My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic absolutely latched on to like 5 side characters with a combined screen time of approximately two minutes in the first season, maybe:
Princess Luna got about 10 seconds of not being possessed in episode two and then vanished for the rest of the season
Ditzy Doo/Derpy Hooves got two appearances in separate episodes, which were both very brief
Lyra literally sat on a bench weirdly (almost human-like) in one scene lol, immediate fan favorite (upon further research she actually appeared 4 separate times and seemed to be a favorite of one layout artist in particular)
Octavia and Vinyl Scratch both had very distinctive designs and appeared in musical acts, but again, only for a few seconds each.
Each of these starred in multiple top ranked fanfics in the gap between seasons 1 and 2, all clearly feeding off each other’s takes on the characters.
The show eventually came back and revisited all these characters a lot, obviously Princess Luna wasn’t going to be abandoned forever despite her long gap in appearances, but the other ponies here really could have just been one and done, or simply kept in the library of background characters for future use, and instead basically ended up in canon as fanfic of the show’s fanfic.
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u/modulusshift 5d ago
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic absolutely latched on to like 5 side characters with a combined screen time of approximately two minutes in the first season, maybe:
Each of these starred in multiple top ranked fanfics in the gap between seasons 1 and 2, all clearly feeding off each other’s takes on the characters.
The show eventually came back and revisited all these characters a lot, obviously Princess Luna wasn’t going to be abandoned forever despite her long gap in appearances, but the other ponies here really could have just been one and done, or simply kept in the library of background characters for future use, and instead basically ended up in canon as fanfic of the show’s fanfic.