Nov
24th
2013
Season 4 opener. · 12:59am Nov 24th, 2013
Have we seen it? What do we think? For me it was allright. I never actually was upset with Twilight becoming an alicorn, since it was Faust's idea from the start. As long as the show doesn't go completely FUBAR (read: EqG) I'm fine with that. Some parts of the new episode don't really make sense, but again, it's a goddamn cartoon about pastel-colored magical ponies. It's not meant to make sense. It's meant to make money. Which makes... sense? 
I have ambivalent feelings about the season opener. I can compare it to Lesson Zero in that it's a self-service episode, by which I mean it's like we're seeing the writers perform maintenance on the operating formula of the show. That obviously needs more explanation. Henceforth shall I prattle for the cause of clarity. Tally ho!
It's obvious that they wanted to strip the characters of their Magical Girl type powers. I think that's not necessarily a bad idea, and to some degree reflects that the characters are now powerful enough without the MacGuffins of Emotional Potency to stand up to challenges without them. Fluttershy convinced Discord to continue his social contract with Equestria by a straight-forward re-statement of her own terms of it. That was easily missed, but Fluttershy apparently picked up a level in Bad-Ass and used her Daily Utility right there. I suppose the elements were already a metaphor, really, but they were also a weak point in the series. Notice how after the pilot, they were never really the direct answer to any of the conflicts? That's good writing, but also meant they were constantly dodging creating problems that the girls can solve by hitting it with a friendship-themed BFG. I frequently use a puppet metaphor when discussing fiction, perhaps because I like puppets and puppeteering. I use the term "the hands of the authors" when I see deliberate story manipulation like this. Naturally, I find it amateurish, but concede that occasionally, if just because of time constraints, and because they aren't truly able to see the show in the same way the audience does (like with puppeteering), some degree of hand-showing is necessary.
The emergence and banishment of Nightmare Moon and the Royal Pony Sisters' encounter with Discord were just barely necessary for the plot, and the latter more than the former. Directly showing both, however, allows the show to put a degree of closure on those events, thus letting the story shift to future matters. Again, hands of the writers, but this one was more grotesque to me. Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed seeing them, but Zecora whips out this Potion of Narrative Convenience for some insane reason, and to be honest I kind of lost it when understood what was happening. I'll entertain justifications for it, but to me it just seemed like a desperate attempt to crunch a larger story down into a forty-minute chunk. That's the standard FiM problem that has haunted the generation from the very start, and I suspect it will linger like a omnipresent ghost fart up to and including the series end. Also she had to use dark magic to active it, so this whole thing is either a plot hook or just... I don't know. A mess? I'm choosing to be optimistic about this and anticipate the matter of the potion in the future.
The central conflict to the story was Twilight versus society, or maybe just her friends. Not many fans anticipated that it was her friends that were going to treat her differently after her coronation. (Except Spike, because he's her awesome little bro that always has her back, and doubly so when he's on her back.) That was a heartbreaking surprise. It came to a head and then resolved itself so rapidly that it felt disjointed and I found it hard this part hard to enjoy.
I could go on, but I'd like to add that the animation, voice acting, characters and music were fantastic as usual. I actually feel like the core of this arc was actually okay, and that if it was formatted differently, it could have been awesome. I guess I can forgive it for its flaws, though. As I just argued, it seems like it's setting up much better stories in the future. The needs of the many, as it goes.
1535709
You should probably edit this and post it in your blog as well. It is a nice review.
1537437 Thanks! I'll think about it, but I think I'd want to go with a more clear thesis to the review, if just to give it focus. So, yes, some editing indeed.