IDW Comics - Story Discussion (Spoilers)

@RektPony
 
@dynamicv  
I’ll take Just Joking for $400, Alex.

Actually a pretty good comic for once. Liked seeing Discord’s crazy mind and Luna interactions.
 
dat ship teasing tho

Personally felt this FF was a bit of a waste. It wasn’t all that fun. The art isn’t all that great. The character interactions didn’t have me engaged. It was a bit of a slog, tbh…  
YMMV

It was okay. Not memorable. Okay.

I’m genuinely surprised, it was actually pretty decent. Gave me a few good laughs, had a nice conclusion and entertaining overall.
 
Expectations have been exceeded.||Though they weren’t that high to begin with. ||

Not excited about the arc, honestly. Not sure if the pacing will be good, based on previous stuff the guy wrote.

@dynamicv  
I still can’t believe we have an arc the can be broken down to “two universes nearly end because of a booty call.”

@Darth Sonic
 
Ha, that’s one way of putting it. Though technically Celestia had used the mirror thousands of times before without incident, so it wasn’t the “booty call” that broke the world per se, but rather her getting trapped in the other dimension for a whole week instead of her intended safe interval of a few hours.
 
So it’s really “two universes nearly end because of a booty call that resulted in a week long stay in Evilestia’s dungeon.” That still sounds so wrong…

@dynamicv  
Still really damn confusing though, and what saves the universes is… making them more alike? Which iirc caused the problem in the first place in a way?

@Itsthinking  

 
Probably because we already had a Luna ep., a Discord ep. and a “lolwacky” ep.
 
Edit. Er, sorry, meant your previous post.

Nice amount of shipping fuel for fluttercord, lunacord, raricord and twicord in it. I guess this was to be expected when Discord is the only main adult character in a show about adult female characters. Though i noticed a hateboner for dislestia. Not only Discord wanted to overthrow Celestia but he also portrayed her as an evil slaver.
 
As for the story, it was a clever move to use doors in portraying the dream sequence. Whitley haven’t seen S5 so he coudn’t know that this is how she travel in Applebloom dream episode. That comic made things more connected (with the exception of CMC/Discord relationship that really felt flat in Smooze episode). And it’s also a nice take on Discord as a character.
 
Why is he afraid of love? Is it because being immortal will only make things harder when the people he care about are gone? Or maybe he feels that it make him vulnerable and easier to control? There was some deeper philospophy in it especially the meaning behind Discord turning into a child. Is that suppose to portray his maturity? Is that the “real” Discord? A child that got lost at his playground?

@soundtea  
Very confusing…
 
What little is clear was that the problem was not caused by universes “being more alike”, it was because of ponies (and objects, before Starswirl stopped transporting things as well) from one universe existing in the wrong universe, upsetting balance. The effect was objects from both dimensions becoming linked and experiencing similar forces when they should not. This eventually culminates in a large scale collision as both entire universes start merging together.
 
The freeze-in-crystal solution was initially to simply contain Evilestia and had nothing to do with fixing the underlying cause, until Celestia showed up and suddenly it became about “restoring balance”, which makes very little sense admittedly. Once a rift is made connecting the Celestias, putting them back in the correct world isn’t enough for balance, because… the rift is the problem? How does freezing them fix this? And Luna also was also affected so would it have even worked without freezing her also?
 
As for the Elements of Harmony solution, while at least targeting both Princesses, doesn’t have any logical basic for fixing the merging universes. Even Sombra’s vague explanation of why it would work seemed based on preventing just the injuries that the rift causes, not fixing the underlying problem, and certainly not fixing the entire universe.
 
The only way I can interpret freezing or the EoH both being solutions that “restore balance” is that it works by making the offending objects (in this case Celestia and Evilestia) become so alike that it somehow reconciles the paradox and unlinks them. Still not an entirely logical theory. No matter how you look at it, the solutions presented are strange and unexplained.

@dynamicv  
And yet people still think the folks that don’t like Reflections just because of the Celestibra ship. Or is it Somblestia? I don’t pay attention to these things because of all the fandom things that don’t really belong like gore and grimdark, shipping is right up there with them.  
FRIENDship is magic.

@Background Pony #76F3
 
I enjoyed Reflections (even more on the second reading) aside from the ending.
 
But I can see why its non-linear storytelling can put people off, even before the bizarre resolution.

@dynamicv  
That’s pretty much why Reflections falls flat. Aside from the poor job of making us feel for this ship, Cook’s own rules for her multiverse thing are constantly broken when it serves to continue the story with no explanation whatsoever. (Why isn’t Good Sombra dead? Why didnt Celestia and Luna go evil when their mirror counterparts got drained of it? Why is evil apparently something you can just take away and absorb?)
 
That along with the Mane 6 being pretty much useless and somehow using the Elements wrong when Mr Hero out of nowhere uses them right, and the Twilight plotline getting hardly attention until the very end, causes the whole product to just fail hard.

@soundtea  
Some of these point do have explanations: Good Sombra never got linked to his evil counterpart, who was defeated before Celestia’s week-too-long visit caused HER to get linked.
 
And Celestia and Luna should not have become evil: remember that the rift causes the linked ponies to experience the same injuries, not opposite effects. So removing evil from one would remove evil from the other (leaving OUR Princesses unaffected, since there is nothing in them for Sombra to absorb).
 
As for the nature of evil and what the EoH can do to it, please consult Lauren Faust’s “Friendship is Magic Part 2” and M.A. Larson’s “Luna Eclipsed”. The Mane 6 can make “dark powers” vanish with no ill effects, but I always figured it was because they have the “full power of the Elements”, unlike Celestia or Sombra using the Elements solo.

@dynamicv  
Except didn’t Luna somehow get linked even though she never went there? And effects do seem to happen as Luna recently went bad in the mirror world iirc when she came back in regular universe.
 
I think the moral is to never just do a plain mirror universe story for kicks.

@Background Pony #76F3  
That’s why there are 2 weddings and a Cadance pregnancy episode in the future?  
Friendship can’t be a main topic in the series without moving onto romance territory since one leads to another.

@soundtea
 
Yeah, the fact that Luna was affected after Celestia is a bit odd, but not without precedent. Starswirl observed links forming between ponies that did not even use the mirror (“cooks deciding to cook the same meal”) so that probably means the rifts can “leak” onto other ponies that interact with the offending one. Since Alt-Luna was most likely in close proximity to Celestia while Evilestia held her captive, that is probably the reason why they are both linked and no pony else is.

@RektPony  
Let’s see… wedding number one.. two characters, not part of the main cast, introduced in the very episode they get married in. I’m supposed to care about this why? Oh, they’re related to Twilight Sparkle despite not having been mentioned at all in the previous two seasons.  
Wedding number two- two characters, not part of the main cast- in fact extremely minor one-shot characters having a callback.
 
Pregnancy. Sooooo romantic. What with the morning sickness and labor pains. Mrs. Cake had foals too.  
Point is, show uses romance extremely sparingly. It’s a show about friends. Not lovers. Not dating. But all shippers want to do is make it about who is seeing who.  
There are couples, yes. And these are the only “canon pairings” that exist. Mr. and Mrs. Cake, Cadence and Shining. Cranky and Matilda. Any parents X and Y of foal Z. But they are not the focus or the point of the series.

@Background Pony #76F3  
Well Discord wasn’t initially a focus of the main series either. So things may change just as the status of Twilight as a princess or CMC and their cutie marks. You are also implying that episode can’t focus on friendship if it involve a romantic couple. Like one thing somehow work against another. Or that married couple no longer feel frienship toward eachother.

@RektPony  
They’re not going to change the show’s focus from friendship to romance “just because” romance exists in Equestria. That’s not to say I don’t expect episodes that feature crushes (Sparty, Trenderhoof etc), I’m just telling you that don’t expect the show to shift focus from regular platonic friendship.

@Background Pony #76F3  
And i never said that the show will shift a focus on romance either. I just didn’t dismissed the possibility of romance being a part of the episode from time to time. Spike relationship toward Rarity serve as a proof that romantic feelings do not ruin his friendship with her as shown in Manifestation episode. And i hope not a single romance in the future will be portrayed the same way as FlashLight in Equestria Girls.

@RektPony  
How about Celestia-Sombra in the comics? Would that be a good fit for the show?

Discord said it wasn’t love. Honestly the build-up would have been better if it were, as it was all we got of his worst nightmare was him saying “oh it gets bad” but not seeing it.