Hello all!

I had the idea to create this group while reflecting about the battle between Twilight and Tirek, which to me felt wrong on several levels. Here's a summary of my thoughts on it.

Basically, I think the battle was filler.

Tirek is presented at first as an intelligent and cunning character. During most of the two parts episode he solves and overcomes the obstacles in his path through subterfuge and smooth talk, only confronting somepony openly when he feels he's in such a superior position as to the render any resistance futile.

But then, out of nowhere, he receives the idiot ball and decides to confront a Princess directly, even though he know she somehow has in her possession not only her own power, but that of three other alicorns. The battle follows.

Now, what would the cunning Tirek, the one that wasn't holding the idiot ball, do under a more sensible, Faustian script?

In my opinion, he'd teleport near Twilight already carrying the captured Mane 6 and Discord, the former imprisoned in that cage Discord had created. He'd then threaten Twilight, telling her to either cede the power or her friends would suffer the consequences. If Twilight showed indecision, he could then send a fireball to destroy the Golden Oak Library, and at her expression of horror warn her: "This was the first and last warning, Princess. Either you cede the power now, or the next one will be within this cage!", pointing to Fluttershy etc. Then the episode would continue as is, with Twilight forgiving Discord and so on and so forth.

Ten to twenty seconds of dialogue. No unneeded violence. One explosion, if that much. Direct to the point. Lean, no excess of fat. No filler. No fanservice or other unnecessary aspects. Pure story. A plot that sustains itself.

That's how I believe Lauren Faust would have done the scene. Provided, of course, she'd have done this story to begin with.

Oh yeah. The first thoughts through my head after that (well, after the "Just for little girls. Riiight.") were: hang on, is this even in the same universe as most of S3-S4? It sure isn't anything like S1-S2.

If Chatoyance wanted to make a sequel to Around The Bend, I think Twi's attempts to find her original home have somehow backfired. This episode and Power Ponies in particular make me think she's caused an even greater divergence, and things are coming completely unglued.

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is this even in the same universe as most of S3-S4? It sure isn't anything like S1-S2.

The reason for this, as far as I understand it, is that TV and Hollywood have six basic target audiences: boys, girls, male teens, female teens, adult men and adult women, and any show or movie targets two or three of those, usually nearby ones. This is why, for example, an action movie made for male teens usually includes a token romance: so that it expands its target audience into the nearby female teen audience managing to earn a little more.

MLP:FiM was unusual in that it targeted the very extremes of the scale: children (particularly girls) plus adults (particularly men). But with its expansion in popularity a lot of teens entered the rank of fans, in particular male teens, and this is an audience that loves them some explosions and stuff. Hasbro, being Hasbro, decided they wanted even more of this public's money, and so, I suppose, the order went: add stuff that attracts them. In other words, they're trying to expand the show target audience into the middle audience groups by, first, going for the "school life plus romance" of Equestria Girls in seek of female teens; and now the "epic battles with lots of violence and pyrotechnics" in seek of male teens.

And the worst thing is that it is working. Given how successful the S4 finale was, breaking all Hub records, we can probably expect more of this stuff, perhaps even with a second attempt at bad taste fanservice like what we saw in the first episodes of S4, with vines suggestive of tentacle porn, Fluttershy sexily bouncing her buttocks around etc. And I say second attempt because, since this kind of fanservice didn't recur in the later parts of S4, my guess is that there was enough of a negative reaction for Hasbro to give up going down this path, at least for now.

What I find funny and sad at the same time, however, is how the reactions to the battle are mostly complimentary. Sad because they prove Hasbro was right (from an profit perspective, evidently) in doing it. And funny because people are saying that with this the show is "maturing", when in reality it was mature from the very start, and investing in pyrotechnic violence is actually a regression from maturity down into adolescence.

If there's any solace, it's in the fact that adults and children still are target audiences, and so we can expect violence to be short and restricted to a few episodes, not expanding into all of them.

By the way, since I named this group "Faustian Orthodoxy", I think I'll start calling these bad episodes the "Meghanic Heresy". It balances well.

If Chatoyance wanted to make a sequel to Around The Bend

Oh! I'd so love that! Chat, please do it!

Oh, I understand the broad strokes of the marketing pressures, I was referring to the in-universe contradictions. While the Tirek battle was certainly impressive as a technical matter, it made no sense in the show's universe, as you explained above. Sadly, I wouldn't be surprised if we just witnessed the birth of a love-foal between DBZ, Sailor Moon, and Power Rangers. They've done all the set-up for "super friends in their castle of awesome fly around the world smiting evil and delivering the moral of the week", and while I'm sure DHX can make that look awesome, it's not quite what drew most of us to the show. I'm trying not to panic too hard over next season, though.

Oh ho-ho, my review of the Tirak epis?

<sarcastic-rant>
Ok, so megan mcarthy found out that Lauren Faust's vision for My Little Pony Friendship is Magic, came from the stories she created from the original MLP from '84. Megan thought, “what a great idea!” and pulled out her diary from fourth grade and read about one of the games of Tales of the Crystals that she played with her friends and kid brother where they mixed in My Little Pony as well. Immediately, she thought to herself, “This'll work!” However, she missed the part where Faust had been keeping those stories in the back of her mind for all of her life, perfecting them over her lifetime.

The plot for Twilight's Kingdom was only slightly changed from megan's Tales of the Crystals game. She omitted Scorpan, changed Spike's role to Discord's, and had four princesses instead of one. But other than that it's the same story she dribbled out as a child.
</sarcastic-rant>

Now for a little damning comments. Personally, I don't consider anything past season one to be canon, but if I did... In the sombre epis, we learn that Celestia has the power of “dark magic”. Personally, I don't believe that there is a true difference between these magics except that dark magic carries the direct and willful intent to harm others. Luna probably has these skills as well. Sucking the soul (magic) out of somepony is certainly dark magic, so if this power existed in the world of Equestria, Celestia would not have been vulnerable against Tirak's pathetic version of it. In Magical Mystery Cure, we are shown that Celestia... is god - not as an exaggeration to say that she is great, but that when your friends accidentally incinerate you, she is the all powerful entity you meet in the afterlife, and has the power to instantaneously bring you back to life in a perfect unblemished body.

Considering her goddesshood, there is not a chance in hell that Celestia would even consider giving her power to another soul, but if she did, the resulting collapse of the universe would be so far beyond any mortal comprehension of “boom” that the effect would probably end up looking something like this.

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Yeah, Tia's power-level has been all over the map in-show lately, and makes no sense whatsoever. And speaking of Tia, when she told an upset Twi that her destiny wasn't set, I flashed back to last season's finale and yelled "bullshit!" You remember, the one with the whole song-and-dance routine about Twi fulfilling her destiny? Make up your mind, guys!

3288776 Maybe you don't understand, the hasbro bean counters don't want their writers or you to make up your minds, because that would be counter productive to The System. What system? The fact is that people watch entertainment TV to experience emotion, this can be observed by counting the beans in the fact that if you observed X number of people watching Y number of TV programs with different plots and themes, the ones that would be rated the highest by average are the ones that caused emotion not the ones with solid or relatable plot lines. The “obvious” result is that the executives will want to create a show that produces this emotion in nearly every second to attract the largest number of views for their profit margins.

This standard model of executive thinking rules out the possibility of a rational plot driven series, because a rational sensible plot line with a realistic progression of emotions would only have a small fraction of the extreme emotions in its entire duration. I liken this to a cake, where the entire show is the sweet bread and the extreme emotions are the icing on top. The bean counters only want icing; no cake. A sensible author's story is like a garden; it takes time to grow. Emotions are like water to this garden. Too little and it dries up, too much and it is washed away. The bean counters have no respect for the story, so they do not allow one person who actually CARES about the story to write the show. Instead they hire a crew, picked for blasting emotion like water from a fire engine, all of whose written repertoire is a collection of stupidly over emotional tropy garbage they use and reuse on every show for which they are hired only slightly changing their original script for the purpose of just barely tying it in to the show they were hired to write.

… Lauren Faust knew that the threat of this happening to her creation always loomed, so she wrote the core of her story into the first episode secretly telling more of the story than was actually said, so that no matter how much utter bullshit comes after, the original could trump any garbage that came after no matter how hard they tried to rewrite it. The original writing team was not as bad as described above. I believe Faust kept them in line and didn't accept deviation from her story. I imagine how frustrating it may have been for some of them to throw hundreds of scripts at her using the standard model only to have them rejected until real effort was given, but maybe they all worked together harmoniously.

If you watch the episodes by writer you will see that the good epis are written by those who have continuity from each of their personal episodes to the next. I believe there have been writers who have tried to make a real story, and unfortunately, there HAVE been writers who would not win fourth grade writing contests with the episodes that have aired. You could say that MLP has MPD, Multiple Personality Disorder, but no it just has MWD, Multiple Writer Disorder.

There is no such thing as “canon” in MLP anymore, but if you want to know what is right, compare each episode to Faust's first.

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I think the last line answers the whole question. Lauren Faust would never have done this cliched story.