Guys, gals, inbetweens, i'm curious, did you used to watch any "girl shows" before MLP?

Oh, I can answer this one!

About a year before I watched MLP, I watched the Tinker Bell movies, after seeing a bit of the first one on TV and thinking the animation looked decent.

When I finally saw MLP, the similarities were uncanny. Fairies control nature according to the talent assigned to them at birth, Tink has a group of distinct-looking friends with different talents, and obviously they have a queen. It made me wonder if controlling nature is a recurring theme in girl shows.

Such talents include taking care of animals,

Flying fast to control the weather,

And dirt handlin'.

Except that the garden fairy hates mud and can be quite prissy. As far as girliness is concerned, these are NOT Barbie movies. I tried watching the first 10~20 minutes of a Barbie movie on TV, and it was ba-a-a-d. The first Tinker Bell movie was indeed filled with clichés and is probably the worst one in that regard, but the theme is still that Tink is kind of a tomboy compared to the others, engineering and building things with her own hands.

After the first one, the movies get much more adventurous and interesting. The alpha bitch from the first movie gets a pretty good redemption and we see some world-ending conflicts that fit the lore quite well. The characters aren't anywhere near as good as MLP's and the songs are pretty much what you would expect, but they only serve to open and close the movie. They are not musicals like the Barbie movie, thank god.

We don't get to see much of the secondary characters since these are movies and Tink is always the main character, but the Pixie Hollow Games extra focused on said garden fairy. And I guess that's what people expected the Equestria Games to be like.

I quite liked these 6 movies and 2 extras, and I'm sad that there won't be more due to declining sales. I would recommend them to MLP fans, it's the closest thing to MLP I've ever seen. ...I must note that I am rather impervious to most kinds of blandness/badness, resulting in my formerly being one of the most consistently positive voices in MLP discussions. It is quite probable that my opinion of the Tinker Bell movies and the following examples also stem from that fact, and may be more positive than the average. I have not found discussions regarding these movies, so my only point of reference is my own. Moving into the realm of anime, I guess I've watched a few shoujos.

Kaleido Star is considered a shoujo, but it felt much more like a shounen to me. Got all these crazy training sequences and stuff, plus no romance. I liked that one quite a bit.

Tokyo Mew Mew was surprisingly violent for a mahou shoujo, besides featuring some morally ambiguous villains.

So far I've watched two seasons of Sailor Moon. This one I made sure to watch around one episode per day, and it was quite enjoyable. Sometimes it's pretty good, sometimes it's comically cringeworthy. I like it more than the manga, though. I don't get the manga, it's weird.

I was holding off on Sailor Moon until I could watch it in parallel with Saint Seiya for maximum throwbackness, but unfortunately there are no good subtitles available for SS.

/r/mylittlepony Thread