DANNYJ REVIEWS: MLP SEASON 9 PART 3

Continued from part two.

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Episode 13 - Between Dark and Dawn:

Celestia episodes were a fucking mistake, and it's all M.A. Larson's fault.

I didn't like Royal Problem even back in 2017, but I had no idea at the time that it would leave this kind of lasting damage. The character degradation of the Royal Sisters has honestly been one of the saddest parts of late-series MLP for me. I still like the ur-concepts of the princesses as they're used across the fandom, but when we're talking about the actual, canonical Celestia and Luna? I don't like them anymore. The final three seasons completely ruined their characters for me. Both of them. Mostly Celestia, but it's both.

But it didn't begin with A Royal Problem. It actually began with an episode that I like, Slice of Life.

In the earlier seasons, even after it was made clear that the alicorns weren't actually gods, they still kept enough of an air of majesty and wonder about them that their occasional moments of silliness were funny subversions of their established characterisation, and M.A. Larson was the master of this. He was the writer of Luna Eclipsed, to date still probably the best princess episode, where Luna was hilarious while still being suitably imposing and keeping a hint of sadness and tragedy to her, as the episode still echoed her past as Nightmare Moon. Later Luna episodes by other writers played her more seriously, but Larson brought back that comical side to the princesses in Slice of Life, when he wrote a very brief scene of them both bickering over presents at Cranky's wedding.

At the time, this scene was, again, a subversion of your expectations. The Royal Sisters are these grand, regal, larger than life figures with all this tragic, painful history between them, and here they were, having a silly little private spat just like real sisters often do. It's funny, but also a humanising moment for them. More importantly, it's not too big a stretch from their established characterisation, because it's only a little argument, not anything serious, and they immediately reconcile besides, as you'd expect from two characters who've been through what they have. It's a fine scene in isolation.

Little did we know that future episodes would treat Larson's one-off joke scene completely seriously, and use it as a template for the Royal Sisters' entire relationship. Starting with A Royal Problem, every appearance has them arguing over stupid shit and generally acting like children, despite the fact that they're supposed to each be older than all of the writers combined. The sibling rivalry is not funny anymore, because it's no longer a subversion. Now it's what these two are actually like, and it makes them so obnoxiously unlikeable that these episodes are physically painful to watch.

"There is no punchline, because it's not a joke." – Celestia, 2019.

Slice of Life was like the original sin. Royal Problem started the character degradation in earnest, making the Royal Sisters petty, childish, and selfish, and irreparably damaging their relationship to the point where they didn't seem to care about or even like each other. Horse Play took Celestia in a new direction by making her an actual fucking idiot who I wouldn't trust to make breakfast, much less run a country. School Raze made them both outright evil when they threw a nine-year-old into a maximum security prison next to a soul-devouring monster and then laughed about it. And then along comes season nine to double, triple, and quadruple down on all of it, just to officially cement their places in history as the worst princesses.

Back in my season seven review, I made a prediction:

"As for Celestia, her inattentiveness has consistently caused Luna untold amounts of physical and emotional suffering. First she missed the jealousy and resentment that led to Nightmare Moon. Then she missed Luna's guilt problems, which led to the Tantabus. In this episode, she once again failed to recognise or understand her sister's feelings, and went straight to fighting with her when they finally came out in the open. That's three times now Celestia has failed her sister, and there'll probably be a fourth, because she comes off like she just doesn't care that much."

Well someone pick up that phone, because I fucking called it.

A Royal Problem might have ended with Twilight and Starlight patting themselves on the back for a job well done because the Royal Sisters weren't fighting anymore, but two seasons later, they're right back at it again. Once again they're bickering over stupid shit, and once again Celestia is the instigator, because she still doesn't actually care about Luna's feelings at all. We see it in Sparkle's Seven when she dismisses all of Luna's ideas about security and then has to apologise through literally clenched teeth afterwards, and we see it again in Dark and Dawn when she steals Luna's turn on the list, makes her leave the opera early, and then blames her for being upset about it.

It's like I said, if losing Luna for a thousand years didn't already teach her to be a better sister, then what fucking chance did Starlight Glimmer have of making it sink in? If Celestia were capable of growth or change, then she would already be a better person than this. Even the official comics back me up on this. Legends of Magic was a direct tie-in series to season seven where we got to see what the princesses were like as young fillies, and they were exactly the same as they are in Royal Problem and beyond. Celestia has canonically made zero character progress in over a thousand years. She's literally less mature than Diamond Tiara.

Look at this bratty filly.

And Luna's not much better. I cut her a little slack because Celestia is clearly the instigator in the vast majority of their spats, but the Luna of late-series MLP is a far cry from the one of the earlier seasons. She's lost her introspective, self-critical maturity, and has regressed to the same level that Celestia's now at, because she's all too happy to keep taking the bait and keep fighting with her sister over stupid shit, even knowing first-hand the dark places that she can go to and the dire consequences that could follow when she lets her emotions get the better of her like this. She too has ultimately learned nothing for all of her experiences, despite her personal growth once being the core of her character.

In a way, the season nine retirement arc represents the final culmination of all of these years of character destruction. It perfectly encapsulates who the princesses are now. The preceding two seasons did all that they could to strip them of every last scrap of dignity, wisdom, and morality, and now this arc is one long parade of them showing off how little they care anymore.

After a thousand years of protecting and fostering her kingdom, Celestia believes that she's finally achieved some level of peace and stability, and her first instinct is to immediately upend it all by foisting the job off on someone else and running away as quickly as she possibly can, an act that is both totally unprecedented in Equestria's thousand year history, and very obviously unplanned. And then there's Luna, who after a thousand years of absence from her royal duties due to her literally becoming a monster is finally redeemed and restored to her throne, which she keeps for all of about five years before she gets bored of atoning for her past deeds and decides that she also can't wait to blow this popsicle stand.

This just isn't realistic for either character, because all of the usual motivations for retiring shouldn't apply to them. It's not like either of them have anything that they'd massively prefer to be doing instead, because they clearly have no solid plans for what to actually do with their retirements. As this episode shows, they have completely different interests, and they can't stand each other. If they just hate their jobs after doing them for so long and would rather be doing anything else, then why not just take a vacation and put a regent in charge for a while, rather than abandoning their jobs entirely? That's effectively what they do in this episode anyway. And the princesses don't age, so it's not like they have to take it easy. Retirement for them isn't enjoying their last years in peace like it is for us; it's just indefinite unemployment.

See, the thing about retirees is that they fall into one of two categories. Either they enjoy having infinite free time and spend it pursuing their interests and practicing their hobbies, or they get bored and depressed because they either enjoyed their work or have nothing to do without it. Some people never retire voluntarily. Some people work until they day that they die, or until they physically can't anymore. You'll notice that a lot of politicians fall into this category, because politicians are typically ambitious, driven individuals, and that ambition doesn't go away just because they get old.

This motherfucker was ninety-four when he stepped down as President of Malaysia, and he's still active in politics today.

It's debatable which of the two categories the princesses would fall into, if they even both fall into the same category at all, but I'd bet good money that an immortal being who's living through an infinite retirement would almost inevitably turn into a case of the latter after long enough. I know that most people don't enjoy work (I certainly don't), but it gives people structure in their lives, and if the princesses didn't want or need that structure, then why the fuck are they still ruling Equestria after a thousand years?

I keep coming back to this point, because the writers keep forgetting this. Do you even realise how long a thousand years is? A thousand years ago is not just before America existed, not just before the British Empire existed, but before a united fucking England even existed. A thousand years covers the entire span from the founding of the Roman Republic to the fall of the western Roman Empire. It's a long fucking time to be a monarch for. If Celestia really doesn't care about her job and doesn't like ruling, then she had plenty of opportunities to bow out before now. So why didn't she?

Because she was waiting for Luna's return? She doesn't even like Luna, nor did she necessarily even need to be princess to deal with Nightmare Moon. Because she was needed to raise the sun and moon? Bullshit, she can just make a magic amulet to do that, and again, this doesn't require a crown. Because Equestria needed her to defeat all the other big villains? But she's terrible at that on her own. Because she was just the smartest and most qualified for the job? Don't make me laugh. Because there were no suitable replacements? Maybe I could buy that for a while, but for a thousand years?

No, the only possible reasons that this version of Celestia could have for sticking it out for that long is that she either liked being royalty and just denies it, or that she felt some sense of duty and responsibility to the kingdom despite her obvious incompetence. And in both cases I have to wonder, what the hell suddenly changed about that in season nine? Even if she recognises that Twilight would make a better ruler than her, that's no reason to just quit and go live on a beach. Equestria would still be better off with Celestia and Luna than without them, if only for social stability's sake. And that's to say nothing of all the potential villains who might see the loss of two of Equestria's four alicorns as a weakness that they can exploit.

"Nice moon you got there, Equestria. Sure would be a shame if someone were to piss all over it."

As for Luna, her retirement is baffling for whole different reasons. For one thing, this mare launched a fucking coup against her sister when she became Nightmare Moon. You don't generally try to seize control of a government by force unless you actually want to fucking rule. So if Celestia ever wanted to abdicate, then wouldn't Luna jump at the chance to finally be the sole monarch? I grant that she might be feeling a little less ambitious now since that whole thousand year timeout thing, but surely she hasn't lost her desire to be loved and appreciated by her subjects as well? Or what about her massive guilt complex? She felt so bad about Nightmare Moon that she created a dream demon to torture herself for it for years, but now she's just totally over all of that, and is fine with deserting all of her responsibilities to the kingdom to go on a permanent vacation?

Speaking of Luna's responsibilities, we never see or hear of her being involved in politics. As far as we can tell, all that she does is raise the moon and protect people's dreams. Well, as of this episode, raising the moon can now be automated by a magical artefact, and according to A Royal Problem, Celestia wasn't covering Luna's dream-walking duties in the thousand years that she was away, but Equestria was still just fine. So doesn't this suggest that Luna's role as a princess is completely superfluous? And isn't the mere act of retiring an implicit acknowledgement of this fact? I mean, if Celestia didn't take over dream patrol, why would Twilight? And if Luna doesn't stop doing it, then what is she even retiring from? So I guess that ponies just go back to having regular nightmares again now? And Luna is just fine with all of this? This doesn't even sting her pride at all?

So I think that it's clear to see that I find the entire conceit of the Royal Sisters retiring to be awful, but the problems don't even stop there. This retirement arc is also deeply flawed in its actual execution, because every single episode that builds on it is terrible, including this one.

What the fuck is with this episode concept? The princesses are retiring because everything's supposedly perfect now and they have nothing else to do. Then a massive horrible disaster hits the kingdom and gives them plenty to do, but they're still retiring anyway. Then they discover that they both actually like being active and doing things for once, so this motivates them to... take a holiday before their retirement? ...What?

Nothing about this premise makes any sense. For one, how is it a new thing for the princesses to discover that they like being heroes? Once again, we have an episode that doesn't remember anything further back than the season premiere, because there's a gap of about a thousand years when it was either Celestia alone or these two together that fought off all the monsters, not Twilight. And even just in the course of the series, I remember Luna being pissed off in Crystal Empire that she couldn't go fight Sombra herself because Celestia was using it as a test for Twilight. And let's also not forget that these two held back the magical blizzard in The Crystalling. How was that any different than holding back the Everfree in the season premiere?

Another thing is that if they're both so desperate to get away from their usual royal duties for a while and play at being heroes, then they have plenty of opportunities to do so. Delegating all of the hard work to Twilight is a choice, one that they could stop making at any time. If Celestia were really as much of a thrill-seeker as this episode would have us believe, then why didn't she take on all of the alicorn magic and have an epic anime battle with Tirek? Or if she needs something to do right now, why not go hunt down Chrysalis? She was still at large the last time she heard from her, and could easily be up to her old tricks. Why all this stupid bullshit like showing up at the last minute to fight the already pacified turtle instead?

Literally this episode.

And how does any of this crap about wanting to be "part of the action" connect to them taking a vacation? Going on hikes or spelunking is sporty, sure, but it's not the same as what they were doing in the opening. In the opening they were also doing shit like baking cakes and repairing bridges. It was clearly about more than just the thrills. They were clearly trying to be helpful and make a difference. If anything, isn't going on vacation the opposite of that?

Then once they're actually on vacation, their personalities are all over the place again. Luna suddenly goes from wanting to be "part of the action" to wanting to do mundane, relaxing things instead, like someone switched her personality around in the middle of the episode, and it really doesn't fit her at all.

Luna wants to get away from the "stresses" of dream-walking, but take a look back at any Luna episode from the first five seasons and you'll see how bizarre this is. Whenever we saw her dream-walking in the past, she was always calm, stoic, and serious. But look at her in Luna Eclipsed when she's actually off-duty and attending a local festivity, and she's loud, boisterous, and always fixing to be the centre of attention. If anything, don't you think that she'd be the one who'd enjoy fun outdoors activities where she could cut loose, and Celestia would be the one with an appreciation for high society stuff like art galleries and opera, considering that she willingly lived in Canterlot for a millenium?

Why does Luna look afraid during the zipline ride? She can fly! Why does Celestia find ziplines thrilling? She can also fly! How is this the first opportunity that Luna's ever had to go out in the daytime and visit a post office in the past five years? Her only royal duties are dream-walking. Does anyone actually impose a schedule on her other than herself? Why is Celestia afraid of chickens? Why do so many of these writers think that giving a character a completely random and ill-fitting phobia is the height of comedy?

What's with the voice acting in this episode? I mean, really. I actually had to look up who voiced Celestia and Luna for this, because I was sure that it couldn't be Nicole Oliver and Tabitha St. Germain. They sound nothing like they normally do. Almost every line sounds really forced and exaggerated. I can't tell if they're trying to compensate for a bad script, or if the bad script just broke them and they're not even trying anymore.

I don't like the song. There's nothing particularly wrong with it; I just don't like it. Also the montage recycles an Equestria Girls background.

Yeah, thought that we wouldn't notice this one, didn't ya?

This is all just so sad. The worst thing about this episode to me is that if we weren't already in the middle of a princess retirement arc, then an episode about the two of them taking a vacation together, touring the kingdom, and having fun doing wacky shit could have actually been great. I'm imagining this episode as written by Larson in the style of Luna Eclipsed, and I'm liking the image.

But instead we get this. We get the princesses taking a holiday for confusing reasons just before they're due to permanently retire anyway, like they can't just wait a couple more months. Instead of them just having fun together, we have to have this stupid forced conflict just to remind us that Celestia is a horrible sister. And then there's this whole stupid side-plot with Twilight and her friends trying and failing do the princesses' jobs, and I haven't even gone into that yet.

Nor will I, because we really don't have time. We'll talk about Twilight's fuck-ups in a more general sense later, because there's a lot of them. For now, I think that we need to take a break from both trash and trash-talking to decompress, so let's look at something a little lighter. And by "lighter" I actually mean "longer."

The Best Gift Ever & Rainbow Roadtrip:

The Best Gift Ever was an hour-long holiday special that came shortly after season eight, written by Michael Vogel, while Rainbow Roadtrip was another special which dropped right in the middle of season nine by Kim Beyer-Johnson. Both of them make for pretty interesting case studies, because they obviously had a lot more effort put into them than the average episode, and somehow, they also turned out to be the best stories that either of these two ever wrote for this franchise. Weird, huh? It's almost like actually trying makes you better at things.

So Best Gift Ever has a pretty standard holiday special story about trying to find gifts, and a pretty standard holiday moral about how the true spirit of the season is spending time with your friends and family, not commercialism. It's simple, but this show's stories and messages usually are, and this works just fine for what this special is. I know that I bitch a lot in these reviews, but really, I don't ask for much from this show. I just like to see some fun ideas and character interactions in a coherent story that doesn't fuck anything up. For some reason the show seems to really struggle clearing even that relatively low bar these days, but I'm happy to say that Best Gift Ever manages it at least.

The special is squarely focused on the mane six and Spike as they try to find appropriate gifts for one another, which is a nice throwback considering how oversaturated the later seasons were with side characters. Its longer runtime also gives each of their stories appropriate room to breathe, while also giving some of those aforementioned side characters time to put in some appearances where appropriate, while not intruding too much on the narrative.

Pretty much all the side characters were well-used in this special. Shining and Cadance had some fun interactions, Derpy's post office scene was great, Rutherford explaining in hushed tones how yaks aren't actually the best at gift-giving was genuinely funny to me, and I liked everything with the Pie sisters, especially Marble's little moment of existential agony when Big Mac was with Sugar Belle. Grand Pear's cameo and Flurry's star costume were also some nice touches.

If you didn't think that this was the cutest shit, then get the fuck out of my face.

The episode also gave substantially bigger roles to both Discord and the Flim Flam brothers. As you all know by now, I'm a big Discord fan, so I have no problem with his role. His gift of tricking Dash into bringing the winterzilla to Fluttershy and giving her a chance to save the day was pretty much peak Discord, in that he's being both thoughtful and a huge asshole at the same time. I love it.

Flim and Flam I'm a little less sold on. I'm glad that we got to see both them and Rainbow Falls one last time before the show ended, since neither played any big role in season nine, but I also think that it's kind of a sour note to end their arc on, just the two of them on a train, being miserable on Christmas. They should have at least been enjoying each other's company for the holiday, despite their failure.

I just feel like they deserved better. Flim and Flam were always kinda scummy, but they're fun and enjoyable characters, and I always took it for granted that they would end up reformed eventually, or at least stop being antagonists. Viva Las Pegasus already pretty much did that when they teamed up with Applejack and Fluttershy to stop Pony Elvis. If they had shown up as allies or friendly rivals or something in their next appearance after that, like Trixie in No Second Prances, I wouldn't have batted an eye. But instead we got Friendship University, and then this, knocking them straight back to square one, and they basically just never progressed as characters. I find it all very disappointing.

As for the new characters of the special, I liked them. The little bit with Pistachio and his family in Rarity's storyline was a nice moment for her to show her better qualities, and the reindeer were pretty interesting. They had kind of a fairytale/mythological/Charles Dickens kind of feel to them with their mysterious time-seeing magic, and they're undeniably fitting for the holiday theme. Plus, Pinkie's story was a good opportunity to see Yakyakistan again. They even showed the yak holidays that we heard about from Yona in season eight.

There is still a minor continuity mistake in the special. Applejack at the end tells Rarity that she got her hat from her father, which we know isn't true, because we saw Rarity buy that hat for her after throwing out her old one in Made in Manehattan. This annoys me, like all continuity mistakes do, but seeing as it's the only noticeable one in the special, and the story is otherwise fine, I'll let it slide this time. I always preferred that old fan theory over the canon explanation anyway.

So overall, The Best Gift Ever was pretty good, both as a holiday special and as an episode in general. It was a fun story, the characters were enjoyable, it does its holiday themes well (not a given in this franchise), and even the songs were decent.

Yaaaay! This wasn't terrible!

Then we come to Rainbow Roadtrip. A very curious title, considering that it's not a roadtrip story. The actual journey from Ponyville to Hope Hollow takes up only about five minutes, and then the rest of the story is all spent in this single small town while the mane six try to deal with the villagers' problems. The 2017 movie was more of a roadtrip than this was. I can only assume that this is one of those cases where they came up with the title first and story second, but then they had to use the ill-fitting title anyway because Hasbro had already registered the copyright.

Having said that, it's again fine for what it is. It's just a simple, self-contained slice of life story with some new characters in a new location and a problem to solve, which for some reason they decided to make a TV movie out of. It's basically just a really long version of your average Cutie Map episode, only without the Cutie Map itself. I don't know why the Cutie Map never called the mane six out to help this village before, because this seems pretty firmly in the Map's wheelhouse, but other than that, I don't have any major complaints about this.

As I said before, Kim Beyer-Johnson wrote this special. How she landed the job, I'm not sure. Maybe the special came first, and she got her writing gig on the show afterwards? But I think that Rainbow Roadtrip taking place in an entirely new setting with mostly new characters counters a key weakness of hers. As a relatively new writer, her knowledge of the show's continuity is spotty at best, and Haber and Dubuc clearly weren't any great help with that, so this premise affords her the most creative freedom as a writer, while also minimising the opportunities for her to fuck anything up. As long as the mane six remain reasonably in-character and she doesn't try to dive into their backstories or anything, she basically can't go wrong.

So the special's okay on that front, for once. But that's just the thing. You can pretty much sum up this whole special as just "okay." Even though it's an hour long and uses the new movie style of animation, it generally plays it very safe and predictable, and the story doesn't really take any risks. It doesn't even have an antagonist. Don't get me wrong, I still prefer this special over what we got with the movie, but for the runtime and the budget that they gave this thing, it feels very insubstantial. I still don't have any particularly strong feelings about it, even now.

But okay, it did some things better than others. I liked the beginning of the special, where the mane six arrive in the middle of the night. It's all dark and quiet, their hotel is really rundown and creepy, and as they go out the next day, they slowly realise that the entire town is grey, and the townsfolk are giving them weird looks all the way. It's very atmospheric, like the beginning of a horror story. If this had been a Halloween special, this would've been a great note to start on before building into something spookier. It's still kinda nice either way just for setting the mood that something's wrong.

I thought that the new characters were mostly alright. They were all distinct and likeable, at least, and they had unique voices. Mayor Sunny Skies was probably the most developed of them, while I think that Kerfuffle had the best name and design. And I thought that Dash's interactions with the Barrel twins were good. It was interesting to see, because Dash is a big sports celebrity now, and is actually really good with kids, but it's easy to forget both of those things, because we almost never actually see Dash interacting with any of her young fans other than Scootaloo.

Though speaking of celebrities, it's weird to me that both Rainbow Dash and Rarity have fans in this small remote town who recognise them on sight, but that nobody ever makes a big deal about an alicorn princess being in their midst. The way that everybody just ignores Twilight in this special gives me some real season four vibes.

And this blatant recolour of Big Mac gives me some real season one vibes.

I also wasn't too fond of the music in this one. The end song is okay, if kind of generic, but the Mayor's exposition song in the middle was pretty terrible. It didn't even try to rhyme half the time, which is one of the most basic things that you'd expect a song to do. I don't know if this was just creative burnout on Daniel Ingram's part, or if it was actually Nicole Dubuc's fault, as she's also credited for the lyrics on this song. Either way, it didn't turn out great.

There's a few questionable story moments that made me raise an eyebrow, like the mane six waiting until they were already on the way to Hope's Hollow to read Rainbow's invitation and learn about where they're going, or the way that the Mayor at the end jumps straight to asking that other mare to marry him, when as far as I can tell he hadn't even told her that he liked her yet. "Hopeless magic" turning the town grey is also kind of weird and out of nowhere for Equestria's world, but it's... plausible, I guess? I liked the rainbow generator machine being a red herring, at least. And the importance of community and neighbourhood is a good message, so I liked that too.

All in all, it's... kind of a mixed bag. Not bad, but not great either. But hey, I'll take it over what we got from the movie or season nine. At least this wasn't constantly making me ask "What the fuck?"

Still, there's something about both of these specials which I need to comment on – the animation.

Friendship is Magic was primarily animated in Flash, or at least it was for most of the series, but starting with the 2017 movie, the franchise started using ToonBoom more instead. The difference is clearest to see in the movie and in Rainbow Roadtrip, which both used a wholly redesigned art style which I personally find rather jarring in its stark difference from the show. But what you may not have known is that the show also changed to using ToonBoom for season nine, and that Best Gift Ever was probably a dry run for that.

See how smooth this motion is compared to earlier seasons?

ToonBoom is a more advanced program than Flash which gives the animators a wider range of options, and you can see for yourself what an improvement this is, especially for action scenes.

The thing is, ToonBoom also has a dark side. It stirs a temptation deep in the hearts of men, and calls upon them to indulge in the forbidden arts and summon a blight upon this world, an unholy sickness that gnaws at the soul and brings despair and destruction wherever it goes. It has always been there in some form, festering at the heart of this series since the very beginning, but it has only grown in strength over time. Once it was insignificant, a black mould that we foolishly ignored in our hubris, but now its malignant decay threatens to consume all that we know and love.

Many of you have seen it. Some of you have even survived. But make no mistake, you were not among the lucky ones. We are, all of us, cursed, damned to live this hollow existence, knowing that our hopes are shattered, that our prayers will go unanswered, and that there is nothing left we can do to halt this spreading darkness.

I am of course referring to:

All.

These.

Mother.

FUCKING.

MEMEFACES.

I never used to mind when the show would occasionally go off-model for a few frames to make a comically exaggerated expression, at least if the scene called for it, but fucking hell did season nine ever go way overboard with them. There were some episodes this season which felt like nothing but memefaces. Trivial Pursuit later on is probably the most infamous for this, but Dark and Dawn was also rife with it, and Dragon Dropped is another egregious example. The change to ToonBoom apparently gave the animators free rein to run wild on these, and this is one of those cases where more constraints were probably better.

I don't care if this is "more expressive" or "closer to the storyboards." It's fucking ugly, and it ruins the visual style and consistency of the character designs. Nine times out of ten, a more restrained and on-model expression would be a significant improvement on what these episodes were doing.

4chan edits of frames from Dragon Dropped. The difference in quality is staggering.

Now of course, this is all just my opinion, and art is subjective, so you're free to disagree with me and like whatever visual style you want. Personally, I hate this new art direction, but if you genuinely prefer it over the old one, then that's cool. More power to you. All I'm saying is that my opinion is objectively superior to yours, because I am a perfect enlightened super-being who can shoot lasers from my eyes, while the rest of you are all filthy mud-people crawling at my feet.

No offence.

Episode 14 - The Last Laugh:

So for the final ever Pinkie Pie episode, they really needed to hit it out of the park, so they got themselves one hell of a premise. They were going to do a follow-up to Pinkie Pride, the classic season four musical episode generally regarded as one of the best Pinkie episodes of the series. They were going to bring back Weird Al Yankovic as Cheese Sandwich, who's set up an honest to God joke factory, and he's going to invite Pinkie Pie to come and see it. The story practically writes itself! A joke factory in Equestria? Ran by Cheese Sandwich? Just imagine what sort of wacky Willy Wonka type shenanigans we could have!

Hey, you know who we should get for this? Those guys who wrote Yakity-Sax of course!

Sometimes I wonder if humanity even deserves to be saved.

Michael P. Fox & Wil Fox have been with this show since season six, and frankly, I think that they've always been mediocre writers. They have a tenuous grasp on the characters at best, and they are uniquely talented at making even fantastic concepts and characters feel boring. To their credit, they did write Discordant Harmony, which I thought was one of the better episodes of season seven, but then again, I am a massive Discordfag, and even I was complaining that he felt out of character in that episode. Not to mention the whole premise of it was that Discord tries to be boring. And that was their best episode.

Their other credits include such gems as Applejack's "Day" Off and P.P.O.V. (Pony Point of View), to my knowledge not the most well-loved episodes of season six, Forever Filly, one of the most boring and forgettable episodes of season seven, and Gift of the Maud Pie, to date still the only episode where I didn't find Maud entertaining. And yes, let's also not forget Yakity-Sax, the worst Pinkie Pie episode ever written, and a strong contender for the worst episode in the entire series.

So needless to say, they wouldn't have been my first pick for the writers of the final Pinkie episode. Pinkie Pie is an exuberant, hyperactive extrovert who loves to sing and bring joy to others, Cheese Sandwich is a character based on and voiced by her closest real life equivalent, and the two of them are brought together again in an Equestrian joke factory, a setting which should provide ample opportunity for all kinds of jokes and songs and slapstick. By all rights, this should kick ass. And yet it's one of the most dry and boring episodes of the season.

Cheese Sandwich is depressed and doesn't do anything funny until the very end, and only sings one song, while the factory itself is a dull, grey, lifeless, and sterile setting just like a real factory. If this weren't an episode about Pinkie Pie and Cheese Sandwich in a joke factory I'd probably appreciate the realism, but come on, know what you're writing! If there was any episode where they should've gone full ham and done a bunch of those stupid fucking memefaces, this was it. But there's nothing here.

Sans Smirk perfectly encapsulates the problem with this episode. He's just some boring bureaucrat guy, but he gets almost as many lines and about as much screentime as Cheese does. I appreciate the fact that he's genuinely nice despite his dullness, rather than a generic corporate-themed villain like Svengallop or something, but he's still not funny. And if the Fox brothers couldn't even make Maud funny, then I'm not sure why they thought that they'd do any better with a whole new character with basically the same gimmick.

This whole episode is like a metaphor for the Fox brothers trying to figure out what humour is.

I suppose that I should be glad, at least, that the episode ended on Pinkie Pie reaffirming her values about living to see others laugh. It's a definite improvement over living for the yovidaphone, like she did in the last Fox brothers Pinkie episode. I got kind of worried at the beginning, when she was talking about wanting to learn her life's purpose, since the others are all moving onto "bigger and better things." Pinkie Pie, like Applejack, has never needed any grand ambition, and it often feels like the show doesn't understand either of them or know what to do with them because of that, as seen in the season eight intro, where they're the only ones who are stuck in the classroom teaching instead of in their own elements. So at least this episode didn't do anything obnoxious like having her take over the joke factory or something.

Still, a really dull episode, and a really wasted premise, especially considering that Pinkie fucking marries Cheese and has a kid with him by the finale. You would think that they would want to at least foreshadow that a bit in their only Cheese Sandwich episode of the season, but apparently not. I don't get why they can do romance with the student six and other side characters just fine, and even with the mane six over in Equestria Girls, and yet they're still chickening out here.

Anyway, enough of Pinkie. Onto Dash.

Episode 15 - 2, 4, 6, Greaaat:

So we come to our final ever solo Dash episode, and it's somehow an even bigger disappointment than The Last Laugh. At least Pinkie's swan song acknowledged her actual virtues by the end, and at least it was trying to call back to her best episode by bringing back Weird Al, even if it completely failed at it. Dash doesn't even get that much.

Rainbow Dash is a character defined by being awesome. She's a pro athlete, a superhero, and in her Equestria Girls incarnation, a literal rockstar. She's met and been acknowledged as an equal by all of her personal heroes, and has a sizeable fanclub of her own. Along with Rarity, she's one of the most ambitious characters on this show, because she set her sights the highest and then achieved it. The final Rainbow Dash episode should be a celebration of everything that makes her awesome, especially since her actually joining the Wonderbolts in season six was done with zero fanfare or sense of achievement, and season nine was a good chance to finally make up for that.

Instead, we got yet another buckball episode where Dash sits on the sidelines, yet another story in which she's the bad guy and makes a fool of herself, and another episode wasted on the fucking School of Friendship, so that Dash is confined to her meaningless role as a teacher rather than shown as an accomplished hero in her own right. And of course it's written by season eight newcomer Kaita Mpambara, who knows nothing about Rainbow Dash's history as a character, so we don't even get any other thematic callbacks to old Dash episodes to make up for it, like Scootaloo, or Daring Do, or even her doing a Sonic Rainboom. We just get Smolder saying "20% cooler," even though both Rainbow Roadtrip and Best Gift Ever already did 20% cooler callbacks recently at the time this came out.

Really, am I being unreasonable here? Wanting the people who write for this show to have watched it first?

So this is a huge waste of the last Rainbow Dash episode, but unlike The Last Laugh, which was just disappointing and boring, 2, 4, 6, Greaaat is a genuinely badly written episode, starting right from its premise.

So Celestia is starting a scholastic buckball league now, which doesn't initially sound that odd given the game's apparent newfound national popularity, but it does once you remember that this is a game that explicitly requires a unicorn, a pegasus, and an earth pony to play, and the "School of Magic," as this episode calls it, is actually Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns. The episode also seems to suddenly remember this at the end, as it explains with a brief line of dialogue that Celestia needed to put magic restraints on her students and conjure magic wings for them to compete.

This raises all sorts of questions for me about the nature of buckball. I mean, this game was fucking invented by earth ponies, despite its pan-tribal team compositions, so you'd think that earth pony strength would be key to playing it in some way, but I guess not, because apparently a unicorn with a horn restraint is an acceptable substitute for the earth pony on the team? Earth ponies are more than just unicorns without magic, you know.

And can a unicorn with butterfly wings really compete on the same level as a born pegasus? I know that Rarity entered the Best Young Flyers competition, but she was just doing a sort of midair dance, not the kind of fancy flying that Dash does, and that was still too much for her wings. Wouldn't a unicorn who can self-levitate be a better match-up for this? Self-levitation has been a thing ever since Starlight in season five, and even Snails does it in this episode.

Actually, come to think of it, if they weren't going to obey the rule about the racially segregated team roles, then why are they even bothering with these workarounds? If anything, doesn't this just expose how pointless the segregated aspect of buckball is? Does this game really need a pegasus on defence, or an earth pony on offense, or even a unicorn just to hold a basket in the outfield for some reason? Unicorns with their horns could conceivably play all of these roles just fine, and I'm pretty sure defence would be the only area where it would be an unfair advantage. And maybe not even then, depending on how exactly magic works. I mean, the goals are a ways off the ground, aren't they? How far can unicorn telekinesis even reach?

This whole sport just looks more and more ridiculous the more we actually focus on it. It really is like pony Quidditch; it's there more to just sound cool than to actually make sense within the context of this world. Buckball as a game was not thought out thoroughly enough to stand up to multiple episodes worth of scrutiny, and I believe that bringing it back this season was a mistake.

Anyway, the episode isn't even really about the buckball itself. It's about Rainbow Dash being forced to train the cheer squad for some reason, something which she makes very clear she has no interest in, and doubts that she can even do. I don't know why Rainbow Dash suddenly believes that she doesn't know anything about cheerleading, considering that her "elements of a good cheer" speech to Fluttershy was one of the most iconic, memorable, and meme-worthy scenes of season one, but Kaita Mpambara hasn't watched season one, so I guess that it's not surprising.

Regardless, I actually side with Dash here. I relate so much to her complete lack of enthusiasm for this whole setup. Even if it makes no sense for Rainbow Dash to not care about cheerleading, she's totally right to feel like she's being wasted on this. Sure, Dash is a good choice for this job if we factor in Sonic Rainboom, but this entire episode is predicated on ignoring it, despite the butterfly wings putting in an appearance. And even taking that into account, Dash would still be better used coaching the team rather than the cheerleaders. Sports are her whole thing. Sure, she's not as good at buckball as Fluttershy, but she trained Fluttershy, and plenty of other ponies could handle running the cheer squad. Pinkie, for one. Twilight for another, who's actually been a cheerleader before, and who doesn't seem to be doing anything else this episode.

Lead the cheer squad yourself, you dumb fucking horse.

Plus, Dash has a point that the cheer squad shouldn't have needed so much guidance from her. I mean, if we look at all of the scenes of them fucking up on their own, it's obvious what their problems were, and any one of them could've fixed their own issues if they'd put in any effort. Why didn't Shimmy Shake and Light Hoof just practice doing their dance while Yona stomped? Did Ocellus at any point try reading that rhyme book that Dash got for them before struggling like that on the field? And Smolder's problem was a lack of enthusiasm in her chants, which is entirely her own attitude. Dash did nothing wrong. Hashtag that. #DashDidNothingWrong.

But this is one of those episodes where the whole point is that Dash is wrong, so of course she realises that her lack of enthusiasm is ruining it for others, and she comes back and tries harder until they're all great at it, and then Twilight reveals that she knew that Dash would hate this, and it was all an elaborate plan to teach her a friendship lesson. I really feel bad for Dash. I don't understand why her friends always feel the need to lie to and manipulate her to teach her a lesson instead of just fucking talking to her, but I guess that that's just her lot in life.

The final cheerleading scene is really underwhelming, too. The perfected cheer would've been the perfect place for a song, but of course, this show doesn't really do regular songs anymore. We went from an average of fifteen songs per season in seasons one to five, to twelve songs in season six, five in season seven, to a whole seven each in seasons eight and nine. I don't know if this is a budget problem or just laziness, but I need to say it one last time: This show got a whole lot less musical than it used to be by the final seasons, and those missing songs took a good chunk of this series' soul with them.

While I'm still doing this episode, I might as well round out with a few general complaints. Like why doesn't Dash know her own students? She recognises Shimmy Shake and Light Hoof from around the school, but the school only has six fucking teachers, so wouldn't she know them from class? Or if Dash was in charge of organising the cheer squad, then where did they get the uniforms that they were using before she got those sparkly ones from Rarity? Why is Applejack at the farm while all of this training is going on? Didn't her family invent buckball? Shouldn't she be helping to coach? And Celestia says at the end that her school doesn't have its own cheer squad already? How? Why would Twilight's newly founded school have its own cheer squad before CSGU?

Lastly, I need to bring up Snips, because this is bothering me. Why is Snips suddenly a greedy entrepreneurial type in season nine? This was never a thing with him before. It just started in Common Ground and happens again here because this is also a buckball episode. Where did this come from? I've got nothing against fleshing out a relatively flat character, but this just seems random to me, especially since Snips and Snails have been fairly prominent background characters in the Equestria Girls series for years without even a hint of this.

It doesn't even service the needs of the plot very well. Doesn't it rather undermine his role as the only one defending the cheer squad and appealing to Dash to try harder if he outright admits that he's only doing it for his own selfish reasons? And why is Snips even allowed to profit off of the School of Friendship's name in the first place? Did Twilight authorise this? Because she flipped her shit when Flim and Flam did that.

And speaking of Twilight flipping her shit...

Episode 16 - A Trivial Pursuit:

The future ruler of Equestria, everybody.

A Trivial Pursuit is another one of those contenders for the worst episode of the series. I actually think that it's even worse than Yakity-Sax, because at least Pinkie's terrible mischaracterisation in that episode felt like an accident; Twilight's shittiness here is 100% intentional, and paired with more of these obnoxious fucking memefaces to boot.

Essentially, this is an episode about Twilight working herself into such a frenzy over a quiz that she abandons all of her principles to win. She starts with being a shitty rules lawyer who tries to get all the other teams disqualified so that she can win on a technicality, and ends by intentionally getting her own friend disqualified as well so that she can form a better team with someone else. It'd be one thing if this kind of ruthless betrayal and deception were an aspect of the game, but it ain't. Twilight in this episode actively ruins the fun of the game for everyone else basically just because she's a selfish cunt, and that's pretty much the root of the problem here.

Late-series MLP had so much character regression that it was unreal. I already mentioned this in my season eight review, but it bears repeating. Every single character got at least one episode in the last few seasons which rolled back all of the lessons that they ever learned and all of the progress that they ever made as a character. Remember Fluttershy being such a bitch that she deliberately drove away all of Rarity's customers? Remember Applejack and Rainbow Dash fighting like children so much that the actual children found them immature and annoying? Remember Pinkie Pie abandoning all of her friends because they told her that she was shit at playing the bagpipes? Remember Celestia imprisoning a child in Tartarus? Remember Discord's entire season nine arc?

Well, now it's Twilight's turn. We've spent nine seasons with this character, and for all of that time, she's basically no better now than when she started. Her ascension to alicornhood was supposed to signify that she understood friendship now after spending three seasons in Ponyville learning about it. She was chosen by the divine mandate of a magical friendship tree to spread friendship across the land and beyond Equestria. She wrote a bestselling book about friendship, and even founded a fucking school to teach it to others. That's how much Twilight is supposed to understand friendship now. And despite all of that, she's still a shitty friend.

This isn't something that we can just ignore. The entire second half of the series is predicated on the idea that Twilight knows what the fuck she's doing. Hell, just in the previous episode, she was smugly manipulating Rainbow Dash to teach her a friendship lesson. And yet she still acts like this in her off time? Seriously, if Twilight is still this much of a cunt even by season nine, then that undermines the entire premise of the friendship school arc, doesn't it? Look at all the shit that she pulls in this episode. Do you really think that this mare has any right to be teaching others how to act? No! She doesn't! Even the student six would be better teachers than her!

At least nobody ever crowned Homer Simpson king. As far as I know, anyway...

And that isn't even getting into all of Twilight's freak-outs and panic attacks. This is not supposed to be something that she still struggles with. Even as far back as season three, Twilight was learning to control her freak-outs with that little breathing technique that she learned from Cadance, and through seasons four and five, we saw her gradually growing more and more comfortable with her role as princess and the expanded responsibilities that it brought. By the time that she's running her own school, you would think that she would be better at managing stress and working under pressure.

But no! Instead, she's worse than ever before, having full-blown Lesson Zero-style meltdowns on a regular basis! Why the fuck do Celestia and Luna think that Twilight is ready to replace them if she's still like this? If this is what she gets like when she's about to lose a quiz, then how is she going to handle a major political crisis?

All of her friends act like "Twilighting" is just some cute character quirk of hers, and that they just have to calm her down and remind her how great she is, and then everything will be fine. But a fucking national leader needs to be able to get a fucking grip without regular pep-talks from their personal cheerleaders. What if the mane six are not around, or their attempts to calm her don't work, like Spike's didn't in this episode? If Twilight needs to give an important speech to the nation, she can't just go up on the podium with a frizzy mane and crazy eyes like she's on drugs. That's the sort of thing that makes people worry. And I'm sorry, but wasn't the whole point of Lesson Zero that Twilight's friends should've taken her freaking out more seriously?

Honestly, what's even the point anymore? If nobody ever learns or grows as a result of their actions and just keeps making the same stupid mistakes over and over again, then why even bother having a coherent story with moral lessons? Just make a stream of meaningless lolrandumb nonsense for babies and put it out on YouTube for them to watch between their Elsa Spider-Man videos.

This show's going to hell, and I'm going to fucking send it there.

Of course, there is a reason for all this, and it once again comes back to the same old problem of the writers not watching the show. This time it's Brittany Jo Flores writing, whose only previous credit is Once Upon a Zeppelin, and I think that this is a good time to finally talk about late-series MLP's production process, particularly how it worked for freelancers like her.

See, if you were a freelance writer for Friendship is Magic under Josh Haber, you weren't expected to watch the series, catch up on important details, and write according to those, nor was there any kind of detailed show bible or internal wiki as far as I can tell. There was a show bible under Faust, but it was way outdated by Haber's tenure (in fact, it was written before Luna was even an idea), so I doubt that they used it. Instead, you would be issued a writer's cheat sheet that gives you a short list of descriptors for all of the characters, and a few reference episodes or clips to base your writing on, and then it was up to the story editors to clean up whatever mess you made.

And this would still at least be workable if it weren't for the fact that the cheat sheets were also terrible. The moment that I first saw them, it's like a lightbulb clicked on in my brain, and suddenly I understood why the latter half of this series is such utter garbage. Look at this shit:

Like puzzle pieces fitting together, ain't it?

Well no fucking wonder Twilight is still such a huge spaz nine seasons into the show if Brittany was told that Lesson fucking Zero was the best example of how to write Twilight! It's a funny early series episode on its own, but you couldn't pick a worse example of her typical characterisation if you tried. And there's no counterexamples of regular Twilight episodes, just the big flashy season finales where Twilight is never in a normal situation.

And look at some of the rest of these. Why is Bats! listed as a good example for writing Pinkie Pie? That wasn't even a Pinkie episode. I don't even remember her doing anything in it other than holding a flashlight with her mane at one point. She was in Griffon the Brush Off, but for some reason that's listed as a good example of a Rainbow Dash episode, even though the most notable thing that Dash did in it was tell her childhood friend to fuck off. Read It and Weep is a decent choice for Dash at least, since it familiarises new writers with the background of Daring Do, but why Griffon the Brush Off? Why not something like Sonic Rainboom or Wonderbolt Academy, or even Mysterious Mare Do Well? Maybe if Kaita Mpambara had been shown an episode displaying Dash's bravery, athleticism, and lofty dreams, he might've written her a better final episode.

Applejack's another character who gets shafted here. Over a Barrel is listed as one of her episodes, despite her not featuring very prominently in it. Yeah, it's connected to her family, but what does she actually do in it? Spike, Pinkie Pie, and Rainbow Dash all had much more of an effect on the plot in that one, since they were the ones who actually spent time with the buffalo. Applejack just had a zany moment where she tucked a tree into bed. And Somepony to Watch Over Me was another episode where she was acting kinda crazy for most of it. Neither of these are very good choices. What about Fall Weather Friends? Applebuck Season? Apple Family Reunion? Pinkie Apple Pie? Even her supporting role in Sisterhooves Social is a better example than these.

Rarity's selection is a lot better, although Simple Ways I'm a little iffy on. But Fluttershy I think got this the worst of all, even beyond the outdated production title for Keep Calm and Flutter On. If you want to know how to write post-character development Fluttershy, look at episodes like Filli Vanilli, It Ain't Easy Being Breezies, Scare Master, Flutter Brutter, and Hurricane Fluttershy. But Putting Your Hoof Down was another of those weird outlier episodes that teaches all the wrong lessons about Fluttershy. Sure, she learns not to be cruel by the end, but having this as a reference episode surely colours a new writer's perception. They'll watch this and think, "Oh, okay. So Fluttershy is a massive bitch who constantly struggles to be nice to all of these people that she actually hates. I shall now go write her that way in my new episode, Fake It 'Til You Make It, because my name is Josh Hamilton."

Exacerbating all of this is the main character descriptions sheet.

Big fucking sigh.

This is a pretty good indicator of how the writers see these characters. Even for all of the lessons that they've learned and all of the progress that they've made across the series, the cheat sheets still mostly define them in terms of their flaws, and so they continue to carry those flaws forever. Watch Lesson Zero and then read that you're supposed to write Twilight as "high-strung," and you can see how we get Trivial Pursuit. And Dash and AJ are both just said to be "competitive" with no further context, so it's not surprising that we got Non-Compete Clause then, is it? Fluttershy is the only one where it specifically notes that she's progressed past her flaws in any significant way, but it also still describes her in much the same terms as her season one self instead of just saying that she's an introvert, hence why she's always flipping back and forth between uber-confident huge bitch and timid little mouse.

Oh, and even if the writers actually watch these laughably bad reference episodes, that's still no guarantee that they're actually watching the whole thing each time. Some of them just watch clips.

Literally. Just clips. This is how you're supposed to learn how Fluttershy acts.

So hopefully you understand now why none of the new writers can write these characters for shit. It's not necessarily their fault; they're being given bad information.

Now sure, if I were a professional writer doing freelance work on a show that I wasn't familiar with, I'd want to watch as much of it as possible first to make sure that I was getting it right. But at over two hundred episodes of material in just the main series alone, I can understand why a working professional might not have the time for that, especially for what might well just be a one-time job to pay the bills. I don't blame any of them for trusting Josh Haber and Nicole Dubuc, and just watching what their cheat sheets told them to. When you work for a new boss, you go in with a reasonable expectation that they know what they're doing better than you do. If the new writer makes a few continuity or characterisation mistakes on the way, that's fine. It's basically unavoidable with this production process. But it doesn't matter so long as the story editors do their jobs and catch it before the script is finalised.

If only one of the story editors hadn't joined at about the same time as most of these freelance writers, and hadn't familiarised herself with the show through this exact same process. And if only the other story editor had given a fuck at any point at all and tried to do something about it.

Anyway, enough about reality. Back to the episode.

So Twilight's characterisation is obviously the biggest problem with Trivial Pursuit by far, but it's not the only one. As usual, even the setup is dumb as fuck and full of holes. Beyond the Trivia Trot being another longtime annual Ponyville tradition that we're just seeing now for the first time, it's also got a lot of weird nonsensical rules, and overly specific questions and categories.

Can someone please tell me why in Christ's name the specific flavour of cupcakes that Pinkie baked for Luna's birthday is a question here? How is that a fair question to anyone who doesn't personally know the princesses? And how is it that there are rules for getting help from pets and sticking your tongue out at people, and yet Twilight is allowed to send Pinkie away from the table to look at shit out the window? Is this meant to be a tightly regulated competition or not? And how does the disqualification even work? Sunburst gets kicked out just because of his partner and loses his score, but Twilight keeps hers after she gets her partner disqualified? How is that fair? Shouldn't they either combine their scores or start again from zero? Twilight and Pinkie have to start from zero when they re-enter as a new team at the end!

And why is Rainbow Dash competing in this contest? Why is she a regular in this contest when not even Pinkie is? I know that she's not totally averse to nerd shit since she got into Daring Do, but I'd still think that this would be the most boring thing in the world to the self-proclaimed Fastest Pony in Equestria. What interest does she have in trivia games? And how does she know enough trivia about anything other than Daring Do and the Wonderbolts to even compete effectively? How does she even have the time to be here for this? She works two fucking jobs now!

Oh, right, she's here so that she can compete with Applejack. Because their character sheets say that they're competitive. Right. Also so that they can reference shipping names.

Why the... the zap-apple question... I just.. Aghhhh...

It takes the room almost a full minute before anyone guesses zap apples.

Why... do they make... such a big deal about keeping score in this quiz? They have all these lines about how it's a hard job, how Starlight used to do it but couldn't handle it anymore, how it might be too much for Spike to handle as well... nothing fucking comes of it! Those lines don't go anywhere! This is meaningless! It's all meaningless! Did anybody edit this script? Did anybody edit my brain? Someone please help me, I can't do this anymore! Where am I? What year is it?! Is 2020 over yet? Is season nine over yet? Please SOMEONE FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK TELL ME SEASON NINE IS OVER! I NEED SEASON NINE TO BE OVER FUKIMNSJENFGKUENGKLSNGLKSDNGKL

Episode 17 - The Summer Sun Setback:

Have you ever noticed how insufferably fucking smug the writing in season nine is? It reminds me a lot of how Steven Moffat used to write, particularly in the later seasons of Sherlock. It's like the show thinks that it's so much smarter than it actually is.

You can see it looking back at the season premiere. We had that long drawn-out intro teasing what kind of problem it could possibly be this time. Only, wow, subversion! There's no problem, except for the season arc being shit. Then Rainbow Dash has lines in two separate episodes pointing out how the princesses never help (because the writers never let them be helpful). Wow, so witty and observant, Dashie! What about how the mane six are all super blasé about Twilight's latest panic attack? "Oh, do we really need to go through this again?" they ask with their shit-eating grins. "You do this aaaaaaaaaall the time in the Haber seasons, Twilight!" Then half of Discord's lines in the episode are him constantly pointing out clichés in the plot. It's all so meta and self-aware! Except that the clichés keep fucking happening anyway.

"Wow, another plot where everybody lies in a misguided attempt to spare someone's feelings! Haven't seen that before, amirite?"

This episode probably has the worst example of it, though. In the last episode, we saw Twilight revert back to her Lesson Zero characterisation and go completely fucking psycho over a pop quiz. Then in the first five minutes of this episode, Vogel writes Twilight as intentionally being super calm and not at all stressed about her impending takeover of the entire country, and then has the gall to use Discord to wink at the audience going, "WOW, CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT!"

Yeah, look at what a great job you guys did progressing Twilight as a character this season, even though you literally did the opposite of that. I don't understand why any of these writers think that they've earned the right to be this smug after the last four seasons. Look at that line from the season eight finale, where Twilight proudly proclaimed that she had finally learned that it's okay to count on your friends for help. This is the exact same kind of shit. She already learned how to calm the fuck down years ago, but then the writers brought back that character flaw with a vengeance anyway, just so that they could then pat themselves on the back for "fixing" it.

Well, I'm here to tell you that they didn't fix shit. They hastily slapped some duct tape over something that they accidentally broke, and then they made a glib remark about it. If anything, all that this constant faux-lampshading achieves is drawing attention to their own bad writing. Half the clichés that they're making fun of in these episodes are only clichés in the first place because these people keep insisting on using them.

So let's actually talk about this episode now, and how fucking absurd it is.

The Legion of Doom are still plotting to betray Grogar, having secretly stolen his Bewitching Bell that they hid in plain sight in his own fucking lair at the end of Frenemies. Fortunately for them, Discord is apparently high off his ass on poison joke this season, so he somehow doesn't notice this, and he has no interest in monitoring them while he's not around, even though he's fully capable of it, so they're all totally free to act when "Grogar" leaves on a "mission." So they plan to plunder the Canterlot archives for information on how to use the bell while Twilight is running the Summer Sun Celebration.

This is, by the way, intended to be the last ever Summer Sun Celebration for some inexplicable reason. The princesses are retiring, so this national holiday is just cancelled from now on, because that's how that works. They're just removing it from the calendar and telling everyone to get back to work, I guess. And they expect everyone to just go along with it, because fuck history and cultural traditions and shit. The more that season nine progresses, the more I feel like Equestria couldn't get rid of Celestia and Luna soon enough. They're a bunch of self-absorbed assholes.

So the villains arrive in Canterlot, and move around by just hiding behind boxes and bushes in their natural forms, because of course that's enough to hide a big red centaur. Chrysalis at least thinks to disguise herself to get into the castle, but she's immediately rebuffed by the door medallion system from Sparkle's Seven. So naturally, she kidnaps a guard and steals his medallion to sneak in and— Oh wait, no, that doesn't happen, because that would be smart. They can still do that later, but first they have to cause a bunch of unnecessary chaos as a questionably useful distraction.

So Tirek drains Braeburn and a bunch of other earth ponies from behind some bushes to... disrupt the baking, I guess? Seems a little risky, considering that Discord is in Canterlot, and that he can sense when Tirek drains magic. Tirek had also better hope that none of these ponies he's draining find the sensation in any way familiar, such as if he drained them before in a previous rampage, because if they can identify what's happened to them, then that'll give the game away immediately.

...Oh.

Well... I'm sure it'll be fine. Braeburn's obviously pretty dumb, because he doesn't recognise it, and neither do any of the mane six after he stumbles in. Though, in fairness, I guess that they wouldn't, since the symptoms are completely different now. The drained still lose their eye colour, but this time they keep their cutie marks for some reason. Clearly a brilliant misdirection on Tirek's part, and not at all a continuity error. Should work reasonably well, too, because the mane six would obviously have no reason to suspect Tirek as being behind this, since as far as they know, he's safely locked away in Tartarus right now, and Tirek has never been able to cause trouble from inside of Tartarus before. And hey, it's not like Discord would have any special reason to suspect Tirek either, right? I'm sure that this incident wouldn't arouse his suspicions at all.

Cozy Glow is up next, somehow managing to insert herself into the official weather team for the Summer Sun Celebration so that she can disrupt it from within. The guy in charge just immediately trusts that this small child is fully capable of doing his job for him, and that letting her do so would be a good idea, and this means that she gets to run amok across the city creating wild weather, completely unchecked. You see, no other pegasi live in Canterlot, and the entire weather team is just this one extremely incompetent guy, so that means that it's totally plausible for one pegasus filly to wreak climate chaos across an entire city with nobody noticing or stopping her. Obviously.

Man, it's a really good thing for Cozy that Celestia and Luna immediately threw her into Tartarus with no trial and no press, and then never checked in on her afterwards to find out that she's missing. I bet that this would all be a lot harder to pull off if Cozy's face had been plastered on wanted posters and the front pages of every newspaper in the nation. Also a good thing that the weather guy forgets all about her the moment that she leaves, and never identifies her to the mane six, because otherwise they might have realised that something's up.

Ah, but Chrysalis saved the best for last! She's bringing something new and fresh to the table:

Racism!

Calm down there, lad.

Yeah, so basically, Chrysalis just goes up to the fireworks performers and tells them that they suck, that their jobs and presumably their special talents are pointless trash, and that as members of the master race, they should come attend her Klan rally instead. Surprisingly, the firework ponies are immediately convinced by this brilliant rhetoric, quit their jobs on the spot, and gladly join Chrysalis in whipping up an angry mob to protest against... actually I'm not sure. They get angry with Rarity for using her magic to be a dressmaker, but I'm not sure what the unicorn supremacists actually want, specifically. To not have to work? To institute slavery for non-unicorns? I don't know.

I'll have much more to say about season nine's honest-to-fuckness race war subplot when we get to the finale, but for now, I just want to say that I find it absolutely fucking hysterical that they seriously put this into the show and thought that it was a good idea. That's really all it took! Chrysalis just walks up to some unicorns, tells them that they should be racist, and they're racist now! Truly a deep and hard-hitting commentary on the insidious nature of radicalisation.

So anyway, all of this chaos clears the way for the Legion of Doom, I guess, who now finally have the courage to ambush a single guard and steal his medallion to sneak into the castle, like they should've done from the start. Sure hope for their sake that they killed him afterwards, because he saw all of their faces and could probably identify them now. And so they get their book and escape back to the lair with Grogar none the wiser, and that's it for their half of the episode.

As for the mane six, they spend their half of the story running around Canterlot trying to fix all of the messes that the Legion of Doom created, naturally never discovering their presence despite the multiple opportunities to do so, just like in Mean Six. It's pretty lame how they eventually handle it, too. The final resolution is done like a song montage, but they didn't actually write a song for it, so we just get some background music over them wordlessly fixing everything. I'd very much like to know what the hell they said to the unikkkorns to get them to shut the fuck up and do their jobs, but we never hear. They just sorta back down with no clear explanation. I guess that Twilight must have offered them some concessions or something.

"Okay, so if you do the fireworks, I promise that we won't take down any more Confederate flags from government buildings!"

There's also some dumb boring subplot where the mane six are keeping all of the chaos a secret from Twilight, because nobody ever learns on this show anymore, and then she finds out anyway and resolutely doesn't freak out, because she's just learned and grown so fucking much since the previous episode, you guys.

And you know what? Pause. Let's talk about Twilight again.

I've talked at length about how it makes no sense for the princesses to be retiring, but I don't think that we've talked enough about the other half of the problem, which is that it makes no sense for Twilight to succeed them either. If this were season five Twilight, who still had her shit together and was actively training as a princess by going to royal events and political summits and shit, then I would be fine with this, but it's not. This is season nine Twilight, and season nine Twilight is an exceedingly terrible choice for this job.

Okay, sure, Twilight has a proven track record of defeating villains and making friends, but running a country requires a little more than that. It requires someone with knowledge, experience, relevant skills, confidence, political instincts, and preferably a level head, or at least some of those qualities. But Twilight has none of them. She's just as dumb as Celestia is, if not worse, and she's completely unprepared for this job both practically and emotionally. This episode insists that Twilight totally overcame all of her worst flaws offscreen between the end of the last episode and the start of this one somehow, but even if that were true, which I seriously doubt, she was definitely not ready to take over when Celestia and Luna originally wanted her to.

Twilight totally freaked out back in the premiere when she was first told that she would be taking over, and rightfully so, because last season she couldn't even manage a school properly, much less a kingdom. The previous episode also proved that she's completely unable to manage her own stress, and might even be mentally unstable on top of that. And then when she briefly had a chance to practice doing Celestia's job in Dark and Dawn, she fucked up both her political duties and managing the solar cycle. It was treated like a joke in the episode itself, but is it not incredibly worrying that halfway through the final season, when Twilight was supposed to already be on the throne, she's still struggling with the most basic aspects of Celestia's job?

In other words, we know for a fact that if Celestia and Luna had gotten their way, and Twilight had taken the throne just after the season premiere, it would've been an unmitigated disaster. Which means that Celestia and Luna have terrible judgement, and that we can't trust them. If their initial confidence in Twilight was that badly misplaced, then why should we believe them when they say that she's ready now?

I'm also not particularly inclined to trust Twilight's insistence that she's finally learned from all of her mistakes, either. She says that this time she's changed for real and won't be a panicky idiot anymore, but I've already seen her go through this character development once before, and it didn't stick the last time, so why should it now? It's just like when Celestia and Luna supposedly "learned their lesson" back in A Royal Problem. No, I don't fucking buy it. If Twilight could go that crazy over a quiz just one episode ago, then I have zero reason to believe that it won't happen again in a more serious situation. Sooner or later, she's going to have another major meltdown over some stupid shit, only next time the consequences will probably be much more severe, ranging from a national embarrassment to an apocalyptic disaster.

If you ask me, Cadance would have been a far better choice for the next ruling princess. At least Cadance has her life together and is competent at everything that we see her doing. At least Cadance isn't a huge bitch. Cadance is the senior princess, with more experience than Twilight with ruling, especially in the political and administrative aspects, since she runs her own mini-kingdom and all. Fucking hell, Twilight didn't even discover the concept of delegating work until four episodes ago. Cadance is the obvious and superior choice in nearly every respect. Is there any good reason to pick Twilight over her other than main character favouritism?

Fact: Only one alicorn ever canonically got laid.

Anyway, I'll have more to say about Twilight and the retirement arc later, but that's about it for now. The episode wraps up pretty quickly after they handle the disasters. The Summer Sun Celebration goes ahead, the unicorn supremacists casually paint Nightmare Moon's face on the moon to remind Luna that she ain't shit, and Twilight tells the two old nags to go fuck themselves by refusing to cancel the holiday. I mean, she still renames it to the Festival of the Two Sisters, which is a much shittier name in my opinion, but I guess that Twilight changing longstanding holiday traditions to make them shittier is a theme this season. Then we get the wrap-up with the Legion of Doom, and that's it.

So there you have it. If any of you watched Frenemies and were worried that Michael Vogel was improving as a writer, have no fear. The Summer Sun Setback will set you straight.

Now, let's see what's next...

---

Continued in part four.

Comments

[Alondro]

Later Luna episodes by other writers played her more seriously, but Larson brought back that comical side to the princesses in Slice of Life, when he wrote a very brief scene of them both bickering over presents at Cranky's wedding.

I talked with Larson about "Slice of Life" and mentioned that my displeasure with it was mainly that it severed itself too much from the more 'solid' narrative. But that it could've been fixed by one single thing: it gets crazier and crazier in the last minute, and then reveals that it's actually Derpy narrating a wild tale about why she was late for work.

Larson then mentioned he had actually wanted to end it similarly, with a massive changeling invasion coming in, to hint that it was just non-canon craziness... which I then noted would have been a PERFECT climax for Derpy's tall tale, since her boss would snarl that there was no changeling invasion yesterday!

And it would end on Bob the Changeling sitting on Lyra's bench, just to meme harder.

I think Larson and I could've made some gloriously insane episodes, which would somehow miraculously maintain continuity.

[Alondro]

School Raze made them both outright evil when they threw a nine-year-old into a maximum security prison next to a soul-devouring monster and then laughed about it.

Gonna be honest: I would throw Cozy Glow in with Hannibal Lecter. And laugh. She's just that awful of a character. And Celestia somehow knew this.

[Alondro]

I keep coming back to this point, because the writers keep forgetting this. Do you even realise how long a thousand years is? A thousand years ago is not just before America existed, not just before the British Empire existed, but before a united fucking England even existed. A thousand years covers the entire span from the founding of the Roman Republic to the fall of the western Roman Empire.

I'm gonna be 'that guy', because I AM THAT GUY!

You expect writers who ascribe to the exceedingly diminished philosophy that celebrating wanton sexuality is the highest level humanity can achieve and history will shower them with praise for eternity over it can manage to grasp the sheer breadth of time and experience Celestia has gained?

These toddler-level twats can't even comprehend their own childhoods, for God's sake!

Now I... I consider EONS!! While they still learning to SPELL THEIR NAMES, I was being trained to conquer GALAXIES!! (Travolta, eat your heart out)

[DannyJ]

5421170
5421171

I think Larson and I could've made some gloriously insane episodes, which would somehow miraculously maintain continuity.

Larson's a cool guy. His absence was sorely felt in the later seasons.

Gonna be honest: I would throw Cozy Glow in with Hannibal Lecter. And laugh. She's just that awful of a character.

Kill away. She's just a fictional character as far as you or I are concerned. But she's a real child to Celestia and all the other fictional characters, and that's what makes Celestia's actions so troubling to me.

[Alondro]

The little bit with Pistachio and his family in Rarity's storyline was a nice moment for her to show her better qualities, and the reindeer were pretty interesting.

Ah yes, the CARIBOU!! WE ALL KNOW WHAT THE CARIBOU DO TO PONIES, DON'T WE OLD-TIME FANFIC READERS?!?!

DEATH THE CARIBOU!!

[DannyJ]

5421176

y.yarn.co/10db96da-679a-4e5e-aa94-f3602c25f4ae_screenshot.jpg

CARIBOU?

[Oliver]

And in both cases I have to wonder, what the hell suddenly changed about that in season nine?

She found the script and realized that it is imperative to escape Equestria as fast as possible, before the reality bill arrives.

Every single character got at least one episode in the last few seasons which rolled back all of the lessons that they ever learned and all of the progress that they ever made as a character.

Rolling back would imply the character returning to some prior, still recognizable state. This is not what’s going on here.

[Impossible Numbers]

Celestia episodes were a fucking mistake, and it's all M.A. Larson's fault.

Hey, don't you blame that man for other people's fuck-ups!

I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I know you're being rhetorical.

Episode 13 - Between Dark and Dawn:

Oh, hell no.

I really like your development of how the subversive jokes of the first half of the show were blown out of proportion in the second, thus missing the point of them being subversions. Especially how the retirement undoes their more obvious character development, it really does look like the new guard completely missed the point of stuff like that, and it's a major reason why I never watched "A Royal Problem" despite the hype.

And the retirement arc this season is exactly that: a culmination of ideas from a staff that, at best, had no real plan or idea what they were doing. A thousand years of rule is not something you can just fritter away, and definitely not with this half-arsed approach about things being more "in harmony" now than ever. Combined with the mentions elsewhere about Twilight's failings, and the only reason you can presume a happily ever after is writerly fiat, because of course this show doesn't have the wherewithal to depict any bad consequences sticking, despite how far more believable those would be, given the evidence.

Especially the realization that canon Luna has little to no necessary function. You'd think it'd be an easy bar to clear (to be fair, this is also on the first half of the show for doing so little with her).

---

MEMEFACES.

The cartoon equivalent of waving your keys to try and distract the baby. I disliked these as early as Season Four, when Miss Harshwhinny dipped in and out of a lip contortion curse during a lecture (there might be earlier ones, but that's the one I remember off the top of my head).

The left side of that collection of Rarity faces alone is ugly, something Rarity definitely should not be.

---

Episode 14 - The Last Laugh:

I know this isn't the finale yet, and I'm going to invoke Fanon Discontinuity regardless, but... am I the only one weirded out by a celebrity stand-in being paired off with a main character? And having a kid with her? A main character, moreover, that he's only interacted with for all of two episodes? Are we seriously trying to convey that Weird Al wanted this self-insert scenario?

This is why the fanfiction comparison keeps coming back to me. In this case, not in a way that seems savoury.

---

It really is like pony Quidditch; it's there more to just sound cool than to actually make sense within the context of this world.

What's wrong with Quidditch? Seems to make sense to me.

But this is one of those episodes where the whole point is that Dash is wrong,

A candidate, perhaps, for the idea that Rainbow Dash nearly gets as bad a canon treatment as Spike? Not as bad, exactly, but since a friend of mine made me realize how few "great" episodes Dash actually has - and how many problematic ones - it kind of makes me wonder.

Also, Twilight being manipulative this season is a big reason why making her Celestia 2.0 is a very, very bad idea. She's the representative of friendship, which means she's not supposed to be manipulative. She's supposed to be a good-faith mentor. Aren't honesty and kindness things she should have down pat by this point?

---

The future ruler of Equestria, everybody.

Lesson Zero as a cheat sheet reference episode.

Figuratively speaking, I think I threw up a little here.

Starlight Glimmer: Edgy.

As if I didn't have enough reasons to want to wipe out the character already.

Those cheat sheets are every bit as bad as you said they were last time, and I still find myself appalled at how awful they turned out to be. Even ones like "Simple Ways", which I consider one of my season favourites, is not a good reference for Rarity. Pinkie Pie's have some blatant omissions (why isn't "Pinkie Pride" or "A Party of One" on there? The hell has "Bats!" got on her?).

Look, I'm not picking out examples all day. It's damning enough that one of Twilight's reference episodes is "Lesson Zero", which even ignoring my conviction that it tainted her character, was supposed to be a one-off incident she learned from, not an example of her ongoing character.

Let's roll it further back, though: the idea of cheat sheets is itself a damning indictment of the system in play here. I sat down once and worked out how many episodes over the first seven seasons you'd have to watch to see each of the major characters get a major focus. If you don't have to watch the whole show, then that amounts to, at most, about ten to fifteen hours of straight watching. At most.

That seems onerous, but it could be done in about a week, and they're getting paid for this as a job, remember. Watching about one season's worth of a show is not a terrible, crippling chore.

To be fair, you don't have to go as high as fifteen hours, of course. That's an exaggeration. But three episodes is one hour. Three episodes is just ridiculous. And when they're three episodes that don't even make sense?

Add in that pathetically thin main character's sheet, and the fact that the system couldn't even be bothered with whole episodes and cheapened out with clips? Well, what do you expect at this point other than a total quality collapse?

Another point where I started to realize how little respect I had for this part of the show.

If only one of the story editors hadn't joined at about the same time as most of these freelance writers, and hadn't familiarised herself with the show through this exact same process. And if only the other story editor had given a fuck at any point at all and tried to do something about it.

This, exactly.

---

It's all so meta and self-aware! Except that the clichés keep fucking happening anyway.

A self-contradicting, hypocritical style that is one reason I remain, at best, wary of self-styled post-modernism (apart from the fact the school of thought seems hopelessly messy, nonsensical, and pointless in itself). You know you've got lazy writing when it combines being awful with flaunting how aware it is that it's awful. At least meta-humour elsewhere works largely by giving you something worth caring about in all that, like actual funny stuff, endearing characters, or a thematic point.

I'll skip over all the vase-breaking clumsiness, because I'm starting to feel like a broken record and I can only say "I agree with you" so many times.

Especially:

Ah, but Chrysalis saved the best for last! She's bringing something new and fresh to the table:

Racism!

Fuck the show for trying to make intertribal racism a thing in fucking Equestria. The show was already progressive, for god's sake: it's written into the bloody DNA that the three tribes get along so well. It's not even just that it's an incompatible idea: what a horrible, backwards theme to stick into a fictional and optimistic world just for brownie points and shoddy storytelling.

I cannot express how much I utterly, completely hated this shoehorned-in prejudice angle, especially in the finale, especially with what a complete lack of insight the show offered as "compensation" for going against the themes of the series, and especially especially for the limp-wristed way they tried to pass it off in a setting where their foundational myth was still capable of drawing gasps from the audience just reminding them that "hating other ponies" was a thing. Yet this season expects me to believe racial tension is still a thing in this setting, and can be triggered by a complete stranger spouting bullshit?

This sort of thing didn't even work well in Star Vs, and that had a fantasy setting built for it. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to tell this side of canon to fuck off.

I'll have much more to say about season nine's honest-to-fuckness race war subplot when we get to the finale, but for now, I just want to say that I find it absolutely fucking hysterical that they seriously put this into the show and thought that it was a good idea. That's really all it took! Chrysalis just walks up to some unicorns, tells them that they should be racist, and they're racist now! Truly a deep and hard-hitting commentary on the insidious nature of radicalisation.

Exactly. It wasn't even worth it. They add nothing to the issue besides scoring off its topical nature for a quick win. It's worse than the queerbaiting earlier; at least that didn't fracture the show trying to force itself into the framework.

It's a cheap, repugnant shortcut to try and wring something meaningful out of this season's story, just like those cheat sheets tried to wring something consistent out of the series' established cast. It ended up being a disservice all around.

Cadance is the obvious and superior choice in nearly every respect.

Ah, but you're putting actual thought into this, remember? That's clearly not what this season is all about.

Okay, sure, Twilight has a proven track record of defeating villains and making friends, but running a country requires a little more than that. It requires someone with knowledge, experience, relevant skills, confidence, political instincts, and preferably a level head, or at least some of those qualities. But Twilight has none of them.

To be fair, this has been a problem ever since she ascended. Becoming a political figure requires that the show overall commit to it, but apart from a few flickers of acknowledgement in Seasons Four and Five, it never stood a chance of committing to such a long-term project. The writing and directorial staff who were consistently around for the first five seasons nevertheless had trouble making much out of long-term story arcs, as Season Four demonstrated. In which case, expecting Twilight's political acumen to ever be examined or demonstrated was always going to be a stretch in canon.

In canon. Reminder that people have been writing "Princess Twilight" fanfics for a long time.

---

5421170

I talked with Larson about "Slice of Life" and mentioned that my displeasure with it was mainly that it severed itself too much from the more 'solid' narrative.

That's really amazing. When did you meet Larson? Was it at one of the major pony conventions? I never attended.

5421264

Rolling back would imply the character returning to some prior, still recognizable state. This is not what’s going on here.

Seconded. Even at their worst, early seasons versions of these characters were not as terribly written as they were in these later seasons.

[DannyJ]

5421264

Rolling back would imply the character returning to some prior, still recognizable state. This is not what’s going on here.

Sad but true.

5421381

I disliked these as early as Season Four

People used to complain about these all the time, and I was always like, "Come on, what's the big deal! They're just a bunch of silly faces!"

Then I watched season nine.

media0.giphy.com/media/87jGhdRVzUOJNh2s0q/giphy.gif

am I the only one weirded out by a celebrity stand-in being paired off with a main character?

It's a common sentiment. Personally, I don't care all that much, but I do get it.

Are we seriously trying to convey that Weird Al wanted this self-insert scenario?

I doubt that. This was probably the writers' idea. At best, they probably asked Weird Al if he was okay with it, and he didn't object. He's a pretty easygoing guy.

What's wrong with Quidditch? Seems to make sense to me.

Other people have broken the game down in more detail than I, but the big one that comes to mind for me is that the point distribution makes no sense. The seekers and the golden snitch are effectively the only players and game piece that matters. A Quidditch game can theoretically be over in less than a minute.

Aren't honesty and kindness things she should have down pat by this point?

Twilight couldn't even handle loyalty, which is one of the more basic Elements. I think you're expecting too much of her.

Those cheat sheets are every bit as bad as you said they were last time, and I still find myself appalled at how awful they turned out to be.

Seeing those cheat sheets for the first time on the 4chan leak thread was an eye-opener for sure.

That seems onerous, but it could be done in about a week, and they're getting paid for this as a job, remember. Watching about one season's worth of a show is not a terrible, crippling chore.

Funnily enough, when I went back to find that Larson interview I linked earlier in the review, he said something much similar.

lh3.googleusercontent.com/MX78IuUOoZy5yGjMfMy8keg7horkhoO8Vmz5h7uuQsq1HglKgScdWo9ICKSQKcdr2bV-lpSdkvGt7T0XwUdKe0tlkJXZwLQDpgQbi5_UumhOjAxbxHR6U8Tx4u6iW2qRCKDHZZBm

This is really depressing in retrospect.

Exactly. It wasn't even worth it. They add nothing to the issue besides scoring off its topical nature for a quick win. It's worse than the queerbaiting earlier; at least that didn't fracture the show trying to force itself into the framework.

Yup. I mean, I've defended fucking HBO Watchmen. I like to think that I have a reasonable tolerance for the oversaturation of social justice themes in every single facet of entertainment these days. But the last two seasons of FiM were probably the most horribly crowbarred-in examples of such I've ever seen.

In which case, expecting Twilight's political acumen to ever be examined or demonstrated was always going to be a stretch in canon.

It would've been easy if we'd just had a good writer like Larson at the helm instead of Haber and Vogel. No matter what else you may feel about them otherwise, Princess Spike and Party Pooped are good proof of concept that you can show Twilight developing her political skills, even if only as a background element, and still have a regular FiM style of episode.

[PresentPerfect]

I love these writeups because you're able to pinpoint so many of the issues that I have with the later seasons but was never really able to articulate in depth. I want to transmogrify this review of Dark and Dawn and make it physical so I can make love to it, except that would get into creepy ethical consent issues, so it's probably a good thing I don't have the ability to do that. :B

I don't understand why her friends always feel the need to lie to and manipulate her to teach her a lesson instead of just fucking talking to her, but I guess that that's just her lot in life.

If you're not constantly stroking Dash's ego, all she hears is white noise. A lengthy lecture could actually put her into a coma.

WOW do I hate these character cheat sheets. It's like intentional sabotage. No wonder the later seasons were ass!

[DannyJ]

5421525

I want to transmogrify this review of Dark and Dawn and make it physical so I can make love to it, except that would get into creepy ethical consent issues, so it's probably a good thing I don't have the ability to do that. :B

I enthusiastically consent to this.

[Alondro]

5421175 I had chatted with Larson A LOT early on, since I was Bronycon staff.

We actually discussed some amazing ideas with what could be done with Chrysalis and the changelings, which inspired that unfinished story of mine that gave them the backstory that they were once the G1 Flutterponies, whom the 3 tribes left to freeze when the Windigoes appeared. Their young Queen Lacewing summoned Discord to save them in an act of desperation, and he granted their wish for revenge by twisting them into the changelings, untouched by the windigoes because they no longer had hearts to freeze, and able to feed on the ponies' love which the ponies had denied to them by abandoning them.

It made them a much more interesting species, both pitiable and more horrible by what drove them.

It also added so much to Discord, and gave him a history as an otherworldly horror from between the dimensions. Kinda like a Bill Cipher, before Bill Cipher appeared!

[DannyJ]

5421381

Think 5421743 meant to reply to you here.

[Alondro]

5421381 Yep, Bronycon. I was staff from 2011 to the very end. Since I knew how crowds moved based on event popularity and convention size, I arranged by schedule to allow myself to attend one of his signing sessions at the same time that Bronypalooza was going on. So the lines were tiny and I could chat with him for quite a while.

I knew I'd made a major impact when I saw him the next year and he waved and said, "Oh hi, Alondro."

Also got to know John De Lancie pretty well. Had dinner with him, Lauren, and Tara as I was a producer of the really long-named Brony documentary. I threw money at it because it sounded cool to be a producer. Throwing money at things is what producers do.

[Impossible Numbers]

5421743
5421751

I remember you mentioning John de Lancie before, because you and he talked about a sailing hobby (I think it wasn't you specifically who sailed, but a relative... your father, was it?).

That's honestly astounding, and pretty damn cool to boot. I can only wish I had an opportunity like that.

[Alondro]

5423334 Yep, my dad and John both share that hobby. Dad hasn't been able to do much with it lately, which is fine since we have many major housing projects we need to work on.

[Impossible Numbers]

If you ask me, Cadance would have been a far better choice for the next ruling princess. At least Cadance has her life together and is competent at everything that we see her doing. At least Cadance isn't a huge bitch. Cadance is the senior princess, with more experience than Twilight with ruling, especially in the political and administrative aspects, since she runs her own mini-kingdom and all. Fucking hell, Twilight didn't even discover the concept of delegating work until four episodes ago. Cadance is the obvious and superior choice in nearly every respect. Is there any good reason to pick Twilight over her other than main character favouritism?

Well, now I can credit this review series for helping me revise my opinion about Cadence (yes, I'm spelling it like that, and no, I'm not apologizing) and showing her in a new light. Before, I was largely indifferent and unimpressed with her character, but even ignoring the Season Nine comparison, the idea that Cadence is in her own right a well-adjusted role model (lover, ruler, working mother, etc.) caught my eye.

True, it was more a slow-burn inspiration over the last few months than an instant "eureka" moment, but recently I've found - having paid more attention to the character for a fic I was writing - that there's actually more potential here than I'd hitherto given her credit for. So yeah, put that on the list of reasons why this blog series is awesome. Ta very much, mate!

[DannyJ]

5602331

I'm curious, so I've got to ask, how many times have you re-read these blogs now? I feel like I'm always seeing some new comment from you on this series about your latest insights or reflections. You're probably my most recurring reader.

By the way, thanks for pointing Mike my way. We had some pretty interesting discussions about the G5 movie.

[Impossible Numbers]

5602430

I'm curious, so I've got to ask, how many times have you re-read these blogs now? I feel like I'm always seeing some new comment from you on this series about your latest insights or reflections. You're probably my most recurring reader.

Honestly lost count. Some of the stuff you talk about is really damn fascinating enough to bounce around in my head, so it feels like I've read some bits more than I actually have. At a guess: Probably once every few weeks, or something? It's not comprehensive, anyway: I usually just come back for choice portions I liked.

I feel no shame.

I mean, in all seriousness I'm entertained by these blogs. There's a lot more going on here than "Wow, that Season Seven/Eight/Nine, wasn't it shit?" And like I said, I do pick up some cool details to steal borrow.

By the way, thanks for pointing Mike my way. We had some pretty interesting discussions about the G5 movie.

I will point your way anyone who tells me they hated the later seasons. It's what any Good Samaritan would do.

Joking aside: My pleasure!

[DannyJ]

5602449

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