Uploaded by XTUX345 
2388x1252 PNG 901 kB
Interested in advertising on Derpibooru? Click here for information!
Help fund the $15 daily operational cost of Derpibooru - support us financially!
Description
Some details on Lauren Faust’s scrapped plans for the future of My Little Pony.
Tags
+-SH dead source51613 +-SH source needed27799 +-SH useless source url4477 +-SH safe2272634 +-SH amethyst stone145 +-SH flash sentry15485 +-SH princess cadance42205 +-SH princess celestia117231 +-SH princess luna121953 +-SH twilight sparkle371974 +-SH oc1001343 +-SH oc:fausticorn1724 +-SH oc:meghan mccarthy369 +-SH alicorn337127 +-SH pony1705640 +-SH g42131282 +-SH ama43 +-SH canon157 +-SH discussion in the comments843 +-SH lauren faust1808 +-SH lore253 +-SH meghan mccarthy592 +-SH reddit1057 +-SH text97177 +-SH tl;dr391 +-SH what could have been225
Loading...
Loading...
This is actually why I hated “The Return of Harmony.”
@ArrJaySketch
Why would the retail buyers believe that little girls would discriminate against dark blue pony princesses besides their own preconceptions that girls are too stupid to be interested in anything other than the color pink?
@Ferrotter
Reminds me of all the B&B episodes that got altered when a kid burnt down his family’s trailer and accidentally killed his sister after being inspired by Beavis’ pyromania. Good ol’ discussions on “non-reproducible violence”.
@Japanese Teeth
Even with Discord on the side of the protagonists, you still have the problem of the Princesses: you need to make them irrelevant or else the M6 won’t get to be the designated protagonists for the episode. At least Discord’s chaotic nature means he can directly interfere with the ponies’ plans without being immediately Worf’d.
I always strive to be better.
Oh brother. Just when you think the comments can’t get any dumber…
Btw doesn’t this image come with smaller text? I was looking foward to use my newmicroscope.
This is not the full context. There was a good deal more in the thread it came from, as I recall.
There is NOTHING HERE except someone saying “X, which is not gonna happen, is better than Y, which is happening right now. I’m not going to give any evidence to support my theory.”
One must never believe an argument that has no support.
I’m also speaking as one who has been of fan of MLP since the 80s.
In the hiatus between S1 and S2, I strongly felt that the show could still be awesome if it went in many different directions, most of it because of the very well-developed cast. At the time, I couldn’t recall many cartoons where I could readily identify with the characters, or when characters reminded me of actual people I knew. When a show has characters that solid, stories write themselves. (How does this character react? What if these two characters were together? What would they do in this or that situation?)
Musing further on this, FIM is already a rather large departure from what MLP used to be, even at its tamest. If I recall correctly, I remember Lauren thinking this all could be a fantastic failure. I don’t have any evidence to support this, but I’m vaguely suspecting that Hasbro probably wasn’t entirely sure about letting anyone have complete control of the reins. There are a couple of reasons:
Interestingly, I wonder if what Hasbro knew then what they know now if they’d let Lauren have more control about future seasons of the show. Personally, I think ponies are still awesome (else I’d not be posting this novel). I think ponies could be truly epic in the truest sense of the word. Yes. It’s a bit overused, but I think that’s the word I’m looking for. I keep thinking of “Dangerous Business” and I can’t put it into words.
Also, I wish Hasbro could point to retail buyers and say that little girls could like things like this, too:
@Japanese Teeth
I’ve thought about that too, but the way I’ve personally chosen to interpret it is that they have enough power to counter any outright attempts by Discord to just up and destroy them, and that his power, though including a lot of real ability, is just spiced up by his ability to do “tricks” like illusions (maybe he doesn’t actually remove horns and wings and tails, just makes it look so) or bending reality in a way that will eventually just snap back to normal if he doesn’t hold it the way he wants it.
Pure head canon I know, but it’s more interesting to think of magic as having some limits, exotic as it may be, otherwise it’s just sort of a show breaker.
Also, we saw discord a bit frightened by the giant worm thing and later genuinely ill, so I suppose he’s not all powerful, just sort of a perception bending trickster, perhaps.
Evil is not defined merely by a propensity for making things dead.
My black gentlemen.
I read that mostly as him prioritizing his own amusement over bothering to be dangerous. He could have defeated them instantly, but that’s no fun.
>if he ever pulls out his full power he’s going to win almost instantly
That’s part of why I didn’t think he was really that evil in the first place – if he really WAS evil, he wouldn’t have lost, because there wouldn’t have been anything stopping him from just turning Celestia and Luna into dust with a thought.
I can kinda see the Trixie thing if they went the course of making her Twilight’s evil counterpart. Sort of like what they did with Sunset Shimmer.
As for Discord, I honestly think that the current route was a better idea. As a villain, there’s only so much you can do with him; he’s too powerful. If he ever pulls out his full power he’s going to win almost instantly unless the ponies pull out the elements, at which point they win. By pseudo-redeeming him, they can have him around and screwing with the cast, while not having to result to pulling out the big guns to solve the problems he causes.
Oh that.
tbh I always kind of assumed that Luna and Celestia would eventually ‘ascend.’ They’re like, goddesses of celestial objects – nature goddesses.
To counter a few specific points in that article though:
That’s the main reason I’m not really too worked up about this; it’s all hearsay at this point, from someone who’s putting their own slant on it.
If somebody different wrote up the same bare facts, you could easily make it sound like Faust was about to drive the show into the ground by phrasing it differently. E.g. “She was considering killing off the Princesses and she wanted to downplay all of the slice of life stuff that dominated the first season!”
The actual ‘‘facts’’ we have are vague and like you said, we don’t really know how far she was actively pursuing those ideas and whether they would have changed if she had to really make those episodes.
I was pretty much just referring to everything in the blue box.
@Japanese Teeth
Okay the other big thing is that the guy doing the AMA was kind of editorializing a lot too.
What isn’t clear is how many of Faust’s ideas he’s referring to are things she was holding up as core tenet of her vision, and how many of them were just ideas she was may bouncing around but not that attached to.
He also might be drumming it up to sound a lot darker and edgier than it really was going to be?
I know, I just wanted to post an Applejack reaction image.
@rogerSnow
“There was a direction the show had that people liked, it apparently matched up with what Lauren had intended, then she’s there in a reduced capacity, it matches the feel people liked a little less, then she’s totally uninvolved it feels like a different show.”
That’s a good point, except that if the hints in the image are accurate, she was going to change the show even more by upping the levels of darkness and fantasy adventure. Which could have been very good (Adventure Time pulled it off), but it would also have been very different from the first season, and could have easily alienated people who liked the more slice-of-life stuff.