>>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.