Gotta say...

I liked RD in this one. Her antics with Twilight reminded me perfectly of my own misspent youth, only with more actual crushed dreams.

Too bad Twilight then had her banished forever for ruining her books.

Nopony ruins Princess Sparkle's books...and lives.

Comments

[Pen Brush]

Rainbow is a terrible artist.

[Dracon_Pyrothayan]

I'm just wondering why Twilight handed her a library book and a Highlighter. This was the intended result, people!

Of course, an Anal-Retentive unicorn at some point probably figured out a de-highlight spell, and Twilight clearly would have learned that a long time ago.
Would be a fun spell to cast on mane-styles, come to think on it....

[Ponynumber14346]

Time to wait for someone to photoshop some saucy Twilihgt picture into the book to fold out. Also this made my almost nonexistant Twi-Dash ship to flare up just enough to get me to even consider it as a ship again...

[La Vallett1]

Sorry, I can't see the pic.

[Emeral Bookwise]

I liked the general message about everyone learning differently, but a better subject matter could have been used to illustrate it. As is, it just came off as odd that seemingly all of the other M6 (save AJ) kew more about the Wonderbolts than Rainbow would.

I mean, personally I don't know a thing about the local sports teams (and couldn't even really be bothered to care), but one of my oldest friends since high school who is a major sports fanatic could ramble off obscure trivia on the subject all day long. It's not even because he ever studied anything in particular, but rather just that he's been following the exploits of those teams for so long that he's just picked it all up over time.

Now, I could still buy into Twilight accidentally psyching Rainbow out so that she became too flustered to think straight, but not really the idea that she never knew any of this stuff beforehand. Not to mention that using Rainbow (who is "the jock") as the character supposedly too dumb to learn, makes for a rather insulting stereotype.

[TheWalkingBread]

I liked it a lot. Strong characterization, lots of funny moments, good moral... not really much else to say.

[wolfstorm56]

1983511 dude did you watch the episode all the way through?? Dash isn't portrayed as dumb at all, even though she insists nearly the whole time that she is, possibly because of those same stereotypes. She just learns differently than the others and it takes them all time to realize it. Honestly once she had the right method to figure it out, she learned it very quickly. And yeah, it is a little suspect that all the M6 just happened to know the history of the Wonderbolts, but it can be justified; Twilight's a scholar, Rarity could be into historical fashions and their contexts, Pinkie's eccentric, and Fluttershy probably actually paid attention in school. Just sayin'.

[Osakayumu]

Best Pony and Second-Best Pony both shined in this episode!

[Emeral Bookwise]

1984006
No, I get that was the message they were trying to convey the problem was with how they conveyed it.

The initial setup was actually great, with Twilight projecting her own test anxieties onto Rainbow Dash, who isn't worried at all about the upcoming test... and why should she be? The Wonderbolts have always been portrayed as her most prevalent driving passion (something she practically eats, breaths, and sleeps), and as such it initially seemed that Rainbow's boredom with Twilight's lecture is that it's all going over stuff that we as the audience would expect her to already know -- only then it turns out she really doesn't know ANY of even the team's most basic history.

Moreover though, no previous episode has ever really suggested that Rainbow an extreme special needs learner. Heck, despite only recently being introduced to a book series like Daring Do, we know for a fact that not only has she rapidly devoured the entire backlog, but that she's committed all of it to memory thus giving her an encyclopedic knowledge that rivals Twilight as seen in their nerd-off...

...worse still, this episode actually makes a brief allusion to that fact, and yet still goes down the convoluted route of teaching through incidental osmoses rather than something more obviously practical like turning the history of the Wonderbolts into a narrative adventure.

Really though, regardless of how she learns, the problem still goes back to why wouldn't Rainbow already know enough to at least pass a such a test in the first place. The premise of this episode could maybe have still worked though, if it had tied into another established aspect of Rainbow's character -- the fact that she apparently never finished flight-school, which is a technicality that could conceivably have made her ineligible to join the Wonderbolts. This could then necessitate her taking a test to get her GED equivalent involving more generic pegasus and/or Cloudsdale related history, which she might more believably not know (or at least not know how much she already knows without realizing it).

[wolfstorm56]

1985371 Yeah, that does make a lot of sense and they went about her learning it in kind of a silly way. It's bizarre that she wouldn't know anything about the sports/aerial team that she's so obsessed with. It's a shame that an episode with such a great moral had to go through those gymnastics to get to that point. I can agree with you that it was executed in an odd way but for me that's less important than the overall theme which is a great one.