Cutie Marks

On why My Little Pony remains a delightful and valuable media object/ a eulogy for the classical internet

Okay so, first off, some necessary preamble. I’m going to assume that the internet has its own social environment and set of moral and behavioural codes. I won’t argue this at length because I think it’s fairly obvious given that the internet cannot exactly simulate real life, and therefore cannot exactly mirror its organising social principles. Right? Okay. Also, a lot of this is based on my understanding of internet culture so if you don’t like the sound of that sorry you hate deinstitutionalised pontification and are racist I guess. I’m also not going to focus on solutions; this essay is going to be about diagnosing temperatures and lamenting the moment. I have not, unfortunately, been socially emboldened to think that I can affect structural change of any kind, so I will never subject you to any tone of authority. But maybe if you, dear reader, sufficiently validate my intellectual refuse, I could one day instrumentalise my malaise into the production of some theoretical framework for surviving the wasteland as a bimbo zombie with a penchant for the baroque, my mind cracked open to reveal a baby pink spillage of potentially usefully synthesised meta simulacra.

So anyway, I’d been thinking a lot about Princess Cadance’s more discernible black eyeliner, that rims the span of her eyes, and seems especially stark in contrast to Twilight Sparkle’s thinly outlined eyes, alongside whom Cadance is often rendered. I came to notice soon after that all of the princess characters in Equestria are animated with a more pronounced black outline on the top and bottom of their eyes. Nonetheless, I think it’s interesting that Cadance’s royalty (and goodness) is conferred by her higher contrast design, angelic outline and even more technicolor animation. Whereas most manes in Equestria are comprised of two or three colours, pink and yellow for Fluttershy for example, Cadance’s comprises of several, along with a discordantly coloured blue heart shaped crystal as her cutie mark. It is for these reasons that I, somewhat speciously, think Princess Cadance is ambiguously ethnically coded, or at the very least, much less speciously, coded as other. I have considered this at length because Princess Cadance is my second favourite character in the MLP universe, with Rarity having secured the top spot early on. Anyway, vitally, despite her otherness and elevated hierarchical position in the monarchic Equestria, Princess Cadance does not interrupt its harmonious collectivism. She, despite being other, in status and chromatic rendering, works to maintain the wellbeing of the collective. In one specific episode, when Twilight Sparkle asks why Princess Cadance has decided to pony-sit her despite her elevated status, Princess Cadance insists that she does not perceive herself as socially superior. In the show, this fully integrated harmonious impulse is embedded seamlessly into the moral machinery of the collective. Although admittedly, since Equestria operates with a closed fictional ethics, instances in which more philosophically complicated circumstances could arise, which could strain Equestria’s stance on morality, are unlikely. But prototypically it’s useful okay. And it happens to remind me of another little digital realm.

I grew up on a blue website. A very specific shade of blue. Almost navy, a little grey toned. Matte blue against an infinite scroll function. Not blue like an ocean. Blue like a website. The users who made themselves visible were quite resolutely scrawled into the margins of the notebook that was 2010s society. Transgender hijabis and genderfluid, demisexual fairykin, sex workers, anarchists and fetishists, and hordes of the clinically lonely and ambiguously mentally ill. A lot of people who couldn’t come out of the closet; who carved cherry pie lattices into their thighs; who sought same sex partners who lived on different continents. This website had a very specific politics. And a very specific conception of morality. It was, if truly distilled, much like the land of Equestria in MLP, based on friendship, community and understanding. If you were averse to unconventional hair colours, you were fundamentally incompatible with the vast majority of Tumblr, and that is how it offered respite to people who were, in a lot of ways, pushed to the edges of society. NB. Admittedly, some people may have placed themselves there but I have come to understand that there is almost always a good reason.

Now whether Tumblr actually embodied the sort of collectivism I perceived, I can’t be sure. But generally, I would argue, yes. Because it allowed varying subcultures to co-exist on one platform, and to exist relationally, and to reinforce each other by offering a fixed general ethos which was broadly: find people who like what you like, which is the basis of most friendship. The reblog function made blog curation an essentially communal activity. That’s what I think made Tumblr proto-Equestria. That being said, I know that Tumblr wasn’t a perfectly functioning imagined community. There were micro-political issues that were constantly being hotly debated on the site from 2012-2015. But they very rarely ventured far from Tumblr’s basic ethos and baseline politics, which were pretty much consistently progressive.

(Also side note, a lot of people think Tumblr tanked after the porn ban, which definitely contributed to its death I will concur, but it was mostly because Tumblr seriously resisted monetisation in a weird constitutive way. I also think one of the major issues was that Tumblr, despite hosting many an ideological mini war, could absorb the shock whilst retaining its platform identity, which is basically unheard of on modern major media platforms, which don’t tend to have an ethos at all separate from commerce and don’t really let dissent meaningfully exist anymore but that’s a slightly different topic.)

Alongside the colour palettes of various ponies, I was thinking about the way in which Tumblr constituted an early model of the Internet which used an understanding of one another as its main stabilising axis. Our early understanding of the internet was one rooted in learning, intermixture (of both theory and identity) and a kind of productive collectivism. These elements stabilised into a certain contemporary digital reality. The internet still largely operates according to the assumption of this collectivism, although ideologically, we’ve strayed considerably. As we transitioned from very late stage capitalism into what is now often referred to as a kind of techno-feudalist system, the seeming plasticity of early internet spaces has now been pretty resolutely invaded by capital. It is not so much that the basic impulses of the internet user have changed; they are still very much rooted in a desire for connection, community and personal identity reinforcement. But that capital has become a fixed intermediary in the online pursuit of these sensations. The ‘pure internet’ (I made that up, sorry about that), as in spaces where these sensations can be freely accessed, are not obsolete, I know, but they’re just too hard to find.

I also feel like this became aesthetically palpable in the colourlessness of the 2020s, or more specifically, the slow draining of it. From the sunflower yellows of the instagram art hoe, to the canonical blue haired leftists, to the lilac lipstick donning pastel goths and the checkerboard posting soft grunge adherents. Heck, even the nymphettes had their cherry reds and Lolita inspired eyelet whites. When brands imposed their veneer over the free internet, it was necessarily beige (briefly washed out millennial pink, now pearl grey/ redundant retina-burning tiktok technicolour that’s net effect is non colour) because beige could operate as the ultimate compressor for basically every type of femininity. At the time, this seemed like the best possible strategy for mapping the new digital landscape. Brands sought to carve out neutral aesthetics, and when they became the mediator between visible internet user and participatory internet user, the beige proliferated. And of course, as the general politics of the internet neutralised from the broad chromatic spectrum of 2010s woke into brand friendly obfuscation, colour palettes followed. Now, I’m not asserting that this is still the case. It was a trend, and it changed and will change. But even if surface trends change, the precepts of the pure internet seem to remain unrecoverable. The current internet is a bazaar and all the people merely vendors, which sucks, because the internet used to be fun.

To conclude, O Pony! My Pony!