Twilight found herself back inside Sugarcube Corner, seated alongside five other ponies. She took in her surroundings and turned to Applejack.
“Five minutes again?”
“Yep.”
“Wow!” Pinkie said, oblivious to their conversation. “Rarity’s doing an amazing job hosting the Judys so far!”
The six ponies were all watching a large flat-screen television mounted on the wall. The last four notes of a bold, spectacular musical number came through the speakers. At the center of the screen stood Rarity in a shimmering gold gown, standing on her hind legs with her forelegs spread wide and her front hooves rapidly rotating back and forth.
Twilight didn’t have time to both wonder why she didn’t get to see or hear the musical number whose preparation had been such a big deal five minutes ago and wonder how much time had passed since she was face down in the grass. She focused on wondering about the latter. Only wondering, though. She had come to the conclusion that there was no point in trying to press the inhabitants for answers.
“Thank you! Thank you! You’re all too kind!” Rarity said as she stood behind a microphone. Now she was wearing a blue satin dress. “It is my great honor to welcome you to what I assure you shall be the most glamorous Judys in television history!”
Rainbow Dash grabbed a hoofful of popcorn from a bowl on the floor and shoved it in her mouth. She said, “She sure looks classy up there,” then swallowed and belched.
From the screen, Rarity said, “We have the debonair Finn Tastic with us tonight.” As the audience applauded, the program showed a shot of a dolphin dressed in a velvet jacket lounging in a large glass bowl filled with water. Twilight wondered both whether the dolphin was sapient and what was keeping Rarity from freaking out over fine velvet getting wet. “And I must say, sir,” Rarity continued, “you are the dolphinition of class.”
Fluttershy collapsed onto her back in a fit of laughter.
After a few seconds and no sign of her stopping, the visiting Twilight asked, “Does she need help?”
Applejack said, “Nah, she’s okay. It’s just something that we went through a while back. You’d understand if you knew what had happened in the past.”
“But you said—” she replied before forcing herself to stop. To herself, she muttered, “It won’t help, Twilight. It’ll only make you angry.”
Rarity said, “And now, it is my pleasure to present the first award of the night: Best Comedy Series!” An unfamiliar unicorn mare walked over while levitating an envelope and a statuette. Rarity reached for the envelope as the shot changed to a split screen showing four different ponies in the audience.
“And the Judy goes to… TackStriver!”
As the sound of the orchestra came from the television, the visiting Twilight said, “Did she just say TackStriver was the best comedy series?”
The native Twilight replied, “Oh, that’s right. If you don’t have television in your dimension, then you wouldn’t know about TackStriver.”
“No, I’m very familiar with TackStriver. It’s a book series about a mare who gets herself out of dangerous situations using her scientific knowledge and engineering skill. It ended a while back – I have the entire collection. But while Money Hunter may have served as comic relief from time to time, the series as a whole was definitely more action and drama than comedy.”
“That’s all true here as well,” the native Twilight said, “but last year, they rebooted the series and turned it into a TV comedy. Oh! I know – I’ll show you.”
She got up and trotted over to the kitchen, leaving the others to watch the awards ceremony. Twilight followed her.
“That’s nice of you to offer, but I don’t have time to watch several episodes of—”
“Don’t worry!” the native Twilight said as she rummaged through the cupboard. She pulled out three similar-looking bottles. “These potions will allow you to experience the entire season in an instant!”
The visiting Twilight took a cautious step back. “I thought you had no control over what your potions did to you.”
“Only sometimes,” the native Twilight said, seemingly contradicting an earlier precedent that may not have been explicitly stated but was certainly implied. “But potions are also useful when we need to accomplish a specific ancillary task and there’s no other easy way to do it. And these potions will show you the entire season of TackStriver with no other effects to your mind or body.”
“Even if that’s true, isn’t that piracy?”
Rainbow Dash came swinging in on a rope, a tricorne hat on her head and a patch over her eye. “Did somepony say—”
“Not that kind of piracy.”
With no warning, the native Twilight shoved the first bottle into the visiting Twilight’s mouth and pushed her head upward, causing her to swallow the entire contents. She quickly repeated the action with the other two bottles.
After gasping for air, the visiting Twilight angrily sputtered, “Why would y—”
At which point her body went rigid and her eyes turned into orange and yellow concentric circles growing and expanding from the center.
After a few seconds, her eyes returned to normal and she staggered backward. “What was that?!” she exclaimed.
“TackStriver,” the other Twilight said.
“Yes, I gathered as much,” she said. “I was being rhetorical. Expressing my disbelief that somepony thought it was a good idea to create a series where characters who are known for traveling all over the world spend more than half of the episodes just sitting around the Caladrius Foundation headquarters.”
“What’s wrong with that? I liked it.”
“What’s wrong with that? The show repeatedly disregarded or contradicted established TackStriver canon! F-Stop is Tack’s mortal archnemesis, not some frenemy prankster who pops in on occasion for minor mischief! Thorn Grinder is supposed to be Tack’s boss, but the show acts like Tack is the one who calls all the shots! And when Tack builds something, she does so using the items she has available to her – she doesn’t summon random objects out of nowhere! If she had the magical power to perform those kinds of summoning spells, then why wouldn’t she just summon a blowtorch instead of trying to build one?”
“You do realize that those are all really nitpicky complaints. Yeah, they tweaked the characters’ personalities a little, but it’s a new series – of course they’re not going to adhere to every single bit of canon from the previous one.”
“But you can’t capriciously pick and choose which aspects of a series you’re going to ignore just because that’s what’s convenient for whatever story of the moment you want to tell!”
“It’s a comedy, Twilight! The point is to make jokes! This version isn’t worried about maintaining a series-long narrative – you can’t complain that it’s failed to succeed at something it never intended to do.”
On the other side of the bakery, Pinkie placed the awards ceremony on pause, resulting in a still image of Rarity – now wearing a puffy wine-red gown – making a contorted face as she was stopped mid-word. She and the other three ponies got up and walked over to the perimeter of where the two Twilights stood.
“But it has failed at what it intended to do. If the audience doesn’t understand who the characters are, then it undermines the comedy. When Thorn said that Money Hunter always has her head in the clouds, the joke was referring to all the times she would fly Tack from place to place and provide aerial reconnaissance. But in this series, she’s never more than five meters off the ground – there’s no evidence that she spends any time in the clouds! The show wants to divorce itself from the previous series and do callbacks to it at the same time!”
Rainbow Dash scooped another pile of popcorn into her mouth as the bowl slowly traveled toward Fluttershy. The reason the bowl was slowly moving across the floor was because it was balanced on the back of a small tortoise.
The native Twilight said, “They aren’t callbacks. The show is taking familiar characters and finding new and interesting things for them to do. If you love the characters so much, then don’t you want to see them return so they can do new things?”
“Not when they don’t act like themselves. Those weren’t Tack, Thorn, and Hunter – those were amateurish imitations of the original characters.”
Pinkie set a bucket of caramel corn down on the floor in front of her. She then took a long, translucent, pink twisty straw, stuck it into the bucket, and began sucking the popcorn into her mouth.
“No they weren’t – they were new takes on the original characters. It’s refreshing to see them in new circumstances rather than pigeonholed into the same tired stories they’ve been restricted to for so many years. For example, it’s novel and amusing to see that the scary, evil F-Stop secretly has a soft spot in her heart for cute little ducklings. That wasn’t an imitation – it was unexpected and inventive. Something funny and different for the character to do.”
“But like I said, that’s only funny if you already know that in the original series, F-Stop would never behave like that. In the context of this series, it isn’t a funny surprise – it’s who she normally is. There’s a difference between subverting expectations in a clever way and just having a character act contrary to their personality for the sake of lazy comedy.”
Applejack looked out toward the distance, away from the two Twilights as well as any of the others in the room. “Not since Buckler and Vidalia did two ponies debate so fiercely,” she said.
“Maybe the problem is that you’re trying to psychologically analyze fictional characters,” the native Twilight said. “I think you’re digging way too deep into what you think constitutes proper TackStriver lore.”
“That’s because the previous series had a lot to dig into. It was around long enough, and told enough stories, that its fans grew to love the characters, and cared about them as ponies, as much as they loved the stories told with those characters. Now here’s a new series that takes the characters that so many ponies adore and treats them as little more than conduits for surface-level jokes.”
“Right! Jokes! You keep going on about characters and canon when the entire point of this new series is to be a comedy. And if you’d stop complaining that the show isn’t what it used to be – which is your own personal metric; the show never once endeavored to be that – and actually enjoy it for what it is, you’d see that the show is fun. And the jokes are funny.”
“If it’s only about the jokes, then why didn’t they create some new characters to deliver those jokes? If the show didn’t endeavor to be like its predecessor, then why bring TackStriver into this at all? They could have created a new workplace comedy about agents who hang around a research institute all the time and get into wacky, light high jinks. Hay, they could have even set it in some other division of the Caladrius Foundation if they were so worried about the branding. Instead they tried to leech off of the popularity of the old characters while taking no responsibility to ensure those characters behaved in the way that made them popular in the first place.”
Off to the side, Pinkie Pie said, “Hey, Rainbow Dash! Look at this cake I have!” She showed her a five-tiered, multicolored cake. With a windmill motion of her forelegs, she began reaching behind the cake to eat slices of it while the overall shape of the dessert remained intact.
The visiting Twilight gestured toward the three empty potion bottles. “This series only accomplished two things. One, it alienated the fans who don’t like that the same characters are acting in unfamiliar ways. And two, it confused any potential new viewers because the series never explained the foundation of the setting, as that had already been established in the old series.”
Applejack said to Fluttershy, “After the Judys are over, do you want to go to the Ponyville Playhouse? Big Macintosh will be doing his one-pony mime show.”
Fluttershy said, “I’m sorry, I can’t – that’s the same time Harry will make his debut as Fuzzik in The Prince’s Bride at the sanctuary.”
The native Twilight stood on her hind legs and threw up her forelegs in frustration. “I never thought I’d say this about a Twilight Sparkle, but you’re too analytical! Why don’t you stop asking questions for a minute and just have fun with us?”
The visiting Twilight put a hoof to her own chest in shock, stopped to think for a moment, and then gave a single nod of composed recognition. “Twilight, this isn’t getting either of us anywhere. I never thought I’d say this about alternate-dimension versions of my best friends, but I think it would be for the best if we went our own separate ways and never saw each other again.”
“I agree. The realities that shaped us are clearly very different, and obviously we’re never going to persuade the other into understanding.”
“You’re right about that.” She thought for a moment. “I suppose…” she said with hope in her voice, “this serves as a good example of how even when you find out you don’t have as much in common with a friend as you had expected or desired, you can still respect that those things you find most unfamiliar might be important to them. It shouldn’t preclude the friendship.”
“I guess that’s a valid lesson,” the other Twilight said, “but analyzing life lessons in the context of friendship isn’t really a priority here.”
“That’s it – I’m leaving.”
With no reluctance whatsoever, the visiting Twilight walked to the mirror from which she had initially emerged. Without even checking to see whether it was still penetrable, she stepped through it, back to her home dimension.
The remaining five ponies sat around the room in an uncomfortable silence.
Finally, Pinkie Pie spoke. “So who won?”
The others simply looked at one another.
Rainbow Dash said, “Can I be the winner?”
A trophy poofed into existence beside her. She stood on her hind legs and proudly held it in the air.