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Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Visited by Discord

Well, not really...but at least by a decent dose of Best Laid Plansitis. Lots of plans for the blog. Zero actual plans roaring into action. The advent of the brony culture threw a bit of a pony wrench into my plans as I realized that the gulf between new G4 fans and old-schooler G1 fans was growing by the day. Do I continue on with G1s or do I start adding G4s? Do I mix the two together? I've had a project to create an entry dedicated to all the G4-ers that think G1s are bloated spawns of something interplanetary, but once I started on it, I realized I needed to study the brony culture a bit more. Watch a lot of the FiM episodes many, many times and jump into brony communities. Was it worth the effort to explain the differences or is the breach in the love and tolerance policy just too large when it comes to this generation gap?

I've actually become more entrenched in both pony collecting and the community this past summer as I realized that some of us are just called to be the keepers of pop culture, plain and simple, and there is nothing wrong with that. I enjoy the company of like-minded people and the objects we curate, so why not immerse myself in it? While the tornado of brony excitement was gaining strength I was quietly working hard on my G1 collection, finishing a host of pony cabals with laser-like intensity. So Softs? Conquered. TAFs? Vanquished. Twinkle Eyes? Taken down like tin cans at the fair. I'm now in the double digits when it comes to boxes left unmarked on my US pony checklists. Don't even think you can escape me, ponies.

The G4s were not thrown to the wayside, oh no. Many of them trotted their way into my home as the "Collect ALL the ponies!" fever kicked in. Canterlot was more like Collectalot; even the useless cardboard castle followed me back from Target. The full cast, and then some, is ready and waiting to be deployed into blog duty.

With all that intensity being thrown at the pony world, I still wasn't sure how to handle this whole G1 versus G4 thing. "Research" in the name of this dilemma meant FiM on the TV every time I turned around. Hey, we just watched that episode. No matter! Let's just memorize it a bit better. Think I blew one of the lyrics of "Winter Wrap-Up" last time. "When you're a YOUNGER PONY..." has become the standard response to "Had a bad day, need cheering up." If it wasn't me watching it, it was hubby. Caught him carefully listening to the words of the theme song "just in case I'm in a situation that I need to know it." Not watching on the TV? Well, then on the phone! Bathroom breaks at work can become a flight over the clouds into Equestria with just a touch of the Youtube app!

I grew to absolutely adore and cherish some of the priceless moments in the show and truly understand why it has such a huge, devoted fan base. I hate the word brilliant, so I won't say it, but I'm thinking it. And sealing the deal were the stampeding smug long-legged bunnies in the season 2 opener. You can imagine how hard that hit home, what with the bunnies on PTT. Pants were soiled.

But the original ponies were b...bril...that word, too. For the 1980s, they were absolutely iconic, memorable, creative, and like gasoline to the imagination. Sure, the cartoon wasn't hovering at the epic level FiM is, I'll be the first to admit. But the ponies themselves sparked flights of fancy unlike anything I can recall from the time. And heaven help you if you loved real horses, because ponies then traveled into a deeper level of childhood infatuation. Can't own a real horse, so saddle Cotton Candy up and lead her over the jumps at the Show Stable. God, there was even tack. (Horse trappings like bridles, for those not in the know) I was a real-life horse fanatic as a kid, so MLP was a dream come true.

You had the whole SHINY! PRETTY! FANCY! thing going on, with GUMDROPS and CLOVERS and POPSICLES and HEARTS...and you had horse-y stuff to get the kids who would put a horse in the bathtub and promise to scoop their poop with their bare hands as long as they could JUST HAVE A HORSE, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S HOLY. Once you got tired of the real horsie thing, you could get ponies that terrorized the seas, ponies that demanded you to groom them and compliment them, princesses to look down upon the peons, and helpless baby ponies that would wet all over your little brother ("Don't blame me! She had to go!"). Don't forget, said ponies could also beat newborn ponies into submission at a nursery, clog arteries at an ice cream parlor, visit numerous parlors of sinful vanity, embrace sloth at an extravagant mansion, and even manage to bathe within a cloud capable of holding weight without plummeting to a bone-pulverizing impact.

Now if that ain't what the 80s was all about, I dunno what is.

They're all awesome. It's all worth loving. We won't even worry about the generations between 1 and 4, 'cuz it seems like in the brony battles they rarely play a key part. Were the ponies of the 80s as intense as the FiM crew? No way. In a battle of who's cooler, I'll be the first one to say that the G4 gang is the hippest incarnation of the family so far. But that's awesome. Almost thirty years later and we can actually say that the best was yet to come? Wow. That's incredible. Yeah, the toys ain't quite always what we're looking for :/ but having a lineup of personalities that people love with such fiery passion is just plain awesome.

So the blog's going to mix and mingle everypony. Sometimes I can do just G1s. Sometimes just G4s, playing off some of the FiM storylines. Sometimes have some awkward generational gap clashes between the two. Other generations will be in there too, as usual. FiM is the newest chapter in the Great Big Pony Storybook and needs its own nods, I'm realizing. The personalities involved are just too fantastic not to. Now the question is when I will actually create said entries, but at least I've stated my credo when it comes to this cold war between the generations.

That all said, can I put in a plea to Hasbro to PLEASE make the self-satisfied stilt bunnies?! What a silver bullet they'd be for the ruling class bunnies here on PTT! The havoc! The produce pillaged!

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