It is, however, still a burning sack of shit ass balls wrapped in the torn skin of orphans and sprinkled with marmite.
"Simple Ways" is still something that's hard for me to sit through. It's cringeworthy on so many levels, from Rarity's behavior, to Applejack's response, and finally Trenderhoof's very existence. Friendship is Magic has no shortage of cheesy lines, but this episode takes the cake anyway. Every time I hear Rarity's shitty country accent I want to strangle everything around me. On top of that, the plot is absolutely null. In my previous editorial, I complained that The Legend of Korra had a lot of love triangle bullshit early on, and this sort of criticism really goes for everything. Love triangle plots are wastes of time. Any show that does them honestly are shooting themselves in the ass. It's lazy and is never met with a satisfactory conclusion because there's never anything to invest in. These were all my major problems with "Simple Ways", and I gave it a 1/10 because of that, which is the lowest rating I give anything. However, I do want to correct this rating.
Instead, "Simple Ways" deserves a 2/10.
Big difference, I know, but this isn't because I think more fondly of the episode. Instead, it's because a new episode has taken its place as the worst episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. An episode that didn't exist on August 28th, 2014. An episode that, if you've been following my review series, you've heard me bitch about time and time and time and TIME again. Clearly, there's an episode that has left more of a sour taste in my mouth than any other episode of this show. Unfortunately for my ass, it's not exactly the most popular episode to hate on either. Well, social acceptance has never stopped me in the past, has it? The episode that really grinds my fucking gears is...
This episode I gave a 2/10 back in the day, and described "isn't 'Simple Ways' bad". Well, time has a way of changing things, doesn't it? I'm swapping out the two episodes' scores because this one has had the lasting effect. "Simple Ways" is horrible, but like most bad episodes, you want to push it to the back of the filing cabinet in your mind so that you never have to speak of the atrocity unless you have to. "Crusaders of the Lost Mark" does not do this for me, however. I'm reminded of it every time I see the Cutie Mark Crusaders, and it's spoiled some of their early episodes for me as well. A bad episode that has the power to never be forgotten and to ruin so much around it, I think, deserves more of a royal beating than one that's a standalone unpleasant experience.
I'll admit, while the comedy on my "Crusaders of the Lost Mark" review was improving, my actual analysis was still a little sloppy. I kept rambling on about what "should have happened" and only seldom touched up on what was actually wrong with this shit stain. It should have been the other way around; rant about the problems and then touch up on what should have happened. Because, really, the missed opportunities with this episode are a big part of the shit factor, but not the ones I think are going to hit home with anyone. So, I guess this editorial is a make-up for that review, and hopefully after this entry I can finally put my incessant disdain to rest. Allow me to explain better: there are four major problems with "Crusaders of the Lost Mark".
1) The Pacing
It's all over the place. Don't get me wrong, pacing is a common problem with this show in general. Every other episode, especially as of recent, seems to have a pacing problem somewhere. It's simply the magnitude of what this episode's supposed to be that makes this one exponentially worse. This fault primarily lies with the songs. I bring up "Magical Mystery Cure" as a reference point to how to do a musical episode 'right' in a sense. That episode's no masterpiece, but I never felt at any point in the episode like I was being interrupted. I never felt like the story was coming to a grinding halt to sing a pop diddy. However, this is the case every time a musical number comes up here. You'll notice that the songs don't actually advance anything. The majority of them don't add anything to the character or the story, and scenes or plot-points that should've only taken a minute or less to explain or show are dragged out to two to four minutes. The few songs that do substantially advance anything are either too forgettable to be noteworthy or become a nuisance just by sheer fact that there's another musical number. Unfortunately, there's no way to win here. The music should have been cut altogether, which would've made for more coherent pacing.
2) The Redemption
Diamond Tiara isn't supposed to be a likable character. She was never portrayed as anything deep in the past. However, I've always advocated that this character be given something to work with. It is objectively not good writing to do this in 10 fucking minutes. The way you set up a character's motivations and backstory so that you empathize with the character is to do it over time. An unfair comparison, but let's look at Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Did they explain his history of child abuse, banishment, struggle with doing the right thing, and finding his own destiny in a few minutes and then have him redeem himself by the end of a single episode? No. They did this over the course of 3 whole seasons. Why? Because that's how you pace your character. You have them learn through trial and error while at the same time allowing the audience to join their journey and receive a pay-off at the end. Diamond Tiara doesn't do this. I know Zuko is a main character of his series while Diamond Tiara is a more of a recurrence, but there's absolutely nothing to connect with when it comes to her redemption at the end of the episode. The resolve? Spread this out over a few episodes. I'm not asking for season long arcs for Diamond Tiara, but the least they could've done is tease her complexes before hand. Namely, have the Pip for President sub-plot be an episode on its own. Not a back-to-back two parter, but something that resolves its own story while at the same time teasing something more to come later on. Yes, our protagonists win, and Diamond Tiara is foiled again, but she goes home to the disapproval of her mother and we leave on that. This way, when we actually deal with the sympathy focus, it has some kind of backing.
3) The Cutie Marks/Arc Closure
What the hell do these cutie marks have to do with anything? Certainly not their talents. We've been building up all series long that, while Apple Bloom's been more fluctuational, at the very least Scootaloo was a stuntmare and Sweetie Belle was a singer. We've also learned in previous episodes that a pony receives their cutie mark once they've discovered their true talent. Perhaps this correlates with the destiny side of cutie marks, but again, they cram this into ten minutes. I'll admit I initially overlooked "Appleloosa's Most Wanted" as an example of the CMC helping someone else discover themselves, so I will give that there was an ounce of build-up, but I think the biggest problem perhaps lies in Sweetie Belle's mark. It blatantly displays a musical note on the design. Sweetie Belle, if "Filli Vanilli" has taught us a goddamned thing, did not have to sing at all to earn this. Therefore, why isn't her mark something more generic and uninspired like the other two? Ultimately, this makes the whole arc a disappointment. It is unlike Diamond Tiara where we could've just given her development a few scattered episodes and nothing more. The CMC arc was a main focus for five seasons, and through it all we were building up to something else entirely. Instead, of all the CMC episodes, only one actually foreshadows this conclusion, which is sloppy. I mentioned this in the review, but I watched this episode without a disposition of anything. My mind was completely blank, and I think I can look at things more critically when I do this, so when the cutie marks showed up in the last two minutes, I honestly said aloud: "Really? That's how they decided do it? Wow. What a waste."
4) Waste of Potential
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic might be an "average" series overall with inconsistent quality abound, but the writers are by no means stupid. I might gloss over this with some other show, but these writers do know how to deal with character and character conflict. The CMC arc could've been something much deeper and thought provoking than it was. I try not to read too much into unfinished works and take things for what they are, but in hindsight, there was a better way to write the CMC's conclusion. The simple outcome: only one of them gets their cutie mark. With something as straightforward as that, their arc takes new and interesting turns, leaving a stronger moral and a better resolve than "Yay! We'll be together forever! Cutie Mark Crusaders Yeah!" Instead, they would be at a crossroad: "Do we remain friends after this?" "Where do we go from here?" "Will things ever be the same?" The episode would be them trying to cope with a change in the status quo. There would be in-fighting, and there would be serious conflict. The writers would take it where they want, but I could see it eventually ending on the message that no matter how different things might be now, they were always the crusaders, and they always will be. Isn't that a less privileged lesson to teach children? Yeah, your friends aren't always going to be on your level. You might get jealous, and society might decide you guys need to drift apart. Instead of having everything fall perfectly into place, you decide which friendships last. That's the smarter, sophisticated writing that I mistakenly thought this series was mature enough to handle. I guess I was wrong.
All in all, I felt I needed to properly talk about these two episodes as I've given them a lot of shit without fully explaining myself. Interestingly, I can see why people would like "Crusaders of the Lost Mark", but even still, those flaws glare through for me and they'll never go away no matter how hard I might try to suppress it. It's a bad episode. It's poorly written, hastily thought out, and makes the whole story arc a waste of time. However, I don't think any other episode of the show has ever left a more sour taste in my mouth, or one that has ruined both preceding and succeeding episodes, and at the time even demotivated me from continuing the series for a good couple of months. Even the more objectively shitty episodes don't do this. "Boast Busters", "MMMystery on the Friendship Express", "Bridle Gossip", "Secret of My Excess", "Rainbow Falls", "Filli Vanilli", "One Bad Apple", and even "Simple Ways", are probably collectively and objectively worse than "Crusaders of the Lost Mark". This episode, though, is still the worst of the show because, like nothing else before it, "Crusaders of the Lost Mark" singlehandedly ruined most of what made My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic a fantastic show for me.
And I haven't even watched season 6 yet.
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