feotakahari

I once read a My Little Pony fanfic that was about the author’s idea of cosmic oneness and abandoning frivolity for true enlightenment. I got in an argument with the author about what this meant for my favorite character, the fashion-loving, status-seeking Rarity. Rarity is interested in things that a lot of people consider profoundly unenlightened, and canon MLP is unusual in treating those things as having indirect value in the way they make her happy. Rarity sometimes needs to moderate herself, but she doesn’t need to change, because her desires aren’t inherently wrong or harmful. By discarding those things as unenlightened, I felt that the author was disregarding part of the message of MLP.

In retrospect, I think this is a pretty good metric for whether a path to enlightenment is bullshit. Can an enlightenment person be like Rarity? If the answer is no, then enlightenment is pointless.