Taking Steps Toward Friendship · 11:48pm Dec 7th, 2019
I was going to put some sort of excuse or something here, but my heart's not in it. You get what you get when you get it. If you care about these things I write I'm sure you know that by now.
So let's talk about Feats of Friendship #3 before I have to get back to my secret mission.
This time we learned that you should be careful who you send to infiltrate the enemy. Some agents have an unfortunate tendency to listen while they're there, and then whose side are they even on? (Clearly it would have been better to find a way to justify Terri Belle's presence; I can see she's to clever to be distracted by inconvenient truths.)
Or you could say the moral is that friendship is awesome and no propaganda to the contrary can stand up to exposure to it, but that seems rather partisan. It's our place to report on the conflict between Equestria and Thrace, not take sides.
Anyway, is it just me, or does this feel like more of a "To be continued . . ." than a "The end!"? This sure doesn't feel like the last we've heard of Thrace. Surely Swift Foot will not be successful in convincing her father of the strength and value of friendship. Surely he will respond to her failure by taking stronger measures. Surely it won't be just one Thracian next time.
And maybe when Swift Foot returns we can get to the moral that was notably lacking, that one of the great things about friendship is that you can get more than you've earned. Friends see what you could be and what you want to be, not just what you are. I can't deny that "I came here to break up your friendship before I started actually liking you" is a lot for a friendship to take, but it's not a dealbreaker at the School of Friendship. The faculty are big on second chances, and they've surely passed that on to their students. Swift Foot is the only one who thinks she doesn't deserve to be with the Student Six.
Why is it that some of Diomedes's daughters have ordinary names like Shining Light and Swift Foot, and others have obvious puns like Blonn Di and Terri Belle? I'd theorize that Diomedes had multiple wives and they named their respective children if not for the fact that Blonn Di and Shining Light are twins. Although we could hypothesize that Terri Belle's mother is Diomedes's favorite and thus was allowed to name one of the twins when their mother unexpectedly found herself with more foals than she had names prepared . . . assuming Thrace doesn't have magical ultrasounds. It's not the most robust theory, but if it's running unopposed then it wins by default. And at least you must agree that is somepony here is Swift's half-sister it's pretty clear who.
For those who don't know, Thrace is region around northeastern Greece that was originally home to barbarians (i.e. people who didn't speak Greek), though the Thracians were later Hellenized. So far as I know there's no mythology that holds the Thracians as any sort of lost tribe or as particularly unfriendly in general, but one of the mythical kings of Thrace was Diomedes who was known of course for his eponymous mares which ate human flesh and which Heracles was sent to steal. And that of course is why we've referenced Thrace in this story; we've got mares who look normal but will eat you (metaphorically) if you let your guard down, and as subjects they belong in a certain sense to Diomedes, and Diomedes is king of Thrace.
Incidentally, "filika" is Turkish for "lifeboat," but that's probably not relevant. The villages of Fillyra and Fylakio in western Thrace are probably not relevant either. In all seriousness, I'm not sure what the significance of "Filika" is, and now that I've done a little research I'd have had Swift identify her home as Fillyra on her paperwork.
I know it's just the homeland propaganda talking, but it does bother me a bit that she calls friendship a lie because her carefully aimed sabotage had an effect. She might as well plant bombs on load-bearing pillars in a basement and then call the building she brought down a lie.
One will note that Yona and Ocellus talked about their issues, and Gallus kind of addressed what was going on with him and leadership too, but Smolder and Silverstream breathed not a word of the doubts that Swift dredged up for them. Maybe it's still festering. It didn't seem like Silverstream was planning to talk to the faculty about their failure to keep up to date on international events, and certainly Smolder's not getting any more gems than she was before.
I would really like to ask Ocellus what it feels like to take the form of a hydra. Given that her heads were showing different emotions and the headbutt dazed one of them while leaving the rest of her unaffected it seems that her heads were thinking semi-independently just like a real hydra's heads. So what's it like to have multiple sapient brains?
The shipper in me is obligated to point out that while Swift was presumably originally flirting with Sandbar as a means to influence him, after defeating the hydra she could only be flirting with him because she wants to flirt with him.
It's too bad for her that she believes she doesn't deserve him and is running off without so much as a goodbye. It would have been rather emotionally manipulative to kiss him and say "I really like you, now I need to go and I don't know when or if I'll return," but it would have given her better odds of getting the guy when she does come back to warn them about/help them with the Thracian invasion.
A helpful hippogriff pointed out something I missed: that the names of Swift Foot and her sisters correspond to the names of the Mares of Diomedes: Podargos (the Swift or Swift-Footed), Lampon (the Shining), Xanthos (the Yellow), and Deinos (the Terrible).
But of course that's only an extradiegetic explanation for the weird names, and an incomplete one at that since you can really work any adjective you like into a pony name. Or any noun, if you'd prefer to work with a related noun. I would totally believe that Diomedes would give one of his kids a threatening name like "Terror Force," for example. (I wouldn't like to meet a Terror Force in a dark alley.)
This felt like a set-up for future issues. The series was nice in that it gave some badly needed interaction between the Student 6, but it doesn't seem to lead to a lot of new character growth, the gang kind of resets without Swift sabotaging them anymore.
Thrace is potentially interesting as an enemy, but they'll have to do more with it in the future.