Franchise logo from 2022 onward.
The fifth incarnation of the long-running My Little Pony franchise and Sequel Series to My Little Pony (Generation 4), specifically My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
Collectors unofficially refer to this incarnation of the My Little Pony franchise as "G5", which began with the CGI movie My Little Pony: A New Generation.
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Animation
- My Little Pony: A New Generation (2021): A movie that premiered on Netflix. Premieres the setting of this new generation as well the new characters:
- My Little Pony: Tell Your Tale (2022-current): A YouTube mini-series done in traditional animation which features the characters getting into misadventures.
- My Little Pony: Make Your Mark (2022-2023): The official TV series of the series, following on from where "A New Generation" left off and continues the further adventures of the new cast. Six chapters have aired as of December 2023, the first of which is an hour-long special.
- My Little Pony: Winter Wishday (2022): An hour long Christmas special which is the third chapter in the Make Your Mark story.
- My Little Pony: Bridlewoodstock (2023): The third hour long special featuring Sunny and her friends heading to a music festival. It is the beginning of Make Your Mark's fourth chapter.
- My Little Pony: Secrets of Starlight (2023): The fourth hour long special and the second to be Christmas themed. It is the final episode of chapter six.
Comics
- My Little Pony: Sunny's Day (2022): The first in a series of "I Can Read" comics for young children. Sunny spends the day with Izzy wandering around Maretime Bay.
- My Little Pony: Izzy Comes Home (2022): Izzy and Sunny return to Bridlewood to visit Izzy's favorite places.
- My Little Pony (2022) (2022-2023): A comic series from IDW Publishing that premiered in May of 2022.
- My Little Pony 40th Anniversary Special: An IDW one-shot comic celebrating the 40th anniversary of the My Little Pony franchise. It will contain three stories with one of them involving Sunny and her friends learning about the history of Dream Valley and the ponies who lived in it.
- My Little Pony Bridlewoodstock: A one-shot comic tying in with Make Your Mark's Bridlewoodstock special.
- My Little Pony Camp Bighoof: An IDW mini-series. Sunny and her friends take over an old campsite to teach young ponies how to control their magic.
- My Little Pony Black, White, and Blue: A one-shot comic starring Misty Brightdawn as she wakes up one day to discover nearly all the color in Equestria has vanished.
- My Little Pony Kenbucky Roller Derby: A mini-series where Sunny and her friends form a rollerskating team to enter a tournament.
- My Little Pony Mane Event: A one-shot comic involving the gang having problems with their manes.
- My Little Pony: Set Your Sail: A mini series taking place in the ocean. Sunny and her friends head to the undersea kingdom of the Seaponies after receiving a message from their queen.
- My Little Pony: Sister Switch (2023): Zipp and Pipp decide to switch lives for the day only to find out how difficult each other has it.
- My Little Pony: Detective Hitch (2023): A comic for young children. Sunny and Izzy have gone missing and Hitch and Zipp must work together to find them.
Video Games
- My Little Pony: A Maretime Bay Adventure (May 2022): A mysterious pony is sabotaging the Maretime Bay Day Celebration and Sunny must track down the saboteur before the celebration is ruined.
- My Little Pony World (November 2022): A mobile app game. Players select one of the Mane Five while playing mini games and exploring Equestria.
- My Little Pony Mane Merge (December 2022): A mobile app game. A dark curse is infecting the land of Equestria and Sunny and her friends must find a way to stop it.
- My Little Pony A Zephyr Heights Mystery (May 2024): A sequel to A Maretime Bay Adventure and the second game to be released for consoles.
Other
- My Little Pony: Virtual Magic (2022): An Augmented Reality by Quantum Storey; combining a hardcover book, App and VR google for smartphones telling the events of My Little Pony: A New Generation and Izzy Moonbow's backstory.
- My Little Pony: The Podcast (2022): An official podcast hosted by Pipp Petals as she talks about her friends and life around Maretime Bay.
- My Little Pony: Sunny Starscout's Book of Adventure (2023): A journal that explores the lives of Sunny and her friends.
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Tropes that apply to Generation 5 in general
- Artistic License – Biology: G5 ponies have a heart-shaped mark on the bottoms of their hooves, which is supposed to be reminiscent of the "frog" on the hooves of real-life horses. However, on real-life horses, the pointed end of the frog points forward, whereas on G5 ponies, the point of the heart shape points backwards. This becomes significant in The Stinger, where we see an earth pony foal leaving glowing heart-shaped hoofprints.
- Art-Shifted Sequel: G4's cartoons all use two-dimensional, stylized Flash animation. Most of G5, by contrast, uses more detailed 3D models with more realistic anatomies (with the comics and Tell Your Tale as the only major 2D exceptions).
- Breaking Old Trends:
- Prior generations of My Little Pony were Alternate Continuities to each other. This is set in the same universe as Friendship Is Magic.
- While there have been important male characters in the franchise before, G5's Hitch Trailblazer is the first male pony to be a main character and a member of the central cast.
- Distant Sequel: The G5 movie and shows are set in the same continuity as My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, but long after the original show's events have passed into legend. The events and characters of G4 are remembered dimly and not entirely accurately, pony society has altered significantly from the highly integrated and expansive Equestria of the previous generation, and the movie's annual calls the events of G4 "Ancient Equestria".
- Fantastic Racism: A central part of the setting's conflict comes from the fact that the three main pony types do not like or trust each other. Getting them to willingly work together is one of the main tasks the main characters have to manage.
- Happy Ending Override: The utopian Equestria that Twilight and her friends create at the end of Friendship is Magic, with all sorts of creatures living in harmony with ponies, has long since collapsed and become forgotten by G5.
- Legendary in the Sequel: By G5's time period, the main characters of G4 have become legendary heroes known as the Guardians of Harmony.
- Magnet Hands: Ponies regularly grab things with their hooves, which seem to simply stick to whatever they're handling and give enough dexterity to do things like type into phones. This is particularly notable in light of earlier generations mostly avoiding this in favor of ponies handling objects with their mouths.
- Power Crystal: One of the primary differences between how magic works in G5 versus G4 is that its presence centers on three crystals, one for each pony type, being assembled and active. As long as harmony exists among the pony races, the crystals are fused into a single glowing, floating gem, and sustain the magic of the world.
- Revision: G5 treats earth ponies as, unlike pegasi and unicorns, lacking magical abilities even after The Magic Comes Back until they develop a whole new form of magic. While G4 earth ponies also lacked inherent and clearly defined magical abilitiesnote, it generally depicted them as having some form of magic insofar, as losing it had a real effect on them when it was taken away by magic-stealing entities.
- Sequel Series: Unlike previous generation shifts in the My Little Pony franchise, G5 is set in the same world as Friendship is Magic, only some untold amount of time in the very distant future.
- Series Continuity Error:
- Nature being finely controlled by ponies is a major element in Generation 4, with ponies using magic to control the weather, plant growth, the day-night cycle and so on, and it's established that these don't work without someone making them — the moment someone stops actively controlling the sun and moon, for example, they hang still in the sky until set back into motion. In Generation 5, despite magic having vanished for generations, all these things continue to function without explanation.
- G4's cutie marks also magic-reliant — they usually vanish if a character's magic is removed — and appear on both flanks. In G5, they continue to appear without magic but also only turn up on one flank; no particular reason is given for either change.
- The Friendship is Magic episode "Molt Down" established that dragons are born wingless and get their wings at puberty. In the Make Your Mark premiere, Sparky the dragon is born with wings. To date, no explanation for that has been offered.
- Soft Reboot: While G5 is in the same universe as Friendship Is Magic, it's set an unspecified but very long time after its events, after most of G4's history has been lost to time and the mystery of what happened to it takes a back seat to exploring the new cast and setting.
- Vestigial Empire: Compared to the previous generation where Equestria was for the most part the most dominant territory on their continent which stretched from one coastline to another and encompassed a number of biomes from forests, jungles, marshes, deserts and frozen tundras that most of the time Ponies had to travel by train. Equestrias' population in Generation Five has been reduced to such a number that there's only enough Ponies to comfortably populate two townships and a single city all of which are located next to a single coastline that are all within at least a few days walking distance from each-other.
