Time to make some enemies · 2:43am Nov 7th, 2017
And yes, this is about the EqD poll.
Perfect Pear is a fine episode, good even, if you think it's great, sure. But the best episode of the season, even one of the best of the franchise?
No, not even close. The episode is a prime example of how to emotionally manipulate your audience into feeling inauthentic feels, and I'm going to explain this because it's really surprising how many people fell for it.
To begin, TPP is all about emotions. This is not a good story from a technical perspective. It is a Romeo and Juliet star-crossed lovers story that's been done to death in all forms of media across the spectrum, and does not add any new twists or perspectives on things. Feuding families, the kids like each other, they secretly fall in love and get married, and then they die and the families are remorseful. In that technical sense, TPP is a very weak story. It is not a story like Gauntlet of Fire or The Cutie Re-Mark or Twilight's Kingdom, where the actual plot is what is important. TPP's importance is in the emotions it attempts to evoke from you. The story is a vehicle to make you feel feels. And that is where the emotional manipulation begins.
TPP's feels are entirely dependant on the Apple parents being dead. It doesn't outright say they're dead but it is obviously structured to fuel that perception, and hinges all of its emotions on that idea. Grand Pear has been estranged from his daughter for, let's say 25 years given Big Mac's age, and has now come back to Ponyville to reconnect with the family he left behind. With the three siblings encouraging him, he returns to Sweet Apple Acres and sees Pear Butter working the fields. She sees him, stops and looks up, and she runs up to embrace her father. It's a sweet, touching reunion... and you aren't as moved by that thought as what the episode gave us, are you? The thought that Pear Butter is dead and Grand Pear can never recover the years lost or apologize to her for disowning her. THAT's where the emotions come from - the tragedy element. Without the tragic angle, without the death to taint things, the emotions are much weaker.
This happens throughout the episode, and aside from Grand Pear and Pear Butter, it is more blatant with three particular moments. "Hey, our parent had this basic personality trait, just like one of us!" Those moments are so corny you chould shuck them. Instead of demonstrating that the Apple parents were like their kids, we're told they were. We don't get Bright Mac saying something like "Ah couldn't let you take the blame for what I'd done. It ain't right to lie like that." We could see Pear Butter hanging out with Mrs. Cake and Mare Mayor almost like the CMC, or Bright Mac doing lasso tricks, to demonstrate visually how they influenced their kids. But we don't get that. We get single, solitary instances where they exhibit behavior mildly reminiscent of one of the kids, and the kids remark on the smiliarities. We're told Bright Mac is honest, we aren't shown it.
Everyone talks about the Apple parents in reverent tones. To hear these stories you'd think they were just the perfect ponies, so loving and kind to everyone and they loved each other so much. The stories told about them feel more like a eulogy being spoken at their joint funeral, like Burnt Oak coming up and telling the story of how the two met and how he was part of it, and then Mayor Mare talks about how she officiated their wedding. Everything in the episode draws back to how in love the two were and how perfect they were. And it begins super corny with them falling in love as foals. Bright Mac is younger than Apple Bloom and he's smitten with Pear Butter and giving her nicknames less than a minute within meeting her for the first time. And why did he approach her, the two directly acknowledge their families don't talk to each other, but why are they? We get not a word about how they think the feud is silly because they're too young to understand or something.
This is what I mean by emotional manipulation. We are not shown things about the two, we are told things, when a character trait they possessed is established it is shoved in our face. And because we are told these things about the characters rather than allowed to just observe them and see for ourselves how they are, the emotions are cheapened and the characters are flat. What do we actually know about these characters as people? We know that they loved each other very much and were very kind and nice to everyone they knew, and again, those token "our parent was just like us!" moments. Bright Mac and Pear Butter as the episode presents them to us are hyperidealized charicatures of the perfect couple. Which ties right back into that tragedy element the episode's emotions hinge on. "Aw, they're the perfect couple, they're so in love, nopony ever in the history of Equestria has ever been so in love! But now Grand Pear disowned her and she's dead and aaaaaw."
Imagine for a moment this was not the Apple parents. Rarity and Sweetie Belle are finding out the story of how their parents met, or Rainbow finds out how her parents met. The emotions do not resonate nearly as strongly. Because this is a story that only works for the Apple parents and only because they're dead. Their story needs that emotional punch to be effective, and without it, it has nothing. But that is a cop-out, their deaths are not part of the story, their deaths are a narrative tool to make the emotions being described to you feel stronger because they are now tinted with sadness and regret. Bright Mac and Pear Butter, as real ponies who really lived and had defined personalities, are not present in this episode. We are listening to other ponies tell a story about the perfect couple who loved each other so much and touched everyone's lives, and then they died.
TPP is not a bad episode. But it is not one of the best episodes of the series by far. When you take a step back and actually analyze, you realize how emotionally manipulative it is. When you peel back that layer of "they're dead" tainting your perspective of everything, you are left with a stock star-crossed lovers story about two overly idealized and memorialized characters who spend most of their screentime making goo-goo eyes at each other with no time spent to exploring their character beyond "their kids turned out just like them" and no time spent exploring their relationship beyond a superficial "they're in love".
Wow, I never looked at it like that before...
Eh, I respect your right to your opinion and interpretation, but I prefer to appreciate it for what it is, and what it is is a sweet, sad love story being told to three kids who never got to hear it from their own parents. That's powerful and reaches deep.
Which did you pick though :B
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Shadow Play. A story that felt like the culmination of numerous separate plot threads that had been woven throughout the series, not just the season.
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And if it does affect people powerfully, that's fine. But, one of the best episodes of the entire series? Really?
It's not really about the apple parents though it's about the apple children and by extension the audience learning about these characters we never had a chance to get to know, through the people who were touched in one way or another by these characters. By the end of the episode we're sad not because they are dead but because we never got a chance to know them and never will but can be content that they live on through the stories told by those that did know them.
This is an episode about grief, the parents come across as perfect because their friends choose to remember the good times not focus on the bad.
No offense, I get what you're saying, but I feel like this story works specifically because it's the Apples parents and it's a story that could only work with them. Besides, it actually has something besides just being a "Romeo and Juliet" plot, and even then it's not a direct knock-off.
4719224
And that's a fair interpretation, but it's not how I've seen most people talk about it. Most really, really get invested in the love story.
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Like what? I'm serious, what more is there to it than the Romeo and Juliet angle?
4719230 Well for one, Romeo and Juliet rush headlong into love without another thought, not even thinking about the consequences. Juliet is even supposed to be arranged to another guy (Paris) when she meets Romeo, who by the way is still reeling from a recent break-up with someone his friends and family don't think very highly of. Yet the two go right ahead and jump into a relationship and a secret marriage, even knowing that their families hate each other.
Here, Bright Macintosh and Pear Butter are together for many years before they even officially confess their love to each other, and Bright Mac only marries Pear Butter in secret after she learns her family's moving to Vanhoover, because he doesn't want to be apart from her. And Pear Butter at first wants to keep both her families, she only chooses to be an Apple when her father forces her to decide one way or the other.
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Honestly I don't find those changes to be all that significant. BM and PB are still smitten with each other at first meeting and are obviously in love long before they officially became a couple, and they still get married in secret against the family's wishes.
Both The Cutie Re-Mark and Twilight's Kingdom failed in their writing department: Twilight's Kingdom has a lot of wasted potential in Tirek's backstory and motivation, has an awful first song, the product placement is obvious and, besides the Dragon Ball moment, I've never seen anyone talk about other aspects from the story. The Cutie Re-Mark has a lot of plot holes when it comes to time travelling, its pacing is horrendous (specially in the second part) and, of course, this:
The Perfect Pear is not flawless, I admit, but it's a good episode. Besides, I can say these same complaints about the first then minutes from Up and that doesn't hide the fact that everyone loves that initial secuence.
Overall, thanks for you opinion. You've make me realize something I was unaware of and I'll revaluate things for my season 7 retrospective.
4719237 I never said it wasn't a Romeo and Juliet love story, I just said it had more to it than just being that kind of story. The part where they could talk normally as foals definitely felt questionable, at least had they been a few years older (like say S1 Apple Bloom's age) then it would've made a little more sense.
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Everyone is entitled to their opinion on what is and is not a great episode/best episode.
Let me flip the script and bring another show into this: I have always felt "The Forgotten" was one of Batman: the Animated Series' best, most memorable episodes. Only recently have I been told that it's widely reviled. I stand by my opinion of it.
"The Perfect Pear" may be seen differently by future generations of fans, but our existing fandom? Is enamored with it for reasons, and that's fine. Just let them have this. :)
The most amazing thing in this episode is William Shatner voicing a character from My Little Pony that isn't hammy. I mostly agree with your post though, imagine if the writers used the Romeo and Juliet formula to emulate the comedy it actually is instead of the tragic romance people perceive it to be.
I didn't like TPP all that much, but I think people like it because no one expected the show to ever touch the topic of the Apple parents.
This made me think of this
And the part where it's covered in this
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An acceptable choice!