Lemurthon: Bridle Gossip · 2:27am Feb 19th, 2017
One of my most favorite things in the history of Youtube is the Friendcast Mailbag, featuring the Best Friends Zaibatsu. At one moment, Angriest Past--who was allegedly once a brony--is receiving poni poni poni toys in fan mail. At one point, Matt McMuscles cheekily asks: "Did you get the racist, black pony?"
Greetings, Marsupials! It's Lemurthon! Today's episode is Season One's Bridal Gossip! Get bucked.
Bridle Gossip
-the opening of this episode is snazzy
-once again, Twilight and Spike are the anchor... as they should be
-I always think about the Pony Anthology bit where they take Spike's "ZOMBIES?!" bit and turn it into a mock Walking Dead intro
-Pinkie's scared whispers of desperation to Twilight and Spike are adorbs
-"What are you all doing here alone in the dark?" Metaphors, much?
-What makes this episode fantastisnazzy is not so much the fact that the Mane 6 get redeemed for their prejudices, but that Twilight—a grounded and scientific mind—starts out open-minded, gets turned narrow-minded by fear and doubt, and ultimately comes back around to redeem herself. That's a tad bit more realistic than the predictable path this episode could have taken
-This is a good episode for Apple Bloom. Good for introducing her and good for using her as an innocent foil to Applejack's and the rest of the ponies' presumptions
-I always giggle inside when Twilight goes "She's a zebra" and the ponies react in shock. Like... OF ALL THE HORRID THINGS. WHAT'S A ZEBRA?
-Fekkin' zebras
-why's Pinkie Pie's song so charming despite its frightening implications?
-I giggle EVERY TIME at the shot of a trembling!Applejack clinging to Apple Bloom. Soooooooo gooooood
-Twilight's sass is through the roof here. In a good way.
-"I AM a big pony!"
-How did the ponies even learn Zecora's name?
-It's nice that although Apple Bloom is open-minded and warm-hearted, even she harbors an ounce of fear while tailing Zecora on her own
-Hay!
-"Spike! You stay here and not be in the episode!" "Will do!"
-Wow. I'm actually... kinda weirded out to see Apple Bloom without the cutie mark. Strange to think that if the show actually does reach eight seasons, she might have more appearances with the mark than without
-Everytime I re-watch this episode, the presence of the Poison Joke seems sooooooooo obvious
-"You guys!" Notice how "guys" is used a lot for feminine plural? Curious...
-This is the first episode that I felt that Applejack was exhibiting a legit negative quality
-As soon as I heard Zecora's "ethnic" sounding laughter in Twilight's dream, I was like "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh I see where this is going"
-why don't ponies wake up with bed hair more often?
-this whole segment with the Mane 6 showing off their varied curses is beyond fantastic. Sometimes it's nice when the show reminds us it's a cartoon
-Hey look. Spike is both goofy AND the voice of reason. Well done, writers
-Rainbow Crash is strangely adorable
-How did Applejack's hat shrink with her? Goddammit
-There should be more Appletini fics
-Long Live Flutterguy
-Spike's so on point in this episode. Too bad there wasn't more of him
-best gif is RD flapping about in mid-air
-Flutterguy says "That woman's gotta be stopped!" while the group is arguing. Interesting.
-"Maybe somepony stepped on her!" "Or SAT on her?" Gawd...
-Even RD's "OW!" is adorable in this episode
-Good on Apple Bloom for taking charge. But... uhm... she sorta leaves a tiny Appletini ALONE in the EVERFREE FOREST. She's dayum lucky her older sister wasn't devoured by a whiptail scorpion or some shit
-This is the vore scene
-I like how in Season One, ponies objected big-time to being ridden like a domesticated horse. It's seen in this episode as well as in Dog and Pony Show
-I've never understood how Pinkie Pie thinks her song was stolen
-Ah yes. The Flutterguy "reprise." So weird. So random. Bronies loved this shiet. They were right to.
-Fluttershy's all "Can you believe this shit?"
-Nifty how Twilight held out for so long on making presumptions
-"What if she's making Apple Bloom soup?" times two!
-I feel bad for Zecora's hut
-What's this fucking Zebra Swahili?
-in hindsight, it's really nice that Zecora expresses anger while defending her integrity
-look at that horse headbutting! Quadrupeds in S1 sure were quadrupeds
-RD sure is wearing that makeshift stick bridle for a long time
-in the Mane 6's favor, Zecora's warning over the poison joke—delivered in rhyme from a distance through a fog machine—didn't really help clarify the situation too well from the get-go
-Anyone ever notice the friggin' leopard skin blanket on the bed?
-I like the tone in Twilight's voice when she apologized. Tara captured the sincerity pretty well
-the message of this episode is pretty dayum on the nose
-TRIXIES! FOUR OF THEM!
-I wish we had more of the flower mares. Seems like they've been largely missing since The Cutie Pox
-I dig how the end of this episode more or less acknowledges that Pinkie Pie is a friggin' annoying chatterbox
-Everypony loves Applejack
THOUGHTS
Alright. Let's air out the fart balloon right away. Did they really need to have a rhyme-speaking medicine doctor zebra with occasional Swahili-sounding aphasia as the vessel by which to address the subject of racial/cultural prejudices? If things were any more on the nose, everypony would be voiced by Barbara Streisand. I mean... I suppose I see where the writers were coming from. "Let's have a black pony so we can vaguely-but-not-vaguely address racism, fearmongering, and unjust predispositions! What horses are from Africa? ZEBRAS!" But then... like... why does Zecora gotta live in a primitive hut, conjure potions from a friggin' cauldron, own fetish masks, and... f'naaaaa. The list goes on. I'm sure if I was the kind of person to fap to tvtropes, I could look up a gazillion "noble savage" sins of literary predictability and toss it at this episode like monkey feces... but buck that.
I love Zecora. I don't think I'm the only one.
And I like to think it's not because I'm some dumb white dude who gets a boner for "noble savage" stereotypes, but she's such a mysterious character who--aside from Princess Celestia--remains the least explored pony on the show. At least when it comes to mainstays. Blessed Nietzsche I would absolutely love to have a Zecora-centered episode teaching us her backstory and stuff. If we truly have two more seasons to fart around with, then please make it happennnnnn.
And what makes Bridle Gossip so fantastic is not Zecora's character. Hell, the writers could have made her a seapony pushing herself around in a fishbowl on wheels, and it still would have nailed the moral. Why? Cuz the poignant element of this episode is how friggin' idiotic the Mane 6 act... and the huge deep dish of humble pie they're forced to eat from by the story's end. On top of that, Twilight's part is the most important. Because--unlike most of the Mane 6--she doesn't start from a point of ignorance. She's learned and enlightened enough to know who and what Zebras are. And yet--due to paranoia and misunderstanding--she's moved to assume the worst about a pony with little to no evidence. In a way, that makes her even worse than the rest of the Mane 6. And yet... it's just a different kind of false presumption, and the show does a good job of showing us different shades of the garbage spectrum that is stereotyping.
Too bad it had to make Applejack a bit two-dimensional and narrow-minded in order to make her the loudest voice of anti-Zecora dissent. I know they use her loyalty to her family and fear for Apple Bloom's safety as an excuse, but... meh. She's almost the equivalent of Rarity from Sonic Rainboom in this episode. Well, maybe not quite that bad, but it's hard to see the Applejack of Seasons 4 and 5 acting this way. But--hey. We've all gotta learn sometime, right?
When Season One started, they kept Twilight Sparkle as the anchor of the show and its lessons for a reason. We really, truly see it put to good use in this episode, and I couldn't be happier. It's also nice to see that Spike--much like Apple Bloom--isn't quite so moved to suspect Zecora of wrongdoing. In a way, you could call him apathetic. But, for the most part, he's a tool for comedy relief in this episode... except for when he plants the Chekov's gun of Twilight's book of "Super Naturals" being a beacon of truth that Twilight ultimately overlooks. Ultimately, Spike just isn't so... passionately invested in the whole Zecora situation, and that makes him strangely saner than the rest of the characters... despite being a total goof ball injecting much needed levity into the dialogue.
And Apple Bloom. If we didn't have this episode and her tiny cameo in the pilot episode, I would have passed her off as some random filly. But thanks to this... I always... always felt grounded in Apple Bloom as the "supreme" or "main" Cutie Mark Crusader. Even today, I still like to think that if they have a spinoff show where the CMC grow up, Apple Bloom would make the best main character. She's rational like Twilight, but also prone to overworry and dramatics. She's very relateable, and I like that they gave us this episode where she displays an open-minded and positive center... so that we can be introduced to her faults later on.
Faults. Ponies have them. A lot of them. And from the heart of Season One, I find that's what makes the characters of Faust's universe so dayum endearing. They're not perfect--far from it. But they have the capacity to learn and improve themselves. It's beautiful, in a way.
And I'm very... very glad that they had more Zecora in future episodes. She wasn't just this episode's "alien of the week," and for that I'm insanely greatful.
And cute ponies. This episode was friggin' .gif material by a factor of ten million.
-SS&E
< looks at Pinkie dot gif > ...
fapfapfapfapfap
I'm not proud of it. Well, maybe just a little.
Originally, they'd planned to use Zecora more, too, as sort of a second mentor for Twilight. It would have been nice if they had ended up doing that.
As it stands, Zecora's reality was my favorite one in the Cutie Re-Mark.
vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/e/e5/Zecora_thinking_S5E26.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/640?cb=20151201151046
--arcum42
Symbiotic organism. That hat and bow closet? Spawning grounds.
But yeah, Zecora is a fascinating character. Unfortunately, her speech quirk means that some writers avoid her like the plague. Some people just can't grok rhyme and rhythm.
Quadrupeds... the was the nice thing about S1 and Fuast. She wanted the ponies to be ponies as much as possible. Especially with how they interacted with there world. They just kept getting further and further away from that as the seasons progressed. One of the reasons I love fanfic writers who stick close to them being quadrupeds as possible.
Yeah, well I heard it's the EEEEEEVIL way she eats hay. So there!
S8 was already confirmed yesterday.
Not really. As a plural, it's actually gender-neutral. I know that seems counter-intuitive, but it really truly is.
Racist barn, racist barn! 1-2-3-4!
My absolute favorite thing to come out of that scene? This one YT video (too lazy to look it up right now) that loops the animation to the song "Fuck Shit Stack".
Apple Bloom IS the Cutie Mark Commander. I've often (rather unfairly, I admit) made the joke that the CMC "share a brain--the one on the left has it today". Apple Bloom is the one on the left a HELL of a lot more often than the other two.
Still miss the mailbag. Would've loved to send them a mug with a clock on it.
Time Cup.
It's a West Coast thang. Totally invisible usage in California... which is where all the writers live.
Zecora kinda reminds me of the crows from Dumbo. Not necessarily a bad character, but you get the impression that time will not be kind to her. An African mammal (not pony, zebras aren't ponies) that speaks in rhymes, uses a cauldron to make potions, dons impractically large earrings, has a vaguely Swahili accent, and functions as the catalyst for an episode about racism?
Boy, Ace Ventura's looking progressive right now.
Blame the french, a group of girls is only feminine until 1 male joins them.
4427921 She was apparently a major hardass on the ponies never being allowed to hold things in hooves, once she left it became more and more frequent with the animators.
Is this not accepted usage where you're from? At least in Canadian English, "guys" is a non-gendered term when used in that context. (Kinda like how "man" and "he" were gender-nonspecific in certain contexts up until fairly recently.)
Fun analysis.
I remember how the community lost its collective shit over Flutterguy. I hadn't given the show a chance at that point, but people kept sending me clips from it. Zecora's always been criminally underused, and I've been really hoping we'll get to see her in EqG at some point, instead of just seeing a toy of what she might look like in that universe.
4427931 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4NubXXg5Rk
How did I ever miss this?
Oh, this episode. I am not a fan. In fact, like a weirdly high number of season one episodes (considering it's my second favorite season) Bridle Gossip is in my bottom ten for the whole series. Part of it is that Zecora just isn't one of my favorite characters, and part of it is that it's one of the more wacky, silly episodes, and I'm an overly serious kinda dude, but a lot of it comes down to the predictability. For the most part, I don't mind season one's predictability, but when I see those blue flowers, it's just so OBVIOUS how important they are, and when Twilight's having that nightmare about Zecora, I can't help but cringe, because I know the problem is the flowers, not her. That's just me. I can still see why it's such a popular episode.
Oh gawd, I really hope you will get to the end with this reviewing thing you have going on. Not only is it interesting, it also lets me know what episodes I would like to rewatch
This is the episode with the plot.
The moral behind this episode is strong, and I enjoyed Twilight's descent into paranoia with the rest of the ponies. Isn't this the one where they literally said, "Don't judge a book by its cover"?
Also, the best thing is to look up Flutterguy's reprise in French. That dude nails it.