No, I haven't disappeared!

There's nothing wrong, either, and I expect to get back to regular updates in the next couple of days. (No, this isn't one of those times when someone says that and then vanishes for months!) I'm just very tired at the moment, and there isn't a lot I have to write about anyway. However, in the nearish future there'll be at least a couple of reviews of new My Little Pony publications, as well as a classic episode review.

How do you spell "nervoucited" anyway, Pinkie?

It's now less than two months until BUCK 2013 is upon us. This is therefore the point at which I run around in small circles, panicking that I haven't done anything at all to prepare for it. (Okay, that's not strictly true... but sometimes it feels that way!) Pinkie's new word is just about spot on for how I feel about the whole thing. This will be my first full-scale con of any description, so it's jumping in at the deep end a bit. I intend to have a lot of fun, however, since otherwise Pinkie might be upset. And you don't want to make Pinkie upset...

S2 cast poster in the UK monthly mag!

So, does this mean that Apple Bloom's destiny is to be yet another princess?

Since the IDW comics started appearing, I've almost stopped buying the monthly My Little Pony magazine, which is aimed fairly and squarely at the show's target audience. (Despite said show barely having been shown in the UK...) In all honesty, I have better things to buy with £3.99 or so. But this month there was a reason to buy it: thanks to Chrisgotjar on UKoE, I knew that the centre spread was... well, look at the picture above and you'll see!

This is the Season Two cast poster, devoid of its Hub and Hasbro branding from the original. It doesn't quite contain everypony who appeared in S2 — Rarity's parents aren't there, for example — but it comes close. And the little details make it pretty obvious that it was put together with bronies in mind. On the down side, you do get staples in the middle. But hey, where else can you get this poster in the UK? Unless you import it, just about nowhere!

UK of Equestria reaches 3,000 members!

Becoming as popular as popular can be

Just a little post, since this isn't really a news blog, but I couldn't let this pass without a quick mention. UK of Equestria, a very fine site (despite having me as a member) has just registered its 3,000th participant. Considering this is a country in which MLP:FiM has barely been shown on TV and which Hasbro really doesn't seem terribly interested in developing as a market, I think that's pretty impressive!

Comic review: MLP:FiM Micro-series issue #5: Pinkie Pie

Amy Mebberson's very amusing Cover A

As usually seems to happen with IDW's My Little Pony comics, I was slightly taken aback by the quick release of issue #5 in the Micro-series, featuring Pinkie Pie. There's an all-new team for this one: writing duties are given to Ted Anderson, while the artwork is the responsibility of Ben Bates. Since I couldn't make it to Nostalgia & Comics this time, I spent £2.64 on a digital edition from Comixology. Apologies for the poorer-quality pictures than usual: I couldn't get screenshots to work properly, so resorted to photographing my monitor with a camera! Anyway, spoilers and such beyond the jump...

The Guardian's Stuart Heritage blogs about the EqG trailer

Construction Paper - Lyra Facehoof by MusicalWolfe, Dec 2012. CC by-nc-nd 3.0

Yes, folks: we really have been reduced to this in order to get some actual UK-centric coverage for MLP on this blog. The Guardian's intermittently amusing film/TV/music writer Stuart Heritage has written about Equestria Girls. Not the actual film, mark you: nobody in Britain has (officially, at least) seen that yet. Instead, the movie's release has been marked by Heritage with a blog post about the (second) trailer. And remember, this guy is a professional: he's getting paid for doing this. So it had better be good. Is it?

We-ell... I think "intermittently amusing" would also be a good description of his writing here. Nothing Heritage says is going to come as a shock to those of us who've seen the trailer, and I'll grant that some of his comments are actually quite funny. My favourite is his description of the interdimensional wormhole opened up by the magic mirror: "like a million children have vomited Haribo into a branch of Claire's Accessories, but with more weird photobombing pig things". Others, such as Sunset Shimmer's jaundiced look, are run-of-the-mill.

And does Heritage mention the fandom? Oh yes. Well, sort of. Like almost every other journalist in Britain (unlike, I have to say, some of our American cousins) he either hasn't done much research on the fandom's lack of noticeable screaming demand for EqG, or he has but doesn't care. As it's a humorous blog, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt there. And then take it away again for his exceptionally feeble and unfunny comment about how we "adult male brony fetishists" will love the scene with Twilight on her knees and Spike on her back. Sigh.

As I type this, the comments section beneath Heritage's piece is a mixed bag, with some Pony fans, some outsiders and some who think the whole thing is completely incomprehensible. I can live with that: I'd just prefer not to have The Guardian, of all papers, thinking it's fine and dandy for commenters to openly compare bronies with the likes of Jimmy Savile, as happened below the line of Rebecca Angel's article in the same newspaper last October. As for Heritage's own piece? Not all that offensive, but not all that funny either. Shrug.

Why "really pretty good, considering" won't be enough for Season 4

Despite the practically rock-solid certainty of large swathes of 4chan that the show is in terminal decline, the only sensible answer to that question is: "No idea yet." I think most fans would agree that season 3 of Friendship is Magic was the least impressive yet, but how much of that has to do with Lauren Faust's departure and how much is due to other factors remains to be seen. It's interesting that Hasbro seem to have given the creative team more freedom once Faust had gone, perhaps realising that they'd made a mistake, though I doubt they'd admit it.

Season 4 this winter will be the big test. The team have had a long time to prepare for it, it's a full 26 episodes long and the sense of people finding their feet without Faust will no longer be an excuse. In short, it must be more consistently good than S3 if faith is to be maintained/restored (delete according to preference). Yes, S3 had some wonderful moments, not least "Sleepless in Ponyville" — one of the all-time classic episodes — but it also had some pretty shaky moments. It simply wasn't up to the overall standard of either S1 or S2.

I've only seen a few snippets of Equestria Girls, but it looks as though that may be a potentially terrible movie saved and lifted into the realm of the genuinely good by a tremendously talented creative team. That's not a million miles from what happened with "Magical Mystery Cure", where MA Larson and Daniel Ingram in particular came up with the goods, to the extent that the only really major complaint was the one they couldn't help: that it was very clearly a two-ep story forcibly crushed into 22 minutes.

But that's not going to be good enough when S4 finally arrives. What I want, and need, to see is a season whose episodes are excellent in their own right. Not "really pretty good, considering", but just plain excellent. FiM is a special cartoon, as all of us in this remarkable and (let's be honest) bizarre fandom know. The standards it set in S1 were amazing, and it mustn't aim simply at being a good, solid kids' cartoon. It has to be more than that, and I'm sure Meghan McCarthy knows it. Let's hope she can pull this off.