Colorful inspiration

It's probably no big secret to my readers that My Little Pony has always been (and still is) a great inspiration for me. These innocent and colorful ponies always manage to make me calm and help me relax so that I can go to that silly inner place where stories come from. In contrast, my pullips always make me more excited and I want to show them off in photographs, telling their stories through pictures instead of words.
My Little Pony is a wonderful brand that is reaching out to a lot of different people; not just little girls and collectors, but also to a new audience of young people, mostly boys, who are greatly inspired to not only make awesome artwork but also write an amazing amount of My Little Pony fanfiction. I think it's amazing that these little toys have touched so many people!

The current My Little Pony line (gen4) has never inspired me to write, however. My Royal Destiny is very different in setting and tone than the Friendship is Magic television show (which I completely love, don't get me wrong), and the toys don't really represent the kind of characters I would love to write about, be it in RD or another setting. While the show's characters are awesome, I don't particularly like to write fanfiction with characters that are made up by someone else; all the characters in Royal Destiny are of my own creation and I love that I can just make them grow in whatever direction they're moving into without having to take someone else's ideas into consideration. I do have a great amount of respect for people who can write fanfiction like that and pull it off nicely; it's hard to take a character and write your own story while still remaining true to the character someone else created.

That doesn't mean that the gen4 ponies don't inspire me to any creativity, however. Oddly enough I absolutely love photographing them! I never really liked this with older ponies, because My Little Ponies are really quite static; it's hard to have them express any kind of emotion as you can't move their limbs or eyes like you can with dolls like Pullip and Monster High. The gen4 ponies, however, seem to have more of a personality to each individual pony (I think it's because of their eyes) so it's more fun to take pictures of them in different settings. It would be nice if a wider variety of ponies would be released instead of just ponies in the same pose in different colors (what I'd do for boy ponies!), but that's maybe something for next year. I'm already happy enough that I can go to toy stores hoping that they have a new pony I want to have; that's something I haven't been able to do in over 2 years after all!