My mom always told me that I was an easy child to raise. Even right from the get-go, things were fairly calm during delivery, and I barely made a peep as the doctors were getting me out of her. The doctors actually initially thought I had issues with my respiratory system because of the lack of crying, but really, I just didn’t seem to want to cry.

As I was growing up, I still had the occasional temper tantrum. I mean, what kind of kid never throws a tantrum? But what made my tantrums a bit different was in the execution. Rather than the aggressive thrashing of limbs and screaming and crying that might accompany the impotent angered reactions of a normal child, my tantrums were silent, brooding. I would simply stay in place, arms crossed, face dark as a stormy sky as I simply glared at whatever happened to be the source of my infuriated vexation. Any attempt to move or corral me was met by swift and immediate resistance until I was left to my stewing.

I recall once, a teacher attempted to intercede during one such episode where I simply refused to move from my spot. As soon as she made to lay hands on me, I lashed out and knocked the art supplies covering my desk towards her, peppering her with crayons, glitter, and glue sticks. This seemed to be enough to make her feel that calling my parents was the only reasonable option, with the teacher describing my methodology as “tranquil fury.”

Aside from the occasional episode of this nature, however, I was a fairly gentle, and obedient child. I would sit in silence during my playtime, only muttering to myself loudly enough that I could understand my own words clearly as I enjoyed my toys and the worlds that I would create with them. Of course, I would still up and wander, explore my surroundings whenever possible, as a child is often so prone to doing, but my parents were always in control of the situation whenever I did so.

My father actually used to tell me a story about a time when I was playing at a bus stop, going dangerously close to the street at times. There were some other people at the station that seemed concerned by this, one of them enough so that they even asked my dad why they were letting me wander off that way.

Instead of answering his question, my father took a more effective approach, simply barking out my name. I snapped up and immediately walked back over to him with no questions asked, like a well-conditioned pet.

Of course, being quiet and fairly introverted, I was not the best at making friends. It was not that I was unable to, per se, I was friendly enough, speaking when spoken to and never being unkind to others. It was more that I did not have any desire to. I had my mind, my vast imagination, I had my books and my toys and all of this was more than enough for me to be utterly content in most instances. This led to me leading what some might have considered a fairly lonely life., which was not helped as I entered elementary school and found myself unable to relate to my peers as well as I might have liked.

While the bullying was fortunately never physical in nature, the other children seemed to have a knack for wearing me down psychologically, eroding what little confidence I had. It was not made better by the fact that at this delicate developmental period in my young life, my parents had sadly, decided that they no longer loved one another and had made the choice to separate. Dealing with a less than stellar school situation while having to withstand a less than stable home life was, needless to say, a recipe for further and further reclusion into whatever I could do to ease my suffering.

And that is where television came in. Even as a young child, I was quite attached to the magical little box that sat on the floor of my room and ushered forth ever more entrancing and endearing patterns of shapes, sounds, and colors that felt tailor-made to hold my attention for hours on end. And the degradation of my living situation only made that more and more true as the years passed.

It was not terribly uncommon for me to come home, eyes reddened and a bit puffy, shirt covered in stains from the fluids generated by my sorrow, only to walk past the parents that would normally be there to help me in my time of need in favor of locking myself in my room and sitting in front of the television to drown out the steadily louder sounds of their never-ending and ever-escalating arguments about this that and the other. One could say that I had more of a relationship with television than I did with my own parents.

Or at least, I used to think it was with the television, but we can come back to that later, no need to make this more complicated than it needs to be.

Eventually, as I was rounding the bend to the halfway point of middle school, my mother had begun to grow wary of my fixation with the small screen. I had gotten well used to a routine of coming home, doing whatever chores needed to be done, finishing my homework, and immediately situating myself in front of my television for the rest of the evening. There was rarely ever more than a foot of distance between me and the screen.

But the breaking point was when she started to notice that I was talking to the television. When she eventually became concerned enough to intervene and turn it off, I would begin to cry and become quite anxious, I would beg her to turn it back on, insisting that she was “taking my friends away.” And reacting in a way that she would never have expected from the quiet, brooding boy she had raised. She ended up scheduling an appointment for me to meet up with a therapist, and after a few visits, it was recommended to my mother that she no longer allow me to watch television.

It was...not easy to say the least.

What followed this recommendation was a constantly escalating series of moves between my mom and myself. She banned me from watching television, I did it anyway. She took the thing out of my room, I simply watched it in the living room late at night when she was asleep, or when she was at work. She even went so far as to unplug the thing and seal the outlet, only to come home early one day to find me with it plugged in and the seal carefully removed, to be placed back on later as I had done several dozen times already.

I seemed to hit her limit once more when she moved the television to her room and locked the door, only to be unnerved by finding my collection of makeshift picks and shims in my sock drawer during what she claimed was a routine cleaning of my room. This finally prompted her to, after an excessive punishment, remove televisions from our house altogether, even removing the computer from the living room to prevent me from sitting in front of that sort of screen instead.

At first, I begged and pleaded for her to return the television. I cannot for the life of me remember what about it being gone drove me to such unreasonable heights of discontent, but every day I spent without it made me feel as if something that had been very important to my life was missing.

After a while, I began to fill the void with healthier activities, Reading, writing, a smattering of hobbies. I ended up joining the team responsible for writing the school newspaper and developing an interest in journalism, something which followed me into adulthood and led me to my current profession.

When the first year of high school rolled around, I was quite busy with an array of advanced classes and extracurricular activities. Though I was still lacking in the social interaction department, all in all, most folks would consider me to be succeeding in life at this point.

One of those people seemed to be my mom because that year was the year she finally decided to lift the ban on television in the house. It was still heavily regulated, I was limited to one hour a day, and expected to report to her if I was having any sort of issues mentally.

My first time back on the old tube, I flipped through the channels with mild curiosity. Most of the shows I stumbled upon did not really catch my attention. A lot of the new programs were not much to my tastes. As I continued to surf the vast variety of available channels, however, something came to mind that I had not thought of in quite some time. A memory seemingly from time almost immemorial sprang forth and I found myself mouthing the words “Channel 222” as I punched them in with the remote.

As the channel changed, I found myself greeted with a familiar intro, and I felt a strangely warm feeling in my chest as if coming back to a friend I had not seen in a very long time. The nostalgia washed over me in waves as a familiar theme song ended and I mouthed the on-screen title.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

Author's Note

And there you have it! Chapter one was more or less a point for point rewrite of the first chapter of the original, to sort of set the mood! The story will diverge from here, while still hitting some of the same story beats in what I hope is a way that is more akin to an homage than an outright duplication. I am intending to try my best to make sure that this story stands on its own merits while paying the respect to the original that it is due ^^