A few weeks ago, I wrote a huge diatribe about how much My Little Pony: Friendship is Magical undermines the causes of feminism and anti-racism etc etc. I made a point about how MLP encouraged girls to follow “faith” rather than, you know, using common sense, reason, or problem-solving.
Well, I have to scale back my MLP ire-ometer from an 8 to a 6 or so, because I’ve since discovered that the whole “blind faith is great” trope is pretty common in kid’s shows. There’s an even an episode of my beloved Spongebob in which Spongebob and Patrick are rewarded for believing in a magical conch and Squidward is punished for doing things like finding shelter and creating a fire.
So MLP gets demoted (or upgraded) from “strenuously disappointing” to “equally as sucky as everything else.” My kids recently discovered JEM, which is basically a cartoon soap opera with occasional music videos thrown in, so these days? I’m kind of missing Ponyville.
