Princess Lona

Critiquing from a "kids show" point of view, this was a very fresh and important take on a classic moral story. We've all heard the story of two people or groups who have been fighting and holding a grudge for so long that they've forgotten what it's about, and everything gets better when they realize that friendship is better for them than fighting. What was different about this version of that story was the presence of a third party affected by the fight - the animals. This is the first time I've ever seen this type of story (when it's being told for kids) take into account the innocent bystanders who are negatively affected by wars or fights between two other groups who share space with them. This episode teaches the children who watch it to be aware of the entirety of a situation, and not just their own small part in it. I hope this episode and other kids media like it will create an entire generation of people with a more globally conscious worldview than most people have today. Sure as an adult viewer I found the story to be quite predictable, but it was well-executed and that's what makes it interesting for me to watch.

I was just going to post this. I love the fact that The Smooze was in the jar. Very nice touch.

Twilight is the Princess of Friendship. She was chosen for that title because she is good at making friends. I wasn't surprised at all when Sassy said Twi is the most popular princess. Good at making friends=having lots of friends=popularity.

Twilight in an Iron Pony suit! It makes perfect sense because she's an overachieving scientist like Tony Stark. And Pinkie Pie as Deadpool.

I love how outspoken and completely opposite to his regular self Big Mac was when he was in disguise. This, coupled with his involvement in the Ponytones is giving me the head canon that Big Mac is one of those introvert performers. People who act, sing, do stand up, or whatever are generally thought of as outgoing or extroverted. Some believe that it is impossible to be a performer without having an outgoing personality. But there are also those performers who are pretty introverted off stage. They keep most of their feelings close to the vest and spend a lot of time alone, then use their time on stage to be a louder version of themselves or in the case of Big Mac, a louder version of someone else. I know some people like this and now I think Big Mac is one of them. I didn't find it transphobic either, mostly because Big Mac isn't trans. He doesn't identify as a mare, he was just trying to pass himself off as one. One of those tumbler posts said that "the guy in a dress speaking in a falsetto trope is transphobic in the same way that the gay guy speaking with a lisp trope is homophobic". I think that may be true within a certain context, but this episode did not have that context. Big Mac has a very deep voice so it would be difficult for him to speak at a high enough octive to sound less male without going into a falsetto. As for the dress, well, he had to cover his cutie mark. No other characters in the episode seemed to care that he was crossdressing, they were just a bit confused by it at first. Most of the jokes centred around the fact that everyone could tell it was him and he did a terrible job of fooling them. There were no jokes making fun of him specifically for going against gender norms.

I take it as a sign of the changing times. MLP was created with the intention of giving gender constructs the boot. Maybe Big Mac isn't acting "feminine" for the lols because he is generally very "masculine". Maybe the writers are saying that "feminine" behaviours don't have to be just for girls. Maybe the writers think that liking dolls and wearing tiaras can actually be "masculine". Or maybe the writers are saying that "masculinity" and "femininity" don't actually exist and are concepts humans made up and that they should be smashed in the name of Truth. Maybe.

I actually kind of like it when parents of main characters aren't much of a factor in a show. I wouldn't mind seeing the mane six's parents more just for the sake of backstory and insight into the worlds of Twilight and co, but if the pony parents started to get too much screen time and development, it would detract from the "mainness" of the mane six for me. In my mind, the mane six are young adults and as such they have probably only moved away from home relatively recently. Say, two or three years before the onset of the show's timeline. That's a time in a character's life when I want to see them establishing their own life and who they are. Of course they are going to keep in touch with their parents, but if they hung around with their parents too much, it would feel more like they were teenagers to me and the show wouldn't feel the same.

I like this theory. I wonder if some of the tools in the human world were also inspired on a subconscious level by inhabitants of the pony dimension. Of course because of the boring real reason you mentioned, it will be hard to find items designed for hoofs in the human world so all I can think of at the moment is saddles. I saw a post recently that wondered why saddles exist in Equestria. The general consencious was fashion. Now I'm thinking that saddles were invented by ponies for fashion and their human counterparts interpreted the design for the purpose of riding animals. And perhaps coins were also invented by ponies. Because of the way small, hard items tend to get stuck in hooves, I think it makes more sense for the ponies to use coin bits instead of paper currency. What other human tools and objects could have been originally designed for ponies?

I liked the way Rarity's mane looked when it was raining on her in Manehattan. I don't know if that counts as a mane style, but I like.

Perhaps certain parts of Equestria and the rest of the planet (if Equestria is indeed located on a planet) need to be generally colder or warmer than others in order to maintain weather systems. If I'm not mistaken, the Pegasi seem to deal mainly if not exclusively in precipitation and wind. They don't necessarily control other aspects of the weather like temperature. Maybe the Crystal Empire needs to be cold all the time so that the Pegasi have a place from which to blow cold air in when they need to make winter happen. If the Crystal Empire is anything like our arctic and sub-arctic, they would need a constant cover of deep snow for almost all of the year to keep whatever minor vegetation they have there safe from the freezing temperatures so that it could grow again during whatever short, cool summer and spring they have.

I always figured when Twilight tries to fix something with magic and screws it up, the point from a writing standpoint is to eliminate magic as a solution so that the plot can move on to a more interesting solution/friendship lesson. It's more interesting to show magic not working than to have a scene where Twilight explains how she has considered using magic and decided against it, listing the reasons why. I remember in Magical Mystery Cure when Spike suggested a bunch of spells that might fix the problem and Twilight kept on dismissing them because the episode didn't have time to actually show her trying them. That was a really boring bit of dialogue but if it had been left out, we would have asked "why didn't she just use one of those spells from an earlier episode?" So Twilight has to be shown using magic and failing sometimes or there would be no point in even having magic in the show. She can be pretty unethical with it though now that I think of it, specifically with the frog. I don't think it's unethical for her to test things on her friends or other creatures who can communicate with her. If they didn't want her to use magic on them, she wouldn't. But the frog, yeah, that was kind of evil.

I saw one person wearing a 20% Cooler shirt with a picture of Rainbow Dash on it before I was even aware of the show. I had never heard of bronies and I didn't even know that there was a G4 yet. Since the pony on his shirt looked nothing like the style of My Little Pony I was familiar with, I didn't think it had anything to do with MLP. Since RD is a rainbow pony, I just thought it was a gay pride shirt but I wondered what the "20% Cooler" was all about. A few months later I heard about FIM via a call for voice actors who could mimic characters from the show for a fan video. I was looking up clips of Rainbow Dash and I stumbled upon the 20% Cooler clip. My friend who was with me said "Isn't this what was on that guy's shirt at the gas station a few months ago?" That was when it all clicked into place.

I like the thought put into not hurting feelings, but if everyone were made to look just like Celestia, that could make Celestia look like narcissistic tyrant who wants everyone to look like her. It could cause the ponies to lose faith in her ability to lead Equestria in the best interests of the people and might cause a revolt. Then again, it would probably get changed back to normal just as soon as Celestia sobered up so I'm sure it wouldn't come to war before everything was fixed.

I watched the original show when I was a kid and FIM gives me no nostalgia at all. They are two very different shows. I also find FIM to be quite different overall from the shows I watched as a kid. It's better than a lot of them and it's an example of some of the positive changes in children's programming that are starting to take hold today. The only time I feel nostalgic watching FIM is when a character makes a weird face and it reminds me of Ren and Stimpy or the early days of Internet Flash cartoons.

I'm not sure about the cilantro, but strawberry cinnamon sounds pretty good! I would try one and who knows, I might like it. I would tell her if I didn't like it. I don't think she would be mad since she herself said they were bad. Now I'm thinking of trying to make strawberry cinnamon cupcakes with optional cilantro frosting.

I'm glad ponies are back! But I am stuck on that pony at the end. People are debating whether or not her presence was meant to make a joke out of fat people, but my first thought when I saw her was "That has to be some kind of obscure reference that I'm not getting". I assumed it was another nod to some piece of fan work I wasn't aware of, but so far no one has identified her as having existed in the fandom before. So she must be some pop culture reference we just aren't getting. A few people in this thread have compared her to Mama June from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. I don't know much about Mama June's personality, but I do think the pony resembled her a bit. Not just because of her size, but her face as well. What's more striking about her than her size is the fact that she has her own face as a cutie mark. I hypothesize that she is a caricature of a famous person who is known for loving themself. It has been pointed out that Rainbow Dash had a picture of that pony in her locker in another episode. If anyone was going to be a fan of a pony with a lot of self-love, it would be RD. Or was "Nasal Pony" as she is identified in the credits, an in-joke with the writers and animators about someone they know? Any ideas? Can twitter help us out? There has to be more to this. What is going on here?

That's a really good observation, I can't believe I never thought of that. I definitely think he'll get over it now. Spike hasn't hit puberty yet so he doesn't really know what lust or romantic love for another person is. Since he's projecting his love of gems onto Rarity, he'll get over it just as soon as he starts to feel real crushy feelings for someone he is actually attracted to. That person will probably be a dragon since so far in this universe it seems that the characters mate exclusively within their own species. Edit: I don't know if he'll get over her within the course of the show though, since the characters don't seem to age.

I think Applejack will only keep secrets that she knows aren't going to hurt anyone, like Pinkie's party. If there was a situation where keeping a secret for one of her friends would hurt another of her friends, she would probably tell the truth, even if it meant being disloyal to the friend who was trying to keep the secret. In a situation where a friend asked her to keep a secret and keeping it wouldn't hurt anyone, she would probably keep it. And if keeping the secret would help to save someone from unnecessary pain, then she would definitely keep it. Like if Spike's crush on Rarity wasn't obvious and Applejack was the only one who knew about it, I don't think she would tell because she knows that Spike isn't ready to tell and the secret getting out would just embarrass him. The problem would arise for Applejack if a friend had done something wrong and they were avoiding the consequences by keeping a secret. Applejack would probably keep that secret, but because of her sense of justice, a concept which is closely related to truth, she would probably feel really bad about it until the issue was resolved.

I can't think of a better reason than similar talents for most of the background ponies. As for the stallions in Rarity's part of the song, that was kind of a dream sequence so it doesn't have to make sense. I would think of it like a dream sequence in an old cartoon where there is a chorus line of dancing girls who all look exactly the same.

This is a pretty interesting idea. It could suggest that a kind of reincarnation exists in Equestria. If a cutie mark has the ability to exist without being visible, then maybe a cutie mark can exist for a short time without a pony to stamp onto. Perhaps cutie marks retain the memories of a pony after he or she passes away, then the mark acts kind of like a soul and finds a new foal to incarnate in. The memories of the past ponies are carried on to future generations but instead of giving their new ponies a conscious memory of the past, the cutie mark manifests the old memories subconsciously in the new pony as instincts which could lead to a new interpretation of the mark. For example, if a pony in olden times had Pinkie Pie's cutie mark, that pony might have been good at making balloons but they would not necessarily have been a party pony by nature. However, their business of balloon making would have put them in contact with a lot of parties and maybe they would learn to really enjoy parties. Once the cutie mark moved on to Pinke Pie, it would bring that love of parties with it and implant it into Pinkie on a subconscious level so that when Pinkie gets the balloon cutie mark, it would now reflect her penchant for throwing parties.

I'd like to see an episode that teaches the friendship lesson that boys and girls can be good friends without romantic implications. This isn't always the case, but I find that in lots of fiction if a male and female character who aren't related form a close bond, they have to get romantic tension and eventually fall in love or at least crush on each other. In real life too, people always seem to believe that when a pair of best friends are of the opposite sex they simply must be destined to get romantic. It sets up a standard expectation that gets in the way of a lot of what could be meaningful adult friendships. So I'd like an episode where Soarin and Rainbow Dash start hanging out a lot and all of their friends are like: "Ooooooh", but in the end they're still just good friends and everybody else learns the lesson not to project onto other people's relationships. The same lesson could be taught with one of the CMC and Button Mash, since everyone wants to see him get some screen time anyway.

For all those people looking for a Celestia episode, this is a nice fan fic I read a while back that might sate your appetites until you get something canon. http://www.fimfiction.net/story/20685/sunny-skies-all-day-long The comics also did some stories focusing on Celestia's past.

They do learn other things. Twilight has been shown studying comets, astronomy, history, and chemistry and it's heavily implied that she studies every other subject you can think of as well. She was always Proncess Celestia's protegé student but she seemed to be attending some sort of college in Canterlot at the same time. Moon Dancer mentions a long list of subjects that she is studying in the library scene in "Amending Fences". The CMC are studying mechanics, potions (ie: chemistry), and magic under the tutelage of Twilight, Rainbow Dash attends flight school, and through Family Appreciation day at school the colts and fillies learn about whatever the guests speaks about; so history from Granny Smith and business from Filthy Rich. Those are the only examples I can think of at the moment but I think that's a pretty good amount of non-friendship related areas of study for a show that focuses on friendship.