What if G5 isn't coming next after all?

My review of "The Point of No Return" will be up tomorrow. After a busy weekend I was simply too tired to write it up last night. Nothing dramatic!

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We all know that Friendship is Magic will come to an end after Season 9. There may be a little Equestria Girls content thereafter, but I suspect most of us, including me, expect that this won't amount to more than a few shorts and conceivably a special or two. Most of us, including me, are also expecting that the 2021 film already announced by Hasbro will be some sort of an introduction to the new generation, at least an informal prequel to the subsequent G5 TV series.

But... what if it isn't? What if we do stick with G4 for longer? I don't, of course, mean FiM. That's not getting a reprieve. But a very interesting point was made the other day by The Feral Brony. He reminded us all that generation numbers have changed with toy lines, not with shows. The most obvious example of this is My Little Pony Tales. Very different from the earlier My Little Pony 'N Friends cartoon, so much so that many people refer to Tales as G2. But it's not. Tales is still G1.

Could it happen? Could we see history repeating itself with an equivalent of Tales, using a completely different setting but still producing toys that are recognisably of the same generation? After all, the G4 toy lines have made a lot of money for Hasbro. When they specify the designs of pony figures for the next film and then the series, might they decide to keep their look very close to what we have now and keep using the G4 designation? It's an intriguing thought.

There is another possibility, though. G4 is the first time that a generation of My Little Pony has had a cartoon at its core. Previously, the toys were what people talked about most, with the TV series most definitely secondary. No longer; since 2010, while Hasbro still want to sell plastic ponies, they need the exposure the cartoon gives. So I just wonder whether Hasbro might therefore dump their previous convention and call the new series G5 anyway, even if the toys continue to look similar.