>>12684
>Basically, you consider that the episode should've been less harmony versus discord in a moral/spiritual sense and more of fun with a chaos villain?
Kinda. Fun with a chaos villain can still provide a counterpoint to harmony I feel.
>The show, especially this episode would have still been constrained by the Season 1 attempt to maintain an educational rating
I don't know that Discord subverting harmony with mind control in this episode is particularly educational, though. Wouldn't Discord being a disruptive figure be more educational as an example of taking certain behaviours too far, of the right balance to strike between individualism and responsibility? You could even have something like he gets Pinkie on board for what starts as just fun, but eventually she starts to see some of the consequences (like chocolate rain eventually killing off crop yields, or other similar ill effects of an excess of 'fun'), which would make both the temptation angle and educational content more effective, it seems to me.
>Yet, A for effort is also a horrible standard to fall back on. Because you tried doesn't always mean you did a good job!
That's essentially how I feel about it: I can see they were going for something clever thematically with Discord, even moreso with the Nightmare Moon parallels you pointed out, but I think they sacrificed somewhat in being clever, and overall I don't think it pays off fully.
>So, I don't consider what you ask for naturally absurd at all, just slightly advanced for what the show would've tried to pull off! I would have been just as happy with that.
One idea I've just had for how you could possibly do it is to have Discord bring the Mane Six into alternate realities/timelines where he's granted their wishes, like Dash is a wonderbolt and such, or it's just a reality they like (Pinkie going to a world made of candy where everyone tells jokes). Obviously at first they'd try and go back to help Twilight stop him, but Discord would only let them leave after they at least got a taste of the other reality, so that then they really have to give up something. Tough to pull off but not impossible! You could even start with Twilight giving up her ideal world, and then going world-by-world, collecting more of her friends as she goes through them. Having said that though, that way might have meant less of chaotic Ponyville. I don't think there's a way to get everything into just a two-parter though!
>how much is the show carried by merely being better in it's wait class (This is amazing for a little girls show!) versus how much is it actually good?
I'd argue where it's good/best is in the world and character building, which feel more fully realised than they actually are. I think that's what makes the fan content for this series so compelling, as well. It's apples and oranges compared to Shakespeare insofar as with Shakespeare, at most I'm left thinking about real life. There isn't much more of Hamlet's Denmark to explore, once the play is over, and that isn't really what the play makes you think about anyways. So even if Harold Bloom might not be so keen on MLP, for escapism, which is at least partly the show's goal, I'd say it's nearly top-notch. In terms of a scale of fiction that succeeds in escapism, I'm not sure it's something that's been explored all that much, but it's the method by which I value things more, compared to other methods, and MLP ranks fairly highly on it. I think the gold standard might be The Neverending Story. The book, that is.

We start off this episode showcasing Twilight’s tendency to over-prepare and overthink things, setting us up for the episode’s exploration of neurotic tendencies. In this sense it falls into a similar category as Party of One, looking into how a character’s attributes that are generally presented as positive become negative when pushed to an extreme. As a concept for an episode I like this idea and I can see why it would be appealing to write episodes around such a concept: with such clear positive attributes present in our main characters, to the extent that they even embody core values of Harmony as a result, it’s interesting to consider the other side of that attribute, how the underlying nature of the character can be expressed in both positive and negative ways, as with real people. However, although I like the idea in concept, I wasn’t overly keen on Party of One on rewatch, and my memory is that I had even more issues with this episode. I’ll see how it holds up for me as I continue to watch it, but that aside, it does make me wonder why these episodes which I view as good in concept fail to be quite as good as I’d hope in execution.

So after the theme song, we join Twilight and Spike on one of Ponyville’s main streets, going through what’s next on the checklist: cupcakes for an upcoming picnic! They go to Mrs Cake’s shop to pick them up, Mrs Cake nicely puts an extra cupcake in the order for her, for free, and Twilight starts to get in a muddle about the icing of the extra cupcake touching one of the other cupcakes due to being packed into the box more tightly, thus making the distribution of the icing unequal. Now, I’m already skeptical of this because I’m unsure what number she’d be bringing to a picnic that would make 13 divide neatly among them all, and if she’s only going to bring some to the picnic rather than divide the whole number evenly then she could simply pick out the ones with evenly distributed icing. In fact, hearkening back to one of those Pony Anthologies with Twilight edited into the Monk intro, it reads more like Twilight just having an OCD episode more than anything else, which doesn’t really tie into our theme very well. Eventually we’re building up to Twilight having a neurotic breakdown, but this either showcases her managing to under-think her overthinking (undermining the point), or having an unrelated bout of anxiety over symmetry in objects, which potentially defeats the point of the scene (although I prefer it to the alternative, at least this way it would build a little of Twilight’s character even if unrelated to the episode overall, rather than actively undermining her character). I think a somewhat easier way to do this would simply be to have Twilight be having a picnic planned for her friends and herself, making six, which for a batch of twelve cupcakes would mean two each. It would still raise the question of why she couldn’t just give the spare cupcake to Spike now and keep the rest for the picnic, but it would simplify the scene somewhat and make a bit more sense, especially since home-made cupcakes like Mrs Cake makes are guaranteed to all be slightly different, with different distributions of both icing and ingredients on each one. If the anxiety is over who gets how many cupcakes, it makes a lot more sense since Twilight would be well aware of how the cupcakes are already inherently different from one another.

Incidentally, this line of thinking is very helpful to me as someone inclined to think on the detail-and-paranoia side of things. For instance, when I was superstitiously fearful of walking under ladders, I then considered that any time I walk into a building, there could be any number of ladders on floors above me, and I would never know. Furthermore, a ladder at a higher elevation would technically be 'above' everyone. Thinking about things the way a lawyer would think about them makes things a lot less scary!

>>12690
Spike and Twilight then return to their library, where an off-hand comment from Spike reminds Twilight that she’s due to send Princess Celestia a letter that same day, and she starts to panic. She says she has to find a friendship problem to solve by the end of the day and asks Spike if he has one that she can solve. I was certain that wasn’t the assignment Celestia gave her, so I went back and checked. Celestia said that Twilight was to study the magic of friendship in Ponyville. So unless Celestia later, off-screen instructed Twilight to solve a friendship problem every week, which doesn’t seem to fit all of the episodes we’ve seen so far anyway, this doesn’t seem to be correct. In fact, Twilight has committed a much more grievous error than being late for an assignment: she has failed to understand her assignment. Also, Twilight knows that Spike has a crush on Rarity, couldn’t she just turn that into a ‘friendship problem’? It would still likely turn out badly, but it puzzles me that this option didn’t occur to her. She goes round to all her friends looking for nonexistent problems, only for nothing to turn up, and at the picnic the others don’t understand why she’s so worked up over what seems to them such a minor issue. And so, returning home in frustration, she concludes that if she cannot find a friendship problem, she’ll make a friendship problem. Oh dear. Fabricating a friendship problem would be a significantly better solution. Perhaps Twilight wants to have witnesses to the friendship problem so that she can ‘prove’ she solved it, but like with her fundamental misunderstanding of her assignment, this approach so fundamentally perverts the purpose of her assignment that it makes her an exponentially worse student than if her assignment was late. Further, she could simply engineer a delay, by simply not sending anything until she completes her letter and then claiming in said letter that Spike had come down with something that prevented sending the letter sooner – or, if Celestia can tell from sending a letter that Spike’s still ‘operational’, there has to be some spell or other that could temporarily put Spike’s fire out of commission, which Spike would probably albeit reluctantly agree to.

And so Twilight places an enchantment on a childhood toy of hers, Smartypants that makes ponies want the enchanted object, enough to try and take it, so that she can introduce the toy into a situation, allowing Twilight to teach someponies about sharing. Not foreseeing the consequences of doing this is fine in my estimation, Twilight isn’t thinking things through in her panicked state which naturally leads to rash actions. So, I wouldn’t hold her responsible for what ends up happening, with the whole town fighting over Smartypants. I also find that it’s true to life to say that in rash moments, extremely poor decisions that are otherwise totally unrepresentative of a person’s character can end up being undertaken, so even choosing to make a friendship problem is in a sense still in character for Twilight. Where I would say the episode does result in Twilight being out of character is in a very specific aspect of the presentation: when concluding that she will make a friendship problem since she cannot find one, even during an overly-stressed neurotic meltdown, even Twilight cannot possibly fail to realise that to MAKE a friendship problem is wrong. To get some ponies to fight over something so she can step in is not so massive or so bad, but it nonetheless completely betrays principles that Twilight is dedicating herself to both following and studying, it’s dishonest, selfish, disloyal, cruel and is directly inducing misery, it is an action antithetical to all the elements of harmony. And yet even this would be fine with me, as a mistaken decision made under extreme pressure, were it not for the fact that Twilight does not acknowledge the fact that maybe this isn’t a good thing to do, she hardly seems to be aware of it at all.

>>12691
If she were to conclude that under the circumstances, doing something wrong is necessary, even if only concluding such due to her extreme panic, that would be perfectly alright with me, but in presenting her as having gone off the deep end, dropping all her marbles and sandwiches on the way down, this nuance isn’t there. I understand the humour of presenting Twilight as having gone crazy, and it lands just fine, but in this particular instance I think just a few seconds of clarity before returning to neurotic overreaction would work wonders to demonstrate that Twilight is in fact still herself and is merely making a mistake, even if it’s a little stretched in the believability department even then.

As it is, this episode very unfortunately makes Twilight come across as fundamentally selfish at some level to me, which I don’t think is true to who she is at all. The fact that the wrongness of making a friendship problem, of prioritising her needs over her duty to others, is not instantly and immediately apparent to her when she’s under pressure makes it seem as though she has to intentionally think about what is and is not selfish normally, such that she’s not naturally inclined to think of others when she’s not in the right headspace. I could believe that of Twilight in part 1 of Friendship is Magic, but I simply don’t believe that’s who she is after finding her friends and defeating Nightmare Moon. That is the magic of that moment, that Twilight goes from being self-obsessed to realising that friendship truly means something to her, that other people mean something to her. I can see that this is not a total overnight transformation, but neither is it the absence of a transformation, and if a degree of selflessness is just a code of conduct she has to consciously follow rather than an everpresent, perhaps small but yet growing aspect of her nature, then her ‘transformation’ feels like a lie, perhaps one even told to herself, most depressingly of all. That to me is the central issue, the thing that makes this episode deflating. I really do think I’d feel substantially different about it if there had just been a tiny tweak – instead of rubbing her hooves together and saying “If I can’t find a friendship problem… I’ll make one!”, saying at the very least “I’ll HAVE to make one.” Zooming all the way in to the microscopic level of my problem with this episode, it comes down ultimately to the fact that Twilight says she’ll make a friendship problem as a declarative statement rather than attaching qualifiers. It’s a lot like my issue with Return of Harmony part 1 in a way, although that was a larger, more complicated issue I had with that episode: both are fantastic episodes, well-written and lots of fun to rewatch, but just have this one aspect or even just tiny detail that spirals out into implications that I dislike. They are both flies in soup, ultimately not ruining much overall, but nonetheless managing to somehow sour the entire soup for me. Not by a lot, but by a noticeable degree, unfortunately.

>>12692
Celestia’s intervention, by contrast, is completely perfect. In particular, I noticed that just prior to Twilight’s friends bursting into the library, Celestia was essentially just forgiving her, but when Twilight’s friends come in and loudly try and convince Celestia not to punish Twilight, Celestia does not correct them but instead asks to hear what they have to say, and after hearing them out, says she’ll forget Twilight’s punishment, “on one condition”, that being for all of them to report their findings to her. Since all six feel that they have made mistakes they need to make up for, Celestia does not try to downplay the mistakes, even though they are somewhat minor, and provides a task for them which both serves as feeling like atonement, and continuing to help further Twilight’s studies. It’s very well thought-out, and impressed me as essentially coming off-the-cuff from Celestia. It’s excellently written, it’s precisely the way a leader should handle such a situation, and in a very short span of time manages to convey how impressively gifted she is with diplomacy. Also, in the end, Spike had to send both a warning letter to Celestia, and a report on friendship to her, and after he’d already gotten claw-cramp from writing and filling out the checklists earlier that day! So I hope his wrist wasn’t too sore in the end!

So all in all, I liked this episode a lot better than I thought I would! My issue (turned out to just be one, in the end) remains, but it’s less egregious than I remembered. I’d say I prefer it just marginally over Return of Harmony Part One, placing it on par with Bridle Gossip at 7.5!

>>12634
Er NOPE. Okay. For all I know there could be some setting or something I am misreading, lol, but I tried putting multiple rolls "dice 2d4 2d4 2d4" but that is just treated as an email address.

>>12633
I suppose one could set up a cyclic for dice rolls, but that maybe tedious, or use a simpler RP system. My potential issues with participation aside PM sent on that, I have no problem you trying an RP game on here if you decided against /mlpol/. If it was successful and you needed a lot of threads >>>/mlp/ might be a good idea. I own this board and had always wanted to clean it up and turn it into a wiki/repository/lists of things place but have never gotten around to it.

>>12635
>cyclic for dice rolls
That honestly would make the most sense.
That thread might have a player, but I think probably doesn't, just a tire-kicker.
Grab the sourcebooks before I yank the link, I guess.
Mega, slash folder slash r55EAapA#56e4eQ7cDStXpjmfBRIWoA

It looks like Thursday and Sunday are my weekend days, for at least a few weeks.

>>12636
General PoLS. I have some personal stuff going down right now that I am still trying to asses the impact of I detailed more of that on a PM.

250!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

USA USA USA Happy 4th to the Pacific Coast!

>>12653
Bathe in it all you want...because the sun is eternal

>>12655
I am working building some improvised structures in the summer heat so I sort of am!

This has Celestia kissing a filly Twilight Sparkle goodnight at night with Mare in the Moon in her full misery and blight in the background of Celestia's clear delight and yet I post this in /sun/ with mild fright at the taboo of sharing night in the thread of light which shines bright!

>>12657
Quite!

>>12681
...and it really is a delight!

>>12643
I fixed it. There is new anti spam moderation tools for unfamiliar IPs. These might be interesting but considering I imagine we use VPNs and a lot of our regulars here post every once and awhile I have it mostly turned off for now.

>>12644
I think part of the issue was I actually had the VPN turned off for once! Plus unfamiliar machine perhaps. Everything's gone topsy-turvy during moving house

>>12646
Similar story, albeit I have two machines I keep switching between for my sometimes highly specific set ups for chan based pony posting.

Point is though, it might be useful to set up better, but also a bit of a hindrance!

testy mc test to see if this will bump.

>>12649
Okay, I *think* I fixed it. Another problem is that there is a limit in place for bumping old threads, not a bad idea, but, the default was 1000 days ago,a lot of are still slow but activeish generals are 6+ years at this point. I think we are good now.

Raining at night, used to be a delight, but now such a blight, and that ain't right.

>>12613
...or maybe Wednesday is Inky?

>>12613
And thanks for the encouragement: rain, there is more than one building I have to deal with that has holes/damage and when it rains, it often rains inside too, I have to deal with, so that expression was very literal.

Rain is still a pain, and while trying to stop leaks in vain, maybe I can stay sane, but rain is my bane.

>>12567
I can't match L23's, Bridgefag's or 5050's autism when it comes to reviewing but next time I remember this place exists I might give my thoughts on it. The premise sounds interesting though I wonder if the invasion plot + the murder might require more than 5000k words to cover properly.

>>12567
The next 1800 words, right after the first half you've already read. Search for 'new student, pleasant' and it should jump right past the missed plot armor that nopony got but was promised a couple paragraphs above.

>>12592
>The camera was proffered to Chuck. "Get her, Snow Drift specifically, to help you, using this camera. Use whatever lies you want or need to. My colleague has put a tracking spell on it so we'll know to pick her up for … well, anyway."
Alright, here we have some more intrigue and clarification (sort of) on intent. Okay, seeing here:>>12571
>Fears over the mission or avoidance over her unicorn aunt? I also am guessing the aunt might be the unicorn from the royal guard who is crying about her niece being sent on a suicide mission... maybe? That is the only thing I am confused over and that could be easily fixed with context.
I had somehow (his brief appearance or my exhaustion induced) mistaken the gender of who I now know to be Snow Ski, (or is it Snow Sky?) Snow Drift's uncle. His concern wasn't fear of something bad happening to her but of her sheer existence and presence there. We also get some key information:
>Snow Drift suddenly appeared and this timing is significant to Snow Ski, presumably with her disappearance.
>Snow Drift had met Ground Chuck Snow Drift only just over three weeks ago, and she seemingly enrolled in the school within that time frame.
>Most significantly, Snow Drift having wings is new.
So, the mystery thickens.

I don't have much to say on the flow or critiques this time. Perhaps it would be nice to know more of what Ground Chuck thought of everything going on with Snow Drift. I initially found myself surprised that he was just going along with the royal guard wanting to question or detail his friend, but she is a new friend he hardly knows and seemingly a drifter. Considering the situation and added stress, that is a pretty human-er, pony-reaction. More context before I can fully judge this of course, but that is my take right now. All I will say on the griffon invasion cloud fort at the moment is that I like the concept and think it is something very in show canon even you're more of the type to be running with concepts and the world beyond the show.

One Grammar Note:
>The unicorn stallion pulled himself together, still weeping but making eye contact with his coworker. Berryfield shook the camera in her aura, and Snow needed several breaths to steady himself before he closed his eyes
I assume the proper spelling is Berry Field based on the conventions your other names have.Though as a mononym I don't think is bad if that is the proper spelling.

>missed plot armor that nopony got but was promised a couple paragraphs above.

>>12600
>plot armor denied

The two unicorn colleagues have been thrown off kilter by the sighting of Snow Drift, or Snow Ski would have had the presence of mind to add the shield to them both.

> >Most significantly, Snow Drift having wings is new.
Technically all that's been said, is that it's more likely to BE Snow Drift if the pink pterippus has wings.

Re-reading it reminds me of how cheesy of a feel I was going for, despite the drama going on. Ski's niece Drift is working with Draft while Chuck watches pony-chucking right after singing David Bowie's Heroes song in a world that probably doesn't have an equivalent, although I imagine the indigenous Buffalo of the David clan have hunting equipment called the David Bow.

/* /me takes a bow/ */

I keep telling ponies, once I unveil the rest of it you'll be mad at me for making you laugh.

>>12601
I maybe mad I maybe not: something that jumps genre abruptly might be interesting/fun in it's own weird way. The main time. My guess is that Snow Drift murdered somebody for her wings in a creepy and evil way.

>in a world that probably doesn't have an equivalent, although I imagine the indigenous Buffalo of the David clan have hunting equipment called the David Bow.
Let's not forget the Diamond Dogs!

>The two unicorn colleagues have been thrown off kilter by the sighting of Snow Drift,
I know you're not aiming for realism but we have plenty of real world examples of authorities being thrown off worse than that (or just being stupid without anything bad going on). I can believe it.

I'd actually asked for a picture of a smol stallion with a very tall mare, but she's so cute in this photo I think I'll keep it around.

>>12556
How many boards have died over there? I sure hope bridgefag has a plan C.

>satyr
I don't see those as much of that as I used to, clop or otherwise. Has /mlp/'s mare! meme put a damper on it or something?