I just finished watching the series finale of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

After the crummy episodes in Season 8, and how Game of Thrones completely botched the best-written fantasy show I've ever seen in its terrible final season, I was very wary about how My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic would end. I joked that so long as Twilight Sparkle didn't ride Spike and burn Canterlot to the ground and then get stabbed by Flash Sentry I would at least be less disappointed by the MLP season finale than the GOT one.

I needn't have worried.

The final three episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic were the most satisfying conclusion to a TV show I've ever watched in my entire life, even beating out my perennial favorite finale, Countdown to Destruction, the surprisingly solid and satisfying finale of Power Rangers in Space. For this finale, I had to keep a box of tissues on hand to dab at my eyes. This TV show has meant so much to me over the years, and affected my life more than any other TV show. The history of my life, especially 2014 and 2015, would have turned out much differently if the show didn't exist. But what really sets this one show apart more than every other show I've watched is the fandom and the community. With nearly every other show, once an episode is over, everyone just goes their separate ways and does something else. You're lucky if you maybe get a little fan art every now and then. But for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a community of dedicated fans created art and stories that sometime succeeded the show in quality. Anthropology, Dangerous Business, Besides the Will of Evil, Eternal, Contraptionology and other stories have joined the lists of my favorite stories of all time, and it gives me heartache when I think how so few people in the world will experience the joys that I experienced when I listened to or read those stores.

And then there's the music, which is in a class all of its own. What started as a few fan covers and original songs has ballooned into thousands of songs of all sorts of genres. I think I have more Brony songs than non-Brony songs on my hard drive. It has been an extreme joy over the years to find and discover new, great Brony songs, and I think that a decade or more from now, I'll still be able to sing along to songs like Dragonheart by Aviators, and feel the raw emotion that went into its creation.

A final thought for now: When I was watching the finale, I had the thought of "This is how Andromeda should have ended." Andromeda was also a TV show that, after a fashion, was about one lonely individual learning about the magic of friendship. However, poor writing squandered its potential in season 4, culminating to a season finale that squandered everything the previous seasons were working towards, where that individual takes on his enemy alone, and in the process sees everything he was working towards destroyed, and all his friends die. It was then followed by a completely superfluous 5th season with even worse writing, that culminated in an anti-climactic series finale. I guess my only point is that a lot of TV shows seem to have real difficulty bringing things to a close, making a satisfying conclusion all the more important in its rarity.

And with that, it's over. It feels like I'm living after the ending credits of my life. There's a hole in my life much larger than the previous holes made when previous franchises have ended. Fan creation of content will continue for a time, to be sure, but I'm sure it will slow to a crawl now, and finding good content will be more like raiding a tomb looking for riches than being excited to see fresh, new content come out. Now I'm left with the task of how to divvy up my time, and what sorts of things I should focus on in the next stage of my life.