It’s been almost a month since I released my review of the season 5 finale, and for once in this post series’ history, my hiatus between seasons has actually lasted without being artificially extended by delaying posts’ releases. While my reviews of the season 3, 4, and 5 premieres had all been written several weeks before their releases, I still haven’t started writing my review of the season 6 premiere, and I’ll release it on the first Friday after it’s finished because delaying posts under the illusion of a hiatus is silly.

It’ll be a while before I get bored enough to resume my episode reviews, or probably work on any significant creative projects at all. This is because I got an offer for a new house accepted a few days ago, and I’ve spent the past few days and will spend much of the next month preparing to move in. This is going to sound dorky, but writing my review of Castle Sweet Castle early in season 5 has genuinely helped me prepare for this inevitable future event. Once I’ve moved and settled in, presumably around mid-January, then I can think about starting the next leg of my journey through MLP:FiM.

OK, I’ll admit it: everything after this point is just a bunch of random rambling. 2022 was in many ways a difficult year for me: my parents got separated, I went through many periods of frustration with a job that I want to quit but am not sure how, I caught COVID-19 for the first time, and I felt increasingly isolated from the rest of the world. The two main good things that happened took months of stagnation to even become possible: I got my own car and, after a miraculous stroke of luck, I got a new house to move into. Aside from this, ponies were the main thing that helped me get through this year, and for that I am very grateful.

One inevitable annoyance of working on a long-term project is looking back on the earliest installments and going “ugh, this sucks”. The further I progress through my reviews of the show, the more I will need to restrain myself from rewriting my early reviews. Whenever I look back on my review of a season 1 episode, I keep thinking about how I barely glossed over most of it and could have gone in a lot more detail and said more intelligent things. But the rational part of me knows to accept imperfections in my old work, as begrudging as it may be. It’s like I said in a Homestuck post from 2016: “I’ll probably look back on THESE posts and think they could’ve been a lot better, but for now, as far as I’m concerned they are supreme masterpieces that I am totally in love with.” 2016 me was wrong about many things, but that wasn’t one of them.

Aside from episode reviews and a few chiptune covers of songs from the show (like this), there’s one more MLP project I made this year that I never thought I would make. Two weeks ago, I finished my first ever MLP fanfic, one that’s on a topic I had never expected myself to write a fic about: Rarity being transgender (specifically, male-to-female). It was a difficult fic to write, but I also had a lot of fun with it, and people have told me it’s both accurate to the experience of being transgender and accurate to the show’s presentation and style, which is good because that’s exactly what I wanted this fic to be. I used to scoff at transgender headcanons, but now I think it’s really cool when people have them, and they’re fun ways to connect to or give further insight into a character. This likely won’t be the last fanfic I write, because that’s the sort of person I’ve chosen to become.

While my thoughts on transgender topics have long been complicated and mixed, I’m now at a point where I pretty much get what it means and have fully accepted a difficult truth: Transgender people are real. I know it’s hard for many people to accept, but they are real, and they’ve always been real. Anyone who denies they’re real either doesn’t know any better or actively suppresses things that they know deep down are true, and I’m proud to say I’m now at a point where I could rant about how mind-numbingly stupid it is when people try to deny that transgender people are real.

Wow, this post got way off topic. But I guess it’s in my nature to write unfocused walls of text at any opportunity.