Help! My Heart is Full of Pony! - Absentee Parenting · 8:07pm Jun 26th, 2019
The Last Crusade was a very emotional episode for many many reasons. For starters, there's the premise itself. Most of us know the pain of having a childhood friend forcibly removed from our lives. In the days before social media, it was even harder than it is now. You simply never saw or heard from your friend ever again. To see the threat of this looming over the Cutie Mark Crusaders was heartbreaking. It truly captured that familiar feeling of helplessness, (even though we the viewers knew that a happy ending was imminent).
However, there was an even deeper tragedy to this story. In this episode, we are given hints of why Scootaloo is the way she is. Her parents are adventurers whom she never ever ever ever gets to see. While functionally out of her life in any useful or supportive way, her parents still kept one hoof in the door. This was just enough for Scootaloo to be emotionally invested. So what did she do?
In her parents' absence, she developed an obsession. Scootaloo found the daringest pony in town - the grownup that reminded her most of her parents - Rainbow Dash - and desperately sought her approval. Scootaloo hitched her own sense of self worth upon Dash. She took this idol worship to such an unhealthy extreme that it took years for the two of them to develop a healthy friendship.
All this time, Scootaloo has been filling a void. It's tragic if you stop to think about it.
Which brings me to third element of this episode that was emotionally harrowing: the behavior of Scootaloo's father and mother. Children need stability. It is not fair to toy with a child's hopes, and dreams, and their sense of belonging by forming a bond with them, and then just...disappearing.
There is no such thing as half-parenting. You are either entrenched in a child's life as a parental figure...or you're not. Sadly, this is something that Scootaloo's parents just don't seem to get, and worse yet, it's a lesson that many people here on Earth still need to learn. It's tragic when blood parents change their minds six years after giving their sons and daughters up for adoption, and try to extract them from the only loving home they've ever known. I have seen first hand the kind of suffering that parents such as these inflict upon their children, and frankly, it's crushing.
It takes arrogance to swoop into a child's life from out of nowhere, and pretend to have any clue what's best for her, or any moral right to decide what course her life should take. Yes, Scootaloo's parents had important reasons for being so far away for so very long, but when they chose that life over their daughter, they ceased to be real parents. There are many ways that this could have been handled - ways they could have remained in Scoot's life in a loving, and supportive, but ultimately secondary role. They didn't.
Which brings me to the real lesson of The Last Crusade. Sometimes your real family aren't merely the people who brought you into this world; they're the people who saw you through all the crazy stuff that comes after. Scootaloo's aunts are her real family. Rainbow Dash is her real family. The Crusaders are her real family.
Even the citizens of Ponyville are like family because they actually know Scootaloo, and they respect and appreciate her for who she is.
This episode did a lot to explore the concept of family without ever saying so explicitly. While a lot of earth kids going through similar situations don't end up with happy endings like Scootaloo did, I like to think that this episode still did some of them a service, if for no other reason than it validated their perspective.
When Scootaloo burst into tears and said "you never even asked me how I feel," she gave voice to that sorrow. She articulated the pain that many actual children feel in a way that they might not have thought to express themselves.
-Sprocket
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"even though we the viewers knew that a happy ending was imminent"
I didn't, actually; I was thinking that something like what they ended up doing would be more plausible but that the episode would instead have Scootaloo indeed being moved away. So I was pleasantly surprised there. :D
And an interesting and good analysis, I think; thanks. :)
I want to give them credit, the reason they wanted to uproot her was after they learned King Sombra had successfully been able to conquer the town. Did they get the details about Scootaloo being a mind-controlled child soldier minion? Their response was pretty calm and reasonable, all that considered.
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Regardless of whether or not their reasoning had merits, they still swooped in from out of nowhere without ever asking Scootaloo how she felt, and without discussing the issue with Scootaloo's aunts, who have clearly been active in Scootaloo's upbringing.