#heartbutt

With this in mind... the first two EQG movies are surprisingly decent. The second being the far better of the two with the exception of Trixie repeating her stupid strip club song over and over.

The third movie is garbage other than its songs and the fourth is meh. I despise "Sci-Twi". She has zero of prime Twilight's charm; they didn't expressly address or play on the analogue to prime Twilight having the least connection to the other girls out of the six so we get only the drawbacks of that lack of connection; and Sunset covers all of her contributions to the show from being the leader to having the most impressive powers to formerly being a monster. Sci-Twi is a boring nothing-character there for creeps to drool over a shy nerd girl. Sci-Twi is completely pointless.

Beyond the movies, I saw I guess a couple of the specials and that's about it. So I have no clue what you're talking about with the character shipping. Either that's more apparent in the shorts I didn't watch or the fandom is once again going "Two characters who appeal to my confused understanding of queerness I developed as a coping mechanism for being bullied at school are talking? I can't believe this gratuitous sex is in a children's show!"

EQG is surprisingly good for what it is, but that doesn't mean it's good good. The most obvious problem is how it looks. While the content they designed specifically for Equestria Girls looks okay, existing characters they had to redesign usually look abominable.

The worst casualties are the Princesses.

They kinda tried with Celestia, who has the right eyes (maybe) barely fitting on her face, but the others have completely new eyes (as an awful lot of characters do) and oh yeah Luna's a totally different color.

I mean, some of Luna's toys were also that color since MLP toys often look like bootlegs of themselves...

But also she is now "human", so EQG was bound to irrelevant and racist ideas of "acceptable" human skin color. Big Macintosh couldn't be red, lest the country bumpkin stereotype be mistaken as an indigenous American stereotype, so I presume no one could be too dark either because "NOBODY could be THAT black it MUST be a caricature". This is of course completely ridiculous, but someone pretended to be angry soccer moms and tried to sue Hasbro at least once over bullshit wokery (The Last Roundup), so they were wise not to take such chances.

This original-good / returning-bad rule of thumb applies even to new outfits. EQG Pinkie is kinda gross in her standard outfit, but looks much cuter in the new outfit she gets while working as a waitress - partially because she no longer has giant elephant feet.

(I think they intentionally worked Alice Liddel into the waitress design as a reference to "Pinkie is secretly an ax murderer". See Cupcakes, American McGee's Alice, etc.)

Because it's made for teen girls, EQG stories are incredibly daft and mostly rely on girls being superficial wenches. Literally every single major EQG antagonist except maybe Gloriosa is motivated by ego, jealousy, or otherwise a concern with their public image or vanity. Even Wallflower, who tried to get everybody to forget her, did this because she was embarrassed she was cringe af for real I can't even.

In the comics, someone - I think it's Sunburst - actually writes a college thesis on how Starswirl the Bearded is the Worst Pony and why everything is his fault. One of the reasons is that he recklessly chucked the Sirens (originally from prime Equestria) into a random other dimension, assuming this'd be OK since it had no magic. In the comics Starswirl's abuse of Luna is part of why she became Nightmare Moon and he also accidentally created the changelings.

I don't remember if the Sirens are mentioned in the core show, but other than them, the only EQG character who is ever recognized is Sunset, because she's the only one who ever interacted regularly with the prime Equestrians (being one herself), and because Sunset was already shown in her impossibly adorable pony form in EQG anyway so they didn't need to make new assets for her or have goofy moonfaced "humans" appear in the core show.

Reverie Equestria doesn't incorporate EQG per se because EQG is completely at odds with everything about RevEq and generally incredibly stupid, but the prime Equestrian versions of EQG characters will appear. I know some of them appeared in the comic, usually just in cameo roles, but the RevEq versions won't necessarily match the comic versions.

For instance, here's a sprite for Wallflower Blush if and when she appears in Out of Season.

(Most character sprites don't have the cutie marks put on yet.)

In the comics, Wallflower appears as an earth pony. In RevEq she's a unicorn, because she does the memory-wiping thing herself. Every magic character in RevEq has a signature spell, and Wallflower's is the Oblivion Spell that lets her wipe memories.

And yes, in RevEq, applicable characters consistently have bushwooly hair covering their faces when seen from the right. This is a half-joke about how all MLP characters are designed to look good from the left, since that's how they're put in the toy boxes, and some of them like the Princesses clearly have the entire right side of their face blocked off. It also lets characters like Fluttershy or Wallflower hide their faces from the player's perspective. Maybe I'll have a stealth segment where you can sneak past someone because she can't see to her right.

If you play the very early, not-remotely-finished Out of Season right now, you'll notice Rainbow Dash even has different colors of her hair visible left vs. right, whereas the show just flips her over.

Anyway.