My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic - Season 6 Episode 8: "A Hearth's Warming Tail" (SPOILERS) · 4:01pm May 14th, 2016
Continuing with recent trends in tackling more mature subject matter, this week's episode sees Starlight Glimmer suffering from holiday depression.
The episode opens with a Hearth's Warming carol as Ponyville works together to decorate the town for the holidays--strongly reminiscent of the Winter Wrap-Up Song, except a lot more Christmasy.
Yay, Derpy's back to breaking stuff!
As the Mane Six and most of Ponyville decorate Twilight's castle for Hearth's Warming, Twilight asks Starlight if she's excited for her first Hearth's Warming Eve in Ponyville. Twilight and Spike are both shocked when she says she'll probably skip it.
In order to try to motivate Starlight to take an interest in Hearth's Warming, Twilight reads her A Hearth's Warming Tail, which revolves around a unicorn alchemist named Snowfall Frost who hates Hearth's Warming. In the rendition of the tale we're shown, Starlight Glimmer plays Snowfall Frost, while Rainbow Dash plays her beleaguered assistant.
The story is essentially A Christmas Carol, with a dash of How The Grinch Stole Christmas thrown in fo good measure in that Snowfall Frost attempts to erase Hearth's Warming Eve from existence.
Starlight hypocritically calls out the dubious plan of Snowfall Frost, which gives Spike the opportunity to snark at her. Priceless.
As Snowfall attempts to cast her spell, "powerful forces" intervene, manifesting as the three Spirits of Hearth's Warming, represented by Applejack (past), Pinkie Pie (present), and Princess Luna (future).
This being My Little Pony, they took the opportunity to make a musical episode out of it.
The Spirit of Applejack Hearth's Warming Past shows Snowfall scenes from her own past, of course.
Snowfall's teacher, Professor Snape Flintheart, hates Hearth's Warming and discourages Snowfall from decorating the classroom for the holiday. After Flintheart crushes Snowfall's spirit, she tosses aside Hearth's Warming and dedicates herself entirely to her studies, becoming as bitter and grumpy as her teacher.
The Spirit of Pinkie Pie Hearth's Warming Present takes advantage of the opportunity to be a walking, talking pun, with her entire presentation focused on the presents and treats ponies share.
Period Vinyl's glasses. 
Interesting bit of fourth wall lean, with Spike requesting an intermission so he can refill his cocoa right before the last commercial break.
The Spirit of Luna Hearth's Warming Future shows Snowfall a dark, bleak, frozen future where Equestria is a bitter, icy wasteland ravaged by Windigoes.
Of course, Snowfall sees the error of her ways, cancels her spell, and joins in with the Hearth's Warming cheer.
The story magically cures Starlight's Hearth's Warming depression, without the episode ever really going into why she was depressed in the first place and leaving that for the audience to infer from what we know about her.
All in all, a decent episode if you largely ignore the framing device which is, in all honesty, sloppily tacked on and has no real effort put into it. It's clear the writers just wanted to do a pony version of A Christmas Carol and didn't give a flying fuck about the rest of the episode wrapped around it.
But that's okay, because they got their obligatory A Christmas Carol episode out of the way.
I want a Derpy ornament now.
Awe Is it that bad? At least they mixed it up a little bit by adding elements from How the Grinch stole Christmas It made it just a little more different then the normal Christmas Carol episodes from other shows.
I give it an 8/10.
3943944 A lot of us want one.
I'd give it either a 7/10 or 8/10 just for the amount of cuteness in it. And it's not that bad quality wise
I think the episode was trying to imply that Starlight's feelings on Hearth's Warming Eve were similar to those of Snowfall Frost, just not to the same extreme.
This episode does continue several trends:
1. Episodes that have Starlight in them are among the best in the entire series.
2. The musical episodes of even numbered seasons tying into an ongoing subplot throughout the season, while not inherently being world changing in and of themselves.
3. Musical episodes being among the best of the season.
3943953 I never said it was bad. I said the framing device for the episode was tacked on as an afterthought and it shows.
Yep, the A Christmas Carol adaption was actually quite decent, but it didn't at all fit in with the rest of the story. And the fact that the story used the normal cast misled me at first into thinking they held a pageant again with a different story this time. Then of course it wasn't so; just Twilight storytelling and magically changing Starlight's mind. But honestly, I enjoyed it, 8.5/10 perhaps.
So, during the story we see Diamond Tiara with her mother, then in present day when she and Silver Spoon are singing we don't Spoiled Rich at all. Maybe Starlight Glimmer isn't the only pony who's not all too thrilled with the idea of Hearth's Warming.
Aaaaaaand we continue the proud tradition of Starlight dismissing something crucially important because she can't see why it is. Eventually, she'll dismiss rumors of insect-like creatures capable of impersonating ponies because she has yet to see one.
I kind of liked Luna's song. It was a fluffy, cute episode, but I agree with a plot that didn't go more in depth.
In the writers' defense, "pro-materialist consumerism" is a tough theme to make uplifting and coherent. Dickens pulled off Christmas Carol by making his Scrooge a crabbed capitalist without any religious overtones, and piles all the charitable impulses on the side of the revelers. It would be a much different story if he were an abstemious Puritan who considered holiday fripperies to be a diversion from daily charitable duties.
Which is essentially what they dipped their toes into with Snowfall Frost. A neo-Puritan who pours fanatical intensity into the explicit theme of the holiday, national unity and making Equestria the best version of itself it can be. "The fanatic redoubles her efforts and forgets her goals."
I'm not sure if I wholely approve of the whole, there's some tonal swings I didn't love, but the individual parts are great.
man i love lunas singing voice
hey......i think this was the first time she sang solo
she has a lovely voice somepony should do a fanfic based on that stat
well other than by the black ax of nightmare moon i mean
I did like it how they used who Starlight used to be as the character basis for Snowfall, hence the equality thing.
It gets no points for originality, but that's just me being old and cynical. Plus, it's probably the best use of Starlight so far, not to mention that stories teaching kids to not be so skeptical are always welcome.
Ugh, ripping off A Christmas Carol, right as Summer really hits, just to act as a metaphor for Starlight's own story, making it very flashy musical to cover all the flaws....just no.
Starlight herself learns nothing, Snowfall is probably fictional altogether to the Ponies and not even based on a person from their past. So any growth there is, who am I kidding, there isn't any.
They shoved Starlight into the original Rainboom, elevated her instantly to the level of power Twilight took the entire show to get to, made her the 7th pony, put her in the opening credits, had her reform Trixie and now trying to cram her into the legend of HearthsWarming the way they did the mane6 in season 2.
They're just trying to make it seem like she's as much a part of everything that's happened in the entire show without her having done anything to earn it.
More horseshit than Ponyville exports in a year. Ugh.
3944403 Wow, tell us how bitter you really are. Also, do you realize how many times you contradicted yourself in your own post/otherwise said nonsensical things?
Because no show in the history of ever has done that.
Because everything in fiction has to be based on somebody real. Oh wait.
No they didn't. She was trying to stop the rainboom. She didn't get her Cutie Mark from it.
Twilight ALWAYS had powerful magic. Becoming an alicorn had nothing to do with her magical power and everything to do with her growth in friendship.
Except she didn't, and Trixie never needed reforming in the first place. She just needed a friend. And acceptance.
It's one thing to be bitter about everything they've done wrong with Starlight Glimmer. It's another to spout a bunch of nonsensical garbage. You have, and I'm calling you out on it.
I liked this episode for what it was. Maybe we'll delve deeper into Starlight's psychosis.....maybe it all began and ended with her first friend getting his cutie mark and being carried out of her life.
Who's to say? Either way, they've done their A Christmas Carol/How Snowdrop Tried to Steal Hearth's Warming - I sense a Grinch-like fan song in the future - and I feel it measures up....pretty well to some of the other retellings of the classic.
Yeah, Spike has been amazing this season. Thankfully, I mean, we even got the one thing we never thought would be possible, an unambiguously GOOD Spike episode.
You mean, Heart's Warming PresentS.
Yeah, that song was chilling. No, pun intended.
It wasn't depression, just apathy, she didn't really care for the holiday one way or another, she wasn't sad about it.