Thrond

Season premier: Chuck full of exposition and not a lot going on. once you trim out all the expositional fat it basically boils down too "Baby broke a thing, here come evil clouds, lets fix the thing baby broke, everyone is happy." Probably one of the most anemic plots out of all the season premiers 

 

Gift of the Maud Pie: Lazy reuse of Maud Pie for a lazy pun towards gift of the maji, which is this eps plot with no substantial alterations. I like Maud, but they did nothing to expand her character in this episode, nor did they do anything to further Pinkie and Mauds relationship. Rarity was just there cause they needed to exposition why she needed another shop. They could have easily used one of Pinkie's OTHER sisters whom we know NOTHING about to show how their relationship works, instead they went with Maud and did NOTHING with her. 

I have zero issue with these. "The Crystalling" is a story about how stressful being new parents can be; about confronting your embarrassing past; about how even a screw-up like Sunburst (or Starlight) could do great things. And I thought that removing a villain from the equation allowed the show to put more emphasis on how the main characters actually dealt with the crisis, which I loved. 

"Gift of Maud" is a very basic retelling, but it's the first episode where we get a detailed look at Pinkie and Rarity's dynamic, it gives us a deeper impression of Pinkie's attachment to her party cannon, and while the story is certainly basic, it does allow for some very sweet moments as we see how much the characters care about each other. It's fun. 

A Hearth Warming Tail: Literally the Christmas Carol done so by the numbers I'm sure I could find a fanfic that did it better before it ever aired. 

I think most fanfics would stick much closer to the original story than this episode did; see my earlier post for an explanation. 

Applejacks Day off: Nothing happened other than making Applejack look so ineffective at the thing she is supposedly talented in that it distracts from the actual message of the episode 

Not going to defend this one as "entertaining," but ostensibly the farm was still pretty functional even with Applejack's inefficiency, and it seems to me that getting stuck in a routine which doesn't matter anymore is both perfectly understandable and very in-character for her. 

Stranger than Fanfiction: Fandom arguments are annoying enough without making an episode about it. Plus they could have handled the premise than just having it all be resolved in the last couple minutes of the episode. Nothing new was revealed about Daring Do or what she is about either. 

That seems like personal preference to me; whole point of that episode was to put some super-dork's knowledge to the test in an actual Daring Do adventure. It's okay for episodes to just be fun, y'know; not that you must change your opinion if you didn't find it fun.

Every Little Thing she does: You know how we are reforming Starlight Glimmer? The Pony who almost destroyed Equestria? The one Twilight is inexplicably teaching MORE magic too? What if she uses Mind controlling magic on her friends like a sociopath, feels no remorse about using said spell like a sociopath, doesn't understand what she did wrong when other characters are trying to explain it to her like a sociopath, and then NOT GIVE HER ANY REAL CONSEQUENCES FOR HER ACTIONS WHAT SO EVER, BECAUSE APPARENTLY SAYING SORRY FOR MIND CONTROLLING PONIES WITH MAGIC IS A SUITABLE ENOUGH PUNISHMENT!  

Well... that's sort of the point of the episode; I don't think this was handled very well, but the idea is that she doesn't need to be punished severely to come to the understanding that what she did was wrong - if someone is already feeling really guilty, punishing them is just redundant. Wouldn't argue this point if you didn't spend so much of the paragraph listing her bad deeds as if the writers didn't know exactly what they were doing, though; it's still weird to me that she didn't feel guilty until Twilight snapped at her. 

Where the Apple Lies: Here's an opportunity to show Apple jacks parents and maybe infant Applebloom within the context of her story and perhaps give the Apple Family more depth.....NAAAAAAAAAHHHH lets just reverse some of AJ's and Big Mac's personality traits a bit and do a paint by numbers liar revealed story...cause THAT's not played out to death. 

I'm not gonna say that they picked a particularly good story for a flashback episode, but criticizing the episode because it's not the story you want it to be seems very unfair to me. 

Didn't pick at a few which I didn't think I could justify, but yeah, I don't really see all the problems that apparently everyone fucking else does. 

What "bugged" you about Season 6 is that there were "bug" ponies?

For that pun, TEN THOUSAND YEARS DUNGEON. 

Can we be friends? Let's be friends, because this is precisely my problem with this episode. I mentioned earlier that mind control is kind of a pet peeve of mine, and in my opinion something only a villain would do. Reformed or not, that's a black mark on Starlight's record for me. I still don't hate her, because I'm convinced that episode was the fault of the writer letting a drunk, lobotomized sociopath write his script for him... with his elbows... while experiencing an hallucinogenic nightmare brought on by whatever was in the tea pitcher that day.

 

That was a relapse in every sense of the term. Controlling others with magic... again, though this time with an actual mind control spell instead of through the removal of cutie marks. There's a point where you go too far, and that was it for me.

I felt that Starlight having gone way too far was the point, especially since she hasn't had some major mind re-writing or anything since season 5. I have zero problem with the fact that she did those things in the first place, as that seems appropriate. What gets to me is that she showed zero understanding that she did anything wrong. At least, until Twilight yelled at her, and even then Twilight sort of assumed that Starlight knew WHY mind control was wrong without ever actually telling her - so while I believe that she legitimately thinks she did something wrong, the show hasn't convinced me that she knows why what she did was wrong, and I'm not entirely sure that it intended for that. Finale somehow still worked for me regardless, but I just don't know what they were going for with the details there. 

In Trade Ya she went out of her way to fix her mistake and in TftM she failed at what she set out to do and instead actually jumpstarted winter, so I guess the writers felt that was enough(whether you agree or not depends on your mileage). S6 is really the only season I felt any real regression with both Newbie Dash and 28 Pranks Later, but both were due to inexcusably shitty writing that I honestly feel was deliberate mainly due to circumstances surrounding both those episodes(Newbie Dash was the episode where she finally realizes her lifelong dream, the episode goes out of its way to do the complete opposite of a milestone episode and dedicates its entire run time to completely humiliate her, while 28 Pranks Later is soooo much like MMDW aka one of the show's most hated episodes, that there's no way, it's impossible to believe that the writers weren't that stupid and didn't see the similarities, but evidently all they cared about was dickriding the zombie hype train)

I maintain that her characterization in "Trade Ya!," "Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3," and "Tanks for the Memories" is more irritating, because they give me the impression that she's not so much a little rude as actively immature. I see just as much meaning behind her actions in "Newbie Dash" as in "Tanks for the Memories," except that meaning doesn't make her look like she has the mind of an 8-year-old. I actually think "Newbie Dash" is pretty sympathetic towards her, considering how much time it spends on her feelings of anxiety on the job (I'm convinced that she boasts to mask her insecurity), although the impressions scene is of course the pits. As for "28 Pranks Later," I can't really justify it aside from saying I found it kinda funny, but it's less about the zombies and more about the moral, which I'm not sure the show has done before. It seems like it would have been pretty easy to do this without having her lose several gained points in sensitivity, so I'll give you that, but unlike "Mare-Do-Well," it at least doesn't contain any scenes of Dash actively humiliating herself for no apparent point besides making her look bad. 

Time to trot out my ARBITRARY MANE SIX SEXUALITY HEADCANON again. 

To be clear, this is based on very little.

Twilight Sparkle: Bisexual, because I count Equestria Girls, and it allows me to ship her with Sunset Shimmer. If we don't count Equestria Girls, then I'd call her asexual. 

Rainbow Dash: If we ignore my own fondness for certain same-sex RD ships, then I'd have her as straight, just to subvert the "RD is a lesbian" meme. 

Rarity: Straight, just 'cause. 

Pinkie Pie: Pansexual, because duh. 

Applejack: Lesbian, to subvert the "conservative straight farmer" stereotype she's sometimes depicted as. 

Fluttershy: Lesbian, for balance. 

Alternatively they could all be bi. That works too. 

I don't agree with sterotyping or "judging" even what they are.... 

 

 

CLEARLY they are straight because THIS is a kid show and like everything good EVERYPONY tries to ruin it with these bullshit labels... (so sick of it) 

How is "straight" not just as much of a "bullshit label"? 

I'll just repost my edit here, since I was a little too slow fixing it.

 

EDIT: I will admit they hammed it up a little hard, though, with Pinkie and Flutters being better than them by a wide margin, but... eh, I'll let it slide since it was actually pretty funny to me.

 

I'm not saying this excuses it, since they could have had them only be slightly better because of their unconventional and erratic playstyle. However, they went the joke route for laughs, and while it may be a bit of a waste of decent character moment, I still like it.

 

I understand why you don't particularly like it, and I won't deny the reasons are valid. I just don't outright consider it a bad episode. That's the only real contentious point I have here.

I think the episode has enough charms to not be outright "bad," and I also brush off potential issues with an episode just because they entertain me. It definitely is that wide margin of skill which I find so irritating, though. 

Ok, this I can address. Rainbow Dash also had no idea what the sport was like before hearing about it, so she also had no practice. Also, Rainbow Dash is a bit more... easily distracted when she has to basically hold still and watch the ball (let's be honest, they're playing a version of soccer/football), basically playing goalie. Rainbow is better where her speed and power will aid her. Fluttershy is more patient and has been shown to be fairly athletic when she tries (I imagine as a result of dealing with animals up to ten times her size on the regular). She doesn't move much, she can focus, and her tail does have a reach advantage over Dashie's, being significantly longer and all. There are also games you just kind of pick up and run with and are just kind of good at. Badminton was mine, and I don't have an athletic bone in my body.

I still find it weird that Fluttershy would so easily outclass the ponies who spend most of their free time on athletics, but I suppose that does make sense. I had other issues with that episode, but that's the main one I had with its actual writing, although I find it surprising that Snails was the only unicorn who was any good at the sport. Although, I remember Rainbow and Applejack having done a fair bit of training before Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie showed up and outclassed them in a single casual match, and even if I'm mistaken, Applejack clearly knew about the sport previously. 

...B-b-b-but I liked Buckball Season. 

It absolutely has its charms, but I just struggle to accept the notion that Fluttershy picked up the sport so easily, let alone became better than either Rainbow Dash or Applejack despite having had little practice or training at all. 

Its more what the video had to say than his credentials, though I posit "its about time" was a more fleshed out and interesting episode than most of the amateurish crap that went on this season.  

I'll allow that "P.P.O.V." (and, for that matter, "Buckball Season" and "The Cart Before the Ponies") are kinda beneath this show, but otherwise I'm not sure there's a whole lot of episodes from season 6 which I'd put below "It's About Time," and I certainly wouldn't call much of season 6 "amateurish crap" like you did.  

@@Ganondorf8,

 

(Like, her parents.)

It's sad, too, because Cadance is one of my favourites and I would jump for joy if she got more significant appearances.

Eternal contest between "Shine Like Rainbows" and "Welcome to the Show," although the post-release music video "Friendship Through the Ages" gives both a run for their money.

It's a strange power which human science cannot yet understand. I'm kinda surprised that humans aren't more afraid of it, really - it seems potentially dangerous, and they still don't entirely know how it works, so it's unpredictable. It doesn't seem to have an inherently negative impact on the world, though, so outside of headcanon I see no reason why it strictly *shouldn't* exist.

As for whether the series would work without it on a meta level... I mean, it's possible, but it'd come at the cost of the films' plot-driven action. It'd need to be very much a sitcom, and while I find the idea of a sitcom in a "mundane" version of Equestria interesting, I'm not sure how long it could go while keeping a fresh take on these characters.

I'm not sure there's any major precedent for a series of TV movies leaping to the big screen, and I'm not convinced that EqG has enough of an ingrained fan base to fully justify that regardless. Plus, would moviegoers struggle with the backstory to that point? EqG is generally more serialized than MLP.

Because she is adorable and in 2/4 movies she's got a sympathetic and endearing character arc. So the same reason anyone would consider most characters one of their favourites.

It used to be Sparity but now My New Favorite Shipping is Raridash.

 

Any Questions?

Ayy, RariDash. Nice one; really underappreciated couple.

For all intensive purposes, sure.

 

I believe you mean "intents and purposes."

I have nothing else to add.

Twilight/Applejack and Twilight/Rarity haven't shared many episodes; we haven't had any real casual scenes with Pinkie/Fluttershy or Applejack/Fluttershy; and we don't get nearly enough of Rarity/Rainbow Dash or Celestia/Luna.

But like I wrote,that'll bring challenges to the writers. First, not everyone received McFlurry really well, but that's because they've expected things they shouldn't. Second, it can be a second Starlight Glimmer, which with experience, it might work better, but still lies the problem of repeating the 6th ranger trope in the show. Maybe if they bring her as a filly and hang out with the cuties instead may have a better chance for her to be better received

I mean for a single episode before going back, not permanently as you suggested. And I don't put much weight on "popular reception," at least in this show.

It’s not just character bending but episodes that do nothing exciting with the characters that are thrown in because they kinda fit. Newbie Dash, AJ’s Day Off, Gift of Maud, Viva Las Pegasus: why are these episodes there? Were they made because someone thought it’d be cool, or were they made because some writer was browsing though a catalogue for easy stories?

 

When a character is built around an arc and not the other way around, guess what happens to them when it’s finished? They get backgrounded, and for a damn good reason. Also, main characters usually get development in the arcs, because, well, that’s just a thing arcs do.

 

P.S: You actually like the grumpiness, don’t you ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I enjoy what "The Gift of the Maud Pie" and "Newbie Dash" do with those characters, and even think that "Viva Las Pegasus" is at least fun, which I think is worthwhile in its own right.

And I don't enjoy your bitterness, but I thind arguing with it sorta cathartic. Gettin' sick of it, though.

More of this, huh? Guess it's nobody's fault but my own for clicking on this thread. Sometimes I wonder if there's a less grumpy forum I could flee to, but then, I was pretty much in your place when season 5 finished. Anyway: 

A Hearths Warming Tail was just a Christmas carol with ponies, that's it. There was no real notable creative twist too any of it, it was just the plot equivalent of paint by numbers with ponies. 

I maintain that replacing Jacob Marley with the windigo mythology and having Snowfall legitimately think what she was doing was best for everyone rather than merely being greedy and selfish gives "A Hearth's Warming Tail" a very distinct personality from "A Christmas Carol." You could argue that the ultimate message isn't even the same. Carol: "It's important to be generous." Tail: "There's nothing wrong with leisure." 

Aside from that - exposition wasn't a huge issue to me aside from a few small instances, "The Gift of the Maud Pie" had a lot of fun details and a different ending (although I never realized until now just how close to the original story it is), and I've already stated that I don't really think the characters acted dumb or regressed that much more often than in previous seasons. 

The "RIP M.A. Larson" thing was horribly unneeded. I don't think the writer of "It's About Time" needs to be mourned as some symbol of good writing in this show. I like his work but I also think he's terribly overrated by fans. 

Well to be fair, Twilight becoming an Alicorn was mandated by Hasbro, because they wanted to sell toys based on the concept of her being an Alicorn Princess.  So if you're going to blame anyone on that one, you have to blame Hasbro.

 

I don't think many people that come to this site realize how much of a lemon a company is handing a writer if they're required to incorporate a toyline into episodes of a cartoon (people that have been on production teams for hit cartoons might be more aware).

He says he had the script ultimately taken out of his hands, so I don't blame him too much for it, but whoever was responsible for the final version still deserves some of the blame for how atrociously it was handled. 

AJ's Day Off? Interesting premise, then we get 18 minutes of nothing literally happening, and an ending where we just make AJ an idiot

Newbie Dash? Dash finally achieves her lifelong goal, lets spend the entire episode completely humiliating her!

28 Pranks Later? We're gonna go back to one of our most hated episodes to see where we went wrong. You know what can help this episode? Let's add fucking zombies!

Every Little Thing She Does? Last episode before the finale which Starlight stars in, how can we get everyone to side with her? Leave her out for 2/3rds of the season, and make Starlight brainwash her friends out of laziness!

Apparently I'm weird or something, because aside from the lack of anything interesting in "AJ's Day Off," I don't have any of those problems with those episodes. Also, I apparently have no idea what everyone else dislikes about "Mare-Do-Well," because my biggest issue was that it contained too many scenes of Dash being humiliated, and "28 Pranks" had very few of those. It's way off from her previous character development, but it doesn't contradict its own moral. 

The episodes give you this unnerving feeling that our glorious writers have taken a bundle of regular run-of-the-mill plots and then made them work by any means necessary. In other words: they didn’t build an episode around a pony but a pony around an episode. 

There are a handful of episodes - in particular, "The Cart Before the Ponies," "28 Pranks Later," and "P.P.O.V." - where I think you have a point here; these episodes seemed to shoot for a specific moral and then bend character personalities lightly to suit that moral without adding the extra detail which would make that bending of characterization actually make any sense. I was more frustrated with the former two for just being overly simple, but I maintain that the characterization in "P.P.O.V." is pretty inexcusable. I don't think a whole lot of episodes this past season made such inexcusable mistakes, however, which apparently puts me in a minority. And yes, Starlight does seem to have been built around a specific character arc and not necessarily given the traits to stand out otherwise, but I don't think that approach is without merit. 

Yeah, no. She's a baby. What are they even gonna do with her? She was there to do baby things and be adorable, and she filled that role well. 

making her a traveler from the future

This would be a really fun idea for an episode, though; having a grown up Flurry Heart travel from the future for whatever reason. 

I agree, but the title is: In real life

So I'm not talking about the cartoon :/

Uh... sure? What's your point? 

It's a cartoon; why are you questioning it? The whole situation would be radically different in "real life," as she probably wouldn't be a pony, wouldn't leave a rainbow shockwave or whatever it is, and probably would be piloting a jet. I'm fairly certain that these ponies emerge unharmed from things which would otherwise seriously hurt them all the time in this show anyway. It's one of those things you accept when you're watching a TV show. 

I really don't think this is the right course of action for the show. She may have reforged some bonds with her childhood "friends," but I'm fairly certain she's still not especially close to them overall. As for "new antics and adventures..." I mean, I guess so, but I doubt it would be so much better than where they are now, and I don't think changing or even so massively expanding the cast of main characters for the show is a particularly good idea. If these are to "replace" the mane six, then that doesn't work. The other five are no less important than Twilight. If it's more having her episodes involve them more, I don't see how that would happen, and it would make an already large group of main characters way too big to manage. 

Seeing Snowdash celebrating made Snowfall Frost aware of the emptiness in her life. At that point, she realized that she'd never allowed herself any happiness, and that her values were by no means incompatible with the celebration of Hearth's Warming. At that point, her defenses were down, and she was probably teetering on the edge of changing her mind. The first two spirits made her aware of her own emotional walls and then aware of what she could have if she let them fall down. They reminded her that her current path is defined as much by pain as it is by determination, perhaps a desire to prove herself above all else - and then showed her that she can let go of this pain, that she has nothing left to prove. 

The final spirit might seem like overkill, but it was necessary for pushing Snowfall towards fully accepting Hearth's Warming for others if not for herself, and causing her to stop her efforts to remove it from pony history. In the original story, Scrooge is visited by the cursed soul of a business partner, and the final spirit shows him his grave. Snowfall is motivated much more by a vision of what's "right" than Scrooge, and so it would take nothing short of the ruination of Equestria to cause her to change her ways - and that's exactly what the Spirit shows her. Fundamentally, this alters the themes of the story. It's A Christmas Carol, and yet at the same time it isn't. 

What it is, though, is one of the show's absolute greatest accomplishments, a perfect episode which I see myself watching every Christmas from here on out. It's full of universal truths and deep characters, connects directly back to the series in a variety of ways, and is an absolute delight to watch on top of that. It makes me happy and never grows old. The show just doesn't get much better than this. 

100/100

Also: did anyone notice that Snowdash tells Snowfall that she's "missing the point"? That's the same thing Starlight was told in "Every Little Thing She Does." The writers must have put a lot of thought into her arc this season! 

All the warm family bonding is great. Everything else? Ehhh.... 

I still appreciate how Pinkie's hyperactivity here is grounded in reality, but this is one of the few episodes where it does get to be a bit much for me, even if only because the jokes about Applejack and Pinkie Pie being maybe possibly distantly related are just not at all funny. Still, I appreciate her enthusiasm, as it comes from a good place and shows how much she loves her family and friends. 

But wow, the main conflict here still does not work for me. I understand that Applejack's desire to share her traditions is probably well-intentioned, but it's built on these long sequences of seeing Pie family traditions as weird and dreary which are never funny for me. Whenever the episode is focused on family bonding, it's lovely. Whenever it tries to push its main conflict forward, though, it frequently whiffs, and it's not necessarily that this is a *bad* conflict in theory, in execution it becomes deeply tedious, and although Applejack's ineptitude in actually setting it up is surely the point, it doesn't reflect well on her, let alone on Pinkie, who grew up here and would surely have some appreciations for the fault lines. 

More than that, the conflict is the least interesting thing going on in the episode. It's clear that Limestone's grumpiness is derived from how much she cares about the farm, but the episode just doesn't bother digging into that. And while Marble Pie is more charming than her sister, she's not given much of a chance to communicate, and in her introduction it seems less like she's not speaking and more that Pinkie is outright speaking over her. She's better later, but she ain't given much depth - I'd like to have heard her talk even once. I like these new characters a fair bit, but the episode fails to realize their fullest potential - which is the same opinion I have of Maud's debut, so if these two appear again, I'm sure they'll be even better. And Maud's great here, continuing the upwards trend of her appearances. She doesn't have all the subtle emotion of "The Gift of the Maud Pie," but she has much more charm and humour here. 

But this episode is easily the weakest of the holiday episodes so far, and one of just so many episodes which contributes to season 5 being the most disappointing season for me. Gonna be a long while before I bother returning to it. 

Score:

Entertainment: 5/10

Characters: 7/10

Themes: 8/10

Story: 5/10

Overall: 63/100

Also, it seems a little less clear this time around if the episode's actually pushing MarbleMac, but there's definitely some scenes which seem to verge on romantic bonding, and Pinkie is VERY interested in pairing them up. Still amusing to me the show might be running into something which it makes sound like incest. 

I do enjoy the worldbuilding of showing us this traditional story of pony history, and it's not like warm Christmas platitudes are all that out of place for this particular show, but I still think the historical characters feel a little too right for these characters to play. It's possible that they're just letting their own personalities shine through their performances, but the roles make it very easy for the mane six to just play exaggerated versions of themselves, and I'm not entirely convinced those are the exact personalities the historical figures would have. I can tell that Chancellor Puddinghead wasn't very bright, Princess Platinum was extremely vain, and Commander Hurricane was overly aggressive, but I can't look past the performances to see the actual people being portrayed. Maybe that's the point, though, and I could identify the differences between the present and historical characters a lot more this time through. Wish I learned more about the actual pre-unification pony societies, though, but that might just be the history nerd in me speaking. 

The present-day scenes are all rather slight, but it's pretty clear that they're not supposed to be much more than just silly little bits of context, and they work pretty nicely for the theme. If this pageant is such a big deal, I wonder why the mane six were selected for it - if it's a community thing, wouldn't Canterlot amateurs be selected? And if it's a national thing, wouldn't they put professionals in the parts? It doesn't really matter, and much of the humour actually comes from the mane six's personalities shining through, but it's something I find myself wondering about every time I watch. The issues I've mentioned keep this from being more than a slightly fluffy holiday story, but I like learning about the stories which ponies tell each other each Hearth's Warming, and this is pretty entertaining besides. It's a fantasy cartoon; questions of authenticity aren't all that important in the grand scheme of things. 

Score:

Entertainment: 8/10

Characters: 6/10

Themes: 8/10

Story: 7/10

Overall: 73/100

Whichever the one from "The Fault in Our Cutie Marks" was, because while it's just one of many bland songs the show has given us since season 5, it's also the only thing holding that episode back for me. Would be an all-time favourite without it, most likely.