Heh, I actually remember liking Friendship Games the most. Not sure why. Motorbikes?
Rainbow Rocks would be so much better if the Sirens weren't over-designed.
They looked so cool in the hoodies in the intro. They should've stayed that way.
By the way, I was browsing youtube and happened to notice multiple MLP videos are over 100 million views. Um, holy crap, that seems like a lot. I remember when This Day Aria climbed to 10 million quickly and I thought that was really impressive.
Checking now, it looks like it's still just "What My Cutie Mark is Telling Me" and "Welcome to the Show". The former has the most views, but the latter has two uploads that are each over 100 million views. After that, it sharply drops, and there's a mix of things, including fan videos like "Children of the Night" and those videos specifically designed to show up in "kids cartoons" playlists, but most of it appears to be Equestria Girls videos. Specifically, the first two movies; on a quick glance, there's nothing involving Friendship Games or Legend of Everfree.
An upload of Welcome to the Show was the first video breaking the 100 million mark, but it happened relatively recently, so it did take quite some time. 2 years or so, I think.
I don't think the Sirens are over designed at all, but it's also true that I consider Sonata the best, and she's arguably the simplest of the three, design-wise.
I agree that design-wise, Sonata is by far the best of the three. I'm not a big fan of Adagio and Aria's designs, outside of amusement at the fact that Aria and Starlight look alike. Heck, according to the description in
this comic, Hasbro even labeled an image of Aria as Starlight on their website,
in the URL here.
As an aside, that's another reason why I consider Sunset's design to be stronger than Starlight's: they gave the latter the same color scheme as another major character from the release right before her introduction (Rainbow Rocks premiered between the season 4 finale and season 5 premiere). And while others aren't as close as a match, there have been a ton of characters with similar fur colors and purple hair. The closest one to Sunset is Sunburst, and they really don't look much alike. Starlight does look better than Aria, though.
I feel like one of the biggest problems with Friendship Games is that they want to have SciTwi be the bad guy in the end, but don't want her to do anything actually bad. If you compare her to Twilight in the pilot episode (which I would say would be a fitting comparison since it's essentially the same character before they learn the magic of friendship) I feel like you can easily see how inoffensive they were trying to make her. Pony Twilight would have mainly just been tolerating the HuMane 6's attempts to be friends with her and called it a waste of time distracting her from her field research with her device that she had. She wouldn't have had that much patience for everyone gawking at her and acting weirdly. SciTwi on the other hand just sort of goes with it despite being confused and seems totally cool with people getting in the way of her research. Aside from using the magic during the climax of the movie she never does anything intentionally bad despite causing most of the conflict for the movie. And because they don't want her to do anything outwardly bad which might make people not like her they decide to make her completely ignorant of everything instead. Which is doubly infuriating because she's supposed to be a really smart character and yet has no clue as to what's going on for most of the movie. The movie is a chore for me to watch because their insistence on making SciTwi a good guy and also the villain means that she has to constantly keep making the same mistakes over and over again without learning anything while coming up with contrived reasons as to why the good guys can't just sit her down and explain to her why what she is doing is wrong. (Which is by far and away the most sensible course of action for the HuMane 6 to take)
Also as a character SciTwi was really uninteresting to me in Friendship Games. She was sort of this demure nerdy nice girl that just went around being sad at the Crystal Prep students treating her poorly and being happy when the CHS students were nice to her, which feels pretty bland when you compare it to all of the strong personalities that the show and movies usually have.
I'm not saying it would be definitively better if SciTwi was more similar to her pony counterpart in the pilot. But part of me wishes that she was written as a more active antagonist rather then the unknowing one she was here. I think it would have been cool if we got to see how Twilight might have turned out if she didn't have Celestia looking over her and never really made any friends. Maybe she would have went down a similar path that Sunset or Starlight did. The fan in me would have much rather seen Twilight be a sympathetic but willing antagonist who might not have entirely understood the consequences of her actions and through the course of the movie learned the value of friendship instead of what we ended up getting. Going down that route and having it work would probably require a rework of the whole story for it to make sense though so just plugging that idea into the story we got wouldn't really work.
After Rainbow Rocks but before Friendship Games, it was very common for fans to depict SciTwi as a mad scientist, which really would have been a more interesting direction than the demure SciTwi we got.I don't think I've put the main issue with the movie's portrayal of SciTwi in words before, but you described the exact problem: they try to have it both ways with her being the antagonist but still kind and good enough to be sympathetic. It's sort of weird that they didn't have faith in Twilight's episode 1 portrayal to be sympathetic if used again, but I think the direction they were going with was for SciTwi to not have any confidence, in contrast to the confident (in theory) pony princess we know, so maybe that just didn't occur to them. Having her be episode 1 Twilight but without the courtesy plus some mad science would have been the best move. Plus having the magic absorption make any kind of sense.
By the way, big Warriors parade means transit is a nightmare means work from home day, means time to watch Nintendo Treehouse clips. Oh, and now's a better time to rewatch "A Royal Problem" than tomorrow.
A Royal Problem, take 2
Well this didn't have the intended effect. I thought that since my first viewing of the episode was under slightly stressed circumstances, waiting a few days then watching again would be closer to a rewatch after multiple months. Instead, I was still in, "just watched this," mode. So, still no PONIES reaction really, but I still enjoyed it, and I still feel like I'd have a stronger emotional connection if I rewatched it in a few months. I also expected to write a new hot take, but it's more of a deep analysis instead.
Twilight is overall the best part of the episode. I hadn't noticed that Twilight's music box makes a sound every time she moves in its first scene. I already thought that part where Starlight asks if she knows when two people are arguing but they pretend like they aren't arguing and Twilight goes, "Noooo..." was among the most adorable Twilight scenes of the series, and that just improves it. It's a shame this doesn't continue in her other scenes. Something pointed out on another board is that when Twilight brought Starlight's toothbrush, it probably was actually Spike's and Twilight was just digging for an excuse, not that Starlight's toothbrush actually resembles Spike. Since I can't find a better way to word it, that's so Twilight!
Though I don't think many people actually thought this, it should be noted that there's zero indication that Starlight's dream was a likely outcome of all this. From what we're presented in this episode, if things continued on without Starlight's interference, Celestia and Luna would have slowly grown more distant, but I don't think either of them would have erupted in rage. That in itself is bad, but not "destroyed alternate timeline" bad.
Luna is described as having turned into Nightmare Moon before because the other ponies didn't appreciate her night, but this episode hints that possibly the biggest part of this was that she didn't think Celestia appreciated it, and she thought Celestia had the easier job. She of course deeply regrets becoming Nightmare Moon now, but after the initial reuniting period, they fell back into a daily ritual where they didn't interact as much. They had fixed the obvious issues Luna was upset about, but they hadn't addressed the smaller underlying issues with communication and understanding. They probably won't increase their daily interaction much as a result of this episode, but now they know the other knows how much work they do and how they feel about it.
Some have expressed confusion at how the princesses don't know what the others do. I'm sure they intellectually know, and would even acknowledge that they each have difficult and important tasks when not incensed, but each was angry that they took time out of their busy jobs to do something for the other sister and they didn't appreciate it. They viewed the other making these gestures as a sign that they have an easy time with their own job, and it seems like they didn't even care much for them anyway. To connect things to the show's target audience, it's like when your mom makes you lunch everyday, but you just throw it away or trade it for cookies when you get to school. If someone asked you, you'd probably acknowledge your mom had to put effort into making them, even if you didn't
really get it. And those moments of lacking empathy still happen when you're an adult unless you're careful.
Luna's focus on fixing that one problem with the school is an interesting bit of insight into the difference between her and Celestia, along with how she prefers the time and solitude to think through her problems. Note how even in her dream, she was focused on that and not the timberwolves. This also ties into her connection with the Cutie Mark Crusaders, showing her interest in protecting children.
With Celestia in Starlight's dream, we see that she is very cautious when presented with a new situation about dealing with it herself, and quickly decided that the best route was to get help from Luna. This serves her well during the day, and allows her to manage multiple things going on at once, but when dealing with nightmares, Luna's focus on a single task and taking decisive action is preferable. This is another way the two balance each other out.
As for Starlight, I suppose I am coming around to the side that it's kind of problematic that she's being encouraged to use aggressive measures to solve friendship problems, but in the context of this story, it's really just a way to get and keep the attention of the princesses, who were otherwise ignoring her. As for the spell itself, we have to consider that (1) it clearly isn't at the level of Twilight's spell in "Magical Mystery Cure", since no memories were altered, and (2) no one seems
that bothered by it. In general, the act of mind and cutie mark bending in and of itself hasn't been presented as a big deal in the show, but rather using it to hurt people. There is a point to be made about this being bad, but it certainly isn't inconsistent.
Overall, it's an enjoyable episode and definitely an interesting one, as demonstrated by all the discussions we had.
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Also
Now you too can finally suck the face of your favorite pony I mean what.
Though seriously, I've never seen a lollipop shaped like the head of a character before. It's pretty weird.
Fucking Twilight with her stupid magic gadget.
