I meet Chidi, the ethics professor from The Good Place. Only... he's turned cerise or deep magenta, almost plum. Weird looking--people come in lots of colors, but not this. And unlike melanin or sunburn, it's an even tone, even his palms and soles maroon. Like he's been spray-painted!

But the professor acts as if he's always been this way. As if everyone's spray-painted random colors...

He tells me "I'm in love. It may be just a spell, but I have no choice."

I guess we'll find out. Here comes his girlfriend...

Weird! She comes in a little pony-driven cart like a miniature Conestoga wagon. She's in the middle of a whole herd of ponies, skinny and small. They have odd, diverse manes in strange colors--very My Little Pony, but more buzzcuts, mohawks and zebroid manes than that TV show's generally femme styles. And they keep their tails bobbed or tied, revealing lean butts and long legs.

Curiously, the very cutest ponies are in the middle of the herd around the carriage. Round them huddle dumpier wannabes; real uglies orbit, Plutos far from the sun of her regard.

Maybe it is an attractiveness spell... one that spills over onto others.

Chidi's love, the Mistress of the Herd, looks as strange as him. Stranger. A brown girl with a huge wedge of curly maroon/auburn hair; like the ponies of her herd or a Minoan statuette, she's slender & small, with huge eyes and an upturned nose/snout and no chin--in fact, she's basically a pony herself, reared upright.

I find her face cute one second, funny-looking the next. But her aura is consistently compelling.

Am I sensing what pulled Chidi in? Is it what lets her rule the herd? What IS that?

And... can I develop it?

• The Good Place and My Little Pony collide: well, both shows teach ethics lessons--on The Good Place, Chidi tutors Eleanor in ethics and episodes embody ethical dilemmas; each My Little Pony show is a friendship lesson Twilight has to sum up for her tutor Celestia. Both shows assert goodness isn't innate but a learned skill--so why not teach it?
• Chidi: The NY Times featured Chidi in a piece on Black Geeks. Only here he's a Purple Geek! Does he mean nerdiness (I'm nerdy) or ethics (I try)?
• Evenly painted or sprayed on: external labels, maybe? Like Black. Or Nerd. Another zine, the Atlantic, had a piece on census questions about race--the census bureau only recently figured out that since discrimination's based on appearance not ancestry, a census can't just ask what race YOU identify as--gotta ask "how do others see you?", too. External judgments matter! They, not identity, make you a target.
  I grew up targeted--shunned, spat on and bullied for being autistic. I know firsthand that Atlantic article is right: discrimination's not about identity; it's about other people's (mis)judgments. They saw me as willfully acting weird--geek as a lifestyle choice. Nope. Just as genetically hardwired as you non-autistics' compulsive tribalism.
• Ponies, cerise/maroon:
  1. Maroon could be a pun--Chidi "marooned" as in "stranded". Or is it a mashup of the old biracial terms 'mulatto' and 'quadroon'?
  2. I'm illustrating a My Little Pony nightmare, My Little 'Pocalypse. One filly I had to draw, Apple Bloom, is magenta.
  3. Online I found a reference poster of the My Little Pony cast. It inexplicably omitted one major character, Cadance (embodying romantic love)--who's cerise. May not be coincidence that Chidi, in love with a sort-of-pony sort-of-sorceress, is the My Little Pony color symbolizing romantic love.
• Cart: today I sketched a similar cart to illustrate a predictive dream, The Griffin's Lesson.
• Ponified girlfriend: for both The Griffin's Lesson and My Little 'Pocalypse, I'll have to sketch over a dozen My Little Pony characters, mostly female.
• Her big frizzy hair: Daisy, the shy queer girl in John Allison's British comic Giant Days. I just read of Daisy's first all-night date. So... does the Pony Mistress mean coming out of the closet, or general courage despite innate shyness? Hmm. Chidi on The Good Place and Twilight on My Little Pony are both shy geeks like Daisy. Or me.
• Her beautification field: reverses the myth of Circe, the witch who turned men to pigs. The Mistress of the Herd apparently turns the bestial beautiful (gradually?) Yet her spell seems painless, unlike HG Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau--that mad doctor uplifted animals to people... through agonizing surgery without anesthesia. Maybe the Pony-Mistress means not just love but self-care? Something we nerds notoriously neglect.
• Bobbed tails reveal sexy bits usually hidden:
  1. We had a heatwave (rare here in San Francisco) and people stripped way down (usually we can't).
  2. On The Good Place Chidi stripped down, baring real muscles (especially for a bookish guy never seen to work out). Actor and role, clashing?
  3. At least two My Little Pony episodes have fashionista Rarity forced to bob her tail short, baring her butt. She learns she can get away with an em-bare-ass-ing look through sheer chutzpah. Style's in the mind! Even blatant nudity won't embarrass if the bare-ass is confident. Again, a lesson for the shy!
• ACTION (immediate): bob MY hair. I'll look better and be more comfortable in this heatwave. What else? Work out? Not in this heatwave. But maybe start when it breaks?
• ACTION (long-term): hmm. Can I learn the mojo of the Mistress of the Herds? Or the Master of the Nerds. I'm not fussy. Except, it seems, for that thing The Good Place and My Little Pony have in common--ethics! Maybe building moral muscle is the hottest thing of all.

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