If you aren’t a member of Goodreads, you may have missed this hilarious review of Summer Hayes’ The My Little Pony 2007-2008 Collector’s Inventory. Created by Montambo and her friend David, this parody review should give any MLP fan a chuckle.
Montambo is one of the winners of our recent giveaway of the book on Goodreads so she’s set the bar pretty high for future reviewers!
You can enjoy the original review here but in case it gets deleted, I’m reprinting it below for your benefit.
Summer Hayes is a literary genius.
I was planning on reading this, but first I wanted to buy a copy of The Cambridge Companion to The My Little Pony 2007-2008 Collector’s Inventory, so that I understood the manifold literary-historical allusions and the stream-of-consciousness narration.
Jürgen Habermas wrote an interesting essay on Summer Hayes’ oeuvre a few years back in which he posited My Little Pony as a forcible diminution and reappropriation of the male’s psychosexual privilege in Western culture. He further describes an orange, purple-maned, doe-eyed pony as a ‘folding-over-upon-itself’ of the traditional hegemonic phallocentric aggression we find sublimated in our modes of commerce and social exchange. He also says he likes to comb their hair and kiss them before night-night.
I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t note that my favorite work in the Summer Hayes canon is The My Little Pony G1 Collector’s Inventory: An Unofficial Full Color Illustrated Collector’s Price Guide to the First Generation of MLP Including All US Ponies, Playsets and Accessories Released Before 1997, in which she collaborates with the highly underrated Kimberly Shriner, who succeeds in tempering some of Hayes’ most gratuitously high-modern tendencies. Also, this is the first Hayes/Shriner work to address the problematic relationship between accessories/playsets and the notion of subjective pony-selfness which has so confounded post-structuralist thought (see Foucault, for instance); what’s most interesting is that Hayes and Shriner define the All-That-Which-Is-Other-Than-My-Little-Pony as ‘accessory’ and not integral to a symbiotic exchange between subjective ideation and so-called ‘objective’ context. Many little post-equine philosophers have rightly challenged this compartmentalized view, but the Pony/Accessories paradigm offers a rather nice model for isolating a subjective notion of subjectivity itself, as demarcated, for instance, from the My Little Pony Rainbow Corral playset.
Let us not for a minute neglect that fateful modification ‘my little’ in which, firstly, ownership and, then, diminishment are asserted — which purposefully counterpoises egotism (the appropriation of Other) with an implied lacking or insufficiency (little being less than that which is regarded as the normative manifestation of a fixed
— or central — ideation); My Little Pony is therefore defined by its belongingness to or of me (or as an accessory to a grounded a priori self, which is both apart from and the cipher which enters into the strategy of poniness on my behalf) and by its devaluation according to an acknowledged standard inherited by the self from the obscure collaboration of accessory identity (or ‘Otherness’). Thus, the tension which is essential to the MLP claim to existence (or, non-ontologically, to ‘mere’ expression) always already threatens to overcome and undermine the very motivations of that claim, thereby alluding to the futility of possession and the frustrated drive aspiring to transcendent satiation.
Massive bonus points if you can comment in the same style and refute/support the arguments presented!
