Season 8 reflections.

This year, I had an exit strategy. If My Little Pony wasn't entertaining me by the third episode of the season, I'd bail. As it turned out, I watched every episode, so clearly this season was an improvement over last year's wretched showing, and there's actually a lot of trends this season which were pleasant surprises for me. At long last, this show is making some serious changes to its approach which have been long overdue, and as it turns out, this season wasn't half-bad. I mean, it's two-fifths bad, and it retains some of the same issues the show has had for years, but it's a small improvement. What season 8 showed me is this: My Little Pony can improve, I can still have fun with it, and the people currently writing the show have no intention of getting their priorities straight. It's still a show which regularly overextends its reach, and it's still a show which has no idea what to do with its own main cast. But it's a more watchable version of that show this year, and even its failed experiments are a bit less dull and rigid than they were last year. It's still a show mostly made by people who care about telling good stories, and that's ultimately what keeps me watching. I just wish they cared a bit more about which series they were writing those stories for.

As it turns out, weekly shorts are perfect for "Equestria Girls"

I thought this series was done for.

By August of 2017 Equestria Girls had fallen so low that new content was being cheaply outsourced. A new series was reportedly on the horizon, but one look at the so-called "Summertime Shorts," which were so awkward and poorly-made that they almost resembled a bootleg version of the series, gave little reason to hope. Surely this was a series with nothing new to say, and which the company making it had no faith in. Some moderately satisfying music videos were being released at the same time, and yet, the simple fact that these were sharing space with such cheap junk was truly dispiriting.

The new series, which premiered on November 2nd on the "Discovery Family GO!" mobile app, didn't necessarily bring big changes to the series' aesthetic or narrative styles. In a lot of ways, it was doing the same things that My Little Pony had been doing for years. But none of it was cheaply outsourced, and moreover, one big thing was different. It would take a while to really become clear, but what the new Equestria Girls series finally brought to the table was a renewed sense of focus. All of the various identities which the series had grasped at over the years were finally synthesized into a coherent whole, there was a consistent focus on expanding the characters and the world, and best of all, this series was more consistently entertaining than either branch of My Little Pony has been in years. If it's not quite as substantial as the best My Little Pony stories, it does an incredibly satisfying job of setting the groundwork.