Cherish Fields is riding high, though no one can put a saddle on this mare. As the star of the hit children’s television show [i]My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic[/i], she has set records for being the highest-paid Unicorn-American actor three years running. Originally slated to last only a single season, the hit television show is now in its sixth season, with three spinoff movies and two more in production.

“It’s been really amazing,” Cherish said when interviewed about her experience with the show. “I remember watching reruns of the original show back when I was growing up, but I never could have dreamed that the reboot could be so successful. I’m incredibly grateful to Lauren [Faust] for giving me the opportunity to star in this show, and to all the members of the staff who have done so much to pull for us.”

According to [i]IU magazine[/i], the cast is doing well indeed. This year Cherish and her co-stars – Jewel Turner, Candace Baker, Merriweather Gail, Skye Byrd, and Jacqueline Chapman – have for the first time received compensation for the merchandise bearing their likenesses, rumored to amount to over $10 million dollars each – vastly higher than what the original stars received in the 1980s.

The growing popularity of the [i]My Little Pony[/i] franchise with the public, especially with its recent emphasis on unicorns, is broadly seen as a indication of growing acceptance for Unicorn-Americans in greater American society. But while the cast of [i]My Little Pony[/i] can hold their heads high in Hollywood, many Unicorn-Americans continue to struggle with a legacy of discrimination, poverty, and marginalization from greater American society.

Originally descended from ancient tribes concentrated in Eastern Europe, throughout much of history unicorns have struggled to fit into human society. Largely supersceded in manual labor by horses and oxen, animals who require no pay beyond hay and a barn to sleep in, they were often forced to lead an agrarian existence, herding sheep and cattle to trade and supplying labor in hazardous conditions where the less sure-footed horses would likely go lame.

The decline of the Catholic Church on mainland Europe threatened their traditional way of life. Invisible to over 40% of sexually active teenagers and 85% of sexually active adults, unicorns had long relied on the clergy and monastic orders to act as intermediaries in commerce and everyday life, and in return some unicorns enjoyed a high standard of living working to ensure that holy vows were being honored. Facing economic ruin, many unicorns fled to western Europe and the British Isles in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Anti-unicorn pogroms in the 17th century sped up the process, and today only 5% of unicorns live in their ancestral homeland in Eastern Europe.

As much of the population had few ties to their new homeland, many unicorns joined in the colonization of the New World. In the English colonies of North America, many Irish unicorns were brought over as indentured servants, signed up to work for many years planting crops and ploughing fields before they gained their freedom. As more horses were brought to the new world, demand for unicorn labor fell, but an ever-increasing number of unicorns braved the seas to come to the Americas in search of greener pastures.

Early unicorn colonists were often used as a buffer between the Native Americans and the human colonists, working with young whites and natives and carrying goods between them in trade – but also serving as spies and skirmishers, often ambushing tribes while their young scouts were distracted or asleep. While many human natives eventually made their peace with the unicorns, their controversial role in the Buffalo-American Wars – and the subsequent mass migration of unicorns out of the East into the West – has continued to plague relations between Unicorn-Americans and the Buffalo, who feel that the unicorns, despite being a fellow marginalized people, were nevertheless willing to assist in the destruction of their way of life and forcing them onto reservations in the arid lands of Oklahoma and Arizona. However, as Archer Long of the NAAU explains, it isn’t so simple.

“We unicorns are why we won the Revolution in the first place . Without unicorn invisibility, Paul Revere would have got his skinny flank shot. Not to [i]mention[/i] the charge of the French unicorn cavalry during the Battle of Yorktown. But what did we get? All [i]men[/i] are created equal? Where was our right to vote? The male landowner laws were meant to keep us out. Back then, mares owned the property, and they weren’t allowed to vote on account of their sex. Moving out West and making our own rules was the only way for us to get our rights.”

Indeed, Unicorn-Americans played an integral role in the women’s suffrage movement. The heavily Unicorn-American states of Utah and Wyoming gave women and mares alike the right to vote in the 1860s, and by the time of 19th Amendment, most of the West had legalized it. However, this earned them few friends in the liquor or prophylactic industry, both heavily opposed by unicorns due to their perceived role in crime, intemperance – and, most importantly to the unicorns – sexual promiscuity.

Unfortunately, the passage of the 18th and 19th Amendments marked the high-water mark for unicorn political power. Facing political hostility over Prohibition, competition from mechanized labor designed for humans, and the disastrous Dust Bowl, many unicorns were forced to the brink of economic ruin during the Great Depression. Many sold their lands at cut-rate prices and moved, near penniless, to the West Coast. The promise of the silver screen drew many to Hollywood, but they found few roles there – at the time, cartoons and movies were seen as adult entertainment, and few could appreciate the antics of unicorns on screen. While they landed some roles, most notably Tadhg Moore’s starring role in the 1950 film [i]Harvey[/i], there was little place for them in cinema.

By the 1970s, the fortunes of Unicorn-Americans were in decline. With increasing knowledge of the importance of parent-teacher contact, unicorns increasingly found it difficult to remain employed in primary schools, and the rise of the service economy and the importance of face-to-face contact drove increasingly large numbers of unicorns into the ever-diminishing agricultural sector. While some large landowners and investors in real-estate did well, many found themselves competing with Mexican immigrants for low-paying agricultural work. Even the Catholic Church, long a refuge for the unicorns, turned increasingly hostile as large numbers of priests and children lost their ability to see them.  Accused of trying to turn people against the church, unicorns in many parishes were driven out and lost their last reliable means of contact with many adult humans in the wake of the Sexual Revolution.

It was into this environment that Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority appeared. Abstinence-only education, with the promise of reducing pre-marital sex and allowing more people to see unicorns well into adulthood, combined with questionable claims of “born again virgins” regaining their ability to see their horned neighbors, helped turn many Democratic unicorns into staunch Republican voters. Reagan’s contested nomination in 1976, along with his eventual overwhelming victories in 1980 and 1984, could largely be attributed to intense campaigning by the unicorns, who believed that their economic future relied on the success of their socially conservative platform.

While president, Reagan passed many laws perceived as benefitting Unicorn-Americans, including the deregulation of children’s cartoons and further legislating mandating children’s programming on Saturday mornings. Unicorns found many roles as voice actors and even on-screen during the 1980s, most notably in the earliest of the [i]My Little Pony[/i] movies and shows. While this greatly benefitted the unicorns still living in the Los Angeles area and other regions heavily involved in television shows and the entertainment industry, most unicorns benefitted little from Reagan’s policies. Increased illegal immigration from Mexico was further driving down the price of agricultural labor, and with many educated unicorns no longer able to find work in education, things were still looking grim.

While Reagan remains a respected figure in the community, many unicorns feel increasingly alienated from social and political life. While the Catholic Church has made overtures to the unicorns in the wake of the child abuse scandals of the 1990s, many unicorns feel that they can no longer trust it as an organization. Combined with the revelation that abstinance-only education increases rates of pre-marital sex and the whole-hearted embrace of the gay community during the last quarter-century, many unicorns no longer feel comfortable embracing social and religious conservatism. But the Democrats’ friendliness towards illegal immigrants and failed promises to provide jobs in the areas in which many unicorns live has made many in rural Unicorn-American communities feel as if there is no one in America who cares about them and their problems.

This includes their urban counterparts, such as Unicorn-American pediatrician Davin Healy, whose controversial comments have drawn the ire of the IAAU.

“The truth is that the jobs are not coming back. Most humans just aren’t interested in making life easier for us, so we have to find work for ourselves doing what we can. They need to get an education and move into professions where our talents are appreciated.”

Dr. Healy believes that the technology and medical sectors are a place for unicorns to prosper.

“The ancient association between unicorn horns and healing is no mistake. Dr. Ward gave her name to medicine. Dr. Foley was instrumental in bringing down deaths from childbirth. If unicorns just stopped living in the past and blaming the Church for everything, they wouldn’t have anything to complain about. Well, other than BART not being properly built for us.” 

Other unicorns in Silicon Valley have found work in the computer industry. Over 20% of Google’s workforce consists of unicorns, and many other big employers, both in California and in the Silicon Forest of Portland and Seattle, employ large numbers of unicorns.

“It is really an ideal environment for us,” says Misty Steele, CEO of Alicorn.com, whose company has grown from a way for unicorns to purchase devices designed specifically for unicorns to a major retailing powerhouse which claimed over $10 billion in sales last year. “We don’t have to see our customers face-to-face, but we can still provide excellent customer service and support – better than any big-box retail store.”

When asked about discrimination against stallions in Silicon Valley, she denied it. “There are a lot of lonely mares who work in tech companies,” she admits. “But most of them are polite and courteous. And really, they’re the exception rather than the rule. None of the major companies employ unicorns who say that stallions are only good for ploughing fields anymore. That’s simply unacceptable behavior.”

Maud Gross agrees. Internationally renowned as “N0H0rn”, one of the rising stars of the professional gaming community (and occasional guest-star on My Little Pony in the role of one of the primary cast member’s cousins) agrees. In our online interview, she noted that “Gamers aren’t sexist. A lot of them just don’t have many social skills. A lot of us really would love to meet a stallion who loves video games.”

But she notes that a lot of unicorns in rural areas don’t have the same opportunities she did. “They don’t even have dialup half the time. It is hard to play a game like CounterStrike or Call of Duty on satellite Internet.” She notes that before Alicorn.com started selling unicorn-specific devices, a lot of unicorns didn’t play video games or use computers at all, and a lot of them still don’t realize those things are available. “I can’t really blame them for not knowing. American Internet is terrible once you get out into the sticks. And it is hard to just walk into a store and ask for help. A lot of unicorns don’t realize that most of the clerks at GameStop can actually see you.”

Her own lifetime-long battle with shyness eventually culminated in her getting a guest role in My Little Pony. Rumors abound that she’s going to return this year. When we asked if she was going to return, she replied, “Mmmhmm.”

And what does Cherish Fields think? In our interview, she gave a very thoughtful response.

“[i]My Little Pony[/i] is intended to capture the friendship between people of all races and species. It is set in a world where everyone can see you, and where unicorns are a respected part of the community. I like to think that the human fans of our show are showing their support for the entire Unicorn-American community. Maybe someday, the real world will be more like Equestria, and everyone will be able to be friends.”

“There’s nothing wrong with working in the fields, but there’s equally nothing wrong with working in fashion, or sports, or as a scientist or a doctor or a baker. There are so many opportunities out there. I know we seem invisible sometimes, but in the end, as long as we let the light of hope shine not only from our horns, but our hearts, we’ll find our place.”