Cloud Strife

I wish I knew if you were in a particular grade because then I could give you my experiences when I was younger. I'm going to assume you're in high school or somewhere around that range, though. If I'm mistaken feel free to point it out.

All right, so when I was in high school I dealt with everything you're speaking of here. I was picked on for liking Pokémon (and someone stole my equipment for it, but that's a discussion for another day) and cats of all things. People would legitimately just find reasons to get my goat; I've had people taunt me for supposedly having a Facebook (even though I didn't have one; someone else with my same legal name did). Basically, many kids in high school were brats to me. Even when I switched high schools where the bullying rate was far, far lower, I still felt like I didn't belong as there were groups already developed there that I wasn't a part of, and after my experience with high school previously I didn't want to be a part of a cliquey, rude group anyway. So I stuck to myself.

March forward to community college, which I've been in for the past two years. I had only one class to prevent from overwhelming myself, and there I integrated in probably the most positive schooling experience I can even remember. The professor never personally lectured me even when I was late with my homework, and the kids there actually genuinely wanted to be there and geeked out with me when it came to video games, anime, etc. In other words, it was a much more welcoming climate than that of high school. One time I left my phone within the classroom, and the students there were courteous enough to help me find a way to get it back, even offering to allow me to borrow theirs to contact student services. It was incredible how welcome I felt there, and even if I wasn't as social as the others (despite my being a social butterfly; high school kind of dampened my social experience, tbh), they still allowed me to talk at my own pace and never harassed me. Not only that, but I no longer felt like the only one in the classroom who got pissed off whenever people were talking over the teacher; I'd eyeballed some other people within it when people behind us were talking and we'd roll our eyes collectively at how immature we were being. It just felt more like a community with less cliques. I can honest to god say it was the first time I ever got invited anywhere, too.

Let me just say that you will always struggle to fit in, to feel like you belong, but it does get better as the years go by, and as you learn better who you are, you will find somewhere that will accept you. You might have to put yourself out there sometimes, and that may seem counterproductive as the times you have have gotten you harassed, but it will eventually reward you. Be bold and don't let go of anything that you enjoy just because others will put you in a catch-22 situation with your interests.

While I do agree with you on a lot of this, I feel saying that the blame is solely on the writers is somewhat wrong. I find a lot of people who dislike Rainbow Dash intensely will outright deny certain things happened within episodes; they'll say she's never been vulnerable (she has), she's never been interested in anything but herself (she has), and she's always boasting and can never be downbeat or think lowly of herself (she doesn't). There's a fundamental misunderstanding of characters like her within the fandom by certain people, and I don't think it's always because the character is mischaracterized; if that were the case, everyone would have hated everypony but Rainbow in The Mysterious Mare Do Well, and yet Rainbow gets beaten more when people talk about that episode, despite her actions being the least abhorrent within the episode. Rather, I believe that people come in with preconceptions of certain character traits, and they simply don't like those character traits.

It's telling when I've seen people outright say that they dislike Rainbow because she reminds them of people who bullied them.

There can be multiple reasons to someone being predisposed to disliking a character, and I won't say that that's entirely the fault of the person in question (after all, it's not as if you can help being bullied, and that you can help drawing personality quirks between them and Rainbow), but to say it's solely the writers' fault doesn't seem right to me. If that was the sole factor, then everyone would have the same opinion on every character, wouldn't they?

is this real or is this fantasy

The issue I found with this episode is that while the Cutie Mark swapping is a very interesting idea for a plot, it's such a big and expansive idea that half of an episode is not going to cover every nuance for it. As a result, the episode feels rushed with the story that it's trying to tell and doesn't allow us enough time to have the fact seep in that these ponies are miserable in their individual positions. In other words, I feel that the Cutie Mark swapping plot should've been in its own, separate episode, rather than tied in with the Twilicorn plot. It also would've been beneficial for the Twilicorn plot itself because it would've given a bit more time to explain how it works, and unfortunately they haven't attempted to explain it at all in Season 4, so we're still left here questioning why her learning the power of friendship promotes her to an alicorn, if all alicorns are like this, and how Celestia/Luna got to their positions.