Lord of the Ponies

Elizabeth has really gotten into the TV show (nay, the world) My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It's about Twilight Sparkle and her friends who live in Ponyville, in the land of Equestria. They have adventures and learn valuable lessons. I was surprised to find out that it is a genuinely good show, with fun characters and an interesting art style and a rich world to explore. The lessons/morals are pretty basic, but on the other hand the two people in my household who watch it most are five and two.

Elizabeth got an MLP doll set for her 4th birthday, well before she knew the difference between Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie. She got a Princess Celestia (one of the two sisters who rule Equestria), a Twilight Sparkle (the protagonist of the show) and a Spike (Twilight's baby dragon pet/friend). These dolls came into play here and there pre-MLP, but after Elizabeth discovered the show, they've been central to play. Now, if they're not watching My Little Pony (which they're not, unless it's a Saturday, a Sunday, or a date night for Mom and Dad) the girls want to play Ponyville.

Ponyville isn't a game. It's a way of life.

Because there are six main pony friends (plus Spike, plus the two Princesses) in the game world, we have to sub in other dolls for the five ponies and one dragon we don't have. (We had a Spike, but soon after getting involved in the show, Elizabeth lost her Spike figure at the park. Her loss, some other fan's gain.) So the girls have designated certain dinosaur figures (a gift from Uncle Scott from a year or two ago) as the ponies. This causes all sorts of wonderful dissonance (such as the pegasus Rainbow Dash being portrayed by a pteranodon). But no doll dissonance is greater or more enjoyable than the fact that Rarity, the fashionable and pretty pony, is played by the most hideous dinosaur we've got: the bump-headed Pachycephelosaurus.

Rarity.

Our in-lieu-of Rarity, played by Pachycephelosaurus. Not quite the charmer that Rarity is, but that's what imagination is for.

This wasn't my idea. It was the girls's.

So we played Ponyville for a number of days, with the girls taking great care to build the structures of the hamlet using wooden blocks and toy trees and whatever toy was in the toy basket, and populating it with the real My Little Ponies, the dinosaurs, and the other animals that pretended to be My Little Ponies (a farm horse figure for the down-to-earth Apple Jack; a miniature giraffe for the shrinking violet Fluttershy). Then, one day, Barb was re-arranging furniture in the living room and Ponyville was destroyed. At the same time, the dining room was opened up by the furniture shift and became a "wasteland."

So the ponies did the only logical thing, and, rather than rebuild their lush village, they moved into the wasteland. Into the vast cavern that was the area beneath our dining table.

The new town was christened "Princessville" (despite my campaigning for "New Ponyville"). We've been playing there ever since.

But recently, things have taken an ugly turn.

It started with Elizabeth (who is always Princess Twilight Sparkle), playing her part with uncharacteristic aloofness. Twilight would just stay in her room. If one of the other ponies asked to see her, they would be rebuffed by the royal guards. So Suzanne and I would play, and Elizabeth would watch, delighting (one would imagine) in the fact that her princess didn't have to sully her hooves with everyday matters such as growing a new apple orchard, or finding places for the refugees of Ponyville to sleep.

Today, however, it got worse. While I folded laundry, Elizabeth and Suzanne used every last wooden block, and most of the other toys, to build for their princesses (Suzanne is always Princess Celestia) huge, luxurious bedrooms. In so doing, they took away the wooden block beds of the other ponies.

So the game was this: the non-princess ponies (all played by me) would express various forms of outrage at their beds having been removed; they would suffer all night lying on the ground; they would complain to first one princess and then the other; they would remark in wonder and disgust at the opulence of the princesses accommodations.

And the princesses would at best do nothing, and at worst relegate the complaining pony to a time-out room.

Ah, human nature!

The line of creatures in the foreground are the "ponies" who have found their beds gone. To the left is Princess Twilight Sparkle's decadent bedroom. Suzanne is lording over Princess Celestia's smaller, but even more luxurious, abode. Once again, wealth has concentrated with the powerful.

The post script of this story is that when Barb learned of this play, she explained to Elizabeth how awful Princess Twilight Sparkle was behaving, and that the responsibility of the ruler was to the ruled. Barb compared the actions of the selfish Princesses to a self-centered rajah in a book they'd recently read. Elizabeth absorbed the lesson and consequently Twilight Sparkle became much more just and generous. She removed some of the blocks from the walls of her bedroom to provide beds for her subjects.

And she blamed all the past evil on Princess Celestia. Which is to say, Suzanne.