Movies & TV

Hay, everypony—

We have been watching MLP:FiM together every Saturday for just under a month now, and next Saturday we'll finally be starting season 2. Two weeks after that, i.e. three weeks from now, we will reach the batch of episodes that includes S2E14, "The Last Roundup".

The only problem is, there are two different versions of that episode: the version of the episode as it originally aired, and a later edited version for reruns, official downloads, and streaming. The changes made to the episode concern the scene immediately after the intro — a scene which was criticized for its depiction of an intellectually disabled character.

I hold that the original version of the scene; the context behind the original version of the scene; the backlash to the scene, and the resulting changes to it; and the brony fandom's backlash to the changes to the scene in turn; are all important to acknowledge as a part of the history of ableism and ID representation in children's media, and an important but uncomfortable part of MLP:FiM and the brony fandom's history — in the same vein as we didn't skip "Bridle Gossip" and "Over a Barrel" just because those episodes are fucking racist. So all in all I would like for us to experience the show "warts and all", and to be critical of our own nostalgia for it.

However, this still leaves the question of whether we actually watch the original or edited version of the episode, and how (and for how long) we cover "Derpygate" after the episode. I'll leave that one up to you all.