The Thread About Ponies, Logistics and General Weirdness (And Gilda)TV 

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That may be the case with any movie one can't stop going on about, if it doesn't go so far as to irritate them unintentionally. I'd expect interest to pique a little if you to mention it was a great movie once or twice though, and then suggested they read a few reviews to back it up.

The same is possible with FiM of course. It may be harder to sell on paper, but it's swayed people never expected to like such shows.
 
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I can't deny that FiM hasn't coloured my view of the world, potentially for good. I'm much more open to watching stuff I never would have before, (like Anime!) MY friend is struggling to get into Madoka Magica due to the girliness, but I forded such waters with ease.

That said, the Anime I've really loved felt more like the best of Fan Fiction than the show itself. Angel Beats really has those feels that some of the better fics I've read has, that sort of sad goodbye feel for characters you grow to love. Heck, even Gurren Lagann does that awesomely.

For me, it was definitely 2012 when things started to cool down. Valar morghulis and all that. I feel FiM has been replaced by a plethora of other shows and hobbies that I enjoy more, but I'll still be watching my way through Season 5, most likely, even if I am almost completely ignoring the fandom nowadays. I've made several attempts to jump back into writing but...it just isn't there. My readers, my pre-readers, my inspiring writers. None of the things that kept me going with it are there anymore, and it feels like the general amount of readers there even are have dropped lately.

A pity, but I think it's best for me to quietly fade from writing for good, now. Maybe some time in the future I'll write a decent story no-one will read, but 'til then, it's simpler hobbies for me.

Oh, and Anime soundtracks are absolutely ballin' Seriously, listen to this baby here:


Music like that wins my vote every time.
 
I do think the MLP soundtrack is heavily overrated; good, but not the "Disney quality" some people praise it as. The entire reason there are so many good remixes is because the songs are simple enough to be broken down into small parts, making them easy to work with(In much the same way as the shows canon being open for writers). The open song to Attack On Titan is my life, now. And the whole reason there are no good remixes is because the song is too complex and organized for it to be broken down into simple parts, as with most anime soundtracks.

But like I said, that's what made MLP unique, what made it so special and the very reason the interest fades with time. Most of the substance is brought out by the fandom, so rewatching episodes, even years later, feels unrewarding because the show in and of itself isn't terribly deep, no matter how enjoyable it is on one or two run throughs. I can go back and watch Scrubs(this is just the biggest example, Sherlock recently fell on my list of rewatchable shows) for a fifth time on my own and still feel totally satisfied at the end of each episode(except for the musical one, I hated the musical one). I'm not so sure it's the fandom peaking, because I still see people get into it and love it as much as I did when I was new to the fandom.
 
Drawing comparisons between anime and MLP still qualifies as MLP discussion. This also happens to be the most active I've seen this thread in some time. Well, as far as actual conversation goes.
CoffeeGrunt
Hey, we bring pony over there sometimes. We should totally collab into a, "Kawaii Cartoons Thread."
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I'm not sure the world is ready for Anime and MLP to be so closely mixed. Which is probably the real reason RizCifra had to stop making stuff like this:
filly_twilight_sparkle____thing_by_rizcifra-d54w2cc.gif


Just imagine it. The characters we know and love from MLP being granted the artistic styling and story depth of quality anime. That would be the greatest show of all time.
 
Minty
I'm not so sure it's the fandom peaking, because I still see people get into it and love it as much as I did when I was new to the fandom.
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I think for each person, it peaks depending on when you joined and how invested in the fandom you become. You can have guys who started watching back in 2010 and still be no less interested in it these days, while new people joining now might find that it reaches its height in the coming seasons. But looking back over the past three years, I have to say the months leading into the post-S2 hiatus was as high as it got in terms of episode quality and the fan content coming off the back of the second season. Since then it's plateaued, dipped at the start and end of S3 and stayed relatively low right through the long post-S3 break. With the S4 finale doing a good job of matching A Canterlot Wedding's awesomeness after a long season with the occasional low point here and there.

The real difference lately was that non of us watched it together, which made the second season seem more memorable and the latest season kinda... unremarkable in that respect. As good as S4 was overall, with some of the best (and worst) episodes so far, it just never quite hit the same high notes that I can look back on with the same affection. And while I will be watching S5 when it starts in a few months, my interests lie mainly elsewhere nowadays.

And Scrubs is one of the only shows I know where I can just re-watch episodes dozens of times without getting bored. In contrast, the number of FiM episodes I've watched more than twice is remarkably low.
 
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I'd still say the overall creative peak of the fandom was in tune with either the Season 2 premiere or the Season 2 finale, and everything since then has been riding off of that to seemingly more marginal returns.
 
Minty
I do think the MLP soundtrack is heavily overrated; good, but not the "Disney quality" some people praise it as. The entire reason there are so many good remixes is because the songs are simple enough to be broken down into small parts, making them easy to work with(In much the same way as the shows canon being open for writers). The open song to Attack On Titan is my life, now. And the whole reason there are no good remixes is because the song is too complex and organized for it to be broken down into simple parts, as with most anime soundtracks.

But like I said, that's what made MLP unique, what made it so special and the very reason the interest fades with time. Most of the substance is brought out by the fandom, so rewatching episodes, even years later, feels unrewarding because the show in and of itself isn't terribly deep, no matter how enjoyable it is on one or two run throughs. I can go back and watch Scrubs(this is just the biggest example, Sherlock recently fell on my list of rewatchable shows) for a fifth time on my own and still feel totally satisfied at the end of each episode(except for the musical one, I hated the musical one). I'm not so sure it's the fandom peaking, because I still see people get into it and love it as much as I did when I was new to the fandom.
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Same.
I joined the fandom since 2012, but not in here for many reasons.

Not to derail, but the same happens to Adventure Time. Consistent writing/crew but the whole thing seems to decline in time (although AT has much deeper story but MLP has much realistic story and character) But both of them are very influential, at least from my view. Both grabs peoples especially animation community attention to animation in general and as a result, we almost always have both references on big media on any medium (mostly animation obviously).

At least AT has a great international relationship behind it (maybe because its CN so it has better network recognition and funding) unlike MLP where it only barely made out of US and gave us syndication instead despite its success, excitable crew, and made large profit. I think thats why the Hub is struggling right now.

(Funnily enough, I felt the same with GT series :D oh my god whats happening to my passive hobby)
 
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Well, the Hub is struggling because they attempted a massive relaunch of an existing network using nothing but acquired (and old) properties. MLP was a hit, but was for reasoning that essentially had nothing to do with The Hub lineup; and the only other show that drew any outside interest besides it was the first two seasons of Dan Vs. It was basically destined to fail because they never knew what the hell they were doing with it.
 
Wiegert
And Scrubs is one of the only shows I know where I can just re-watch episodes dozens of times without getting bored. In contrast, the number of FiM episodes I've watched more than twice is remarkably low.
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I've watched all of Season 1 twice(because me a friend decided to marathon the whole thing, and it was his first time), but aside from that I've only seen maybe 2 or 3 episodes twice, and I still haven't even bothered to watch the one from S4 with Flim and Flam in it.

When I really look into EqD or Derpibooru, there is still a large volume of quality art and videos, it just all seemingly becomes buried beneath the vast amount of mediocre crap. Come to think of it, it seems like there was always a lot of garbage to sort through(Hell, I contributed to it), it's just that with time, for me at least, it just hasn't been as rewarding to sift through it and find the gems. I mean, Mandopony even back when he was relatively new was one of the most popular Brony vocalists out there, and I never even thought he was that good, but I bought into the hype train nonetheless. The only popular brony vocalist I ever really liked was MicTheMicrophone. Same goes for remixers, really. There are only a couple I still listen to because I realize most of their stuff I liked because it was pony and I wanted to like pony rather than it actually being quality music.

Tornado
Dan Vs.
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Which they subsequently pulled from YouTube, despite the freedom to share the episodes being exactly what made MLP so accessible. Because Hasbro's marketing team is just brilliant.
 
I used to be a massive brony, myself, but what happened to me was this:

I tried to get more into brony music when I joined Tumblr last year, thinking that I could be more like them if I started hanging around the same spots as them, and getting to know a few of them. This was a mistake; I have NEVER been all that into brony music save for a few artists, and following these people's personal lives made me find that, actually, they perhaps weren't such great guys/girls after all. The circlejerking, sycophantic fanaticism over how "2011-2012 brony muzik was better", and the sweeping, blind generalisations about the current state of the fandom. Considering that I feel it's just as **** now as it was then, I find that hard to stomach. EqD's "Music of the Day" posts slipped slowly into stagnation, and I began to care less and less for even making music about ponies.

I got into the top fifty of Everfree Radio's Top 100 tracks of 2013 - which sparked a humungous turd-flinging contest on Tumblr, eventually ending in me basically being shafted from the brony music community. And honestly? The three non-pony tracks that I made in the succeeding months and the views that they racked up independent of the franchise that I'd essentially been using as a prop for the last two years? That means more to me than the paltry selection of "Music of the Day" features that I'd previously been so egotistical over. Honestly, the fact that two of my real-life friends are into 4Chan's /mlp/ is one of the only things that's kept me connected with the fandom over the last few months, because my opinions on the show and the fandom itself gradually started to drift away from everyone else's.

I liked Season 3. I liked Equestria Girls. I don't believe that Season 1 was some sort of "golden age" for the show, I've never really liked the in-show music that much, and I wasn't as enamoured with the fan-made animations and memes as everyone else seemed to be. Hasbro hands out C&Ds like Jehova's Witnesses hand out flyers, so the fangames I was excited for got cancelled. I've been given less and less of a fresh reason to really engage with the show and the fandom on the level at which I used to; I stopped reading fanfics, as my favourites slipped into hiatus and obscurity, and I could never find the time to care about many newer ones. There are only a certain number of fan-made stories about the same characters that I can sink my teeth into without the different continuities ending up as conflicting messes in my head - and I've started to care about characters from other shows more than I do about the MLP cast.

Then, just before the Weird Al Yankovic episode aired... I found K-On. Then I found Kill la Kill, then iDOLM@STER, then Sakura Trick, then Haganai, and then Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Basically, I found shows with the slice-of-life elements of MLP, characters as lovable as those in MLP, music better than that in MLP and the deeper storylines that I read fanfiction for - but this time, without the repetition of being limited to a single franchise. This is what so many people miss when comparing MLP:FIM to "anime"; anime is an art form, whereas MLP - no matter how you swing the fandom's contributions - is just one show. Limiting myself to it and obsessing over it as opposed to focusing specifically on the elements of it that I like was a bad decision, and it made me over-reliant on a fandom from which I eventually became distant. There will always be more variety in an entire art form than there will be in a single show.

This doesn't mean that I've stopped caring about MLP:FIM altogether; on the contrary, the biggest poster in my room is one of the mane six and Celestia. I proudly display my "power level", as my aforementioned 4Chan-going friends call it - but I have other focuses. And that's made me realise something: were it not for the size and potency of the fandom, and the sheer amount of content available surrounding Friendship Is Magic, it would simply have been "just another show" to me, as it is right now. I don't feel as though I've wasted my time, though, as I've met some awesome people, made some awesome friends, and have generally been opened up by the whole pony experience - and as much as anything else, I have you guys to thank for that.

On a more positive note, I made a remix of Giddy Up a couple of weeks ago, totally on a whim. No sense of obligation, and it was a track linked only to MLP by circumstance - and a song that, I have to admit, I legitimately enjoyed. And when I released it, it went straight to an Equestria Daily Music Spotlight. That, to me, felt like something of a personal victory; I made a remix of a track I liked from a franchise I enjoyed because I wanted to, and it stood tall enough to be noticed by its target audience - and not just in the jumble of "Music of the Day", but in the Spotlight. I feel that there's no reason why I can't try that with other franchises, or even push to get more of my original songs out there, and seeing as there are now franchises with which I connect far more deeply than I have with MLP, ponies is no longer my focus. To me, it's now "a franchise that I enjoy", (as I feel about so many other franchises) as opposed to being the be-all and end-all of my entire creative output. No more, and certainly no less.
 
Minty
Which they subsequently pulled from YouTube, despite the freedom to share the episodes being exactly what made MLP so accessible. Because Hasbro's marketing team is just brilliant.
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(Copyright mish-mash. Heck they even close I think two major contributor channel to show their power, forgot which but one of them producing Button videos)

As for the music, I didnt actually like them from the start. I even try to skip them when I watch the episodes (I watch through cartoon streaming website because the only way to watch this show on my place is either to buy HD channel package or get Malaysian channel signal, both of them are even 2 seasons late)
 
That whole thing sounds awfully similar to how my interest slowly dipped, only replace Tumblr with "derpibooru comment sections" and there you have it.

Except I loved the fan made memes, and in some cases I still do, but they're usually horribly overplayed within a week of their conception.

Also, I just remembered that the only song I ever really enjoyed listening to straight out of the show was I've Got To Find a Way, which for whatever reason everyone seemed to hate when the episode first aired:


Also, for reference on my comments about there being a lot of garbage to sift through, remember that Cupcakes was for a very long time to be considered the gold standard of grimdark fanfiction, and that...that's just awful.
 
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eXtaticus
Hasbro hands out C&Ds like Jehova's Witnesses hand out flyers, so the fangames I was excited for got cancelled.
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Incidentally, the C&D for Fighting is Magic was the single defining thing that basically killed my outstanding interest in the series. I wasn't even that interested in the game, but so much of the community was built around it (including the fan interaction with the show staff) that its death renewed the apathy cycle that started following that nonsense pulled with Derpy with a vengeance which I had to that point been able to forget then because at least the show itself was still going strong at the time. I limped it out through Season 3, but even if it hadn't been crap I wouldn't have made it any longer following EqG.
 
Whatever happened to that "Totally Not Fighting Is Magic" game that Lauren Faust was apparently going to help out with, anyway?
 
I guess I kinda joined at the "golden age" and have just been casual about it since. I was never obsessed but just really enjoyed both the show and some of the people I've met. The only thing that's really turned me away in the slightest is some of Hasbro's legal crap, the usual random morons (none of you... well except that one guy who got banned lol), and then of course that movie which shall not be named... ugh. Other than that I'm still along for the ride.
 
I have to be honest, the only musician in the fandom I really, truly thought was awesome was Makkon, and his sparse updates have very little to do with the show, aside from Deae Lunae. Other than a few pieces from scattered artists, I actually have very little non-Makkon pony music on my phone nowadays...I think Anime is catching up to it now.

I just think everything that I used to get out of this show has been replaced, or that I don't even need it anymore. A pity, but that's growing up, I think.
 
Makkon's gotten more into speed painting and concept art as of late. It's been ages since he last uploaded a track that was vaguely pony-related, and his music uploads in general have been scarce this year.

I do like how the few musicians I've followed who produced fan music in the past still come out with quality tunes without the need for an obligatory pony image or title slapped afterwards, even though they tend to get fewer hits. Lyrical works were harder to like apart from remixes of show songs every now and again. And with the exception of a handful of fan songs from the earlier days of the fandom that had original lyrics, I really couldn't care less about them. Instrumentals were - and still are - superior.

And all this talk of the so called "golden age" makes me wonder where some of the writers who used to post here have gone. @BronyCray, @CoreyWWilliams, @that guy who wrote EQZ, @that other guy who will never finish The Ballad and fills their time by organising racy photo shoots.

I do genuinely wonder how the first two are doing nowadays. Or if BC will ever finish that old GTP-favourite.
 
Honestly, I think TNTNE and The Ballad being updated would be the only thing to draw me back to fics.
 
CoffeeGrunt
@Azure Flare

Yeah, most of us have gotten a bit bored of Pony, though some still watch the show, myself included. Season Four was nice, but the fandom just isn't something I wanna be associated with anymore, and haven't wanted to for a long time. Most of the writers and artists that made this fandom so amazing in the early days are gone or sparse with updates, and there simply isn't much substance left to the fandom, aside from the same crappy musicians making music.

Personally I've gotten right into Anime lately. It has the things that I like about Pony; interesting characters, conflicts and comedy, but does them all better than Pony does, with no real marketing undercurrent or kid-pandering. They're also often a one-season thing, so the story arcs end in closure, and there's actual story arcs and character growth during said series, in most cases.

The Mane Six have the same flaws since I first saw them 3 years ago, and I just don't find it interesting to see the same "Fluttershy is shy" story over and over.
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I'm just taking a brake I guess. Trying other things and yeah... taking a brake, because the whole art thing made me feel like a prisoner. I'll be back. We have one more season, right?
 
On the subject of Makkon and his current pursuits, he has started doing a few more MLP paintings this month. Some were part of an art dump along with a variety of other works, and a couple more were commissions,. Like this one from today:

commission__luna_astrum_by_makkon-d7otr1p.png

Source

I could easily see him putting that piece to a minor orchestral track if this were still 2011.
 

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