>>42553933
Faust’s Equestria is not utopian, despite the many voices on /mlp/ that think so. It is, instead, structured by lack. Conflict, error, moral dissonance, and character deficiency could’ve been used as narrative exigencies, much like other cartoons, but instead they turn these into ontological affirmations. The social fabric of FiM is not presented as seamless, it is wounded, sutured by continual acts of trust, forgiveness, and becoming. In this way, the show institutes a kind of ritual economy that resists commodification, much like its creator refused to commodify something she whimsically created stories with in her infancy. Friendship, within this scheme, is an event, a rupture in the isolated self, opening the subject to responsibility without guarantee.
What follows Faust’s departure is neither evolution nor divergence. It is a collapse, the show, severed from its spiritual telos, begins to replace its own form. Characters cease to grow, instead, they repeat. The ethical stakes dissolve into the aesthetic gloss of brand continuity. Morality is no longer lived but displayed. The later seasons of FiM become the very hyperreal spectacle the early seasons resisted, this simulation, the simulacra of sincerity, with the Real amputated.
This transition parallels the fate of modern religions, wherein the ritual is no longer a gift but a function, the sacred no longer encountered but simulated. The ecclesiological becomes performative, Faith is made marketable. What began as a gesture toward Being, Dasein, ends as the endless reproduction of content. So too with FiM, its early articulation approached the sacred, but its latter phases are indistinguishable from the content-machinery it once punctured.