HMMMMMMMmmmmmm, spammers seem to really like this thread for some reason.


>>12123
>wow, forget how much of oldfags we are to endchan.
I forget that as well. Seems like a whole different site then when we started to get going.

>crappy ideapad
Oof, I knew some people who had those before, never lasted that long, at least in a good state. I know the stereotype for consumer grade but those seemed to be worse than average. Then again, I am saying this as somebody who used a single core Pentium M Dell Latitude D610 till like 2019 or 2020 as my prime computer and it was pretty beat up when it died. So I also get the mentality as well.

>Like your life is both hard and complicated and you had to get used to getting by with weird stuff.
Yeah, I'll admit it was/still is kind of complicated. Growing up, my father had a relatively high paying job but also was horrible at managing stuff. Thus some periods I would be flirting with a comfortableish middle class lifestyle and other times would be flirting with being very much not middle class, even food insecure. Got used to living with a lot of broken stuff (when things broke, they wouldn't get fixed usually) and using what I had. My father also would acquire lots of random stuff, including computers, so I have some experience messing with stuff there . I do like hoarding tech sort of as a hobby but I prefer trying to find a use for it.

] I'm late for a very important date! The big brunch for Princess Celestia at Sugarcube Corner. Oh, the princess is here in Ponyville for a party, and we all promised we'd be there. But I'm not there! Oh, do I look all right? Do I need to bring anything? Maybe I shouldn't go.

I, for whatever reason, really enjoyed the cold open to this episode. Angel playing charades while Fluttershy honed in slowly on what he was trying to covey: that she was late for the party with Celestia. Nice seeing a bit of Fluttershy doing her own thing alone too.

Theme song that isn't my favorite but has slowly grown on me throughout the years.

At the brunch itself. Twilight Sparkle is quite nervous around Celestia hoping her friends make a good impression. I know this episode is used to give context to potential trollestia/tyrantestia in canon, and while it is certainly meme fuel I partly disagree. While Celestia showed a joking side here."Gotcha!" and her little tea prank while Mr and Mrs Cake were fussing over her. I think the dynamic of this episode is that Princess Celestia is actually pretty laid back and everyone takes her roll as the immortal monarch of the realm a bit too seriously. I do agree it is a bit weird she didn't immediately explain Philomena but I don't think it crosses over into troll territory. She was soon interrupted by Mayor Mare's request with a personal audience after all.

Fluttershy fussing over Philomena was fun, I see an alternative episode where this could've been some sort of lesson on animals departing and accepting loss, but as is, I enjoyed it. This goes into overdrive when Twilight Sparkle arrives. Now, this is where Tyrantestia comes into play as Twilight rattles off potential punishments. The fandom started to play into that, and in some cases, really ask, why would Twilight be so afraid of banishment? I think here it is more of the innocence of this setting here and Twilight's obsessive personality over any basis for anything rational in universe. The slap stick was pretty good here too, though not as good as the previous sequences of Fluttershy and Twilight's hapless attempts to forestall Philomena's deterioration.

The conclusion, I enjoyed it enough, but not spectacular. It got a couple of chuckles but the main thing I noticed here was this one line:
>And I do appreciate that your heart was in the right place, child. But all you had to do was ask me and I could have told you Philomena was a phoenix and saved you all this trouble.
This not only places Celestia as an somewhat of motherly authority figure which is the roll she is sort of playing, but this is the strongest I've seen it. It will be interesting if we will see any other instances of her referring to the mane 6 or any of her subjects this way.

Alrighty, now for my rating: 7.5/10. It is a very good episode for what it is, even if I found the last third slightly less interesting.

>>12168
Rainbow Dash and Philomena
A cute little interaction where Rainbow Dash gets Philomena to prank the guards.

Philomena seldomly appears
Correct me if I am wrong, but, I think this was Philomena's only appearance in the show. I just might check, but I kind of like to avoid wikis and such and go in sort of blind, even if I am researching some things during these reviews. Trying to keep a perspective somewhat local to the season.

Lots of meme screenshots
Twilight's face seems especially exaggerated more than normal, lol. I remember, and still sometimes see, the Twilight Sparkle with the pill circulating in different contexts.

Animation notes
They reused the background from the underground in A Dog and Pony Show for the imagined dungeon. This could easily be headcanoned, if not an outright logical inference, that Fluttershy pictured the recent experience when imagining a dungeon.

Notice how the front door view the door is a normal stable/horse stall door but from the side view it lacks the detail of the middle line denoting that and the handle is reversed?


>>12167

The zipline opening is funny and a quintessential CMC trademark of ill-advized antics, enjoyable to see as always! Scootaloo also mentions that Spike told her that ziplining is awesome, and I could definitely see Canterlot having ziplining.

After the intro, it’s amusing that Apple Bloom doesn’t know what a varmint is when her big sister uses the term. And her story gives us our first look at Manehattan, ‘the most cosmopolitan city in all of Equestria’. The first reference to Manehattan, I believe? I think it’s singularly appropriate that homesickness would drive Applejack’s realization of who and what she wants to be in life, it’s a very strong feeling. We also seen the sun rise in the direction of Ponyville, so perhaps Manehattan is west of Ponyville. Fluttershy in her flashback appears to be older than Applejack was in hers, and that’s where we start to get the whole comparative age debate with the Mane 6 – although most of the others seem around the same age so perhaps Fluttershy is just lanky or got an early growth spurt. Fluttershy being seemingly unaware of her own shyness, thinking that was more of a phase in her youth, is a funny idea but it clearly got dropped quite quickly. In Rarity’s flashback we see Cheerilee, looking about the same age as Rarity in the flashback, which contradicts a small theory I remember DWK having a minor tangent on, namely that he thought she was the teacher at the school even back when Applejack and Rarity went there, but this shows that’s not the case. When her horn starts acting on it’s own, Rarity mentions how unicorn magic doesn’t happen without a reason and connects it to her destiny when it brings her to a boulder, suggesting an interconnection between magical talent and cutie marks within unicorns. In Twilight’s flashback, we learn of her eagerness to see Princess Celestia to raise the sun, and how this inspired her to pursue magic for herself, which I think goes some way to explaining Twilight’s sometimes quite extreme loyalty and devotion to Celestia, as well as the neuroses that sometimes crop up from that as a result. With how the Sonic Rainboom affected her, at first what I thought was going on was that the Rainboom itself somehow imbued Twilight with her power. I rather disliked this idea – but on rewatching the episode I wondered whether her inability to perform magic in front of the examiners was perhaps due to her nerves and the Rainboom, which she clearly hears, knocked her out of her nervousness and in a moment of unchecked desperation she then managed to sort of break through the barrier and get that moment of unicorn-magic unlocking like Rarity’s experience. Or perhaps the power of the Rainboom brought out just enough of Twilight’s magic for her already innate ability to manifest. The Sonic Rainboom has some rather odd and mysterious properties and I don’t feel like we actually know all that much about it (it’s referred to as an ‘old mare’s tale’ after all), but I still feel it would be a stretch to say it can actually imbue a previously weaker unicorn with some of the strongest powers that we regularly get to see in the show, even IF that’s the interpretation that was in mind when the scene was made. So long as that connection isn’t explicit, I’m happy going with more or less any alternative. In Pinkie Pie’s flashback, I really can’t even guess as to the function of the rock farm. I’ll have to look up theories after because I’ve never really thought about what exactly the rock farm does or produces before.

>>12176
>And that’s how Equestria was made!
Iconic.

In Sugarcube corner, Rainbow Dash tells her story and the Mane Six all realize that their stories were interconnected. I love the way they all react to it, and Twilight’s letter to Celestia about it at the end. It’s an interesting early example of a literal connection between friendship and magic in this world, after the pilot that is. Fate linking these six ponies together is an idea which perhaps takes some of the wind out of the sails of them befriending eachother earlier, and I feel as though I’ve heard it said that this sort of fateful connection between them all is perhaps a little too convenient, but in a world where fate and magic are intertwined with all aspects of reality and fate itself doesn’t feel too overused in the show as a whole, I think it works well (provided we don’t assume that these six becoming the Elements of Harmony was also predestined, that I do agree would be a little overly convenient. I prefer to think that this sort of thing happens for a lot of ponies, fateful friendships – in this case it just so happened to be extra significant). It’s not necessarily much of a lesson – moreso an idea of hope, that perhaps good things are fated for the future, a sort of lesson of optimism. I really like this episode a lot, mainly because it solidifies the idea of the Mane Six all being really close friends with one another. Much like the famous Kirk-Spock-Bones trio of 60s Star Trek, the bread and butter of this show really is these six and their relationships to one another. There are a lot of shows, particularly western cartoons, where if you think about what each character thinks of every other character, there are lots of gaps where you’re not really sure what two characters would think of one another, and they just don’t interact that much – and I believe I’ve brought this up before in terms of it being really quite impressive to me that this show juggles six characters all having strong, explored relationships with each and every one of the other six. I also like the CMC in this episode, they’re used perfectly as a framing device, it’s very well conceived and executed all round. I’m going to give it a 9.2 – in my mind it’s comparable to the pilot, coming close to that great group dynamic we got to see there but not quite reaching the same level, with a couple of rough patches in terms of how you interpret this episode compared to the pilot too.

PoLSeapony, or two!

Hope everypony is doing well out there as we get close to Nightmare night! and staying safe with the drum beat of war going on lately.

Obligatory summer bump. Have some not very summer related Wind Waker themed Celestias.