...Maybe it was an attempt at appealing to the target audience??? The franchise is built primarily for little girls, so it's not exactly shocking that they'd make a simple movie full of gags for little girls to enjoy.
Pretty much every Hasbro franchise has been created to bring in money - G.I Joe, Transformers and My Little Pony being 3 of their biggest franchises, not even considering their monopoly on Monopoly. Lauren Faust helped to build the franchise back with more kick (to give the little girls and/or boys a show to look back on as adults or teens and appreciate all over again, look at how that turned out), but in the end it's still a Hasbro franchise, which has been used since it's debut to sell merchandise.
They do not give a flying fuck about the "fandom". They made a movie for children to draw in their pocket money. Where you see a "fandom", they only see dollar signs and fully grown men readily equipped to throw handfuls of money at a children's franchise. In short, get over it - this movie was not for you or the legion of adults who have found solace in a children's series. It was for children.
The ever so classic its for children so its okay to be subpar in writing excuse.
Lots of stuff aimed at children is well-written, take Avatar for example (The Last Airbender in particular). But the fact is, a sheer majority of My Little Pony is vapid bullcrap made to sell toys. Friendship is Magic was an attempt at creating a more substantial series, but in the end that does not validate the franchise for the rest of time. Hasbro is going to use it to sell to children, and they're going to do it cheaply. The franchise is not special.
I never said it was "okay", I said it was aimed at children by Hasbro and not the demographic who gets so much meaning out of Friendship is Magic. This is not a movie for the "fandom", it is a cash-grab aimed at children (and anyone else dumb enough to throw their money after it) - it's not "okay" to make poorly written movies for children, but A) that's the majority of this particular franchise, and B) that doesn't mean it isn't a prevalent practice, even today.
Not once did I say it's "okay to be subpar in writing because it's for children". I'm saying the reviewer shouldn't have been surprised, because it's a children's franchise, owned by a company known for their lack of quality, published separately from the cartoon they evidently enjoy. Just because it's not deemed acceptable to be written poorly because it's for kids, it still happens more often than not. And this is a movie which has evidently been written with young children in mind, not grown men or parents - so really, why give a shit?
In the end, it was not written for the "fandom". That is what I'm trying to say. Not that the movie gets a free pass because it's for children, I'm saying if an adult walked into a theatre and watched it, or went into a Wal-Mart and bought the DVD, and complain because the children's movie did not have enough depth, then it's their own fault for following a franchise known for appealing to their main demographic in a manner which has been cemented as effective for over 30 years in children's franchises.
In short, I was taking a stab at the franchise and at the Periphery Demographic fanbase.
These same people enjoyed the TV series, so they expected to be able to enjoy the movie. And if it's not okay to make poorly written kids' movies, the reviewer did nothing wrong in voicing that complaint.
"What's out there? What's waiting for me?"
Just because the target audience is children does not mean that you can get away with Bad Writing. The Weekenders. Recess. Avatar: The Last Airbender and its sequel series. A Series of Unfortunate Events. Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Harry Potter. The writings of Rick Riordan. The Hunger Games (Yes... before the movie came out, you had to go into the children's section to find a copy.) The Wizard of Oz. The Chronicles of Narnia. A lot of Shounen series in the west. What do all of these have in common? The target audience is not old enough to drive. Yet they are enjoyed by a periphery demographic of adults. Why do adults find appeal in these things, apart from nostalgia at maybe having seen them as children?
The writers don't talk down to the kids. The writer(s) don't assume the kids are too stupid to keep track of continuity and feel free to have the characters call back to events, or they even show the characters's actions have consequences. They don't tell the viewers that a character is manipulative, they show it - or maybe if they do say that a character is manipulative, they back it up by showing the character manipulating others into doing their bidding. Maybe the plot is interesting enough that adults can act surprised at how they want to see where it goes. Maybe the characters are written enough that even an adult can care about them. Maybe it's humorous enough that even an adult can find it funny. Maybe they add in "adult humour" without resorting to Getting Crap Past the Radar (aka "Fitting in Toilet Humor and Sexual innuendos that kids aren't as likely to get so we can feel clever fixing it in.") and it actually feels more mature. (An example of this? Dinosaurs - the puppet sitcom. It was targeted at kids, yet it had so many jokes that were references to stuff kids had obviously not seen or social commentary.)
To reiterate.. just because it is a movie targeted for kids does not mean you can just throw random crap on the screen and call it a day - your audience is much much smarter than that.
I never said it was okay. I said a grand majority of the franchise is poorly written bullshit (with at least an attempt on Lauren Faust's part), and for people to believe Hasbro would continue investing time and money into acceptable writing when it can get handfuls of dollars through brand name alone... Well, they're idiots.
If something comes from dust, it will return to dust. Crops are grown in shit, and the fruit from those crops turns back into shit at the end of the day. The fact that adults willingly walked into a theatre to view a franchise known for one stand-out adaption, expecting gold, is just plain baffling.
(also, Legend of Korra = good writing? the pacing is horrible, the first series was far better.)
Leave a Comment:
An unfortunate throwback to My Little Pony's Roots
As you may or may not know, MLP started off as a series that was essentially a twenty minute commercial for toys first and foremost, and a story second. Equestria Girls is very much the same - a seventy minute long commercial for Hasbro's new toyline with a loose plot stuffed in.
While many may ignore the fourth generation's obvious commercial aspect simply because it happens to be fairly well written (And consistent! Even though MLP does not have a horizontal narrative, characters retain knowledge of things they learned and the town seems to change), this movie is obviously not written well enough that many people can tell that this is an obvious cash-in for a spinoff. The first sign should be the concept - that it is a movie about My Little Pony, but the ponies are quickly stuffed offscreen in favour of their human counterparts.
The plot itself is a mess of contrivances, unexplained aspects, out of character moments, informed attributes, as well as the fact that a major aspect of the plot revolves around the main six characters being complete idiots. Conflicts are introduced and then resolved in the very same scene. Characters call attention to an important aspect of the plot's background detail, but it's never mentioned again.
Even when you take the aspect of the setting (something that has been done to death), the plot just makes an intelligent viewer think that maybe there was all sorts of executive meddling having gone on. Did they ask the writers to write a plot, and gave them no chance to edit it? Did they take the final draft, and give it a sloppy editing job before moving onto animating and filming it? Did they start animating it before they gave the writers a chance to finish the writing, forcing them to improvise?
Fans of MLP might like the amount of fandom drops like Trixie's cameo. However, others might not and instead view it as a way to mask a drop in writing quality, or simply trying to cater to the periphery demographic the wrong way. Fans of the show like it because of its good writing - something this movie does not offer.