After Trixie's "Way-To-Go-Dum-Dum-You-Really Messed-It-Up-This-Time Repentance Tour" show in Ponyville, many ponies have re-evaluated their opinions on Trixie, giving her a little more respect.
Fluttershy, however, sees beyond the show and wonders just what truly happened. Fluttershy asks Trixie about her emotional state, and what she was truly feeling right before launching herself out of the cannon.
Their chat reveals a few surprising things about Trixie's life.
SPOILERS for No Second Prances.
Chapters (1)
“Hmm?” Trixie turned around. “You look familiar, I’ve seen you at the acts I’ve had in town here. Did you want an autograph or something?”
Pretty sure she encountered in earnest when she was possessed. Also, http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/Manehattan_Mysteries this explains WHY AJ and Fluttershy would be at a show of Trixie's!
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Yeah it's somehow sad what comics aren't canon.
On the other hand, it gives authors more free will, just like here at fimfiction.
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But if that was the case where's Rarity ? She was there too.
Dammit, someone else thought of the manticore being safe and got it out before me.
Don't know what else I expected, really.
7175408 True, but remember that Trixie was in her megalomania stage at the time. If she didn't have a prior vendetta with a pony (Rainbow Dash, AJ, Rarity, Twilight), I doubt she would've given much thought to even finding out somebody's name
7175735 I suppose I should buy the comics, considering they're on a Humble Bundle right now
7176835 Rarity was busy preparing for her own performance encore with the Rariball
7176926 Working title was actually 'Mare to (the) Core' but for a pun it didn't roll off the tongue very well. Besides, the manticore takes a bow at the end. All it needed was a bowtie and it'd be dapper as f
7177350 What's the Rariball?
7178377 spoilers if you haven't seen The Gift of the Maud Pie yet
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Hmm, never thought of a animal whisper Trixie before. Can anyone say new headcanon gained? Anyways, this would explain how the manticore bowed at the end, you're quite right about that. My theory, Trixie was never in any real danger. If you ask me, I figure she was going to preform the trick anyway even if she hadn't met Starlight.
Honestly, the whole episode was pretty poorly plotted.
Even these fanon explanations don't really work, as it then paints Trixie as having manipulated the entire situation from the start to an even greater extent.
Remember, she told Starlight she had no idea how Hoofdini pulled off the stunt with a wild pony-eating manticore. But in these cases, she DID know how it worked. She knew manticores could be trained by ponies with the talent for it and had worked out an agreement with the manticore well ahead of time. Which means she'd deliberately lied to Starlight TWICE with a two-layered deception.
Having the 'vicious predator' bowing after swallowing a character on stage or in a circus is an old animation shtick from Bugs Bunny in the 1930's and so forth. But that was in a pure slapstick setting with nothing meant to be taken as serious story-telling. It didn't fit as part of a dramatic plot development. In fact, it clearly undermined it, considering that it's the most contentious part of the entire episode aside from the out-of-characterness of Twilight, Celestia, and even Trixie. Starlight gets a partial pass because her character is never stable from one episode to the next, so we don't even know what 'in-character' means for her.
7192382 I can't help but think that Trixie probably planned to kill herself from the very beginning.
She arrives back in Ponyville, a town that probably still hates her for she did during Magic Duel. You'd think that Ponyville would be the last town in Equestria Trixie would want to visit again after all that.
She arrives with the intent on starting an Apology Tour by performing a dangerous magic act that could possibly end her.
It makes me wonder whether or not Trixie intended to deliberately kill herself as punishment for enslaving a whole town. She probably figured the ponies would much rather see a villain like her get her final comeuppance.
And when you think about it, her making friends with Starlight seems to be more of a lucky accident. I don't think she ever planned on running into Starlight at the Spa, a place she more than likely chose to spend her final moments before ending it all.
I might be overthinking all this, but it does seem a tad convenient.
7210599 All of this would have become clear if the episode had been written better.
It could have gone that route, if it were not a little girl's show, and set up the scenario rather strongly. It could have avoided the mischaracterization issues and so forth and made Twilight's suspicion more justified, or eliminated it completely and let Starlight be the central focus, while Trixie is shown to be clearly driving a wedge between her and Twilight until Trixie spills the beans.
Twilight had always given Trixie a chance, and that alone could have been Trixie's motive: that inwardly she didn't believe herself worthy of another chance and performed that weird mental gymnastics thing some people do when they attack someone trying to help them.
But it didn't. The episode just didn't do a good job with the story or set any of the situations up well other than the initial encounter. After that, it just seemed patched together.
7212671 Even in the friendliest of cartoons, there's sometimes that dark undertone that no one really sees without going deeper into it.
Maybe Trixie pretending to be Starlight's new friend was the idea from the start?
She probably saw Starlight as her one last chance to get back at Twilight. But when she witnessed how powerful she was and how similar their paths were, she began to see Starlight more as an actual friend and not just as an instrument of revenge.
She then changed her plans as she realized she could still give Ponyville what they would want to see, but now live to perform another day.
Unfortunately, she let her moment of final triumph get the better of her and she regretted that action immediately after realizing she now a had reason to live.
Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
You captured the emotions and the tension really well here. Trixie is a complicated character with some pretty obvious mental health issues, and I was curious to see if anyone would probe a bit deeper into her intentions. I'm wondering what Trixie's reaction would have been had the Manticore puked her out; would that tip her back over into a depression, considering it would be pretty humiliating?
This one certainly walked a line on the edge of darkness there with all the suicide talk. The episode was not one of my favorites... specifically for Trixie doing the trick even if she didn't know whether Starlight was going to help her or not. I still think your portrayal of Trixie is a much more rounded and generally likable character than they make her most of the time in the show (though they have been fixing that bit by bit as we continue on).
As for Fluttershy in this one... Way to find the elephant in the room and punch it in the face!
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Yeah, I honestly didn't quite like the whole 'suicidal Trixie' thing. She's still a little bit here, but the key difference was that she didn't actually have a route to go through with it at the time. In retrospect, it also might make her look a little worse for it, if she was consciously hamming it up for Starlight to forgive her and save her.
The greatest trick Trixie ever performed was to claw her way from a two-bit character-of-the-week in early Season 1 into becoming at the very least a major second-tier character, if not a minor first-tier character
Yeah I can totally see Trixie saying that.
PS, good work on this.