Talk:Background Six
GNG
[edit]"‘Slice of Life’ was organized entirely around the activities of characters popularized through the adult fanbase. In an inversion of standard practice, the main six characters feature only as background ponies. This was not the first instance where online communities were explicitly acknowledged. The most notable was the aforementioned naming of Derpy Hooves. A grey and yellow figure with mismatched eyes, this pony appeared on the show with increasing frequency after being spotted and adopted by fans, although the moniker has subsequently been retracted due to disability sensitivity (Bell 2013). ‘Slice of Life’ starred an un-named Derpy alongside a British scientist character with an hour glass cutie-mark dubbed ‘Dr Whooves’ by audience. Octavia Melody and DJ Pon-3, a character whose fan name was similarly adopted by producers (Amon,2016: 95) were another frequently fan-matched couple shown sharing a house together. A third popular pairing, Lyra Heartstrings and Bon Bon, was also depicted, with sly references to the latter’s alternative name of Sweetie Drops. The canonisation of these couples not only indicates the blurring of boundaries between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ cultures, but questions assumptions concerning the ‘subversive’, ‘transgressive’ or ‘queer’ nature of slash fiction. As Jones argues, if media producers and media texts are complicit in the generation of slash pairings, this challenges traditional understandings of such practices as necessarily oppositional. Instead, ‘the exotic erotics of slash fiction look much less like instances of “resistance” and much more like extensions of cult television’s own contra-straight logics’ (2002: 89)."
"An example that tracks across several layers of official recognition and cocreative engagement is the character mainly known as either Derpy Hooves or Ditzy Doo. The character originated in an animation fault in the first episode of season 1, where she was accidentally given eyes that pointed in different directions, giving her a goofy expression (figure 14). The character developed a significant fan following, with the gradual establishment of a quasi-formalized fanon character defining who Derpy is and how she fits into wider society within the show and its setting. This process tapped into both Dena's tiers and Booth's digi-gratis economy. People created a wide variety of works inspired by the character, and then other secondary works were inspired by fan-generated material, until a sufficient body of work existed that there could be said to be multiple subcanons surrounding interpretations of the character. Derpy became a site of significant affective investment: a subset of the population cared deeply about the character, whether they were primary-tier people who had created work featuring her or people in the secondary tier who had engaged with that primary work and critiqued it, or ones in the tertiary tier who simply enjoyed the fact that she belonged to the fandom in a way that was seen as special (note 11). [...] There was considerable debate when two background characters named Lyra and Bon-Bon, whom the community understand to be in a relationship, were not sharing the same card, and delight when another card not only brought together two other background characters —Octavia and DJ-P0n3—but specifically teased viewers with possibilities about their relationship (figures 16 and 17). Another background character, who had been nicknamed Doctor Whoooves because of his visual similarity to Matt Smith's appearance in Doctor Who, appeared on a trading card with the official name of Time Turner—itself a reference from the Harry Potter series. His card specifically mentions a talent for all things "timey-wimey," referencing a quote from David Tennant's tenure as the Doctor (figure 18)."
"The plot of the episode is not particularly relevant to us; what does matter is that there is a musical number featuring a large crowd singing, and at the 3:32 mark a particular background pony is shown more clearly than at any previous point in the show. His appearance is almost certainly a coincidence. The primary tool used to make the show, Adobe Flash, permits a relatively easy way to generate large numbers of background characters by building a small library of “puppets” with pre-set animations, then duplicating them and adding on different coloration, hair, and so on. This early in the show’s run, the library of additions for the background characters is fairly small; in particular, cutie marks repeat quite often. One of the most common is an hourglass. So, almost certainly by chance, one of the background ponies—one who has been around since the first episode, actually—is a similar shade of brown to the coat worn by David Tennant in his immensely popular turn as the tenth incarnation of the Doctor, has slightly mussed dark hair similar to Tennant’s, and an hourglass cutie mark. This episode was the first time he was shown prominently enough to be easily spotted without actively looking for him, and so this appears to have been the first time fans noticed and talked about him. Within days, fans had created Doctor Whooves, Last Survivor of Gallopfrey. The usual fanworks followed. Drawings and Photoshopped pictures first, then stories. Time Lords and Terror (see Chapter 16) was a particularly influential one; novella-length, it followed the Tenth Doctor as he accidentally slipped between universes, turned into a pony due to “morphic field resonance,” and took on the show’s main characters as companions. The adventure in the story took a typical Doctor Who approach to absorbing other tales, bringing back the villains of 1986’s My Little Pony: The Movie, a trio of witches and an all-devouring goop called the Smooze, as a coven of Carrionites and their master, the primordial, Void-dwelling, life-and-matter-hating Lovecraftian entity S’müz. Other fanworks followed. There are fanmade animations, mashups of the Friendship Is Magic theme with the Doctor Who theme, even two entirely independent (other than one crossover) fanmade audio drama series, Doctor Whooves and Assistant and Doctor Whooves Adventures. Some are reasonably good as fanworks go, others rather less so. While the level of creative output surrounding Doctor Whooves is, perhaps, unusually high, that it exists is not particularly odd. Fans do strange things, and one of those things is latching onto minor characters and building stories around them. This is neither the first nor last instance of such happening with Friendship Is Magic—indeed, as I discussed in the previous volume, an animation error from the first episode resulted in a walleyed pegasus, dubbed Derpy Hooves by the fans, who dwarfs Doctor Whooves in popularity and serves as the other title character in Doctor Whooves and Assistant. She is actually where this does become unusual, because that first-episode animation error was corrected in subsequent episodes where that particular pegasus appeared—and then, after the online popularity of Derpy Hooves soared, the “error” began being intentionally reproduced in later episodes, leading up to an eventual speaking role. [...] What if a background pony existed as such in a diegetic sense as well as extradiegetic? What, in other words, if she were in some sense invisible to the other characters? Thus we have the story’s main character, Lyra Heartstrings, one of the better-known background ponies in the fandom. As the story opens, she has been living in Ponyville for nearly a year, cursed to be unable to leave the town and to be almost immediately forgotten by anyone she talks to."