As Pertains to Alarm · 5:40pm Mar 30th, 2019
Good morning, all! Have you been waiting for horse girl horses? Because I was.
So let's talk about Spring Breakdown before I go overboard and tank my credibility.
Clearly the moral is to never split the party.
Well, except, it isn't. Sunset and Sci-Twi going off without the rest of the group was entirely sensible when they were just performing a simple retrieval mission while the rest of the group worked on fixing up the ship. (Rainbow Dash running off alone to find evil magic was less sensible, but that only proves that splitting the party is sometimes stupid.) The real problem is that they neither maintained contact with their shipboard friends nor hurried back to them as soon as they could. That was clearly irresponsible, and not just because they assumed nothing could go wrong with the broken-down ship with a storm bearing down on it for however long they felt like hanging out with Princess Twilight; how was everyone else supposed to know this delay didn't mean they were hurt or dead? I mean, what do you think would have happened if the others hadn't had their own problems to keep them occupied while waiting for Sunset and Sci-Twi to bring RD back? Fluttershy would have worried that they fell off a cliff or something, Rarity would have catastrophized, and AJ would have lead all four of them on the boat to go hunting for the missing half of their group until they got attacked by the giant evil plant too. (Actually, what even happened to that plant?)
The other moral, of course, is that if you get yourself all amped up and alarmist then nobody will believe you if you actually do see some indication of a problem. It's not quite "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" since Dash wasn't doing it for attention, but the same principles largely hold.
The third thing we take away from this is that I don't think Nick Confalone really knows the plot of the movie. They didn't lock away the Storm King's power; they killed him and returned the power he stole to the princesses that he took it from. He had no power of his own to create storms; he's not the king of storms, he's the king who is a storm (in his own opinion).
I mean, it's within the realm of plausibility that the Staff of Sacanas could vacuum up rogue Equestrian magic; stealing magic seems to be its sole purpose. But there's no reason there should be leftover Storm King magic drifting around causing magic storms.
The fourth thing we take away is that humanworld has really good cell coverage, even in the middle of the ocean. Also it may have some unclaimed uninhabited isles, depending on whether they left international waters again as they approached the island where the portal is.
Moving away from taking away, I am sad to say that I was not satisfied with the amount of horse girl horses in this special. ComicCon didn't promise me an adventure on the high seas; it promised me freakouts in Equestria! The freakouts in Equestria were too brief.
I'd also like to point out that Dash was wrong. They're not superheroes; they're magical girls. The difference is sometimes subtle, it's true, but the transformation sequences for one are a fairly strong sign.
I think the process went "attune with Staff => use weather magic => die while attuned => become thunderstorm elemental => get mind torn apart by Staff => wander into portal => wreak havoc while gathering power => NO NO NO NOOOOO."
I agree that there could've been more horse freakouts, but I'm happy with what we got. And I don't care how good Sunset's sneaking skills are, that many people-turned-ponies are going to get noticed.
I think FoME here 5035214 nailed what actually happened to the Storm King. However, when Princess Twilight is telling Sunset and friends what happened, she doesn't want to say they petrified him and then smashed the bits, so she stretches the truth a bit with that "we drained his magic" white lie. You'll notice after Rainbow Dash IDs the sigil, Twilight actually says "No, we destroyed him" and in MLP destroyed is code for kill.
Speaking of magical girls and transformations, what was the point of them Ponying up? Most of them used their powers in a similar fashion to what we've seen them do without transforming. I guess maybe they get a power boost and Rarity needed it to make that one giant diamond construct, everything else they could definitely do either way. Did they just transform because Rainbow Dash had been whining about it for so long they did it to make her happy?
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Ponying up does seem to give them all the ability to fly. Or at least Sunset and those with wings; we didn't see AJ, Pinkie, or Rarity fly outside of the transformation sequence, so that's a bit ambiguous. So that's useful.