Over the past year or so, I've looked on as my male (if admittedly slightly gay) friends succumbed one by one to a baffling craze that was sweeping the Internet - the My Little Pony cartoon. Respectable, talented FA artists fell to drawing and writing about complex mythologies set in places with names like Ponyville, and some haven't emerged since. Thinking that I actually had some things I wouldn't stoop to, I resisted for a long time, but this weekend curiosity got the better of me.

I watched an episode of My Little Pony. Lesson Zero, in fact, which kjorteo had been trying to get me to watch for ages - and I have recorded my reactions for the benefit of others.

Save me now

The episode opens with a purple pony who might be blue, called Twilight (I cheated in getting this bit of information, reading it from the Youtube episode description). She's merrily trotting around her luxurious tree-apartment getting her personal assistant, a diminutive dragon called Spike, to check off a recursive list of checklists as she steps through them in an accent and personality that instantly makes me feel like I'm watching an equine version of Sex and the City.

Fortunately, one title sequence later, any handbags and shoes on the list have already been dealt with, and the next thing on the calendar for the day is cupcakes. The two of them arrive at the bakery to find the baker-pony dashing about carrying other cupcakes and boxes around on her mad twirly haircut. It was at this point that I wondered how these creatures with four legs that end in blank plastic hooves could hope to manipulate anything with more precision than just kicking it across the room, but my question was answered a couple of seconds later. Spike reaches for a cupcake and is suddenly surrounded by a pink sparkly bubble and whisked away as Twilight's unicorn horn glows - it seems that they have telekinetic powers to make up for their lack of usable limbs, like Homestar Runner or Psycho Mantis. Overall it seems a fair trade.

Anyway. The first signs of Twilight's underlying mental disorder are hinted at here, as she complains because two of the cupcakes are touching each other and "I don't want anypony to be like somepony else is getting more icing". We're two minutes in and my urge to slaughter things is already lodged at a level for which I hadn't realized I had the capacity. The baker-pony obligingly just puts on a show of humouring this clearly mad customer as Twilight floats a spatula over to herself and whittles the mass of red icing down like a Chewing the Fat 'Angry Man' sketch until there's a microscopic amount per cake, covering Spike and making him lick the mass of spare icing off himself in a fantastic Tasmanian Devil manoeuvre.

Back at the house, Twilight panics as she remembers that she hasn't sent a letter to Princess Celestia this week - she's meant to send a regular report describing something she's learned about friendship and the whole programme suddenly turns into a dystopian sort of false smile-land where not being happy or useful enough leads to swift, quiet termination. The actual punishment for failing to send this letter isn't specifically mentioned, though it's said that Princess Celestia holds everyone's fate in her hooves - a real predicament because as I detailed earlier, you can't really hold many fates in those hooves before they all just sort of slip off. Twilight asks "Do you know what teachers to do students who don't pass?" and has a mad vision of herself being sent back to pony kindergarten, which is pronounced with a D - I quite like how Spike is the straight man here to her insane frenzy, equally trying to reason with her and making aside glances of utter contempt.

In a panic, she gets her organizer out and... balls, I actually laughed at that. She horn-summoned her calendar over to herself while Spike was still attached to it and he whacked against the side of the lectern. What are you doing to me? And we've only been going five minutes. Perhaps, across all tastes and artistic media, watching others in pain is always slightly amusing.

Anyway, she goes out to find someone who has friendship problems that need solving, so that she has something to write about. Instantly hearing a scream from a pony who I think she says is called Rarity, she runs up to the nearby house that looks like a demented carousel, heroically kicks her door in and pulls a terrifying face as she happily realizes she's in some manner of distress. Rarity, who has a very in-and-out slippery accent from that place that doesn't really have a name but is what happens when Americans try to imitate how British people speak, has lost some sort of inconsequential accoutrement but then finds it again in the shortest mystery ever, and Twilight has no choice but to leave her alone to spend the rest of the day prancing about with ribbons and fainting.

Certain that someone else will need her shortly, her next encounter is with a pony boy called Rainbow Dash who is furiously demolishing a barn with the aid of just goggles, the power of flight and his Pride Parade hair. However, the owner of the barn, a pony in a Speed Racer helmet called Applejack who has the accent that happens when people from Britain try to imitate how Americans speak, explains that he's just knocking it down so they can put up a new one, as the kamikaze rainbow-pony concludes with a vertical dive-bomb which causes a sort of atomic gayplosion (a scene which I also, much to my chagrin, also found absolutely flippin' hilarious).

Trotting away from that waste of time, the next of the ponyfolk she heads for is Fluttershy, who got her name from a photo printing website, and the... oh my goodness. I've just, honestly, watched a cute plastic yellow pony breaking a bear's neck, complete with a rather sickening bone-snapping sound (and a Strong Bad Japanese cartoon background). Four seconds later, though, just after Twilight has moped off, it's revealed that it wasn't a fight after all but that she was just trying to massage a knot out of the bear's shoulder, though personally I haven't heard of spine-snapping as a normal treatment for this.

Unable to find a problem, there follows a sort of mental breakdown where she talks schizophrenically to her own reflection in a pool, exactly like Gollum, and watches a group of childreswfsidfsdfAAAAGH! This... this programme isn't right. Why are you making me watch this? This is just... demented. I'm writing to my MP.

I had started cataloguing Twilight's impressive collection of disturbing expressions, but I realized here that I was never going to keep up. Fortunately, Spike arrives to slap her to her senses, and at a pony-picnic somewhere else, the not-British one finds that she's forgotten the plates, but is fortunately able to magic up a chaise-longue for short notice fainting purposes. I thought that this was going to have some relevance, but it doesn't - Twilight arrives, her mane frazzled and with the cold grin of a killer on her face, and tells them about her near-due letter, only for them quite rightly to tell her that she's overreacting like a complete girl. She leaves in a huff via teleportation.

He'll kill you while you sleep-le

Twilight, by now clearly mad as a Dopefish, decides to engineer a friendship problem of her own, and telefrags the children's ball as they're in the middle of playing with it. She advances on them twitching like a maniac on Red Bull, and offers them... Christ almighty. It's the equine version of Uncle Feedle. The children - who are called Sweetybell, Scoodaloo and Applebloom, proving that our world hasn't quite yet plumbed the true depths of humiliating names - politely go along with it at first and then wisely run away very fast indeed. They only get into Twilight's planned dustcloud Beano-fight when they argue about which one of them has to stay and risk being in the vicinity of this nutcase to play with the monstrous voodoo-teddy. Then she spurts hearts out from her horn and hypnotizes them into loving it, symbolized by their eyes being somewhat disturbingly replaced with hearts.

Realizing she can't halt the newly refuelled punch-up, she calls on a nearby monosyllabic pony who I think is called Big Mac, who plucks the undead monster-doll out of the fight and falls under its curse as well, causing an growing tidal wave of ponies as everyone in the entire world chases after it. It eventually lands near Rainbow Dash at the picnic, and he... oh, it's a 'she', sorry about all that - I just looked at the comments. I wonder why I thought she was male - I'm sure her voice sounds less feminine than the rest, but that's like saying Gilbert Gottfried's voice is less annoying than sandpapering the back of your own head. Anyway, the eye-heart infection almost gets her as well - however, in a moment oddly reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Twilight appears to cover all of their eyes and screams not to look at it as chaos breaks out around them and darkness covers the world.

The sun sets and Celestia descends from the heavens like an avenging Vidal Sassoon advert, undoing the spell and breaking up the plague that had gripped the land. She then summons Twilight away to the library for extermination, melting down and being reformed as individual little Kinder Egg toys. From here, at least, things are unsurprising - she's not going to be punishing her after all, and they've all learned to take people's feelings seriously lest they become mad as a bag of spanners due to overstressing themselves, and so on and so on. It ends with them all composing a summary of what they've learned to send to her almighty postbox - closing with Spike trying to editorialize the letter and then giving us exactly the kind of withered look that I would expect from someone condemned to eternity existing in a twisted dreamscape full of squeaking, sparkly plastic girls.

So there it is - I now don't have the proud male state of "not having watched an episode of My Little Pony". You can tell it was made by someone from the Internet - I went in expecting a girly cartoon about plastic horses and got Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence. When I first saw the artwork style I thought it was extraordinarily ugly, and the uncannily creepy expressions they can pull doesn't exactly help with that, but in motion there's a certain odd charm to the style that's different from the angsty, angular cartoons that I thought existed exclusively today - I liked the way that throughout the episode, the sun wrenched itself through the sky like an arthritic clock. If I had a daughter (or a son without a sense of school self-preservation), I'm happy to say that I wouldn't mind watching this with them, up to a certain dosage - but only after we'd run out of Bagpuss.

Actually I might watch another one