Gratification

by KorenCZ11

Observation

Surprisingly, the theater was mostly full. Save for the seats no one would pay for, just about every seat had been reserved. Luckily, we made our purchase much earlier in the week when I knew this was happening, but I was still shocked to see so many ponies. Even stranger so many mares. I knew Dash liked her particular Roboknight, but that can’t be why all these other mares are here, can it? Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mare other than Dash go near Hobby Max, and since that was our local shop, we were here for Prism almost every other week.

As far as it goes, most ponies wouldn’t call me a bad dad. Where I openly venture into that territory on purpose, however, comes to sneaking food into the theater. Sure, call me a hypocrite and all that, but thirteen bits for a bowl of popcorn and butter I could get for half a bit down in the supermarket below is absurd. Also bought there are boxes of candy and soda bottles, not as egregious as the popcorn prices, but still at about half the price of what they sell right here. Wings make it easy to conceal things, and since the packaging is literally the same, they wouldn’t really know without checking surveillance footage, which is far too much work for the disinterested teens who work here.

“See?” Dash said as we found our seats, “Just don’t go crazy with it! Normal stuff gets by, and as long as you don’t literally show anybody, nobody knows.”

Haze rubbed his temple. “Not only are we an incredibly privileged family for other reasons, we’re also a cheap family who won’t just buy theater food.”

Prism turned to his brother. “Bro. It’s thirteen bits. That’s half the price of your imported Real Grade Roboknight kit! Oh, wait, you were reading that manga, weren’t you? Are you subscribed to Shuppansha or something?”

Guilty, Haze’s ears folded. “No…”

“Uh-huh. Eat your candy.” Prism slid a box of sour gummy ponies from between his feathers and dropped it in his brother’s lap.

He’s still mad about his grades being brought up. One of these days, he’ll pass history and science. One day.

“Look, guys, we do what we can to enjoy the things we like, and we pay for them when we can afford them,” Dash lectured. “Some things are worth paying for, some things aren’t worth it, and some things can’t be paid for in the case of Haze’s manga. Nopony has it licensed and it was translated into Equestrian by fans. It’s not his fault he literally couldn’t pay for it even if he wanted to.”

Not playing favorites, huh? I’m surprised she looked into that. “There you have it boys, even your mom knows the world’s not black and white.”

She clicked her tongue at me. “Who are you, Applejack?”

I ignored that. “But, at least attempt to do things the right way when you can.”

Haze sighed. “Except here, apparently.”

“Because it’s a scam!” Prism shot back.

The argument would have escalated if the lights didn’t dim. “Hey, do this later. It’s starting.”

The theater went silent, phones were put away, and trailers filled the screen. First was a new comedy movie. I wasn’t paying much attention and more focused on my little chocolates and nothing that was said took me away from them.

Trailer two was for another animated movie. It was about a highschool volleyball team. I believe Prism and Fallacy watched this at one point because I remembered the jumpy orange pony.

There was a buddy cop movie where the duo are charged with the teenage daughter of one of them while working. Comedy ensues.

The next one featured dudes talking more at each other than to each other and transforming into colorful suits while using some sort of prop weapons with mediocre special effects. Apparently, this was a long running franchise that not a soul in my family really had any knowledge about.

Finally, the lights turned off, and the theater’s own ‘don’t talk, turn your phones off, be polite’ warning played.

With that out of the way, the movie opens hot in the middle of some kind of war between two factions. Prism had a few of these roboknights on his shelf, but they were also kinda wrong somehow. Like, all the things that looked familiar and had similar names had these extra fins and spikes and laser weaponry that I didn’t usually associate them with.

Then, up in space, our title characters show up. Squeals abounded as the lead character, Mountain Glow, filled the screen getting into the new Roboknight we just looked at down stairs. Him working with the protagonist of Seed 2, Tomorrow Edge, whom Prism vocally dislikes, fly down in the blue and red roboknights and just cut everypony to pieces. They don’t kill ponies though, since that’s the role of the new world police force or whatever. A lot of talking in Umanese, and flashing lights with robots fighting. As a certified manchild, my attention spiked when the robots were on screen, and cratered when they weren’t.

For the next hour or so, I did my best to not fall asleep. Some new country wants to join the police force or whatever, Mountain Glow thinks he’s being cheated on by his marefriend, Lily Cross, with the new pretty boy who looked… strangely similar to the real bad guy from both seasons of Seed, but was apparently totally unrelated. There’s another b-plot where another new mare character has the hots for Mountain Glow and gets rejected by him so Lilly is also not feeling great, and like, the new character literally turns traitor for that later on. It was like a bad soap opera with the evil twin and everything.

The initial trailer Prism showed me made me think this art style was good and dead for a reason, but the movie had a few scenes during the parts I fought for consciousness that straight up looked bad. The ballroom dance scene had maybe three frames of animation and a whole lot of sad computer generated 3D. It was odd, because sometimes the robots were 3D, but they looked even better than usual when they’re properly animated. It was almost like they forgot how to animate their characters at the beginning of the production and ran out of time before they could finish this. Prism tells me this is one of those anime studios that don’t screw their workers over with absurd hours and deadlines and it felt unusual for what I remember being very good animation on the last movie all the way through. It really does feel like the style is what’s causing most of the problems.

Still, after that very long, very boring series of scenes, we got back to the robots. Some war had started somewhere else, and the world police and this new faction set out to take care of it. Somebody says there’s nuclear warheads out there and it needs to be stopped. After a while, and I guess, finding out that the blonde guy has some kind of mind control powers, or maybe they all do, Mountain Glow goes off against orders to chase a guy he knows who may or may not actually be there.

A warhead launches, the new country takes Lilly away to ‘safety’ and everybody does their best to stop the warhead. Then, the new country’s roboknights, which I assume is what Injection Mold meant when he said ‘more,’ show up to confront Mountain Glow and Tomorrow Edge. Both of them get bodied because the new black knights are just as powerful as the main knights from the last series for some reason, and they are only winning because the new suits are an actual downgrade to the ones from Seed 2.

Mountain Glow and Tomorrow Edge are both saved when After Burner makes his second appearance in a crab like Roboknight and goes hoof to pincer with the black knight, fighting him, saving the guys, and running away. What was weird about the crab suit is that Prism has one that looks almost identical to it, save for the strange backpack it wore. Unlike the other roboknights that look like they were ‘borrowed homework,’ this one was straight up the same. The old ship that the crew traveled on in the original Seed gets destroyed, but everyone with a name survives and we relocate.

From this point onward, the movie begins to get silly and lose the serious tone entirely, but I wasn’t against that. Mountain Glow is all sad because they stole his girlfriend, After Burner beats the crap out of him, Tomorrow tries to stop it, only to get his face punched and thrown away, which I genuinely laughed at, only to be shushed by the other members of the audience.

After this happens, the view from the enemy ship goes from zero to one hundred as not-the-other-villain goes on about assigning cutiemarks to ponies before birth to ensure everyone has a scripted life to follow by using his and apparently Lilly’s mind control powers that she has now, I guess. Lilly is still downbad for Mountain Glow though, and she refuses pretty boy’s advances. What was his name? I have no idea. If I didn’t already know the character, they were very easily forgotten since this was a movie about Mountain Glow and Lily more than anything.

As it turns out, the old suits got a few upgrades and because they were literally superior the whole time and just… hanging out in storage or something, the gang takes them back out to save Lilly. There is another new ship hanging around, and to make it not look like the country that Mountain Glow’s sister and After Burner’s marefriend, Copper Ash, runs, they ‘pretend’ take it over with like, five ponies.

Even this silly movie had enough respect for its villains to make them realize it was total garbage, and then they prepare to fire the same super weapon from Seed 1 and 2 because destroying it the first two times wasn’t enough. They nuke a city off the map with that and then threaten to do it to Copper Ash’s country, but our crew says they have the old suits again, and that turns them into a target. As it turns out, hitting a moving spaceship from the moon with lasers and mirrors is fairly difficult, so our crew gets away and into range of the super beam.

Pretty boy, which is his name now, starts to get desperate and he straight up tries to rape Lilly. I was not prepared for this kind of turn at all. The movie had been getting sillier; this felt… so, so out of left field. Anyways, he’s a joke and Lily really sticks it to him, so he just slaps her and storms off to join the space fight. Given the earlier scene in the cave where they just have a mare taking a shower and nearly showing all her parts to the world, I wasn’t sure just how that would go.

Two fronts break out, one to deal with the fleet, and another to deal with the moon laser. Tomorrow goes after the fleet where Lilly is, while Mountain Glow and After Burner fight the bad guys. Lilly is saved after what is a hilariously easy fight as Tomorrow tears through everything in his way in the old Destiny.

On the other side, Mountain Glow and After Burner fight off the black knights, but once Lilly is lost, prettyboy gets back in the fight in his two pony knight which was white and gold and had laser cape and was super cool, and I unfortunately saw that spark of inspiration in Prism’s eyes when he saw it. Whenever that got released, wherever it was released, we’d have it ordered within a week or two.

At first Mountain Glow is losing, but then Lilly shows up with a new backpack for the Strike Freedom, wearing a space suit that is so skin tight that she would be less explicit if she were naked. It was almost worse than a wonderbolt’s uniform. Almost.

This silly upgrade gives Mountain Glow the power to stop all incoming fire and use a laser hidden in the knight’s head to destroy all his enemies. For some reason, now we don’t care about killing enemy pilots I guess.

After that, After Burner kills the main black knight, Tomorrow kills the rest of them in one of the coolest scenes in the movie in which he moves so fast that he creates afterimages of himself to shadow clone his way through all the b-grade black knights. The b-plot is resolved after mare side character 1 talks it out with mare side character 2 in the middle of a fight and I guess she’s redeemed after that or something. Sure, just let traitors back on the ship in space where things can very easily go very wrong.

Not that I expected a whole lot of logic out of a show where After Burner hides his Justice inside the crab knight, breaks out of it, and then uses that stupid, super long horn on the suit as a beam blade and headbuts his final opponent to death. It falls into the category where it’s ‘so stupid it’s cool,’ and I was not the only pony in the theater who laughed out loud.

The movie ends with After Burner and Copper Ash finally getting married, and Mountain Glow and Lily Cross strip down and go make out on the beach.

Roll credits.