So-- I watched the new movie. Like I said in another thread, it's an okay children's movie. But the magic has gone out of Equestria in G5: literally as part of the plot, and figuratively as a deficiency in the world and the story.What's the problem? I think the problem is that the mythic glow that pervaded Faust's pony world from S1E1 on isn't built into the fabric of the G5 world.Faust's long experience with articulating and trying to sell [i]Galaxy Girls[/i] had primed her for setting up a world based on roles and archetypes. The G4 Equestria was— originally, at least — a mythological kingdom ruled over by immortal superbeings who controlled the sun, moon, and stars: an unambiguously good and benevolent goddess of light and order and a somewhat ambivalent and scary goddess of darkness and the subconscious realm of dreams. Pony society was divided into the three primordial castes of Indo-European society and myth: the magic-wielding priest-shamans (Brahmans), the winged warriors, and the muddy peasants. The central characters, the Mane Six, were (like the Galaxy Girls) conceived as representatives of polar-opposite character types: feminine/masculine (Rarity/RD), extrovert/introvert (Pinkie/Twi), chaotic/ordered (ditto), spiritual/material (ditto), mind/body (Twi/RD), nature/culture (Fluttershy/Rarity), city/country (Rarity/AJ) -- and so on and on. It was no wonder that in the early days, when these marvelously conceived and balanced characters and their myth-haunted world first burst onto the internet, people were posting memes representing them as every set of mythic stereotypes and Jungian archetypes from the Seven Deadly Sins to the four Galenic humors (pic).G5 isn't like that. It's just America (or maybe three Americas) with talking horses. The unicorns, pegasi, and earth ponies all have separate Bantustans, so they don't map onto different social roles. They all live on the ground in modern cities with electricity and LED signs: there's no myth-tinged Greco-Roman Cloudsdale in this Equestria. Their technology is boringly identical with our own. (Inexplicably, it doesn't depend on unicorn magic; somehow these hoofed animals are able to assemble microelectronics and punch the buttons on cell phones without any fingers.) The characters all look pretty much the same and speak with identical accents and dialects. They represent sitcom characters, not archetypes. The result is a world devoid of mythic force and fantasy.So that'