On Teamwork · 5:17pm May 18th, 2019
I'm surprised I haven't used that title already. (After all, there's only a few dozen nouns in the English language, which is why I keep reusing blog titles. Otherwise my tendency to repeat myself wouldn't make any sense.)
So let's talk about "Frenemies" before I start to second-guess our relationship.
So today's moral is that friendship is magic. That's it. That's the moral.
But of course half the time I follow up my first statement of a moral with some manner of contradiction or disclaimer, and there is in fact more to unpack. Our villains specifically observed that even when you're evil, working together both is more effective and feels good. No matter who we are, we are stronger together than alone, and as long as we don't belong to a non-social species we do desire to have some group we can trust, as that is the behavior that kept our ancestors alive. (Although Chryssy is a bit strangely human in her attitudes given that she was the head of a eusocial hive, but we do make allowances for fantasy lands.)
Still, they conspicuously missed why friendship is a disease. Friendship is a disease like place-value numerals and agriculture are diseases: they're just unambiguously better than what they supplanted, so it's blatantly irrational to go back. Although perhaps agriculture is the better comparison; like friendship, it does introduce new potential issues (e.g. reliance on a small number of crop species leading to susceptibility to crop failure) that are outweighed by its benefits. It's a disease that has the potential to hurt you, but it's a disease that you want because it's still to your benefit. (Although I admit Chryssy would be well advised to be careful with friendship lest she end up as colorful as her traitorous former subjects; I'm sure she'd be quite averse to that.)
Oh, and I guess we've also got the moral that you shouldn't send all your workers to an unsupervised team-building retreat when you treat them like shit. They might realize they can unionize.
I'm strangely curious about the food Tirek left out. Are we talking attracting evil ants here, or is this more in the vein of attracting Spoiled Milk?
(I'm here 'til Thursday; tip your waiter. No, you can't gt rid of me.)
I do blame Grogar for a lot of the discipline problems that his little legion of evil was having. He is in charge, after all. It's his responsibility to communicate enough about the plan to inspire confidence that there a plan at all and that progress is being made. It's his responsibility to establish a chain of command and operating procedures, both of which were clearly needed; you can't just recruit a bunch of would-be world-conquerors and expect them to decide for themselves who's in charge when you're not present. Grogar really ought to try performing some actual management.
I'm sure nobody missed it, but of course I have to point out the specific contrast between the trust exercises at the beginning where they were actually trying to hurt each other and the forced trust exercise at the end that they passed with the power of friendship.
Some of you may not be aware that Mount Everhoof appeared in the official comics. Specifically, it was Friends Forever #36 (blog post here).
I'm not going to pretend it's anything more than an independent reuse of the same pun. It's still a mountain with strong weather, but it's really not the same mountain with strong weather.
Honestly, I feel like Chryssy's failure to make it up alone just shows she's not smart enough. I'm not sure how she should have crossed the ravine that stymied her, since I didn't examine the situation very closely, but there had to be ways she could use her transformation abilities to make a bridge, be long enough to bridge the gap unassisted, go down into the ravine and up the other side, or go around the ravine. She's lucky no creature saw her give up so shamefully after having only a single idea fail.
Also, why didn't she do Twilight's voice when she was making fun of Twilight? It's not like it's hard for her to imitate voices. I imagine it takes more effort to not sound like Twilight while in Twilight's form. Does she just hate Twilight's voice so much that she can't even stand to hear it in mockery of Twilight?
One will also note that Chrysalis actually genuinely likes Cozy Glow now, however much she may not wish to admit that friendship can happen to her. Who knew she would ever so much as willingly tolerate a pony, let alone like one?
I loved the episode, but Chrissy could have turned into a creature with a burrow speed (like a diamond dog or a maulwarf) and just dug all the way up and into the cave, presumably.