My Little Pony - Generation 5

Fixed, because Wikia, a $200 million corporation that always shoves dozens of unwanted ad scripts onto my computer, don't like people hotlinking to their website.

Said station had listings for Manehatten, Maretime Bay, Zephyr Heights, and Bridlewood, suggesting whatever caused it to be abandoned/forgotten and the divide between the tribes was far more recent than whatever cataclysm undid G4. Maybe we'll get some answers. Then again improbably preserved ruins are common enough [[Ragnarök Proofing there's a trope for it

But the G5 comics starting the end of this month with feature the ruins of Canterlot and will have Discord return. So it's past the point we can reasonably assume against canon G4 happening in the backstory (if it should is a separate debate likely pending the upcoming handling). Any objections to giving the comics the namespace "My Little Pony: G5 (IDW)"? Any other names to put them under?

With that My Little Pony: Make Your Mark now had a page. With three work pages is G5 ready to get its own page like G4 has? The only entry under YMMV.My Little Pony Make Your Mark is the non-YMMV Trailers Always Spoil, so anything we can add to the YMMV so we don't have to just cut the page?

Edited by Ferot_Dreadnaught on May 15th 2022 at 3:22:37 AM

Not sure what you mean by "cataclysm". I was under the impression the divide between the tribes and the end of the G4 "era" were the same thing.

Given the overall level of society and technology in G4, like steam engines and phonographs, the aristocratic toffs in "Sweet and Elite", Granny Smith being a pioneer when she was young, etc. it makes the most sense that G4 took place in the Gilded Age/Regency era. When the aristocracy was still sort of relevant but their prestige was crumbling due to modernization.

The Gilded Age was only thirty years prior to the Art Deco era, so if we keep to the pattern, then everything fell apart after Twilight's generation was over.

(Also, the Wonderbolts poster hanging in the station is identical to G4, implying the station does date to the FIM era.)

We only really have Argyle's word that Twilight's era was ancient history, and he was talking to a five-year-old at the time.

To expand on this conjectural Equestria/real world correlation:

• 1840s: Granny Smith is a pioneer pony
• 1890s: steam trains and phonographs, Friendship is Magic happens
• 1930s: Art Deco balloon station is constructed
• 1940s: The great divide? The power of monarchy collapses?
• 1940s-1980s: Everypony thinks "the other side" is going to kill them, arms manufacturers like Phyllis Cloverleaf make bank
• 1990s: The walls come down, everypony is "friends" again

Edited by WarriorsGate on May 15th 2022 at 5:54:09 AM

By cataclysm I mean whatever caused the G4 setting (multiple races in oft contact, magic needed to move the sun/moon/weather, Twilight's reign) to disappear. The divided between races could have happened long after that.

Unless there was Laser-Guided Amnesia, that seems to short a time for it to have been forgotten, given there should have been ponies who remember said collapse. Once the comics show the state of Canterlot, we'll have enough to guess the skip if it doesn't outright reveal it.

Edited by Ferot_Dreadnaught on May 15th 2022 at 10:01:29 AM

Just because the show seems to match our history does not mean it will move as fast. If the show wants to claim their gilded age lasted 1000 years somehow, they just will, and can. Medieval Stasis can apply to other time periods as well.

I considered the Medieval Stasis angle and I left it out of my speculation since I don't care for it.

I'm not claiming it's an exact 1:1 timeline. But a 2020s-ish Zephyr Heights with a ruined 1920s-ish station underneath it has specific symbolism tied to the real world that says "100 years ago" to the audience, rather than being a part of the show's internal timeline. That's what I meant by "judge by real-life aesthetics."

Edited by WarriorsGate on May 15th 2022 at 10:58:50 AM

There's also the possibility that the ponies having to transition their tech from Magitek to pure electric powers devices created a MASSIVE gap in innovation.

I don't think the five-year-olds that this show is meant for are well enough versed in American transportation architecture to pick up on the kind of hint that you're claiming.

Pretty sure when the protagonist's beloved father and mentor laid down the history, that was meant to be taken at face value. The problem with theories like this is that they try to vastly overcomplicate things by ignoring the fact that everything that happens has a specific narrative function.

The show isn't as clever as you want it to be. It's a children's show about pastel ponies learning that hugs are good and racism is bad. It's not burying secret plot points in the history of American subways.

Edited by TobiasDrake on May 16th 2022 at 5:34:22 AM

I think you're reading way too much into this. Fi M was never that aesthetically consistent to begin with, and didn't particularly care to adhering to one specific time period. It was vaguely Victorian with whatever bits and pieces of technology and culture stitched on that the writers felt like adding.

This is not hard historical fiction. There are no clues to its timeline hidden in the architecture. The artist just chose art deco because, one, they liked the style for an abandoned train station, and two, because they pushed the general style to the gilded age. It's not meant to convey an accurate sense of time being skipped between one series and the other.

Like I said before, if they want a thousand years, or 500, or 100, to have passed between the 30 years or so of the general human cultural touchstones of the two series, they will just make it so, in the same way that before Twilight happened, there was a thousand years of peace in which basically no history happened at all.

And I'm not sure I would want it to be that deep either. The last show pretty much buckled under all the lore and continuity building, and they didn't really know what to do with it once they had it. I would rather not continue the trend of unused Pillars and ignored one off cultures again.

And yes, while it is aimed at older audiences, it is still aimed at children first and foremost, if the Tik Tok-esque bits didn't tip you off.

I considered editing my earlier comment to clarify, but I didn't since I thought what I was trying to say was obvious.

I can see now I should've.

I am speculating about how the eras of the universe "feel" using the real-world aesthetics they're patterned after. If they use Art Deco symbolism, it "feels" 100 years ago. That's the psychological effect it has on the audience. The real-world time gap informs our understanding of the in-universe time gap. Invoking handwaves like Medieval Stasis is besides the point since those only affect the film's internal timeline. Not the historical fact that the Art Deco era was 100 years ago and symbolized an era of prosperity and optimism that collapsed into economic ruin and global warfare, which has obvious parallels to the fictional backstory.

That said, the balloon station being only a hundred years old is supported by the in-universe fact it's still relatively intact and not horribly ruined. But everything else is just speculation.

Edited by WarriorsGate on May 16th 2022 at 10:47:48 AM

Oh, I see what you're getting at. I'm sorry if I was a little sharp. It is certainly an interesting idea, but I think it runs into the stretchy timeline again.

Though now you mention it, there does seem to be an interesting kind of time skip going on here. The last show was basically "Victorian age with some 80s/90s era touches" (think glam rock stage shows, electric guitars, gangsta rap), while this show seems to be "Gilded Age with modern age touches" (so we get smartphones and Tik Tok videos now).

So it does seem that in however long there has been between generations, some 30 years of our cultural markers have moved, slowed to a crawl by Medieval Stasis.

As such, I don't think you could easily say exactly how long ago that art deco train station was, since it would be effectively "modern" ruins for the new setting. I think perhaps that station is representing the tail end of decline from whatever happened after Twilight's reign.

I don't get "Gilded Age" at all from this film.

Zephyr Heights is recognizably modeled after modern New York, with the giant viewscreens and the classy boutiques, though like New York it retains some of its historical Art Deco symbolism.

Maretime Bay is less advanced, though the references to The Terminator, showing G1 on television screens, the Cold War overtones about infiltration by the enemy, the industrial power of arms manufacturers, and Sunny's rollerblading imply a 1980s-ish feel (even though its pro-immigration subtext also point towards the 2010s at the same time). The architecture looks sort-of Gilded Age, but we also know from the poster in the station that the lighthouse has looked the same for many, many years. I think it's just a well-preserved facade of the Gilded Age, like many New England towns.

The only place that feels ancient is Bridlewood. Though that's probably a joke/symbolism about medieval fantasy creatures retreating into a fairy tale forest and becoming Medieval Morons.

That's what I got from it too. On both a symbolic level, due to its Art Deco overtones, and a literal level, since the Wonderbolts poster looks pretty much the same as the G4 era.

Edited by WarriorsGate on May 16th 2022 at 11:22:29 AM

Just because the show seems to match our history does not mean it will move as fast. If the show wants to claim their gilded age lasted 1000 years somehow, they just will, and can. Medieval Stasis can apply to other time periods as well.

FIM always ran on Schizo Tech anyway, so picking one particular data point to match to real history and claiming that's how it will be seems very silly to me. You might as well point to the videogame machines and say that FIM was set in the 80s!

Not really, actually. It's not like ponies were regularly playing video games, but they were regularly travelling by steam train. I think you can determine a rough time period by what their society generally looks like and how they generally live their lives.

No one plays video games in Fi M, so it has to be set before the 80s at least. In contrast, everyone seems to have a smartphone, even the backwards unicorns, so clearly they live in modern times, where even the poor can afford a smartphone.

Correction: We did see video arcade games in FiM Season 2's "Hearts and Hooves Day", with the colt playing (nicknamed "Button Mash") becoming a fan-favourite for a while. It's one of the most obviously modern touches of technology in FiM, especially since this is the same season with old-timey movie projectors and electric dams. It does seem like the furthest FIM gets with technological advancement is the 1980s (and some cultural influence with the classic "That's how everypony was wearing their mane back then!" line), but that's still on the rare side, as it otherwise still sticks with older (i.e. before the mid-20th century) technology.

Edited by harryhenry on May 17th 2022 at 12:44:02 PM

I remember one Cutie Mark Crusader episode had Applejack rush out of Sweet Apple Acres, then cut to her rushing back in and telling them she let Rarity know what they did and that she was coming to pick them up.

It was very, very obvious the writer didn't know there are no phones in Equestria, so when the script editor got the script they had to clumsily skirt around that part.

FIM generally sticks to pre-20th century technology. The country is largely pastoral and barely industrialized, there's no phones or long-distance communication technology, music is played on phonographs, they travel in steam trains, horse-drawn carriages are everywhere (for obvious reasons), their air travel is entirely hot-air balloons and zeppelins, there are at least two wild west towns, the Hatfield & McCoy feud is still going strong, etc. There are outlier "data points", but the overall "feel" is late 1800s.

I think the implication is the pegasus ponies are selling smart phones to the other races due to the reunification. The Canterlogic factory has computers, but they look like boxy industrial machines with bright green monochrome displays, implying Maretime Bay has a 1980s level of technology while Zephyr Heights is more advanced.

Edited by WarriorsGate on May 17th 2022 at 1:31:20 AM

Yes, that seems to be the impression, that Zephyr Heights is exporting smartphones now.

I suspect Bay Day from the upcoming special will be a showcase about how the three tribes have so many products to sell each other now.

I half expect Sunny will start selling MLP merch, like the kind her father made.

She's totally the type to cheerily rope her friends into pulling an all-nighter making Mane Six cutie mark pins.

TIL the film's cowriter, Tim Sullivan, previously made a Margaret Thatcher biopic.

(In fact, aside from some script doctoring on Flushed Away, he hasn't done any children's films at all. His career is mainly British period dramas adapted from turn of the century novels, which explains the very out-there shout-out "To the Lighthouse!")

I've always known Phyllis Cloverleaf looked like an amalgam of mid-century conservative women. Thatcher, Phyllis Schafley, Mary Whitehouse, etc. But a nationalist war hawk who (symbolically) puts a third-world dictator into power? A dictator who then uses her weapons factory to build a giant robot that, in the concept art, was meant to look just like her, making her a literal "iron lady" destroying the town? Written by a guy who made a Thatcher biopic?

Also, Argyle Starshine (whose name evokes the sky/optimism, contrasting with the down-to-earth/pragmatic Cloverleaf) has that little ponytail, flaring sideburns, and groovy pendant that make him resemble a hippie. And he goes around talking about peace and togetherness. So in Maretime Bay, which has a strong '80s feel, an aging hippie and a Margaret Thatcher clone bicker over who's brainwashing the children about the vague foreign threat that wants to destroy their way of life.

That is some symbolism for a My Little Pony movie right there.

I suspect this is the work of Sullivan (born in 1958), rather than Gillian Berrow (probably not born in 1958). He was most likely channeling his adulthood in Thatcherite Britain during the '80s when writing the film, while Berrow was responsible for the more recent "America under Trump" side of things, and they just mashed both sides together.

Edited by WarriorsGate on May 17th 2022 at 1:36:50 AM

Wow, that sure is some interesting symbolism.

FIM generally sticks to pre-20th century technology. The country is largely pastoral and barely industrialized, there's no phones or long-distance communication technology, music is played on phonographs, they travel in steam trains, horse-drawn carriages are everywhere (for obvious reasons), their air travel is entirely hot-air balloons and zeppelins, there are at least two wild west towns, the Hatfield & Mc Coy feud is still going strong, etc. There are outlier "data points", but the overall "feel" is late 1800s.

That's more true of season 1 than the later seasons (and even season 1 had some moments with advanced technology). While the video game arcade is an outlier, there is a lot of 20th century technology in the show. For example, they have X-ray machines, and not the early kind either. Vinyl Scratch plays electric music with giant amps. They have what look like electronic sewing machines (introduced in the 1970s per Wikipedia). They have modern movie theaters and bowling alleys, Viva Las Pegasus features a resort-wide intercom system, hidden microphones, etc.

The "feel" of the show is basically whatever the writers felt like. They stick to a "no cars" rule, but if they want to write a scene at a movie theater or a modern doctor's office or Vegas resort, they just do it.

Edited by storyyeller on May 18th 2022 at 9:52:57 AM

Very true. They are lacking some things they should have, even for late Victorians, like typewriters and telegraphs.

I think if anything, the feel that the show evokes is most commonly the late 20th century. They're happy to use anything modern as long it doesn't involve visible electronics, cars, etc. But they want it to be relatable to modern audiences, and/or can't be bothered to stick to a specific time period.

Like if they show a kid gluing something at school, they'll just put in a modern Elmer's glue bottle or whatever because that's what people are familiar with and hope the audience doesn't think too hard about what that implies about the offscreen economy.

I can't recall any telegraphs offhand, but they definitely do have typewriters.

Edited by storyyeller on May 18th 2022 at 10:21:32 AM

I always enjoyed that about the series: The world sometimes being "modern, but not too modern" never felt jarring to me. Surprising, but never lore-breaking.