Regarding Princess Celestia in the premier · 8:54pm Mar 24th, 2018
Page break for spoilers.
That was the boss moment from Tia that we basically needed in terms of political power. Could she fire the guy? Shame him? Launch him off the mountain? Sure.
But that's not Tia. That's not how things get done in her kingdom. She likes to find ways around conflict. And yet, she didn't let him off.
Think of what she said to Neighsayer and where she said it. Think of her tone, the sarcasm and severe, ancient teacher speaking to a student who didn't do his homework and is trying to say that he is unfailingly correct in everything he says, regardless of how wrong he is. Think of the words for a moment. Think of how she said all this in the shadow of the very school he was trying to close.
And now think of who she said it in front of: the mane six, Starlight, Spike, the same students and families, creatures, he insulted ... and, at the same time, in front of some of Equestria's greatest allies. She dressed him down in front of a General (yes, he should be an Admiral, let it go), the Elder of the Gryphons, the Dragon Lord, the King of the Changelings, and the Prince of Yaks.
Politically, that is one of the biggest backhands across the face she could have given him. The only way that could get worse was if she did it in front of the entire EEA, told them that, as one who once taught them, she has never been so disappointed in her ponies, made the entire thing public, spread it in every paper across the land, and then fired them out of a cannon off Mount Canterhorn.
The problem with that approach is that it doesn't solve anything. It just fosters resentment. It just lets Neighsayer, and any like-minded folks in the EEA, claim themselves martyrs, try to alter events, and whip up any who might think like them and turn those who are on the fence. Instead, Celestia and the Royals can now watch them closely and, if they act up again, remove them and state to the public that chances were given, lessons were imparted, and, ultimately, these officials failed to understand friendship, one of the most important magics in the land. Perhaps their greatest magic and moral law.
Or, she's going to let Twilight handle that, because the EEA just tried to take a dump in her domain, on her carpet, so to speak. The end of the premier was Neighsayer's nose being stuck in it.
This. This basically sums it up. Kudos.
4824305 The tl;dr version of this is "YO GUYS! CELESTIA CASTRATED A STALLION AND LET FOREIGN DIGNITARIES WATCH!"
It was a glorious moment for best princess. Celestia can be firm without actually being firm. Like many have referred to her as a chess player, she moved and acted when the result would bring the greatest effect.
Loving such attention she got from the writers.
...and now she has a tribalistic unicorn running around.
4824319 And she'd have him running around regardless unless she just offed him then and there. That's not exactly a point.
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Ahh but he'll be back later, you'll see, and with a contingent of like minded troublemakers. (We are talking Hasbro here)
4824332 True, but he'd be back later if he was fired as well. He'd just claim martyrdom.
This is the kind of Celestia we needed to see. I only hope to see more.
... Darn it, now what am I supposed to do with this "Celestia takes Neighsayer aside and explains the extent to which he has fucked up" idea in light of this?
4824349 You can begin with her handing him back his balls :P Jokes aside, that's a pretty good idea. Personally, I see something like frustrated student either holing himself away until he's summoned/she comes to confront him, or goes to her, hurt by how she cowed him, and asks for explanation, only to find himself face-to-face with his old teacher rather than a furious princess, and that old teacher sitting him down and reminding him of lessons she taught a young foal with promise so long ago, sighing in regret that it seems he's forgotten it now. Then she leaves or dismisses him, leaving him to mull over just how much he forgot and how grievously he failed.
My guess at your idea, I suppose. I'm curious to what you had in mind.
4824348 Yas!
Massive applause to you man, summed up everything I was thinking of with Princess Celestia during this episode.
4824319
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer the saying goes.
so it seems like they are building season 8's big bad up to be specism.
Did you like Ocellus?
4824334
Really, the only thing that’s different here versus a big, public hullabaloo is that this way, she silently acknowledged the greatest weapon he could have used against her, and took it away from him.
You don’t need a total victory in order to keep the rabble rousers from rousing the rabble; just a strategically-chosen one.
4824428 I can already smell /mlp/ and /pol/ burning.
4824436 I FUCKING ADORE OCELLUS
4824466 Bingo. There is an elegance to what she did to him. A very beautiful disarming in front of some of the most powerful rulers around.
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Ocellus is adorable, yes. She may be one of my favorites if she shows up more often.
I was impressed that we have explicit confirmation that there are some sort of legal limits on the powers of Princesses. I guess Equestria is a constitutional monarchy after all.
Why should he be an admiral? He's a hippogriff.
Sure, he's spent some time under water, but he's still probably in charge of a group that considers itself an airforce.
Unless he said he was navy. Did he say he was navy?
4824682 I believe he mentioned being in her Navy, specifically, but I could be wrong.
I'm sure he is an admiral when he is a seapony, at least until the show dissapoints me.
4824682
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Is what he said. I rewatched that bit to be sure. I suppose that under water, the Navy would be the equivalent of the Army on land. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
4824718 Gracias. In that case, he should probably be an Admiral. But it's a small quibble amid a sea of great episode.
This blog gives me hope.
4824897 I feel like this is where I reference Bane or something about poisoning Gotham with hope.
4824364
I don't particularly think any "taking to the side and talking to" is really necessary. Neighsayer represents something systemic.
Too often in stories, we see the King/Sultan/whoever-leader being used to sort of represent or anthropomorphize the entire country into a single being. You then have that "one advisor/vizier/general/captain of the guard" representing the dissenting view. In that situation, that vizier needs to be rather prominent or highly ranked. They need to be privy to national secrets and the like, in order to believably have a say in and influence on national policy, so that their opinions have meaning and impact.
That was not the case here. Neighsayer wasn't some highly ranked government official, with any involvement in Equestria's foreign policy. He was head of a very important domestic institution. Indeed, he seemed to utterly fail to recognize the importance of the very creatures he was badmouthing. He was very clearly not a diplomat in any sense of the term.
Neighsayer represents a clue that common Equestria culture and mindset is still very much the same one hinted at in several places through the series. Bridle Gossip had Zecora being frightening to the whole of Ponyville. Simply for being not a pony. Snowfall Frost, even if a fictional character (most likely) still is indicative of a sort of mentality is a young Equestria where defense against very real threats is of high importance, and there are ponies passionate about that. Training up the next generation of soldiers, heroes, and monster slayers is an important role to play for society.
Twilight Sparkle represents a change to that. She is advocating peace and friendship. While griffons have been seen around Equestria now and then, they're clearly far less common than donkeys. Gilda has been shown to be more the norm for how they typically interact with ponies, rather than the exception. Griffonstrone in particular is still slowly learning the lessons Pinkie and Rainbow Dash introduced to them. And that's probably the friendliest neighbor they have.
Dragons have been: mysterious and unknown creatures that Equestria has little to no written information on. They're often huge, incredibly dangerous, and entirely unconcerned with things like Equestria's borders or the well-being of ponies. They feature in Equestria's legends as monsters only the most brave legendary heroes have faced and lived. The fact that Ember is the Dragonlord is, once again, a recent political development, and probably not well-known, nor even particularly comforting to most of those in the know. She's another dragon, raised in dragon culture, and the fact that she has radical, peaceful policies... let alone that dragons have a nation or government at all isn't common knowledge or reassuring to the common pony.
Yaks are similarly not well known. What little interaction ponies have had with them involves recent visits by them to Equestria, and those have involved a lot of property damage and nearly resulted in war.
Changelings attacked Equestria twice, and have successfully (if briefly) conquered Equestria, while the first attempt resulted in open battle in the capital.
Hippogriffs are largely unknown to everyone. While they might end up being the best friends of Equestria out of the six groups, they haven't exactly gotten off to a good first impression. Queen Novo refused to aid Equestria when it was conquered by the Storm King. The one hippogriff (Princess Skystar) to come help was publicly chastised for doing so, in case there was any doubt that she acted against Queen Novo's policy.
We, as the audience, know the specific individuals and Twilight Sparkle's (and her friends') history with them. But it is of no real surprise that a conservative, practical, and education-focused individual like Neighsayer would hold the views he does. You have to remember that, according to canon, it has been only a couple of years since Twilight Sparkle dealt with Nightmare Moon. A lot has happened in a rather short amount of time, and up until now everypony has been used to Celestia as the sole monarch of the land for a thousand years.
The episode was weird in how it presented a lot of things. Again, this was not some foreign affairs meeting with Celestia introducing some kind of "foreign exchange program to foster good will." This was Twilight Sparkle, acting on her own initiative, to do so. Equestria has clearly been content to ignore other nations, especially since (other than the yaks) they're all across the ocean ( even the Dragonlands and Griffonstone are not on the same continent as Equestria, though since both of those races can fly, that has aided in visitors to Equestria being a thing).
I don't think there is anything to talk to Neighsayer about. This school was largely an unprecedented project. It was poorly planned out. The exact needs of the school were not discussed even among Twilight and her friends, let alone with anyone else with a valid opinion on the matter.
I also am not entirely comfortable with how the episode villainized the EEA. There are plenty of problems here in the US with unaccredited schools and the risk that even if they stay open for business until you graduate, whatever paper they hand you may not be worth the ink and paper used to print it out. An employer wants to know that a potential employee has the skills needed for the job they want to be done. Paperwork such as a degree or diploma from an educational institute helps assure them that a potential hire has that. Accreditation serves to ensure that whatever a school teaches, it has done so to standards. When a school teaches history, we can rest assured that they're teaching real history, not some revised, biased, or agenda-driven version. Or, so we hope. If the school is teaching math, we can be assured that an accredited school is teaching the currently best-known math. And so on.
The EEA should have no such standards to cover an entirely new subject like Friendship. It could not actually approve of Twilight Sparkle's plan just by filling out the proper forms. It would necessarily have to be set up in an experimental manner, with studies done after several rounds of students have gone through, in order to assess things like best teaching methods, accuracy and depth of knowledge on the subject, and so on. There would be no approved textbooks or disapproved ones. Only Twilight Sparkle herself has written anything on that topic.
At best, the EEA might have guidelines on how the overall structure and administration of the school goes, but that too isn't really the purview of accreditation.
So, the episode imposed "rules" without ever going into detail about what those rules actually were. We got a few hints at what they might be based on the changes Twilight made to her friends' teaching methods. But there are no rules that the EEA could impose that would make any sense. Unless Twilight's school intended to cover traditional subjects alongside Friendship.
Realistically, the EEA would just simply reject Twilight's petition for accreditation. But that would not carry with it a shutting down of the school. It would be, "we're interested in what you plan to do with your school. Give us some data on how to teach your subject, and we'll build a set of standards with you, and once they're ironed out, we can offer accreditation to any schools seeking to teach Friendship."
Neighsayer should have had absolutely zero interaction with, observation of, or say in what students Twilight chose to enroll in her school. That is entirely out of his jurisdiction. At best, he (or, more likely one of the lower ranks in the EEA) would visit a class a few years down the road, once the school had figured things out through several class cycles, simply to get a better context to whatever reports Twilight had submitted.
Overall, the episode attempted to villainize "bureaucracy." It failed to actually represent anything realistic about what the EEA would even do, let alone the actual positive and beneficial services the EEA likely provides. While it is possible for an entity like the EEA to provide conflict to a story, this episode hardly did it believable.
Given all of that, I can't even really take interest in what antagonism Neighsayer provided for the episode. It is so bizarre that it would be like a dentist getting up on stage at a rock concert and trying to tell the keyboardist he has to stop playing because he didn't brush his keyboard's keys properly. Because a random dentist has authority on the matter, because if you squint the keys of a keyboard are sort of like teeth.
In light of that disconnect, I can't even really notice or care about other little details like calling the ranking officer of a navy a general, or the dressing down of a bureaucrat for bungling a foreign affairs event that he frankly had no business being involved in. If anything, it is Celestia who needs dressing down for even involving the EEA in this. Just how is Equestria run that we even got into this situation at all?
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The whole problem is that Twilight's school is not a regular school-it's an academy designed to teach a particular philosophy. Ancient Greece had them.
Would it be weird of me to start posting links to this blog on future Neighsayer stories? I feel like this blog and the comments that followed it provide important context, but am unsure if linking this on other stories would come across as spamming a view or heckling authors rather than attempting to inject additional perspectives into a discussion.