Someone needs to search for dups.

someone needs to learn to put spoiler tags

(Fluttershy)” I’m so happy today because is my birthday”.Today Fluttershy was going to apple jack barn.(Fluttershy)” hello is anybody here”.But when Fluttershy here somthing all of her friend shout “surprise!”.Fluttershy was so happy.THE END!

@Mudpuppy  
That’s part of why IMO the comics have surpassed the show, at least as far as the writing goes. They are not being pressured by Hasbro to push merchandise, and have thus far been able to write wbatever they want.
 
I think IDW is doing an EQG oneshot because they are genuinely curious to see if it is a viable comic franchise. I am pretty sure it won’t be, but at least it’s not like Hasbro made them do this as an arc in the main comic or waste a micro series on it. It didn’t even cause a delay in the FiM comics, so it’s not like it’s affecting FiM’s readership particularly.

@Itsthinking  
Yeah, that did surprise me too, and I hope that Goldner meant that. It’s sometimes hard to remember that big companies are run by individuals, although they seem to get a ‘hive mind’ attitude and then the individual’s opinion doesn’t matter. Really the problem with these sorts of things comes from the clash between creative and business, and the business people often have NO idea how to make a good, creative cartoon.
 
So yeah, I guess we are really lucky that Loeche is behind the network.
 
 
@d715  
True…but it seems that for Hasbro it’s more about the ‘ad’ part, and for the Hub it’s more about making a good, quality show that draws viewers in and thus makes money off of ad revenue. MLP is so successful not because it’s just Hasbro’s ‘ad’, but because it had creative people behind it who just wanted to make a good, quality show. Sure, they had to include what is basically product placement, but they are creative enough that they know how to make the best of what they are given. However, I think all creative people work best when they aren’t forced to include too much. That can just ruin the original vision for a show…I’ve heard many people in entertainment say how they’ve seen great shows just butchered because of too much interference.
 
So yeah…Hasbro wants the show to help sell toys, but we’re lucky that they gave the crew so much creative leeway on the show. I just hope they continue to do so, and don’t expect them to take whatever crazy, toy-selling idea they have and make it good (A.K.A. Equestria Girls).

@Mudpuppy  
Basicly Both Hasbro and The Hub want money but know the best way to make money is make a good 22 minute ad so they hire good writers and animators to make said ad
 
and look were it got them? The BEST marketing group males 16-24 got into the show as well as their target demo.

@Mudpuppy  
Thank God that the Hub has some experience behind it. Loeche (sp) is known for her wrangling and ability to handle running an underdog animation network and Vogel is perhaps the most candid higher up I’ve ever seen in any company. It’s just so weird to see a company say “we don’t have to be number one to do well” though.
 
Good on them for being happy on not being number one, because they’re about 200 thousand daily viewers shy of that.

@Itsthinking  
HA! Strange, but true. XP

As long as the Hub and Hasbro continue to fight, it means good things for us.

@Mudpuppy  
True, though I still wonder why they made a EG comic in that case, I think bboifatz was right: they’re testing the waters.
 

 
@Itsthinking  
If that’s how Meghan writes with ‘a LOT of control’, then quite honestly I’m afraid for the quality of season 4. I find it very hard to believe she had control over everything, but her and the crew did have some room to play with the concepts I suppose.

@Masem  
Hasbro is interested in selling toys, and the main demographic that buys pony toys is little girls, so yes, they are probably more interested in the target demo when it comes to the show, and obviously when it comes to EG. However, it seems like the Hub is actually trying to make good series that get good ratings and they’re probably thinking more about profits from ad revenue, rather than the toys so much. Doesn’t really matter to me who they’re ‘catering’ to though. I don’t want them to cater to anyone, I want the crew to have enough breathing room to make a series that they like, which was the main goal from the start (although of course they have to keep in mind that it has to be appropriate for the target demo).
 
I do think that the comics are probably targeted at least a little more on the older audience, as comics usually aren’t targeted at a very young audience (not comics marketed in this way at least), and the semi-dark nature of some of them further points towards that. It may have been IDW approaching Hasbro about making comics, after seeing the success of the fandom, I don’t know.
 
 
@Itsthinking  
You are given guidelines, for example, “characters should be designed with accessories, include a love interest, set movie in highschool - current time”. Does this give you NO room to put your own influence on it, or to try and make it into a good story, or to include little references and whatnot? Of course not, but guidelines like that are restrictive anyways, and even if they didn’t tell her what every character was going to say or look like or what the exact story was going to be, certain elements would have been there anyways, and at the bare-bones level, it would probably have been the same basic storyline.

EqG still had some heavy clear influences from the creative team. Won’t go into why, but I can tell that it was written by McCarthy having a lot of control.
 
Who knows how well the toys will sell, but designs like EqG are en vogue and sell incredibly well.

@Itsthinking  
Ironically, I am not quite as apprehensive towards this as I was towards the movie, because 1) I know who is writing it and 2) it is a prequel, and therefore it will not be “Twiligt Sparkle: The Movie” (which was one aspect of EQG that particulalry infuriates me, along with the constant HURRR I’M A HOERS jokes). However, I still find the character designs hideous, Fleecs being the artist is not going to do them any favors.
 
If the EQG movie gets an apprehensive “ugh” from me, the comic wilk likely be an apathetic “meh.” I am just beyond glad that this did not cause any delays for the FiM comics– part of why I resent EQG is because I know it’s the reason Season 4 is so far away, even though Season 3 was only half length.

@Itsthinking  
Thanks for the links…really appreciate it.
 
I actually saw that video when it came out, and it really doesn’t change my opinion at all. She doesn’t exactly go into much detail, and I think it’s very likely that Hasbro did have certain things that they wanted her to do, or she was told to watch similar things and include certain elements (the ‘boyfriend’ for example). I cannot confirm this obviously, it’s just a guess, but I find it incredibly hard to believe that EG would have turned out the way it did if Meghan had more freedom to do what she wanted with it.
 
That article is interesting…again though, seen it. I hope that the creative team does have more freedom than it seems sometimes, but who knows. They aren’t going to let the crew get away with putting anything in the show, but they have been pretty good about that so far. Hopefully the Hub will be able to break free of Hasbro more in future, because when you mix big business with creative storytelling, you can end up with a big mess, or creative people having to fight for what they want (which pretty much always happens, just in varying degrees). The fact that Hasbro is a toy company just adds to the complexity, as they are always looking for saleability in the series the Hub produces, whereas it seems that the Hub is more concerned about simply making series that people watch.
 
“The real concern is, are they trying to run a business they don’t know how to run,” - see, that there is the worrysome thing. Hasbro doesn’t really know how to run a network I think, they know how to sell toys. So the more the Hub breaks off from them, the better.
 
I think maybe what it does come down to is if the EG merch sells. If it does, Hasbro will push for more. If not, they won’t, and I doubt the Hub will pursue making more of it, considering the mixed (and quite negative) reception it has gotten.
 
 
@bboifatz  
Very true, well said. Though I don’t know about anything being definitive even after we get the #s, as it’s more like a niche within a niche within a niche - only some of the fandom buys the comics, and who knows, maybe they’re more or less predisposed towards buying EG stuff (I buy some of the comics and I’m not going to buy this one).

@Background Pony  
It should be noted that Hasbro has stated that that they know the brony market exists but they are not doing anything to specifically cater to us. MLP is a toy line for little girls, for all they care about. We are maybe 5% of their net MLP profits, and that’s a drop in the bucket for all Hasbro properties. This is why when the brony fandom gets all worked up about things (like princess Twilight, EQG, Derpygate) that the sense of entitlement kicks in and gets annoying. They are going to make decisions to make their bottom line work, and if they disenfranchise the whole brony thing to get their, they will do that.
 
That said, I don’t think they are that insensitive to the brony fandom, just that they cannot put us above profits. EQG is an example of that.

@bboifatz  
Obviously a one-off won’t sell as well as the original, and the artists that make the main series of FiM comics have already expressed their disinterest in drawing for EqG. This probably will be just a one-off as you said, and it won’t sell well. Since the comics aim to sell nothing but more comics, I can’t imagine it doing well.
 
But hey, the art is pretty good.

@Background Pony  
I highly doubt the EQG oneshot will pull the same sales numbers as the FiM comics do. Giving EQG its own comic series would divert resources away from the FiM comic which is IDW’s top selling comic of all time. It doesn’t make sense to rut that cash cow at risk for a comic that is likely to have very “meh” sales in the long haul.
 
EQG is a niche within a niche, which makes the process of marketing it a highly befuddling prospect. The FiM comic appeals to all bronies, but an EQG will only appeal to bronies who like equestria girls. I don’t blame IDW one bit for only wanting to test the market at this point rather than committing to a full series based on pretty much no reliable demographic data about EQG whatsoever.
 
In fact, this comic is the perfect opportunity to compare the popularity of EQG against FiM directly within the fandom. If it sells bananas the way the main comic does, that would prive the argument that EQG’s detractors are a vocal minority. If it sells only a fraction of what that month’s FiM comic does though, then that would prove that EQG is not the success story amongst adult fans that a lot of people wish to believe it is (let akone anywhere near on par with FiM). The best part is there will be actual sales numbers that we can compare side by side, so the answer should be fairly definitive.

@Background Pony  
This article explains the growing pains the Hub has had and how even with FiM, they are barely competing.
 
Here is a video where McCarthy explains the process of its creation.
 
I’ll quote it if you don’t want to click through:
 
“The original concept was brought to me and they said- Hasbro said “We’re intrested in kind of having this as an idea, what can you do to flesh this out into a story and make it a feature length movie?” and that’s what I did.”

@Itsthinking  
Well, as I said it’s not about people enjoying or not enjoying the movie. It’s the issues behind it.
 
Would you mind citing some links for the info you’re talking about here? I’d like to learn as much as I can about what goes on with Hasbro and the Hub so I don’t just have to make educated guesses (or rather, so I can make more educated of guesses).
 
Also, when did Meghan ever imply they only gave her a vague idea to work off of? I don’t remember her ever saying that on her Twitter. I’m guessing (again guessing) that they did give her some relatively specific guidelines, based on research done with stuff like Monster High, but then let her to what she would with those guidelines.

@Background Pony  
I can’t help that I enjoyed the movie, man. I mean, buying these comics are probably as far as I’m going to go in supporting EqG simply because I’ve seen enough of it. I’ve personally expressed discontent to Hasbro on several occasions, so it is great to hear that they listen. I’ve also read about the corporate politics that often plague Hasbro’s handling of the Hub, where the latter tried and succeeded in loosening the bond between them. I really do think that even after all of this, even after numerous things, the creative team still has a ton of control over the final direction. McCarthy seems to have implied they gave her only a vague idea and she made the spinoff what she could.
 
There’s a lot of inter-office politics between the Hub and Hasbro, and with the former hemorrhaging money, the latter doesn’t have much choice other than to let them do what made them successful. They’re just terrified that when FiM ends that they’ll lose all of their already pitiful viewership and have to fold the whole cartoon division. Creative teams caught up in this can get a lot of things past them and S&P.
 
@Background Pony  
That’s what the whole series is intended to do. Sell toys to young girls. Don’t give me the “but it was more apparent in EqG” line, because it wasn’t. You know what was an apparent ad that almost nobody mentioned? The chariot Twilight rode for five seconds in MMC. I saw NOTHING that bad in EqG. Anyway, the comics are designed to sell comics and nothing else. I know some people see this as an immediate catch since toys aren’t involved any more, but often it takes a while for the author/artists to catch up and make good stories.

@Itsthinking  
That’s what puzzles me. These aren’t intended for little girls as much as they’re intended for the older audience it seems, so why go the Equestria Girls route? I don’t think that movie was targeted at us, it was meant to sell toys to younger girls, so I wish they would keep the two totally separate.

@Masem  
Well, I don’t think our hands are tied. We are the consumers, and considering how big this fandom is anymore, I don’t think the original targeted demographic are the only ones that Hasbro ever listens to.
 
Also, I was speaking to someone who has had a lot of experience with Hasbro and especially the Transformers brand, and I was surprised at just how much they listen. Public image does mean a lot to them, and they actually listen to customer input really really well, even if it’s just one person expressing a concern.
 
People looking at Hasbro in such a black-and-white way - either they’re evil or they can do no wrong - makes absolutely no sense. They’re a company made up of many individuals, and sure, they’ve made some really stupid choices, but they’ve also given the crew a lot of leeway with the show (or rather, the Hub, which is actually separate, has).
 
I’m not going to give up and just accept Hasbro is going to do with these characters whatever they please. I think people being disapproving, instead of just accepting whatever Hasbro hands them, is a good thing, especially if it’s in a reasonable, non-hateful way. It’s not about being arrogant or entitled, it’s about wanting what’s best for the show we love, the characters we love, staying true to what the creator of the show wanted, and letting the creative people actually BE CREATIVE. Ask anyone who works in animation what they prefer, and they’re going to say they prefer it if they’re handed the reins a little more (pun intended), and not just be expected to market a toy.
 
Sorry if that sounded a bit preachy…it’s just frustrating that people are so divided on the issue. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter if people liked or disliked the movie, it’s the whole idea behind it, and the implications of it that’s the issue, I think.

I guess people have forgotten these comics are never really for the target audience and are less restrained, huh?

@Background Pony  
Trust me, if I had full control of the brand, I never would have gone human characters.
 
But if I were in the creative team’s place and told by Hasbro “We want to sell human dolls based on MLP, create a fiction for us”, well aware that much of the show’s appear is the fact it is NOT a human world, I would do everything I can to make it an odd and interesting human world to meet the letter of Hasbro’s law but striving for something interesting. There’s only so much you can do with your hands tied here.

@Background Pony  
To sell toys.