I should really be coherent when posting these, and should've gone to bed a good while ago. Oh well.

So the next episode is "A Trivial Pursuit", by Brittany Jo Flores. Guess she wrote Once Upon a Zeppelin, too, and wrote for Skylanders Academy. Which makes sense, since Josh Haber was story editor over there, and some other mlp writers write over there.

I'm gonna guess this actually is Twilight inviting all her friends over for Trivial Pursuit. Only it's magical or something. Angel's cheating, Rainbow Dash is bored, and Discord's insisting some of the answers are actually incorrect. If Starburst is visiting, maybe he wins. He seems like he'd be good at it.

As usual, you can discuss the episode over here, whether speculating beforehand or commenting afterwards...

--Sweetie Belle

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I'm gonna guess this actually is Twilight inviting all her friends over for Trivial Pursuit. Only it's magical or something. Angel's cheating, Rainbow Dash is bored, and Discord's insisting some of the answers are actually incorrect. If Starburst is visiting, maybe he wins. He seems like he'd be good at it.

God, I wish we'd gotten this over what we got in the actual episode. What we got in the actual episode was so much worse.

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Have anyone saw the movie game night? What if that was the plot of the episode instead of a trivia contest

> inb4 the lesson is not to win, but to have fun

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Well, I guess we haven't had a focus character behaving like a total immature brat since... er... last week. I mean, I prefer this episode since plenty of it was actually funny, but this felt like it belonged in S2 rather than S9. Actually, Twilight's behaviour reminded me quite a bit of "Lesson Zero" -- which I love, but in its place. I liked Pinkie eventually turning out to be the voice of reason, though. It's always nice to see her represented as something more than "hyper party pony".

6960553 I agree. How could this episode's potrayals of our characters seem like a good idea? There's nothing to like about anyone at any time, aside from Spike who barely even does anything the whole episode.

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I'll say that the episode was interesting at best for me =3

I do like how in the trivia episode:
We don't see the winner
For all we know, the other players end up breaking a rule that turns their points to 0 and TwiPie wins by having little amount of points that are still greater than 0
I mean the rules are retard-ly complex?
... it's possible???

6960658 The only thing I even remotely liked about this episode was this:

Which then got transformed into this:

Also this:

Twilight was being a god-level dick in this episode. Although, if I'm being completely honest with myself, she's uncomfortably like me.

I get competitive when it comes to games. Since I'm terrible at most sports, this is one area where I have an advantage. When I take a step back and look at myself from afar, I've acted like Twilight sometimes, which may have made my friends not want to play games with me.

Therefore, the reason I may not have enjoyed this one as much is because this episode hits too close to home.

Also, what happened to Spike?

He was the scorekeeper
Starlight was the previous scorekeeper
That made her crazy

We don't know if Spike was driven to crazy at that point.

Fuck Twily being a dick and Pinkie Pie being useless
DID SPIKE SURVIVE???

Really, both the concept and the moral are pretty solid - it's just the execution that seems off-base, but that's enough to sink it. I suspect that this episode is at least partly inspired by real life, too.

This episode seems to suffer from the same problem as the last one, where we have a character kind of revert back to a previous state for the sake of the episode. Even so, where as Rainbow Dash being so abhorrent came out of the blue and felt very forced for the narrative, this episode leaned more into it for the sake of comedic effect. I give this one more of a pass because it's a shared view of the fandom and the show that Twilight freaks out are funny, even though she said she forsook all that when Celestia and Luna planned to step down. Also, this episode really nose dived into the comedy and there were a lot of hilarious moments throughout which took the majority of the edge off of the 'out of character' moments for Twilight. Also, the running gag of throwing out ship names got a laugh from me at least. We got some good side character action too, which is always a plus as we wind down to the series finale.

I actually quite liked this one.

I found this episode hilarious so I liked it. That aside, I will admit that it was a little odd for Twilight to be that competitive to the point where she'd try to get Pinkie disqualified. This is the kind of stuff Rainbow Dash might do if she got carried away with her competitive streak; Applejack's too honest to do it even with how much she'd hate to lose.

True, Twilight's capable of silly or even stupid stuff once she really gets carried away and loses it. But this wasn't about disappointing anypony or meeting deadlines that usually makes Twilight lose it that bad. At least no one can blame this on the writers trying to make Starlight Glimmer "look good".

Maybe the writer wanted to build off on how bad Twilight didn't want to lose to Shining Armor back in "Sparkle's Seven"?

To give this episode a little bit of credit, it doesn't treat Twilight as being in the right for how she behaved, unlike say Pinkie in Yakity-Sax or Discord in A Matter of Principals. Not to mention she does get some karma for her actions when Sunburst basically gives a taste of her medicine, which in turn helps her to realize her own mistake and apologize to Pinkie for how she treated her.

Bottom-line, I think this whole episode is just an excuse for the show staff to get one more "Twilight freak-out" plot out of their systems before the series finale. Plus, I highly doubt it's going to give kids a Family-Unfriendly Aesop saying they should completely disregard their teammates when playing a game.

The writer's return to the old crutch of Twilight is an unstable mess that freaks out at the slightest inconvenience

This is especially bad considering Twilight's arc this season has been 'I'm putting that behind me, I'm growing and maturing into becoming a capable ruler'. I don't have a problem with the message but as stated above this episode belonged in Season 2 where Twilight was still coming to grips with friendship, not the final season. Twilight has plenty of flaws that could have been explored rather than rehashing tired old tropes.

Also when has Twilight been a bad sport ever? In season 1 she was advising Rainbow Dash and Applejack that competition is meaningless if you're not enjoying it.

Amazed no one's said it yet, but Pinkie is best Sean Connery.

BUCKFUTTER!

YER SITTIN' ON A GOLD MINE THERE, GRANNY SMITH!