My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic - Season 8 Episode 17: "The End in Friend" (SPOILERS) · 4:00pm Aug 18th, 2018
In which the downward spiral that is season 8 produces yet another immense turd to clog up the friendship toilet.
Rarity and Rainbow Dash are both called to Twilight's class to serve as an example of compromise in friendship. And that's exactly when they display how bad they are at compromising when they can't agree on an activity to spend their day of fun together on.
Yeah we're doing "Non-Compete Clause" again with a different pony pair. Yaaaay.
The students start interrogating Rarity and Rainbow about their friendship, and tugging at the threads of their unlikely friendship causes it to fray around the edges.
Also, FYI Twilight? THIS IS NOT HOW COMPROMISE WORKS. Compromise is not forcing one person to do something they hate to appease the other, then vice versa. Compromise is finding something they BOTH enjoy doing TOGETHER.
Twilight tries to BS her students into accepting that the "compromise" is going well, and when Rarity and Rainbow move on to treasure hunting together, it ALMOST seems like she can pull this one out of the fire. Of course, Rainbow tries to make a Daring Do game out of poking around the gem caverns, which leads to shattering the gems Rarity was collecting, which leads to Rainbow and Rarity fighting and leaving angrily, declaring that they're no longer friends.
(Uhh. Gems don't...don't shatter like cheap glass...)
Rainbow and Rarity visit Starlight for "guidance counseling". By which I mean they sit there bitching about each other until Starlight does what she did to Celestia and Luna except without the Cutie Mark switching spell. She decides the way to fix their friendship is to have them reach each other's favorite books.
Because that makes total sense for fixing a friendship that's being tested for the first time in several YEARS. This only leads to further damage to their friendship and a TON of dramatic gasping from bystanders.
While Rarity and Rainbow are fighting, Twilight loses a magical amulet Celestia gave her that would be dangerous in the wrong hooves. Rarity and Rainbow are summoned back to the School to help search for the missing amulet. They go on an adventure in the swamp where they keep running into problems they have to help each other solve, it mends their friendship, in the end it turns out Twilight staged the whole thing to get these two to stop fighting...meh.
This episode is an absolute turd. Everything about it from the badly forced plot to the awkward and badly handled "moral" to Rarity's incredibly fugly boots to the SHATTERING GLASS GEMS just rubs me the wrong way. I can't find a single good thing to say about this episode. 0/10, and I really hope the same writers who fucked this season up so badly are NOT back for the last hurrah. 
No, a compromise is giving up something to make the other side happy. You do something your friend enjoys even though you don't enjoy it and then they do the same for you. Ideally what will happen is that you'll enjoy hanging out with each other even if the activity isn't something you'd normally enjoy by yourself. The best case scenario is you find an activity you both enjoy instead of the activity you really want to do but that isn't always an option.
Someone has never negotiated before.
4921869
That isn't compromise, that's mutual emotional blackmail.
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4921880
Friendship isn't business or politics. But nice strawman.
I was really hoping Starlight would do the cutie mark switching spell on them.
Though that would be unfair, too. Rarity does have experience with Rainbow Dash's cutie mark.
4921883
Friendship is exactly like business or politics. Philosophers across civilizations have concluded so since very early in history, historians have chronicled friendships as they do politics, and today social scientists model business relationships and friendships in the same way.
What we learned from this episode:
One: Without outside interference, neither party would have ever come forward to mend a damaged friendship (which was only damaged in the first place by being put on the spot, natch.)
Two: They've proven to be capable teammates and effective coworkers, but "using one's unique skills in tandem to solve a problem" is not the same as being friends.
4921886
If that's really what you think, you'd make about as good a Princess of Friendship as Twilight.
4921890
I have no interest in propagandizing for a religion or ideology (which is Twilight's actual job), so that's no real skin of my nose.
4921880
What you're describing is "strongarming". Which is a type of negotiation, but not usually the kind that happens among people who like each other.
4921889
They did enjoy working together, and did bond over the experience. Even after they learned of the ruse, they did not resent it, because it was good for them.
4921892
That's fair enough. But it's not for nothing that compromise is described as a resolution that leaves nobody happy.
This episode started off as "Non-Compete Clause" take two, then morphed into something else at the end and I think it became better because of it. Rarity and Rainbow Dash were probably the two who would be the most likely to have this conflict, whereas Applejack and Rainbow Dash should've been above it. Plus there's no students being put in danger, so that's a plus (Yona nearly drowning while her professors did nothing has to be one of the worst scenes the show has ever presented).
4921881
Compromise: an agreement or a settlement of a dispute that is reached by each side making concessions.
Concession: a thing that is granted, especially in response to demands; a thing conceded.
4921884
That already happened in Magical Mystery Cure. Didn't go well for them
4921884
To be fair, though, we know from A Royal Problem that cutie-mark switching is the right response to all situations.
4921908
Um yes, I was referring to that exact incident with the second line of my previous comment.
I find it completely implausible that these two have never managed to do something together (other than going on adventures with the rest of the heroines) that they both enjoyed in all this time.
...That said, it sounds like these friendship lessons need to be planned a lot further in advance.
Oh Moth, if you had problems with this one, you're probably going to pop a vessel when you get around to the Trixie/Starlight episode later on. (And that's all that I'm saying there, since I know you don't want spoilers. Well, that and I'm pretty sure the episode has a nod/callout to Family Guy of all things. If anyone is likely to catch what I'm talking about and confirm or deny, I figure it'll be you.)
With that out of the way, I thought the episode was decent. Not the season's best by any means, but certainly not its worst either (Yakity Sax holds that position for me, even though I like Pinkie episodes as a rule. But that one was just...
). The multi-eyed frog thing with the literal swamp breath was fun (and an interesting reveal of another sapient species in/around Equestria too).
Really, the biggest problem I had with this episode was the fucking early release of yet another episode. With how I watch episodes these days--Youtube/Dailymotion on day of airing--I have to either watch the advance release or risk not seeing it at all when the video gets carpetbombed by Hasbro's takedown requests.
So... the best and even correct way to get two friends to stop fighting is to... trick them?
What???
That is exactly how compromise works. Compromise means that both parties have to give up something for the other’s sake. If they find something they both enjoy doing, then nobody’s giving up anything.
4921929
I don't know, I don't think I can recall an episode that focused on Rainbow Dash and Rarity together more then twice.
Still seems a bit early to consider this season better or worst than other seasons.
4922124
It's already well into the bottom three.
I agree. trust me the next episode has a somewhat cringy conflict but it's really good.
4921930
if you're looking for good episode links at the time of airing sorting through the comments on equestria daily is a good way to find good links.
4921929 It feels like an episode that was meant for much earlier in the show's run, like Season 1 or Season 2. It would've been much better as a flashback episode.
4922195
Exactly. That's what I thought after finishing this episode. This is much more in the vein of the pre-Princess Twilight seasons, when many of the Mane 6 were still getting to know one another. The only ones who had a lengthy friendship prior to Twilight coming to Ponyville were Dash and Fluttershy. Pinkie was stuck on a rock farm, AJ was stuck on an apple farm and Rarity -- where the hell did Rarity grow up to acquire that accent? If you think about it, the R Gals are the least-paired, well, pair of the group.
I liked the swamp beast. I'm sure most of us saw the relic hunt was a set-up from a mile away, but that wasn't the point. The point was to get Rares and RD to reconnect, which they did. This eppy was also good at showing kids that people can be friends even when they don't share much in common. I don't understand the rancor toward this episode.
They also don't grow pre-cut with many different types found together. Oh, wait. vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/1/13/A_gems_deposit_which_would_make_Spike_drool.png/revision/latest?cb=20120214052504 Riiiiiight.
Just saying that gems and other crystalline things on that world act differently than they do here. They are grown on farms by earth ponies after all.
Maybe their gems do just shatter if not handled right. Might help explain why some gems are so expensive, they turn into dust most of the time so when you have one it is worth something. (But really, the "bit value" of gems, and the value of bits overall, has bugged me for a long time.)
I'm just saying that out of all the "sins" of this episode this one is on the weak side. Everything else totally justified though.
The only way this makes sense is that if someone beat Chrysalis to the punch and created the Dumb Six.
And... didn't read on from that.
You really need to consider how you start off expressing your opinions of you want people to actually look at them. Or better yet, actually express your opinions as opinions.
4922608
You really need to consider not commenting just to be a dick if you want people to actually not block you.
I agree with those who say compromise involves doing something you don't want to to make someone happy and them then returning the favor, at least some of the time. Now if this is all the relationship has then it's failing relationship and needs to be dropped. But not all time together can feature finding something everyone wants to do equally