)S9e20 - There, I fixed the biggest problem of the episode. · 5:13pm Sep 16th, 2019
The following post contains NO SPOILERS for any later episodes than the most recent US-RELEASE (s9e20), as I myself have not seen the leak.
What follows is a FAKE screenshot based on one line in s9e20.
(Which is something that these days must be explained in advance. 
)
Vectors used: Chancelor Neighsay, EEA-medalion, Twilight Sparkle, Spike, Canterlot, Ponyville, Portal
"I'm moving to Canterlot."
There. I fixed it. 
...This season is just alienating and depressing. - ___-
Most of s9's episodes are great, but some of them just... 
Please, no spoilers or even "vague hints" / rumors / speculation based on possible spoilers or on Hasbro's s9-trailer. (I never watch their trailers, they give away too much.)
I'm sticking to the US-Release shedule and by this point even the episode titles are spoilers that can ruin the entire thing.
As you've said, you read it for the fan fiction. That allows you to fix the probelms created by the show. (Besides, how long do you think it'll take for Twilight to move the seat of government to Ponyville? It's good to be the princess.)
Yeah, distance stopped meaning anything several seasons ago anyway. After all, Griffonstone is way further from Ponyville than Canterlot, and Gabby can apparently have that as her morning commute without any kind of handwave. -_-;
Remember when Canterlot was an overnight train ride from Ponyville? The writers don't, because they never watched the previous seasons.
5122008
Oh. I don't remember it being an overnight train ride either; when was that?
5122014
MMMystery on the Friendship Express. They boarded the train during full daylight, spent the night on board, and arrived the next day just in time for the competition (so during business hours).
5122081
Ahh, right, that one; thanks.
5121968
Thank you. That is indeed a possible headcanon.
...But, suffice it to say, this is unfortunately merely a symptom of a much larger problem.
It... actually would take quite some time to unpack it all, even trying to express my concerns in bullet point form proves difficult.
....I'll try to keep it short.
I'm less worried about my own fanfics and unwritten fanfic ideas at the moment, as I am about the impact s9 will have on the fanfiction community as a whole; I've seen too many popular headcanons and entire story scenarios die because of a canon-change, and this season is practically changing everything.
It's like I'm watching everything fall apart.
While it may be possible to find workarounds for some of the things the writers are suddenly throwing at us out of left field, this does not guaranty these workarounds will become widely accepted by other writers.
For example, it's entirely plausible for other changelings hives to exist in a post-King Thorax setting, even ones that could not use the same process to "reform", for, say, purely biological reasons, entirely independent from their morality, providing some source of narrative drama/conflict.
Yet, of the top of my head, I can merely think of three stories total that ever had more than King Thorax's hive (Chrysalis founding a new hive of her own taken aside for now). One of those was a comedy one shot chapter where one hive's changelings all turned into super-comfy chairs (ponies love chairs), in one the existence of other changelings wasn't really the focus (it was Bronies turned changelings/alicorns/dragons), and the third... well, I wouldn't want to spoil it for any passers-by.
Also, while one could write a story where, e.g., Celestia and Luna come back out of retirement, the show has hammered it in that"they want this", so the ways one could plausibly reverse this are limited, and unlikely to be happy circumstances.
One can still set their story in the past, when Celestia and Luna still ruled - but any writer planning to set their story in the "future", it likely will be a future where Celestia and Luna are no longer on the throne... or, worse, it'll become a popular trend to interpret their retirement as them eventually "dying of old age".
The writers literally implementing one of my worst case scenario speculations I hypothesized purely on the premise "If the writers are willing to retire Celestia and Luna, WHAT ELSE are they willing to do? / If they wanted to 'close off' character arcs, what might they do?" before the season even started as an actual episode (s9e19 - "Spike finds someone else") already did not help my confidence.
For them to then go and exceed my "worst case speculations" (s9e20 - "I'm moving to Canterlot") with something that wasn't even on the list until someone else put it there, and even then I considered too absurd and illogical to assume it was more than an unfounded speculation unfortunately posted shortly after the trailer I deliberately did not watch hit... well, that made it considerably worse.
Granted, and that's the saving grace so far, these two instances can be headcanoe'd around and resolved. (Rarity and Spike may get together in the end after all after some romantic drama with Gabi ; Twilight may use a portal to visit Ponyville whenever.)
But, what about the next thing the writers throw at us? And the next one? And the one after that one? They suddenly are doing this in "normal" episodes, and there's still several left, not to mention the "grand finale"...
I've made similar "speculations" about potential hazardous events in future episodes based on limited information in the past. Can't help myself, as a fanfic writer, the patterns just complete themselves.
Except usually, they don't come true.
E.g., contrary to popular rumor at the time, Starlight, in the s5 finale, did not somehow make everypony in Equestria an alicorn (be it mainline or alternate timeline... well, not canonically, anyway), and thus equal - and thus canonically trivializing and rendering alicornhood meaningless.
But now? I have no idea anymore what's "plausible" and what's not. There are other worst case scenarios I had in mind, some of which would fit the theme of "closure", which the writers seem to be forcing on us.
I am terrified the show might* end on a flash-forward to show us "what happened to all the characters, years later" or "this is Equestria, 1000 years later" - because then we don't get to decide, it'd be pretty hard to retcon something like that, unless some extremely specific circumstances allowed for it or what they showed was SUPER vague. And I'm pretty sure the fanfic community could do better than whatever they can show us in the last 5 minutes of an episode, not to mention provide more diversity.
*[Not actually a spoiler, not based on any rumors I'm aware of, and actually a thought from early in the season - but anypony who doesn't want MORE hypotheticals to worry about may skip this part]
And canon doing that would close those possibilities off to us. Foreeeeever.
It would prune our possibility space.
5122008
...Which is something that may get ignored in an episode - but if you're writing a fanfic, and you want it to be taken seriously? Then one should come up with an explanation to make it seem more plausible to create a more immersive world.
(E.g., the regular route to Canterlot being under construction, and the train having to take a vastly different route. Then later in the show, the fast trip to the Crystal Empire? Better engine thanks to magical breakthroughs devised by Crystal Ponies working with Equestria.)
...Why yes, I am holding fanfiction to a higher standard than a production with a multi-million dollar budget.
5121997
At the opposite extreme end of the spectrum, this can also become a problem. If you trivialize something too much, or take away the conflict, you also take away possibilities for story-telling.
...See, this works great for a comedy. Not so much if you want to write an actual adventure.
Where would the fun be in a Daring Do novel, where Twilight teleports the artifact straight from the center of the temple directly into Daring Do's hooves before Daring Do even left her house?
Where would the conflict be in such a story? The drama? It's gone, and the story may as well not be written.
"Distance" is just an example here - if show-canon decides to trivialize something, say, planting 20,000 Trees of Harmony all across the world and find a way to mass-manufacture Elements of Harmony, saying "And now Equestria is peaceful FOREVER!", that also robs us of story opportunities there (not to mention completely breaks the lore of Equestria).
Another example would be the changeling mass-reformation in the s6-finale; I would have loved to see other changeling characters step up and side with Thorax, even maybe a whole bunch of them - but not all of them, all at once!
The entire conflict "pony X is secretly a changeling" completely evaporated. 'Cause, you know, changelings are just neighbors now. There are no more evil changelings except for Chrysalis. And that's nice when it happens at the end of a fanfic - but now barely anyone ever writes these stories anymore that show us the journey how we get there. Because the changelings' journey is canonically over.
I too like reading about adorable colorful cuddle-bugs being adorable, sure. But I find it telling that the best "non-fluff" changeling stories these days are those where the changelings are still black.
Either because the story started before the s6 finale, is set before it, or manages to side-step it somehow. (*cough*, alternate time lines, *cough*)
...And at this point, I can't tell anymore what's plausible and what's not, and if the writers just want to write a "happy ending", they may do so with little regard for Equestria's lore, or leaving open the potential for dramatic conflicts for us.
Then there's the fact that I find myself unable to enjoy certain episodes when the stakes are so ludicrously high that watching the episode becomes more of an anxiety-filled "I must get it over with to find out what the new status quo is" than entertainment.
And getting spoilers ahead of time would just make it worse.** The devil with these things is usually in the exact details, so being told "Don't worry, X happens, but not Y" probably would just make me worry more.
I don't want to be unable to enjoy the "grand finale", but... well.
There's too much happening, all at once, too much at stake, no holds barred. I have no idea what its impact on the fanfiction scene will be, good or bad or both. (okay, probably both? But I still don't know which things would be bad and HOW bad, etc)
And that's just sad... And then seeing a scene that I know is supposed to make me smile, is supposed to make me go "wow!", is supposed to make me happy - and it doesn't... well, that just hurts.
The s9 premiere was like that for me, after the whole "The immortal goddess of the sun is retiring, lol" thing*** was spoiler'd to me an entire month before the season even started, in fimfic's featured box, of all places.
***(Which I still think breaks Equestria's lore, it'd be like saying god is retiring.
Though I am aware that analogy is somewhat extreme. ^_^;)
And, more recently, so was S9 Episode 17, as a reminder.
S9e17 probably ended the best way possible given the setup, but it still was extremely unpleasant to watch for me. And I wish it wasn't.
...Well, I said I'd try to be brief. I failed.
I hope there's some way for me to change my perspective, before the finale happens.
Because right now, I'm watching these episodes through... whatever the opposite of rose-tinted glasses is. (Green-tinted contact lenses?)
And I wish I could take those out.
**A reminder for any passing-by commenters:
Please, no spoilers or even "vague hints" / rumors / speculation based on possible spoilers or on Hasbro's s9-trailer. (I never watch their trailers, they give away too much.)
I'm sticking to the US-Release shedule and by this point even the episode titles are spoilers that can ruin the entire thing.
5123148
I've seen "jade-colored glasses" as a pun on "jaded" and that's pretty close to what you actually said.
Also, I know you said no spoilers, but I'm going to spoiler tag it: (REPEAT: SPOILERS AHEAD!) The "flash-forward" as you put it is being given an entire episode to itself, and in any case, didn't you get an entire ongoing fic out of a throwaway line in one of 5121968's? And don't even get me started on "what about such-and-such who disappeared after their episode was over, especially since that episode was several seasons ago?" and actually, possibly do get me started on how you already have to choose which parts of canon you're going to ignore because they haven't had anybody trying to keep it all straight since Faust left, and that was back in season 2 of 9. And then there's just not even bothering to hew to canon and slapping the AU tag on (which, again, isn't too far from what the actual show and comic writers are doing, because even the ones who bother with callbacks only do them to things they personally wrote)