Pretty Little Things: Action Figures We Quite Fancy.

#2: Rarity

Like many men,  I had an in-built, latent hatred of My Little Pony. The toys were hideous. Girls would bring their pastel-coloured, deformed, equine abominations to school and brush their matted hair in the playground. It was a Sisyphean task, as anybody can tell you that four inches of nylon does not behave like real hair, and no amount of brushing will stop it from being a knotted, frizzy mess.

In every respect, those ponies were ugly, ugly toys.

But then, in space-year 2010, everything changed.

My Little Pony returned, for the second or third time, and it was new and different and strange. People spoke about it in hushed whispers. Men carried suspicious parcels under their coats. People would give sly winks to each other as they passed in the street.
A year or so later, it’s popularity exploded and everything went nuts: My Little Pony was cool. Grown men, little girls, schoolchildren and university students all joined hands and declared in unison “We love MLP!”

Right, history lesson over. On to the toy.

Here we have Rarity. She is a pony of the blue-eyed, purple-haired variety. You won’t find her type on Dartmoor, that’s for sure. She’s not bad to look at; bright eyes, white fur… violet locks playfully hanging off her shoulders. Really, not much more can be expected of a toy of this kind. It is a vinyl pony, after all.
Perhaps I’m bending the rules here, but what attracts me to this toy is her character, rather than the toy itself. You see, in the cartoons and comics Rarity is ‘the pretty one’. She’s beautiful, popular, wealthy and talented.
In any other series, she’d be a complete bitch. She’d be the antagonist, clashing with the plain-Jane, average title character.

But not Rarity. She’s kind, sweet and generous. She goes above and beyond to help her friends. Surely a fine role model for any young girl, or even boy, for that matter. So when I look at this toy, and fruitlessly run a pink plastic hairbrush through her mane, I’m always reminded that the world isn’t made of character stereotypes, you can find kindness and generosity in anyone. Even a bizarrely-coloured cartoon pony.

Fancy Rating: 5/5 – Rarity gets full points for being a decent toy, but also for giving my jaded, broken heart reason to love again.

“A complete bitch”