Essays Are Magic IV: The Three Lessons of "Lesson Zero"

Okay so.

Let’s think of a certain episode of MLP: FIM, the one called “Lesson Zero” (S2E3), in which Twilight flips because she has forgotten to send the week’s letter to Princess Celestia. To solve the problem, she sets out looking for possible problems with which her friends might need help. None can be found, and as the day nears its end, Twilight reasons that if she can’t find a lesson to write about, she is forced to make one instead. The results are well known, just as is the ultimate lesson of the episode: you should take your friends’ concerns seriously, even if they seem superficial from the outset. A letter is devised, during which Spike brings the comical relief and a wrap for another memorable episode.

But there’s more, so much more. For one, a vital question persists even after the (supposedly) happy ending: how come a smart pony like Twilight could snap so completely for such a seemingly insignificant reason? Initially we might think that her strange behaviour is simply one of her character’s less savoury sides, a lapsus in an otherwise very rational and sensible pony. For even though we know that she generally tends to lean towards the kind of neurotic behaviour showcased in the beginning of the episode (making lists of lists of checklists, evening the icing on cupcakes etc.), the problem seems to be especially acute here. Why is that? Wouldn’t it make sense for her to have gotten over this sort of thing now that she has a full season’s worth of experience about friendship under her metaphorical belt? Her wish to learn the magic of friendship has practically been fulfilled, and yet she comes across more insecure than ever before.

To offer an answer of sorts, let’s go over the three lessons of “Lesson Zero”. First, there is the obvious one, already mentioned here: “You should take your friends’ concerns seriously.” An all around good piece of advice. However, a careful viewer will have found a second lesson in the episode, one less conspicuous but still rather apparent. In the last scene where Celestia and Twilight talk alone in the library, just before the Mane Five burst in, the following exchange takes place:

Twilight: “But… but I’m supposed to send you a letter about friendship every week. I missed the deadline. I’m a bad student; I’m tardy.

Celestia: “You are a wonderful student, Twilight. I don’t have to get a letter every week to know that.”

Twilight: “Really?”

The point here is implicit once one pays attention to it: Twilight’s identity as a good student is not composed of following some stupid rule, but she can be herself regardless of it: in short, she outlives the rule that supposedly defined her. To frame this a bit more generally, a person’s identity is not supposed to depend on a single rule or a thought, i.e., personality should not fundamentally be something external to us.

Now the third “lesson” is a bit more complicated, because it mostly has to do with the reinterpretation of the former two. To begin with, to explain Twilight’s particularly acute neurotic behaviour, we must understand that it’s not a flaw or a disruption in her otherwise sound personality, but rather it’s her personality as such, laid on its barest. The central claim here is that Twilight, in “Lesson Zero”, acted exactly like she had acted in the first season. The disturbing and strange neurotic behaviour which shows all the signs of Obsessional Compulsive Disorder is not a symptom of Twilight: it’s the fundamental structure of her personality.

Is there any warrant to say something like this? After all, doesn’t the first season prove that Twilight is capable of “normal” and “healthy” behaviour just like most everypony is, and the change we witness is just an effect of stress or something similar? Neurotic personality can hardly count for a psychological structure, right? Well, that depends. However, since we don't want to drift too far into an overall theory of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, let’s return to our neurotic little mare, Twilight Sparkle. More importantly, let’s revisit the short dialogue we cited earlier.

For anyone who has seen the actual episode, it should be clear that Twilight is being absolutely sincere when uttering that last line, “Really?”. The honesty shines from her face: she actually believed that to be a good student she needed to sent a letter to Celestia every week. This shows two things. First, it gives us an ironic view on Twilight's major fear in the episode, which was to be sent back to magic kindergarten. Mentally speaking, she never left it: she remains trapped in a rule-based thinking where the priority is put on the formal requirements of acceptable behaviour. This includes taking the order to send the weekly letter indeed as an order, as a blind law that must be followed under all circumstances, even if she doesn't have anything to write about.

The other thing is that, in season one, Twilight didn’t actually learn a thing about friendship. Yes, she learned a lot of simple rules and how to apply them in various contexts, but they never became anything more than that. In a sense she was yet a friendship-robot, capable of processing complicated and intricate variables and rules, not because of their content, but because of their form. She knew a lot of friendship, but didn’t actually live in it – because she thought of it only as a set of rules.

Now we can understand a little better why Twilight seemed so insecure and nervous in the beginning of Lesson Zero, even though she had done everything by the book in the previous season. It was because she only ever had instrumental value for friendship. That’s how it started out, like we remember. In the first season, Celestia gives Twilight yet another “task”, a mission to accomplish: “Make friends, write me about it”. Twilight did nothing but took Celestia’s words literally, which included sending the weekly letter, which for her wasn't anything else but that: a formal task. The neurotic pattern is present already here, and the reason it becomes so obvious in “Lesson Zero” is not because of a fundamental change in Twilight’s mental structure, but because in the episode there is nothing else left but this blind compulsion itself, the need to send the letter no matter what, and the key point to recognize is that, for Twilight, there never was anything else than that. Her behavioral pattern is not so much malfunctioning but simply exposed in the episode as all the actual subject matter of friendship is deprived from her reach. The only reason this didn’t become apparent earlier was that her friends had actual problems that needed to be dealt with, that is, the society around Twilight could offer a meaningful context for her essentially meaningless formal rule.

We mentioned that friendship had, up to Lesson Zero at least, only instrumental value for Twilight. What, then, was her primary desire? The answer is blatantly clear: to please Celestia. The formula is treacherously simple. Are we just saying that Twilight is indeed a robot, only interested in appearing likable in Celestia’s eyes as a good pupil? Yes, in a sense that is exactly what I’m saying. But there is more, and to understand at least a little bit of that more, we need yet again to beg an answer for the seeming paradox: why did Twilight go haywire at the very place where her supposed goal (learn the magic of friendship) had reached it most advanced point; why didn’t the fulfilment of her deepest desire bring her happiness? Why did she cling to the blatantly stupid formal rule of sending a letter every week?

Because by apparently finding out everything there was to know about friendship, she did not reach a complete identity as a friend, but lost the horizon of what it means to be a good pupil, which was her primary motivation all along. In the beginning of “Lesson Zero”, Twilight already knows she doesn't have anything to write about to Celestia. She may not completely realize the implications of the proposition, but a part of her knows it, and it shows in her mindless focus on details (the lists, the cupcakes), which are so typical traits for a person suffering from the OCD. By clinging to the senseless behaviour, Twilight is essentially postponing the immediate realization that she doesn't know how to please Celestia anymore, that is, she doesn't know how to be a good student when sending letters is not an option anymore. When she becomes fully conscious of her situation, a massive flood of panic sweeps over her, seemingly from nowhere. That happened only because she subconsciously delayed the realization herself.

We can now attempt to formulate the “third lesson” of Lesson Zero somewhat more precisely. I said that it contradicts the other two, turns them upside down. This is evident in the case of the second lesson: first of all, it is true that, prior to Celestia’s intervention, Twilight really was that simple rule and nothing else: her identity as a good student was fundamentally characterized by it; it gave the name its concrete meaning. But it would be naive to think that, as Celestia tells her that she is more than that rule, that she doesn’t really need it, Twilight would immediately become closer to realizing her authentic self. At the very least, Celestia’s words are implicitly followed by the tacit addition: “You are not this rule but some other, which you’re not aware of yet.” Moreover, at that moment when Twilight confessed herself to Celestia, it’s clear that she is completely at her mercy: the Princess could literally do anything with her. This is exactly what displeases Celestia: she spots immediately that Twilight is still in the magic kindergarten, following rules and doing little else in the process.

What, then, does Celestia wish to do with Twilight? Whatever any other responsible educator would, of course: to see her grow up to be a balanced and autonomous adult, perhaps capable of running the country one day. The rules she gives her to follow play a vital part in that, but, paradoxically, only when their exact content remains ambiguous to Twilight. By going through the rule “send a letter about friendship every week,” by exhausting it to the point where its blind mindlessness is exposed to all, Twilight has also exhausted yet another definition of the “good student” she wants to be. So why can’t Celestia just come clean and say something like “No no no, you’re doing it wrong: X, Y and Z make a good student, not A, B and C. This is how I want you to behave.”

Like already said, Celestia refrains from this kind of education because she doesn't want to create a robot, or to fuel Twilight’s innate neuroticism even further. On the other hoof, she must give her something, some meaning to the name “good student”. So she gives her tasks and missions, the implicit meaning of which always remains opaque. The rule of letters wasn’t of course meant to be taken so literally, but we can venture a guess that Celestia saw that Twilight would end up doing exactly this. This was because, ultimately, she wants to show her that no rule can ever exhaust the “true” meaning of “good student”, but that she must figure its meaning out herself, through trial and error. When Twilight eventually sees this, she has reached the point of autonomy Celestia wanted to incite in her in the first place – the irony kicks in when we see that this autonomy consists of nothing but of all the failed and exhausted rules Twilight had to go through to perceive the ultimate rule: there are no rules.

Finally, we arrive to the “actual” lesson of the episode, which we can now perceive in its full absurdity. The lesson was created in the same process where Twilight failed to find it: in short, it was the causal reason of its own existence. The episode literally shows how Twilight’s compulsory behaviour, recognized from the outset as meaningless, gradually gains meaning and turns into its opposite: into a meaningful lesson. Pure form ends up creating content: that is the brilliant third lesson of “Lesson Zero”, or the lesson zero as such, the lesson above all other lessons. The episode, taken as a whole, materializes the paradoxical essence of Twilight’s relationship to Celestia: Twilight can grow to be an autonomous individual only when she fails to follow the rules Celestia gives her. In other words, she can only learn the magic of friendship by collecting all the lessons about it and then seeing their essential futility in actually explaining friendship.

P.S. I tagged the story so you would read it.

Comments

[ponygrad]

That third lesson is what makes this episode great. Despite its' hijinks and twilight's shenanigans, it's one of the more subdued episodes because everyone else is firmly ensconced in their off-screen slice of life lives. That makes it very easy to rewatch, and is in fact one of only two outside of season one that I have seen multiple times. It is purity of form.