So that’s that. As of several days ago, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic aired for the last time.

I finished watching the final episode (The Last Problem) last night, and have since noticed that it cleverly invokes the title of what was to be the final Sherlock Holmes story, The Final Problem (Friendship is Magic has always operated on two different levels – one for the children, and one for the adults, and the latter has always enjoyed meta-commentary). Recall that The Final Problem was not the last Holmes story after all. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought the great detective back as a result of public and publisher demand (and boatloads of money)… and, well, The Last Problem won’t be the last word either, so far as My Little Pony is concerned. There’s the comics, for a start, and, of course, much public demand, and boatloads of money involved. We’ll see what happens.

One thing is for certain: the fanbase is not going anywhere. It will certainly quieten down, and indeed BronyCon wound up earlier this year, but one suspects the fan community, with its prodigious output of art, fanfiction, and other material, will endure at least until My Little Pony discovers its next incarnation. On the other hand, I myself do not self-identify as a Brony, perhaps because of the term’s negative connotations, and I don’t really participate in the fandom, outside sampling some of the more infamous fanfiction. Put it this way – I have (anonymously) written my share of extremely dodgy and disturbing fanfiction, and I don’t even want to touch My Little Pony. I read Cupcakes, and realised immediately that I could never top the stuff others have come up with.

If not a card-carrying, self-identifying, Brony (I don’t own any of the merchandise either), I think I would at least qualify as a sort of Fellow Traveller. I am, after all, an adult man who watches the programme, and enjoys it to the extent of having watched all nine seasons, amounting to over two hundred episodes. It’s all a far cry from the 2015 sceptic, who thought My Little Pony was just a mechanism for selling toys to little girls, and who hesitantly watched a couple of episodes because my flatmates’ children enjoyed them (leaving the living-room when My Little Pony came on involved more effort than I was willing to expend). On the other hand, by the time I started watching, the (silly) online war about Bronies and gender roles had largely simmered down,* and the programme had not yet reached its later seasonal rot. In that sense, 2015 was a decent time to start one’s Pony habit.

So what did I like about Friendship is Magic? In large part its ability to present genuine and sincere idealism, while also presenting non-trivial life lessons to its intended child audience. This non-trivial nature is what appeals to me – these are recognisable situations we have all been in, even as adults, and far from being an exercise in fantastical lotus-eating, a fluffy over-sweet world that exists only as a safety blanket, there is a recognisable commentary on our own social situations. Twilight Sparkle spends the series learning, not from books (which she loves, and never abandons), but from her interactions with other people.

Meanwhile, as an adult, I also get to spot the nuance – there are plenty of gleeful pop-culture references (“What do we do, Twilight?” “Same thing we do every night, Pinkie. Save the world!”), whole-plot allusions to, for example, Murder on the Orient Express, and deeper commentary on both theme and the artistic creative process. One episode has Twilight publish a book on friendship, only for the local ponies to worry about putting their unread signed copies in protective wrapping (as if to say “damn it, guys. We’re trying to discuss the importance and role of friendship, and all you care about is the way the story is packaged”). Another has a character lose his ability to generate jokes because the mundane, mass-market nature of commercialism has destroyed his anarchic spontaneity. And so on. As I have said, Friendship is Magic does lean on the Fourth Wall from time to time, all the more interesting given that this sort of knowing wink is generally associated with cynical world-weary storytelling… of which My Little Pony is the thematic antithesis.

That is not to say the series is perfect – not by a long chalk. There is the occasional misstep into areas best left alone (the episode with the buffalo). There are copious filler episodes, and the occasional predictable cliché. The later seasons are significantly weaker, as the writers start to run out of ideas (Season Eight being a particular nadir). The root problem here is that there are only so many insights into friendship one can make before starting to become hackneyed, and there is a decent case that the series did last a bit too long. On the other hand, Friendship is Magic did wind up before it outstayed its welcome, which is more than can be said for certain other series I could name, and Season Nine did wrap the thing up in a broadly satisfying conclusion. Which is also more than can be said of certain other series I could name…

By curious chance, the run of Friendship is Magic coincides almost exactly with that of Game of Thrones (2011-2019). I cannot recall this coincidence being noted elsewhere, perhaps because one is a children’s cartoon, and the other is a live-action ‘adult’ fantasy, but I think a compare-and-contrast is worthwhile. These two television series, each spanning the length of this soon-to-be-departed decade, and each having a very enthusiastic fanbase, represent two contrasting views of the human condition. One is profoundly idealistic, the other profoundly cynical. Friendship is Magic appeals to the better angels of our nature, even as it struggles to get out from beneath the weight of its own commercial raison d’être. Game of Thrones – no longer to be confused with A Song of Ice and Fire – prefers to present the human experience as a Hobbesian nightmare. Potentially even a pointless Hobbesian nightmare if we continue to ignore the existential threats on our doorstep. Friendship is Magic offers hope, but Game of Thrones (at least until the last season, when it loses the plot) offers a warning.

Now, there is actually a place for both viewpoints in modern popular culture. Humanity, as Terry Pratchett once put it, is the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape, and I have derived pleasure from both series at various points over the years. I was reading George R.R. Martin long before I stumbled across My Little Pony. In comparing the two, however, I cannot help but recall an episode from Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift has his protagonist come to a place populated by the equine Houyhnhnms and the humanoid Yahoos – the former noble and decent, the latter savage and depraved. Gulliver prefers the Houyhnhnms over the Yahoos, even though biology places him closer to the Yahoos. Maybe the legacy of these idealistic cartoon ponies will outlast that of Throne’s cynical humans?

Who knows. But for myself, I currently find the eventual next incarnation of My Little Pony in the 2020s a more interesting prospect than any of the proposed Game of Thrones spin-off series. Yes, such an incarnation carries with it gigantic question-marks, and maybe the series will degrade back into the puerile commercial nonsense of yesteryear – I was initially sceptical of Friendship is Magic for a reason. But for now, I’m willing to give it a shot. Maybe I, along with Swift’s Gulliver, am a Brony after all.

*C.S. Lewis said it best:

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.