>>10215
>Honestly, I still enjoyed this episode, and I am not the type of person to really care that much on a bad lesson or two like how I recall some would back in the day
Coming from the company behind Transformers, it's more of a treat than anything. I love G1 Transformers but it's basically no lessons and all entertainment, which MLP seemed to be in earlier generations too. To get a balance of both here is not unusual per se, but could very easily have been absent altogether. I guess most people place value on children's entertainment roughly in proportion to how much learning of either a social or educational kind it imparts, though.
>>10216
>I am not sure I agree with episode air dates equaling dates of the episode
Nothing that exact, I think it's closer to a time-feeling or like an Equestrian equivalent to the sort of time frame they're being made or released. Possibly mostly subconsciously, too. I mainly mean to say that I feel like I see more of a correlation than not, and really it's just my desire to get a feel in my head for the timeframe of the whole show. I'm not watching like I used to, where each episode is a discrete package, I'm imagining the things inbetween the episodes, imagining the entire show as one singular continuous story (something which I don't think was ever really intended).
>she sometimes being studying random science stuff just because smart character trope. I don't mean this as a wholly out of universes explanation either. I think she has some side pursuits and such chemical experiment might be unrelated!
I don't disagree, but it's knowing that the research comes so much in handy with our next episode, Boast Busters, that gives me this suspicion that Twilight's got a sixth sense for researching topics that will come in useful to her soon.
>I don't feel a romantic energy so much as old high school best friend and Rainbow Dash discarded her rather quickly.
I agree it's one-sided on Gilda's part, but as for the rest... Well, it's two against one, so I guess my senses were wrong. I don't really know how close friends interact normally, so I accept that I may have just strongly misinterpreted it all.
> As for Pinkie Pie, she and Dash aren't mean spirited enough for me to go the full cynical route either but the tone is still a bit odd.
That's really where the writing is twisting around in a spine-breaking way to fit the lesson, which is where I somewhat agree with your point that the lesson in this episode is a bit janky in delivery, on reflection.
>If you didn't see the april fools post
I didn't really know how to respond to it but I did see it, twas a fun april fool's