Dragonshy review! · 2:02am Jul 5th, 2021
...Wasn't I doing something? Oh yeah, I was.
Well, this episode was a little odd. I remember jokes the fandom made about why Celestia didn't send her army to get rid of the dragon. Given what we find out later, I think that was plan B, and sending the pony she was grooming to be her successor to try the diplomatic solution was plan A, seeing as the dragon's have a government. No need to risk war at mistreating a dragon, even if the dragon was in the wrong.
Still, why does Twilight refer to dragons as animals? Not only do they have sentience, she has one in her family. And how did Rainbow Dash not know Fluttershy was afraid of dragons, given that they've been friends since childhood?
And I believe this is the first appearance of the demon bunny. He's pretty funny here.
This was another episode that was kind of meh. I appreciate that this wasn't about Fluttershy having to prove her worth to the group, which I think a lot of shows would have gone with. But I was still wondering why they didn't send her back to Ponyville. Her expertise with animals shouldn't have mattered, for reasons I mentioned.
Really, I'm thinking the show's charm carried it through the first season.
Next episode... I think will give me a bit to talk about.
Technically Angel first appeared in Ticket Master, but this was the first episode we see him acting like a “demon” which would become his entire personality going forward.
Yeah, this is another episode that's kind of plagued by "Early Installment Weirdness" and it would be better if they could ever come back to it.
Worse, they kept Spike out of the episode. And it was about dragons.
You'd think he'd be at least interested in joining.
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In the first couple of seasons, the writers kept Spike out of anything adventurous. Probably because they hadn't really settled on how old he was. (Okay, they never really did. But they decided it was okay for him to come along on adventures anyway starting in season three.)
The dragons of Dragonshy are better than their later-season dragon society dragons. The way other species would be handled in later seasons of FiM showed a major failure in imagination. Why do they all have two-parent nuclear families with a clear leader of their respective villages?
Why not make it so that the Dragon Lord only is relevant to juvenile dragons? The adult dragons are too busy napping in their caves to care what the Dragon Lord decrees. At least the dragons weren’t a clear case of two-parent families being the norm: they seemed to incubate eggs and raise young more so in communal age cohorts than in separated family groups. Meeting the parents of Fluttershy & Dash were missed chances to show a pegasus society that practiced free love and raised their foals communally.
In fairness, "dragons" is a pretty uncommon stimulus for a phobia, even in Equestria, so I don't know if it's that unlikely that it wouldn't have come up. Though that does make one wonder how she got that phobia in the first place, but I suppose if we understood that sort of thing completely, phobias would be a lot easier to deal with. Would make my life easier, at any rate.