Time to Help · 5:36pm Nov 20th, 2021
And so we begin what one might reasonably call the last bit of G4.
But let's talk about MLP Generations #1 before we move forward.
The moral I see here is that eternal punishments make eternal enemies. I won't deny that Grackle and Dyre show destructive impulses independent of their desire for revenge—I don't imagine they've had much in the way of positive role models in their lives anyway—but certainly it's not hard to trace a source for their animosity towards ponies, and maybe if they weren't banished to a volcano they would have some positive role models.
Do you think Grackle and Dyre have fathers (in a biological sense, anyway—it seems safe to conclude they were raised purely by their mothers and grandmother)? For all we know witches just reproduce asexually via magic.
With the Faculty of Friendship being so overworked, do you think Rarity has been forced to stop personally making all the dresses for all three of her boutiques?
I guess there are limits to whatever time magic has been allowing the school to operate with a small faculty who have full-time jobs and passions on the side.
The fact that Starlight had to get help to do research to figure out they've been admitting too many students does not speak well of her abilities as a headmare. Setting admissions to a sustainable level is clearly her job, and it's not hard to figure out that adding fifteen students per faculty member (including those who don't teach) in a school with no TAs (ever since the one self-nominated TA got thrown in Tartarus) is going to be a big increase in workload.
Does anybody else kind of want to arrange a playdate between Trench and Tiberius? Sure, Trench is allegedly a lava goblin, but he looks like an opossum. And it's not like Tibbles never gets up to mischief.
I love puns as much as the next person who has chosen to subscribe to the bad-puns mailing list at work, but even I think calling Hayvard a "unicorniversity" is a bit forced. It's not like we don't have a canonical example of a school calling itself a normal "university"; why's Hayvard trying so hard?
So obviously one of the new teachers has a deadly nightshade cutie mark and is surely named Belladonna (side note: if you do a Google image search for "deadly nightshade flowers," you get a lot of bittersweet nightshade and black nightshade, maybe half of which is labelled as the correct species), and another has a snowflake and is probably named Frost Something, but what's the third one got? Is it an egg? Is it a snowball? Is it a generic white circle? It's just so nondescript.
The most surprising thing to me is Trixie's complete absence from the faculty meeting/welcome party. Which is a real shame; if anypony could tell these three are coming in with malicious intent, it'd be her. (Though you'd think the evil cackling would a tipoff...)
Also, whatever he is, Trench can chew his way through the fabric of time and space. Among other consequences, I have no choice but to make him a planeswalker in tomorrow's card blog.