fluttershy > rainbow dash > applejack > pinkie pie > twilight sparkle > rarity. spike is scrappy doo-tier
I'm only on the second season though so I don't have much to contribute to a high-IQ discussion. I will say that so far MLP is the best children's cartoon I've seen since spongebob
/mlpol/ is also hilarious if you like imageboards
At the time MLP G4 came out it was really constructed with every other cartoon that was out at the time, since most were focused on slapstick. MLP actually implemented character development, which was an innovation for western cartoons at the time. I'm no cartoon scholar so I'm probably wrong that MLP's slice-of-life character development was an innovation, I doubt no early 00's cartoons had that, but for some reason, there was this really weird cartoon shortage between the years 2005-2011ish, so MLP felt really fresh.
I'm not sure how well it holds up against modern cartoons. I've heard Owl House and the frog girl cartoons were pretty good. Not to mention 2010s classics like Adventure Time. Last modern cartoon I tried watching was Star vs The Forces of Evil and the plot was awful, so I dropped it after S2 or S3 I can't remember. Regardless, seeing how low the bar is set, justly or not, for cartoon shows, it probably still holds up lol. At least in the early seasons.
On that note, has anyone seen the G5 movie or netflix show? The movie's animation was great, but the plot was really mediocre, it felt like a dumbed-down Zootopia. And Sunny was a terrible protagonist, what's up with modern writers not knowing how character arcs are supposed to work, it's not even that the character arc is bad. It's the fact they don't even give your friggin' protagonist a character arc. Maybe that sort of writing innovation has worked, somewhere, but I can't say I'd ever seen it competently done.
Anyways, the G5 movie was worse than all Equestria Girls movies. Well, it's on part with Legends of Everfree, to be honest. Fight me.