"Simple Ways" Response

Wow. I was seriously conflicted as to whether or not I would rank this below Rainbow Falls. After much mental deliberation (which involved writing most of the stuff below), RF shall remain my pick for “Worst of Season 4.” However, both of these episodes are terrible in their own ways, which made it hard to put them side by side. Rainbow Falls is one of the worst episodes of MLP to date through sheer incompetence: annoying side characters, uncreative and grating dialogue, cherry-picking continuity to follow and ignore, making Rainbow drastically out of character, yet unintentionally putting her in the right due to a ridiculous setup. Simple Ways, on the other hoof, does an excellent job at what it sets out to do, and that is making Rarity into a horrible person. The only other episode Josh Haber has done is Castlemania, where Rarity also had questionable motivations, dragging Fluttershy around crumbling ruins to make money off of artifacts. This wasn’t as bothersome though, since Rarity wasn’t the focus, and wasn’t the only character making bad decisions. Here, I don’t know if I can decide what I hated more about her in this episode:

- The way she cuts the entire town off at the knees, throwing their founding day celebration into disarray, and makes the people participate in her idiocy, to glorify herself and fulfill selfish desires.
- The way she degrades an entire demographic; her view of country denizens and farmers is worse than anything we saw from the snobs in Canterlot; her “representation” is more stereotyped than Beverly Hillbillies. When she dresses Applebloom like a crazy country hobo, I think an appropriate equivalent in our world would be putting a black child in a loincloth in a school play to represent African culture.
- The way she degrades herself. She snaps out of her crazy poser state thanks to the events of Applejack’s intervention. The way things were accelerating, who knows how far it would have reached? If Trenderhoof had a scene shoveling manure, would she have started doing a jig in it? Rolling in it?

Surprisingly, I don't have any problems with how Trenderhoof himself, or how he factors in to the love triangle. It’s true that Rarity has never shown in interest in reporters or literature before, but it’s pretty easy to rationalize; Rarity is a hopeless romantic. Emphasis on “hopeless.” Her first long term crush was Prince Blueblood, the cream of the crop in the city she admired most (“the most handsome, eligible unicorn stallion in Canterlot”). Once he knocked himself off her mental pedestal, there was probably one or more periods in which she searched for someone else to fulfill the stallion-shaped hole in her utopic interpretation of a successful future.