>>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.