The irritating thing about "Last Crusade" that was not the inevitable thing of some right-wing nincompoop screaming One, Two, Three, Four, I declare a culture war is the fact that the writers failed to put a full stop on the completed story arc what was the Cutie Mark Crusaders saga. In the real world, it would have been held to be very sad that for now, Scootaloo lives a day's journey away and can only show up on special occasions but her parents would very much like to be there for her for

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Without actually probably intending to, the writers are starting to do the viewers something of a service by putting Flim and Flam in charge of the alternative friendship school Neighsayer is running. This is because they've shone a light on a dynamic that people need reminding of: the one between a con man and his willing mark.

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Now, given the format of the series and the need to have recurring antagonists, it might look as if today's episode is a foregone conclusion. In any other cartoon, Twilight's suspicion that Trixie will try to change Starlight's job description to 'disposable accomplice I only pretended to like' will be proven true and she can continue to be a magic superhero (like, say, Bloom of the Winx Club) who chases the same idiot (or idiots in triplicate named the Trix girls) forever. The problem with

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As we all know by now, we're finally at a rather familiar place in the various fanon universes owing to the fact that Apple Bloom, Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle are about to ask themselves "Now that we've GOT our Cutie Marks....what next?" I've noticed two trends of equal popularity:

1) They realize that the only reason that they're together is because of their crusade and since they have nothing really in common, they sadly disband

or

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Well, that happened, didn't it? The Cutie Map seemed to show Starlight just enough horror to make her stop, listen and TALK about her real problem: a collapsed friendship. While I'd thought of her as being the victim of a perfectionist mother who warped her mind, having her blame the cutie mark for its results is just as good an excuse (and just as dumb) as trying to police the world so that one can placate Monster Mommy.

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It seems to me that those who've observed that what animates Starlight Glimmer is a disgust that those around her do not act or think exactly as she would in a given situation are dead on the money. Her body language is that of one repulsed by the discovery that the childhood assumption that everyone is essentially the same and has the same knowledge of the world is all bollocks. While we never completely free ourselves of that idea that "I would do X in situation Y so it's weird and wrong that

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So, the second part of the series close-out for Gravity Falls is up and it's pretty much what I sort of expected: Mabel has no real idea that anything abnormal is happening nor does she really quite remember what touched off the latest weird thing. While she says that she passed out in Sweater Land and woke up in her bubble, she probably does vaguely remember talking to Blendin Blandin about some vague thing. This makes her that staple of fiction, the unwitting instigator of doom. She has no

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I was checking out EqD like I like to do when I came across the craziest thing. It seems that Berrow is going to write one of her chapter books about Princess Twilight's most infamous student EVER: Starlight Glimmer.

Great.

Wonderful.

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As we saw today, most of Fluttershy's previous problem with Nightmare Night is that she had the time to convince herself it was a big, fat, scary deal; upon actually attending, she realized that while it wasn't really the horror she'd talked herself into thinking it was, it also just wasn't something she was interested in. This made the thing a sort of a call back not only to Luna Eclipsed but also to Green Isn't Your Color. As it was then, playing dressup and making herself look and feel silly

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It occurs to me that the Lunaverse versions of the Cutie Mark Crusaders/Consultants might not necessarily have the same bond they do in the series. What this means is that when they do finally discover their talents, they will not have the shield design element in their cutie marks. (Coincidentally, said shield reminds me nothing more of the way various superheroes and villains had their symbols spammed by a logo for a Lantern Corps.) With that in mind, I decided to subtract the shield and

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