Re: help finding people to discuss something with
@aaron: Hmmm. Actually, I have a lot of them. First off, I was incredibly glad to have the transcripts. While I love the voice acting on the show, I am a lot less thrilled by the sound design. This might be because this is only the third animated show I've ever watched in my life, as I generally avoid cartoons of any kind. But...I'm sorry...that isn't what a Pegasus in flight sounds like! The flight sounds they use for Rainbow Dash don't make me think flight, they make me think dishwasher from the 25th century having an accident. That's the worst example, but I find all of the other sounds equally bad. However, the rest of the show, plus just ignoring the sound design because I don't need to listen carefully to follow along thanks to the transcript, meant it only really bothered me for about half of the first episode and then I mostly got over it.
Second off, I am kind of surprised how much I *do! * love the voice acting. Every single character sounds completely and totally different from the voices I was hearing in my head from fanfic. Being the kind of person I am, I am shocked at how totally fine I am with that. Normally, I get a set idea of how things should be, and cling to it pretty tightly. But the actual MLP voices sound even more like the right voices for those characters than the voices I was imagining for them. So, who ever was in charge of casting has mad skills to make it that satisfying.
Now that I've dealt with the technical stuff, I can move on to the plot. I don't know if you're a Piers Anthony fan or not, but Equestria feels so much like xanth without the sex, and a few less puns, and a lot more ponies, it's astonishing! When I was watching Dragonshy, I could have sworn that exact plot happened in Xanth. But I looked through my _guide to xanth_ and the xanth concordance, and it turns out it didn't. It just felt super xanthian. The starting two-parter episode also felt like something that could have happened in xanth: a young creature is sent out on a quest to do x by the all knowing magician, and along the way meets a group of companions, and discovers the things that were really important all along. At the end, just when everything seems lost, the all-knowing magician tells her that she was meant to discover those things from the start, and all is well. Even the dialogue feels like something Piers Anthony might have written for his child characters. I remember actually saying out loud at the end of part 2: "My God, this is early xanth again." Also, MLP uses similar word gags that don't really affect the plot much, but are funny, and encourage a love of words and language, while building character. Also also, a lot of the animation gags (hearts in people's eyes, seeing stars, etc) are thing s that absolutely can and do happen in xanth. The things that are important in MLP are really similar to the values that are important in Xanth. Xanth and MLP are both interested in clothing only for appearance sake, otherwise being fine with nudity. Xanth even has a lot of equines in it: centaurs, flying centaurs, unicorns, ghost horses, alicorns, etc. They even seem to have similar ideas about exactly what it should mean to be royalty. The reason I am harping on this so much is because the xanth books were the books of my childhood. I grew up reading, re-reading, and otherwise loving the hell out of them. But as I grew up, I got more and more uncomfortable with the side elements of xanth: strange sex, female objectification, etc. Also, as xanth went into its 30th book, the plots got tired, and the characters got warn. I mostly convinced myself that it was because I'm just too old to enjoy new xanth books now, not because Piers A nthony jumped the shark long ago. And then I finally watched My Little Pony. This is almost exactly how it felt, to be 11 years old, and curled up with _Aisle of View_ or _Ogre Ogre_, but distilled into half an hour. And you know what? I'm still not too old. I didn't do all of the awful growing up that I was kind of afraid I had gone and done. Sure, I'm more aware of things now, so I can see the holes that Xanth had that I couldn't see when I was 11. But My Little Pony doesn't have most of those pitfalls. It's just silly little adventure stories, with a lesson at the end, where nothing really horrible ever actually happens. I don't mean that in a demeaning way, at all. I lived for exactly those kind of stories as a teenager. But I lost them somewhere during university, and could never quite reconnect with my favourite characters and stories. But finally, in Friendship is Magic, I 9;ve found them again. And that's what kept me up all night.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=174022#p174022
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