I really do adore how much backstory and serious!Celestia they dropped at the start of that ep.
So yeah, people argued about whether the mane cast *were* the elements of harmony, or whether they just wielded them. There's a couple different ways to read it, but it looks like the elements are primordial forces that are activated by demonstrating their essences...just like Discord is a primordial force that was activated by demonstrating or calling upon his essence. Oh God, what does that make the CMCs? Respectively, Apple Bloom is confusion, Sweetie Belle is evil, and Scootaloo is chaos? D:
Alternately, the elements of harmony weren't in the box because the jewelry is completely ethereal, and the mane cast really are the living avatars of the elements. GUESS WE'LL FIND OUT
Also I couldn't help thinking of The Fifth Element, and forgive my awful google-fu'd image:
Man, remember when YTMND was cool?
I wonder if MLP is finally realizing 75% of their fanbase are males over 13.
I somehow doubt that this is true where TV is concerned. But even still, remember, this is actually a problem. MLP has two revenue streams.
One big revenue stream is the toys. How many toys do you guys buy? I know I have the McDonalds toys, and Hasbro didn't exactly make a bunch of cash off of those. The stores haven't put out any great gotta-have-it toys yet (white Celestia for example), but how much money are you guys actually going to spend on it? Consider, ten households where little girls are huge fans of MLP versus ten households where male high school / college students are huge fans of MLP. I assure you that the little girls' families are going to spend at least a hundred bucks collectively due to the "BUT I WANT IT" factor, while the bronies...not so much. Oh yeah, we buy
fan-made shirts, but they don't make any cash from that anyway (unless you get it from
welovefine and even then it isn't much at all).
The other revenue stream is advertising. They get ZERO benefit from us watching on TV (which face it, we don't do anyway). Advertisers care about their target audience because that's who they are selling to, the ads just don't apply to anyone else. You advertise things for kids (or their parents) on a kids' show, and you sell stuff. One million families will sell about the same number of kids toys from commercials as one million families + one million college students. If you try and split up your commercials to appeal to everyone who might be watching, you tend to get even worse results. So their advertisers ignore us completely because we are literally worthless to them.
Anyway, considering that someone needs to sign the paychecks, how do you want them to make money off of us?