Visiden Whines It: No Second Prances · 1:01pm May 1st, 2016
In this episode, Princess Twilight Sparkle is a lying, controlling, insecure, narcissistic bitch, and an incompetent teacher.
And I love it.
My biggest worry regarding Twilight since her princess-hood has always been that she might be transforming into a perfectly wise, serene, do-no-wrong ruler. In other words: dull as dishwater. Now, I do think they leaned too far towards the other direction with the faults, but I'd rather have this extreme than the other one.
It's interesting to see that Celestia does what appears to be inspections on how Twilight's work is progressing, indicative of the two of them not quite as equal as some fans would suggest. Or this could just be something Twilight wrongly assumed, which makes it indicative of Twilight's inability to get out of student mode so to speak.
And hoo boy, Twilight is awful here, in a good way. The fact that Starlight runs around manipulating others at the first opportunity and seems to have no working knowledge on how to make friends such that she has to rely on the rest of the Mane 6 shows that Twilight has taught her absolutely nothing in the intervening time between this episode and Starlight's "redemption".
Yet, despite this show of teaching incompetence, Twilight persists in presenting herself as a good teacher, going so far as to lie about the number of friends Starlight has made. I think that goes against an element of harmony, Princess of Friendship. Looks like she's more interested in puffing herself up in front of Celestia than Starlight's actual progress. Isn't that something? Of course, there's the whole "I decide which friends you can make" but that is sort of fixed by the end.
Coincidentally, I just read one of the novels "Applejack and the Great Switcheroo" or something wherein Applejack commits the horrific evil of venting in a journal about how useless her friends are at farmwork and how Twilight is a corrupt politician who will use her influence to give an unfair advantage to her friend in a contest.
Oh, and we have Celestia show up and make annoyed faces. Baby steps, show, baby steps.
The title is shit. I know horse puns are on par with the show, but come on.
Is that a metal collar around that manticore? For shame, ponies, enslaving monsters for your amusement.
So Starlight praises Trixie's stage magic, which I assume refers to Trixie's talent in using practical effects to create the illusion of magic. Then, she suggests completing a trick using actual magic thus undermining the fact that the performance is a show of Trixie's ability to simulate magic without using magic. And Trixie goes along without a protest.
Spike's not around. Which I find particularly annoying, because he does have a strong dynamic with Starlight, as shown in the premiere. He could have worked here. I don't care if he just got his episode, if the character is useful, put him in.
"He doesn't talk much," Applejack says of her brother, who now resorts to greeting ponies with Eeyup instead of howdy. No, Applejack, your brother is actually capable of talking much as shown in the earliest episodes. What you have standing before you is the flanderized doppelgänger of your brother wrenched from the bowels of fan dumb put there for a gag.
Did Trixie just emotionally blackmail Starlight by suggesting that she was going to go through with the highly dangerous trick that requires Starlight to succeed regardless of whether Starlight is there or not? Wow...that is fucking dark.
Pretty decent episode in my opinion.
Yeah... the worst part is, Trixie clearly has an inferiority complex due in part to her inability to do "real magic" and Twilight's status as a ridiculous prodigy over it.
... And of course the solution is for someone who is the superior unicorn to use her real magic to do it. Which won't really remove Trixie's inferiority complex... given that it's saying that she still needs the real magic she'll never have to reach her true potential.
Overall it was pretty decent. The core of Trixie's resentment as conflict, half accidentally using someone else to get revenge (but liking them genuinely anyway) and forgiving that is a pretty solid core. I sorta wish that Sunset would have had a "but... I remember what it's like to be bitter towards you... and I want to give Trixie the chance to get over it I had" moment.
But I also agree with your gripes.
I already said this elsewhere, but I really didn't like Twilight's presentation this episode. I'm with you on her being more interesting while flawed, but the thing is, she was acting like an idiot this episode, and idiotic is the one thing that Twilight should never be in a well-written story.
When Spike acted like an idiot in Princess Spike for instance, there were a slew of fixfics in the feature box, but I didn't really mind it in that episode, because while Spike has his moments, he's made stupid mistakes consistently enough that I consider it a part of his character at this point. And Twilight makes stupid mistakes too, except that with Twilight, the show is always telling us that she's the smart one. She's treated an intelligent character, both by other characters, and by the narrative itself. So when she doesn't act intelligently, the show undermines itself. It's legitimately out-of-character, rather than just an unflattering portrayal.
And the more it happens, the harder it becomes to ignore. This is canon, so at a certain point, the out-of-character behaviour becomes in-character, because moments like these are as much a part of her as her good moments. And I wouldn't mind that if it were intentional. If the show actually presented Twilight's intelligence as being an informed attribute in-universe, I'd probably forgive things like this. But it's clearly not intentional, so I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
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I would suspect that there is something about Princess Celestia's scrutiny that turns Twilight into a blithering idiot like in Lesson Zero, or the beginning of Sombra's episodes. At the risk of sounding like a Twilestia shipper, it does remind me of Dr. Tofu and Kasumi Tendou. I do believe that they went too far just for the sake of pushing the moral. She should be better than this. But I'd rather have this unnaturally moronic Twilight than the opposite. Balance would be even better. I would find it spectacular if this bumbling turns Starlight evil again.
But that's also the danger of making Twilight wiser and stronger as more episodes pile up, isn't it? She becomes more and more unwieldy as the audience expects her to solve problems with increasing ease.
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I think they were almost onto something, though. What they should've done was gone ahead with making Twilight wise and experienced like they were doing, and then just as it starts getting boring, introduce this element of her as a teacher, but have her be really bad at it. That way, it keeps the character progression she already got (which is important, because if she never actually overcomes flaws and conflicts, the last five seasons are made pointless), but it introduces new character flaws and new sources of conflict, such as Twilight being too stuck in a student mindset to actually be a good teacher.
And it almost feels like that's what they're doing, but Twilight's mistakes here go beyond just being a bad teacher, and the premier certainly didn't seem like it was setting up Twilight to fail at this. Instead, she was praised in that episode for being a hands-off teacher, handling Starlight the way Celestia handled her. My great fear with this arc is that for all Twilight's mistakes, she'll succeed regardless and be praised for everything, while Starlight becomes Twilight 2.0 in a third of the time, wings optional.
Of course, maybe that's just the pessimist in me speaking. We're early in the season yet, and it could just be coincidence that one of the first episodes of the Starlight arc was (in my opinion) not very good. Maybe this isn't representative of where we're heading. I hope it's not. But I guess we'll see.
As a fan of awkward dinner scenarios this episode made me crack a few smiles. Additionally I really enjoyed Trixie's VA, who seemed to be having a lot of fun with the whole thing. However I was surprised that Celestia didn't arrive at the magic act to wrap things up. I guess the writers just don't know what to do with Celestia, but big surprise there amiwrong?!