“Why?” The New York Times investigates:
“We are responding to the desire by our fans to experience the brand in more ways,” said John A. Frascotti, Hasbro’s chief marketing officer. “They imagined themselves as which pony they would be or which pony they identified with the most.” So Hasbro created Equestria Girls, a parallel world in which the My Little Pony characters were reconceived as teenage girls in high school.
Seriously, it’s happening every day now, people coming up to us and saying “I want to experience your brand in more ways. Could you lose the hooves and snouts?”