My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
largerobot-deactivated20211119:
Really sounds like the development process for She-Ra was just some suit holding up a sheet of paper in each hand like
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
- 80s toyline reboot
- female-oriented
- small group interpersonal dynamics
- neon pastel
Stephen Universe
- pretty queer
- emotional dynamics
- jewel tones
and going “hmmm”
lesbian cats have a little fear of abandonment, as a treat.
Honestly I’m impressed how much these kids shows’ morals have become actually useful life lessons for kids. I remember in my day cartoons would be like “if someone puts hanging out with other people ahead of you they’re not your Real Friend!” And MLP:FiM was like “yeah, when your friend develops other interests it does kinda put pressure on you to hang on to them, but you know, not everyone will be part of your clique forever and that’s ok. Give them space and express some interest in their interests but don’t feel obligated to follow them everywhere, and commiserate with your mutual friends to blow off steam sometimes.”
And for romance I guess She-Ra still does Be Yourself™️, Your Soulmate Is Out There but it feels more appropriately weighted coming not as a convenient one-off but the resolution of several seasons of Scorpia being kinda lonely and rejected because people don’t reciprocate her romantic interest because they don’t find her body appealing
She-Ra also did the friendship thing where Glimmer gets worried when Bow finds new friends as she fears abandonment and she acts bitchy to him for a while and then forgives him but he points out he’s done nothing wrong and he’s mad at her, etc. etc. until everyone learns a valuable lesson about the meaning of friendship (uh and threesomes, possibly?) and I’ve noted a few times that cartoons really do a much better job of this stuff than they used to, with the ultimate being Pixar zooming into your brain and trying to explain where all these emotions even come from.
Gosh, it’s almost like children’s cartoons have become Serious Business, with a lot of cultural-clout-heavy critical attention focused on them, when in the ‘80s and early '90s the only people who gave a shit were small children and their overworked moms.
That’s definitely part of it, but I think another dynamic is that the small children in the ‘80s and ‘90s who gave a shit grew up to become the show runners.
Yeah there was a lot of meta- in the 90s, The Simpsons, X-Files working with modern myth, Xena with older, Sandman and Grant Morrison, third-generation screenwriter Joss Whedon playing with how tv formulas cultivated audience expectations
(Peaking later in the mid-2000s with Family Guy, neo-BSG, Veronica Mars, I’d say.)
But also the internet getting the audience involved, “Jump The Shark”, which was mostly people all over the country getting the Internet and realizing other people had had that pre-MTV schlock bored into their heads too, that leading on to Television Without Pity and TV recapping as the standard entry-level internet writer position
Kontextmaschine thought the thing to do in the 2000s was go to LA and try to be a TV screenwriter, you’ll remember
So yeah secondary analysis of already complex, multi-generationally aware media is the baseline this generation of creators come from, that’s paying off!
Plus the change in formats such that the audience might possibly follow a multi-season character arc at all, rather than like chunks of 50 independently written episodes released all at once to be shown every weekday at 3 to whoever happened to catch it for a year