Posts

@SquiggyBomb
 
Meta-wise, or in-universe?
 
In-universe, the explanation that seems the most obvious is that the transformation has nothing to do with personality changes. Rather, a changeling changes when they share and accept love. The black, holey form is not the form they take when they’re evil, it’s the form they take when they’re starved and underfed. When they learn to share love rather than take it by force – which can be seen as them adopting a healthier feeding regimen, essentially – they are able to metamorphose into a healthier and more complete form.
 
Basically, Pharynx’s transformation is triggered by him and the rest of the hive accepting each other: in the episode, it happens after the other changelings admit he was right in saying they needed to defend themselves, and specifically when he says “Are you kidding? I love the hive!” – acceptance of mutual love, not a personality change, is what causes the transformation.
 
From a metafictional standpoint, it would be because having Pharynx share love like the other changelings did and not change like they did would retroactively invalidate their previous transformation. If the change was superfluous and did not have to happen, why did it even occur? The show had established that a certain stimulus – sharing love – causes a certain reaction – the changeling to “changedling” transformation – and now they need to be constant and stick with their guns about it. Otherwise, it would just be flip-flopping and honestly rather bad writing.

@Sufficienttosay
 
Correction, that is an accurate and to scale map of the the Equestrian solar system.
 
There’s plenty of other stuff in the universe beyond Equestria’s shell of stars, like a world inhabited by humans.
 
It looks like this:
 

@EquestrianScholar
 
Right on.
 
For me, it also helps that my college has a four day weekend this week, so there’s not gonna be anything in the way of seeing this movie on opening day! Or later in the weekend either, if I like it enough to warrant going to theater for it a second time.

This is precisely why I’ve kept the movie spoilers hidden since last week and avoided the more spoiler-obsessed sites like the plague.
 
I am going to see the range movie later this week, and I will enjoy it. If people can’t muster the basic self-control to wait a few goddamn days and spoil themselves the entire movie, well, that’s their problem.

@Background Pony #4D16
 

 
Eh, that’s as good an explanation as any. I just wish they’d have at least mentioned it in passing, though.
 
@Dustcan
 
Almost certainly. Whether she’ll succeed is another matter, I suppose.
 
If the guessing re: the season 8 tidbits is correct and she’s going to open a school, I shouldn’t wonder that she’ll try to get him to teach there, too.

@Background Pony #108C
 
… the heck does that mean?

@Background Pony #63FA
 
Probably not, but I still don’t like the reasoning. I get that Applejack’s honesty and integrity are good qualities in a judge, but judging also requires some fairly extensive familiarity with the thing one is judging – you can’t make a good judgement on incomplete data.
 
Look at it this way: each of the main characters has her area of expertise, and is very familiar with knowledgeable about it – an expert. Each of them also has areas they know little or nothing about, and even a couple of days of lecturing and all the goodwill in the world won’t change that. Rainbow Dash, for instance, would be an excellent judge of someone’s athletic performance, but Twilight wouldn’t because that’s not something she knows much about. Fluttershy would be an excellent judge of the quality of a facility for animal care, but Pinkie wouldn’t because that’s not something she knows much about. Rarity is an excellent judge of high fashion and attire, but since it’s been fairly well established that Applejack knows little about fashion and isn’t interested in it anyway, there’s no reason to expect that she would be.

@Magma_ERuptiOn
 
No kidding. I normally don’t like it when people bandy around the phrase “this felt like a Season 1 episode”, but that was the only thing I could think of while watching “Honest Apple”. It really felt like someone really, really wanted to write a Season 1 episode, damn the consequences.
 
@hironakamura
 
And on that note, all we saw were a few disjointed, seconds-long clips out of twenty-two minutes’ worth of runtime. As it stands, it’s entirely possible that Spike is in the episode, just not in the three or four bits we saw.

@Applejack007
 
I mean, they’ve had no speaking roles worth the name and less focus so far than literally any of the other relatives seen on the show, so that’s to be expected, really. The question is how interesting or boring they will be this time next week.

@Goobington
 
Because it required Rarity to ask Applejack to judge something she knows next to nothing about for God knows what reasons and Applejack to forget how to distinguish between being frank and honest and being rude, tactless and insulting.

@Seabridge Drive
 
Exactly. To me at least, question with this movie isn’t wether the show’s usual viewers – by which I mean the target audience and us adult weirdos – are going to see it. I mean, at least the ninetieth percentile of the usual show viewership is going to see it at some point or another – the simple fact that it’s an MLP movie ensures that. The real question is if people who don’t normally watch the show will see it, and if so how many. And if you want to draw in people who don’t watch the show, it’s pretty obvious that making the show required viewing is the exact opposite of helping things along.

@Philweasel
 
I’ll agree with you there. I mean, maybe if the movie does well enough to warrant a sequel (as sequels generally require having some knowledge of what happened in the prequel anyway) then that could tie into show events in some way or another.
 
But if this movie is to do well, it needs to work on its own. I love continuity, but needing to know what happened in the cartoon to understand or enjoy what’s going on in the movie would cripple it from the start.

So, impressions from the promo and synopsis…
 
No Spike. Of course. That said, we got a handful of seconds-long clips out of a 22-minute episode, so I’m holding out hope. Don’t count your dragons until they’re hatched, or whatever the saying is.
 
If I remember, back in “Twilight’s Kingdom” Twilight was upset that her princesshood amounted to her being a glorified smiling ornament and wanted a bit of attention from people. Well, they wish is duly granted. Enjoy.
 
Given the way the plot seems to set up, I expect I’ll end up sympathizing with both Twilight – after all, she does have the right to some private bonding time with her family – and the cruise attendees – because it seems that they were told they’d get to spend time with a princess, paid for the privilege to do so and (more to the point) I doubt they were given any indication that Twilight was anything but on board (har har) with this.
 
Who I’ll expect I’ll be pissed at by the end of the episode is whoever organized the cruise. Going by what Twilight and her parents were saying, it seems likeliest to me that whoever is in charge of things decided to sell Twilight’s (and Cadance’s, I’m assuming) private time like a commodity, and not only did not tell them anything about it but actively made sure they wouldn’t learn anything until on board the ship. If that’s actually what’s going on, that’s just an absolute scumbag move.

@fobone
 
Out of curiosity, what kinks are you referring to?

@SeraphimDawn
 
See, that’s the thing that’s been bugging me about the movie characters. I’m liking what I’ve seen of them, I’m confident I’ll like them when I see the movie, and consequently I’d love to see them in the show – but there’s no way on God’s green earth that they can afford however much it would take to get those kind of actors to VA for the show on a regular basis.
 
I mean, maybe if the movie does well enough to warrant another, but other than that…

@EotD
 
I suppose that would hinge on what the writers would have valued most at the moment – having an effective bully character now or having a redeemed but still usable former bully character later.
 
Personally, I think that if you’re planning to do a full redemption at some later point in time, then having the villain in question be a less unambiguously villainous character in a few appearances would be perfectly acceptable. Of course, that would all also depend on whether the redemption in question is something planned for ahead of time or a more spur-of-the-moment decision.

@Pepsi Twist
 
@EotD
 
Another issue with Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon is that they didn’t really have characterization outside of their role as bullies – essentially every personality trait they had was intrinsically tied to their story role as unpleasant, cruel bullies.
 
To look at it another way, what did we know about Diamond Tiara’s personality before “Crusaders of the Lost Mark”? We knew that she was a bully – that had to go away with her redemption. We knew she was spoiled, self-centered and looked down on less well-off people – that also had to go away. We knew she kept herself at the top of the school pecking order by standard “alpha bitch” tactics – that also had to away. We knew she and the CMC detested each other – and that also also had to go away, and you can probably see where I’m going with this.
 
Likewise with Silver Spoon. She didn’t really have any established personality outside of being Diamond Tiara’s toady.
 
By contrast, Trixie had personality traits and characteristics that, while they contributed to her role as an antagonist and her unpleasant personality in her debut, they didn’t require her to remain an antagonist in order to remain. Simply being full of yourself does not a villain make – Rainbow Dash is a prime example of that. Plus, we also knew she was a stage magician, a traveling showmare and skilled with magic that is showy but not potent, and it was also possible to give her and Twilight a rivalry – the way “Crusaders of the Lost Mark” ended didn’t leave much a chance for DT to have a similar rivalry with one or all of the Crusaders. All those things stuck around after she stopped being an antagonist, meaning that there was still something to use for writing stories involving her. By contrast, the near entirety of DT’s and SS’s personalities were wiped clean with their reformations. The way they were reformed left them with as much established personality as your typical background pony, which makes it difficult to think of stories that they could have a place in.
 
What bugs me about this issue is that it didn’t have to happen the way it did. If the writers were planning to redeem them, all it would have taken to prevent this issue would have been to have them feature in an episode or two before “Crusaders of the Lost Mark” and show them doing or enjoying something other than bullying, or come up with a couple of talents or traits that didn’t revolve around them being awful people. Then there would still have something to them afterwards and they could have kept appearing.
 
… I guess I may have gone on a tad longer than I expected, but I feel that their reformation was probably the worst-handled on the show.

On an unrelated note, a thought occurred to me while watching this episode. In “Brotherhooves Social”, it was a stated point that the Sisterhooves Social operates on a fairly loose interpretation of the concept of “sisterhood”, and that their standards are broad enough that they don’t mind stallions competing (which I understood to work in the same sense as when we, in the real world, talk about the concept pf brotherhood we understand it not to be necessarily limited to only include literal brothers).
 
My question: if the Social turns up again in a future episode, would Thunderlane and Rumble be eligible, or what?

@Miss Shy
 
No argument there, but I don’t see how that affects a claim to hypocrisy one way or the other – you’re hypocritical if what you say and claim doesn’t match what actually do or believe, regardless of your attitude.
 
So, in other words, he should have been more apologetic AND he was not hypocritical – the two concepts coexist.

@Jarkes
 
I wouldn’t say so. His main gripe was that cutie marks box you in and force you to do one thing only for your entire life, and the episode ends with him realizing that that’s not the case and more or less admitting as much. I wouldn’t call that hypocritical.

At the moment they’re different tags, despite the fact that they seem to describe the exact same thing. I think it would make sense to have one redirect to the other (probably cavern -> cave, since cave is the more widely used one).

@Anonycat
 
The part that bugged me the most about this scene is that we saw bows that didn’t require magnetic hooves in “Equestria Games”.
 

 
(I know that this is an edit with another character, but I couldn’t find a good screencap.)
 
@Spinny
 
All right, allow me to rephrase myself. We have a story about the CMC and Rumble: the main focus of the plot is on the CMC dealing with an issue related to their chosen purpose in life (i.e. working with cutie marks) and overcoming it. In other words, it’s about the CMC growing by dealing with their own issues, obstacles and character arc. The main antagonist is a former background pony with no connections to any main character. The bulk of the story doesn’t even take place in town.
 
Here’s my question: what narrative reason is there for Mane 6 to need to be in this episode? Now, I’m not arguing that they needed not to be in it, but there was no specific reason that this story required their presence (or absence) in order to work. It didn’t involve them or their character arcs, and works just fine without them in it. It’s not a mark against this episode that they weren’t in it.
 
EDIT: And for that matter, I don’t see how them not appearing in three episodes out of a season of 26 is them getting pushed aside.

@Spinny
 
 
@EPPony
 
This reminds me of the issues with Twilight getting shoehorned into every Season 1 episode, regardless of whether or not she had a reason to be in the story, because the show needed her to be in it in order to have someone to write a letter to Celestia at the end of the episode. It pretty regularly hurt the stories being told by dragging in a character with nothing to add to them and consequently hurt Twilight’s character too. It was a pretty smart idea to replace the letters with the journal all the characters could write in – it gave Twilight the chance to only appear in stories that she a reason to be in, and helped both her character and the overall quality of the episodes.
 
Same story with the Mane Six not being in this episode, seems to me. There was no reason for them to need to show up beyond just having them on screen – forcing them in for the sake of it would have just bogged down the story and lowered the quality of this episode.
 
As for “Uncommon Bond”, the conflict is supposed to be about Starlight feeling left out when Starburst turns out to have a great deal in common with her friends and to get along well with them. I find it highly doubtful that the Manes won’t be in it.

@EotD
 
Same way they can grab objects with the flat of their hooves, I figure.

@Josh103
 
I’ve actually read it for the first time just this summer. Seemed a perfectly fine story to me.