Where I Watch – My Little Pony – Episode 8 – Rarity Takes Manehattan

We haven’t had too much Rarity for a while, so it’s off to Manehattan, with Spike in tow, still starstruck by her. The other Mane 6 are going with her to support her during Fashion Week. And the ponies are all going to the Hinny of the Hills musical on…Bridleway. They’re staying in Manefair.

No. Please. Make it stop. Make the puns stop. Now.

The ponies got the tickets through favours and favouritism. This is ramping up to be a dead disappointment, because of the law of carefully-laid plans. Rainbow Dash doesn’t like musicals because of random singing, which just calls for a song.

Not a great song, but they can’t all be awesome. It’s a bit cheesy and, well, like something out of a musical. It’s all about doing favours for people. Be kind without a fuss – Generosity.

I wrote a story entitled Generosity once. I had a specific naming theme and…well, later.

Now we’re on…a famous shopping street without a puntiful name.

Rarity has been working on a new fabric and needs to go and set up — by 2 in the afternoon, which is ten minutes from now, and she needs to find a cab to get there. Despite all the fuss about generosity and friendship, Manehattanites are not happy with .

The dresses aren’t there. Rarity has collapsed in panic before the bellhop brings out the dresses. Because she did people favours. During the song. Cute.

We then meet Prim Hemline, with a very strong British accent, who is angry at Rarity’s tardiness, and who explains the rules of the competition – win an audience with the best MHC designers.

Rarity meets a friend from the Ponyville Knitters’ Circle, Suri Poloneck, who moved to Manehattan to make it in the big city. The animation of the dresses is reminiscent of something from the Pink Panther. Poloneck wants a swatch and Rarity generously gives her friend a sample; and she promptly disappeared.

Now Rarity is early, and the reception pony compliments her on her clothes – only to find out that Poloneck has somehow stolen her designs. Rarity is obviously rather angry. At this point we’re half-way through the cartoon. Poloneck reminds Rarity that Rarity gave her the material so she could add accents. She just happened to have less an accent on her work than a whole other language. She points out her put-upon assistant, Coco Pommel (as in saddles – no, that one wasn’t too bad), and behaves pretty crappily towards Coco’s complaints. Ah, so we have another villain on our hooves now…

Poloneck slyly tells Rarity she’s only a rube who fell for a big city trick. Then she bullies Coco a bit more and prances off.

And Rarity comes back in, crying over her humiliation. The other Mane 5 listen to her bawling about being a sap and her generosity going wrong, but Twilight assures her – with a little unease in her voice – that they’re all here to help her out. All they need is fabric, right guys? Right?

Hotel bedspreads give her some inspiration. (Hang on, what happened to her appointment in half an hour?)

The Mane 6 set up an assembly line. The ponies want dinner, and it’s not very long until Hinny of the Hills. But she starts getting cross over them abandoning her. Obsessed with the fashion show, and the ‘Every Pony For Herself’ mantra, she abandons them without even a thank you. And they don’t walk out on her either, not even to go to the show.

Poloneck has a few digs at her over her ‘copycat fashion’, but ‘Hotel Chic’ seems to amaze the audience. Rarity can’t wait to celebrate with her friends…but in the process of creating her sensation, she’s lost her friendship. She can see the adoring crowds, but not her friends.

Who are gone.

Gone.

Back to Ponyville – she realises her mistake, their hard work, her winning collection, and her ingratitude.

Reprise of the musical song earlier on. It really doesn’t have the same clout as other songs this season, particularly Hearts as Strong as Horses, but to give them the benefit of the doubt, they’re trying to ape the sung musical style. Which is fine…just not my sort of thing, so I’ll pass.

But the Mane 6 overslept and missed the show. Rarity apparently lost (well, according to Poloneck). So we get a kind of strange and anti-climactic ‘ending’; a personal performance of Hinny of the Hill and a consolation. How did they agree? The costume designer gave her a costume-making gig in Manehattan. She takes her opportunity.

Cloak and dagger to the last, Poloneck and Coco have deluded Rarity into thinking she lost. Actually she won. (Did anyone NOT see that coming?) Coco is given a few lines to say that Poloneck had convinced her that ‘every pony for herself’ was a valid tactic; however, she. Rarity gives her the costume gig, enabling her to return to Ponyville.

The lesson is obviously not to take advantage of the giving nature of friends.

I think I’m going to give this episode 6/10. The story is enjoyable. I think Coco’s character, with such a significant role at the end, could have been better developed over the course of the show; it seems like a bit of an ass pull. The song wasn’t as strong as others. The adult in me could see a lot of plot coming a mile off; whether kids would see these things is debatable, and again and again we remind ourselves that MLP is for seven year-olds, but frankly, the rest of the season has been better than this. It’s a fashion show story — the usual fashion show tropes apply. After the first couple of times they need to get a different handle on it, I think. I did like the twist that it was enough for Rarity to think the Mane 5 had abandoned her, rather than just overslept because of all the work they put in. They might also have fixed the plot hole about Rarity being half-an-hour early for her appointment and apparently not showing anything to the other ponies beforehand. I didn’t quite follow that part and it might have been better writing to have her see Poloneck’s collection elsewhere.

But a cute, loveable episode, not as exciting as I judged from the trailer last week, but certainly charming and a worthwhile inclusion.

Where I Watch – My Little Pony – Episode 3 – Castle Mania

NB – spoilers! and I watched this and wrote this at the same time. So double spoilers for both the show and my ultimate reaction.

We open with Twilight developing the theme of the locked box, which I totally overlooked last week and has been playing out on Tumblr and other places for a whole week now.

There seems to be a story arc developing here with the next destination on a mega-quest . And Twily and I have something in common (well, we have a lot in common, such that her story could be mine if you squint hard and turn the picture through 90 degrees). We. Love. Books. THIS PLACE IS PERFECT!

We open with another pony image, resembling The Wicker Man. Applejack and Rainbow Dash are competing in the Most Daring Pony contest by surrounding themselves with bees. The beekeeper pony (could this perhaps be the Transformer Pony Bumblebee?) is wanting his bees back. The contest ends in a tie, and Pinkie Pie bounces off to her next engagement, leaving the two feisty fillies to dare themselves into oblivion.

Fluttershy and Rarity, meanwhile, are going for a walk in the forest. Towards the Castle of the Two Sisters, which has a reputation for its tapestries as well as its ancient magic and Rarity wants inspiration. Retro-ancient-classical inspiration.

This is a little …broken up. It seems a little bit like the comics – a bit too focused on set-pieces as yet. It’s good to see, however, that the ponies haven’t lost their well-written characters. So three ponies are at the castle, and three others…are not.

Except they are, because they came to the castle too, for reasons of finding dark magic originally belonging to Nightmare Moon – The Pony of Shadows.

I think they’re trying a little too hard. In trying to get a tapestry down, Fluttershy is catapulted through a secret door and swings round again, hurting her wing. This is My Little Scooby-Doo at its finest. Rarity is more concerned about tapestries than secret doors.

AJ and RD dare each other to stay in the castle the longest and therefore prove themselves the Most Daring Pony. So we now have all the makings of an interesting climax for about three different episodes, except the writers have seen fit to condense it into one. There better be something to make this come together; we’re already half-way through.

Rarishy find themselves in a secret tunnel looking for Angel the bunny. In a case of mistaken identity, they hook up with RD and AJ but as they are feeling each others’ hooves through a hole in the wall, they don’t realise it.

Twilight’s research has found out that many of these interesting elements are ways in which Celestia and Luna pranked each other. The other ponies are getting freaked out. (Pinkie Pie is absent, by the way. I think she would probably add a little too much levity to the episode.) Rarity and ‘Shy stumble on the throne room with its magnificent tapestries.

‘It’s not like it’s going to come to life or anything,’ says AJ of an old suit of armour – and, to be honest, of this episode. It’s trying very hard to be scary, and I guess it might be for little girls who have never seen Scooby-Doo, but actually, having grown up, it’s not exactly thrilling material. You get the impression that a lot of this stuff is trying too hard to work up a scary atmosphere over some mundane aspects. Three-quarters of the way in now and still no obvious antagonism apart from the furniture. AJ is lost, Rarity is spat out of a chute and left to rage at the ‘ungrateful’ castle, and Fluts is still looking for Angel.

RD is speaking for me when she says: ‘C’mon castle is that all you got?’ Followed by a major scream. The castle is falling apart. Spike is still in the doghouse for holding the chump ball from last episode, so of course Twilight thinks he’s being sarcastic. The rest of the ponies are losing their collective minds over a few collapsing beams. Twilight raises the obvious issue and asks what they’re doing.

The only unexplained event is the creepy organ music. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention it. Perhaps it’s the PONY OF SHADOWS?

Three guesses and the first two don’t count. Based on the rest of the episode it’s probably a mundane thing.

Well, OK, it’s Pinkie Pie. Duh!

And she would have got away with it but for those meddling kids.

I think this is a severe waste of a location. I suppose we’ve been spoilt by the previous few episodes continuing the broader series arc, such that a more mundane episode with the moral ‘Don’t let your imagination run away with you!’ and ‘Such and such is helping me cope with being a superprincessgoddesspony!’ has been something we’ve not seen for almost a whole year now.

So the shadowpony is just a myth, like many things.

I’ll give this a 7/10. The moral was fine as a story in its own right, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with reassuring kids that the spider is more afraid of them than they are of it. But after a whizz-bang start to the series, and as an adult fan of fantasy literature where most stories are myth arcs rather than needing to puncture the serious-business aspect for much of a series, it was a bit of a climb-down from recent form. Having said that, sometimes we all need reminded not to let our imaginations run away with us. When there’s big stuff brewing, don’t neglect the little stuff. In that regard, I need to give it a reasonable mark, because I let myself get caught up in the need for action adventure every week while forgetting the reason My Little Pony exists in the first place – to scare the bejeezus out of little kids and then reassure them that everything’s OK; sometimes the shadow on the wall is just a shadow. The suspense lacking for me as an adult would be more intense for the show’s target demographic. In a way, we adult fans sometimes make the show become something it’s not.

It’s not the show’s fault; it’s mine. I think next week I’ll be back to approaching and appreciating the show as a kid’s cartoon rather than something that has recently taken on the import of Lord of the Rings.