Hi! Since you were disappointed with how MLP g4 turned out by the time it ended (as was I), I was curious if you have any opinions on Equestria Girls? Personally I think it had a ton of potential, as to me Sunset Shimmer is one of the few positive elements that the new writers added to the franchise, but they sacrificed any expansive world building and overall narrative integrity for forced ship pandering, much like the MLP finale did (though in this case with rarijack and sciset and on a much bigger scale), which ofc the fans eat up. I actually think if Sunset was included in the main show, it could’ve let to some interesting and cool plot lines (plus imo she brings the best out of Twilight). I’d like to know what you think! :)
Finally, Summersong has come back to Tumblr.
... to whine on a different account, but it seems this was sitting in my inbox. I have no idea how long it's been there.
Just like old times, it took me a whole day to finish writing this. But anyway it's been a while since I watched this crud so let's see...
Equestria Girls (EQG) was a very obvious cheap cash grab for teen girls. A really successful one, though, since it let Hasbro steal the Disney Princess license from Barbie.
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.
EQG is okay. I didn't expect much and I didn't get much. It has some interesting ideas to transform into better forms for fanfic AUs. Humans suck, pone not munkey.
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I'm supposed to be workin' on a pony game. It's kind of really really late but whatever. One day it'll be good 'n' stuff.
You can play the mega early cruddy version on Itch! It's not done. If you whine about the obviously not done parts I'm gonna laugh at you for being dumb.
Out of Season takes place in Reverie Equestria, so some of the characters are gonna look a little different, and references to past events are gonna be different too.
It's gonna be a lighthearted game. No explicit depictions of sex, no bad words, no blood and death or whatever. It's full of jokes and the characters being endearingly stupid. Some of this will only be endearing and funny to vaguely smart people who can understand how people work, and as you might be aware I don't think the brony fandom is rich in that resource (nor is Tumblr) but we'll see!
It'll have a day/night system with weekly character schedules and, possibly, special schedules for special days.
Eventually it'll have custom tilesets kinda like this:
. . . . .
The biggest obstacle to Out of Season is that I'm using it to develop a custom code library called SolaerMV. Some of the implemented features include:
General fixes and toggles for stupid things RPG Maker MV does by default
Letterboxing (public demo cheats, next published version has it legit)
Automatically changing character "Costumes" based on current Class
Ability to change facial expressions mid-message while reflecting Costume changes
Name window on message box
Ability to define different window skins for different windows
"Sixers" - character sprites that animate thru six frames of animation instead of 1-2-3-2
Future features include:
A Final Fantasy V-inspired class change system
Advanced parameters and status effects including stacks and dormant stacks
Enemies which use SV actor sprites instead of still images
... ???
. . . . . . . . .
The other obstacle is drawing lots and lots of sprites and pixel arts. Such as all the unique buildings in each city.
The playable characters need sprites for about 30 costumes for the overworld, a couple dozen face expressions, and their SV battle sprites. In the current alpha they have a few overworld costumes, only one costume's worth of faces, and no SV battle sprites.
The good news is: it turns out you can make face images as big as you want and MV can work with it, so I don't need to get all pedantic about defining exactly how many faces everyone gets. Rarity and Pinkie already have an extra face expression to themselves with no apparent technical issues.
I need to look thru the character list to do sprites for all the minor characters / BGPs and might need to do new designs since the old BGPs are all coherent characters now. Since the Celestia in the above image is out of date, here's a more recent revision of her sprite:
Truncated version of earlier, deleted journal for brevity and to avoid RevEq spoilers.
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Hello pones!
Reverie Equestria partially relies on me remembering what '''''great''''' ideas I made up back in the S1 / S2 days that I forgot all about partially because they are strongly at odds with the actual show's later developments so I just kinda put them out of mind, and then choosing which to still go with and which I've changed my mind on.
If anyone saw this journal on FIMFiction, that's probably what I'll do with Scootaloo in non-Reverie Equestria work... mostly the funnier stuff, because it would absolutely get in the way of anything too serious. The entire point of making Scootaloo talk like that would be to make her comically unintelligible.
But the idea I had for Scootaloo's family back in S1/S2 is totally different from what happened in the show canon. In Reverie Equestria you might catch some hints of this in her speech or mannerisms before I get around to writing Scootaloo's inevitable requirement to introduce her family to everyone.
Friendship is Magic is over, and we’re heading into G5 soon. Maybe we already did, I don’t know. Point is, In 2020 I want to finish up the basic story of my dumb pretentious AU, Reverie Equestria (#reveq), and throw it out there super quick before Hasbro tells me to stop it.
Reverie Equestria is partially in response to all these people who overthought and failed to understand a show about cartoon ponies to sell toys to six-year-old girls. I basically did exactly the same thing, except I’d like to think I can do it better. I probably can’t, but that’s a never and dreams are where the maybes are found.
It’s also partially in response to the show itself, which forgot what it was about partway through (or perhaps never really knew) and meandered around with no consistent, meaningful lore.
Because of this, Reverie Equestria isn’t a wildly different AU like say, Fallout Equestria. It’s more like retelling the existing pony story differently and hopefully more better.
No matter what happens, this will not “prove anything” about how the show staff “could’ve done a better job”. The studios involved had a lot of limitations I don’t have to worry about such as corporate demands, logistic issues, and budgeting, and I have no intention of making any animation or other properly comparable medium.
Anyway, on this blog, you’re gonna read about:
Information about and progress on Reverie Equestria. It’s really hard to avoid spoiling the parts of the story I’m the most excited about. There will be more of those as I actually put content out.
Rants about why something a pony show / comic / etc. did is really stupid and why I think it was considered acceptable. (Implication: Reverie Equestria will not do it that way.) You will see a lot of this early on until I’ve exhausted the topics thereof.
Rants about an under-appreciated element of pony. (Implication: Reverie Equestria will incorporate or reference it.)
I’ve chosen Tumblr for this because I expect Tumblr to be hostile and childish, which is also what I expect when I criticize something with a rabid casual fandom. It’s just the best place for it, to avoid toxifying my other venues.
Have fun! Don’t bully anybody into suicide! Thanks!
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