Cripping Magic: Composing Madness in My Little Pony

"All the ponies in this town are crazy" 
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

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Due to pressing engagements in the month of August,

including comprehensive exam preparation, conferences, and articles

a lot of writing has been happening but activity on the blog slowed.

I will conclude the month with a look at the processes of writing itself.

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5 Lessons on Mental Illness

Curated on the online visual arts venue, DeviantArt.com, Hannah Truesdell (a.k.a. PrincessDestiny114) created a series of posters using images from the cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP), aimed to fight bullying for a variety of deviant bodies, from queerness to body size to disability. One such poster (pictured below) reading "I'm not insane. Stop bullying," features the manic, party-crazed pony Pinky Pie (DeviantArt).

Under the poster, the artist offers an explanation of the project's personal and social relevance to the crippling effects of perceived mental illness and diagnosis: "See my other posters for the background story on why I started these. Pinkie Pie's poster. I chose the theme of mental illness for this one. This one is an issue particularly close to my heart. I'm bipolar and have had to deal with the stigma of it from the moment I was diagnosed. I have seen friends/roommates visibly step back when I told them this fact. I accept it as part of who I am, but it's still hard. Pinkie Pie is the one everyone likes to make crazy. So here ya go" (DeviantArt.com). Following the trajectory of Disability Studies, the poster takes the discussion of mental illness from the medical sphere and makes it into a social issue.

Immediately the MLP poster got backlash based on the premise that mental illness and disability are personal, not social, problems. Skyp3r101012 is one of the most recent to comment, writing "i always get bullied my hole life i just laugh it off so suck it up...." (DeviantArt). Others such as EccentricBrony, who self-identifies with depression disorder, generalized anxiety, obsessive compulsion, suicidal thoughts and autism, offers the truism that "everything works itself out eventually"  (DeviantArt).  The artist worked to defend her argument throughout the comment section, shedding light on the social dependencies that make blaming the individual generally ineffective and potentially violent. A few viewers comment in support of the poster, acknowledging that "there's not a single person without at least hidden issues defined in the DSM-IV" and calling for solidarity across all those who suffer (EarthPhantomTS,  DeviantArt). Receiving both criticisms and affirmations, the cartoon ponies provoked a surprising amount of critical conversation about mental illness.

One of the most common misconceptions about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (MLP) is that the characters depicted are primarily children concerned with childish problems. It only takes a close reading of the show to reveal that MLP is flush with adults dealing with issues of queer friendships, transgender passing, and dismantling disability in society. This goes to show that childrens' cartoons, children, and their problems are not a distinct category from other social concerns. The writers of MLP critique the wider society as society informs the narratives the show tells.

The show's protagonist, Twilight Sparkle, while a student in the discipline of magic, has a lot more in common with a graduate student (Masters, Ph.D, etc.) than one in college or K-12 education: she is engaged in a prolonged independent research project, she reports to a singular advisor who also functions as a mentor, and finishing her work promises to establish her as an expert in a specialized field. While her adventures are analogous to the school experiences of many younger viewers, MLP is evidently reflecting serious social problems in the academy, not least of them the pressing issue of mental illness.

Issues concerning Disability Studies occur throughout My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. In this examination I focus on "Lesson Zero" from the second season, where Twilight becomes consumed by the pressures of her academic studies sending her into an anxiety driven panic attack that threatens to dismantle her mind, her friendships, and the society around her. In the process I draw on Robert McRuer's "Composing Queerness and Disability: the Corporate University and Alternative Corporealities" from Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability to argue for 5 lessons that MLP elucidates about Mental Illness that draw viewers away from a pathology-based understanding that blames the victims of disabling forces into a critical crip politics that demands improved social investment. Cripping magic in MLP demonstrates that virtually everyone can be affected by socially propelled mental illness and offers specific critiques and alternatives for transforming disability into structural and personal change.

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1. It is Not Nothing

The first thing that "Lesson Zero" makes known to its readers is that mental illness "is not nothing," as Twilight yells at her friends in the middle of a breakdown. The structure of Twilight's independent study and the basis for each episode's lessons is that each week she composes a letter to her advisor reporting the insights that she has gained about friendship. Established in the series reboot pilot, Twilight's project is aimed at mapping the interactions between personal power (magic) and social relations (friendship) towards the thesis inscribed in the show's subtitle: "Friendship is Magic." When a week passes and Twilight finds no lesson to report to her advisor, she turns to her friends in a panic for help. Their refusal to see the pressures her friend is under leads to a personal breakdown and a breakdown in their community.

While the fear of being tardy with an assignment and disappointing her mentor may not be, as Twilight believes, a problem as big as "everything," it does constitute a real and present danger for many academics and their community. Depression and anxiety, McRuer argues, functions as a symptom of capitalism and especially in the education industry where the expectations for constant performance and rigid deadlines maintain "gaps, overlaps, dissonances" between worker's accomplishments and the expectations of the field (McRuer 156). The work one does will never be enough. The finish line will constantly be moved. 

The drive to expand a laborer's output while ever narrowing the material and temporal allowances that the laborer receives is a fundamental character of capitalism's exploitation of workers. Even if Twilight's advisor, Princess Celestia, or her friends do not intend on placing this pressure on Twilight, the system by which the academic is understood and managed is based on the implied demand of a certain kind of productivity. The assertion that Twilight is the intellectual and so she has the intellectual answers ignores the intellectual labor involved in producing these answers every week. One can also glean the experience of the show's writers (many of whom likely experienced the pressures of graduate school) as they strain to develop narratives with appropriate lessons for viewers each week.

By highlighting the pressures and the breakdown of Twilight, the show pulls at the thread of mental disability in society to show that it is in fact not "nothing," and as it starts to unravel suggests that it may possible be tied to "everything." Everyone is virtually a victim of capitalism's pressures and implicated in the execution and exclusion of its mentally ill workers (McRuer 151-152). The ubiquitous nature of capitalism and anxiety can make its violence naturalized so that it may seem impossible to imagine life without "the perpetual panic about students' perceived lack of basic (professional-managerial) communication skills they are supposed to need" (McRuer 153). As a result, the causes of mental illness become invisible and so the victims become marked as hyper visible embodiments of a personalized (as opposed to public) mental disability.

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2.  It doesn't (just) get better

Alienated from her friends and having internalized the problem in her work as located in her body, Twilight begins to spiral as she feels there is no escape from the failure that is her life. Curled up on a park bench, a symbolic fetal position that many workers in and out of academia find themselves occupying, Twilight tries to assure herself that "it's fine, it'll all be fine." This truism is a common tool of many dealing with anxiety or anxious persons. It is a capital device because (1) it identifies the problem in the person rather than the environment, i.e. if only they would realize everything is fine they wouldn't be suffering, (2) it may turn out to be true, and (3) it requires no active changes by anyone involved. Laziness and fear of fault, more than optimism, seems to drive this reductive mantra.

Queer theorists and writers have taken the related idea behind the It Get's Better Campaign that promises youths a future that will be livable for them if only they persist in their current life. Aimed implicitly (sometimes explicitly) at lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth in danger of suicide, queer critiques of the campaign have argued that it isolates the problem at the level of the individual while leaving untouched the social violence that marks and marginalizes the child (Sady Doyle, the Atlantic). It effectively becomes another way of blaming the victim, as it establishes a chain of authority where the world-wise adults correct and subordinate the despairing (supposed ignorant) young person (Alex Eichler, the Wire). What is wrong with you that you don't know that it just get's better? One pathology adds onto the the others.

Twilight is quick to pick up on the false-promises of a "it'll all be fine" culture. "The day isn't over yet," she says rephrasing the drive to wait for the future, "but it will be over soon! My time in Ponyville, my academic studies!" Simply waiting for things to just get better is likely to leave Twilight in her disabled state and leave her pray for the threats aimed at those considered disabled (especially mentally ill) in the academy: the loss of her means of living and the loss of her professional standing (McRuer 148). It is no wonder that she is personally spiraling; the structure of the industry sustains the risks in order to keep laborers continually working to avoid falling down a dangerous slope into the classification of professional (and personal) failure (McRuer 156-158). Things seem directed towards getting worse, not getting better. Left alone and without social change, anyone and everyone may enter into categories of disability. 

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3. It's a matter of time

A common argument for the importance of disability studies is that everyone, if you live long enough, will at some point be considered disabled. It's all a matter of time. The power of the clock to perpetuate disability comes from the regimented time that capitalism inscribes into our bodies. From the formative trajectory from student worker to expert worker, we are trained from a young age to follow the clock. We see Twilight, right in the fit of her panic, showing off her childhood doll, "Smarty-Pants" to several local children. The toy comes, she says, with a "notepad and quill for when you want to pretend she's doing her homework." From a young age we are encouraged to repeat the practice of bringing home work in order to discipline our bodies into the habit of working according to a clock. Tasks are determined to take a certain amount of time for the universal "seamless and univocal" body to accomplish (McRuer 156). This time rarely takes into account the differences in the bodies or environments in which they are performed. The clock, instead of measuring time becomes a tool for enforcing time (McRuer 2-3). When tasks are not accomplished within the dictated period, the failure falls on the worker rather than on the clock.

Twilight's academic anxiety is a matter of time. The pre-determined deadline of one lesson per week was set from the start of her study and each week (each episode) Twilight has been able to accomplish her goals. "The Clock is ticking"  repeats Twilight mimicking the unceasing march of deadlines. When circumstances and flesh get in the way, however, the clock keeps pressing on, causing a conflict between the imagined mechanical worker and the dynamic ebb and flow of real bodies. The ceaseless pace creates a "sense of control" but wears down the body, then the gap between the expected and the real temporality of work (full of stopping, going, and swerving) creates even more tension as failure seems to become a matter of time (McRuer 154-155). Even if Twilight can finish her work this time, the weariness and threat of failure will continue to compound and haunt her like the specter of disability.

As the episode goes on and time passes, the anxiety gets worse and worse, disabling her even more. In the end, the ingrained ideology of failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The same mechanisms that force her to produce, threatens to expel Twilight when her body breaks down. This is the basis of neoliberal capitalism's "raw exploitation" of the worker: use one body until it fails and then replace it with an interchangeable worker (McRuer 2-3). Like the non-human objects on which the industrial theory of labor is based, there is simultaneously an enforced "perpetual panic" and scarcity of employment (creating a certain body of out-of-work desperate workers that threaten to replace members of an industry if ever they begin to slack) as well as an excess of refuse (creating another body of "de-composing" out-of-work disabled workers) (McRuer 154). The weeding out process of academia doesn't begin or end at the graduate level and nor is it limited to students. The whole industry is premised on the idea that nearly anyone, except a protected few who administrate the system, is potentially one failure away from being dismissed (McRuer 152-155). It is this fear that underlays intellectual labor, even as those who bring attention to this anxiety are pathologized and marked for expulsion.

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4. Mental Illness is a Social Problem

When Twilight's advisor arrives and she leaves her friends with a note that the consequences for her failure will likely remove her from her life and work among them, the community finally acknowledges that what they perceived as "nothing" was in fact a real problem and that they are implicated in the violence Twilight is experiencing. Only then, after it appears too late to do anything for Twilight, does Applejack ask "What are we going to do y'all?" At last Rarity declares what Twilight has been telling them throughout the episode, "This is the worst possible thing!" This is a common time-line for many social responses, only after a "personal tragedy" is beyond repair does the wider community work to remember that person and give some measure of political action.

For Twilight it is not too-late for collective identification and action. Just as she is admitting her guilt to her advisor, Twilight's friends come crashing into the room shouting "Wait!" Grabbing the attention of the authority, they collectively beg for the failure to be considered a group and not a personal problem. "We all saw that Twilight was upset," admits Fluttershy. "But we thought what the thing she was worrying about wasn't worth worrying about" adds Rainbow Dash. "So when she ran off all worked up," continues Applejack, "not a single one of us tried to stop her." "As Twilight's good friends," concludes Rarity, "we should have taken her feeling's seriously and been there for her." Taking the responsibility for the escalation of the anxiety, Fluttershy begs, "Please don't take Twilight away from us just because we were too insensitive to help her." Re-narrating the episode, the group of friends challenges both the compulsory demand for solitary productivity (a lack of help), the  insignificance and invisibility of the pressure to succeed (a lack of recognition), and the drive to mark any one body as disabled or failed (a lack of collectivity).

This conclusion and the decision of the advisor that follows is a crip departure from traditional TV narratives that would have ended with the intellectual (nerdy) character realizing that their school work didn't matter that much and they had just been behaving insane; or with the teacher providing a special exception or lesson for the problem student. It is important that not only does My Little Pony veer away from these narratives that blame the person with anxiety but before the problem is "solved" by the authority, the terms of the problem are re-defined from a singular issue to a "collective" issue (McRuer 155). The intellectual labor was not tardy because Twilight is insane or inept, but because when a challenge was posed to group (the lack of a weekly lesson), the group eschewed responsibility to one person and then to disregard the struggles of that person as insignificant. This is not an instance of a group protecting an individual but the group owning up to its own social productions and "collective writing" (McRuer 155).

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5. Failure Can Be Productive

Twilight's attempts at fixing her "personal" problem ultimately fails. Caught in the ruins of her attempts at producing academic labor when circumstances have not allowed for it, Twilight's friends, who had been absent when she asked for their help, show up just in time to witness her downfall. The sun goes down and her advisor shows up in a burst of light, magically fixing the disarray that her student caused, and sternly shouting "Twilight! Meet me in the library." Bowing her head, expecting the worst, Twilight leaves her friends to face the consequences of her failure, "Goodbye girls, I hope you visit. I'll be in magic kindergarden back in Canterlot." As she walks in to face her boss, the anxiety and alienation that Twilight feels reflects the feelings and nightmares of many intellectuals suffering from what gets called "Impostor Syndrome." The problems in the industry become internalized so that the failure becomes identified with the self rather than the impossible demands of the work. The system is expunged from guilt as it expels its failures.

Rather than dismissing Twilight as a professional failure or as mentally ill, her mentor appreciates the pain and pressure that her student has been under and turns the situation into a chance to explore alternative systems that would better allow Twilight live and work without alienation and impossible expectations. When Twilight confesses that she "missed a deadline" and that this must mean that she is "a bad student," Celestia listens compassionately and then begins the work of moving the blame away from the individual. "You are a wonderful student," she assures Twilight, "I don't need to get a letter every week to know that." By calling out the measures for assessment (the letters) as an imperfect and partially arbitrary means for monitoring her student, Celestia is able to put critical distance between the problem of the examination and the problems of the person. 

A failed exam can mean less for the teacher, who knows the student (although not all teachers do), than for the administration looking to get rid of problems that threaten a downturn in their statistics. Despite this "professional-managerial" business model for education that insists on constant, regular, and "seamless and univocal" measurements for the intellectual capacities of students, this often fails to represent what teachers often know about their students: that they are gifted, smart, and diverse workers (McRuer 156-158). Often the test that aims at a universal standard fails to capture the distinct gifts and limitations of a diverse pool of people.

Instead of punishing failure, Twilight's mentor changes the mode of measurement and productivity. "From this day forth" announces Celestia, "I would like all of you [Twilight's whole community] to report to me, your findings on the magic of friendship, when and only when you discover them." With this move, Celestia attends to several problems at once. First, it demonstrates that the drives and rules of the industry are not natural but a social construct that can be changed (McRuer 148). Second, it acknowledges that intellectual work does not succeed or fail in solitude but is a community product (McRuer 155). Third, it places responsibility for improvement on collective rather than on any one individual (McRuer 152-154). Fourth, it reestablishes the timeline for work to reflect lived experiences rather than arbitrarily assigning deadlines based on some mechanical expectation for productivity, "critical thought" rather than "professional-managerial skills" (McRuer 148-149). Fifth, it returns dignity to Twilight by citing her and her suffering as a providing a important social critiques ("the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excess of meaning") that can lead to better communal relations (McRuer 156-159).

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More on Queerness & Transgender 

in My Little Pony

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Passing is Magic: Transgender in My Little Pony

"What if they find out 
just how different I really am?" 
My Little Pony: Equestria Girls

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A Strange New World

Previously, I've examined the Erotics of My Little Pony, demonstrating how this reboot of the classic toy-inspired cartoon series has adapted a variety of non-normative affects and relationships into pony-form in a way that explores queer issues under the nose of potential censors. While this analysis became one of the most read posts on Transliterature and cited on the Huffington Post, there remains a number of aspects that need to be unpacked.

A critical aspect of the show's queer feminism is how it deals with Trans issues. In LGBTQ politics, the "T" continues to be a silent remainder. The structure of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic plays out a problem that Lesbian Feminism has had a hard time expunging: transphobia. Because the world of Ponyville is populated largely by cis-gender women (well, ponies), there is a lot of room to play with same-sex erotics but at the risk of naturalizing and privileging certain gender identities. The pixie-haired Rainbow Dash and the butch cowgirl Applejack help are sites where the topic of "female masculinity" (to borrow a phrase from J. Jack Halberstam) but these characters do not occupy the precarious position of having to transition.

The danger of trans-exclusion in Ponyville is what makes the film My Little Pony: Equestria Girls (2013) remarkable as an engagement with topics of transgender, transition, and alliance. The film opens with the protagonist Twilight Sparkle struggling with her new status as princess (as of the end of Season 3), only to have her crown stolen at her very first "Princess Summit" by her mentor's former apprentice. Chasing after the thieving pony, Sunset Shimmer, a mirror image of Twilight's name and personality, the two disappear through a magic mirror that leads them into "a strange new world." Suddenly in high-school and transformed into a "tall fleshy two legged creature," i.e. a human, Twilight must deal with the Trans issues of passing, access to technologies of change, and alliance forming in order to retrieve her crown and return back to her home and embodiment. While not overtly identifying as transgender (just as she never identifies as queer), in this film Twilight Sparkle occupies the position of a trans body and plays out public anxieties around gender transition through her transformation into a human.

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Twilight Sparkle

Discovering that her body has changed from pony into human form, Twilight panics. How is she supposed to walk on two "skinny" legs? What are these finger "things" where her hooves should be? How does one adjust to wearing "funny clothes," like a skirt? Running into the closest building (a high-school mirroring the social structures and personas of Ponyville) Twilight seeks refuge in a bathroom. No sooner has Twilight caught her breath than her feeling of safety is shattered by a stall door opening to reveal a boy screaming at that a "girl" is in the Men's Bathroom. Many trans people will recognize this fear of being seen as out of place in bathrooms, where privacy and security is replaced by abjection and an interrogation of one's gender.

Playing out the transgender/trans-human trope, as the scene concludes, the image of the bathroom door with the ominous Men's Room sign fades over the humiliated Twilight. For a moment the images blur on top of one another, picturing Twilight caught in the shape of the Man, signaling an analogy between passing as a man (i.e. human) and passing as a man (i.e. masculine gender). For a show that reliably demonstrates a commitment to feminist politics, the spectral positioning of masculinity as the literal sign of humanity may very well have been intentional. In any case, the scene establishes the uneasiness of Twilight's transition in the context of queer gender politics. A critique of the human remains inextricable from the critique of gender models established over a long history of male dominance. 

Furthermore, the danger surrounding Twilight's artificial humanity draws on social discourses around the artificial bodies and gender of trans persons. What will happen if Twilight's transition is discovered? In answering this question, we are bound to draw on the violence we see publicly directed at trans persons: shame on failing to occupy an identity, humiliation and ridicule, bullying, exclusion from public office (including becoming King or Queen of a high-school dance), fear of rejection from friends and potential lovers, and expulsion from bathrooms. In one fashion or another, all of these come to pass when Twilight's failure to sufficiently perform her humanity are made public through cyber bullying, when Sunset Shimmer releases a viral video on You-Tube. Reflecting a common-place scene in many Trans films, Twilight stands in front of a mirror looking at herself and internalizes the alienation that is being directed at her trans body.

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Fluttershy

Given the analogy of the film between transgender and trans-humanity, it fits that the first ally that Twilight makes in this strange new world is Fluttershy. While distinguished as not "that" Fluttershy, the pony from Ponyville, this teen girl is marked by the same name, coloration, butterfly motif, and personality as her pony counter-part. Twilight first encounters this Fluttershy in the halls of the school being harassed by Sunset Shimmer for being weird (read: queer) because of her inordinate affection for "stray animals." Previously, I have noted how this trans-species eroticism marks Fluttershy as breaking from the normative expectations of same-species, opposite sex attraction. Here, the orientation (if not sexuality) opens her up to be Twilight's first ally as a trans human.

Witnessing the verbal attack and physical intimidation of Fluttershy, Twilight jumps to protect her and forces away the bully. Already, Twilight's trans perspective is affecting her actions. First, the feeling of alienation is immediately recognizable and objectionable to her after running from the Men's Bathroom. Even if this person is a stranger, like many queer bodies, they share a common marginalization that prompts mutual defense. Second, transitioning from pony to human has trained Twilight to look for constancy across change as the world "starts to look familiar." Twilight looks different as a human but retains certain aspects (hair, color, cutie-marks) and so she is able to quickly recognize Fluttershy. Even though her bashful friend is a counter-part and not the transformed version of her friend, Twilight is able to recognize the potential for kinship in this stranger.

Likewise, Fluttershy's cross-species orientation allows her to see affection and potential alliance in unfamiliar forms. She recognizes Twilight's care for her and for her "dog" Spike, as reflecting her own love for animals she keeps in her backpack. In very short order, Fluttershy turns from stranger to friend, helping Twilight to navigate the high-school. Assisting her in hiding Spike, getting food, mapping out the political structure of the high-school, Fluttershy gives Twilight a perspective on this new world that matches Twilight's position on the margins. Rather than offering help in a condescending or policing manner, Fluttershy recognizes Twilight as another oppressed subject in the system of violence and directs her accordingly.

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Pinky Pie

Second in the order of allies that Twilight gains in her new body and environment is the hyper-relational, hyper-affective Pinky Pie. Previously I have noted how Pinky Pie's excessive energy reflects an eroticism that is not counter to hetero-normativity but beyond it, overflowing it. Pinky Pie gets "excited" by seemingly everything and everyone. In other words, she opens herself to the same marginalization felt by many bisexual or pansexual people. The stigma against moving from man to woman, woman to tranny, etc. that paints many bi and pan people as sluts, shallow, or fake, and the common demand to "pick one" reflects a distaste in society for people who love "too much." Although this Pinky Pie is not overtly involved in legible sex-acts, her immediate relation to Twilight in this world shares the same radical openness to new objects and the willingness to cross new boundaries, including personal space.

While Fluttershy's friendship required mutual oppression to facilitate becoming friends, Pinky only requires proximity to latch on to her new friend. As in Ponyville, Pinky is particularly interested in Twilight. As ponies, Pinky follows Twilight around and frequently bursts in on her during private moments, suggesting that she has been stalking her. Only knowing her for minutes, Pinky is ready to sign on to help the stranger with whatever she needs. This intimate friendship, plays out how bisexuality and pansexuality compliments transgender, even in their stereotypes. Whereas the trans person is seen as secretive, the bi/pan person hyper-extends. As the trans person is subject to inconstancy in their body, so the bi/pan person is subject to inconstancy in desire. The trans person embodies too much and the bi/pan person desires too much.

This willingness to embrace change, which frequently accompanies a trans person's life time and time again, allows Pinky Pie to be the first person to affirm her alliance with Twilight as she continues to undergo shifts in her identity. When Twilight becomes publicly humiliated by the viral video released of her awkwardness as a human, she temporarily hides in a new outfit and persona. Bursting into the room, however, Pinky immediately recognizes the changes Twilight has undergone and affirms her transition with facial expressions (leaning forward, checking her out up and down, staring with half-closed eyes), and cooing, "I like your new look," reeking of flirtation. 

Later, when Twilight is about to come out to her friends as trans-human, Pinky interrupts her confession and suggests all that Twilight was about to say with oddly specific detail. Has she been stalking Twilight? Are they so complimentary that Pinky knows what she is thinking? Is Pinky so open and receptive that she knows the thoughts and plots going on around her? Perhaps, Pinky Pie's excessively queer desire suggests we embrace all of the above.

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Rainbow Dash and Applejack

While the whole group enacts queer female friendships, Rainbow Dash and Applejack seem to play out the most overt tropes of lesbian relationships, including the potential to lock out other members from their community. In the show, Rainbow Dash and Applejack are often found alone together already in the middle of an untold story that gets interrupted when Twilight and her gang comes knocking. So too in the film, where Applejack enters the drama incidentally on a delivery of apple cider for the school dance. At this chance meeting, Twilight convinces Applejack to help her to become the queen of the dance and thus receive a crown (which turns out to be the one Sunset Shimmer stole). In exchange, Twilight promises to help Applejack with her own problem: her and Rainbow Dash split.

Encouraging Applejack to talk it out with Dash, the group moves to the soccer field where Dash and Applejack speak intimately in the distance while the others speculate on what must be going on from the bleachers. As in the show, we do not hear or know exactly what passes between Applejack and Rainbow Dash. The extent of their relationship as friends (or potentially lovers) is not divulged. The audience is left, like Twilight, to speculate from the outside on the exact nature of what is going on in their relationship. All we know at the ending of the conversation is what Pinky Pie observes, "Hugs! Hugs are always good!" 

In many respects, the closed circuit of the relationship between the sports-obsessed rainbow pony with a pixie cut and the rough and tough southern cowgirl reflects the distance between lesbian feminism and trans politics. At times outright trans-phobic, traditionally the tension has been one of exclusion rather than harassment. Despite any willingness for a trans-alliance, there remains hesitancy for many butch lesbians to identify with trans men or to allow trans women to join in their community. Applejack and Rainbow Dash are open to being friends, but maintain their own distinct lives and critical distance from the group.

Joining the group, Applejack introduces her good friend Dash to the others, describing her as "captain of the softball team," common code language for being a lesbian as the sport where many queer women find community. With this pair on the team, the group jumps into action with a musical montage where they convince the whole school to shift their votes from Sunset Shimmer and ally themselves with Twilight. 

As those who get things done, Rainbow Dash and Applejack offer Twilight some of the best of what the lesbian community has to offer trans persons: established social networks and resources. Rainbow Dash is able to pull strings with her sports teams to lobby for Twilight. Applejack is a successful business with capital that might be mobilized. While the montage cuts over the details of how each of them help, it is evident that things cannot get moving for the new trans student until she gets the butches on her side.

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Spike and Rarity

Of the many enigmas and untold stories that are suggested but not declared in the show and the film, Rarity's relation to the others is consistently one that goes without explanation. The most wealthy and the most passing in heteronormative circles, showing the greatest signs of sexual attraction to men, Rarity seems as though she does not need the others in the same way that they need her. Associated the Element of Charity, Rarity's social status and relative normativity offers her the privilege that affords her the ability to make it on her own. In a more mainstream movie, the audience would expect Rarity to be the snooty rich popular girl that is too good for the band of misfits (at least at the start of the film). 

Yet Rarity, in the film, as in the show, jumps at the chance to help the others. She appears when Twilight is most in need as the viral video is released, offering her momentary safe haven when the hallways brim with people laughing at her, then without stopping to explain gives Twilight a change of clothes and a new identity. Rarity continues to give to the queer group and to her trans friend without any specific reciprocity, because it is the right thing to do. She offers the costumes that the group wears to convince the school to vote for Twilight. She makes the dresses that her friends wear to the dance; many different dresses in fact as each girl has many complaints and adjustments they want rectified. She even offers a box full of her own riches so that the girls could all have pretty jewelry to wear.

In this way, Rarity stands in the place of cis-gender straight feminists who reach out to their queer and trans sisters. Afforded the financial and social benefits that come with a longer history of privilege, Rarity is indeed a "unicorn:" the best non-explicitly queer friend that a group of queers might want. Her willingness to admit her social status and to use it, even divest it, for the sake of others shows that Rarity is a powerful model for feminists allies to LGBT politics. Rarity gives herself to her friends, joins with them, and offers what she can without lording it over her friends. She could live in a world without them, but that is a world that she does not want.

In a queer move of her own, Rarity possesses an explained intimacy with the film's purse dog, Spike. As the shows only regularly speaking male, he inordinately desires the hetero-like Rarity. This eroticism continues even though there is an evident gap in their age and species, which as the film demonstrates, reflects a gap in gender as well. What is remarkable is Rarity's willingness to feed Spike's desire for affection. In the film, she calls him "adorable" at first meeting, locking eyes with her as their faces come within kissing distance. At the conclusion of the film, Spike is feeling a bit left out of the celebration of female-friendship and Rarity picks him up, telling him how much she cares about him. Spike melts at Rarity's touch with an orgasmic "Oh, yeah!" Again, this moment is opened up without explanation. In this sense, Rarity practices the act of queer friendship, allowing for intimacy without the need to pin down or police relations or identities. Rarity is on board for whatever the future offers the ever changing world of her queer and trans community.

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Elements of Harmony

The conclusion of the film is (not surprisingly) the least queer thing about it. It tries to tie up loose ends rather than leave things open to possibilities. Yet despite its desire for closure, that works towards homogenizing politics where we "put our differences aside" rather than attend to the lasting critique of social inequalities and violences that these differences suggest.

After a campaign song and dance number, the school won over by the message: "we may seem different as the night from the day but look a little deeper and you will see that I'm just like you and you are just like me." If nothing else, we can all rally behind school spirit (here a stand in for the government/nation). This reflects the argument that we are all "humans" so that transgender rights are human rights. This however closes down the conversation about cross-species identification or community across differences that does not try to homogenize or cover over those differences. 

However the film opens up room for radical difference, noting through music that "things are only starting to get better," it concludes with the platitude that "things are only gonna get better" without the need for any radical changes to the status quo. Twilight Sparkle's success at becoming the princess of the dance and receiving back her crown sparks a final battle between herself and Sunset Shimmer. Stealing the crown, again, Sunset turns into a winged demon and transforms her friends into hell-spawn. What began as a complicated series of social politics is suddenly reduced to a flat and dualism between good and bad that can only be settled through violence, or else magic. 

Using the crown, Twilight calls upon the Elements of Harmony (and "the magic of friendship... the only magic that can truly unite us all"). By coming together, the team emits a beam of rainbow light that spreads throughout the community and hitting Sunset destroys her power. Using the LGBTQ rainbow, bringing together many different colors, the trans outcast is saved by the force of unification and integration. The film thus ends as one of its songs promises "it's alright... we will come together in the end."

Whether or not one can buy into the inevitability of progress, even cynics, radical queers, and trans feminists can appreciate an air of optimism. The show is targeted to children, after all is said and done. That means, for instance, that there is a strong push from producers and distributors of children's media to conclude with hope and bite-sized lessons. Just as putting trans community in the seemingly benign context of ponies allows for more complex visions of gender and sexuality to be presented, so too can a ridiculously simple (however out-of-place) ending provide a glossy frame to a potentially counter-cultural drama. It is part of My Little Pony's magic formula: a spoon full of sugar and cutie-marks helps the queer politics go down.

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