Why MLP?

It was sometime around September 2011.  Season 2 had just come out, and I was starting to discover My Little Pony for myself.  I was writing a fiction piece called “Unicorn Hunting,” a piece that I had been working on for a few years, and I’m…still technically…working on.  My roommate knew this like most of my writing combines the light and innocent with the dark and experienced.  So she thought I would like this internet.

Tasteful AND hilarious!  After countless memes later, I came across a brony complaining that many people only liked the memes without knowing about the show.  “What?! People watch the show other than to get clever screencaps?” was what I thought.  At that point I knew the show had to be well-written.  I wasn’t disappointed.

The characters were so well rendered that nobody I know has watched the show without saying “I’m _____.” (I’m Luna, Twilight Sparkle and a little Rainbow Dash.  I completely turn to Rarity when it comes time to edit).  Everyone relates with the characters to some extent.  And the themes explored are lifelong lessons.  The show had the ability to benefit the lives of those who watch it and by extension actually have some real positive effect on the world.  These are modern fables.

I texted a friend about the show, since he was recently writing a parable and had ambitions of using his moral writing to fix the world.  He viewed himself as a soldier brandishing his pen-sword to fight the evils of the world with his rhetorical fiction.  I told him that My Little Pony was a successful example of all he ever wanted to achieve with his writing (I didn’t know at the time that bronies would actually become a force of crowd-sourced philanthropy improving the lives of strangers through empathy, friendship, and magic/money.)

AND HE FUCKING LAUGHED AT ME!  He said that there was no way that a show for little girls could be well written.  I was insulted.  He just called me wrong with nothing but prejudice to justify it.  Although he was one of the more promising writers in that program, he was definitely leagues away from the writers of My Little Pony.  Lauren Faust wrote a more emotional, heartbreaking, and complex story in one page of screenplay format (the first page of the first episode), than my friend had ever written in his entire career.

Regardless of when the first video goes up, or the first blog post goes live, or whenever Tracy McCusker and I finish designing this thing, that moment where he threw my suggestion back in my face was the moment this blog was born.

Originally this blog was going to be called, “My Little Pony Is Better: Why a Show for Little Girls Is Better Written Than Your Undergraduate Manuscript about Relationships, Drugs, & Death” or “MLP Is Better” for short.  Somewhere down the line I decided it would be less inflammatory to go a positive route.  Thus “Writing Is Magic.”

There is a world to learn from the professional writers at My Little Pony.  And that is just what I’ve noticed.