Rollercoaster of Friendship Review · 10:19pm Mar 21st, 2019
So it’s time for a review of Rollercoaster of Friendship… at least half a year past the point anyone cared about it.
Of course, if you’ve been keeping an eye at my writing progress post (which this blog post will unfortunately knock off my user main page), you might notice that even by my usual standards Friendship Is Absurd is coming along really slowly, and I want to reassure you this (rather lengthy) review isn’t related to that. In truth, this review was completed months ago, I just kept putting off actually posting it, but with the next Equestria Girls special coming up so soon, I figure I should before it truly loses all relevance. The slow pace for the last month or two was due to a number of personal matters that have now mostly been resolved, so instead of glacially slow, progress will just be normally slow. I’m not George R.R. Martin-ing here, where I’m just writing a bunch of blog posts rather than my story.
Anyway, onto the review! If you want the short version: I didn’t like it. If you want the not-as-short-but-still-short version, I really didn’t like it. If you want the long version, well, that’s what this post is for.
Let’s get into why I view this as the worst Equestria Girls special—and by a reasonable margin, at that. First, it has flaws that no previous Equestria Girls special has had—and, indeed, in one case, nothing in the Friendship Is Magic franchise as a whole has had.
We’ll tackle the one that hasn’t happened before in the entire franchise later, as it’s not actually the biggest flaw. The biggest flaw is that unlike all preceding specials, it brings nothing new to the table. All of the previous specials felt like they were furthering the story or at least introducing something new. The first four films are all clear continuations of each other. The subsequent specials less so, but Dance/Movie/Mirror Magic gave us more development with the Shadowbolts, had the novelty of someone other than Twilight and Spike crossing over, and it was at least sort of a continuation of Legend of Everfree in regards to showing more of their newfound superpowers. Forgotten Friendship gave us resolution regarding Sunset and Celestia and some actual characterization for Equestria Girls Trixie. All of these were building on previous specials or giving us new ideas. There was progression.
One cannot say this for Rollercoaster of Friendship, which furthers no narrative and introduces nothing that isn’t at best superficial. No previous Equestria Girls special ever had this problem. All of them had a purpose to them. Some less than others, but there was a real reason for them to exist. Not this one. Its plot is a retread of an already not great special (Mirror Magic), so there’s nothing new there, and it’s of no real importance to any previous special.
There are only two things I could see that someone could point to as being “new” as a reason to justify this special’s existence: The fact that focus was put on characters other than Sunset and Twilight (namely, Rarity and Applejack), and the fact Vignette is a new character. Let’s take those in turn and explain why they really don’t count.
First, focus was put on different characters in previous parts. Dance Magic was focused more on Rarity than anyone else, and while Movie Magic was more of an ensemble story, Rainbow Dash still stood out a bit. Mirror Magic had most of the focus on Starlight, but it might be unfair to count her as she’s not a regular Equestria Girls character. Trixie got focus in Forgotten Friendship. So it’s not the general idea of focusing on other characters that’s new, just the fact they put it on Rarity and Applejack in particular. But even if we count that as something new (which I find to be a stretch), it’s only “new” in a superficial way. The plot is to get angry at each other for contrived reasons, then make up, resetting us back to where we started. Indeed, it’s surprisingly tangential to the actual plot of the special (weak as said plot of trying to stop Vignette is), feeling like it’s just there to pad the runtime out. It’s certainly a far cry from how the inter-group arguments and conflicts in Rainbow Rocks was actually well integrated into the plot, made sense, and furthered their characters.
So one can’t really say this special is new in providing character focus as a reason for it to exist (and note I have been focusing solely on the specials for comparison; if we consider the shorts then the argument fades even more). That brings us to Vignette, who is technically new. Unfortunately, while it is possible they’ll do more with her, she’ll most likely never be referred to again. Additionally, even if she is used later, that would only be a vindication of that later usage, not her original one. I really like Sunset, but that doesn’t retroactively mean her portrayal in the first movie was actually good.
But perhaps more importantly, while Vignette’s technically a new character, the plot being a retread of Mirror Magic causes her to just be another Juniper Montage, so we’re still not getting anything new. Sunset, for all her character faults in the first movie, was at least something we hadn’t seen before in that she was supposed to be a dark version of Twilight. I don’t think they executed that particularly well, but I can see what they were going for and it was something they hadn’t done before.
Indeed, I would say Vignette is the least interesting villain in the Equestria Girls franchise, and perhaps in the entire Friendship Is Magic franchise. I say “perhaps” simply because I have not seen a number of the later episodes and thus the possibility of someone being worse cannot be ignored, but even if so Vignette is very much on the bottom (for the record, I have seen Cozy Glow, and despite her having some deficiencies (like the fact her character really does not make sense), she was far better because she at least was fun to watch). Yes, Vignette has displaced even Cinch as the worst villain, because at least Cinch had a more memorable personality and came across as more menacing.
And this brings us to another issue with this special, and the one I alluded to being a problem that never occurred before: The villain gets absolutely no comeuppance. Now before you say “wait, what about cases like Nightmare Moon or Wallflower Blush, who got basically instantly forgiven even though there was every indication that if they weren’t defeated, they would’ve continued being bad?” While I had some problems with those also, we should note that even in those cases, they ended up not getting what they wanted. Luna didn’t get eternal night and Wallflower Blush didn’t succeed in ruining Sunset’s life. Vignette not only doesn’t get a punishment, she STILL gets the concert and extra publicity from the Rainbooms she wanted! Unless I’m overlooking something, this has NEVER happened before in the entire Friendship is Magic franchise (and it certainly hasn’t happened before in Equestria Girls). Every previous reformed villain gave up on whatever their original plans were. So it takes the problems of characters like Luna or Wallflower Blush but makes them even worse by having no actual consequences occur to the villain even in a nominal sense.
This is to say nothing of how Vignette is defeated. After our main characters go through the obligatory transformation sequence, she’s defeated… by a single laser blasting her phone. That’s it. I suppose it fits with the general lameness of her character that it just took a small laser blast to defeat her, but what was even the point of them all powering up if they were just going to beat her in such an anticlimactic way? Heck, after so many specials being decided by a magical showdown, them coming up with a plan to grab it from her and then destroy it would’ve actually been a welcome change of pace! But instead we go for the big magical showdown even if it doesn’t actually turn out the way that would warrant there being a big magical showdown to begin with, so you get the worst of both worlds.
Everything cited before would probably be enough to name this as the worst Equestria Girls special. But it gets worse!
Much of the conflict is contrived and requires characters to implausibly not believe each other. Remember that Bendy episode from Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends where the plot requires Frankie and Mr. Herriman to somehow believe that Wilt, who’s absurdly honest, is lying? It’s like that with Applejack. Even when Sunset and the others stand up for her to Vignette, they don’t bother to do it while she’s there and wait until after she’s left, because I suppose if they were to do it right away we’d lose the contrived drama that results.
Also, this is easily the worst Equestria Girls special when it comes to songs. All of the preceding specials had most of their songs be good. This is the first one to not have any song I liked. Okay, there was only one song, so obviously it would rest totally on that, but the original Equestria Girls along with Dance Magic had one song each and they were both fine. But this isn’t just not a good song, it’s one of the weakest in the Equestria Girls franchise—I’m not sure I’d call it the worst necessarily, but it’s down there. It’s so forgettable I have to look it up to remember anything about it.
There was one attempt to distinguish this from Mirror Magic, and that’s the reveal that they were just zapped into an empty room rather than trapped in her phone. This was obviously intended as a joke, but it fell flat to me. The sheer wackiness of it felt more like something from Friendship Is Absurd, which is dissonant with the rest of the tone of the special, and it also doesn’t really make sense. No one saw the door? Even if the door blended into the wall when seen from the inside (why would that be the case?) and conveniently no one ever opened it, why didn’t they just try to see if there was some kind of opening in the walls? If this was a pure silly comedy, it could’ve worked, but it’s not.
It seems my disdain for it isn’t unshared. It didn’t seem to provoke much discussion, and it seems a not insubstantial amount of the discussion it did provoke had nothing to do with the actual plot and was just debating whether it was proof the staff was trying to ship Applejack and Rarity. While I’d be unsurprised if ship teasing was intended in a few parts, I’m skeptical of actual shipping desire on the part of the staff; this special isn’t as blatant as the “Stop Team Go” episode of Kim Possible was in teasing Kim/Shego, which was something the writers clearly had no interest in actually doing (as the finale went out of its way to demonstrate). I further note that anything one could construe as a ship tease in this special is in the animation, not the actual writing, so one could only ascribe such a motivation to the animator(s), not writers; indeed, writing-wise, the recent holiday special was one giant gift to Sparity fans, an odd thing to do if the writers actually had interest in a Rarity and Applejack ship. At any rate, the fact this got the attention that it did just shows how forgettable this special is otherwise. Maybe the animators realized how dull the special’s script was and threw teases in to provoke discussion?
But we can measure things more objectively. Thanks to archive.org, I was able to look back and see the number of views videos in this series got a week and a month after being released. They were approximately half of the amount that Forgotten Friendship received during its first week and month. Granted, these were essentially “re-airings” rather than when they were first put on the channel (I’m not sure the original TV ratings were ever publicly released), but the contrast is striking. Admittedly, this could be attributed to any number of things, but the distinction is quite noticeable.
This special did have a few good things, but they’re pretty small. The plots with Fluttershy & Rainbow Dash and Sunset & Twilight were actually decent, but they’re also irrelevant to the larger plot and could’ve worked just as easily as shorts. Unfortunately, when the only good thing about your special are a handful of parts thoroughly unrelated to the actual plot, that’s a problem.
On the whole, this special is just the worst Equestria Girls special in so many categories that it’s the weakest by a considerable margin. I’m not sure exactly what my least favorite one was prior to this, but this one is unquestionably my least favorite. The time I spent watching it felt utterly wasted.
The entire special, quite frankly, feels like they were forced into doing it, like they didn’t have any ideas but they had to put SOMETHING out so they just re-purposed Mirror Magic and padded it out to an hour. The odd thing is, though, there’s not exactly a shortage of things in the Equestria Girls universe that could have used further exploration about. Even if they’re holding back the obvious candidate of the Dazzlings because they only want to bring them back when they come up with some really great idea for it (somewhat like how in The Powerpuff Girls, I believe Craig McCracken said they held off on bringing the popular Rowdyruff Boys back until they came up with a good enough idea to warrant it), we could always see more of the Shadowbolts, Trixie, or even former villains like Wallflower Blush and Juniper Montage who have basically been forgotten after their appearances.
So even the claim that they’re just out of ideas seems odd, as there seems to be no shortage of things to explore. Maybe this was by decree of the higher-ups, but that of course just reinforces the idea it’s something they were forced into doing without having real ideas for, hence the even-weaker-than-the-original repeat of Mirror Magic.
Perhaps the worst thing in all of this is that, contrary to what you might think after all of this, I didn’t actually get angry at the special. I got depressed, thinking “is this really what they’re doing now?” It’s especially sad because quite honestly, I probably would be out of the fandom already if not for Equestria Girls, or more specifically, Rainbow Rocks. That film still remains my favorite thing the entire Friendship Is Magic franchise has produced, managing to reignite my at-the-time waning interest in the franchise as a whole and turning me into a big fan of Equestria Girls when before my opinion of Equestria Girls was “well, I WANTED to like some parts of it.” Subsequent specials were hit and miss but none ever left me feeling this sense of disappointment and depression this one did.
Hopefully, Spring Breakdown will manage to do better. I don’t expect anything to reach the heights of Rainbow Rocks, but I at least hold out hope it’ll be better than this one. If nothing else, unlike this special it at least seems to be a sort of new idea due to it appearing to involve people crossing over into Equestria that weren’t originally from that universe.
And that’s my lengthy review of it. Hope you enjoyed it. And if you didn’t enjoy it… well, go watch Lucas the Spider. Actually, go do that even if you did enjoy it.
Uh.... the current name of the 2019 EG Special is Spring Breakdown. Not The Other Side ^^;
hmm... well, this is looking to be a craps shoot. This, "Forgotton Friendship" and "Spring Breakdown" are all written by the same person.
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You're right; fixed. This is what happens when I write something months before I actually post it (I believe originally it was referred to as "The Other Side" until the official title of Spring Breakdown was given). Admittedly, I didn't just take what was written and post it, I did do do a quick read-through of this before posting, but missed that.
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Your welcome :)
Honestly, same.