Hello everypony! I'm Sugar Cube, and this is my first blog entry on any site ever, so please try to bear with me as I'm pretty tired, so this may or may not be very well-written. I'll try to keep it short and sweet, but knowing how I am, it probably won't be.

By now, it should be common knowledge amongst bronies that Applejack's parents are deceased. Lauren Faust said that if she had it her way, they would be dead, and the writers confirmed the death in Apple Family Reunion. You can visibly see two shooting stars go by twice in the episode, and these shooting stars are a subtle symbolization of Applejack's parents. It only makes sense that they are deceased, as they didn't appear at the family reunion at all, or at any point in the series thus far.

This is the first occurrence...

And the second.

Now, a lot of fans have been hopeful that the show will touch upon the deaths in an episode. I think not only can it be done, but it should be done, as it will really give an added boost to Applejack's character and the Apple Family as a whole. It can provide an important lesson to the audience while potentially being a very emotional and powerful episode. And I think I speak for most people when I say I love stories that pull at the heartstrings, so to speak. The problem is is that it's pretty dark subject matter, and it might be deemed too dark for Hasbro's target audience of young girls. I can understand the concern, but I believe in the writers and their ability to make it happen without any problems. My Little Pony would not be the first cartoon to pull this off anyway. For example...

Does anyone remember Rugrats? One of the main characters, Chuckie Finster, had a deceased mother, and this was actually touched upon, not only in a special Mother's Day episode, but a movie that followed a few years later. Rugrats had a similar target audience of younger kids, and the characters were even more innocent in nature than our fellow ponies, as they were just babies! And yet, the writers pulled off a real tear-jerker of an episode. And bear in mind, Rugrats was on Nickelodeon and was the top show on the network for a long time. It had a bigger television audience than Friendship is Magic currently does, and I don't recall any controversy surrounding the episode. I remember watching the episode when I was just a young girl myself, and I quite loved it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha-vSGRuqKs

Here's the Rugrats episode if you want to watch it and get an idea of how the Rugrats writers handled the death of a parent.

Hey Arnold, which was another TV show on Nick, was very similar in that the titular character, Arnold, was implied to be an orphan until the episode "Parent's Day" revealed some backstory about Arnold's parents. I think that the show was originally going to follow a plot where Arnold finds his parents, (confirming that they were missing rather than dead) but the show got cancelled before it ever happened. Even still, the aforementioned episode never confirmed whether or not Arnold's parents were alive, but it was written in a way where you would think his parents are likely to be dead, and it was still a very emotionally powerful episode.

Anyway, the only thing I'm not sure about is how they would pull off an episode about Applejack's parents, simply because there's so many ways to approach it. We don't know how AJ's parents died in the first place. Would it be a mystery, or would we find out what exactly happened to them? And would the episode be more about Applejack, Apple Bloom, or both? Does the rest of the Mane Six know about AJ's parents, or are they still unaware?

So, tell me in the comments how you'd like for the episode to go down! How would you write an episode about Applejack's parents? Should the MLP writers develop an episode about this, or is it a bad idea? I'll be giving this some thought myself.

Thanks for reading everypony!