My Little Pony: Cleanup Is Magic

ok that makes sense

On PopularWithFurries.Western Animation:

• The relationship between the My Little Pony franchise and furries is complicated. Traditionally the fandom had no issue with furries. Many older fans are furries and the ones who aren't either don't mind or ignore it. My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and its large Periphery Demographic of young men is when the controversies began. Hype Backlash caused many furries to hate bronies, while in-turn many bronies insist that they aren't furries and hate furries. In contrast to most pre-G4 fans, many FIM fans don't even like horses. (They only like FIM ponies; part of it is the designs. There being more stylized and "cartoony" than their somewhat horsier predecessors means even slightly more realistic proportions make for a jarring step away from your cartoon crush and toward livestock; even when painted purple and given a cutie mark, your average anthropomorphized horse is still a few hoofbeats too far in that direction.) Which makes them more averse to other horse works and the furry fandom as a whole. There was at one point a huge Fandom Rivalry between bronies and furries. Still, many bronies consider themselves furries and some even make fan-works of the characters as human(oid)s (though it's often the cause for a Broken Base even amongst furry bronies). In the early days, it was also common for furries displeased with the fandom's internal politics to regard MLP as an alternative community.

The example's not only a little long but seems really out of date? It seems rooted in early fandom drama, whereas now that the fandom's shrunk most of them who stuck around the longest do proudly call themselves furries. I think it still qualifies, but I'd like a second opinion from someone more in tune with the furry fandom as well.

Edited by harryhenry on Jul 1st 2023 at 9:38:22 PM

If it's something that evolved over time, then one solution to excess length would be to break it up into sections/paragraphs by era.

I don't know much about the furry thing, at the least it doesn't really come up a lot in Fimfiction which is where I do most of my fandom interactions these days, but I'm very skeptical about the "MLP fans like cartoon ponies and find realistic horses visually jarring" thing. To my knowledge, MLP ponies with more realistic or elaborate anatomy have always been popular in fanart. I mean, if stuff like this or this was being made and was popular as back as 2013, I am a little skeptical that there was some sort of fandom-wide feeling that realistic horses look bad. Classical deer-legged unicorn designs have definitely always been a big thing.

Edited by Theriocephalus on Jul 8th 2023 at 12:05:14 PM

You could definitely trim the part about realistic horses.

This is on TearJerker.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic Season 5:

• It's heavily implied that Pinkie's family is poor, and that the reason they have such a simplistic lifestyle is not just tradition, but because they cannot afford anything else, and that they've had to make due with what they already had. Is it really? I never got the vibe that they were poor from that episode. Was it because Big Mac's bunk broke? I saw that more as a gag about him being heavy. And when you look at Igneous and Cloudy's clothes, they don't look poor.

Agreed. They definitely seem to be meant to be frugal, not poor.

Me too in my eyes. It doesn’t sound like the issue from what it’s trying to say honestly.

From RonTheDeathEater.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic:

• Twilight Sparkle was subjected to this once more after her controversial portrayal in "No Second Prances", where it lead some fans to really question her morality, with others outright demonizing her as a two-faced Knight Templar who really doesn't care about friendship. Things really got bad after an even more controversial scene in "Marks For Effort" where she scolded the Cutie Mark Crusaders for (supposedly) making Cozy Glow fail her test and banned them from the School of Friendship as a result.

I believe this is misuse as written as they fail to explain how the fics exaggerate the wrongs/ignore mitigating canon context. "No Second Prances" I did a RTDE for its YMMV page awhile back. Want to check the vanity of these mitigating aspects of "Marks For Effort":

• The CMC had resorted to such trickery earlier this episode (do the fics make the distinction of what they supposedly did being OOC malicious compared to their prior trick).
• Twilight's confrontation with them was her attempt to hear them out, only banning them after they couldn't explain themselves.
• Twilight was showing regret even as she banned them and reversed it as soon as it was explained.

Or are either of these legitimate enough complaints RTDE doesn't apply here?

I'm also not sure if RTDE counts if they're meant to repent/show remorse/redeem themselves such they're back to normal by stories end, which pretty much all the examples I've seen/heard of these and other Accusation Fics are (I admit to not caring for such fics so I might only be hearing about the "good" ones who avoid such excess bashing).

From YMMV.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic S 1 E 1 Mare In The Moon:

• Fourth Wall Myopia: Twilight is often misguidedly rooted for by fans for not wanting to make friends with any of the residents of Ponyville because of how annoying they think her friends are. However, given that Twilight is the main focus of the episode, we mostly see things from her perspective as we see the other ponies bothering her and coming off as a nuisance to her. Her friends-to-be had good intentions despite not always hitting the target, with future episodes showing that this is just how they are. Twilight refusing to take part in their friendship is part of Twilight's character development, as well learning to accept the other ponies for their flaws, rather than isolating herself from them out of lack of interest in friendship.

How often does this "rooting" actually seem to happen? I don't recall ever seeing anything of the sort.

I've never seen that happen. Maybe people had that thought in the premier where Twilight was kinda dismissive of the others, but I've never heard that pop up since. I also don't remember any other times where Twilight rejects the friendship of other ponies in Ponyville?

Ron the Death Eater Friendship is Magicneeds a serious scrub since most of the examples are about parody series, fan works and the like. Rainbow Dash's entry could be shortened to:

• Rainbow Dash gets this treatment due to being seen as the most consistently flawed of the Mane six with many proclaiming "She doesn't deserve her element" and fan works portraying her as an abusive guardian to Tank and Scootaloo, as well as being a victim of Die for Our Ship when one wants to pair any of her suitors with someone else or her seeming canon love interest Applejack. She's also seen as an ableist pegasus supremacist at times, with "Rainbow Douche" art being constantly drawn.

A lot of examples on Woobie.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic are barebones, but this one takes the cake:

• In the movie, all the Derpy-like foals we've seen on the show. That's Mom/Auntie/Big Sis trapped in stone.

It's way too vague and hypothetical. Should I cut it?

That's also Fridge. The foals that Derpy is often seen with aren't canonically related to her. This is fan conjecture getting in the way.

Removed.

@Nitro Indigo: Bring the problematic examples to the Woobie cleanup and I'll see if I can't rewrite some of them.

YMMV.My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic S 9 E 15 Two Four Six Greaaat

• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: While many agree Rainbow was in the wrong for hating cheerleading, not even bothering to help, making Ocellus cry and not even caring, plenty of people don't just blame her for this episode's shortcomings but Twilight Sparkle as well due to Twilight knowing exactly how Dashie would react and basically forcing Rainbow to do something she hates and doesn't understand when she could have taken on the job herself and let Rainbow coach the buckball team.

To be valid, it need to explain why Twilight was supposed to be sympathetic despite her Trickster Mentor methods annoying Rainbow (which Informed Wrongness already covers). I think it should also explain why Celestia doing such to get Twilight to make friends and her other moments were accepted but Twilight doing such is contentious. Thoughts?

I think Twilight is implicitly meant to be sympathetic there because of Protagonist-Centered Morality. Twilight is the protagonist and supposed to be the expert on Friendship (which in this case seems to include sports management), which implies that all her ideas on Friendship are correct unless the episode explicitly corrects her on this. This episode doesn't and assumes Dashie is wrong here, so by implication, Twilight is supposed to be sympathetic for forcing the situation.

This isn't the only time on the show where forcing the issue in a not particularly friendly way is still shown as good Because Princess Twilight Says So, mind you.

Yeah, Dash is depicted as flat out wrong and needing to learn a lesson. Twilight essentially tricking her into doing the cheerleading is never brought up as a flaw or bad thing, so the show essentially wants you to agree that she handled things correctly.

Regarding the Celestia thing, it is worth bringing up that for the first... six seasons of the show, she wasn't written as working behind the scenes to make Twilight make friends. The premiere is written so that, once the crisis is done, Twilight and Celestia prepare to head back home, but Twilight doesn't want to leave her new friends, so Celestia makes up a new project on the spot to give her a formal reason to stay:

There's no tricking anyone into doing anything here. Celestia sends Twilight to deal with a very serious crisis that would harm the whole world if allowed to take course, and then comes up with a new project to give Twilight an excuse to do what she told Celestia that she wanted to do. Nothing shady going on, not really.

Then what happens is that, in "Celestial Advice", the part where Celestia talks about her reasoning for sending Twilight out, things are recast so that her primary reasoning is specifically centered around improving Twilight's personal life and getting her to make friends, as well as having already pre-identified the five people that Twilight will make friends with. That comes across as a lot sneakier, but it was late enough in the show's run that most people's views of the involved characters had already stabilized.

tl;dr — the reason why Celestia doing such to get Twilight to make friends and her other moments were accepted is because, for quite some time, Celestia did not do anything of the sort, and Twilight's friendships developed mainly on her own initiative.

So the difference is Celestia was shown to have a successful enough track record and did the research (identifying the ideal friends) to be justified in such methods, and gave Twilight a choice to continue afterward which wasn't clearly the case for Twilight?

I mean, it is Celestia we're talking about here. It's entirely possible that she pulled a Batman Gambit and knew Twilight would want to stay, only giving her the final choice to be sure her plan worked. That may dip into ACI, but the point is that she has become known as the Trickster Mentor who's words can't always be taken at face value.

The thing is though, all that was initially basically just the narrative leaving room for Celestia to have Planned It All behind the scenes, without saying anything one way or the other. Then season 7 comes along with a retcom that makes a specific headcanon (because that's what it is, basically) explicitly canon in the name of Lore Building.

YMMV on whether that was truly needed or wanted. I don't think the early show particularly needed it, nor did the fans particularly want it, but both had changed substantially by season 7.

No, I mean that the difference is that, in the version of things present during the first six seasons, Celestia didn't use "such methods" at all to push Twilight into making friends; Twilight bonding with her friends and leaving Canterlot to be with them was presented as her own choice, which Celestia just facilitated once Twilight expressed that she wanted to do that. Later, season 7 retroactively changed things to have it so that Celestia had scouted things out ahead of time and already knew how things were going to go, but fandom headcanons and interpretations had mostly set by then and did not really take this into account because that hadn't been a canon element when they formed.

I see.

That argues against Twilight being UU (as the entry was written) if the difference from Celestia's sympathetic methods is fanon/fans ignoring later developments as opposed to how they're actually written/objective differences.

Protagonist-Centered Morality covers the complaints, so UU seems redundant unless there's a (non-fanon/double standard) objective explanation why Twilight was seen as wrong but not Celestia in context. (Was Twi more forceful in pushing Rainbow into this position? Or forcing them even after seeing she was struggling? Celestia having a prophecy to know things would work out/having more urgent need than Twilight to do so? The omniscience that justified Celestia being discredited/something the show moved away from?)

Edited by Ferot_Dreadnaught on Sep 18th 2023 at 9:53:52 AM

I don't think so, PCM is what leads to UU, but it doesn't make UU redundant, it just informs what makes the example UU.

I think Celestia gets more of a pass on these cases because she is more exclusively depicted as a mentor who is supposed to know better, while Twilight has been a student for a long while, and is still shown to make mistakes even after that, so I think people are less inclined to accept Twilight as an authority who knows best than they would for Celestia.

Edited by Redmess on Sep 18th 2023 at 6:02:03 PM