So with the announcement today that the final season of Friendship is Magic will begin in April and with an open-art event going on at Equestria Daily to draw ideas for Gen 5 of the property, I figured now was as good of time as any to talk about the possibilities of What Comes Next.

As for the picture, it’s more of a fun little exploration that touches on some of the things I think about when it comes to the Next Gen of MLP rather than any hard and fast wish for things. There has been some leaked artwork floating around for a long while now purportedly showing potential Generation 5 designs for the Mane Six. These included such things as (most notably) shifting which pony race certain characters belonged to (specifically making Pinkie Pie a Pegasus, Fluttershy a Unicorn, and Twilight an Earth Pony), but also trying out different styles and design elements. They became more detailed, with distinct hooves, fetlocks, and multi-toned coats, as well as more ‘realistic’ body shapes.

I figured I’d throw some of that in my drawing… nothing too radical, as most of these kinds of details have been explored by other artists who like to up the detail levels of our very cartoonish ponies. I wanted them to be just different enough from the way I would normally draw them to suggest a new style without going so far as to lose the charm of the original characters altogether… something which would naturally be the goal of any redesign, but a hard level to identify. How far is too far?

As for my own preferences as to what Gen 5 brings, I’ve always been on the side of shuffling the world around the characters while keeping their personalities intact. Some would prefer an entirely new cast as in previous generations, but I think that when you find characters with the kind of proven appeal that the Mane Six have, you’d have to be crazy to discard them. Just as they don’t toss out Optimus Prime, Bumble Bee, Snake Eyes, Megatron, Storm Shadow, Baroness, etc. with their other properties, I believe that Hasbro has found an enduring cast to anchor future revisions of My Little Pony. So what’s the point of doing a new show at all? The ability to toss out continuity and start over, making new and interesting choices as you go. Putting the characters into different starting points in life, and having the way that they come together be new and different.

So for me, designing the Gen 5 versions of the Mane Six is less about what stylistic changes can be made and more about deciding where they’re coming from in this iteration. And so I had some fun with it in the drawing above. Again, not necessarily my wish, but just an interesting direction to pursue. Making Rarity more exotic from the start… Maybe she’s from a distant land. Maybe, as some believe her accent to be, it’s all an act to escape her less interesting roots. Maybe she’s a professional actress just playing a role. She’s still the Rarity we know at heart, but the details of her life are different this time around.

And that brings us to Applejack. Much has been made in the fandom over the years of the “problem” with Applejack. To those of us who love her, there is of course no problem. However, rumor has it that the people behind the scenes feel differently and were looking for a way to overhaul our beloved farmpony the most for Gen 5, and definitely looking to take the country out of the country pony. Personally, I think that’s a mistake. While I’m nowhere near a country boy myself, I think it’s an important and charming part of her character… as well as the series as a whole. There’s something off about removing ponies from country roots entirely. And truthfully, I don’t think that’s something that has been holding back AJ all this time. If I had to pinpoint an issue, it’d be that she was created with everything she ever wanted in life already achieved. It’s much harder to draw stories out of simply maintaining a status quo, and it makes her a bit harder to relate to than ponies who still yearn to achieve a big dream. So for me, the solution to Applejack is simply to give her unfulfilled goals in life. For a big shake-up, maybe she’s an orphan who doesn’t even know who her family is. Maybe she’s a rookie officer looking to make a career in law enforcement. Or maybe she’s a peaceful farmer who has had her land taken away from her…

And that’s what led to the version we see above. If Hasbro was so dead-set on not making AJ a southern farmer, what would be different, yet thematically the same? How about a highlander? Still no big city pony, but a country one… just based off of a different country. So that was just for fun… still, give me Ashleigh Ball’s wonderfully warm southern twang any day.

So that’s how I see Gen 5 personally… Keep true to the characters, but let’s have fun discovering where they are in their new lives and where they go from there. Maybe mix up the supporting casts some… are the CMC fully grown? Perhaps Alicorns are mythical, and yet-to-be discovered. There are a lot of ways you could go with it, and of course, there are a lot of ways it could all go wrong. It’ll be extremely hard to recapture the magic of Gen 4, but it could be interesting to see what they come up with anyway.