Thoughts on S5E11 "Party Pooped" · 4:56pm Jun 27th, 2015
General:
I liked this episode, even though I was disappointed that Cheese Sandwich didn't show. (At the same time, I was relieved that he didn't show with a wife and five children, or in a manner strongly implying that he's been avoiding Pinkie, because this preserves my concept that Cheese and Pinkie meet occasionally, which is one reason their romance is proceeding fairly slowly -- my Pinkie models much of her sexual morality on that of her mother Cloudy Quartz, and her mother's very traditional -- and romantic, but most outside the Pie Rock Farm don't get to see that side of her).
Specific:
Episode confirms that Pinkie Pie can travel by some very strange pathways, as what she was doing was temporally impossible -- it would have taken months if not years, and at least a week or more to engage in her planned travel by rail, wagon and foot. Some of the ways she went were backwards in time.
Also, that Pinkie doesn't plan her actions by normal logic -- she traveled to Dodge (exactly in the opposite direction from Ponyville to the Crystal Empire), because her precognition told her that this was the way to succeed. She didn't even consider the issue of geography until she got there. The reason she went to Dodge was actually to save the life of Cherries Jubilee and her team, though Pinkie didn't know this until she did it.
Additionally, the way she saved their lives was through probability twisting. She tried (and failed) to do it the mundane way (even though she summoned objects like the alarm clock from hammerspace). She then succeeded in doing it by doing something funny-scary and having the Wonderbolts happen along at the last moment.
I'm not sure why the magic directed her to save Cherries Jubilee. I mean, Pinkie would have done that anyway on general principles -- she's a good Pony and she actually knows Cherries Jubilee -- but I suspect that Cherries has some sort of destiny important to larger ends. Or, she might even have been saving one of the team for a special purpose. And I don't think that PINKIE knows why either.
The important thing she brought back from Yakyakistan was that the young Yak, unencumbered by the dignity of his elders, was willing to be friendly to a stranger from another land, and that this -- rather than an elaborate simulation of Yakyakistan, was what she needed to do to win over the Yak delegation. Pinkie didn't even understand what she was learning at that moment -- she only realized it later.
The moment Pinkie had realized this, the magic snapped her back to Ponyville -- the better to avoid creating dangerous Paradox.
Headcanon: Yakyakistan is in another part of the mountains where Crimson Quartz's father lost his legion, along with Lady Tourmaline's first love, over a thousand years ago. They keep safe from the Windigos and other horrors of the Frozen Wastes by a very strongly Lawful culture in which everything must be done just right. This empowers a magical barrier around their lands. Unfortunately, this makes them very, very inept at dealing with foreigners, since they've been doing this for many thousands of years. When they leave their culture-matrix, they can go more than a little bit crazy. As the Mane Six found out.
Also, Yakyakistan is going to become important to the Shadow Wars. I'm not yet sure how or why.
Conclusion: Pinkie Pie is awesome.
Also, this is Pinkie just coming into her full adult powers as an Earth Pony. The Alicorn Thalia is going to make one amazing Princess, I'd imagine!
Quite literally the only thing I enjoyed about this episode was Gummy.
I was sorely disappointed that the Train of Plausibility jumped the tracks and crashed into the ravine somewhere north of the Crystal Empire.
The fact that now two incredibly subpar episodes have aired after the epic Slice of Life has me worried about the future of the show. In fact, in Slice of Life there was literally a shark jumping moment where Vinyl and Octavia and their sonic go-kart leapt over a shark on the way to the wedding. The implications of this moment (if taken seriously) could mean that someone at DHX knows that quality MLP content is at an end. I sure as hell hope not though!
It was a good ep!
The facial expressions were really good especially Pinkie Pie's and Twilight's. And it was interesting seeing Pinkie respond to pressure. It's also good to see Pinkie put more effort into planning a party instead off just the usual children's parties she usually does and her monologue were entertaining.
i must say any episode where everyone learns from Pinkie and admires how amazingly weird great she is, and she's not just comedy relief is a good episode in my book. (And i lol at Twilight fear of quesadilla).
Now as for the yaks some like them, some hate them. i'm somewhat in the middle with them but i do enjoy the antic and the moral is interesting. No-one wants to be presented with a false facsimile of themselves when making friends. You've got to be yourself and show why YOU are worth the knowing or its' all fake. Similarly, we are reminded that you make people comfortable and feel at home by being welcoming and nice not by attempting to perfectly imitate customs that you may have only heard about. (Especially when it comes perfectionist like the yaks.
all in all good ep.
Or it showed us Pinkie Pie's POV whenever she gets like this:
And it looks to the rest of the world like she's talking to herself. She has a really vivid imagination after all.
She starts narrating when she's on the train heading to Dodge, so its more likely that she got told at the station that the trains were out today and that got her started beginning with the train being stopped by sheep.
The sequence also ends in a state of failure, just like her little rants do.
I think the increasing ridiculousness of the events is a really clever way to show Pinkie's POV without outright pointing it out to the audience (and it mimics perfectly, again, just how her outbursts escalate).
I'm honestly not sure how much of Pinkie's journey happened in reality. The afternoon spent becoming a cultural phenomenon with John, Paul, and George, for example, might have been anything from a glimpse of another timeline to a joke that went over Cadance's head. This seems like a case of a narrator so unreliable that even she doesn't know what actually happened.
Still, excellent observation about the young yak. I hadn't made the connection until now, and from the commentary I've seen thus far, neither has anyone else.
I didn't like it. It was an obvious "cartoony" gag that completely broke the immersion of this universe. The new writer treat MLP same way he did Johnny Test which is not good.
3187101
Does that make her Ringo? Because her Humanoid analogue is a drummer ... ! It's certainly difficult for me to see her as Yoko ...
Um, I think it really happened but I think the sort of path she took through spacetime to do it was something that would have made Dr. Sweetie Finemare stare in astonishment at the implied physics required. She may have even been going through alternate versions of some places. I think that in her great determination she pushed her powers beyond anything she'd ever done before.
And yes, I think that Cadance had absolutely no idea what happened. Nor did the rest of the Mane Six. Nor, to some extent, Pinkie herself.
3187276
But Pinkie does things like that all the time on the tactical level. This is just the first time she did so on the operational to strategic level. This is a manifestation of a higher level of a power that Pinkie's been repeatedly shown as having.
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It seems that Pinkie is a drummer no matter which of her she happens to be. In this case, it meant a possibly literal fifteen minutes of fame. Starrdom, if you will.
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It's like saying that Bugs Bunny have a higher level of power because he can summon a giant hammer out of his pocket. It isn't her "canon" power like Pinkie sense becasue it's only used as a gag while she can't use it in defence or outside any gag like Fluttershy can do with her stare. It's like her breaking the 4th wall, it's not suppose to be canon or you would already have Twilight trying to study the life action human world o ours. In this case, Discord is more in character since he use all those gags and memes with the use of chaos magic. Pinkie have no magic and never was established to have such ability.
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Well, actually, Bugs Bunny is more powerful if he can do that. "Only able to use it as a gag" is what Champions would call a "Power Limitation," and the referee would probably require some explanation of what that statement means in practice. There's a whole RPG (Toons) which was based on analyzing the interactions and capabilities and limitations of exactly those sorts of powers.
Pinkie's powers are all about causality detection and manipulation, which is the essence of "chaos magic." She perceives and interacts with reality very differently than do most Ponies. Whereas we would choose a goal and then try to take logical steps -- including logically defining sub-goals -- toward its accomplishment, Pinkie chooses a goal and then opens her precognition to find the actions which lead toward accomplishment of these goals, even if the connection isn't rationally comprehensible even to herself. The usual way this works is that Pinkie does something which doesn't look as if it should have any causal connection to her end, but which by a series of apparent coincidences achieves her end.
Pinkie of course also tries to solve problems the normal way. For instance, when she found herself in a runaway wagon heading toward a cliff (and she couldn't just jump off, because five other Ponies would die if she did that, and Pinkie is a heroic Pony) she first attempted by normal methods to stop the wagon. This worked -- but then it didn't, because the cliff edge crumbled and they all fell into the canyon anyway. So Pinkie's probability-twisting power caused the Wonderbolts to happen by and save them.
This was almost certainly in pursuit of multiple ends, including some that Pinkie hasn't even yet formulated. Had Pinkie not been there, Cherries Jubilee and four other Ponies would have died, and at least one of them is important to something that Pinkie means to do in the future. Pinkie probably doesn't even yet know who or why.
What I mean when I say that Pinkie's power is growing is that this time the chains of causality and the probability sequences being twisted were much longer and more complex than we've seen in previous episodes, and what's more, Pinkie must have done some of this by opening portals not merely in space but also in time, some of them a thousand or more miles in length or many weeks in duration. Under emotional stress, she stretched her power beyond its normal limits -- and it worked!
It's quite true that Pinkie can't consciously control this (also covered in Champions as the "No Conscious Control" or "Power Activation Roll" limitation). It's also true that she can only do some things and not others -- this is mostly limited by Pinkie's own psychology she won't use her power to directly kill, for instance, or even to intentionally cause sorrow to anyone she's not classified as a "meanie," because these are things Pinkie wouldn't do by mundane means, either.
Pinkie is a highly-moral Pony, which is a very good thing given the subtlety of her power. In the Shadow Wars Storyverse, this was one reason why the Paradise Entity chose Crystal Quartz Pie as Pinkie's mom, and why Paradise very much approved of Igneous Rock as stepfather -- because they raised her to respect both herself and other Ponies.
What makes you think Pinkie has told Twilight about our world? What makes you think that if Pinkie tried, she would explain it in a form Twilight would comprehend? Celestia and Luna know about the Watchers, because the Cosmic Concepts do in general, but this is one of those secrets that could shatter the sanity of most Ponies, which is why they haven't yet told Twilight about it save in the most general and theoretical of terms. And they are actually better at explaining things to others -- one of Pinkie's weaknesses is that she's a poor communicator about everything save parties.
Pinkie's magic and Discord's magic are almost identical in nature -- they are variants of Chaos Magicc. Discord is simply much, much stronger and has fewer limitations on its usage.
I didn't much care for it at first, although I did laugh out loud when the snow ledge cracked, and Pinkie shot backwards all the way to her own home when she was just metres from success. For whatever reason, I liked it much better the next morning (I watched it just before bed). I suspect that my subconscious saw something there I missed, although I'm still not sure what.
I hadn't caught that about the significance of the Yak child, but I think you're right. I wonder if Pinkie sent his sled back?
The reason she went to Dodge was actually to save the life of Cherries Jubilee and her team, though Pinkie didn't know this until she did it.
DIDN'T EVEN THINK ABOUT THAT!
For the record, I think the Yaks didn't mean to go war with EQUESTRIA, just Ponyville, because of how their own government and culture works, they didn't understand you can't go to war with just one city (which is what THEY DO to settle disputes).
I liked the episode.
With the yaks, I half wondered if they actually hoped to start a war with Equestria. "We'll start a war with Equestria, surrender at the first shot, blame everything on a lousy economy and trouble with internal dissidents, and rake in the billions of bits in foreign aid" -- don't laugh, my father knew a man at his workplace who actually planned to try that with an island in the Caribbean in the 1970's!
That and it's hardly been unknown throughout history to send the most obnoxious person you can find to another nation in the hope that they lop their heads off and give you an excuse to proclaim war -- it worked for the Romans, Aztecs, and Mongols, among others. Yeah, not too likely for MLP:FiM, but the fact that they mentioned war in the show shocked me.
I also wondered if the yaks were kind of jumpy with the ponies because, being north of the Crystal Empire, their first contact with ponies came in the form of a fight with King Sombra back in the day. I get the idea that he'd give anyone a bad impression.
3198495
"The Yaks That Roared" ...?
Their mention of war makes me think that there really is something dark looming in the future, maybe a Big Bad who is behind some of the lesser Big Bads. Some multi-season story arc, bigger even than what they're planning on doing with Starlight Glimmer.
The North is a terrifying place in the Shadow Wars Storyverse. Windigoes, Ice Giants, and the Lady of the Ice, yearning to send her children south for the next glaciation. The Yaks would have to be tough, and a bit paranoid, to survive there.