2772: Anon-A-Miss — Pages 1 through 16

–DISCLAIMER–
The comic under review today is a professionally published work by IDW Comics. Portions of it are reproduced here for the purposes of criticism and analysis only. We encourage those who are interested to seek out an original copy.

 

Title: My Little Pony: Equestria Girls Holiday Special or something
Author:  A whole lot of people working for IDW Comics
Media: Cartoon
Topic: My Little Pony / Equestria Girls
Genre:Holiday or Family, maybe?
URL: IDW Store Link
Critiqued by AdmiralSakai and Serketry

 

*All is quiet in RIFFCON. The overhead lights are turned off, monitors are powered down, and rollie-chairs are unoccupied. After several months of nothing much happening, the door in the far wall creaks open, revealing AdmiralSakai in all of his bespectacled, cargo-pantsed glory. (An incredibly minute capacity for glory is still glory, right?).*

That’s what all those pockets are for, aren’t they, sir?

Gaaah! How did you get in here! There are a finite number of keycards and I took away everyone else’s.

I… never left? 

Uhm. I mean, nothing is dusty and there aren’t any cobwebs, so… thanks? I’d ask what you ate, but I know ants can eat electrical wiring so I’ll just leave the lights turned off for the foreseeable future and we can forget this ever happened, mmmkay?

Oh, right. Howdy y’all, I’m Serketry, and I haven’t left this office in over a year. It’s dangerous outside!

So… what’re you doing here? 

I’m here for riffing? Used to be kind of my thing before writing stories for other people to read kind of briefly engulfed my entire online presence? Figured I’d come back with something a little different this time- a canon spinoff work, namely My Little Pony: The 2014 Holiday Comic, by IDW, an actual honest-to-god comics company and not some random person on the Internet with an overly edgy RWBY avatar.

Oh hey! I know this one. So, this is odd.  For the first time since I’ve been one of the Admiral’s guests, I’ve read this comic, and he hasn’t. 

I have, however, been sufficiently exposed to the source material, which is not regular My Little Pony (holy hell is it not regular My Little Pony) but a spinoff series called Equestria Girls.

Equestria Girls is made up of a few featureless sorry, feature-length movies, they were actually pretty interesting, a large collection of utterly forgettable little YouTube movies, and little… filmlet things you can get on streaming services but not on Youtube? Not really sure what to call them.

They’re called specials, Tom. The 40-minute ones that do eventually migrate to Youtube. Those are hit-or-miss. 

Yeah, most of them are indeed pretty… “special”, so I guess that fits, but they are also standouts in the field of genericness so it kind of doesn’t.

Hey, we haven’t actually described what all this is.

Fine, fine.

Equestria Girls is a spinoff series that takes place in a parallel universe from the main show, connected by a magic mirror. Unlike the vaguely “1930s meets D&D” setting of MLP:FiM proper, this universe is modern, with electricity and cars and computers and smartphones and things.

A former apprentice of Princess Celestia’s, named Sunset Shimmer-

– this shining example of friendship and harmony–

slipped through the mirror years ago, and only came back to steal the Element of Magic. Twilight followed Sunset back into her “own” world, met parallel versions of all of her friends, hijinks ensued, Sunset raised an army of mind-controlled locals, and then this being MLP she got a fairly decent redemption arc and became a POV character herself leading the alternate Mane Six. From then on, Sunset would have her own adventures in this world, occasionally reacting to events that occurred in the main show’s universe but her universe would not go back to affect the main show.

It’s also a High School AU. It’s a goddamn High School AU. They made all the adult ponies high-school age. That’s all you need to know. 

Well, not all you need to know. They also turned all of the pony characters into humans.

Oh, yeah. And that.

And Spike gets turned into a literal dog.

I don’t particularly like Spike in the main show, but… he didn’t deserve this. Nobody deserves this.

 

So, as you can probably tell, my feelings on Equestria Girls are… mixed. The four movies are… decent to meh, but they never do anything that could not be done if the characters were kept as adult ponies, and only the setting was changed to add modern technology and remove most of the magic. The high school AU, and the humanized elements, contribute jack diddly, and I think actually hurt the setting in terms of what the characters are able to actually go around and do. For instance, since they’re high school students, they can’t really have full careers like the… main Mane Six (??) do, so they’re reduced to working very entry-level jobs in those same fields: Rarity no longer owns her own shop, Fluttershy can’t actually keep animals in her house and just volunteers at a shelter, and so on. Rainbow Dash gets this far and away the worst of it, turning from a charmingly gung-ho mall ninja who actually makes it into the Blue Angels, to… playing on the soccer team.

AJ pretty much doesn’t change at all, but that’s AJ for ya. Not even parallel dimensions can take the Apple out of her. 

That said, AJ is also the only one who seems to have an understandable family situation, on account of her parents being canonically dead. The others… just kind of seem to live alone, sixteen-year-olds with part-time jobs who own entire houses in the suburbs.

Actually, we’re about to see about that, and they discuss it in the aforementioned largely forgettable shorts. Everyone but Sunset lives with their folks. 

Oh, OK. My mind just kind of shuts off whenever I try to watch those, so I rely on you to condense information about them.

Also the humanoid character designs, in my technical opinion as a research roboticist, suck ass.

They’re walking Bratz dolls. Bobble heads, pencil necks, really screwed up feet. The works. 

I dunno, the face designs always reminded me more of shield bugs for some reason.

Oh dear god why. 

I told you. Shield bugs. Shield bugs every time.

The curse will only go away if you make someone else see it. It’s like Smiledog, but candy-coated.

Actually, if you brought Smiledog through the portal, would it turn back into a dragon?

…

Shit, that’s a better idea than 90% of the actual Equestria Girls shorts.

Also, when I searched “Rainbow Dash AND Equestria Girls” on Derpibooru to find a good reference picture of her face, these were the other results:

 

Stay classy, Derpibooru!

Umm. Shifting gears a bit-

To something that generally doesn’t suck…

The main show was also supplanted by a still-running comic series from IDW. They’re pretty damn good, and sometimes they also feature the Equestrial Girls setting.

Except… well, this comic came out in December 2014. It was preceded by the much-maligned The Good, the Bad, and the Ponies arc, which resulted in one of the core writers pretty much getting fired, and was flanked by the works of Jay P. Fosgitt.

Is that pony on the sidewalk supposed to be Cheerilee? With a baby-sized Applejack in a stroller??

 I… honestly don’t know? The comics were at an all-time low, Equestria Girls already isn’t the most popular series, but IDW released this thing anyway. 

We’ll get to Fosgitt’s contributions in depth later. Probably in October, when we do all of the other Lovecraftian horror.

And of course, this was written by IDW veteran Ted Anderson:

He mostly worked on side-series comics like the “Micros”, and Friends Forever– including that Fosshitt one up above, poor bastard. Anderson wouldn’t hit his stride until a few years later, but he does good work, reliably. 

I actually heard about this comic well before I knew it even was a comic- I thought it was one of the video specials or something. Fimfiction.net will not shut up about it in producing fix-’fics, drama-’fics, and general whining about it. In 2021. When the comic came out in 2014. Not even Mysterious Mare-Do-Well has had this long of a half-life, and I can feel myself getting dumber just by typing the title of that episode.

And you know what’s weird? I haven’t heard anything. Hell, while it’s not a hill I plan on dying on, I’d say this comic is actually kinda good? Not A-grade IDW work, but definitely not something worth bitching over? And, again, it came out in 2014.

But the backlash is still around! I even decided to riff it because I was originally going to riff a different ‘fic called Deaths New Life: Equestria’s Apocalypse [sic] which is flagged as related to one of my stories (why??). That was published in August 2020, and is based around this comic. Anon-A-Miss has a reputation as the single worst piece of official media relating to My Little Pony, ever, and I am very curious if that’s true.

…anyway, a little further context: It’s 2014. High School was still a recent memory for Tom and I, Facebook owned the world, Twitter was starting to become not just everywhere, but fucking unavoidable… 

And… apparently, IDW needed a Christmas special. Yeah, this is actually their Christmas comic. Which we are riffing in late March. Whatever.

Hearths Warming comic! 

Right. Yeah.

Usually the Hearths-Warming specials, while not the most amazingest epic things ever, are decent character studies. I don’t know why this topic was chosen, and I can say that with complete confidence even though I am going into the comic blind and have only a secondhand knowledge of what the plot of the comic is. Because nothing says “holiday spirit” like a Twitter mob, I guess?

Not a big fan of the cover here. It just looks… cheap and low–effort

Like a custom Christmas card? Because those pretty much always look cheap and low effort.

Kinda, yeah. But… you’re IDW Comics. You have access to entire office floors of people whose job it is to draw things. And you filled easily 50% of the area of your cover with a tiled gradient wrapping-paper background? I get what they were going for with making the comic look gift-wrapped, but if that was the case then I feel like the picture should actually be smaller and more detail put into the wrapping itself.

Also, why are Rarity and Sunset Shimmer normal and then everyone else slightly grayed out?

I’m not seeing it? But then, I don’t see color like you do, evidently. 

Yeah, I’ll leave this one to the comments.

And also due to the way her eyes are drawn, Rainbow Dash looks about 70 years old.

Oh hey, it’s the group pose from the show. 

Yeah, this one is a lot better because it’s a faithful depiction of the group shot on the splash screen for the show, but it’s still just a group shot without the characters really doing much of anything. Compare this to some of the other mainline IDW covers…

– and there’s just no contest.

But hey- at least there’s a god damn background.

Wait, we’re gonna riff the splash page? What’s wrong with this one? 

I don’t see why we wouldn’t riff it? It’s a part of the comic. And I gotta love that old-style phone with physical buttons on the bottom.

God I miss 2014 phones, I had an Android with a full slide-out keyboard. It was awesome. 

Yeah, that’s awesome. I think 2014 was when my original Android got introduced to the sidewalk at high speed and I had to get a new one without the buttons.

I don’t get why the characters here are wearing costumes, but maybe it will make sense in context. Since, you know, we’ve filled 12 pages with something that’s called “riffing Anon-A-Miss” without, actually, you know, riffing Anon-A-Miss. If we’re not careful, before too long we’ll end up operating a torture dungeon underneath the Medical Robotics Lab.

Tom, you do know what a splash page is, right? It’s always one panel, taken out of context, used to grab attention while providing a little contrast for the bylines and copyright info. 

Ooh, cool, establishing shot.

Which… does not look half bad. I think the unicorn statues on top of “Canterlot High School” look way too large to be reasonable for any real building, but they are like that in the show and I can’t fault the artist for faithfully reproducing them.

And yes, they called the school “Canterlot High”. Even though five out of the original Mane Six live in Ponyville, not Canterlot, and the one who does (Twilight) has an EqG version that goes to “Crystal Prep”.

Who’s to say there isn’t a Ponyville High, that none of the main cast go to? I mean, I live in Katy, but I didn’t go to Katy High School. I wasn’t a football jock. 

Yes, but your life wasn’t intended to be circumstantially simultaneous with a specific other Serketry who spent all of his time on Planet Katy or whatever.

That I know of. 

Oh, that’s interesting. Twilight’s cutie-mark is on the atrium of the school. I never noticed that before. I wonder if it’s like that in the show, or if the comic added it?

It’s a big blue 8-point star, and it’s in the movies.

Ah, I used to love winter, too. But my lawn is still completely dead. Although my pipes didn’t burst!

And here’s one of the two core themes of this comic: spending time with your family. As far as holiday messages go, it’s not a bad one.

Ok, yeah, that’s… actually fairly heavy stuff coming from Sunset The Literally Exiled, here. Her and AJ’s heads are both the size of their torsos in this panel, but that’s a minor quip.

Pretty typical of the Equestria Girls art style. 

They never actually name said holidays in the human world, but yeah. Nice deflect. 

That, though, is one of the things that makes Equestria Girls feel so empty compared to mainline MLP. Mainline has this very rich mythology and history custom behind it, for instance they have a winter holiday called Hearth’s Warming that’s like a cross between Christmas, Thanksgiving, and a national day of independence, and has a crapton of its own traditions that are completely alien and change from region to region.

And EqG is supposed to be… 95% earth? So presumably there’s a Christmas, and a Hanuka, and a Diwali, and everything else celebrated in December. Festivus. 

But we never see anything like that. They took out the mainline mythology, but didn’t replace it with anything. They made Celestia and Luna school administrators (yes, really), so who’s running the country? Hell- what’s the country called? Where do these people come from? Who invented all of this modern technology they have? It’s all happening in a vacuum.

She did a little more than “sabotage friendships and manipulate people”.

This is still pretty solid conversation with Sunset, though.

And it explains why Sunset’s never gone back home. Well, at least at this point, she hasn’t.

Artistically, these panels are a little sparse; there’s a lot of space taken up by just empty locker frames with no characters or dialogue or anything in them. But it’s not like Sonichu or whatever.

There’s a consistent space throughout all of it, but yeah. This is a highschool corridor, there should be no breathing room. 

And AJ’s giant head is not going away.

They all have giant heads, it’s a staple of the medium. 

Hers is gianter.

Maybe it’s the hat?

Oh hey now there’s people going past.

The text on the phone looks weird in an otherwise ink-drawn comic, and I am deeply weirded out by the fact that Applejack has orange fingernails. 

She has orange skin, what color would you think she’d have?

Actually, for that matter, because TV-Y, we’ve never seen if any of these characters have red blood, or if they’re, like, Homestuck trolls or something.

We’ve seen a few get scuffed up, they have red blood. 

Also, 2014 was a while ago, but were people still sending text messages with “Hey guys!” openers?

Well it’s a group chat, and isn’t that how I usually open up chats with you? 

All that said… the comic still utterly fails to appall me? I am really starting to wonder what bee got in the Internet’s bonnet to make them hate this thing so much.

Or what might come next, we’re on page 4 of 48. 

This is not by any means the worst way to communicate visually that the message is being received, but did it really need to take up most of a page?

Eh, probably not. But it is establishing setting, as opposed to each of them sitting in a featureless void. Also, Pinkie Pie balancing important stuff on her nose appears to be a universal constant.

Yeah, can you imagine how Chris-Chan or ConnorDavidson would’ve tried to do this? I don’t think they’d be able to do it at all without a bunch more text, while this communicates it just fine with visuals.

And then there’s… this. 

It’s Pinkie. Of all the characters, she’d be able to pull off four hands typing. 

On a keyboard where each key is the size of a US quarter?

Now that’s weird.

Oh god, is that an Apple? WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO YOUR STUDENTS, CANTERLOT HIGH?!?

…

OH dear lord!

So, first off, it’s a MySpace clone. In 2014.

Second off, I refuse to believe they did not create this fully aware of Fallout Equestria and its own hideous misuse of the word “stable” for things that have jack all to do with stablage.

…

Huh. Google Docs recognizes “stablage” as a word. That’s kind of amazing.

Also, bathroom selfies. No highschool girls’ account is complete without one. The comic really nailed that. 

Also also, recognize that profile pic? 

Was it from the original movie?

Nope, clipped from the cover art. I like that. 

The printed text still looks off to me; look at the kerning on “Can’t wait” versus “Spendin  time  with”.

…

Then again, I have seen plenty of IRL websites that do much worse. Including posts on fanfiction and other sites that are supposed to fix your formatting for you.

Wow. Cheerilee looks really young as a human.

High school teachers usually start on the young side of things, plus, canonically, she’s only about as old as Shining Armor. 

Again, I have zero other complaints about this part of the comic but am not entirely sure we need to be seeing it. Did the writers not think readers in 2014 would need to have explained to them what social media was?

No, just that the Humane 6 are using it. Don’t ask about the name, it’s just what it is.

And yes “Humane Six” is the agreed-upon term for them, and it suuucks. Equestria Girls itself is okay, but the Equestria Girls fandom is pure high-octane acid cancer.

This sounds like a terrible idea, and also exactly the sort of thing teenagers would consider themselves entirely capable of managing the logistics of.

Checks out! 

That said…

Creepypasta AJ is trying to ingest my soul. Good thing I replaced it with caffeine years ago.

Hey, her head’s smaller! Must be because she’s got no eyes. 

They’re all like that in the bottom panel, but she’s looking directly at us and it is weird.

Also, panels 2 and 5 are nearly identical, but they’re not straight copies of each other. There’re a few changes to expressions and postures, plus repositioned frame borders, so there’s some definite care put into the art. 

Unlike Fosgitt… and Borba… and ConnorDavidson…

… Looks like I jumped the gun a little on the creepypasta jokes.

It’s Pinkie. Of all the characters, she’d be able to pull off teleporting behind your locker door. 

The way the page is structured, there’s no real transition between the above panel and this one. Which… fits? It is entirely believable that within the space of one second they were in the school, and then they were here.

It’s literally a smash-cut. 

Gosh, communicating pacing and motion through the placement of static images??? What is this wichery?!

OK, so, another thing I hate about the canonical Equestria Girls designs are how they have these giant, tall boot-like shoes. I’d assume it’s to show continuity between their hoofed original versions and these, but it looks really weird. Having had a history of severe foot and ankle problems it always makes me wince a little to think about actually trying to walk like that.

They eventually fixed that in later movies, but it was originally mostly done to save the animators time. 

THAT SAID…

You say that now… 

…

Well OK then!

HE HE HE.

Compared to some of Pinkie’s other parties, this ain’t half bad. Also, a nice short timeskip with the hair braiding. Yeah, it says LATER in the upper left, but it doesn’t even need that. 

It’s almost like the artists here are competent or something. I still have nothing to complain about.

Ok, well, I do have something to complain about, but it’s more riffing of the source material. IDW, with a single real exception, has some really good artists. Tony Fleecs, the same artist who drew this comic, also draws shit like this:

My turret is a changeling; your argument is irrelevant. 
MY TURRET… HAS A TURRET!

You can’t really do this sort of shit in a high-school AU, so I cannot shake the feeling that Fleecs’s skills are a little bit wasted here.

Fun fact- I was just dissing Agnes Garbowska as a b-lister, but she did Wings Over Yakyakistan, and that one was metal as fuck. I thought that was Fleecs, but nope! 

And even comics that are just dialogue and characters doing stuff have a really great expressive range and a lot of dynamism in the way ponies are posed and move around. Here… well, it’s not like Sonichu where everyone’s facial features are made of tissue paper in a washing machine, but I really do think the shield-bug heads and stick-figure poses constrain the expressions.

Oh hai Maud! 

I actually laughed at this. I actually laughed at something that was intended to be funny. Twice!

Yeah, we’re a full quarter way through, and… yeah, I’m still not seeing what people bitch about?

Yeah, there are things that I don’t see a pressing need to include, but it’s not like the comic is eight hundred pages long or other stuff I wanted to see was cut to make room for it.

Yeah, this was the holiday special, this didn’t even displace the main series. 

It’s not boring or slow to read, and it’s not confusing. I was complaining about the large amounts of empty space back in the hallway scene, but now they’re using actual detail and interesting layouts and it’s not like more dialogue is always better:

Jegus.

What, can you not sit upright and open a bag? 

She just got her nails done. It was in the background, a couple panels back. 

Oh, wait, you’re right!

What is this strange thing called ‘internal continuity’ we are experiencing?

And you know what else?

The music notes bubble is different between each panel; it’s not just a copypaste.

Ordinarily I’d get pissy about a character verbalizing parentheses, but I think this comic has earned the freedom to use some specialized formatting for its dialogue.

Same with the sarcasm quotes, it’s mostly a voice thing. I think AJ’s muttering that line to herself, which is a little hard to display with all-caps comic font. 

Or that it’s said as, like, an aside, yeah.

I do think AJ’s expression in the bottom right panel is a little overdone with the scare lines (or whatever they’re called), but again it’s a minor nitpick.

Would you rather them do what the show does, dropping the background and bringing up that weird spray-pattern thing? 

Or a swirly background with a caption just to inform us a character is imagining things:

I found this picture just by searching Party of One, because they used it all the goddamn time in that episode.

It still confuses me why people think Part of One was good.

Or, I guess, Party of One. “Part of One” sounds like an underappreciated new wave album.

Actually, for that matter, “Party of One” does too.

Only if it’s all lower case, with a period at the end. I’m looking at you, fun. 

Are we just reduced to riffing my own typos now? Is this comic that competent and devoid of fail?

Finally, I’m noticing the heads here are actually rounder than the ones in the show. The comic has in fact improved on the source material.

Kind of a… directionless story, but it does its job.

Typical farm stuff. A horse nearly bit my hand off, when I was 4. Shit like this just happens around animals. 

And the sort of thing someone would realistically ramble about just before going to sleep.

For context, anything Sunset writes in this journal also appears in a paired version back in Equestria, and vice versa, providing a way for her to communicate with Twilight. Now that I saw the scare / noise / motion lines once, though, I am seeing them everywhere, in really inappropriate contexts. For instance, here, they make it look like Sunset is snapping the journal closed instead of opening it, and then that the text is glowing or vibrating on the page instead of just appearing, below.

Also it looks like the journal is giant and sitting on a giant crystal lectern, when I think the idea here is that’s a zoom-in on Twilight reading the thing.

Or, Twilight’s reading just some book, and the journal’s in the foreground. 

That’d be some wonky perspective, though. Actually, for that matter, the bookshelves here go beneath the floor, too. The circular part delineating the floor is curved, and then the shelf is flat. 

Is it? And yet, the green arches are above the floor. I think the shelf is also curved, we’re just looking straight at it, so it looks sorta flat. 

Except it doesn’t look curved, even with different shelves at different levels.

But still. We have A background, with actual things in it and not just the Wiggly Lines Tool. I’ll take what I can get.

Just in general overall, the criticisms I’ve had for this comic so far have been… really pretty minor? I knew there was something up with Mysterious Mare-Do-Well within like three minutes of the episode starting, and while it’s possible this will spring some kind of asinine creepypasta-style “tweest” on me out of nowhere and thereby shit itself, I… don’t really think that’s likely?

Well, all I can say is we’re at the point of the horror movie where the monster hasn’t shown up yet. So, we’ll have to wait and see what happens. 

Which is a criticism, I guess, since this is a third of the way through the comic and it doesn’t really seem to be building up to anything in particular or for that matter building at all…

And yet! One of the core themes of this comic is coming together for the holidays, which is exactly what we’ve been watching. So it’s accomplishing what it set out to do. 

That, and the fact that we’ve been through 17 pages of nothing much happening and are not bored out of our skulls or screaming at the characters to get their act together is an achievement in and of itself. Can you imagine how much text, say, Chris-Chan would’ve taken to relay these same events? 

Or what fetishistic shit Conor Davidson could cram into 17 pages? 

Hell, can you imagine how much pointless bickering there would’ve been if this was a scene in First War featuring Chris McChan? Or how much mustache twirling and plots of galactic takeover Grand Moff Whyney would’ve filled the space with?

Yep. Speaking of running out of space… 

Yeah, we’re running up to the point in wordcount where my riffs usually just anticlimactically termi–

 

 

 

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