Oh Lady Rarity, my damsel in distress
May 1, 2011
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is a treat: a show that takes some effort to appreciate but pays back joy with interest. It's the new generation of the My Little Pony series from the minds behind The Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Well written, carefully animated and beautifully voiced, Friendship is Magic has lots of delightful touches. As I'm unaccustomed to children's television, some of its quirks rub me the wrong way. Characters are unfailingly polite and well-mannered, the stories are generally obvious by the time the intro appears, and the day's moral is always explicitly stated at the end of each episode. But these are trifles. I've never found a tattoo that speaks to me, but I'll be damned if I don't want my own cutie mark.
While it's impossible to dislike any of the ponies, Applejack doesn't get to do much and Rarity too often succumbs to simple vanity. My favorite is the purple unicorn Twilight Sparkle, whose bookishness and lack of friends I can identify with. I'm perplexed by the affection people have for Derpy, the cross-eyed Pegasus pony with no speaking lines and no personality. But then again, Vinyl Scratch was on screen for exactly five seconds and has her own fan club. Must be tiring to wait in line for signatures from the six main characters.
As for me, I'll be in line to see Spike.
My Little Pony features lots of (authentic?) mythical creatures: sea serpents, cockatrices, griffons and manticores. It also has dragons, with one in particular who serves as Twilight Sparkle's assistant. Spike is a baby dragon, no more than two feet tall, and one of the most interesting characters on the show. If the other ponies (as humans) are in their late teens or early twenties, Spike is emotionally about fourteen years old. He hangs around with Twilight, fetching books for her, writing messages, delivering scrolls to Princess Celestia by burning them with his magical breath. He's a little snarky and sarcastic, disapproving of girly things like dresses and dances, and usually there with a reaction face when things get too saccharine. Spike serves as an anchor for some of My Little Pony's male audience, but he's also a fascinating window through which we can observe the eccentricities of the magical land of Equestria. I'm going to ape my betters at Overthinking It and dive into a crazy analysis of My Little Pony, so please secure your eyeballs before they roll straight out of your skull.
I'm a little surprised every time I hear pony-specific terminology. Of course, each episode takes place in a different part of Equestria, whose cities are all horse-related puns (Canterlot, Fillydelphia, Manehattan), but there are little tics now and then that reveal how deep the pony preference runs. You hear this almost immediately in the first episode, as one of Spike's first sentences scoffs at Twilight for asking about "an old pony's tale." Maybe it was intended to be another pun (I'll bet "an old pony's tail" looked better in the script), but I found it striking that he didn't say "an old wives' tale." What about an old dragon's tale? We later meet some adult dragons with remarkably long tails.
Other language changes are strangely exclusionary. "Hooves" replaces "hands" in many expressions, such as "the fate of Equestria is in our hooves" during the episode Dragonshy. Spike wasn't on that particular adventure, but would he have looked at his own little spiky digits in shame? He seems like he would be superior to the earth ponies in most tasks as he doesn't need to use his mouth to grasp objects.
Much more worrisome is the regular usage of "everypony" instead of "everybody." Spike himself uses this word often, but around non-ponies its discriminatory nature is clear. How does Gilda the griffon feel when the instructors at Junior Speedsters Flight Camp ask "everypony" to line up at the starting gate? She's not a pony, but she does have a body. Are they even talking to her? Does Gilda have to wait for someone to call "everygriffon" before she moves out? I laugh every time I see someone on a message board say "everypony," but in the show it's heartbreaking. Did Spike ever feel slighted by the term? It's not quite like the n-word, as "everypony" is used by the majority to refer to itself. To my ear it sounds like the term "voter" in colonial America: a word for white land-owning males that normally encompasses everyone in the room… but not always.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not condemning the show because of some minor word choices that its target audience will never pick up on they're in high school. This is just something my left brain pours over while my right brain is cooing at Fluttershy.
Spike's infatuation with Rarity is the only truly discordant note. Rarity is a fashion designer pony with a light grey coat and intricately coiled purple mane. While she can be egotistical and prissy, she has a compassionate soul and an eye for detail. The instant Spike enters Carousel Boutique and sees Rarity he's smitten and begins fussing over his spines. I laugh every time the two of them are together and Spike makes moon eyes at her (his fantasy rescue during A Dog and Pony Show being a highlight), but thinking about the two of them causes my monocle to fly off.
One issue, obviously, is that he's a dragon and she's a pony. Not to drag miscegenation into this, but what does Spike's ideal scenario with Rarity entail? We learn in A Dog and Pony Show that he wants to kiss her, but is there anything else? There are married couples in My Little Pony (Mr. and Mrs. Cake run the confectionary Sugarcube Corner), the existence of elderly ponies (Applejack's kin Granny Smith and a handful of old timers), and people's parents do exist (well, at least Twilight has a mother and father). I'm guessing rating restrictions more than simple biology forbids the typical fantasy scene where grey and purple pony/dragon hybrids play on a living room floor while an elderly Spike and Rarity look on lovingly.
It's a sign of Spike's elite upbringing that he adores Rarity above all the other ponies. Fluttershy is the fan favorite, possessing a natural beauty, soft feminine voice, and a timidity that incites desire in human males. But having grown up in wealthy Canterlot all his life Spike has a taste for cultured women. Perhaps he has admired the dresses and capes coming from a talented designer in Ponyville and unconsciously makes the connection to Rarity. While she would have to be blind to miss Spike's feelings, Rarity is content to use him as a fashion slave, serving in her shop as a dragon pincushion or spiky gopher.
Aside from a fantasy sequence in The Ticket Master where Rarity imagines herself marrying Princess Celestia's nephew, there are no other references to romantic love in the rest of the show. And given her lust for money and sophistication, I can't imagine Rarity treating poor Spike as a peer. She has to reject him forever.
Don't be down, Spike. You'll find that dragon of your dreams someday. Until then you'll always be Twilight's Number One Assistant.
