Season 5 is upon us! In the interest of getting people talking about horses again on this horse board, why not work the rust out of our fanboy machines and start talking about it? Are you excite? Are you grump? Do you even know how to feel about all this? Can you even?
Some people don't like spoilers, not even the hint of what the plot to the premier may be. Please be considerate of this, and mark/hide your spoilers, although if you are of the above persuasion, be advised that this thread may mostly lack in actual content for you to talk about, unless you just want to vent off all that frustration from waiting nearly a year.
Personally, I'm really intrigued about the upcoming season. I'm really hyped about the promised potential for more worldbuilding in general, and the exploration of how cutie marks actually work, specifically. The latter seems to be not just a subject of the first episode, but a topic for the season as a whole, similar to the way the mechanics of Friendship Magic became more nuanced for all of the mane characters in Season 4. This new topic seems like something that will crop up in episodes throughout the season. Not in the least because apparently the CMC will get their cutie marks.
Actually, on that point, can I just say that I'm kinda bummed that it looks like that's all going to be packed into one season? I know it'll wind up only being three (four?) episodes, and in a season of 26 episodes, that's easy peasy to space out, but it feels contrived or unrealistic. Like, why doesn't Sweetie Belle discover her singing talent super early on, and for no reason other than stupid luck, Scootaloo and Apple Bloom toil away for another year, then randomly get theirs on the same day? Obviously, this would make it difficult for there to be a thematic point to it all, but I can't help feeling like some of the potential for tension and release is lost.
I also have to wonder if maybe we're starting to get to a point where it becomes a challenge for the writers to get more novel experiences out of the Mane 6 for the purposes of teaching about friendship, while still keeping the context that, ostensibly, they have nothing left to learn. Season five apparently does this by having the Mane 6 teach others across Equestria how to be good friends, and that would appear to be something that can get a lot of mileage, but how do they plan on creating a sustainable, consistent story arc for more than, say three seasons based on that? After a while, it will become a question of where are we ultimately going? What suggestions of the shape of the show's endgame do we have?
I've recently been watching a lot of Star Trek (DS9 and Voyager, specifically), and the notion of a background story, that constrains all of the decision-making and thought-processes of the characters, is strong, there. It ties the characters' stories together, and gives the shows a place in the world. Does FiM have this? For the first four seasons, I was sure it did. The revelation of the Tree of Harmony shows that, yes, these first four seasons describe a cohesive spiral that is remarkably tightly-plotted (just like Twilight, amirite?), considering that the staff literally didn't know they would be making a fourth season until, at the earliest, somewhere between the airing of Season Two and Season Three. The adventures of the Mane 6 were actually all set in motion, unbeknownst to them, thousands of years earlier, by Celestia and Luna removing the Elements from the Tree of Harmony, and the Tree's life-cycle in relation to these gems seems to be driving the plot. So what part of that life cycle are we at now? What does that say about the shape of things to come? I can't possibly say. I'm hopeful the staff has a really good idea, though.