Some late impressions on S7E1/S7E2 · 7:30am May 2nd, 2017
I am hilariously late to the party on this, but I wanted to speak up because I watched the two season openers today and my main takeaway was how damn much they gave us to discuss.
Seriously, this was a pair of episodes just dripping with implications around the edges. I'll jog through the list after the break.
As for the episodes themselves, beyond all the new headcanon nourishment? ... Eh.
Three neutral changelings out of five. (One's happy. One's heckling.)
The Mane Six, when they show up at all, are basically cardboard cutouts, so it's good that they don't play more of a role. I guess it was nice seeing more of Celestia ... but her actual part in the show wasn't nearly as interesting as the things that brief parts of her appearance implied, which is kinda crushing. My waifus Luna and Ember both got brief focused screen time, but basically just for visual gags. Overall, the episodes seemed to be strongly signaling that S7 is The Starlight Show™, which would have been cause for a major existential fan crisis if they hadn't made such a beautiful saving throw with all the Starxie. (Seriously, their interplay is by far the best thing about Starlight Glimmer, to the point where I can almost find myself interested in her.)
Also ... is it just me, or are ponies collectively crying a lot more than they used to?
Without further ado, let's charge headlong into the mindfield and see what blows up:
1. "I knew there was a special group of fillies in Ponyville ..."
This is the scene which everyone took as confirmation of Chessmistress Celestia. And, yes, it is that. However, there's a second thing it confirms which I think is even more interesting:
The rest of the Mane Six were already all friends before Twilight's arrival.
Frankly, for me that kind of blew one of the major early show arcs out of the water. 
The idea of Twilight being the Princess of Friendship always kind of rested on the idea that she ran across this group of fundamentally incompatible ponies, united them, and served as the fulcrum around which they all rotated. (Look at "The Ticket Master" or "Look Before You Sleep" and tell me that those ponies were friends before her arrival.) I mean, yes, we quickly learned that some of them had history — Pinkie knew everyone because Pinkie; and Dash and Shy grew up together — but with this screenshot the only real conclusion we can reach is that Twilight was hoofed the entire setup on a silver platter. (The more so since her brother was captain of the guard, her foalsitter was an alicorn, etc.)
Basically, Twilight Sparkle is now Chelsea Clinton.
2. This screenshot.
Setting aside the oddly different art style of the photographs (and setting aside Rarity going bipedal in a kimono) ... let me call your attention to the upper left hand corner:
While I think there is a legitimate argument to be had about whether or not this implies canon Dislestia, there's one thing I don't think is arguable any more:
Twilight ships it.
Look at the way Twilight wants to be reminded of all her other friends. All of them are in their element, or caught in a pivotal moment in their lives. But the mentor that basically raised Twilight for a decade isn't represented by the two of them together — nor with the sister that she literally moved heaven and earth to save. And neither is Discord with Fluttershy, who is canonically his best friend and solely responsible for his salvation. Those are both very curious omissions ... unless there's some greater reason to have those frenemies in a picture together.
3. "No one's ever stood up to Chrysalis like that!"
The episode pulls no punches about the future of our sherbet antelope pals. They're sticking around in a more significant capacity. Everyone caught the Skittle virus, Thorax is ruling the hive, and they need some ongoing friendship lessons. But one of their off-hoof lines stood out, because it banjaxed one of the major speculative headcanons about changeling society: that they were structured as a literal hive, with (ETA: mindless) drones mentally subservient to under the direct control of the queen.
So this kicks out the canonical supports from a lot of interesting fics about alien social structures. I guess, as a consolation prize, I don't have to rewrite Hard Reset 2 any.
Oh! Speaking of new canon backing up my fics:
4. "Probably shouldn't have sung that song."
The core premise of my classic Fugue State — and the Verse Averse anthology about Versebreakers — has just been explicitly confirmed: Equestria is a reality where musical numbers literally spontaneously break out and have actual consequences.
This may require further Versebreakage. 
5. "I've always found magic is tied to my emotions. Whatever I'm feeling fuels whatever I'm doing, and the stronger I'm feeling, the stronger the magic."
I have to give this one a special shout-out, because it singlehornedly managed to make Starlight feel like almost not a Marey Sue.
The core of the problem with Starlight as a character has always been that she kicked the plot of the literal Princess of Magic in a one-on-one duel. (Technically, the core of the problem is that that undercuts the message of the early seasons — that Twilight Sparkle transcended into alicornhood because she is the apotheosis of friendship-and-thus-magic. Combine this with #1 above, and the show basically has destroyed anything that made Twilight Sparkle special: she sucked at friendship before being shoved into a remedial distance-learning course; she isn't even the best at magic; she just happened to be born in the right place to catch the eye of the monarch. BUT ANYWAY.) What this line — and the accompanying Sith-Lord smoke — seem to be telling us is that Starlight is explicitly powered by the sort of dark magic we've previously seen in Sombra and the Alicorn Amulet.
This neatly solves two problems at a single stroke. First, it justifies Starlight's high base power level, because we know the anger end of the magic pool has higher base power than the sort Twilight uses. (See: "Magic Duel".) Second, by drawing an apparent division between this negativity-based magic and friendship-based magic (even if they both use the same charge-from-emotions principle), it means that Twilight is then explicitly the Princess of Friendship-based magic, and the apotheosis of that path rather than magic as a whole. Someone pulling from a different power source might still legitimately outpower her, but anyone else being magically friendshippy won't be as good at it, and her title still means something.
6. "Ember said dragons do a lot of fun things. The Feast of Fire, the Dragon Bowl, Claw-chella."
While it's cool that we're getting some foreign holidays thrown into the mix here — including the changelings' Gorbfest — the most exciting bit here is what Clawchella tells us about dragon culture:
My "new Horse Voice story" sense is tingling. 
That severely depends on who the Other Sith is. If we’re very lucky, it’s actually their show.
Celestia’s flashbacks are not reliable. For example, none of the fillies in class in the first flashback have their cutie marks, when at the very least, Twilight has to have hers.
Once again, I must mention the Other Sith… :)
There's also the idea that potentially changelings aren't able to tell other changelings apart when disguised, though that may just have been fearful speculation on Twilight's part.
#1 bothered me a lot, so I decided that the best solution is to not think about it too hard. Maybe it'll go away if I ignore it long enough.
I especially love that point about the Versebreakers though.
Something that I don't see brought up enough when discussing Twilight getting her flank beat down by Starlight way back when is motivation and morals. Starlight has a very clear goal, and has previously demonstrated a willingness to do whatever the hell she wants to achieve her desires. Twilight is stuck with the usual hero's problem of, "yeah I could probably liquefy this mountain and stop the bad guy, but think of the innocents!" It's like a tangled cord: there's an uncountable number of ways to tangle it, but only one properly "untangled" state. Twilight is at a huge arena disadvantage, and even screws up the timeline herself a couple times, as I recall.
Besides, Twilight doesn't have any formal combat training. Starlight probably doesn't either, but she strikes me as the type to have participated in some underground fight clubs in her more enthusiastic youth, or at the very least had the need to actively defend herself while carving out her town. Or beat some ponies into submission.
Honestly, the Celestia flashback thing could very easily simply be explained as an imagine spot to quickly show what Celestia was talking about. Or maybe they were all in the same place and happened to be in a good mood (a festival, perhaps, or the upcoming Summer Sun Celebration).
The point is, that one bit doesn't really prove much of anything beyond Celestia being aware of 5 potential bearers of the EoH.
Well yes, but I don't know how close they all were. I think that Fluttershy was close with Rainbow Dash and Rarity, and Pinkie Pie with Rainbow Dash and Applejack, and Applejack with Rainbow Dash, because we see this in the early episodes of Season 1. But I do not think that Fluttershy was close with anyone but Rainbow Dash and Rarity; and in particular I don't think that Fluttershy and Pinkie or Rainbow Dash and Rarity were particularly close friends.
I'm going to join with the others on Celestia compressing and massaging past events for the sake of expediency and making sure Twilight got the message. We saw how much more the Mane Six had to bond after coming together; that was the crux of a lot of Season 1 episodes.
Also, thank you for being the first person I've seen who's explained what the crap Claw-chella was based on. I had no idea until now.
I mostly agree with the “Celestia's flashbacks aren't necessarily that accurate or specific” thing some other people have commented on; I don't think her actual speech implies that they were close at the time, only that she knew they existed (arguably, not even that she knew which ponies they were precisely, only that they were in Ponyville).
Some other things:
That's exactly the kind of picture Discord would sneak onto the mirror as a joke, though.
This is an interesting idea, but alongside it, during The Cutie Re-Mark, I would point out that she was also being fueled by a massive emotional-gravity engine in the form of losing her village. To her, that village represented her entire life's achievement, and had all the emotional energy of a lifetime's worth of bitterness over what she lost as a child sunk into it.
Destroying it unchained all that at once to power her resultant tempor-tantrum.
I'll split the third thing into a separate comment, because it's long…
Did it, though? (I'll ignore the part where the one who responds to the line is Starlight and not Thorax, assuming that Thorax was still one of the intended referents.) The way they interact with each other now implies that they're more individuated, but couldn't the reason no one ever stood up to Chrysalis like that before be that they were constrained by the hivemind? The “breaking the evil magical artifact also releases the mental hold on everyone” thing is a pretty stock trope in situations like these, for that matter.
That leaves open how Thorax was able to carry out his plan despite this control, but I think being stuck starving at the margins of the Crystal Empire for a while would have reset his allegiance. Group minds are more resilient if there's some way of dealing with absent (including permanently absent) leaders, even if everybuggy is thoroughly enthralled when the queen is right there. By the time he got back into range of the original hive, Spike had introduced him to sourcing love from friendship, and his instincts had re-imprinted on ponykind, severing him from control by the original hive. (Spike, while a dragon, is effectively pony in culture as well.)
So what happened to everybuggy else? None of them were affected by that directly—but they could have been influenced by him through the hivemind once he transformed! If we assume (backed up by the idea that he reports not feeling hungry anymore even though Chrysalis ridicules this as impossible) that extracting love is very inefficient compared to positive-output love reactors—like fossil fuel density versus nuclear—then once Thorax actually started transmitting the New Wave of Changeling-Nature (on the orders of a pony, even, which might have been necessary to override his intrinsic suppression; it's ambiguous exactly which situational elements were necessary for this), Chrysalis was by far no longer the highest-power signal in the room, resulting in a wave of instinctive allegiance updates.
One last minor thing: why (aside from narrative convenience) would the others talk now as though they'd been individuals all along? That one seems easy enough: their memories of their time in the hive were subsumed and reinterpreted during identity formation. When they adjusted their personalities to match their new allegiance, Thorax was (perhaps subconsciously) basing the NWoCN on his experiences with the ponies, who in turn show a very clear tendency toward sanctity of individuation (most visibly in the form of cutie mark magic). Everybuggy suddenly had to come up with selves in order to conform, and latched onto whatever they had already to make them out of.
So yeah. I think the part where they act like they do now is actually best explained by them having been a group mind to start with. But, uh, I'm very biased for personal reasons, so.
Bonus places this could go:
* Was Chrysalis already a weak leader underneath who had to prop herself up with the magic-nullifying throne so that her control wouldn't be fragile to challenges? If so, was that true all along, or did things, say, start going wrong after the overconfident attack on Canterlot?
It's been shown that griffons don't get them, but if the changelings are protean enough as a group, maybe they could pick up the trait somehow?
* Does the part where they all transformed just mean changelings have both transient and permanent shapeshifting styles available? Maybe while the transient kind are usable for invasions and such, the higher-power permanent kind can only be used together and sincerely. That sounds peculiarly consistent with a friendship-magic-based universe.
* Will the rainbow sherbet antelopes go as far as to start getting cutie marks of their own?
I see this as confirmation of a successfully running government bureaucracy. Presuming there's a centralized cutie mark registration agency, it wouldn't have been too hard for Celestia to have reports prepared on who got their cutie marks at the same time Twilight did, and a group of five ponies that match the criteria all living in Ponyville (aka convenient access to the Everfree and the Elements) would have stood out. At the very least she could have had ponies look into the sonic rainboom and its effects, and that would have led to Dash and potentially the rest of the girls, too.
Interesting observation about the Celestia and Discord picture. If Twilight ships it, who am I to argue?
4517050 Update after looking back to check: I didn't remember that Thorax actually mentions having had these tendencies since birth, back in The Times They Are A Changeling, so apparently he didn't get the initial culture-change spark from contact, though it was developed that way. Arguably this implies that the 100% version of the hivemind hypothesis was already jossed back then; the less-than-100% versions of it still seem intact to me.
4517016
Totally agree with this.
In Ticket Master, AJ and Dash seem to automatically know that hoof wrestling (competition) is how to settle a problem. (Though we will see that perhaps this strategy isn't foolproof.) Also Rainbow is comfortable sleeping in the apple orchard without asking. This implies they have some sort of relationship with unspoken boundaries, though probably not a really strong one.
AJ and Rarity have both lived in Ponyville their whole lives, so they almost had to at least know each other.
We know that Pinkie thinks Dash is the coolest thing since confetti, and Dash thinks she's kind of a pain, from Griffin the Brush Off. Knowing Pinkie, this must have been a regular thing before Twilight showed up.
Of course Fluttershy and Dash knew each other, but probably didn't have much in common. And we don't know when Fluttershy and Rarity's spa visits seen in Green Isn't Your Color started, but since we later learn that Fluttershy has mane extensions it seems likely both were at least making regular spa visits before that and probably knew each other at least as acquaintances.
So my take has always been that the Mane Six had some sort of relationships before Twilight came, but the ponies who were close had some flawed ways of dealing with each other, and the ones who weren't close were letting issues keep them from becoming closer.
Edit: Kind of like most of us and our circles of friends.
I want to give a special shoutout to the part where Celestia reveals she had no clue that ponies used her name how we would use God/Jesus/etc.
All alicorns=gods headcanons btfo. And Celestia giggling is THE BEST
... Have I mentioned I'm semi-retired?
But don't worry--I'm sure I'll change my mind and make a comeback, just like last time and the time before that. So, the question arises... "Maretallica," or "Mareowar"?
"The rest of the Mane Six were already all friends before Twilight's arrival."
I would go with more that they knew each other and had certain loose friendship bonds, because RD and Fluttershy obviously knew each other since the Sonic Rainboom, and Pinkie Pie knows *everypony* regardless of their wants. After all in the first two episodes, when Pinkie burst into song in the middle of the scary trees, the reaction is... Pinkie.
Twilight: She isn't?
Rarity: She is. (sigh)
A good night time gallop through a hostile forest proved to be just the thing to cement those loose relationships into a tight bond.
No, but you should write more of it..........
4517175
Definitely Mareowar. Maretallica is not true metal and generally not cheesy enough.
4517000 this is a good explanation.
I think its clear that twilight was holding back because she didnt want to hurt the innocents in this crowded cloud city, nor did she really want ot hurt Starlight herself!
I love the point about Starlight possibly being a conduit for dark magic. While I know she rubs a lot of people the wrong way, I never thought she was stealing what makes Twilight special--and I think what you're pointing out is a concrete reason why she doesn't compete directly with Twilight: Twiggy's power comes from light, not darkness. And Starry is all about the struggle to leave darkness behind and step into the light.
And I'm with everybody else in agreeing that Celestia's flashback thing with the Mane 6 is probably more along the lines of storytelling shorthand than a literal occurrence.
4517285 Early Maretallica was more authentic. Mid-period Mareowar kept the flag flying. But honestly, the last couple of Maretallica albums don't get enough credit. Some ponies just wanna be haters.
4517193 Exactly! Well, and to chip in as someone who lives in a small town.. I know most people around here. I am on friendly terms and might do community activities with many of them. Are they friends? Eeh, not of the sort the girls become. Ponyville is a small-ish community and that changes the dynamic. Totally creepy that Celestia is taking credit for noticing the girls before the whole thing went down, though!
Oh, and this was a good analysis and gave me some food for thought, definitely.
Ehhhh, retconning the magical rules of the setting so they make new canon make sense doesn't make it any better to me.
Because the title of the show remains "Friendship is magic," not "magic is magic and friendship kind of sometimes is also magic, depending on the season ending villain." Starlight remains, if not a Mary Sue, then a wildly imbalanced character whose character has been shuffled around to suit new arcs twice now. She used to be misguided; then she was EVIL. Then she went on and on about how EVIL she was despite not being evil, except for the times when she acts exactly like her old evil self. Now she's becoming Twilight 2.0, but better because of aforementioned artificial flaws.
Starlight wasn't stopped because of friendship or magic; she just stopped voluntarily because she thought "Oh, well, killing literally everyone wasn't my plan, just maybe a bunch of people, or trapping Twilight in a world where she is alone and miserable for the rest of her life." Which itself kind of undoes the message of the show--Twilight's friendship didn't actually do anything, she was just a cog in a destiny machine. And to defeat Starlight, she just banked on Starlight not being totally amoral. So yeah, the show hasn't actually brought Starlight around into a comfortable place for me.
On the episode impressions, I agree with people that Celestia's flashback spot about the Mane Five is probably artistic license for the convenience of the audience. (Also, I really loved seeing Celly laugh out loud for once, and the humanizing touch of her worrying about Twilight and putting off sending her student onwards, because she didn't want to lose the close connection they had)
4517314
And, obviously, Starlight has a vastly easier win condition there: the Sonic Rainboom gets disturbed. Whether this happens because Starlight zaps Rainbow Dash out of the air, she friendship lectures the bully trio and makes them apologize to Fluttershy thus preventing the race from happening, or if the lightshow of two high-magic unicorns (well, one unicorn and one alicorn) going at it distracts Dash and the others from racing, Starlight wins.
Twilight's win condition is that the Sonic Rainboom happens on schedule, which is very hard to pull off with Starlight actively trying to interfere! And we see that she can't do it by just out-magicing or out-fighting Starlight, as Glim-Glam is much too powerful, canny, and well-prepared* for Twilight to be able to stop her without disrupting the Rainboom herself.
Of course, Twi figures that out after enough repetitions, and changes the no-win situation by pulling Starlight along for a brief trip to a Bad Future, which forces Starlight to start justifying her actions, which then gives Twilight the opening to start finding out about the root causes of her Anti-Cutie Mark Crusade, which then gives her just enough leverage to pull friendship on Starlight and get through to her.
*) That's something people seem to be missing about the whole Starlight vs. Twilight match: Starlight is prepared and Twilight isn't (and we all know that Purple Smart is not at her best when she has to hurriedly improvise!). Starlight's had an entire season (however long a timespan that is) to spy on Twilight and study her past, and prepare her vengeance for maximum impact. Like the subelement of the time spell that ensures that whenever Twi and Spike return to the Rainboom moment, Starlight gets taken there too, but before them. In other words, she can't be surprised and always knows to expect Twilight, which is a huge advantage!
I liked the episodes. I enjoy the fact that they're able to make intelligent stuff without resorting to a big baddie to start off every season. I like the flavors they added to changelings: although they were able to activate the love thing (well, maybe), they're still rowdy and bad with friendship, which makes perfect sense.
Starxie is wonderful, and I hope it becomes an actual relationship at some point in the future (we're getting pretty close to the point where that would be viable for Hasbro to do). Although, if you haven't watched the most recent (not the Canadian one) episode, prepare for a three-way love triangle.
That situation is definitely on the you.
Now, to refute all your points.
1) Wasn't this obvious to everypony? Of course the Mane 6 minus
were friends before 
showed up. They were fated to be friends when they were foals, at the moment they each got their cutie marks. Twilight was just the last of the six to join the herd. Everything in the show illustrates preexisting friendships between the other five. Rarity and Applejack were just sour with each other; that doesn't mean they're not friends. However, the six of them did become closer friends after Twilight's appearance.
2) Twilight has plenty of other photographs. Those photos aren't "more special" just because they're the ones currently on her mirror. If she only kept the most special photos, there'd be a group shot, and certainly at least one picture of her BBBFF. The Celie pic doesn't implies Dislestia, nor Twilight shipping ponies (she still distrusts Discord a great deal, and still worships the keratin shell of Celestia's hooves).
3) While I never thought changelings were psychic robots, I don't agree completely with your induction. Why would that phrase imply the drones aren't mentally submissive to the Queen? It's just like the changeling said: "No one's ever stood up to Chrysalis like that!" There's no indication of whether everybuggy wasn't unable rather than unwilling to challenge the Queen (remember: Thorax is a mutant changeling), and at some point the distinction between "won't" and "can't" becomes philosophical masturbation anyway.
4)
5) I still suspect I'm right about the future of Starlight Glimmer. She's incredibly powerful (she was driven like Twilight, but by emotions far stronger—and this is still the case as we see in the second episode), but still lacking in discipline. We've seen her screw up spells a few times now because of her personality, and Twilight hasn't had that problem in a long time.
6) I was pretty sure it was "gorefest"!
Otherwise, Thorax's follow-up makes no sense...
4517161
Oh Dear Celestia, this too. I forgot this part. It was gold.
Also also, horizon: yes, they're getting much more emotional. The show is going into complicated drama territory, because it is a good show.
Oh one more thing: in episode 3 they confirmed Cake baby eyes are different from Flurry Heart eyes. I have no idea what this means.
4517285
Having mulled over a story idea today, I think I'll follow your suggestion. Works better for impressing an audience of dragons.
4516984 Non-reliable memory is what I got here for the exact same reasons. Basically I take the flashbacks as way more loose than others, and some of it dramatized a bit for Twilight's benefit, because Momlestia.
4517161
That sounded like a sly tease to me. How could she not know? Several characters have used her name that way, which seems to imply its common enough. A successful thousand year palace conspiracy to never let her hear "Oh, for Celestia's sake!", while she's also aware and keeping track of the potential element-bearers in Ponyville?