Lauren Faust on Television for Young Girls

I was extremely skeptical at first about taking the job. Shows based on girls’ toys always left a bad taste in my mouth, even when I was a child. They did not reflect the way I played with my toys. I assigned my ponies and my Strawberry Shortcake dolls distinctive personalities and sent them on epic adventures to save the world. On TV, though… female characters [in children’s shows] have been so homogenized with old-fashioned “niceness” that they have no flaws and are unrelatable. They are so pretty, polite and perfect; there is no legitimate conflict and nothing exciting ever happens…

This perception, more than anything, is what I am trying to change with My Little Pony.

— Lauren Faust, creative head and executive producer of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

We already loved the My Little Pony mashup videos, but, okay, now I’m seriously considering paying an extra $2 in Netflix a month to get My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic DVDs. Faust’s whole post on My Little Pony and her attempts to create a show for girls that says “There are lots of different ways to be a girl,” can be found here, and it’s well worth a read.

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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