October 17
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Recent Episodes)
TV Show
So this is kind of a mini-review for the latest two seasons of MLP:FIM, but neither of them as full seasons because of stupid streaming rules and messed up streaming services meaning that it's been actually kind of difficult for me to find the show when I want to catch up. At one point the only way I could watch was to pay $1.99 an episode and I'm sorry, but the show wouldn't have been worth that in the beginning when it was at its best so it's definitely not worth it now.
Which is the point of this review, now that we're in an eighth season of My Little Pony's revival, I think the holes are starting to show. There are almost 200 episodes and there's really a sense of diminishing returns happening. Characters are learning lessons that they've learned before, new characters are being thrown in and aren't as well developed. For a while there was entirely too much Discord, but that seems to be waning.
I don't know if it was just that the show started to decrease in quality after Lauren Faust left, but there's really a sense that crept in a few seasons ago that the show was almost buying too much of its own hype and being too meta about it's fandom and fans within the show instead of focusing on good storytelling. The episode I watched today (Forever Filly) was about Rarity not understanding that Sweetie Bell had grown up and while the message was good (if a little simplistic) it just didn't feel right. It didn't make any sense to me that generous Rarity would behave like she did in the beginning of the episode, being dismissive of Sweetie Bell's work, etc. And that's the problem, there's a lot more "we want to tell this story, let's just have these ponies do it" going on it feels like. And the less I say about "The Maud Couple" the better. Even the moral of that episode was bad, it absolutely teaches the wrong lesson.
One thing I can say though is that the "Young Six" might feel a little contrived at first (a new group of exactly six made up of perfect diversity from the different species that have appeared before because conveniently everybody we've met before has a younger sibling or child? Sure, sure, whatever) at the same time, I'm okay with it. They feel more natural and interesting than the Mane Six do at this point, because they are still figuring each other out and the audience doesn't know everything about them yet either. So they're definitely not on my list of "new characters I'm already tired of."
