"watch the pattern take form / children your time is done / if you say it's done together"

[larryhammer]

In lieu of the usual monthly TBD report, which I haven’t pulled together,*** a single anecdatum:

TBD found the pilot of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic so scary they didn’t watch another episode until a week later, and only after parental prescreening confirmed it's much less dark.* The ponies nonetheless immediately became part of pretend play, with scenarios being routinely interrupted by everyone turning into My Little Ponies for a detached adventure, before turning back into whoever they were beforehand. Rainbow Dash is definitely Favorite Pony—right after watching episode 2, I was told TBD wants to be Rainbow Dash for Halloween next year.**


* The pilot is darker than either Frozen or Moana. Surprisingly so.

** We already have this year’s costume, Batgirl.

*** I'll double up next month.

---L.

Subject quote from "Watershed," Vienna Teng.

Comments

[sovay]

The pilot is darker than either Frozen or Moana. Surprisingly so.

How so?

[larryhammer]

Unlike the almost purely physical threats of the movies -- for while there is a larger scale threat in both, it is largely dramatized as a direct threat to the protagonists -- the threat in the MLP:FIM pilot is personal AND existential in a clearly realized way (Equestria and its ruler in danger) AND social (attacks on the bonds of friendship and social order). Moreover, I suspect the way that each threat of the second half had to be overcome by a different pony meant TBD couldn't comfortably fall back on the reassurance that The Hero will save the day.

The following episodes are more gentle, and dramatize in ways familiar from other shows difficulties in navigating friendships. Which is fitting, given the primary viewpoint (Twilight Sparkle) is new to them.

[thistleingrey]

I'll double up next month.

Only if it pleases you!

MLP: FIM struck Reason as quite scary, too, probably for longer than TBD will mind--into early age six--because of Nightmare Moon's imagined potential rather than what/how NM actually shows in the episodes, I think. (Reason is a scaredy-cat, hands down. As a first-grader she still doesn't want to watch Frozen entire, and she's known the story as represented by the Golden Book version intimately for nearly four years now: it's how she learned to read, by memorizing the text and matching it up. Cinematic/video representation is too much sensory stim at once.)

We have a piled-up Halloween costume queue, too. This year has been fixed, but next year has five options already. I guess it's better than having zero child-originated options.

[larryhammer]

TBD is more fearful than they want to believe or admit, but is constantly pushing themselves with scary things -- asking for scary stories, sometimes requesting a precisely calibrated amount of scare. Last evening, they watched parts of Fantasia with a friend who found parts of it (especially the opening Toccata and Fugue and the Rite of Spring dinosaurs) scary, but TBD was mostly complaining about how boring lots of it was, except for the Nutcracker fairies. (Unfortunately, the Nutcracker fairies includes those dreadful orientalized mushrooms -- if we could get the whole number with that part snipped out, we'd have something to watch repeatedly. Frost fairy dancing was happening for a while.)

[thistleingrey]

is constantly pushing themselves with scary things

That'd be one of the key differences in personality between TBD and Reason, yes. :) It's been useful for me to ponder how subjective such things can be; I read and saw all kinds of terrible-for-kids things as a kid and didn't care, but I had distancing scar tissue in place already (by four, if memory serves, and it thickened from there).

Reason watched Inside Out on an airplane only because the sound "wasn't available." That's her one attempt to push herself, so far, because she can identify that leaving off the audio helps her avoid feeling overwhelmed. She reads novelizations or sequential-art versions of films her classmates have seen, which seems a pretty good coping strategy to me. (Watching bits of actual staged Nutcracker ballet on YouTube in pieces is fine. We haven't tried Fantasia.)

[larryhammer]

Reading adaptations sounds like an excellent coping strategy. Good for her.