>>12432
>I think in some cases that is taken too far. Overcompensation for shows talking down to us.
Even so, it's been true since before cartoons existed that children prefer to imitation to obedience, so where one can set an example it can sometimes achieve better results. I think that was more or less Mr Roger's modus operandi. Whether overreaction or not I don't know, the shows I grew up in the 2000s with certainly didn't tell me dos and do-nots the way some of the preachier 80s cartoons did (Captain Planet and the 'Sonic Sez' segments come to mind) - perhaps in response to a perceived 'overstep' in preceding decades.
>Pinkie being Pinkie, versus Pinkie being more than Pinkie? I think you probably could argue you it both ways, tbh.
I'm a bit of a literalist, so as mentioned in Fall Weather Friends, overly slapstick antics bother me. It directly challenges me whenever it arises in the show with the loud question of "what actually happened here that the animation is exaggerating?" - I'm not particularly interested in dismissing something as 'just a show' or 'just fiction' when it's presented with an otherwise internally consistent world that permits for immersion, 'just a show' and 'just fiction' properly belongs to experimental art and I'd invite people who are overly reductive of immersive art in that manner to go watch something realist or experimental instead if me getting invested in a story bothers them so much. That said, a frame I find useful in my admittedly somewhat extreme literalism is the idea of a non-existent 'source text'. So for instance, any inconsistencies in Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit can be chalked to up to a mere mis-translation of the Red Book of Westmarch, the tome that Bilbo and Frodo penned together from which both books supposedly derive, with Tolkien as their translator. This actually serves to explain why in the original edition of The Hobbit, Gollum amicably gifted Bilbo the Ring, in fact IIRC it's directly addressed somewhere in Lord of the Rings as a lie that Bilbo deliberately wrote in his part of the text. In a similar vein, Star Wars is supposedly adapted from the Journal of the Whills, dictated by R2-D2 to the Keeper of the Whills, a um... Microscopic entity that lives in harmony with the midichlorians, or something to that effect? It doesn't fix Star Wars by any means, but it lets me enjoy the Prequels just a little bit more as I can write off certain inconsistencies and leaps in logic as either exaggeration or situations where R2 was absent and thus cannot accurately report on what happened. MLP *possibly* could be said to have this framing device towards the later seasons, where the journal and letters to Celestia are reminisced on, and there's even a flashback with the last episode which might suggest that the show is the recounted memories of the Mane 6. On the one hand, that's overthinking it a lot, but on the other hand, it makes the part of the show where the letters are being written and then the journal considerably more 'accurate' since they have a written record in-universe.
>...and considering this thread is your idea, if you wanted to take the lead and post, whether new years or later, I would welcome in!
I'm perfectly happy to have you make the thread, I don't know what I'd put for the OP for my part. A hiatus might be a good idea, but I'm open to having it posted new year's day, as it would make it a neat clean starting-date for the thread, with season 2 finished ideally by the next new year's. Up to you!