Should Newfoals Get '=' Cutie Marks? (Season 5 Spoilers)

Just been rewatching the SDCC Season 5 clip. Aside from Spike's usual hilarity (gotta love the little guy...you know, when we're not writing scenes involving Trixie crying over his mutilated adult self) I had a random thought about those 'weird' ponies the girls travel to meet.

Those smiles they wear...are so very newfoal. The wide eyes, the rictus grins, the outright sense of something being awfully, terribly wrong.

And best of all, it was Pinkie who saw that those smiles were unnatural, which I'm pretty sure is how it played out at some point in Spectrum. Rock on Mizz Pie!

Now admittedly, it's not the same situation. These ponies have a fearful look to them that an actual newfoal would lack. They're clearly being coerced, but they're aware of it, and don't like it. But they have to smile, and be happy, or something terrible will happen.

Hrmmmm....this sounds familiar.

Oh, but of course.

"Simpsons Did It!"

Lol, I kid of course. And I want to know more.

What's really interesting to me is the use of the equals sign. Now this can be a charged bit of iconography. It is for example used by people as a demonstration of equal rights, a nifty little symbol of advertising a belief that we are all entitled to the same rights, regardless of race/gender/sexuality etc. (I even know of one instance in 2012 where someone designed an 'anti-equality' sign to oppose this, but had to engage in some creative double-think: they referred to it as the 'two yellow lines' symbol, because to say otherwise, to even use the words 'equals' or 'equality', would be to demonstrate their own fallacies).

I don't think this is the case here. This isn't ponies slapping 'equality' symbols on cart windows or street-signs or lunchboxes. This is some external force applying them in place of their cutie marks, overwriting the very representation of what they are as individuals.

This is not the equality of equal rights, or fair and equal treatment. This is the imposition of a false equality at the expense of all individuality, of reducing ponies to statistics. It's as close to a visual representation of getting smiles painted on your soul as you could achieve (and on a kids' show too!).

And that, is so very, very newfoal.

What do you guys think?