Review of a Review of Saddle Row Review · 12:43am May 23rd, 2016
I had some thoughts about the interesting structure of the most recent episode, Saddle Row Review (obviously there's gonna be a lot of spoilers!). Hear me out, I haven't seen anyone talk about this aspect just yet (though it's only been one day)
and along the way, that got me thinking on another subject, another topic on writing itself. I think maybe it's important, and one that I've been wanting to write about recently, partially inspired by horizon's blog post on illusion and authenticity, as you'll later see. I was gonna delay and do it later, maybe after finishing a story I'd been planning, but..... coincidentally this episode comes along and it seems like the perfect time. It's the much longer section and doesn't involve any ponies. Sorry!
Here's a reply I left to someone on the fimfic episode discussion thread. They made the obvious comparison to the episode Castle Sweet Castle, as I've already seen many fans do, and I tried to explain how the morals are only similar/contradictory when horribly oversimplified.
You're not entirely wrong, but simplifying the morals into "be an individual" / "don't be an individual" is missing a lot of the context going on.
the Castle episode had Twilight's friends decide to do a nice favor for her, but none of their contributions work together as a whole. basically it's "Too many cooks spoil the broth," though it turns out the real theme was about Twilight worrying about losing her past (symbolized by the treehouse). When they stop thinking about themselves, they're able to see what's really upsetting Twilight all along, and it's not just fancy decorations.
Saddle Row was about Rarity's friends being hired to fix various problems, each of which they know they should already be good at (Fluttershy and animals, Pinkie and parties, etc.). When they stop trying to think like Rarity and just be themselves, they're able to think outside the box and solve them creatively. they play along with each problem and turn it around into a solution. it's basically the cliche, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." and as it turns out, the whole episode's frame (the newspaper interview) builds further on that; the review looks at the opening in a positive light, even though it had plenty of ammo to make it negative.
so the show is saying "sometimes you should be an individual, and sometimes not" and it depends on what's going on.
(extra thought: one positive similarity is that both episodes focus on one character, while having the rest of the mane 6 involved each in their own unique ways. you don't want a group to become an amorphous blob, acting like a single character with multiple heads. Rarity episodes usually do the blob thing, but I was surprised this one didn't)
I hadn't even realized when I began writing that, but the interviews are very useful to this episode. Think about it: a lesser writer could've cut that out entirely to save time, and just had the episode begin and end with the shop's opening as it's happening in the present. The opening is a success = conflict resolved! Some might think it was all an excuse to have snarky jokes between each story beat, or to make a pony parody of The Office (which it really isn't. The Office is a parody of documentaries, which already existed. despite all the humor, this episode plays it straight with the documentary style), but as I discovered in the quote above, its purpose was to reinforce the theme. Like a colorful CGI fractal, it reflects all the parallel mini-stories going on within the episode.
When each of the characters thinks positively instead of worrying about Rarity's sense of perfection, the possibilities open up. The newspaper's article, instead of being cynical and spinning everything together as a disaster, becomes optimistic. I guess the reporter was free to go either direction he wanted, completely out of the mane 6's control, but I'd like to think he learned that optimism himself from listening to each of their stories.
But wait, the episode wasn't just a series of flashbacks. The interview itself was a flashback. It was contained within another framing story: Rarity reading the newspaper. So she learns that the planning didn't go perfect behind her back, and those who read the review will learn that Rarity's shop is not perfect, but that's..... just fine! 
It's not merely a fun, interesting episode with good pacing. I see it as one of the most true to the entire show's message itself, by showing optimism winning out over cynicism.
Not a perfect episode, some of the logic in the mini-conflicts is kinda sketchy. But hey, I don't even care, because it all worked together as a whole impressively. All it's missing is a catchy song, and I'd instantly call it my favorite episode ever. (Sweep Sweep song is objectively not catchy, because Rainbow and Applejack said so 
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How do you work a framing story into writing? Stories within a larger story, just like in Rarity's episode.
It's not the most common structure, since most writers find it more natural to just tell their story directly. But it does appear often enough that I'd say it's not because it's difficult to do. Just slap a storyteller in the beginning and then you can claim all your mini-stories are connected! It's certainly nothing new in literature. I've read The Decameron and enjoyed it. Also had to read The Canterbury Tales for school, though I'm still not sure if the story had any point besides being a snapshot 
of the time period. I'm attracted to this general idea, how little short stories can add up to more than the sum of the parts (maybe it has to do with my attention span), but maybe it's just a shiny gimmick?
There's one book in this style that made a huge impact on me: The Arabian Nights. thankfully, I first discovered it via Husain Haddawy's translation, which strives for authenticity.
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THE BAD: It's not the popular translation, and it never will be. It doesn't include Aladdin (because it's most likely French in origin). No Sinbad either, nor Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. None of those were part of the original Syrian manuscript. If you want those popular stories, get one of the longer editions. In the spirit of entertainment, it's no big deal, really. It all was descended from oral folk tales, where each narrator would add and subtract whatever they wished. Maybe they're fanfics, but they're great fanfics that people still love today.
THE GOOD: by chopping out the fanfics, it becomes a condensed work of art, as the manuscript intended. It's the difference between a band's great concept album, and throwing all those tracks on a "greatest hits" collection. The individual songs are just as enjoyable as part of the collection, but the structure and concept is completely lost!
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You might be familiar with the famous framing story in all versions of the Arabian Nights: Shahrazad must tell stories to the King, ending each night on a cliffhanger so that he will delay her execution by one more day. Again and again, he lets her live because he'll regret never knowing what happens next. To pad out her stories even further, she has characters tell each other sub-stories. And sometimes those sub-stories go into stories themselves. When one story completes, she launches into the next one, which repeats the whole process.
No no no, the moral here isn't about the virtues of delaying tactics and filibusters. 
Though it might be amusing to think of it as a message to writers: can you make your story's hook and flow interesting enough when your life is on the line?!? In the context of telling this tale to your children each night, it doesn't matter too much what the stories contain as long as they're entertaining, right? It could be no different than Grimm's Fairy Tales or Mother Goose, a large quantity of stories (the more the merrier), only this time with a clever little meta-story to pretend they're all related.
Pretend they're related? That's just it. For this "authentic" translation, Haddawy argues that they are related. More so than the obvious "snapshot of the times" (the Mamluk period), but in its themes and message that gets diluted when it was reworked into "a large, heterogeneous, indiscriminate collection of stories by different hands and from different sources." (page xvii) And the book becomes much more interesting as a work of art.
Shahrazad's tales aren't just fantastic entertainment, but they are designed to teach morality to the king. After being betrayed, he becomes misogynistic to the point of executing every woman in the kingdom, so that he can never be betrayed again. You don't have to be a feminist to see that within a few years, the kingdom's population will go extinct. The world has wronged him, and he says, "fuck the world." What can one do to stop the most powerful man in the world? (the local world at least, to the common person of the time). Shahrazad volunteers to be the next lady on the chopping block so she can try to cure his madness. Aladdin might be fun and all, but the moral doesn't really have anything to do with forgiveness and empathy towards other humans, now does it?
It's funny how the first story she tells, "The Merchant and the Demon", resembles the meta-story pretty closely. The demon wants revenge for his dead son, caused by the unaware merchant by accident, and nothing in the world will calm his anger. The merchant tries everything to talk him out of it, but eventually accepts his fate. Luckily, 3 different travelers stop by to watch what happens. They offer a deal to the demon: they've each experienced a "strange and amazing" tale, which they'll tell in exchange for a share of the merchant's life. This is the only thing that makes the angry demon pause; he's just too darn curious about these stories, so he'll give them a chance. The travelers' short tales all involve betrayal and vengeance, appropriately enough. The merchant is saved and forgiven in the end, though we never get to hear the third man's tale. Maybe laziness on the part of the writer, though it seems plausible Shahrazad decided her audience wasn't hooked any longer and she had to skip ahead to the next longer story.
This is the pattern for all of the major tales. Along the way, stories must be told by the characters. Sometimes with the short term goal of delaying a fatal end, but always with the long-term goal of steering the story towards a happy ending. There's a variety of comedies, adventures, romance stories, and even steamy erotic stories, but they carry the same themes and messages laid out in Shahrazad's framing story.
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To sum up, Shahrazad tells her stories for three important reasons:
1. She saves her own life, since her execution will be delayed.
2. She saves the world, because other women won't be sacrificed while she lives.
3. She saves the king's soul, by teaching him to forgive the world, whether it deserves it or not.
The Arabian Nights is a fairy tale about stories within stories, and the message is that stories are important. They can change us and save us... on a personal, universal, and spiritual level. This was no mere clever gimmick, but the purpose of the whole and the parts.
I consider it my #1 favorite book of all time. I think it's one of the most optimistic messages ever. All this fiction we create isn't just a waste of time.
So, that's the standard I hold for framing stories. Don't do it just because you can, because you think it's somehow clever.... anybody can do that (even me!). Give it a purpose that matches the contents. Otherwise, you might as well keep throwing unrelated works in there, even though they could've easily stood by themselves. If adding more ingredients doesn't dilute the potion, then it probably wasn't mixing well in the first place.
Was sent here by horizon's blog post, and I just wanted to say that I found your post really insightful. I liked your analysis of framing stories in both the MLP episode and Arabian Nights. Another function of framing stories that I really like is in Rashomon-style stories where you hear a story from different perspectives. While the episode did not go that far, I do like how, in the interview segments, we got to hear the characters' inner thoughts on the events in the story. That inner dialog is something that we get to see as fanfic readers/writers, but it is often absent from the show itself. The interview provided a clever way of showcasing the characters' perspectives on the events, and that was one of the aspects of the episode I enjoyed most.
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thanks for reading it!
yeah, the show sometimes goes into inner thoughts, but only for one character (e.g. Lesson Zero). or I suppose Pinkie Pie is always speaking her inner thoughts, but those often feel like a silly off-topic distraction when it's in the middle of important things happening. this episode's interview format worked in getting everyone to speak their minds, but also in a way that flowed without interrupting the action.