My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is a Long Runner with An Aesop Once per Episode, with nine seasons and more than two hundred episodes under its belt. The aesops presented in the show are generally solid lessons for kids, but the sheer number of them has produced a few that get broken by its own narrative.
- In "Swarm of the Century", the lesson is that you should always listen to your friends, even if what they say doesn't make sense. The trouble is that Pinkie Pie has the solution to the problem, but just demands that everyone help her do what she wants without telling them how to help her or why it's going to work. And when another method almost works, Pinkie screws it up by not listening to anyone else. It's more like the lesson was about how not listening to people creates trouble.
- "The Mysterious Mare Do Well" has Rainbow Dash's friends become the eponymous Mare Do Well to teach Rainbow a lesson about humility. But the rest of the Mane Six come off as Hypocrites in execution. They objected to Rainbow's egotism and theatrics before it caused any harm, apparently on principle. They also boast about their own accomplishments as Mare Do Well, and their method was making Rainbow's issues worse until they confronted her about it. So they chastised Rainbow for taking an unhumble and theatric method, despite doing the exact same thing. This could have been unbroken if the Mane Six were being a Deliberately Bad Example, but that's not how they're portrayed nor what caused Rainbow to learn the lesson.
- "Sweet and Elite" tells us that you shouldn't hide your embarrassing social connections to gain social status. It does this by showing Rarity hiding her embarrassing social connections to gain social status. And the ally she gains is someone who will force other elites to back off when it's revealed Rarity's best friends are dorks. The episode also showers Rarity with rewards for lying about her friends, with no consequences of any kind.
- In "Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000", the stated moral is that taking the time to do something the right way will yield better results than rushing, but the Apple's way was failing to produce enough cider to meet demand while Flim and Flam's machine was easily able to produce cider of near equal quality at a vastly higher quantity. Even in direct competition, and with a ton of help from their friends, they only barely managed to outperform the machine and only lost because Flim and Flam lowered their quality settings to keep up — in other words they only won because they changed their method, and even then the "wrong" method of using machinery is still shown to be a very effective method.
- "A Friend In Deed" aims to teach that you can't force someone to be your friend, and that if someone doesn't want you hanging around them all the time, you should give them their space. The problem is that Pinkie doesn't leave Cranky Doodle Donkey alone until she figures out what she needs to do to endear herself to him. There's a somewhat mitigating factor in that the Aesop is more accurately expressed as "friends don't have to constantly spend time together", but the entire episode hinges on how Pinkie refuses to stop spending time with Cranky no matter how much he clearly doesn't want her around. Only by doing this does she solve his problem so they can be friends who never speak to each other again on-screen.
- "A Canterlot Wedding" has Princess Celestia give an Aesop about the importance of trusting one's instincts, as Twilight's doing so saved the real Princess Cadance and the day. However, Twilight's instinctive repose is only Right for the Wrong Reasons and to make outrageous accusations without evidence in a way that ruins her credibility even to herself, which would have doomed everyone if not for the the fake Cadance grabbing the Villain Ball immediately afterward. Twilight's instincts also lead her to nearly attack the real Cadance before being talked out of it. Celestia and everyone else's instincts' to trust the fake Cadance over Twilight are proven wrong and almost destroy Equestria.
- In "One Bad Apple", the Cutie Mark Crusaders learn the Aesop that when being bullied, instead of retaliating they should tell an adult like Applejack who can handle the situation better. This is enforced at the end of the episode when Babs Seed scares off two bullies by threatening to tell their parents. The problem here is that the adult Applejack is also present, and she doesn't do anything. Also, the bullies suffer an indirect humorous retaliation as the intimidation causes them to fall into some mud. So an adult actually fails to do anything while deserved physical retaliation is shown as a satisfying thing that solves the problem.
- A minor one in "Just for Sidekicks" where Zecora swipes a gem from Spike and gives it away because "there's no worse mojo than Dragon greed". While that's true and Spike is doing a poor and thoughtless job, he's not motivated by mere greed; he's working to earn a cup of gems, something that's thrown around like candy in Equestria, to bake a cake. While the end moral of "don't half-ass your responsibilities" is solid, Zecora essentially stole from a kid to teach him that doing odd jobs to earn some cash for a specific purpose is wrong.
- "Games Ponies Play" has the team traveling to the Crystal Empire and setting up festivities to impress a games inspector so she'll decide to let the empire host the ponies' version of the Olympics. They end up getting the wrong person, while the actual inspector has a terrible time. At the end, the two meet and the pony mistaken for the inspector talks about how amazing the empire is. The inspector decides that the empire will host the games, because every other place she visited went out of their way to impress her, while she was told of how great the empire was from a regular pony. The problem is, the only reason the other pony has such a glowing impression of the empire is because she experienced all of the things they had been planning to do for the inspector, undercutting any message about being sincere.
- "Bats!" has Fluttershy gives the aesop of "You shouldn't let anypony pressure you into doing something that you don't think is right. Sometimes you have to tell even your closest friends 'no.'" But Fluttershy spent the entire episode pressuring the other ponies into doing something Applejack didn't think was right and was ultimately shown to have the moral high ground for it, and that Applejack was shown as being objectively in the wrong for trying to say no to Fluttershy despite having valid reasoning based on experience to do so.
- "Rainbow Falls" presents Rainbow Dash with the choice of competing with the Ponyville team, who are terrible but counting on her, or the Cloudsdale team, who are great flyers but are revealed to be holding the Jerkass Ball. The Aesop is that one should be loyal to one's friends in the face of temptation. But Rainbow was never seriously tempted to chose them over her friends and Took a Third Option giving up what she wanted to avoid having to chose which causes Twilight Sparkle, the only one of her friends to notice her conflict, to confront her with hostility and guilt rather than support.
- "Princess Spike" has two aesops, both of which are soundly broken:
- Spike learns that it's wrong to use his connection to Twilight to make himself feel important by handling her appointments while she's asleep, and then abusing that authority to enjoy a bunch of indulgent perks. The episode illustrates this by having a bunch of orders Spike gave on Twilight's behalf cause a chain reaction that ruins a major diplomatic event. It doesn't work because Spike arranged all of those events according to his original order to not let anything disturb Twilight getting some sleep. The actually selfish actions go completely unmentioned and with no negative repercussions whatsoever, so even if Spike had only been responsible with his duties everything would have gone to pieces regardless.
- At the end of the episode when everything has gone to pot, one of the ponies who begins helping Spike clean up tells him "when each of us plays our own small part, it adds up to something great". Terrific lesson, except Spike did his small part to the best of his ability. Things went to hell anyway because Spike was in over his head and circumstances out of his control were working against him. It especially doesn't help that this comes from one of the ponies who refused to listen to Spike earlier; in other words, someone who was actively preventing Spike from doing his part.
- "Newbie Dash" has the Aesops of not let embarrassing moments affect you and not put standing out ahead of the team. But Rainbow Dash's Embarrassing Nickname was hurting her and in turn her teammates before she tried to stand out, and it's her attempts to stand out that result in her resolving the issue by talking it out with her team when they confront her on it. This argues the opposite Aesop that things would have been better for everyone if she acted on her embarrassment and stood out by explaining her issues sooner.
- "Shadow Play" gives the message that it's wrong to immediately assume someone is irredeemable without getting the full story or trying to redeem them, as it was Stygian's friends wrongly assuming the worst and banishing him that caused him to become the Pony of Shadows who was redeemed once they tried. This is broken by every similarly Big Bad-tier villain in the series afterward being portrayed as so irredeemably evil the heroes were justified in so punishing them, even if they were a child, without giving them the effort they did to understand the circumstances of or redeem them they did Stygian and the other redeemed villainsnote .
- "Yakity-Sax" states that you should be supportive of your friends hobbies and interests even if they're not good at it. But besides Pinkie's yovidaphone playing causing tangible harm and annoyance, her friends were portrayed as wrong even when they were supportive by sugarcoating it as she wasn't good as opposed to the harm she caused. This might have worked if it was about their not finding a way for her to do so without harm, but their doing so came after nor was part of the stated moral.
- "Daring Doubt" states that you need to get every side of the story. But Ahuizotl being treated as Good All Along has them ignore prior sides of the stories where he committed evil seemingly beyond what could be justified by his being the regions guardian rather than address/explaining them.
