MLP G5 Discussion and Speculation Thread

@Background Pony #6561
I wonder what will happen to her if G5 ends some years from now?
Maybe she could get reformed?

Meh, idk.

I think it’s too soon to ask ourselves if Opaline will get reformed because we don’t know too much about her.

That said, if the writers want her to get reformed, I hope the writers don’t use Cutie Remark as a good reference. Maybe something like the 2017 movie or Crusaders of the Lost Mark, where the characters took their time to develop and reflect on themselves.

👍
Though, time will tell.

I’d say that if the writers want anything close to a proper redemption, they need to look at all the reformations of G4 and say, “lets… NOT do any of that.”

Thing with redemptions is that the characters should have redeemable qualities beforehand. Sob stories aren’t that. Suffering unfairly isn’t that.

If memory serves, people wanted Zuko from The Last Airbender redeemed not (only) because he suffered a lot, but because he was shown to have room to be a good person. This is the guy who risked his life to save his ship’s lookout during a deadly storm as soon as the first season, and in that same episode we discovered he was banished and mutilated in the first place for trying to protect people.

(In sharp contrast with She-Ra’s Catra, since I just finished watching that show… She’s pretty much all sob story and no acting decently ever.)

In G4, any virtue or value the ‘reformed’ characters had only showed up during the redemption episode, or sometimes even only after that. Nightmare Moon, Discord, Diamond Tiara, Sunset, Starlight, Tempest… I can barely remember them ‘petting the dog’ before they switched sides. Tempest was probably more likely to throw her lookout into the storm herself, in fact.

@Roseluck
I always felt like Nightmare Moon’s redemption felt kind of lazy and tacked on. Like they didn’t know what to do with her, so they gave her that ending. And then she did nothing for the whole Season 1.

Part of me wishes they didn’t istantly defeat Nightmare Moon but make her an enemy of Season 1 to develop her character and make her redemption more satisfying.

Look, I don’t think Opaline can be reformed. If she is the same unicorn from G5 comics who wanted a perfect Equestria, she is part of a bigger problem. No every villain can be reformed. You can’t make people change if they don’t want to. Some people forget that. Then again it is too soon to say that she is going to get reformed or not. Now as for Misty, who I think it is that blueish unicorn alongside her, doesn’t look like she wants to be there. She may fall away from Opaline.

@Cosmas-the-Explorer
Yeah, a more long and drawn out gradual threat.

@Dustcan
Wing Surprise Opaline. I think it is those kind of toys that change colors when you put them in cold/hot water.

@Cosmas-the-Explorer
I’ve never checked if this was true, but I remember random posts on the forums mentioning that initially Lauren Faust wanted Friendship is Magic to be less slices of life and more epic adventures, and also that Luna was planned to become a second mentor to Twilight (with Zecora being a third).

If that’s true, I assume Luna would have been a recurrent character even back in season one. The first premiere may have been still in the original mold when it was written, so to speak, hence Nightmare Moon/Luna falling off the face of the earth at the end.

The original vision didn’t come to pass, so instead G4 is in this weird place where villains appear and are defeated in the same episode (until the very last season). If you didn’t watch the premieres and finales, you wouldn’t even know there are threats to Equestria out there. There’s no one looming in the background like Slade in Teen Titans or even Gargamel from the Smurfs.

Opaline appeared in the last scene of Make Your Mark, so I assume she will actually be in the background during the upcoming season. Because there’s Misty to explore as well, if nothing else.

@Background Pony #0BF0
“Everyone _{(exceptions may apply)} can be redeemed!” apparently was G4’s tagline, but I’m not sure it’s G5’s. I feel wondering about Opaline’s redemption has more to do with inertia/memories from the previous generation than with G5 on its own.

I may be wrong though, I don’t follow G5 or its fans much.

@Roseluck
I don’t think “Everyone can be redeemed” should be G5’s tagline. I think it’s more like “everyone can be friends”, which seems to fit with the motivations, context and stakes we’ve seen in A New Generation and Make your Mark.

And about “Everyone can be redeemed” being G4’s tagline… that’s highly debatable. I think G4’s tag was actually “Friendship is Magic”. Another story would be the G4 having too many different hands with too many different ideas and, as a result, not going anywhere. I don’t believe Lauren Faust created the show with “Everyone can be redeemed” as a tagline in mind.

Also an offcalname for it as well

“Make Your Mark: Chapter 2”

@icicle wicicle 1517
Finally something new! And the Shadowy Alicorn’s assistant has a nice design.

@Applepie2021
Yes!

This looks interesting enough for me to see nothing else to avoid any kind of spoilers. I do wonder what the motivations of the alicorn are gonna be.

That said, I’m not a fan of how the earth looks like in the second image. It looks like the floor of a videogame from Xbox 360. But if the story is decent, people won’t care about the flaws of the visual fidelity.

Works for me.

Still wondering how many TYT eps we’re getting.

@Dustcan
70.

Works for me.

Have read the comic #4, it didn’t go as expected, Pipp is more passive than I thought in her online persona so the responses to her report about the discovery of Canterlot and the confrontation with Discord have been “hidden away”, instead she had a “A-HA” experience in the night when she wrote the report. Instead, it becomes a heartwarming story about mistakes, self-bragging and self-discovery to help others, as when Pipp found someone who had also experienced the same thing as her.

And Hitch is a dork when it comes to mares in his life. “Singing, sparkles, and glamour…” he said it! Everyone else from her mother to her sister was supportive in the face of her requests for her to take the important step, although Sunny was not a little shaken by the encounter with Discord. At least it’s now confirmed that Discord can use smartphones - we’re doomed. If Discord had lived in isolation in Canterlot until the magic returned, it could mean that communication technology had arisen before Equestria’s collapse.

The comic is nice, a bit more for the money to be a “pointless” side story. But now on to the discoveries;

When the report about Discord came online, it was obvious that a lot of ponies had been waiting for it, over 100,000 in just five minutes. And it was revealed by Izzy that there are 1.6 million “pippsqueaks” following her online activities. This could be the population size of Zephyr Heights, although it could also mean Bridlewood and Maretime Bay. The movie has revealed that Zephyr Heights is a big city that can hold hundreds of thousands of ponies, but don’t think it’s more than half a million at most. It meant that the Pegasi Empire is a large state that can have approximately 2 million inhabitants.

We still know very little about the unicorn state of which Bridlewood is a part, which seemed to consist of colonies with collective societies, and the earth pony state where Maretime Bay is simply too small or little more than a resort town.

Nice comic. Better than the previous one. In my country there are comics that have a main story and several side stories, I don’t understand why the Americans want separate stories in single issues, it doesn’t look economical from a European perspective. A Disney comic has 48 pages with three to four stories in it.

Opaline sounds like the name of a magical macguffin from an 80’s fantasy movie that the heroes must obtain to defeat the villain. I think the name could’ve been a bit better.

The screencaps from these episodes do look promising, but I’m wary of the fact that it looks like it has the same style as the special; I hope the animation could be better this time. I’m more excited over the Shadowy Alicorn’s assistant (Who’s apparently called Misty from what I’ve been seeing), I want to see more of her cause I love her design.

@Mr.Myoozik
She has ‘cutie who betrays the bad guy’ written all over her.

Interesting images about the upcoming series, which had come along with a number of different revelations about future G5 publications - so the mysterious alicorn is called Opaline, and her student or minion could be Misty. She was sent to Maretime Bay to spy on the Mane 5 and possibly sabotage them, it’s very interesting that my impression of her horn from the time I saw it was not wrong. For the horn design is not the same as on the other unicorns, Izzy has a smooth and pointed horn compared to the horn on Misty which is a bit angular and blunt - and doesn’t seem to radiate magic in the same way. She is definitely not from the same group/tribe as the Bridlewood unicorns. And both she and her “master”, the alicorn, appeared to be wearing multicolored fur in contrast to the other G5 ponies. It could mean that they both have a common origin.

And this origin was a little earlier revealed to lie in “the dark castle” shown on a map intended for children, still inspired by the European guidebooks from the 1960-1980 period with drawings of attractions as buildings on a map. But the G5 team, who haven’t yet got the right color set for the alicorn, keep messing it up, Equestria doesn’t have a south coast so the compass on the map is very wrong. The first map from the movie was correct, because the compass was correct in relation to older G4 maps. If the map had been upgraded with this after the end of the movie, we would have a good logical starting point for comparison with older G4 maps.

Then the G5 team came up with the revelation that the lone tree in the meadows between Bridlewood and Zephyr Heights was the Harmony tree, and an orientation point was established. Until then I was under the belief that the Mane 5 had bypassed the valley en route to Bridlewood, but the information of the G5 team showed that they had gone down into the valley and across the landscape where the two sisters’ castle once stood. Before the movie, it was revealed by the Hasbro that Zephyr Heights was in the same location as Canterlot, and the G5 team has made admissions that they had wanted to show the ruins, but did not have time for the extra work. The IDW took on the responsibility of showing the ruins to the fans, although with the exception of the cover of #2 they have not revealed where Canterlot was in relation to Zephyr Heights.

Unfortunately, the G5 team chose to reuse the childish map Sunny had made, from the movie. The dark castle through the use of the G4 map is located southwest of Maretime Bay. We know from the first map that a place associated with apples and farming is located there, probably the territory of Dodge City/Appleloosa. It could be where the apple clan had settled down after Equestria’s collapse, where it is possibly a neighboring state that has close connections with the state where Maretime Bay is located. However, the new map shows that the dark castle that the illustration shows on the edge of a cliff may be deeper inland from the coast. The G4 maps show that the land south of the Macintosh hills is divided into two landscapes, the Badlands - and the Mysterious South.

A map from the IDW G4 #2 has shown that the landscape beginning with the Appaloosan Mountains contained a number of mysterious locales, hence the nickname “the Mysterious South”. To the southwest after this we find South Equestria with Egyptian culture and to the southeast we find the Badlands with many dangerous monsters there and the jungle lands with Mayan culture. It seems that there were several canyons through the Mysterious South that were used to get from north to south without entering the hinterland.

From a historical perspective after the comics and the shows, it is clear that there were pony settlements in South Equestria long before Equestria came into existence, and that the ponies had come there from the northeast, presumably through the Mysterious South which may have been populated by pony tribes that left there from the old homeland that lay far to the northeast. Middle Equestria was completely deserted, until the three pony tribes were forced there by the great cold. We know that there are isolated pony tribes in the jungle lands and that the ponies in South Equestria, called Anugypt according to the IDW comics, were there several millennia before Equestria arose. It is possible that there were very old pony cultures in the Mysterious South in ancient times, which fell into oblivion after the rise of modern Equestria.

Opaline, if that is the name of the alicorn, may have her own kingdom there in the Mysterious South, possibly accessible by roads that cross the Macintosh hills and the Appaloosan Mountains. The illustration of the dark castle may suggest a mountainous landscape. Opaline is going to be Sunny’s rival as with Trixie and Twilight in G4, and if she has a kingdom and minions - she can challenge an upcoming alicorn by attacking her ideals.

It has never been established where Mistmane’s “Eastern village” is located on the G4 map. But the village is located in a mountainous landscape with a warmer climate than in Ponyville. Mistmane has multicolored fur just like Opaline and Misty.

This could mean that the two villains in G5 are from the same tribe as Mistmane, the horn on Opaline is no different from that found on the “eastern unicorns” who had never been given an explanation of their origin, only that they were not among the three original tribes of the middle Equestria. It is possible that these, like the Kirins, were a colony that had been established far from their home regions. We know that the kirins, who also pretended to have East Asian culture like the eastern unicorns, live in the peak of peril in the savanna lands between the jungle lands and the Bone Dry Desert. The eastern unicorns and the kirins may have had a history in earlier times, and we know that the hippogriffs had Chinese-style ships of the junk type. Which suggests that East Asian culture has a strong influence in the southeastern part of the continent of Equestria.

The ancient Chinese in our world were not much concerned with the sea, as they lived quite deep inland, so it fits well that the eastern unicorns should stay in the Mysterious South where Opaline may have her castle and possibly her kingdom.

@Background Pony #525F
Or maybe descendants of Mistmane?

@Background Pony #525F
my boy discord hitting up pipp’s dms lol

@GoodVibesGorgeous
Huh, nice.