AKA: a bunch of my collected random thoughts, mostly previously posted on Reddit. Having previously touched on this (see Pony Notes #1), the sixth-season episode No Second Prances brought out a whole lot of emotions and feelings, and once again I thought I’d (over-)share. The original post was very well received on Reddit, but some of my phrasing was a bit clunky and my comments a bit unclear in places, and so I’ve also appended some of my replies from the thread where I try to clarify things a bit more. I’ve stripped out any of the comments from other people that I was replying to, as I don’t have their permission to share.

(Obvious spoilers if you’ve not seen No Second Prances – we won’t get to it with a proper Ponywatching recap for probably a couple of years yet!)

…So, that final scene really struck close to home. (Alright, not the final scene, I don’t mean I was especially moved by curious Cranky and cranky Celestia). So… here goes.

I suffer from depression. Despite being a successful and really generally quite happy person – I’ve two wonderful children, a good job – I spent a lot of my life going through extreme spells of depressive behaviour, including suicide attempts.

(This isn’t a cry for help – I’m on medication and pretty stable right now. I’m just filling in the personal background here.)

Now, I understand from my time here that quite a few bronies have the same issues, so apologies if I’m going over old ground or opening up old wounds, that’s not the intention at all. But here’s my experience as it pertains to No Second Prances.

I’ve seen a few critiques already of that scene from a number of points of view. When Trixie decided she was going to do the potentially fatal trick anyway, despite knowing the likely outcome, people are asking various things – was she really suicidal? Did Twilight and Starlight realise? If so, did they just assume she wouldn’t go through with it? And so on.

But from my own experience, the very essence of depression and its accompanying suicidal urges is that those urges make no sense. They come out of nowhere, often prompted by incredibly minor setbacks that one would ordinarily laugh off. They were ridiculous. And they were extremely dangerous, for one reason that anyone who’s had encounters with depression will instantly understand: if you’re the one having them, they make perfect sense at that moment. Like, ending it all seems completely rational, to the point that it appears an acceptable and even preferable outcome among several possible outcomes for whatever dumb thing you’re about to do.

And this is where Trixie comes in. I really do think that was beautifully handled. She didn’t necessarily want to kill herself, she just wasn’t all that bothered if she did, because at that moment, it seemed like a viable alternative to figuratively dying on stage and heading off, alone, in her “messy” wagon, to the next town and the next town and the next town, forever.

When I tried to kill myself, contradictory though it sounds, I wasn’t actually actively trying to kill myself. It was always more about me doing something incredibly, stupidly dangerous, and being completely apathetic as to the outcome. Not even curiosity, or the thrill of living on the edge, or anything like that – just a great big “oh, whatever”.

And yet oddly I never really wanted to die as such, I just wasn’t that bothered. My doctor said – somewhat brutally, but she’s right – that if I actually wanted to be dead, I’d have just killed myself without any of this cry for help stuff, and the fact that I didn’t – even without an explicit cry for help – showed that deep down, somewhere, I still cared what happened. And so Trixie’s would-be last words struck a huge chord too:

  If you’re out there, and you still want to be friends… let’s be great and powerful together?

That little glimmer of hope speaks volumes, because at the end of the day, suicide is so stupid, it’s such a waste, a needless, stupid waste. If people just took a moment to step back and realise how stupid it all was… Of course, if you’re going through a depressive episode, the whole point is that you can’t take a moment to step back and realise how stupid it all is, and that’s how people end up pointlessly, stupidly dead.

I’m reminded of two things. One, from Steinbeck’s Cannery Row – the watchman who, not really thinking through what he’s saying, threatens to commit suicide and then sadly feels he has to go through with it when nobody seems to care. Two, from an essay by Anthony McGowan in The Nightwatchman (a cricket magazine, of all things):

“Many years ago I recall watching a programme about the Scotland Yard Black Museum. A grizzled old detective was talking about suicides – specifically those who threw themselves off one of the London bridges into the swirling murk of the Thames. He said that they always do it for one of two reasons – for love or for money. And, he went on, his rheumy old eyes staring straight at the camera, you could tell which by looking at their fingers. The bankrupts and the petty fraudsters who jumped would always have clean, unmarked hands. But those who jumped because they were thwarted in love – the jilted, the rejected – had fingers torn and bloodied, nails ripped and shredded, often down to the bone. For, as soon as they hit the cold water, they would realise that in fact life was worth living without Francine from Accounts or Rod the photocopier guy.”

Was Trixie “suicidal” in the way it’s traditionally portrayed? No, of course not, but then if I had managed to “successfully” take an overdose or jump off the bridge, people would have said the same things about me – he seemed fine, a bit down or sullen but not outrageously so. And that’s why this really struck a chord with me; Trixie was depressed, and could have ended up killing herself, for absolutely no good reason.

I’m past that phase now, or at least I sincerely hope I am – it’s been over a year since I started taking the antidepressants and I’ve had no suicidal thoughts at all. And I’ve said in other threads that I credit MLP for helping me stick it out the last few months when things were getting serious, and helping give me strength to seek the help I needed. But you know what? If this episode had been around back then, I think it would have hit me even more powerfully, and even more positively. I might even have sought help even sooner, because honestly, some of that scene was like looking in a sodding mirror, and it wasn’t a particularly flattering look.

It’s never a good idea. There are always friends or potential friends out there.

Good luck, Trixie.

Well, the above is purely my own experience, y’know? I think – as with Inspiration Manifestation and Tanks for the Memories – I feel there’s a subtext (or that it’s possible to plausibly read a subtext) there that my daughter didn’t need to pick up on to “get” the episode, in full, even while at the same time I’m marvelling at just how close to the bone this one cut for me. Even if it was completely accidental, and the whole suicide thing is nothing more than elaborate headcanon, well, it works for me.

Or, to try and phrase it a bit better, the show excels in working on numerous levels, not least making sure the story makes sense for the target audience while also not officially endorsing or shutting off any genuinely plausible alternative reading, however radical. Whether it was or wasn’t “meant” to be read a particular way is something only the writers could really say for sure, and without that kind of clarification (which is never likely to be forthcoming and doesn’t need to be – indeed, probably shouldn’t be, if we’re treating this show as subjectively-received Art), well…?

tl;dr: I thought it worked beautifully either way, which is why I still love this show.

It’s all about interpretation at the end of the day, isn’t it? I mean, we all take from it what we take from it, even if some of the personal headcanons that fly around – subtexts, allusions, ships – are less plausible/more stretchy than others (and even that judgement is itself subjective, I guess). I think it’s great that the show manages to work under the weight of different interpretations. The episode works absolutely fine – hell, I’d say is meant to work absolutely fine because that’s the best way of reading it – if Trixie is in no physical danger at all and “only” beating herself up for being an idiot and screwing everything up, works absolutely fine if she’s having a highly public meltdown in front of a baffled crowd, and, yes, for me, the episode works if Trixie is having a depressive episode with potentially very bad consequences. But the impressive thing to me wasn’t the potentially going to a very dark place (which may be accidental – like I say, it just struck a massive chord because that’s exactly what it was like), but that the episode itself doesn’t actually rule that in or out, and works fine either way.

If I thought the only reading was the suicide one, and a particular version of it at that, I’d have been disappointed, even though the portrayal (to me) was impressively accurate.

No, the point of me telling that long and tedious story was just to give a bit more insight into what a suicide attempt is actually like for a manic depressive, at least as far as I got. There’re no “GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD” histrionics, no long notes to loved ones, you literally just fail to give a shit what happens if you walk in traffic or take an impromptu swim in the lake or, sure, down a load of random pills. You might not even recognise it as a suicide attempt until, for instance, you wake up in a fucking ambulance covered in neon pink vomit and immediately regret your poor choices. But if you don’t wake up in that ambulance, you get marked down as a suicide, and don’t get that…

[RELEVANCE KLAXON]

…second chance.

ANYWAY. If the writers didn’t mean it that way, they didn’t mean it that way, I’m not going to be the crazy person who insists on the ABSOLUTE TRUTH of a particular reading or a favourite ship or that Catcher in the Rye foretells 9/11 or something (I’ve had enough crazy already, ta.) But if it’s left open to interpretation and works well enough under different ones, that’s even more awesome.

[IRRELEVANCE KLAXON]

(Like the films of Kieslowski, which are basically a set of great stories that are nothing but massively open to interpretation, and – perhaps as a result – are wonderful.)

I’m definitely waffling now.

I wouldn’t go that far [as to say Season 6 has been the best season to date], but I was starting to worry the show was coasting a bit until this one, which really felt like a proper solid episode. Whether or not it actually meant to veer into the darker waters I was talking about, well, Trixie’s issues and what all this says about her (and Starlight, and Twilight) are worth serious consideration in any event, and the show that doesn’t flinch from showing stuff like that – redemption isn’t a magic handwave, Trixie and Starlight do still hold grievances legitimate and otherwise, Twilight isn’t an omniscient friendship teacher… That’s the show I love.