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February 12, 2012 at 2:47 pm 
Natalie Reed So the time has come at last! In about an hour or so, (1 pm pacific time), we’ll be starting the official SNR My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Mare-A-Thon.
We’re going to stick with the original plan of just watching them via YouTube and chatting about it in the comment thread for this post and on twitter. We should have some kind of hashtag, I guess? #SNRMLPmarathon ?
This keeps things relatively simple and allows those without high-speed to keep up. It also means we’re not violating any of Hasbro or The Hub’s rules. We’re using a format they’ve already explicitly approved.
It DOES make real-time discussion a tad trickier, and also means we won’t be PRECISELY in sync, but it’s just generally a lot less of a headache and risk.
We’ll take fifteen minute breaks after the first two episodes, then a 45 minute break after Sisterhooves Social so I can go run a quick errand, and then fifteen minute breaks between the remaining episodes. Those will allow for leaving comments and discussion points and stuff, and also getting snacks, going to the bathroom, doing all that human stuff. And of course if anyone needs to, they can skip an episode or two (preferably ones they’ve already seen?) for doing real life things.
Here’s the episode order:
1) – Best Night Ever
2) – Applebuck Season
3) – Sisterhooves Social
4) – Baby Cakes
5) – May The Best Pet Win
6) – Feeling Pinkie Keen
7) – Winter Wrap-Up
So in one hour and 13 minutes, cue up Best Night Ever and we’ll get started! 
Posted in 
*looks around new thread*
*sits down on the sofa and places feet on table*
So… hashtags? #SNRMLPmarathon I just place it in front of the tweet like I just did and it ends up somewhere where we all can read it, correct? And I can follow #SNRMLPmarathon like I follow you or Rebecca, correct?
And I get to smoke the hashtag when we’re through?
Yeah, you write the hashtag exactly like that on any tweet pertaining to the MLP marathon, and then it will appear as a link through which people can see all other tweets pertaining to this.
Okay, I think I just made the first tweet under that hashtag.
You Swedish? Because if you are, we can talk in secret and no one will be able to understand.
I don’t have a Twitter account, but I’d like to join in realtime discussion. I don’t know if there’s a format restriction, but would it be kosher to direct people to the IRC channel #ponython on irc.sandwich.net ? Totally free, cool people hang out on the server, etc., etc.
Obv, if not kosher please smash this post into bitsy pieces.
Yeah, go ahead. Fine by me!
Woot, thanks! I hope it helps some folks have some fun.
For those wondering, IRC is a low-bandwidth realtime chat protocol that can be accessed with many free, small programs: common ones include mIRC on Windows and Ircle on Macs. There’s practically no setup: after you pick a nickname (sandwich.net has a few registered, but other than that it can be anything you want) you connect to server irc.sandwich.net and join channel #ponython. I’m William in there.
Are all the cool people over at IRC now? The Twitter thing seems mighty empty…
Yeah, it seems like most discussion has been here, so I just decided to use here instead. I also didn’t want to bug all my followers who aren’t playing along.
If downloading clients is an issue, then alternatively you could use http://www.mibbit.com/
Hit ‘Launch app’, click ‘server’ to enter in the address (irc.sandwich.net). The rest should be self explanatory.
*poing poing poing poing poing* /pinkiepie
squee! Got all eps pre-loaded and ready to go!
Er, it might be a tad late for this, buuut… FTB has a twitter-feed widget that appears on the sidebar; see Crommunist’s and JT’s blogs for example. For now:
https://twitter.com/nataliereed84
Oh, and to whoever said Best Night Ever wasn’t a great starting ep because some ponies act out of (typical) character… that’s debatable, but I suggested it because it’s a great hook and full of anticipation and easter eggs. Basically it’s a good episode for people who are ambivalent about a kiddie show full of cuteness.
It seem the gala song gives a very quick overview of all the character’s personalities (and establishes that they’re all different) more or less. So as a starting episode I think it works quite well.
Well, I think it’s only Fluttershy who acts out of character. And I imagine some of the fun of that bit would be lost on someone not familiar with how she usually acts. But everyone else were being their usual selves, more or less, although bringing out some of their more selfish sides.
As someone who is totally new to this… *so confused*
Fluttershy was the one trying to capture the little animals, right? That was out of character for her?
…
That’s good, I think. What does she normally act like?
And who was the pony with the hair like fire, that Rainbowdash (right?) kept trying to get the attention of?
Yep, that’s fluttershy who was going crazy and out of character.
Rainbow Dash was trying to get attention of The Wonderbolts, a group of flying aces she dreams of someday joining.
btw, I think the orange-maned Wonderbolt’s name is Spitfire, and the dark-maned one with the pie is Soren (Soarin’?)
“I’m Prince Blueblood”
“It goes with my eyes”
Lawlz
I remarked about this in the Twitter feed – shouldn’t the ponies be famous? I mean, they saved Celestia from Luna, Rainbow Dash is the only pony to have done the Rainboom, they drove away a dragon…
You’d think so, but stuff like that probably happens a lot in Equestria. Defeating a dragon is probably to them kind of like, I don’t know, finding someone’s wallet and giving it back is to us.
Anyway, next ep (Applebuck season) at 1:35…
Equestria doesn’t seem to have any mass media beyond newspapers and magazines. (We’ve seen radio technology for short-range headsets, but nothing longer, and nopony seems to have a stereo.)
I suggest that a similar phenomenon might be found in our world with the SEAL team that took out bin Laden. The achievement itself is very famous, but can you name any of them other than Cairo?
I’m going to over-analyze this and suggest there is a certain amount of ageism involved.
They are essentially teenage girls and might not be treated as seriously as if an adult had performed the same feats.
I’m going to over-analyze this and say we put more thought into this than the script writers…
Continuity is for suckers! Applebuck season coming up!
Yeah, but continuity is actually at play in that ep. They reference the Sonic Rainboom AND there was a whole episode all about they squabbling over who could get tickets precisely so they could pursue all the things they screwed up in Best Night Ever.
The ticket episode was “Ticket Masters”. Also, “Suited for Success” is all about Rarity crafting the individual dresses they wore at the Gala.
Someone should tweet to Hallq that Fluttershy usually gets along very well with small animals, and is surprised that the ones in the Royal Gardens don’t respond like most.
I’ve wondered about it myself. Perhaps they’re exotics from outside Equestria, suitable for a royal zoo but insusceptible to her native charm?
Well, she was so excited that she RAN at them. Normally she knows better than that…
*Gotcha*
Twitter via browser:
https://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23SNRMLPmarathon
I loved that episode! It comments on what’s a pretty common phenomenon (in my life at least): that the “best night ever” rarely is.
Also, it has an epic musical number.
Any thoughts on the gender essentialist undertones of Rarity’s story at the gala?
I was totally on the Prince Charming pony’s side, until he dissed Applejack’s food. That was just being a dick.
Sure but we’re in the next ep now ;> It sure made the romance tropes look silly though!
They both are acting out stereotypes – Rarity is the woman who expects the man to do everything, Prince Blueblood is the aristocrat who expects everyone to be his servant. It’s just that Blueblood is more stubborn.
Anders, that’s a very good point. I had assumed Prince Blueblood’s behavior was just the inverse of Rarity expecting the man to do all those favors for her – but as classism, it’s even more clear how ridiculous and insulting it is to *expect* someone to serve you, from EITHER role.
“DON’T YOU USE YOUR FANCY MATHEMATICS TO MUDDY THE ISSUE!!!”
If I was offered one of the ponies to marry (and she was a human) I’d marry Applejack.
STAMPEDE!!!
Official bunny census!
“Get along, little bunnies!”
“Not to upset the applecart…” *snrk*
Hee, Fluttershy just LOOKS up into the tree! <3
and Applejack's reminding me of trying to finish a dissertation in grad school… William said in IRC that Big Mac reminds him of the advisor afterwards!
All Alliterations Are Awesome!
Twilight can harvest an apple grove in a single go. What keeps the economics balanced so that unicorns don’t dominate the market? I suggest:
1.) It took her 30 minutes or so to set up that trick, or
2.) Unicorns have more useful things to do, especially making gadgetry, so that earth ponies keep their farming niche. (Much as you can hardly pay an American to get his hands dirty in a big apple orchard these days.)
Clearly the Apple Industry lobbied the Equestrian Government to keep the filthy unicorns from taking good ol’ earth pony jobs.
IIRC, only the Earth ponies can make stuff grow. So the farming niche is fairly squarely theirs. When’s the next gonna start?
2:10… or in two minutes
Are all unicorns as powerful as Twilight Sparkle? From what I’ve seen so far, she and Rainbow Dash are total superheroes compared to everyone else.
No, but all ponies have some kind of “special talent”. Twilight’s is magic.
I think Twilight Sparkle is unusually gifted at magic. Rainbow Dash is fast for a pegasus, but the Wonderbolts are almost as fast if not faster. Even Fluttershy on occasion has been shown to be able to keep up with her.
Pegasi and unicorns are clearly overpowered compared to earth ponies. +2 LA at least.
Their powers are pretty much limited by plot.
I wonder if there’s any lessons I can take away from Applebuck Season re: not staying up until 3am just to make sure I have at least two posts for the following day, and getting sick, and STILL posting while I’m sick, and so forth.
*AHEM*
Natalie, what was your relationship to yon brothers? And has it changed since you transitioned?
If you could summarize 28 years of relationship in a sentence I’d be most obliged…
That’s a pretty complicated question.
Really simple answer:
I get along rather well with my older brother, the geologist / climate scientist. Our interests and worldview have actually grown closer together over the years.
I’m very, very distant from my little brother. We haven’t spoken in almost two years.
All three of us were rather different from one another. Big brother was the sciencey one, I was the creative and artsy one, and little brother was the energetic troublemaker.
Yeah, I realized that as soon as I had posted. Maybe I should think before submitting a comment.
I’m the youngest of three and I get along well with my brothers, but perhaps especially the middle one. We share a lot of interests – history, anti-theism, strategy games… but I love all of my family.
re Sisterhood Social: But Sweetie Belle was following the rules! Right? Messes = bad?
I honestly think MLP does a great job of training, er, aspie-ish folks like myself in these kinds of situations.
I don’t get how the economy works in regards to gems. Sapphires have value to us mainly because of their rarity, yes? But in Equestria, sapphires are as common as mud. Spike even eats gems as food.
But if so, they shouldn’t be in demand for fashion if they haven’t got the status symbol value.
But these were especially good gems?
I don’t think we’re supposed to think about that.
Sas, I’m assigning you with the task of writing a 20 page dissertation on the economics of Equestria. If you could calculate their GDP and relative value of the Equestrian dollar, I’d appreciate it.
The thing is, if I was to run a campaign in Equestria I’d probably spend time doing just that… even if it never came into play! I couldn’t play in Dragonlance because their stupid adherence to steel coins.
When shall we three meet again?
On a similar note, how does a fashion designer stay in business in a world where ponies go around naked 99% of the time?
(I think they actually lampshaded this in the Best Night Ever ep.)
I just think of her as a formal wear designer, since almost all wear is formal wear for them.
That makes sense.
There’s a cute little tumblr called askthepiesisters.tumblr.com starring the two sisters we see in Pinkie Pie’s cutie mark story. It assumes that the rock farm story is true — they explain that certain rocks have stored magic, and are more valuable therefore.
Some gems are presumably more valuable simply due to natural nuances. Spike’s fire ruby, for instance, seems to be, if available on a youngster’s carefully-hoarded allowance, still something Rarity finds spectacular enough to set in jewelry.
Gems also have value because they’re beautiful, even if they aren’t rare. Not everything rare is in demand…
Okay… so we’re taking a little break while I go run an important errand. We’ll start Baby Cakes at 3:15.
Okay, I have to raise the issue of the sheep. They can talk, yet from all appearances are treated below ponies, kept outside and herded like, well, animals.
Add that to the appearance of the mule in one of our previous episodes. Clearly caricatured ugly, and sounding stereotypically unintelligent.
Our beloved ponies appear to be pretty serious oppressors.
That is correct, although I’m more worried about the pigs. The sheep get sheared but the pigs…
Also, what do the ponies keep pigs for? I can’t think of any product that the ponies use that requires pigs. When do the ponies enjoy a bacon sandwich?
Maybe hunting for truffles? I think I *have* to believe that otherwise I’ll be watching every future episode much closer to see if there is anything that resembles a ham sandwich…
Garbage disposal/recycling, and niche cheeses? Boar’s-hair bristle brushes? Fortunately, I don’t think we’ve heard pigs talk — although I, too, doubt we will be seeing any bacon in the future.
Regarding the sheep and cows… yes, that’s a little tricky. One hopes that there is a reasonable employment regime, and not caste issues.
I read somewhere that the series creator said that the pigs “needed a place to stay.” Ponies are definitely vegetarians.
Coming soon – Red Dawn in Celestia
Overthrow the oppressive rule of Princess Celestia! Death to Prince Blueblood! Liberation for the slaves of Applejack Farm!
(could make a pretty decent one-shot adventure…)
YES! You should totally do your GURPS campaign with Prince Blueblood turning out to be a vicious despot!
(Celestia is OBVIOUSLY Lawful Good, though. I mean, she’s pretty much this plane’s Goddess of Lawful Good)
Someone probably has done GURPS: MLPFIM, haven’t they?
We need a new rule of the internet: There is GURPS of it. No exceptions.
GURPS doesn’t do alignments… although a suitable mix of disadvantages can simulate it pretty well.
I knew that. I don’t know why my brain suddenly shifted RPG systems like that.
You know 4e doesn’t even use the two axis Lawful / Neutral / Chaotic, Good / Neutral / Evil system any more?
That REALLY bugs me. It was SUCH a perfect system! Almost ANY system of morality can be more or less fitted into those nine options. The only flaw it had was that Chaotic Neutral leaned towards insanity but didn’t make room for people who just weren’t particularly good or evil but adamantly disliked or compulsively rebelled against laws and rules. Or someone with a really “pure” anarchist philosophy, where the -only- thing they really oppose is law, heirarchy and government (though that might be a form of chaotic good).
I knew that. I don’t know why my brain suddenly shifted RPG systems like that.
You know 4e doesn’t even use the two axis Lawful / Neutral / Chaotic, Good / Neutral / Evil system any more?
That REALLY bugs me. It was SUCH a perfect system! Almost ANY system of morality can be more or less fitted into those nine options. The only flaw it had was that Chaotic Neutral leaned towards insanity but didn’t make room for people who just weren’t particularly good or evil but adamantly disliked or compulsively rebelled against laws and rules.
You’ve played GURPS as well? You are, like, the perfect woman.
I’ve only played it a couple times, but yeah.
I picked a few disadvantages like “addiction” and “social outsider” to score extra points to invest into my intelligence and blogging stats. I’m not perfect, I’m just carefully mix/maxed.
After joining the LGBTA thread on Gitp (yeah, I know, broken record) I asked on the GURPS forums how they would simulate transsexualism. Obviously it depends on the setting, but for modern day we worked out something like this:
Closeted: Secret (Utter Rejection) [-10]
Out: Social Stigma (Second Class Citizen) [-10] + Delusion (other sex) [-10]
Delusion in GURPS terms can mean you believe something other people don’t believe is true. That’s the interpretation we went with, for obvious reasons.
The problem with alignments was that any ideological system could be fitted into three or four different slots. I remember a flame war on the Wizards’ board about Tyler Durdun (from Fight Club)… people plausibly placed him in all possible categories.
Actually, if I were to run a MLP campaign (not very likely) I’d probably cross-breed it with something rather odd, just for fun. Equestria on its own is a little dull I think, but if you place a Hellmouth underneath Ponyville it becomes a whole lot more interesting…
I just think of it as that most animals in Equestria are pretty much just animals, but the ponies are, in varying degrees, able to communicate with them.
By the way, we can see from AppleJack’s chats with the cows and sheeps that they’re pretty cool with the arrangement and are doing it more or less voluntarily.
Baby Cakes time!
Love the implication of mistaken paternity in the first two minutes!
Am I allowed to kill Pinkie Pie?
No, Pinkie Pie is eternal.
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die
Deep underwater, in the abyssal trenches of the sea lies Pinkie Pie, waiting for the time when the stars are right.
+1
Yay, I finally got my internets devices to work and the long break let me catch up! Silly internets. Can’t quite manage the commentary because I’m watching on my mobile (yay, on the road) but having fun!
Trainspotting reference?!?!?!?
Yeah, I caught that first time round as well
I missed that one. Where?
Creepy baby on the ceiling.
It’s a REALLY f-ed up reference, given that the original context was a fevered heroin-withdrawal-induced nightmare vision of Renton’s best friend Sick Boy’s baby who died of cot-death/neglect while they were all high in the next room over.
If you listen really really closely, during the montage of various junkie-things that precedes the baby’s death, you can hear the distorted sound of a baby crying in the background… but we, the audience, ignore it, just like they were ignoring it.
Pinkie Pie obviously isn’t a real woman. Any real woman knows how to handle babies instinctively. It’s in their genes.
Yes, it’s on the same section of DNA that in men handles sports and sexual harassment.
Large stretches are also occupied by coding for how to handle the barbecue.
And changing diapers with one’s mouth. That’s some hardcore
fatherstallionparent-hood, there.NYOM NYOM!
Cutest sfx evar!
I’d never seen Baby Cakes before. It was…um…kind of annoying, actually. I like Pinkie Pie, but that’s A LOT of her in one episode. I think I need to go brush my teeth.
May The Best Pet Win at 3:55
That was… a genuinely freaky dream sequence. It may help that I’m new to the show, and therefore didn’t know it didn’t make sense in the context of the show.
OTTER!!!
This song, and the bat, are AWESOME!!!
Yeah its the best song of the show IMO
Is there some special story with you and bats?
Not really. They’re just my favourite animal.
There are SOME stories about them and how much I like them, but no “origin story” to my love of bats or anything.
You didn’t fall down a hole, got scared by a bat and was rescued by your Dad’s butler?
The Atheist Community of Austin does a bat cruise every year, looking at the humongous local bat population. After I win a million dollars I’ll take you there.
Troncycle Rainbow Dash.
Yes! After seeing her make Tron lines, Rainbow dash is now officially my favorite.
That was another episode I hadn’t seen before, and I liked it a whole lot. Good Fluttershy moments.
Next episode, though, is the dreaded Feeling Pinkie Keen, at 4:30.
DUN DUN DUNNNN
I think the first step in constructing an appropriate experimental protocol would have been to interview Pinkie and the town’s other witnesses about the occurrences of Pinkie Pie sense, isolating perhaps a specific type of falling thing (“Okay, so it only activates when something’s about to fall on somepony with a possibility of injuring them, but not necessarily then?”). Then follow her around with the clipboard recording instances of Pinkie Pie Sense, to see if there was a predictive temporal correlation.
On the other hand, who knows how long it would take to follow Pinkie around to get enough data to get a statistically significant result…
If the Pinkie Sense is 100% accurate then you don’t need very many episodes. It all has to do with how probable it is that the event happens.
Assuming a dichotomy (Pinkie Sense fails or does not fail), a Pinkie Sense Accuracy of 90%, a probability of things happening without the Pinkie Sense going off of 10%, false positive rate of max 5% and a two-tailed test, even n=2 gives a power of 96.5% (this is the probability that we detect the effect provided it is there). For higher n, detection is virtually certain (power 100%).
SPOILERS! Wait until everyone’s seen it!
Another Pinkie Pie ep? I should just call my dentist now…
Don’t worry, it’s not overwhelmingly Pinkie-centric, and Twilight is the protagonist.
Hmm, where do the ponies get all the military references like “tank” and “bullet”, does Equestria have an Army somewhere? ;P
I’d like to imagine Equestria exists in a post-human Earth run amuck with genetic experiments formed at the dusk of humanity.
There’s definitely the palace guard, that we see in the Pilot.
And it may be that the ponies are so much more advanced than the rest of the animals because they were useful as transportation for humans following the exhausting of fossil fuels.
I like to think it comes from their fiction, the military references. We have dragons and wizards, but there aren’t real dragons and wizards. Maybe in their world, Tom Clancy’s a fantasy author.
The crappiness of my internet leaves me sadly behind on this, but I have to say, MLP has very nice plot.
You can catch up when we’re done and then participate in the conversations here if you’d like!
It certainly has more advanced storylines than I gave it credit for.
This is my first time watching MLP:FIM and it’s interesting to me that I don’t have one standout favourite among the main six yet. Usually in an ensemble cast like this I have a clear front-runner pretty quickly. But they’re all great in their own way. I think I like that even more. It means they’re well-rounded characters.
*sigh*
Applejack
*sigh*
Ooh, a sceptical episode!
Fluttershy is my favourite, but I sort of relate strongest to Twilight and secondarily Rarity. And sometimes a bit of AppleJack.
This is the only episode that left me feel actually offended.
Same here.
Most of the time, I find the show’s messages very positive.
I also find the underlying structures and messages, and what Lauren Faust is trying to do, specifically the more feminist stuff, very positive too.
Sometimes there are minor things that kind of irk me a little bit, like the gender-essentialist stuff in the Rarity/Blueblood story (at first he’s “bad” because he’s not playing his expected gender role).
But still, mostly good.
But Feeling Pinkie Keen? That message seriously, seriously bothers me. It’s not only a stupid and problematic message, it’s a dangerous one, and the very last thing I think girls should be taught. They should be taught to think, question, be curious, be critical, and be interested in science and understanding. Telling them that’s bad and they should just take “leaps of faith”… it’s… it’s horrible. It’s the exact opposite of the kind of thing I’ve devoted my life to, and built my values around.
I sort of want to look into it more in terms of who wrote that episode, their background, whether they might have had ulterior motives (like they’re really religious or something) and whether or not Lauren Faust approved it.
A quick check of imdb for the writer, Dave Polsky, gives him an extensive background that doesn’t seem particularly religious — he wrote for South Park, for instance. Nor does anything pop up near the top of a Google search. That’s just ten minutes of looking, though.
It’s probably meant to teach trust between friends… and there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is that whoever wrote the episode mistook gullibility for trust.
Feeling Pinkie Keen isn’t even portraying skepticism accurately – it’s a bad stereotype of skepticism, and conflating it with science. Science isn’t ALL about strapping subjects into fancy machinery that goes ding. And skepticism isn’t about being an arrogant snot by telling everyone how you know better than them.
“I don’t believe anything I haven’t seen with my own eyes” angers me, too. Creationists teach kids that one to disbelieve ACTUAL SCIENCE – “How do you know that rock’s millions of years old? WERE YOU THERE?”
I know of a woman who trusted her boyfriend when he said you couldn’t get pregnant if you had sex in the backseat of a car.
She’s a mother now.
As one of the more hardcore skeptical posters at Ponychan, I liked “Feeling Pinkie Keen”
My argument is that it is conceivable that there are phenomena that we can not explain, yet exist. In the end Twilight was convinced through evidence (evidence fit for the target audience, but evidence none the less). It would be a case of bias if there were a lot of situations where her sense did not work. So it’s fair to say that her detector is not very precise, but it works.
Except for this episode, potentially, I think Twightlight is the sanest one, but I kind of like rainbow dash – the personality seems more distinct but not kitchy. Thank you for inspiring me to come back to this show after only watching it in the 80s. The themes of the shows definitely seems different though, so I’m still figuring out how I feel about this “generation 3″ group.
Either way, I definitely can’t wait for the post-episode discussion on this episode!
YOUUUU SHAAAAAL NOT PAAAAAASSSS!!!
I hate when Fluttershy just conveniently seems to forget she can fly.
She should have used the Stare on the Hydra.
Also, Twilight Sparkle didn’t have any magic that would be useful?
She has an… erratic list of spells. One of the more useful ones causes the subject to grow a moustache.
Actually Fluttershy’s afraid of heights, which is why she lives down in Ponyville instead of Cloudsdale (which is in the sky). She CAN fly higher, but it takes extreme circumstances for her to do it… more or less.
Soooo… yep.
I think it should be EXTREMELY clear why I have serious problems with Feeling Pinkie Keen.
“Kids, you totally should never bother questioning things or trying to understand them or being curious or thinking critically. Instead you should just take everyone at their word and accept things at face value, no matter how ridiculous the claims are”
Grrrrrr.
But we’re going to end on a high note. We wrap up with Winter Wrap-Up 5:10!
Damn you,
I’ll have the “Winter Wrap-up”-song stuck in my head all day…
I know, isn’t it catchy? My significant other who was just in the same room but not watching it with me (yesterday, since I had some errands to run today and didn’t know if I’d catch the discussion in real time) totally had it in hir head today.
Argh! That started as such a great opportunity to teach critical thinking. Why, writers? Why?
…This looks like a job for… FAN FIC.
My current fan-fic project is a complete re-write of Star Wars episodes 1-3. Obi-Wan is overconfident and impetuous and HE’S the one who decides to train Anakin, not Quigon. They meet Anakin as a teenager. His life as slavery was WAY fucked up, and he’s totally got PTSD and is cold and ruthless from the moment they meet him. But Obi-Wan is so supremely confident in his talent as a potential mentor, and so scared of wasting Anakin’s obvious potential, that he wants to train him anyway, against Quogon’s wishes (who then gets totes killed). Anakin uses the force to kill Sebulba in order to win the podrace and his freedom. He’s all abusive and controlling towards Padme, and she dies BEFORE he turns to the dark side. That causes him to believe that emotions are ONLY a liability unless you can use them to heighten your power to get shit done. He doesn’t join Palpatine out of some stupid Faustian thing, but because he genuinely becomes convinced the Jedi are the “real” enemy and a military autocracy is the only means to restore order to the galaxy. You know… stuff like that.
And there’s no such thing as Jar-Jar.
I really want to read this.
My Little Skeptic: Reason is (better than) Magic?
It wouldn’t even have to go that far. All it would take is for Twilight to realize she’s going about evidence-collection in the wrong way and have the data convince her – “I don’t know HOW you’re doing it, Pinkie, but I can’t deny it anymore – Pinkie Sense is really happening.” Take out the “leap of faith” and you have a fairly powerful message against the sort of straw-skepticism and preconceived ideas that gives us the anti-global-warming and vaccine-denialist movements.
“Just because *I* can’t explain it doesn’t mean it isn’t true!”
and
“You believe *in me*?”
y’know, I think that’d make a great message about believing IN YOUR FRIENDS, not in psychic woo-woo, because (as we saw in Baby Cakes) it’s easy to discount Pinkie as too scatterbrained to be good for anything but parties.
…And, that brings up another troublesome aspect that just occurred to me – everyone in Ponyville (including Spike) takes Pinkie very, very seriously. That NEVER happens – and, it sets Twilight up as the lone voice of dissent who’s under social pressure to go along with everyone else. Having her fold at the end isn’t just an anti-skeptic message, it’s an anti-freethought message.
That’s the one where I mix philosophy and religious history in a wonderfully far-fetched theory!
Sorry. I’m thinking about the wrong episode.
Feeling Pinkie Keen really sums up my problems with the ep in the letter to the Princess. “Wonderful things in this world you just can’t explain… you just have to choose to believe in them” is everything freethinkers are in arms against. It feels like someone wrote this to encourage religious thought.
Pinkie Pie Sense might have an obscure method of action — Twilight’s initial investigation was aimed at that, and didn’t yield much — but its effects are simple enough, and a statistical survey of Pinkie Pie Sense episodes could well have verified Ponyville folklore on its predictive ability. Better experimental procedure would have likely yielded better results.
Another major thing that bothers me about this episode is that Twi’s skepticism reads to me like non-skeptics’ idea of what skeptical people are like: sheer refusal to believe, instead of having an evidence threshold for belief. And of course it’s disheartening that at the end, even though her change of mind is driven by at least anecdotal data (although the last prediction with the doozy strikes me as similar to the faithful who will fit events to prophecy), it’s categorized as a leap of faith.
In fact, the idea that skeptics don’t believe in things they can’t explain is, itself, so horribly wrong.
I know!
It’s not like we’re all polymaths, or reject every scientific field we don’t have expertise in. We KNOW that there’s just way too much stuff in this universe to know everything. We’re willing to accept the expertise of…well…experts while admitting that we ourselves don’t understand. We just make a point of asking questions, thinking critically, and not just ASSUMING that everything we’re told is true and that all evidence and claims are equal.
I also really didn’t like the old Straw Skeptic “only believe what you can see with your eyes” malarky they pulled out in that ep. That’s one of my most hated of anti-skeptic tropes. There are LOTS of things in this universe we can’t see, or even apprehend with our senses at all, but we’re nonetheless able to know of them. It’s not like skeptics go around insisting there’s no such thing as germs, microscopic parasites, atoms, quarks, radio waves, or isotopes.
You know, that kind of sounds like the seed of a song!
What can’t you see?
Microscopic parasites, ultra-high-frequency light,
atoms, quarks, radio waves, isotopes and DNA!
Even though beyond my senses I *can* see germs, with giant lenses.
Atoms take expensive gear but you can see one, never fear.
Quarks are quite another hour. Rev the cyclotron! MORE POWER!
What can’t you hear?
Bats can navigate with sound.
Don’t believe me? Slow it down.
Whales can sing below our range.
It goes for miles, it’s not strange.
Slowly, lowly, earth can shake.
Needles hear it start the quake.
And good thing too, it starts alarms,
which help to keep us safe from harm.
There’s lots of things beyond my call;
the human senses are so small,
the world beyond so big and deep,
of course its bits are hard to keep.
But we can catch them in the act,
build tricks and traps to get them tracked,
build tools that see where we cannot,
bring light to darkened points forgot,
build ears to hear the songs we can’t,
and hear the bats in midnight chant,
build chemical arrays of dots,
to sniff out things we couldn’t spot.
“But what of love? What makes us cry?”
We could strap folks in MRI,
or talk to them, and take good notes,
and maybe help depressive folks
if we insist that woe and joy
are something that we can deploy
instead of perfect mysteries
but rather parts of a disease
or maybe something natural
to be embraced in living full.
Psychology is medicine,
biology can help therein.
If something’s real, it has effects.
That means there’s something there to test.
That means that we can build some tools
and work out all its guiding rules.
Do I believe what I can’t see?
Depends on what you mean by see.
Do I accept what’s unexplained?
Of course; for now. I still sustain
the effort to yet ascertain
the patterns in the thing ingrained
in order that we so obtain
some use, and beauty, and human gain,
and all the good thereby entrained.
(Addendum to the unskeptical:
If you enjoy your mystery,
that’s fine, if you will leave me be.
I’ve work to do, and hope to play
a useful part in a better day.
If you won’t join us, stay out the way.)
I’ll never win any Internets with people like you around…
*claps*
You win +22 internets!
I think Jeff Dee summed it up pretty well in his critique of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: if the house is being bombed and your sister hides in the wardrobe rather than going to the bomb shelter – should you really trust her? Even if she has no previous record of insanity?
My daughter loved My Little Pony when she was young (about 26 years ago), and I enjoyed watching it with her. I liked the My Little Pony: The Movie which was about the ponies battling The Smooze. I am surprised they are still around.
DR. WHOOOVES!!!!
And suuuuch a great song. I love it so much.
I wonder what a team of Daleks would do with Ponyville…
Did you notice him in the background of this ep too, btw?
I did not. I’m terrible at noticing stuff like that and I have no clue what to look for. As I said, I have no personal relationship with Dr. Who.
My Little Dalek – Extermination is Magic: http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxj3fsQbOr1r6j7n3o1_500.jpg
They need a soundtrack CD for the show….or do they have one?
Would buy this product instantly.
Likewise.
Hasbro is in the process of shifting MLP marketing to a team more used to adult fans. They didn’t expect MLP:FiM to take off so enormously with young adults, so their products are all still geared to 5-10 year old (traditional) girls. Word via Equestria Daily is that Hasbro’s working on soundtrack CDs, T-shirts, more show-accurate toys (correct colors, cutie marks on both flanks) and the like.
I wonder if they’ll do an MMORPG…
I was hoping that Winter Wrap-up would be the MLP version of Once More With Feeling, but only two songs? I feel cheated.
Well lots of episodes include songs. They have great ones in Best Night Ever and May The Best Pet Win, too. Winter Wrap-Up just happens to be a REALLY good song.
Okay!
So that’s it for the officially-picked episodes, but…
The conversations and discussion are more than welcome to continue on in this thread for as long as you’d all like. Even forever if you want!
And also you all should feel welcome to go ahead and watch some more episodes if you want and talk about them.
I’ll be back really soon with some questions and discussion points, but am going to go grab some lunch.
I also need to finish up my essays for next week tonight, as I don’t want a repeat of last week (I’ve settled on a compromise schedule: write my five “essays” for the weekday mornings in advance by Monday, but write my shorter afternoon posts as they come, thereby allowing me to post news and topical things when they come up). I’ll be poking in and out of this thread throughout the evening, though.
Thanks so much for playing along everyone! This was lots of fun.
Thanks everyone! I’ll be hitting the sack, because it’s 2:40 am over here. I need my beauty sleep. Badly.
Thanks for hosting this, Natalie! It was fun.
Thanks so much, everypony, and especially you Ms. Steed!
Yeah, I’m completely hooked. Maybe if we do another I’ll be home and better able to join the conversation. Have a good night!
Thank you Natalie!
Inflection’s IRC chat was fairly busy while I was there; at maximum there were nine of us, I think. But we kept having to cut the discussions short to start the next episode!
If anyone wants to do another group viewing *bats eyes at Natalie* someone suggested a Cutie Mark Crusaders episode to discuss the search for identity. We didn’t get one of those in this mare-a-thon, so maybe another time?
Sounds fun! Yeah, we could this again some time, sure, and focus on Cutie Marks and the search for identity. Absolutely.
I want the one with the play, so I can pontificate on Plato and Dumezil.
…I support this proposal. Some of us learn the classics from cartoons and Internet strangers. <_<
I hope you do another one
Your blog has quickly become one of my favourites, and this really is the clincher. Adding pony to anything makes it better. Another one please!
Thoughts on the next morning: The stories are generally good and the messages are generally good (except Feeling Pinkie Keen). I think it’s great that young girls get heroines who, you know, actually do something rather than just sit around and wait for the prince to come and save them.
Actually, what I found most disturbing (even moreso than the message of Feeling Pinkie Keen) was my own emotions. I actually felt a little bit ashamed about watching this. About stepping outside my gender (and age) boundaries. The pink aisle is, it appears, verboten (I steal only from the best). I wrote on another forum how I listened to Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper between episodes to recharge my manliness and that wasn’t entirely false. So, I learned something about myself – I’m not as free from society’s restrictions as I like – and for that I thank Natalie for arranging this.
That’s part of why I’m an active advocate for the show, when I can be. I recognized a lot of the same feelings in myself, and realized that I sincerely love it, and pretending it’s ironic or being overly shy about it would be giving in to that inculturation.
This. I’m watching MLP largely to overcome my own aversion to cute, pink, bubbly femme-yness. It was really, physically difficult for me to sit through my first episode. It’s also uncomfortable for me to be reminded that when Rainbow Dash acts like a jerk, that’s really how geeky and feminist folks tend to perceive a sports enthusiast like myself.
This may interest y’all who care about binary gender roles – teenagers reacting on-camera while they watch MLP for the first time:
Teens React to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
I’m more interested in seeing Hitler react to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
A bit late… but your wish is granted.
For you gamer-types, there’s a screencap comic that reframes MLP in RPG terms here:
http://friendshipisdragons.thecomicseries.com
So far the author’s only gotten through the premiere two-parter episode that began Season 1, so those would be the only spoilers.
Also, from a commenter there:
Mmmm, very Darths&Droids.
Pony marathon alert – the Hub’s running a fan favorite marathon (re-running?) right now, for Valentine’s Day. I bet Equestria Daily has a livestream or three going!
also, I do have to give Feeling Pinkie Keen credit for the ‘rain of frog’ in the intro.
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