MLP G5 Discussion and Speculation Thread

Cosmas-the-Explorer
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Explorer in Training
@Background Pony #9F47
I guess it depends on what you want from G5?
On youtube I see some like Star Strike and MLP Fever think it is.
We have those who are both like Peace Petal and Addy Lovestar as both positive and critical.
And skme like QuantamHippologist who has more opitimism.
I think everyone has interesting reasons for why they like or dislike a show.
Some might think about lore or how characters change or stay consistent.
It all depends on your perspective and also what you seek most from this gen
For me I thought I disliked it but I might change my mind if I view more. I’m unsure.
DerpyFast
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@northern haste
I wouldn’t say it’s just a spinoff, since information in TYT gives context for things in MYM, and vice-versa.
@Background Pony #E52B
That’s what I thought until I remembered a line from Winter Wrap Up:
Spike: Clean up winter? Who cleans up winter? Don’t they just use magic to change the seasons like they do in Canterlot?
Given that Canterlot is the unicorn city, and this was before it was established that the pegasi’s ability to control weather was magical, we can infer that it was the unicorns using magic to change the seasons. I think this is insight into how they did it.
@Shimmering Spectacle
It’s possible, but Twilight’s CM is a very distinct six-pointed star:

So far, when it’s supposed to be Twilight’s CM, they make sure we know it’s her CM:
There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fixture in the theater that’s not quite the right shape, but the colour is unmistakable. The brooches the choir ponies wear looks more like the star itself.
@Background Pony #9F47
It’s alright. It’s less of an epic adventure and more of a walking tour of how different ponies celebrate the holidays. In my opinion, the more stuff like this, the better. When it comes time to save the world, this is what they’re saving.
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DerpyFast
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@northern haste
There’s quite a few things:
  • A Home to Share has them rebuilding the lighthouse
  • Zipp’s Flight School not only has Zipp teaching the pegasi how to fly, but it also establishes that Zipp and Queen Haven used to have a good relationship that deteriorated later
  • Sisters Take Flight shows that princesses Zipp and Pipp didn’t just leave Zephyr Heights unceremoniously
  • Mane Melody establishes the titular salon
  • T.U.E.S. Day is where Senor Butterscotch is created, who appear in multiple MYM episodes
  • The Game is Ahoof is where Zipp got her visor
  • Dumpster Diving is where Izzy repaired Sunny’s Lantern
  • Puphunt has Queen Haven sending Zipp a forensics kit as part of a care package, showing that she supports her daughter’s choices
  • Take Flight in The Marestream has Zipp and Izzy building The Marestream
It seems to be a “continuity soup” kind of deal. There are clear phases, but thematically similar events happen at roughly the same time, even if it’s tricky to put them on a discrete timeline. For all its faults, it’s still a better attempt at telling an ongoing story than G4.
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Wiimeiser
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(Foil Hat)
For all its faults, it’s still a better attempt at telling an ongoing story than G4.
To give you an idea: G4 had a Season 1 episode in Season 9, and one in Season 8 that actually hard required the changes made that season, A Season 5 episode in Season 7, etc.
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northern haste
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Enter if you dare
One thing I did find a little odd is that in Sunny’s song at the beginning she says happy new moon Pretty sure a moon is not a year. Then again as I recall G4 was also not pretty sure what a moon was
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Background Pony #9F47
Zipp has a high IQ.
Pipp has a high SQ (Social Quotient).
Sunny has a high EQ (Emotional Quotient).
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Ring Team
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It seems to be a “continuity soup” kind of deal. There are clear phases, but thematically similar events happen at roughly the same time, even if it’s tricky to put them on a discrete timeline. For all its faults, it’s still a better attempt at telling an ongoing story than G4.
I agree. While I wouldn’t completely defend Tell your Tale, I think the G5 writers have clearer project goals when it comes to continuity than the G4 writers. And for those who still think to this day that “Friendship is Magic has continuity”, I’ll tell you this:
-In Made in Manehattan it’s established that Applejack has a sudden fear of huge crowds, but it doesn’t make sense to show that since the audience saw her being fine in Manehattan in Cutie Mark Chronicles and Rarity takes Manehattan, both from season 1 and 4 respectively.
-Pinkie Pie had 2 sisters, not 3. I won’t say it as a reason to dislike Maud Pie. She was great in some episodes, but I kinda wish she was one of the two sisters.
-Pinkie Pie became more annoying in the later seasons, to the point where an episode was written as an excuse for her to go insane (Yakity-Sax and Secrets and Pies). I’m very glad that it wasn’t the case for The last laugh. It would have been very easy and very tempting to write an episode where she annoys Cheese Sandwich for 22 minutes.
-The writers have thrown the idea of Applejack and Pinkie Pie being related, but very little else. They haven’t toyed with the idea enough to the point where there was no conclusion (either being related or not related). I wanted to see a conclusion, even a small one, not an episode entirely dedicated to that conclusion.
-Rainbow Dash is supposed to care about her little turtle, but, after seeing her feeding the turtle with unhealthy food in Secrets and Pies (in this case, cake), I have a hard time believing that she actually cares about her turtle.
-The writers wanted Twilight to become a princess in season 3, which was fine, although I thought she would have been better as a teacher considering her character features. And then they wanted her to be a teacher in season 8 not only her, but also the Mane 6. Unfortunately, some of the main characters are not written to be teachers, such as Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie and Starlight Glimmer.
-In Call of the Cutie it was established that the cutie marks represent their talent, the uniqueness of each pony, which was a beautiful idea. But in Cutie Map, Starlight kinda swaps cutie marks like nothing. I think this skill completely invalidates the personal aspect and the point of having a cutie mark. When you have a talent, you perfected it and you make a living with your own talent and effort, that doesn’t matter because Starlight is gonna take that away from you whenever she wants and however she wants. And I think it shouldn’t have been this way. It’s like seeing a human playing God.
-Starlight as a new redeemed character is a really cool idea to talk about redemption and empathy, but I don’t think that’s what we got at all. Starlight using her magic to manipulate everyone (including age regression spells, brainwash spells, hypnosis and exterminating a draconequus) and swap cutie marks in an abusive way to achieve her personal goals and being a complete jerk with essentially everyone is really bad. Using magic to solve friendship problems and/or learning about friendship shouldn’t be a solution for a character who was previously a villain.
-The show clearly questions Discord because he was evil in season 2. That makes sense. But the entire Ponyville and Canterlot don’t give the same treatment for Starlight. And, like Chrysalis, Tirek and Cozy Glow, Starlight has done so many horrible things that she has no redeeming value. And she never faced any consequences, just like Discord. They’re as bad as each other but the show desperately wants you to think she’s better.
-Trixie is supposed to be someone who has learned from her mistakes, but I don’t think it was the case here, especially in episodes where she was thinking about herself (like All Bottled Up) and how she blames everyone for jugding her (which, by the way, she is the last pony to talk about judgement considering what happened in Boast Busters and Magic Duel). In A Horse Shoe-in, Trixie doesn’t learn anything. She wants something, there are obstacles, she gets what she wants. The end. Despite her causing all this trouble, she still gets exactly what she wants. She whines and complains, and in the end, she’s rewarded for it. There’s no sense of effort from Trixie’s part.
-Queen Chrysalis was probably the most mishandled character I’ve seen in the show. From showing up at the end of season 2 to briefly appear in season 5 to briefly appear in season 6 (including an UGLY redesign of the changelings), to briefly appear in season 8 and to finally appear as frequent as she could in season 9.
-Speaking of villains, I don’t remember what the point of Cozy Glow was. I don’t mind typical villains with ambitions, but these villains needed to be more fleshed out.
These are my arguments to why Friendship is Magic didn’t make too much sense when it comes to continuity. There was a layer of improvement that the show rarely got. It was doing the bare minimum. No continuity, no consistency, etc. When you have a show that depends too much on the status-quo of the show, I have a hard time believing that the writers wanted to get ambitious, which is neat, but it didn’t completely work at the end.
I said this in a Make your Mark comic, but I’ll repeat it. the TV shows with a established status-quo have always existed and they will always exist, but nowadays there’s no excuse for the writers not to create stories that reward the audience for paying attention, something that MLP:FiM didn’t do and the G5 can do.
If we keep telling ourselves over and over that the story makes sense, we’ve been lying to ourselves. It actually isn’t. It’s very inconsistent. My Little Pony Friendship is Magic isn’t supposed to have a concrete planned-out logical storyline. If there was one, it would be there, clear as day, and we definitively wouldn’t talk that much about Starlight’s character arc and Cozy Glow’s relevance in the context of the show. The writers didn’t think of the idea of writing stories about ponies for nine seasons. Trying to say that “the story makes sense” would be like falling in the Kingdom Hearts rabbit hole.
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Starless
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Prog rock pony
What the fuck happened to Hearth’s Warming? Did all the ponies just forget about it and replace it with some other holiday because they wanted nothing to do with the old, better Equestria?
@Ring Team
I’d also add that in One Bad Apple, Babs Seed threatened to tell Diamond Tiara’s mother about her bad attitude and Diamond Tiara begs for her not to, yet in Crusaders of the Lost Mark, it’s revealed that her mother had encouraged her bad behavior.
And in one of the shorts before season 9 it’s revealed Twilight has a fear of ladybugs yet in season 4 we saw this:
Of course G5 also suffers from this just as bad. Hasbro should have just given up and gone back to just making toys sometime before 2018.
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Cosmas-the-Explorer
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Explorer in Training
@Ring Team
One could say the G4 writers might have been more used to writing episodically. They have less experience with things like character development and story arcs.
I might not agree with you much on Starlight, but here’s a thought to tickle our brains. I think Starlight in Season 5 was not brought up enough only anticipation for the Season Finale. She could have appeared in multiple episodes building up tension over time in significant ways not just a cameo in an episode. It could have made Starlight a more interesting character.
I think G5 writers might now be more willing to follow a continuity and treat it like a full on story since they are looking at the show in hindsight instead of in the middle of it.
Even if I still prefer G5 to be its own universe, as long as it follows its own logic and continuity then I think I can respect that.
Background Pony #DAFA
@northern haste
I wouldn’t say it’s just a spinoff, since information in TYT gives context for things in MYM, and vice-versa.
@Background Pony #E52B
That’s what I thought until I remembered a line from Winter Wrap Up:
Spike: Clean up winter? Who cleans up winter? Don’t they just use magic to change the seasons like they do in Canterlot?
Given that Canterlot is the unicorn city, and this was before it was established that the pegasi’s ability to control weather was magical, we can infer that it was the unicorns using magic to change the seasons. I think this is insight into how they did it.
@Shimmering Spectacle
It’s possible, but Twilight’s CM is a very distinct six-pointed star:

So far, when it’s supposed to be Twilight’s CM, they make sure we know it’s her CM:
There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fixture in the theater that’s not quite the right shape, but the colour is unmistakable. The brooches the choir ponies wear looks more like the star itself.
@Background Pony #9F47
It’s alright. It’s less of an epic adventure and more of a walking tour of how different ponies celebrate the holidays. In my opinion, the more stuff like this, the better. When it comes time to save the world, this is what they’re saving.
Still… look at the cutie mark in the bag that Sunny had with her, it has underlying rays in addition to the usual star shape. And Argyle has a locket with her cutie mark, which seemed to have some of this. From what we have learned so far, it seems that no one knew what Twilight Sparkle’s cutie mark looked like, (aside from Argyle and Sunny) yet Zipp noticed this already in the movie. And I don’t think it’s just because she saw the glass window with the star in the airship hangar. Looking back at C3, look at 31:33 when she saw snowflakes shaped like stars. And it was just after this observation that she asked her mother about the background of “Wishentine pony-tales”. We didn’t get an answer to that. And soon after this we saw the first picture of the concert hall with the violet star as if it should make an impression on us.
From the movie we got a bomb; it was later revealed that the lone majestic tree between Zephyr Heights and Bridlewood was the Early Harmony Tree. It is possible that the Wishing Star is also a bomb that we simply did not see until it is detonated with subsequent shock effects. And if we were to look at the G1 Twilight that had served as the inspiration for the G4 Twilight, it is noted that this unicorn’s magic relies on “I wish”… when she wants to do something magical. We know that you don’t celebrate just because we want to, we have to have someone we wish for. What did the ponies in the beginning wish when they started marking this day?
This is what Zipp - and now us - is pondering.
It is possible that it is Twilight Sparkle who has become the Wishing Star, and that she is still alive, watching over the world - and only once stopped every year (or moon) in the sky. If this hypothesis is correct, and it seems that Opaline may be unclear about this, then it must mean that Twilight had done something very fatal. The Unity Crystals have over time become the very center of all magic, and had become a whole that could not be split. So if Twilight split the crystals, sealed the magic - this would have to be punished. And it is possible that she did this to save the world, to sacrifice herself - and this reminds the ponies at the beginning. They want her back.
But then they start to forget in record time. Only Argyle pretended to know the truth, perhaps because of the blanket that he may have found in his youth. And if this hypothesis were to be correct; must we not forget the IDW cover of # 6; who did Twilight fight? Who scared her so much that she sealed away all magic? Is it possible that she took all the monsters from the G4 with her so they can’t haunt Equestria?
I think we will get an indication of this in the next year.
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Background Pony #DAFA
And we need to look into the book “Fantastic Flurry Tales of Wishiehoof”. It was clearly made when the three tribes were together, and the grandmother had said she read it as a filly, which could mean about 60 to 70 years before the G5 movie. This suggests that the three tribes were in the beginning together, before for inexplicable reasons they began to forget their past and went apart. Although there are intact books from this period, and the book itself was not too old when the grandmother first read it.
The cover (16:11) shows two unicorn heads, Zephyr Heights and the mysterious tree called “Wishing Tree”. When Zipp saw it, I think she may have come to think of the tree from the first episode of C1, when the earth pony magic was out of control back then. She possibly assumed it was a magical tree. Then we got to see what was in the book from 38.40, which revealed that the big tree was actually hollow, there is an opening where a candle is lit. Unfortunately, the resolution on my side is too poor to see better, so what is printed cannot be read.
It is possible that Wishday is actually the day when winter came in the G4, where the seasons are marked with celebration days as seen in Ponyville, and we know that there are different traditions from place to place in Equestria. What the unicorns actually do in the book is to invoke winter weather to start the season, hence their spell “Frostyshives”. But then came the surprise; the book was probably made before Equestria’s collapse.
In 39.00 it is possible to see that something very dramatic had happened, two unidentified unicorns were facing each other, the light against the dark, and a mysterious symbol could be seen on one corner of the page. Something symbolizing fire, and one appeared to be Opaline. Did it mean that Opaline is The Big Bad of the G5 and that she caused Equestria’s collapse? The symbol on the opposite side, on the other hand, is about ice, cold, a snowflake. Ice vs. Fire?
Or was it from the post-G4 era when Opaline trashed Equestria before she was stripped of her powers? Because in the end it seems that there was a happy ending, with a clearing in the sky and better times after what happened.
It is possible that the book, which can be up to 100-150 years old, is actually about the start of the winter season at the beginning, where Bridlewood was central to the mysterious tales recorded in the book, which was intended for filles. It is possible that the book was made in the beginning after Equestria’s collapse before the tribes split up, where preserved tales are written down, to create a new tradition.
And; if the Wishing Tree was hollow, it meant that the tree in Bridlewood has secrets that may be from the time when the Mane 6 lived. Don’t think it’s the harmony tree that we know about, or the crystal castle after Twilight, as Bridlewood seemed to be outside the valley with Ponyville and the Everfree. But the Mane 6 or maybe the Younger Mane 6 had a role in this. Bridlewood was important in the time between S9 and the G5 movie.
The song from Zephyr Heights is confusing and seemed to be constructed from loosely assembled accounts and memories that had been tried to be kept alive. But several of the words, the star - and some of the decorations - suggest a connection with the Mane 6. The ponies had TRIED to remember something very important.
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