It started innocently enough. When I was looking at online dating profiles, a girl casually mentioned her personality was similar to that of Pinkie Pie. Somehow, without looking it up, I KNEW who Pinkie Pie was. Maybe because I was familiar with the earlier generations of My Little Pony because of the gaggles of small female cousins I've had over the years? I don’t exactly know how, but the point is, I did. I decided to do more research, so I looked up who she was. I thought “wow, that’s… interesting.” It led me to watching episode 10 of Season 1, the parasprite episode, showing how ridiculous Pinkie Pie could be. I then tabled the idea of MLP… For a while.

Then a friend was talking to me and said something like “You know, there are many 20-something guys who like that show, I’m not into it, but I see why they like it.” I remember being strangely happy that a community like that existed, even though I wasn't part of it.

Next, at some point during the fall my family was making apple cider again. Turns out that our family owns an ancient, antique (note: not worth anything) cider press from 1850 Springfield, Ohio. The same cider press that appears as an antique in the Museum of History and Industry in downtown Seattle. I think I decided to look up something about apple cider. Either Google knew me too well, or some other confluence of events happened to lead me to watching “The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000” episode… Which I really liked. After that, I gave up on fighting it and started Season 1, Episode 1 to see what this whole brony thing I kept hearing about was all about, and the rest is, well, history.

It took about 3 months on/off, but I did watch all the episodes. One time I told a friend “I was upset today so I made a milkshake, got out my favorite blanket, and watched My Little Pony all night” The response I got back was “…wow.” Wow, indeed.

I grew to really like Fluttershy, because I saw so much of myself in her. She has a pet bunny, I have a stuffed bunny from my childhood. She’s impossibly shy and doesn't always know how to assert herself and occasionally goes on efforts to fix that – much like myself! Her element is kindness, and that is something I've always strived to have in my life. Next to Fluttershy, I’m officially in love with Twilight Sparkle, because she’s a nerd, because she tries hard to think about the consequences of her actions, and works really hard to fix things when they go wrong with unwavering perseverance. I do that, too, but the thing that cinched the deal, was the final episode of Season 3.

I had a party at my apartment to celebrate the last episode of Season 3, which I deliberately avoided watching until I could watch it with some friends. If I wasn't a brony before watching that show, I am now.

For the next week, at home, and at work, that episode was on constant repeat, as background noise, or as simply something to stare at as I tuned out the rest of the world. I kept watching it because I couldn't understand why I wanted to keep watching it. Certain things about it are logically frustrating. It leaves so many unanswered questions, and as everyone admits, it felt super-rushed. Yet something genius lingers in the episode’s construction. Ultimately, my attempts to make sense of it failed because it isn’t logical. It is emotional, a clear example between a masterpiece of the emotion and a masterpiece of logic. This episode would not have been possible before season 3, because it relies on the emotional history that the characters have built up, and it ties it all up with song, which as one reviewer said “makes me extremely happy.”

What is it that has got this show taking off like a rocket? When I have friends look at me strangely for watching it, I tell them “Watch Episodes 1 and 2 of Season 1, then tell me you don’t like it.” Thus far, nobody has come back from that experience without being converted, and I believe the following is why.

The generation of people < ~30 years old (including myself) has struggled to find a morality they call their own. Conventional religion clearly isn’t cutting it. While I have friends who have joined churches, I have many more who have left after the wounds and scars of organized religion became intolerable. Religion is still strong in many ways and indeed has many advantages, as this TED talk elucidates (http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html), but for many it has ceased to perform its self-proclaimed purpose, leaving a hole that many struggle to even admit is there.

This hole, I believe is where My Little Pony’s morality, with its laser-focus on one thing and one thing only: the importance (the ‘magic’) of friendship, enters the picture. The most important one I will call out is this one: “I’ll tell you what we've learned Discord, We've learned that friendship isn't always easy. But there’s no doubt it’s worth fighting for!” (http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/Friendship_lessons#Season_two). How many of us have had friends that we've abandoned? Friends that we've “grown out of” or had some fight with that seems to be an incontrovertible wedge? How many times have we thought about going back and fighting for them, again? How many times have we been in situations where, without our friends, we would be in serious trouble, if not dead? How many times have our friends been “the shoulders of giants” that we could stand on, enabling not one of us, but all of us, to do something incredible? For me, the answers to these questions clearly show how powerful this simple concept is, so why is it that we needed a cartoon for little girls to demonstrate it?

In fact, this idea is not new. I believe the answer to the above question is the packaging. The message from the show is undiluted by anything else that may cloud it such as scandal, conspiracy, bureaucracy, cliquishness, jealousy, closed-mindedness, or any of the other problems that come with other vehicles that our society has created to exemplify this message (corporations, religion, education, etc). MLP is pure. It is an idyllic vision, much like Avatar, and we come away from it asking ourselves “why can’t our world, our reality, be like this, too?”

Next, a point based on personal experience. The generation that has been gripped by MLP (< ~30 crowd), also has mighty struggles with romance (then again, perhaps this is nothing new if all of literature is to be taken into account). There are numerous differences between how today’s generation and how previous generation handled relationships. Consider a culture of earning the MRS degree (http://www.curvygirlguide.com/daily-curve/earning-the-mrs-degree/), where you need to find “the one” in college, or you won’t find them; contrasted with more liberal movements hearing young people say “I don’t believe in marriage – ever.” Instead of struggling with this concept, why not focus on what MLP focuses on: friendship. Be friends, don’t worry about the romance. Instead of fighting and grappling with it, simply quit worrying about it… FRIENDSHIP is what is magic, NOT romance, and this is supported by the old adage that “the person you marry should be your best friend, too.”

Even more profound is this: http://www.aarp.org/relationships/grief-loss/info-02-2012/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying.html. Read the article. Then tell me which of them My Little Pony does not address. If I may be so bold as to answer the question for you: It addresses all of them. The show is more than just a show for little girls, profoundly more. It may, in fact, be the burgeoning renaissance of a serious philosophical search for truth in meaning that our generation is yearning to have: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1m099t4TIA

Humanity works best when we all work together through honesty (Apple Jack), loyalty (Rainbow Dash), generosity (Rarity), kindness (Fluttershy) -- laughing about all of it (Pinkie Pie) and lead by some inexorable force to improve ourselves (Twilight Sparkle). Perhaps this is an incomplete morality, there are other concepts, such as forgiveness, that may warrant further discussion, and of course Rarity’s element was originally that of inspiration, so it wasn't even intended to be a fixed representation of truth to begin with. Still, My Little Pony’s success is not just because of superficial features such as how adorable the ponies are or how awesome derpy-hunting is. It fills a deep gap that many people have been trying to fill in their lives, and hopefully it will continue to do so.

Hasbro, you hold my heart in your hand. Season 4 could throw me into the bosom of ecstasy, or leave at my knees, weeping, and from reading all the online content that MLP has generated, I know I am nowhere near alone. Be careful with your choice. 11-23-2013 <3.

For a while now I’ve thought about starting a blog. For one, the ideas swirling around in my mind need a place to call home, and the occasional deep philosophical conversation with a friend is not satiating enough.
However, that alone was not enough. I am busy with work, having a social life, and all the other things a recent college-graduate might do… There is a priority queue for time and one must strictly manage it. Yet, several recent events have told me that this is something I cannot procrastinate on further. The first is my leaving Ohio for Seattle. Moving far away is something that most people would relish the opportunity to do, but I never have and still do not. I even have a friend who tried to move away from the Midwest to the vaulted California, only to find, like the family in the Grapes of Wrath, that California is no better. I still have trouble adjusting, but I will eventually get there.
Second is related to the first. By graduating from college, moving away, and starting a job, my effective friend base has been shrunk. This is not necessarily a negative event, but it does mean that my human need to have a forum to express ideas (discussed above) has lacked satisfaction.
Third, and I know I’m going to get some interesting feedback for saying this, is that over a year ago I saw the movie Avatar. Maybe I’m just a sucker for the engrossing philosophy that it projects, but it affected me on a deeper level than most movies do. The last movie that stunned me to the point where it numbed my brain for a week was “A Walk to Remember” – so maybe it’s just a coincidence, maybe it’s just because I have free time because I’m still on a Holiday hiatus, but I’m starting this blog. I make no New Year’s resolutions about keeping it updated, it is very possible my need for this forum will disappear and it will be relegated to what my Xanga page once was.
I intend this specific blog to be more about philosophy, intellectualism, religion, politics, literature, music, and how all of these and others tie into the quest for Truth, Fulfillment, Happiness, and Heaven on Earth. I will leave most of my day-to-day life out of this. I may start another blog to address that, but while no writing can be timeless, I can at least attempt to free this blog from the constraints of split-second pop culture and the enigmatic winds of change.
Now, onto what I really wanted to talk about in this blog, and that is Avatar. After I saw the film my first reaction was that it is a vision, albeit a flawed an incomplete one as all inevitably are, of paradise. The world of Pandora is a vision of heaven, with a message that it is possible for humans to enter into it. The word “paradise” is used in only one place that I can detect, in the song for the ending credits (Link: http://filmonic.com/i-see-your-leona-lewis-video-for-avatar-362, Lyrics: http://www.metrolyrics.com/i-see-you-lyrics-leona-lewis.html). But it is paradise, a paradise that the viewers can make a connection to.
After searching around to see what other reviewers think of it, the most interesting was this column by the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/opinion/21douthat1.html. I am not an advocate of pantheism or atheism; I am a hardcore Catholic. I also do not advocate that we should return to nature, I think the various differences between the world described in the movie and our reality are different enough to not allow for such an environment to exist, at least, not on Earth or not for a long while (more on this later). We cannot return to nature in the form that we came from it, but a part of me desperately wants to do so anyway. The most elegant answers in science and engineering are those that are the simplest, so I long for simplicity, for incorruptible purity (too many situations in fiction and reality document a fall from innocence into evil), and for some sort of advanced communalism (NOTE: Not communism).
So, ultimately, what is useful that comes out of this? Pandora doesn’t exist; we can’t move there (Though that doesn’t stop the emotional side of me from REALLY REALLY wanting to). What practical effects should we take away from this incredible piece of art? Frankly, to me parts of Pandora are not as far-fetched as they may seem. The main element is the built-in intra-planetary network. As has been shown from the Internet, there is enormous power in simply making connections from one entity to another. These entities do not even need to be sentient for the power to exist: if they are sentient, even better. Is it far-fetched to think that a human consciousness could be transferred, if not to a computational network then to an artificially constructed natural neural net not unlike what is on Pandora? Imagine if even just the memories of the greats of history were around to still influence the world. How would this change things? What if we were able to tap into this network, or to somehow commune with animals, trees, etc? The answer is we don’t know: it might be useless; but then again, it might not be. This is the key difference between Pandora and Earth, and why people get all up in arms about the movie promoting pantheism. However, this is not in opposition to God. Such a neural network is a concrete creation that science can grasp, albeit with difficulty. If religion and the questions of religion are outside of science, then the network of Pandora is only a conceived god, but it is not God; it is simply evolution showing its genius once again, though it could very well be a guided creation of God, the same argument that safely merges creationism and evolution. There is a living neural network on the planet that is capable of sustaining life and avoiding the problems that any sufficiently large society begins to run into. And as I’ve said previously, these entities need not be sentient for the advantages to be felt, so would somehow linking up with a tree be useful? Probably not, but we’ve also not tried it, and the laws of physics don’t forbid it, so why not?
And I think this networking idea is where the magic of evolution suddenly seems to be a primitive second banana to creating an ideal world, and it is also why we cannot return to nature. While nature has notions of communalism, such as parasitic commensalism, the V shape of flying birds, schools of fish, the signal transduction pheromonal pathways of both plants and animals, etc. These entities have still fundamentally evolved separately. Each one has a unique functioning power system, control system, propulsion system, and each can decide to deviate from the whole without necessarily impacting the other entities, though unwise, it happens. The communication mechanisms between groups of animals, plants, and often arguably humans are very primitive compared to the internal design and internal communication mechanisms of a living being. Much of the internal signaling inside the human body, or between neurons, has yet to be deciphered, the most eloquent masterpieces of human communication are arguably quite primitive compared to what might be possible from the type of link-up described in Avatar. If such a network could be created, either biologically or mechanically, this might actually allow for a Pandorian Earth to be realized. Stephen Hawking, in his book a Brief History of Time, argues that science will eventually overrule the guidelines of the natural system to make them work in harmony, and this would require that humans no longer actually look or act like humans. The “human race” may not look much like the “human race” in the future, because the world as we were given it has imperfections – Catholicism fully acknowledges this. These imperfections are the reason why we cannot return to nature in the same way from which we came. Either nature has to change or we have to change. Maybe the conception of the Na’vi in Avatar is not really alien, but a statement of where humanity needs to direct its self-guided evolution… Because barring an uncontrolled apocalypse, destroying the world in a nuclear war, or the depletion of our resources to the point of no survival as in Lost in Space, I say this evolution is only a matter of time. We are a production of evolution, a production that has evolved beyond evolution, and we will continue to do so.
However, Avatar is not the first place where we see this idea. Star Trek, as usual, was there first with its conception of the Borg. They are a humanoid-mechanical hybrid connected and ruled by a supreme nearly omniscient and omnipresent consciousness. But, as anyone who has seen the Borg episodes, they are far from an idyllic society. The collective consciousness sacrifices the individual consciousness and also does not respect the dignity, or balance of life. At any point a drone will sacrifice itself for the good of the collective, the Borg take incredible risks in the name of science, etc. This is the dark side of the technological communalist idea. By contrast, we are already aware of the dark side of the non-technological communalist idea; it is largely because that system wasn’t sustainable that humanity is where it is now.
The final element I want to discuss regarding Avatar is the notion of beauty. Roger Ebert’s review of the movie called Neytiri ‘sexy’. Frankly, I just can’t do that. Hollywood is very good at making girls sexy, it’s not so good at making them beautiful. Neytiri in the movie is beautiful, not sexy, and my reasoning follows. Her whole culture is beautiful. They don’t seem to have the problems of sexual abuse that our society does, so from the virginity standpoint she’s pure. Also, she moves more gracefully through the forest than I think even the best human jungle crawler could. Also, she shows more patience, kindness, forgiveness, faith, and strength than most people I have ever known. But this beauty does not just apply to her, it applies to her whole race, and indeed her whole planet. Some call the renderings of Pandora ‘stunning’ – I say, it’s beautiful, it’s a vision of heaven on not-Earth.
Now, have I violated my Catholic religious principles by proposing that such a system would be a good thing, and potentially something that we will inevitably work to build (and likely succeed)? Not in the slightest. I don’t think any religious person would disagree with the idea that we are to attempt to build heaven on earth, not in opposition to God, but in complement and in parallel to Him. In my view, Pandora is heaven. In my opinion, Jake Sully is one of the luckiest humans to ever not exist. He has a beautiful girl, an incredible community, and a lifestyle that is both healthy and infinitely sustainable. The Na’vi saw no appeal in human technologies, because they didn’t need them. While I do love the technologies we have developed (this was written on a computer after all), I could easily do without them in a heartbeat if presented with an environment in which the Omaticaya exist. When I got home after seeing Avatar, I changed my Facebook status to “Screw Earth, I’m moving to Pandora.” Frankly, if it were possible, I just might do it… The goal in life is to be fulfilled, the notion of “loyalty to one’s race” is something I take with less than a grain of salt; in fact, I don’t take it at all. I’m loyal to my principles, to my faith, and to the dignity of people everywhere – alien or not.