Hi! Im Sunny And Im Gonna Make Queer Media!

1: applejacks personal style left up to her own whims leans neutral to relatively feminine.

She’s by far not the most feminine but she isn’t the least either. The least feminine is Rainbow dash.

2: rainbow dashes new design actively makes her more masculine visually. Not less. Going from just standard shoulder length hair with bangs to a full on mullet.

She’s been getting less gender conforming each design revision. More alt.

If they were feminising the cast to the point of removing a character like applejack it wouldn’t make sense to be pushing rainbow dash away from where they’d be wanting the brand to go.

They could take her back to her hyper femme fashionista G3 iteration at any time. But they’re actively choosing to make her more and more masc leaning. To the degree the new design honestly (and very likely unintentionally) feels quite queer coded about it. Like both me and my other lgbtqia mutuals agree that she looks… Gayer.

And honestly that solid push away from super femme can be felt to a far lesser extent on the others.

With the noticed push of blue (more Teal for flutters) as the teams unifying colour.

Three out of four of these characters didn’t have Blue as a major colour in their palette. Three out four of them did have pink.

It would have been less to change if they’d just added more pink to rainbow to push it from a small accent to a full primary colour instead.

But instead they chose to make blue an element to all their designs. Which while it’s dumb is generally considered a “boys colour” in our current social climate.

So I don’t get the feeling they’re trying to rid mlp of its less feminine elements. That doesn’t seem to be the direction at all.

Bluey tells good stories just under that under that in eight minutes

The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy told good stories just barely over it with eleven minutes.

You’re perfectly fine with short episodes elsewhere.

The typical YouTube slop you’re talking about averages out at about three minutes per episode. This is still significantly above the norm.

G6 is not the first time pinkie pie has been presented with heart shaped Balloons instead of regular ones!

The first actually being on one of her G3 toys!

And while not pinkie pie directly her G3.5 mother had a heart shaped balloon as a default cutiemark!

If this is the goodbye generation for that universe, world and characters.

That this is going to on its wrap up lead us out of the main six into something new.

It would track with it having a smaller cast and therefore a narrower scope.

Nicholas Kole who is a confirmed concept art on the rebooted my little pony vague posted this as the discussion was starting to shift to that.

Then immediately an hour later made a post that “subtly” clarifies his dislike of generative ai. That he has shared many times before.

If you don’t know who Nicholas Cole is? You do if you’re a Spyro fan because he’s an exceptionally talented artist who actually also worked on the reignited trilogy being a concept artist for it too.

And if you put his work from that next to the my little pony leak? Yeah I can feel his vibe all over it.

The lineless look, the soft colour gradients to imply visual depth, the way of rendering hair that has thicker blockier shapes with shading and flyaways? That’s him alright.

It’s just tweaked for a different brand. With a different target audience of little girls.

“B-B-But my ai detector said it was-”

If you need a machine to tell you what is and isn’t ai then all that tells me is you don’t actually know what makes something clearly ai. Those things are infamous for false positives especially when it comes to artists that have had their work stolen a lot by ai.

Those things have an awful habit of using art style to determine if it’s ai and that’s a very bad thing. Because ai does not have a “style.” Every style you’re trying to think of came from real artists first. Ai can’t have anything original to itself by the nature of how it works.

But his word is one thing. The art also speaks for itself.

So let’s zoom in and I’ll show you what I mean. To pinkie first because she’ll help my point the best!

When looking for ai (especially ai from 3 years ago according to the trademark) what you’re looking for is a sense of unintentionality which often exposes itself in garbled smaller details.

Little things like eye shines or makeup often get a smudged/bleedy look because the software doesn’t actually know what it’s placing. It doesn’t know what a heart or a twinkle is. It especially fucks up along tangents.

But all the little shapes here are perfectly crisp in their forms. If they’re near each other they’re not fusing into each other or the fur gradients nor warp on their own. I can cleanly distinguish the hearts, sprinkles and twinkles. There’s slight variation of course. It is hand drawn drawn there’s going to be.

But it feels intentionally placed there by a person who was also zoomed in making it. We are not looking for perfection we’re looking for human touch and care. Where thought and long time practice meet.

Now class we move our eyeballs down a bit to her hair.

Squinting past the million glow effects and shinies you can see the way her newly added blue hair highlights. And pardon my French but…

Ai would shit the bed of it even tried this much curls, gradients and glitter now let alone three years ago.

The way the hair highlight takes into account not only volume curling in and out of sight as it goes around her other curls. There’s an intentional thought pathing it. It doesn’t just mindlessly wrap around it’s bending with the hair texture it’s working with. Even being slightly parted into sections.

Now I’m going to pull you into two of the other ponies. Fluttershy and Rainbow dash.

These are completely different hairstyles to what they usually have even looking past the added green to fluttershy and rainbow getting pink back.

Fluttershy has bangs now and a proper back to her hair instead of just being split down the middle into a heart shape. Rainbow dash somehow looks even gayer with her hair swept back into a long mullet. I think people call that a “wolf cut”? I’d have to check.

These not being hairstyles they’ve had before is important. Unlike pinkie and twilight they have made a decision that completely changes the feel of a character outside what people expect from them.

Something ai doesn’t really do. It’s trained out of anything close to it. Because it’s boring. It always tries slide towards the dull average in whatever you ask it to copy. Because it’s trying to be as generically appealing to as many people as physically possible. If they asked it to give them fluttershy with green streaks it wouldn’t randomly start also cutting cute little layered bangs in that she’s not had before. Because that makes her look less like fluttershys generic average and that means it’s not a result that would not be universally acceptable.

Also once again like pinkie the little details not being garbled still applies such as their eye highlights, custom lash shapes and gradient eyeshadows.

“But I don’t like them!”

You don’t have to! Art not being something you like is personal taste. I have things I like about them and things I don’t. I may analyse them and express that another time.

But art being bad by your standards and art being ai is two completely separate things. And learning the skill to break down your dislike of something in actual detail with actual terminology and not blanket statements is important. And just builds a stronger argument.

Nicholas is a lot more patient than I would’ve been about this. It sucks to get work leaked early and it sucks to not be able to explicitly defend it from accusations because of probably a million NDAs.

Because colouring in books like these never include side characters regardless of how major unless they get some kind of transformation.

“The reason Equestria girls swapped some ponies colour palettes on their human designs was because of Colourism, they were afraid they could be read as Black.”

And genuinely have like fifty 12 year old fighting me tooth and nail while unironically clearly exposing their colourism.

“They’re not racist! The colour palettes just look more appealing that way on a human!”

Congrats kiddo! The idea that dark colours look “less appealing” as someone’s skintone… Is like the textbook definition of colourism!

You need to unpack that bias and discard it! Immediately!