Looking at the new trailer today (
My Little Pony: Make Your Mark | Official Trailer | Netflix After School), I caught on to one of the things that makes G5 so vapid and flavorless (for me, anyway) — the sameness of the voices. Start up a G4 episode and close your eyes: you have no trouble at all telling which of the main characters is talking. Pinkie's warbling soprano screech, FS's apologetic murmur, AJ's Texas drawl, Rarity's silken Atlantic gurgle, RD's nasal alto bark — they're all as distinctive and different as the characters they were designed for. But the G5 characters look, sound, and act much less distinctively. Just about the only way I can tell them apart is when one of them has a tennis ball on her horn.
When G4 hit the world's screens, people posted graphics comparing the archetypal characters to the Seven Deadly Sins, the Four Horsemen, the Four Galenic humors, the astrological planets, the signs of the zodiac, and so on (pic). No danger of that with G5, where the characters -- and their voices -- differ no more than a bun from a brioche.