On New Beginnings · 9:38pm Apr 15th, 2017
Welcome back to a world of magic and wonder. A world where anything is possible. A world where I sometimes write blog posts about things while they're still current.
It'll be weird, I know.
I was really expecting this season premier to be a two-parter. Sure, I saw the episode summaries, and I could see they had no apparent connection. But I still assumed there was some progression from one to the next. Why would I anticipate that the season would lead with two unrelated episodes back-to-back? It's kind of weird.
I guess the moral of "Celestial Advice" is that being a mentor is harder than it looks to a mentee? Certainly that is true. Understanding a subject doesn't just make it easy to teach it effectively.
Of course, anybody who's ever tried to teach anything already knows that.
When I found out a couple weeks ago that Starlight was graduating, I didn't think she was ready. But you know what? I was wrong. I was not considering the fact that Starlight was in remedial friendship tutoring as part of her probation. Saving Equestria by uniting a motley crew of friends and acquaintances is certainly reason enough to graduate from that.
I'm glad to see the dynamic between Discord and Twilight hasn't changed. It's just too much fun to watch him mess with her. I was worried she'd start actually liking him enough that he'd stop having a reason to pick on her especially, but so far that doesn't seem to have happened.
Twilight must have a great mind. Or at least a pretty good one, since she was somewhat behind. I was thinking Starlight should maybe go help Thorax bootstrap the new changeling society from when he mentioned how overwhelming his new responsibilities are. Certainly it wouldn't hurt to have another outside voice on hoof; sure, Thorax isn't the only changeling who's spent time outside the hive interacting with other societies, but given the lack of skill with which the changelings who replaced the Mane Six performed their roles, I don't think the rest of them learned much.
Speaking of which, I don't think I asked: what ever happened to those changelings? Did Chryssy go pick them up as the beginning of her new hive? Or did they return to their original hive to find the top blown off and their compatriots changed? If they did, were they easily indoctrinated into the new ways (as changelings seem to generally be very much followers) or were they chosen for the mission because they were more capable of independent action and especially loyal to Chrysalis, leading them to at least try to hold onto the old ways? Were they suspicious of some trick when they found everything different than they had left it?
And then the imaginary changelings turning on Starlight raises questions too. How does changeling society deal with identity and associating actions with actors? Certainly a changeling would not have trouble imagining that appearances may be deceiving; we know that they cannot automatically see through each others' disguises. Certainly if a changeling sees you acting in an uncharacteristic manner, that changeling would suspect you're not really you. But what if that changeling doesn't know what is normal behavior for you? What if you just want to do something you couldn't normally get away with while maintaining the ability to deny it was really you who did it? I suspect that the average changeling doesn't know a spell to break transformations (plus it's probably rude to just cast that on someone), which would complicate checking for such tricks. And of course it gets rather a lot harder to check if you want to check later rather than in the moment. It's certainly a potential threat to a functioning society.
I wonder how Chryssy dealt with the issue? I'm sure that Thorax can't be the only rebel the changelings ever had, and I doubt all of them expressed their rebellion by leaving. When you're an evil dictator like Chryssy, it's all well and good to not mind punishing those who were not actually involved in punishable behavior, but there still must be a reasonable presumption that the actual perpetrator, or at least someone the perpetrator cares about, is among those punished. Otherwise it stops being a deterrent and starts being another means to harm those you don't like.
That said, I'm not sure if Twilight is right that changelings still can transform. I imagine she would presume that by default, but I'm not so sure it's a given. I don't seem to have mentioned it around here, but I think it would be reasonable to guess that the changelings' ability to change was due to their incompleteness, and that now that they are complete they have lost that ability. I haven't seen any of them change lately, and I bet Twilight hasn't either.
On the subject of changeling transformations, if Thorax can still transform, I wonder if he considered switching to a form without such large antlers to help Luna put the medal on him? But possibly that would be bad for the medal. Have we ever seen a changeling transform while wearing something and come out of it still wearing it? Perhaps those green flames are more than just visual, although if a neon changeling can change who knows if it still involves green flames?
Also, it probably would have startled Luna, so that would be rude.
You may note that 'Tia's story implies that the rest of the Mane Six were already a group prior to Twilight's arrival. We never thought they were before they went through a terrifying but deeply bonding experience seeking out the Elements of Harmony. So that's a surprise.
All this time I've been asking 'Tia to let her guard down more often, but now that she's acquiescing it's kind of jarring. I never imagined her allowing herself to get caught up in catastrophizing over the dangers Twilight might (and in fact did) face in Ponyville. It's touching though that she's finally sharing this side of herself with Twilight.
I don't think there's anything to say about the moral in "All Bottled Up". Starlight seems to have summed it up pretty effectively. I'm not even going to pull out a secondary moral, since they're just so secondary (or even tertiary).
And on the subject of Starlight, here's the other half of why I do believe she was ready to graduate. She made a series of choices that lead to a bad result, and when that point was reached she was able to identify which decision was the major blunder. If that ability to diagnose her own problems isn't a sign that she really was ready to graduate, then what is?
When I read the description for this episode, I thought "Wait, she's going to lose the map? As in the giant stone table that has to weigh tons and is attached to the floor? How do you lose that?" And now I know.
Now I only ask how she got it through the door when she brought it back.
By the way, I love those escape rooms. I haven't done one of those in too long. We escaped from the Time Lab, you know. I've got a picture . . . somewhere . . . to prove that we escaped within the time limit. Not many teams do. Those things are hard.
It's certainly interesting to note that Starlight gets powered up by emotion. I wonder what emotion she was feeling during the magic practice at the beginning of "Every Little Thing She Does"? Certainly she was displaying a lot of power there.
But also it's kind of terrifying that she's most powerful when she's least rational.
You know, I want to believe that one time Starlight and Trixie were hanging out and something went wrong, so Starlight went back in time to fix it. And of course it went so badly that Starlight swore to never try that again and made Trixie promise to keep it a secret.
I know Trixie was just making a bad joke about Starlight's revenge on Twilight, but I want to believe.
Very good points about Starlight's graduation and the progress she's made. I hadn't thought of it like that until now.
That being said, the rest of the Mane Six almost certainly couldn't be that close before Twilight came. Much of Season 1 is dedicated to them getting to know and understand each other to a degree that just doesn't make sense if they were already tightly knit enough to move in a convenient group shot during a surprisingly low-hype visit by Celestia. Going to have to call dramatic convenience/unreliable narrator/symbolic storytelling/what have you on that one.