On Fear · 6:26am Nov 1st, 2015
As your calendar may have told you, today is Halloween. I don't know about you, but my house is all dressed up and ready to test how brave small children will be in exchange for candy. Halloween is a big deal for my family, and we have a lot of fun with it.
However, of course, not everybody feels the same. For some, it is all far too much. (For others, it's a parade of sticky, demanding children, but we're not interest in them right now.) Not everybody enjoys being scared, even in a context they know to be safe. So what do such people do during the annual festival of fright?
This episode did not go as I expected. I of course thought 'Shy would find that being out on Nightmare Night isn't actually completely terrible. I'm sure I wasn't alone in this; that's how a character usually grows in such an episode. Experience says that 'Shy was going to go out and have fun.
But the predictions were not as far off as one might think. 'Shy still did experience character growth. She still did learn that Nightmare Night isn't so terrible. One could be forgiven for missing the difference between staying in because the outside is scary and staying in because you want to be there, but it really is quite significant. As a matter of fact, she's grown more this way than she would have if things had gone per normal narrative conventions; in a single night, she has gained both the power to leave her home on Nightmare Night and the power to not leave her home on Nightmare Night. She faced a challenge—admittedly not by choice, but Angel can always be relied upon to be a problem when a problem is required—prevailed, and then was able to recognize that the prize was something she did not want. She gets respect for that. She has taken on the scariest night of the year and has not allowed the desire to conform or the illusion of self-improvement to distract her from the fact that she has more fun staying home.
Although she never appears to have gotten Angel his carrots. I guess she must have handled that while we weren't watching? Angel certainly wouldn't have let her back into her cottage without any carrots, so she must have gotten some.
I do wonder though if 'Shy will still have a role in NMN in future years even though she'll still be spending them inside. She doesn't like watching her friends be scared, but that doesn't mean she can't plan something and have Angel actually run it. You know Angel'd be happy to be in charge of a good fright, and he's bossy enough for it. And there's no doubt that at least Pinkie will want a repeat performance.
I'm glad to have met Fuzzy Legs. He's cute. Sorry, Harry, but Fuzzy's my favorite now.
You know, I'll bet 'Shy could take a lot of NMN decorations with impunity on any other night. Most of the normal motifs can be found in her cottage year-round if you know where to look. Spiders aren't scary. Bats are even less scary. Big sharp teeth are positively prosaic. Skeletons are . . . okay, skeletons are scary when there's a lot of them in one place, but being the primary animal caretaker for the area does require a certain amount of dealing with death.
It's amazing what the right—or wrong—state of mind can do.
Very true about state of mind. She'd have been fine with just about every activity she'd worried about on any other night. The biggest issue probably would've been worrying about how Princess Luna would react to Pin the Horn on Black Snooty. There was an almost Pavlovian reaction there: see jack-o'-lanterns, break out in cold sweat.
If they were still writing Friendship Reports, hers would be "What is the appeal of this festival? I cannot see it. Signed, Fluttershy."