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The Hearth's Warming Club  

82 users have voted

  1. 1. Like or Dislike?

    • Ocellus: "That's a horrible story!" (I HATE IT! >__<)
      0
    • Sandbar: "How can you be so cool about this?" Smolder: "We're mad. We just show it differently." (I dislike it!)
      3
    • Gallus: *rolls eyes* (…meh…)
      8
    • Yona: "Happy Snilldar Fest!" *smashes bucket happily* (I like it!)
      31
    • Everycreature: *stays with Gallus so he doesn't spend Hearth's Warming alone* (I LOVE IT! <3)
      40
  2. 2. Which one of the Student Six's stories is your favorite?

    • Ocellus's
      30
    • Yona's
      7
    • Smolder's
      17
    • Sandbar's
      6
    • Silverstream's
      6
    • Gallus's
      16
  3. 3. How hearing what Gallus went through, how big of a hug did you want to give him?

    • A great, huge hug
      32
    • A major, huge-r hug
      8
    • A dragon-sized, monster hug
      42


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2 hours ago, gingerninja666 said:

I found the Yaksong adorable, personally. I read it more as a silly song among family members than something that's supposed to be serious.

I couldn't parse the other lyrics so I sorta forgot it wasn't just "yak song, yak song." 

2 hours ago, Dark Qiviut said:

ReYoung Five

I feel like we might need a better term for this. 

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Here's what I find funny, since we saw the redeemed changelings celebrating the last Hearthswarming, that means the latest Feast of Fire happened after Ember became Dragon Lord.

Meaning she was most likely in attendance to hear that story. The one about a kind and sensitive dragon lord being overthrown for helping someone else. Sounds kinda like her, doesn't it?

And that was the story which WON too.

Edited by gingerninja666
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An amazing episode, one of the best ones of S8 so far.

At the beginnig I felt that they were trying to push the whole "different cultures' holidays" theme too much, but when the stories began it developed naturally. I liked that a lot.

Twilight and Rainbow Dash were good enough but the stars of the episode were the Student 6, and every one of them had such great characterization and stories!

My favorite story was Sandbar's, the title of his story was a big spoiler to it, but the drama he put in such an absurd story made me chuckle.

My favorite holiday tradition was Silverstream's, I can see how they were eager to celebrate their escape from the Storm King and now that they've taken Mt. Aeris back they didn't change their underwater celebration, they just added new days celebrate more and for different reasons to be happy.

Gallus' story and reason to sabotage the fire was really touching and I loved the ReStudent 5's reaction to give him a first holiday among the people who love him. Kudos to Twilight and Rainbow for their decision to give him time to confess.

Overall it was a lovely episode and my second favorite this season so far, only behind Marks for Effort.

Edited by DonMaguz
Corrected a word.
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This was a really well written episode I'm glad we got some more development on the six students and there past history, Gallus's is my personal favorite I found it rather sad compared to most characters's motivations for there actions. 

A solid episode, probably one of my favorites this season.

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My guess about lack of Starlight is that she and Sunburst decided to visit their parents in Sire's Hollow for the Holidays, to prevent another Map Mission from arising.

Edited by YoshiAngemon
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I really liked the episode, I suppose Cristmass in August works somehow? I really like Ocellus's literal interpretation of a holiday. and I guess Yuna's holiday was smashing.

Edited by R.D.Dash
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I haven't seen Friendship U yet (what is up with the Australian scheduling?) but so far this is by far my favorite episode from the second half. The framing story is an old trope, but it was well-executed. I had no idea it was Gallus until after Silverstream's story (after his comment on it I remembered that he was the only one who fought to stay at the school, so his motivation was clear, and at that point he was the only one who hadn't told a story yet, so it was clear the direction it was going), but then I looked back and they dropped a few hints, for example in the opening scene he is the only one who isn't happy when they are returning to their dorms to pack. The stories were all great in their own ways. Smolder's was my personal favorite as it had the most substance to it, and it was just hilariously sociopathic. Together it feels like the student six's personalities are finally being fleshed out.

Edited by Ganondox
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7 hours ago, gingerninja666 said:

Here's what I find funny, since we saw the redeemed changelings celebrating the last Hearthswarming, that means the latest Feast of Fire happened after Ember became Dragon Lord.

Meaning she was most likely in attendance to hear that story. The one about a kind and sensitive dragon lord being overthrown for helping someone else. Sounds kinda like her, doesn't it?

And that was the story which WON too.

Sounds like the real reason the story won is not because the dragons are complete sociopaths, but as passive-aggressive criticism for some of Ember's new policies. It wasn't explained how best story is determined, but I'm guessing plurality vote, and enough dragons found it to be on-the-nose enough to push it to victory. A determined minority is more likely to win than the majority in a plurality voting system as they don't split. Or Smolder could just be lying and trolling the other students. 

Edited by Ganondox
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31 minutes ago, Ganondox said:

Sounds like the real reason the story won is not because the dragons are complete sociopaths, but as passive-aggressive criticism for some of Ember's new policies. It wasn't explained how best story is determined, but I'm guessing plurality vote, and enough dragons found it to be on-the-nose enough to push it to victory. A determined minority is more likely to win than the majority in a plurality voting system as they don't split. Or Smolder could just be lying and trolling the other students. 

Or, my personal theory, maybe EMBER was the one who told it. As kind of a "I'm not as soft and against dragon culture as you may have heard," message to some, and a "Yes, I know down to the letter how you bastards think, so don't think it'll work on me," message to others.

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1 hour ago, gingerninja666 said:

Or, my personal theory, maybe EMBER was the one who told it. As kind of a "I'm not as soft and against dragon culture as you may have heard," message to some, and a "Yes, I know down to the letter how you bastards think, so don't think it'll work on me," message to others.

I find it hard to believe the dragons are quite as terrible as Smolder portrays them in as being, I think she exaggerates things for kicks, but I do like that theory. 

Edited by Ganondox
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Overall, I would say that this is an okay episode. It reminds me a bit of "Surf and/or Turf", in that this episode is kind of fluffy and has a fairly basic plot, which serves to facilitate a bunch of worldbuilding exposition. So this episode is fine for what it is, and I wouldn't say that there's anything particularly bad about it, but it also doesn't really blow me away or anything. Consequently, I won't have too much to say about it.

One thing to comment on a bit more on is the idea that Twilight, Rainbow, and Spike had cornered the culprit in the Student Six's quarters, and therefore, one of the Student Six must have been the culprit. The three of them come in the front door, and Rainbow reports that the back door is locked and that there's no way out. So the students' quarters only have a front door and a back door to enter/exit? Do the hallways or dorm rooms have any openable windows through which someone other than the Student Six could escape? If not, only having two possible exits for the students' quarters would seem to be dangerous if there were some emergency requiring escape (fire, etc.). Also, couldn't the culprit be, say, a unicorn with an ability to teleport? Or what if Discord just wanted to cause some more chaos and teleported away? So I wouldn't have been 100% sure that one of the Student Six must have been the culprit.

Another big part of this episode is Gallus's backstory. When Gallus says that he doesn't have a family, and he's shown outside looking in through a window at Gilda and company "celebrating" the Blue Moon Festival, what's the implication of that? Does Gallus not have a caretaker or any place to live? Is he literally a homeless orphan wandering the streets? Griffons don't seem like the type to have any orphanages or the like. And obviously his homelessness would be a serious issue, which he ought to bring up with Twilight and/or the Mane Eight, especially before he gets "sent home" on break without having an actual home to go to. Also, if Gallus is a homeless orphan, then how would he have come to be selected as the (apparently) one griffon to go to the Friendship School? Was it just a matter of the other griffons being tired of seeing him or having him hang around, so they figured that they would send him off so that he would be cared for by the Friendship School instead?

The other thing I wonder about is how the Student Six's families feel about their staying at the Friendship School for one of the presumably infrequent school breaks. Most of the rest of the Student Six seemed pretty eager to go see their families (to the point that Ocellus and Silverstream were tearing up at the prospect of not going home), and their families might have been waiting for months to see them, but now it's not clear that any of them will go home to visit for the break. I jokingly thought that the cynical moral to this episode is that if you're living away from home to go to school, then when the holiday break rolls around, don't go home to see your family, whom you might not have seen in several months; instead, stay at school to continue hanging out with your friends, whom you've seen every day. But I do wonder when the rest of the Student Six would plan to see their families again, or if there would be any way for them to still arrange to see their families during the break for a shorter period or something, especially considering that Rainbow says that they don't really need to stay at school for extra lessons. Maybe Gallus could even go with one (or more) of the other Student Six to see their families and cultures. It seems like at least the hippogriffs or the changelings or even Sandbar's family would be welcoming and laid-back enough to do that (I might not be so sure about the yaks or dragons).

Now here's the rest of my miscellaneous observations:

So there's a literal Fire of Friendship on top of the tree? Do ponies in Equestria have horror stories like we have about Christmas tree fires and how to avoid them? Or is it like some kind of magical fire that wouldn't burn the tree or nearby flammable materials? The fire does react and get bigger when the goo powder is poured into it, so the fire isn't totally inert.

It's nice that Twilight protected herself from the slime with a magical shield, but I kind of wish that she could have protected Spike, too, like she did with her wing back in "What About Discord?", as I mentioned in this post.

Almost 30 seconds elapse between the time that the slime stops flowing and when Spike spots Gallus still hanging around. I might think that the distraction of the Fire of Friendship getting bigger and the subsequent wave of slime be a good chance to get away without getting spotted. Was Gallus observing to make sure that the goo powder worked as intended, and then it was too late to escape without being discovered?

After none of the Student Six confesses to the sliming, Twilight tells them that they'll all have to help clean up before they can go home. But wasn't Rainbow telling them to pack rather than hanging around earlier in the episode, joking that "if you miss that train, it's a really long walk"? Would they have just all missed their train(s) because they had to stay to clean up? Would they have had to get new tickets for a different time and/or day to go back home?

Do changelings really want/need to celebrate pony history with Hearth's Warming Eve? What's the significance of it to them? I would think that it would make more sense to make changeling cultural holidays out of things like, say, the day the changelings transformed or something.

The changelings' punch pool isn't even the first time such a thing has appeared in the show; and as I also thought back then, a punch pool is liable to create a sticky, dirty, unhygienic mess.

If apparently most of the hippogriffs stay under the sea or on land without going back and forth, then does the Three Days of Freedom Celebration also serve as a check to make sure that all the hippogriffs are still able to both swim as seaponies and walk/fly as hippogriffs?

Finally, Sandbar seemingly gets suspicious of Smolder and Gallus because they're being "so cool about this" and aren't displaying sufficient anger/upset at the situation. But it's not as though Sandbar has been displaying strong emotions about the situation either.

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2 hours ago, Music Chart Fan said:

Overall, I would say that this is an okay episode. It reminds me a bit of "Surf and/or Turf", in that this episode is kind of fluffy and has a fairly basic plot, which serves to facilitate a bunch of worldbuilding exposition. So this episode is fine for what it is, and I wouldn't say that there's anything particularly bad about it, but it also doesn't really blow me away or anything. Consequently, I won't have too much to say about it.

One thing to comment on a bit more on is the idea that Twilight, Rainbow, and Spike had cornered the culprit in the Student Six's quarters, and therefore, one of the Student Six must have been the culprit. The three of them come in the front door, and Rainbow reports that the back door is locked and that there's no way out. So the students' quarters only have a front door and a back door to enter/exit? Do the hallways or dorm rooms have any openable windows through which someone other than the Student Six could escape? If not, only having two possible exits for the students' quarters would seem to be dangerous if there were some emergency requiring escape (fire, etc.). Also, couldn't the culprit be, say, a unicorn with an ability to teleport? Or what if Discord just wanted to cause some more chaos and teleported away? So I wouldn't have been 100% sure that one of the Student Six must have been the culprit.

Another big part of this episode is Gallus's backstory. When Gallus says that he doesn't have a family, and he's shown outside looking in through a window at Gilda and company "celebrating" the Blue Moon Festival, what's the implication of that? Does Gallus not have a caretaker or any place to live? Is he literally a homeless orphan wandering the streets? Griffons don't seem like the type to have any orphanages or the like. And obviously his homelessness would be a serious issue, which he ought to bring up with Twilight and/or the Mane Eight, especially before he gets "sent home" on break without having an actual home to go to. Also, if Gallus is a homeless orphan, then how would he have come to be selected as the (apparently) one griffon to go to the Friendship School? Was it just a matter of the other griffons being tired of seeing him or having him hang around, so they figured that they would send him off so that he would be cared for by the Friendship School instead?

The other thing I wonder about is how the Student Six's families feel about their staying at the Friendship School for one of the presumably infrequent school breaks. Most of the rest of the Student Six seemed pretty eager to go see their families (to the point that Ocellus and Silverstream were tearing up at the prospect of not going home), and their families might have been waiting for months to see them, but now it's not clear that any of them will go home to visit for the break. I jokingly thought that the cynical moral to this episode is that if you're living away from home to go to school, then when the holiday break rolls around, don't go home to see your family, whom you might not have seen in several months; instead, stay at school to continue hanging out with your friends, whom you've seen every day. But I do wonder when the rest of the Student Six would plan to see their families again, or if there would be any way for them to still arrange to see their families during the break for a shorter period or something, especially considering that Rainbow says that they don't really need to stay at school for extra lessons. Maybe Gallus could even go with one (or more) of the other Student Six to see their families and cultures. It seems like at least the hippogriffs or the changelings or even Sandbar's family would be welcoming and laid-back enough to do that (I might not be so sure about the yaks or dragons).

Now here's the rest of my miscellaneous observations:

So there's a literal Fire of Friendship on top of the tree? Do ponies in Equestria have horror stories like we have about Christmas tree fires and how to avoid them? Or is it like some kind of magical fire that wouldn't burn the tree or nearby flammable materials? The fire does react and get bigger when the goo powder is poured into it, so the fire isn't totally inert.

It's nice that Twilight protected herself from the slime with a magical shield, but I kind of wish that she could have protected Spike, too, like she did with her wing back in "What About Discord?", as I mentioned in this post.

Almost 30 seconds elapse between the time that the slime stops flowing and when Spike spots Gallus still hanging around. I might think that the distraction of the Fire of Friendship getting bigger and the subsequent wave of slime be a good chance to get away without getting spotted. Was Gallus observing to make sure that the goo powder worked as intended, and then it was too late to escape without being discovered?

After none of the Student Six confesses to the sliming, Twilight tells them that they'll all have to help clean up before they can go home. But wasn't Rainbow telling them to pack rather than hanging around earlier in the episode, joking that "if you miss that train, it's a really long walk"? Would they have just all missed their train(s) because they had to stay to clean up? Would they have had to get new tickets for a different time and/or day to go back home?

Do changelings really want/need to celebrate pony history with Hearth's Warming Eve? What's the significance of it to them? I would think that it would make more sense to make changeling cultural holidays out of things like, say, the day the changelings transformed or something.

The changelings' punch pool isn't even the first time such a thing has appeared in the show; and as I also thought back then, a punch pool is liable to create a sticky, dirty, unhygienic mess.

If apparently most of the hippogriffs stay under the sea or on land without going back and forth, then does the Three Days of Freedom Celebration also serve as a check to make sure that all the hippogriffs are still able to both swim as seaponies and walk/fly as hippogriffs?

Finally, Sandbar seemingly gets suspicious of Smolder and Gallus because they're being "so cool about this" and aren't displaying sufficient anger/upset at the situation. But it's not as though Sandbar has been displaying strong emotions about the situation either.

In the case of the Changelings, I kinda got the impression it was mostly Ocellus (who we know is very inquisitive) and a few other changelings who were particularly interested who tried out Hearthswarming. I imagine Twilight gave the instructions to Thorax, who then handed them out to any Changeling who was interested.

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All I can say about this episode, really, is 'what the hell is going on with Twilight lately?' She immediately concluded that one of the student six had caused the mess, and then she went the basic elementary school route of punishing everyone for one's mistakes (and when she said that I really wasn't even certain any of them had done it to begin with). I liked the Hearth's Warming's tales of all the students, which saved this episode, but other than that I really didn't like the way the situation was handled.

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13 hours ago, VG_Addict said:

What do you think of S8 so far?

I'm liking it! I've enjoyed about 9/15 episodes so far, which isn't the strongest in the show, but still fairly decent. There's some general trends I enjoy, as well - directly addressing more mature subject matter, downplayed moralizing, and an at times increased comedy focus are particularly welcome. Shame about the low points, and shame that the school gimmick doesn't make more sense.

3 hours ago, KatonRyu said:

All I can say about this episode, really, is 'what the hell is going on with Twilight lately?' She immediately concluded that one of the student six had caused the mess, and then she went the basic elementary school route of punishing everyone for one's mistakes (and when she said that I really wasn't even certain any of them had done it to begin with). 

All evidence pointed to one of them, and without knowing exactly what level of schooling Twilight provides, the punishment doesn't seem out-of-place to me. 

On 8/3/2018 at 8:09 PM, VG_Addict said:

Anyone else wish the Student Six would get more focus episodes this season? Ideally, their friendship would grow over the course of the season, mirroring the Mane Six's friendship growing in S1. 

They're not the characters I care most about, so nah. 

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It was an interesting episode, one of those that kept me entertained without being too funny or having much action. Finally, the Student Six were utilized properly and had some decent development.

As for the stories, I voted for Smolder’s tale because it was something I didn’t expect to see in MLP – an unapologetically brutal and mean story justified by “that’s the way dragons like it, deal with it”. Ocellus’s story made me wonder how unprepared changelings had been to infiltrate pony society – shouldn’t they have learnt ponies’ customs and traditions so they could spy unnoticed?

Also, the stories of most non-pony creatures confirmed that pony master race culture is superior.

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3 hours ago, AlexanderThrond said:

All evidence pointed to one of them, and without knowing exactly what level of schooling Twilight provides, the punishment doesn't seem out-of-place to me. 

I honestly found her evidence rather flimsy other than 'the culprit went in here and the other door is locked'. In a world where magic is a ubiquitous as Equestria, a locked door wouldn't really prove much to me. Also keeping students from going home over the holidays for something only of them has done (without even knowing if the others knew anything about it at all, for that matter) doesn't sit well with me, but then I've always hated the 'punish the group for one person's misdeeds' approach and found it to be idiotic even in the real world.

Edited by KatonRyu
typo fix
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(edited)
8 minutes ago, KatonRyu said:

I honestly found her evidence rather flimsy other than 'the culprit went in here and the other door is locked'. In a world where magic is a ubiquitous as Equestria, a locked door wouldn't really prove much to me.

There's more to it than that. They saw the culprit who poured the goo powder run to the students' quarters. There, there's only one way out: leave their dorm door and then out the front. The Student Six were the only ones left, and the cloaked individual opened doors without magic, so that reduces the suspect count more. Dash and Twilight also admitted to suspecting that Gallus did it, but waited for him to openly confess.

Edited by Dark Qiviut
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Just now, Dark Qiviut said:

There's more to it than that. They saw the culprit who poured the goo powder run to the students' quarters. There, there's only one way out: leave their dorm door and then out the front. The Student Six were the only ones left, and the cloaked individual opened doors without magic, so that reduces the suspect count more. Dash and Twilight also admitted to suspecting that Gallus did it, but waited for him to admit it by himself.

To me, their suspicion came out of left field a bit. Sure, out of the student six Gallus was the most likely suspect, but I really didn't suspect any of them at all. I actually thought they would be going with a setup plot that would lead Twilight and Dash to erroneously conclude that one of the student six did it, only for it to be someone else altogether. That may have been expecting a bit too much from an MLP episode, I guess.

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Just now, KatonRyu said:

To me, their suspicion came out of left field a bit. Sure, out of the student six Gallus was the most likely suspect, but I really didn't suspect any of them at all.

That's by design and what makes this a great mystery story. THWC made us believe it was someone else from the school. Revealing he did it was a plot twist many didn't see coming.

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Just now, Dark Qiviut said:

That's by design and what makes this a great mystery story. THWC made us believe it was someone else from the school. Revealing he did it was a plot twist many didn't see coming.

Fair enough, but that still doesn't mean I liked it much. It was just a very disappointing reveal to me, so I don't really agree it was a great mystery story. I would've liked it much more if it had actually been another student, who had then come forward out of guilt at seeing the student six get into a fight over it, and prompting Twilight and Dash to apologize for their wrongful accusations. But hey, to each their own.

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