved from lurching stop-and-start to a steady trot, and…it was a series worth watching! Why hadn’t I noticed any of this the first time? Why hadn’t I just waited a few more minutes to check out a second episode? I’d done the same for Friendship is Magic, after all!
As it turns out…groupthink is a very real phenomenon, no matter how immune you think yourself to be.
A lot of the fandom discourse around Generation 5 is about how much worse than Friendship is Magic is. Tell Your Tale has no soul, its 2D style is just modern CalArts beanmouth slop, it’s Youtube Shorts tier; Make Your Mark looks like it was programmed by the Toy Story animators after they’d had way too many beers…you name it. All the discourse is about why it went wrong, and why you should hate it. A few do give nods to the solid points, such as having a favorite character (usually Izzy early in the fandom, later Pipp or Misty), and maybe liking the premise of a few episodes, but overall, it’s all rated as “stay away so you don’t ruin the good memories.”
Moreover, some people think that G5’s position as a sequel to G4 somehow taints the latter’s legacy, ruining everything that the Mane 6/7 achieved, in the name of reintroducing pony racism and spitting on that show we all used to love and insert Zoomer slang and cell phones and social media! I totally get the sentiment, and I would be extremely infuriated along with you, but I have to ask…
Did you get any of these impressions yourself? Or were they told to you by a review-tuber or fellow fan, and you trusted them implicitly?
Overwhelmingly, I find that usually, they just heard from somebody that it was trash. Maybe someone had watched the first 5 episodes of TYT and an episode or two of MYM before writing it off. And you know what, that’s fair! You’re dipping your toes in, you’re testing the vibe. If you don’t like what you see, it’s more than fair to write it off and move on to things you do enjoy. But the important thing is to go form your own expectations.
Am I saying you can’t not-like the series I speak about here? No! Quite the opposite! Dislike and like as your heart desires. But try to approach new content with a new frame of mind. Don’t compare it to Friendship is Magic. It’s not trying to be that! It’s its own piece of media, crafted for a new generation. It has its own tales to tell, and wants to make its own mark. Listen to it as if you knew nothing about MLP, as hard as it is. Yes, that’s a big ask, and you’re definitely going to go “wait, huh?” quite a few times. But just remind yourself that this isn’t just a reboot of the older series. It’s trying new things. It’s going to stumble until it finds its footing. And these series find their footing despite all the obstacles in the way. It takes a while, but they blossom into beautiful things…before being cut abruptly short by Hasbro. But we’ll get to that another time.
Okay, So Why Should I Try Watching Again?
Don’t you remember going into Friendship is Magic expecting a bunch of mass-market appeal to little girls, endless tides of pink, and the worst story since fanfiction.net’s inception? Well, okay, maybe you’re a late fan and its reputation preceded it, and you heard nothing but amazing things from the get-go, and received them. But think of that initial skeptical thought you probably had: “My Little Pony is actually good? Really? I gottasee this.”
Take that into Generation 5. Don’t compare it to anything you already know about Generation 4. Enjoy the experience, breathe it in, take notes. And, personally, I advise not binging the entire series in a few sittings; letting the episodes breathe and discussing them among peers who’ve only watched as far as you have is so refreshing. It was what made the early brony fandom great. Media nowadays seems to encourage only solo consumption. Ditch that paradigm. Watch it with friends, take notes with friends, make silly theories and memes with them. But even if that’s not your style…please, keep an open mind and heart. Just like all the little ponies of days past, Sunny Starscout and her friends just want to be beacons of happiness and hope for you. Let them grace your eyes and warm your soul with their silly little antics, and remember that friendship and unity carry on through the ages.
Because whether they’re old or new, they’re all My Little Ponies.
