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i'm too tired to think of a title
Apr. 4th, 2014 03:46 amSo even though no one reads this blog as it's really just a personal blog for me to vent about meaningless things in the grand scheme of things, one thought likes to pop up in my head all the time. What if this blog did have many readers!? Instead of saying anything I wanted I had to be careful of potentially controversial opinions! Then I wondered if there were topics people would be tired of if I had an audience here, and I already know. People would tell me to shut up about Negima because holy crap, I can continue ranting on it forever. It really is less about analysing and me just spewing out senseless anger at how the ending was handled.
Filli Vanilli is starting to go down that path as well. But lately I've realized while the episode itself was alright (the Ponytones song is super catchy and Fluttershy/guy singing/Big Mac with a larger role is super cool, among some minor grievances I had with the episode) only like two minutes of the episode consisted of that damnable beast that considered itself Pinkie Pie! And suddenly my rage flares out and I wish to decimate and assault this episode with hateful word missiles and nukes! Oh look, I did it again.
It's just...no matter how good or decent the episode was, if it fucks up my favourite character I simply cannot overlook it. Others might be able to but I can't, really I can't. Of course that episode leads me into a huge rant about Pinkie Pie herself as you may have seen in an earlier post. Then my ideas begin being rehashed because I've pretty much touched upon all her episodes multiple times in multiple ways! Why am I fine with The Last Roundup but have a problem with A Friend In Deed? That episode had a great aesop and an amazing song, but how it led up to the aesop was dumb, but at the same time the comedic value was off-the-charts! Then Pinkie ends up having rather divisive episodes and if it weren't for season four's amazing Pinkie episodes I'd be sitting here complaining even further about all this!
I mean Pinkie's episodes are usually good, but a lot of the times either Pinkie is off or her friends are. MMMMystery on the Friendship Express was both! Oh, it is very admirable that Pinkie never suspects her friends at first because they are her friends! But her friends did eat the cake and tried to get away with it...why? Because they suck that's why. No self-control, no admitting to their crimes until they're caught, no guilt. I can see why Pinkie would be so angry but to pounce and attack them, perhaps over-the-top reactions are in-character for our prancing pink pony, but whenever I see her cause physical pain to Rainbow Dash I cringe. The poor mare, what did she deserve to have her hair pulled? Okay sure she bit off a part of the cake, but for Pinkie to assume she had pink hair hidden away on her head made her very very stupid.
So basically everyone was dumb. Unless you're Twilight. Twilight is always right! Until she isn't. But that usually isn't too often. Then you go "well it's a kids show, so this type of aesop is necessary for the kids" and then I go "but these ponies are adults! It'd make more sense for a CMC episode to have this type of moral!" Even then Scootaloo probably has more self-restraint than her fellow pegasi and Rarity. Maybe such a moral would work better if the execution of such an episode wasn't so juvenile. On the other hand Scootaloo has such excellent episodes like Sleepless in Ponyville and Flight to the Finish, so if a little filly has better, more mature episodes than you something is wrong. Again AND luckily, Pinkie has the power of amazing showtunes (A Friend in Deed), popular guest-stars (Pinkie Pride) and infamy itself (Party of One) to chug her characterization along.
Fuck, I'm doing it AGAIN. Goddamnit. Well, to fix this problem let's talk about a topic I HAVE done so before, but not to death yet. That's right, the horse lives on!
More Reasons why Weekenders is superior to Recess
Why am I still talking about this? I dunno.
But Recess was the one that got the movie. Recess got the better timeslot in comparison to Weekenders. Recess.
Recess is fifteen fucking minutes. Lunch was way more preferable because you had like half-an-hour to do anything. Sure it takes up some time eating, but you're still hanging out with friends and doing no work at the same time. Plus who doesn't like eating!? I LOVE EATING! Food is great! Recess is fifteen minutes of attempting the jungle gym or the monkey bars and skinning your knee in the process. I still remember that fateful day I went to the nurse's office. Lunch? I'D BE EATING FOOD, ENJOYING MY NUTELLA SANDWICH instead of injuring my poreclain kneecaps!
Recess? Pft. I recall crying under the oversized rather dangerous slide after hitting my head. I recall the teachers segregating the big kids from the small kids, and basically this area of the schoolgrounds was where the older kids were allowed to go, but no little kids could come. THE ADULTS did this. It wasn't some hangout only the super awesome children could be at simply because the super awesome children were always there and denying entrance to anyone beneath them, themselves, the adults did it!
So there's this Disney show on TV glorifying all that is recess. The playround monitor was this evil old woman who hated children. Our main characters were all these kids representing each stereotype. You have our hero, wearing his hat backwards because he's the super cool rebellious leader. His almost as equally awesome jock friend and their other friends the nerd, the tomboy, the dweeb, and the sensitive poet guy. I liked sensitive poet guy. He was the only decent character.
But even if the main characters had some sort of depth, the side characters were all cardboard-cutout caricatures. There's the upside-down girl on the bars. Every recess she is always there, being upside-down. Then you have the diggers with actual shovels and hard-hats. Now unless they were constantly playing in the sandbox like toddlers there was no reason for digging people to actually exist. If I brought a shovel to my elementary school and started digging holes like nobody's business I'd be dragged to the principal's office faster than I can unearth a shovel of dirt! Then you had an actual king and your stereotypical asshole prep girls.
These stereotypical asshole prep girls were so similar and had no distinction whatsoever that they all shared the same name. This is probably what infuriated me the most about this show because I ALSO share this name. Not only do I despise my name because of how common it is, a popular kids show spells out how completely common it really is and then assigns the name to a bunch of complete douchebags! Then, to drive the point further the tomboy girl secretly also shares the name but hates it so much she uses her last name!
What does that teach the impressionable children, Disney!? MY NAME IS EVIL!!!
And it is this show that gets the movie, this show that gets the better timeslot over the intelligent show, the Weekenders.
And I know why the Weekenders wasn't as successful despite its clever and witty writing. The character design isn't one to be fancied about. Everyone has big large weirdly shaped heads and their eyes are tiny and far apart. They even lampshade it multiple times in the show itself. It's too bad they couldn't have perfect facial and head proportions so they'd look like absolutely everyone else like that one movie Disney released recently about some snow queen princess person and her sister or whatever. The adults in this show weren't useless at all and the children often confided in them for advice.
But that is very uncool to kids. TALKING TO ADULTS!? Why would we do that!? Instead the kids should always be the ones who solve the problems themselves and adults are actually useless as hell and somehow function in society despite all that! Kids should become horribly rebellious because not listening to authority is the coolest thing to do! In reference to the caricatures of Recess, a particular (and very good episode) brings this up. Tish, the resident smart girl gets a B. Now usually if some really smart kid ends up getting a lower-than-average grade, they usually freak out when in reality there is no reason to really freak out. It's okay to get a B. It's a B! That's still above average! And it only happened once! However Tish didn't care, but EVERYONE else cared because they were like "IF YOU GET A B, You can't be the BRAIN! You have to be some other stereotype!!" And then they try getting her to adopt some other personality and character.
The aesop? People are three-dimensional and cannot be defined by one aspect of their selves! THIS IS GOOD! The main character isn't some super-cool rebellious leader kid! He's paranoid, neurotic, sarcastic, intelligent and hilarious! I love Tino and wish more main characters in kids media were like him. All these male characters these days have to be badass and perfect and super hot-blooded and stupid or dumb or something else stereotypical. Also all of their names are pretty uncommon so I don't run into that horrific problem Recess had. Plus they all had a great amount of diversity. Only one of them celebrates Christmas! You have ambiguious Eastern European heritage and a fucking pagan! Like holy crap!
And you know maybe a reason I liked this show so much was because it didn't deal with school at all. Oh sure there are a few plots that might bring up or directly deal with school projects or what have you, but it just deals with their freetime which is A LOT LONGER than fifteen minutes, during the weekend! The kids sense of entertainment is playing pool and games as the arcade, or sampling foreign food at the museum. This is the same stuff I would find rather fun to do because I played pool a lot as a kid and enjoyed video games. Sampling food and going to museums (assuming I am interested in the exhibits) is also something I am not privy to doing. The kids were also very normal in social status. They ran into bullying occasionally but they weren't on the bottom of the social ladder or anything; they were usually just left alone. It's not like their portrayal of the "cool kids" was particularly impressive. (usually there are more than two cool kids and that one episode where one was struck down, usually there isn't a loner cool kid...I'm just saying)
Though I did like how they portrayed the "popular" kids, where the one girl they interacted with was a complete douchebag, but the episode implied she was really the only douchebag of her clique. "They didn't get me a present for Flag Day!" Well of course they didn't you ungrateful bitch, it's just Flag Day. Her friends seemed very down-to-earth and normal from what we were shown of them even though they had like zero lines. What does this mean? That just because people are popular doesn't mean they must be complete utter assholes.
But not only did they not have to deal with stereotypical school/high-school problems, the show really focused a lot on friendship...like literally every episode. It wasn't the whole lot of them trying to overcome the evil adults or fight against some horrible bully, or defeat a tyrannical teacher, no the kids were trying to deal with their own issues within the group. Sometimes there were other plots at play, like say the career aptitude test episode or something like that, but a lot of it was friendship. The standard jealousy episode, or the two having a fight, or Jennifer Love Hewitt appearing out of nowhere. It was great!
I think the characters too, were fully fleshed out and very believable. One episode Tish was speaking like an old TV's detective because she had marathoned the show the night before or something. THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE DO! Or at least nerds do! No show portrays nerds properly at all! They just go "ha ha ha he said something smart or something specific to some really obscure hobby so we laugh!" (I'm looking at you Big Bang Theory! D<) The joke isn't Tish loves detective cop movies or whatever and it's a big part of a character, it was just written in for an episode because they could. Because people do that. They might, and it would be a one time thing, do something for that day because they were influenced by something. Like how we all talk like pirates on Talk Like a Pirate Day because it's a day about pirates. YA DIG!?
I'm sorry. The Weekenders is just so underrated in comparison to a show that really peeved me off. I heard the teacher character in Recess was really hilariously progresive though. (Like she was passing out history textbooks, but remarked that history is written by winners, so minorities get very little representation and the textbooks are likely inaccurate in some fashion or another in the process) Such a remark would fly over all the children's heads. So inevitably something about Recess must be smart or interesting, but all the things I pointed out pissed me off too much to really find the show all that entertaining.
Now both these shows no longer air. In the context of modern children's shows, I really only know of MLP. I know there are plenty of wonderful kids show existing today like Adventure Time and Gravity Falls, but I think one reason (besides the cute ponies themselves) that draws me so much to MLP is in its title "Friendship is Magic". No kids show since Weekenders has really touched upon friendship all that much that I have watched anyway. So whenever MLP touches upon friendship as a theme it is extra special to me. I don't mean in episode one and two where friendship is a rainbow beam of death that can reform or turn ponies to stone, but episodes that deal with the issue in a realistic context. Ticket Master is a largely forgettable episode; hell, I usually forget it, but runs with the age-old formula of not having enough tickets to invite all your friends, so you have to choose a few out of your group and suddenly all your friends do favours for you so they can be chosen to go to wherever it is you have tickets to.
The Weekenders also had this concept. A large reason I cared little for the episode in MLP was because it reminded me very much of that one episode in The Weekenders. In hindsight I think how both shows handled that conflict had good and bad points. Tino got so frustrated by his friends and people outside of his group giving favours he just flung the tickets at them instead and didn't take any for himself. But his friends were like "oh shit we're being inconsiderable pricks" and bring the tickets back to him. I especially liked how Tino ended up actually choosing, just by seeing who had a poster of the band of the concert they were going to. Instead of choosing someone because "hurr I like you better than my other friends" he had a pretty smart of way of deciding.
What I liked about the episode in MLP? Well, it was the start of season one's prevailing arc and is still, even if the keys in season four or the Equestria Games episodes have yet to be concluded, the best prevailing arc they'e done. So they couldn't simply just bring one or two ponies, all of them had to go for a few other episodes to even work. In the Weekenders, the concert was wrapped up in its own episode. I suppose this gives MLP the excuse so that they did all get to go, but I think that all whole is a cop out.
Tino ends up taking all his friends to the concert because his tickets were passes and not tickets, so it was all a misunderstanding. Twilight and co. went because the hostess of the party is the goddess princess of the land and can do whatever the hell she wants including purposely sending fewer tickets than needed to force a friendship lesson on Twilight--er I mean, can allow as many people as Twilight wants to go to the Gala. Either way solving the conflict by allowing everyone to go anyway seems far too optimistic for my liking, but optimistic outcomes are to be expected in children's shows so I'm just nitpicking.
Unfortunately even a show called Friendship is Magic is not always themed around friendship. Let's see, 3 was friendship, 4 was stubbornness, 5 was friendship, 6 was showboating, 7 was fears, 8 was friendship, 9 was racism, 10 was...Pinkie, 11 was organization, 12 was self-identity, 13 was sportsmanship, 14 was shitty clients, 15 was creationism, 16 was confidence, 17 was biting more than you can chew, 18 was self-identity, 19 was underestimation, 20 was secrets/jealousy...well a few of those can also be considered friendship but a majority of the first 20 simply aren't. So...hmmm. Not that the Weekenders touched on friendship all the time either, but I love that theme and always want to see more of it!
Anyway this rant is not in any way properly organized at all, so here's an impromptu MLP song ranking list!
1. Apples to the Core
2. Apples to the Core
3. APPLES TO THE MOTHERFUCKING CORE!
4. Apples to the Core
5. Apples to the Core (reprise)
6. So Many Wonders
7. Smile Smile Smile
8. A True, True Friend
9. This Day Aria
10. What My Cutie Mark is Telling Me
11. Becoming Popular
12. Bats
13. The only good song in Equestria Girls, you know the one
14. Find the Music in You (Ponytones)
15. Any other song Fluttershy sings
16. The rest
ok the music in this show isn't so clear-cut that I can rank them all properly so yeh
..........
97. every other season four song
98. Raise this Barn
99. Generosity
And here are my favourite singers in order!
1. Pinkie Pie
2. Pinkie Pie
3. More Pinkie songs please, I don't care if she already sings most of them
4. Rarity
5. Pinkie Pie
6. Apple Bloom
7. Applejack
8. Rainbow Dash, but it depends on the song (At the Gala RD solo is really good, everything else RD is meh)
9. Fluttershy lol
10. Twilight
Ideally some sort of duet with Pinkie and Rarity, with Apple Bloom on harmonic vocals and then RD getting a tiny solo somewhere. I have no idea what context this song would come about.
Wait one more thing about The Weekenders. I never understood why that show never aired on the weekends and only aired before Recess...like, the weekend is usually anticipated at the end of the week, so its timeslot was very, very nonsensical. I do not understand Disney. I hate you Disney.
Yeah that's it bye. 'been Spotto or something.
