So, Derpy Hooves appeared in My Little Pony again—and not glancingly, or as a background cameo.

Nope! She walked into the doorway and derped at the camera, because she was going to be the new contestant in the relay race tryouts—and we saw her right alongside the other ponies, derping away as if she’d never left, with the big difference that she had made a decision. She wasn’t just an onlooker: she was stepping up to help Ponyville, and that decision is not unlike the decision to include her again, after she’d been exiled for her looks and clumsiness. She’s back! She didn’t let those things stop her. There she was, center stage, because the team only had Bulk Biceps and Fluttershy left, and they needed her.

The great thing is, it totally defuses the objections to having her there, without changing her in the least.

Derpy’s possibly mentally retarded and certainly has strabismus, but is beloved and has a good heart and is utterly adorable. We don’t demand she has to be clever or look sharp and never did, and it’s not really her derps that won our hearts, that’s just what distinguishes her.

Until they could both show her good nature AND have a punching bag set up to be a bigger fool, they couldn’t feature her ‘cos they sort of had to be beyond reproach thanks to a certain irritating complainer.

Now, ‘Bulk Biceps’ (hate the name but it DOES lampshade his new role, doesn’t it?) is the punching bag. He is a vain blowhard who can barely fly and panicks at harmless things and is clumsier (or at least does more damage) than Derpy. Next to him, Derpy is just lovely to look at, and otherwise totally unchanged.

When she appears, it’s a GAG and brony-food, because nobody expects she is going to win it for the team. It’s basically, ‘wow, the derpy pony is going to try! That’s brave even though she’s probably going to break the other half of the course that Bulk Biceps didn’t already break’. It’s definitely not a ‘yay, now a win is assured!’ moment and they aren’t positioning her to be a strong capable example of winninghood.

(hmph. I wrote a teasing shout-out to Winningverse before the canon show did. So there!)

I don’t like that they didn’t trust us with Derpy without having to make an Old Spice Pony douchebag jerkface (who could only be male, because you can’t mock a less powerful thing so brutally and get away with it), but they did make a better punching bag and so now we can have Derpy because she’s not the biggest target anymore. I should be grateful to Bulk including his obnoxious name for making that possible.