Sep
15th
2017
Points of Canon: S3x04 - One Bad Apple · 4:39pm Sep 15th, 2017
You know, that girl, who somehow never comes back properly again.
- So why is Babs Seed going to Sweet Apple Acres in the first place, alone? Applejack says later in the episode that this is due to her bullying problems, but these wouldn’t be solved by a week’s absence, now would they?
- Babs is a cousin to Apple Bloom, and implicitly, to Applejack and Big Mac. Which, interpreted literally, would require her to be the child of a brother or sister to either Apple Parent. Now, she probably isn’t the child of a Pear, because Applejack knows nothing about the Pears at the time, so even if Buttercup had any brothers or sisters – she probably did – Babs can’t be their child. So Bright Mac had to have had a sister or a brother or several. Now, is that hypothetical Apple actually an Orange?
- Since when did Apple Bloom care what to wear at all? She does seem to be developing some interest in the subject later in the show, but this is pretty early on, and the variety of clothes she tries on and discards is quite high, especially considering she never seems to wear any of that. Notably, the first thing she does find, and immediately abandons, is a sailor suit. Other interesting things in her closet include a sock. With a sole and foot. As well as another boot with a toe.
- “It’s not like it’s the Harvest Day Parade!” Harvest Day Parade is Yet Another Yearly Festival. It’s not entirely clear whether this is the same thing as the “Summer Harvest Parade” that actually happens within the episode, but you would think so, wouldn’t you. In any case, this episode is solidly set during a summer, presumably close to the end of one.
- “You know, your cousin is supposed to sleep in here!” Contrary to popular belief, the Apples don’t seem to have a guest bedroom, otherwise Babs would get it.
- “I’m just so excited I could burst!” When Sweetie Belle says this, she does let out a burst of magic. Not sure if this can be used as a chronology marker or not.
- “Oh, wait, tha… that’s not her either, uh…” When Apple Bloom says this, what she’s looking at is a cow riding the train. Cows are free to do this, evidently.
- Apple Bloom has never met Babs before, but Applejack recognizes her instantly, meaning that she did meet her. I wonder when. Didn’t Apple Bloom and Applejack attend the last big family reunion together?
- Nopony bats an eye at a lone child with no cutie mark making a cross-country train trip. It’s both totally a thing and safe.
- “This is gonna be the best week of your life!” You would think the entire episode takes a week, give or take a day or two, but later, Apple Bloom also says “Besides, she’s only here a couple of weeks.” So it’s anywhere between one and two weeks.
- CMC Clubhouse exists, chalk up a marker.
- “This is where we eat our lunch…” Wait, the CMC eat their lunch at the clubhouse? That would be problematic during the school year, wouldn’t it?
- Scootaloo hangs down a hatch in the ceiling. This hatch is normally not there, or at least, is pretty much never visible. See also Family Appreciation Day.
- Notice that they never say anything about the actual crusading for the cutie marks, or the adventures they had while doing so. It’s like they didn’t even have them yet.
- “Here it is! The official Cutie Mark Crusaders float for the Summer Harvest Parade!” I wonder, what does it take to get a float into a parade like that. I also wonder why is it a pumpkin, with an apple silhouette carved into the side.
- So why exactly are Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon on Apple land today? This never gets explained, and it had to be deliberate.
- I don’t understand why is Babs taking the Diamond Tiara side even though she just got insulted – especially considering that she was a victim of bullying back in Manehattan as well. I don’t understand why she treats this sequence as an invitation to join the bully club, either. And I don’t understand why Diamond Tiara accepts her after just insulting her a second ago. It feels more than a bit contrived.
- “We could always tell Applejack…” Actually, they could always tell Applejack that Diamond Tiara destroyed their float. It’s interesting that neither of the three girls thinks of it. In any case, the stigma against involving adults in child business is pretty strong among ponies.
- “But then, we found the truth; she’s just a bully from the east” Manehattan is considered east of Ponyville rather than the more precise north-east. Unless this is for rhyming purposes only.
- The song montage includes our only shot of the Ponyville movie theater in primary canon. Comics mention the place multiple times later on, so at least the place and the practice itself is not just a visual device. Notice Twinkleshine and Minuette in the audience. Babs stepping out of the screen probably is a visual device, though.
- When, during the montage, the CMC are hiding in a clothing shop, we see a rack with the Gala dresses. Which would give us a useful chronology hard lock if this was the Carousel Boutique – only, it isn’t, and I can’t imagine a reasonable way for the Gala dresses to end up there. Next to them, we can see a few costumes that appear in Luna Eclipsed – suggesting that this is where they originally come from, and that at least in this, Rarity has competitors. Most of the outfits on display are costumes.
- So why do Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon want some rundown clubhouse anyway?
- We see Hondo Flanks, Rarity and Sweetie’s dad, fishing by the windmill. Yes, that’s him. No, I’ve got no idea why does he suddenly appear. The house he is fishing next to is definitely the house Sweetie Belle is supposed to be actually living in – windmill blades are visible from the window – and here, for the first time, we see Sweetie’s actual room.
- Why exactly are pigs running around unsupervised in the swamped-up area next to the windmill and the cliff, anyway?
- There’s a cow sleeping while standing up, or at least, chewing hay way late into the night, in the fenced-off area next to the main live-in barn at the Sweet Apple Acres. We generally don’t see the cows do anything of the sort.
- Apple Bloom is using a firefly lantern this particular time.
- “Luster dust from Sugarcube Corner. They use it for decorating cakes.” I wonder what this powder is exactly.
- “That must be what Rarity uses on her emergency edible boots!” <insert clopfic> No, really, why would one want these?
- So basically, the CMC are capable of constructing a self-propelled vehicle mostly from scratch in about eight hours. Notably, we never know what is the energy source that moves it.
- Of course the Canterlot Friends turn out for the parade. Or at least, Twinkleshine and Lemon Hearts do.
- “Too cool for mule, Babs.” The mule does notice this.
- The kitchen timer appears to be marked up in minutes, rather than seconds, otherwise it would have long since elapsed by then – and there are sixty of them – however, it’s ticking down much faster than real time.
- “Pinkie Pie, let us in!” Pinkie’s float is a lettuce, and apparently, uses actual lettuce leaves. This pun only works in
EnglishEquish. - Pinkie is reading a beauty magazine in her float. She very rarely, if ever, does anything of the sort.
- “Oooh, sweet applesauce!” Pigs are going to find this offensive.
- “We, the Cutie Mark Crusaders, elect Babs Seed to join us as a sister, friend, confidante, ally, bosom buddy, gal pal, compadre, chum of chums…” Notice that Scootaloo admits to having written that. And she calls Sweetie Belle a dictionary?
- “Well, what if I do? What are you gonna do about it?” “Tell your mothers about your bad attitudes!” Wait, why exactly is this an effective threat?
The biggest wtf about this episode is actually Diamond Tiara’s behavior.
Babs Seed reappears in the family reunion episode, and is mentioned down the line as having gotten her cutie mark, so not completely unheard of again, unlike, well, Cheese Sandwich I guess?
Hondo's fishing habit was mentioned in a fic I was just reading the other day about Twilight getting addicted to meat consumption, as a source for her fish habit.
Maybe that was the costume shop, and the costumer has knocked off Rarity's Gala dresses as costumes for an upcoming Nightmare Night?
Cousins occupy a wide swathe of familial relations, at least in North American usage. You still call them cousins even if they're third cousins twice removed. The grand-foals of Granny's second cousins could still qualify for 'cousin' relations with Apple Bloom. But yeah, my headcanon is that one of the Oranges is Granny's literal child. I don't think that Babs is the daughter of the Oranges, though - her rather low-class accent and eventual hair-stylist cutie mark doesn't map well to what little we know of the high-society Oranges.
4669262
Not completely, no, but you’d think she would get used, being the only known member of the Manehattan CMC branch and all.
Unlikely, seeing as how the only spot for this episode is Summer 1. Though not entirely impossible.
Depending on your interpretation, it's a power play, a childish attempt to regain monopoly on the Apple family, or a very misguided way to get Apple Bloom to realize DT has a thing for her.
On a semi-related note, if you haven't heard of it before I'd like to recommend PatchworkPoltergeist's The Silver Standard. It's kinda like Aporia, except instead of answering questions about the Journal of the Two Sisters and how ponies do the sandwich, it tackles pretty much every question of Diamond Tiara, through the lens of a very compelling Silver Spoon.
4669287
I am reading it. It’s the best treatment of DT out there, so yeah.
I bet you can get a lot of murders done in a week.
Oddly, I don't remember that line from the episode...
4669303
Bad Biscuit. Don't bring the Apple mafia into this.
4669309
It was the Red Weeding all over again...
4669309
i.pinimg.com/736x/14/e4/17/14e4178e7348e6c7f42c449b54072044--pony-party-the-family.jpg
Is there an explanation for the "veggie salad" thing?
4669303
So I'm not an only one who think that way :).
4669346
Pinkie’s float is a lettuce. She’s trying to make a joke regarding its imminent decomposition back into individual giant leaves of lettuce. It’s not working very well.
Considering that clothes are pretty much optional to ponies doesn't that mean that Apple family are pretty well-off? I doubt that they would buy unneeded things if they starving for money.
Something like that happens to me in the school. One of my (former) friends that were bullied together with me joined bullying campaign after bullies invite him in attempt to get to me.
IMO whole shaking and engine sound suggest internal combustion engine but...
4669358
The counterargument to that is that cider sales during the few days they run for make or break their yearly budget. See the discussions regarding Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000 and the particular possible interpretations of the bind that the Apples end up in. We don’t really have any good leads on how the Apples are doing financially, except whatever’s going on in that episode, and it is ambiguous, so how exactly to spin it is your choice. It is a common fanon that the Apple business practices are suboptimal, and after the stuff Applejack is seen pulling in Applejack’s Day Off, I can well believe that. Applejack is a silly pony.
That said, I can imagine lots of reasons for Apple Bloom to possess clothing she never seems to wear. For example, much of it could be Applejack’s old clothing, or the stuff that other local Apples, like Apple Fritter, grew out of, passed down to the younger member of the clan who could still make use of it. The sailor suit is particularly interesting – generally, pony fashion floats somewhere between the equivalent of human 1930s and 1950s, with occasional freaks of couture that jump all over the place. Sailor suits as clothing for children, (outside of Japan, where many school uniforms were derived from them) were particularly a thing at the turn of the XIX century in our world, and subsequently died out. It is, of course, not much of an indication, but it is something.
4669358
Even at their poorest, the immediate Apple family controls an orchard twice the size of the town that was built specifically to leech off it, and they also have the entire rest of the Apple family to call on.
On a good year? The Oranges look like the poor side of the family. Thank goodness Granny Smith was never one to flaunt it.
4669262 Also, we get a glimpse of Cheese Sandwich in the Twilight's Kingdom end montage.
4669368
IIRC there some rumor that we see him in season eight.
4669363
IIRC in season six, we see memories of the Starlight and she wears something like sailor uniform in her past. So at least twenty or so years ago ponies still wear them.
UPD.
Scratch that, it's not memories.
Probably less “We’re going to get rid of all the bullies forever while you’re gone” and more a vacation for the sake of her own mental health. Which still makes it odd that she went completely alone. But pony mental health standards seem laxer than our own in general.
Cycles of hurting, punching down, etc etc. Lots of people get angry at others who they can’t retaliate against, for any number of reasons, so they take it out on someone who they can hurt without punishment. It’s an unfortunate truth that being a victim doesn’t necessarily make one good, or grant them any particular empathy.
Being a target for bullies didn’t teach Babs “Hey, maybe bullying is bad,” but instead taught her “The only way to avoid being miserable is to make someone else miserable instead.” So when she learned that Ponyville has a bully problem, just like her home, she leaped at the chance to be the one holding the whip for a change.
Because the CMC are DT’s real targets. They don’t really care about Babs for her own sake: if she’s an ally of the CMC, then she’s worth mocking along with them, but since she turned against the CMC, DT isn’t going to decline her help. Not to mention Babs looks slightly older than AB (are we still operating on the assumption that DT is slightly younger than AB?) at an age when that sorta thing matters. And she’s from Manehattan, which even DT thinks is cool:
Basically, from DT’s dog-eat-dog viewpoint, Babs is a pony with enough social clout that she could threaten DT’s position at the top of the heap, even without a cutie mark. So, in that first conversation, DT is trying to (re)assert her authority to this newcomer and the CMC. Perhaps she’s hoping to cow Babs into submission, but Babs throwing her considerable clout behind DT is an acceptable outcome as well.
Really, re-reading the dialogue in that scene, DT only directly insults Babs once, by calling her “blank-flank”. Most of her insults are directed at the CMC and the pumpkin float. It really comes across like DT&SS sense that Babs’s loyalty is up for grabs and are trying to recruit her.
Ironically enough, once Babs is inside DT’s clique, she actually does steal DT’s position as leader. DT just doesn’t notice because she has a lot to learn about subtlety.
Granted, Spoiled Rich does throw a monkey wrench into this. Still, to make this episode fit with “Crusaders of the Lost Mark”: I think Spoiled genuinely has some irrational dislike of ponies the CMC’s age who don’t have cutie marks yet. DT goes along with it because that’s what her mom says—and she keeps using that as an insult against Apple Bloom because it gets results—but she isn’t as dogmatic as her mom about disliking blank-flanks. So DT is willing to associate with a blank-flank when there are other factors (in this case, age and being from Manehattan) to mitigate the stigma.
edible clothing is pretty primarily for that, though.
On the other hand, if Parasprites can't recognize strange-looking food…
Rarely on-camera…and she is, of all of them, probably aware of the camera. She almost certainly has downtime, but she knows how to schedule it around episodes and behind scene transitions.
(After all, she reads a newspaper in the latest, and heavily implies she does so regularly.)
and somehow nakama didn't make it in
Breezies.
Later episode which establish the Apple family as a whole is quite detailed and precise about family relations leads me to disagree with 4669262 that Babs, like Braeburn, is a 5th cousin twice removed or something that just gets called "cousin." Of course, that does suggest that Bright Mac had at least two other siblings then, one to be a parent of Braeburn and one to be a parent of Babs. I suppose some of those other Apples we saw glaring at the Pears could have beenolder siblings. And I do think Babs is an Orange, her accent difference seems like a mirror-opposite of the difference between Rarity's accent and that of her parents. Babs seems like she's in a rebellious phase so she talks like she's from Princesses, or whatever that borough is called in Manehatten.
4669358
4669363
4669364 The Apples seem to be fairly well off for family farmers, even compared to the Pies, who make enough to pay Trixie a big ol' bag of bits for her work, but still have to have imagination presents for Hearthswarming most of the time. That said, it might be that they're not that well-off overall, but that they just spoil Apple Bloom rotten, spending a disproportionate amount of money on nice things for her. I suspect there's a fair amount of guilt among the older siblings that they got to know their parents and Apple Bloom didn't, so at least they can buy her a bunch of outfits instead (and materials to rebuild a clubhouse into a fancy building, and lots of expensive hang-gliding and river rafting activities).
Harvest Festivals + Earth Pony magic causing frequent harvests = Plenty of Time off.
But do they have to ride in the cattle car?
Apple Bloom might have been just a baby herself. Also, if Babs is older than Apple Bloom, Applejack must have seen her at least once when she went to Manehatten. More unique coat/mane combinations means you can identify older versions of people you met as babies fairly easily I bet.
Maybe they do it like the French, and go home for lunch?
And yet Apple Bloom isn't allowed to stay inside the house unsupervised for an afternoon, very weird.
. I think 4669415 nails it on just about every particular.
Knock-offs. Presumably Gala dresses are photographed like Oscar dresses on the red carpet.
Clothing isle of Barnyard Bargains?
I cannot think of a single non-R-rated reason for edible clothing to exist, especially boots (which you walk on). This is a big reason why people started assuming Rarity makes...special orders for discrete customers.
Of course, there are handsome doctors in Pear floats to ogle!
4669309 The Apple Mafia isn't real! Flim and Flam still draw breathe, don't they?
4669556
Different (nuclear) families have different ideas of what’s acceptable for a kid to do.
Also, I think AJ is prone to temporary bouts of monomania, and that’s what caused most of her behavior in “Somepony to Watch Over Me”.
Pretty sure I remembered jokes along those lines before season 3. But I wouldn’t doubt that they increased after this particular episode.
4669556
I honestly don't think it's a case of 'have to'. They're farmers, they've always been farmers. Proud, honest, magic-despising farmers who'll defend family values and the simple life to the death even when Applejack can pull her Apple Jewel dress out of thin air with no evidence that Rarity ever made such a thing.
Plus, lots of people just don't do presents.
4669556
Considering how old Granny Smith looks when Bright Mac is an adult – compare to, say, Twilight Velvet at the Canterlot Wedding, when she has two adult children – I do think that has to be the case.
If they do, it’s no different from any other car.
Babs’ is hardly unique, though…
That’s a lot of walking though.
Evidently Applejack wasn’t thinking straight that day.
Even before they get actually used for their intended Gala? I wonder if Rarity is pleased at being imitated or mad.
Nope, it’s one of those small stores around the town hall.
Consider also that these are emergency edible boots.
So what would be the emergency?
4670058
Or they could just mean they eat lunch there on weekends. Which again, kind of fancy for a clubhouse, I think Apple Bloom is a little spoiled.
Good question. The designer must have been in the crowd of the second fashion show in S1. Orrrrr... I mean, they did borrow the designs of Rarity's dresses months ahead of time so Fluttershy could make them. What happened to those dress blueprints afterwards?
Estrus.
4669862
Hmmm. Now I'm remembering how when Pinkie invited everyone to Gummy's birthday, which was the closest we've ever seen to Pinkie throwing a party for herself, she specifically said
No need to bring a gift
Being there will be enough
Birthdays mean having fun with friends
Not getting lots of stuff .
Kind of weird that she thinks there are "hidden presents" then, instead of the Pie family just not doing presents.
4670174
Pretty sure that is not actually a thing. :)
4670330 Hey, if humans can still have a disproportionate number of births in the summer, ponies can still be effected too.