Headscratchers / My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic - Season 5

Headscratchers Index

Seasons:

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
Season 4
Season 5 (You are here.)
Season 6
Season 7
Season 8
Season 9

Others:

Setting
General Canon

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5.01 & 5.02 The Cutie Map

• Can you figure out a genuinely beneficial use for removing Cutie Marks?
  • In terms of a societal sense? Temporarily disabling a dangerous and powerful criminal. The Cutie Mark remains undamaged and can be returned at any time, so once rehabilitated, they can have their mark back.
  • It's just about the most effective combat magic imaginable, and could be very useful in war. "The Cutie Re-Mark" makes it pretty definite that war is not a foreign concept to ponykind. Even in a peaceful context, disabling a unicorn on a destructive drunken bender sounds pretty beneficial.
  • Why does there have to be one?
  • As of "A Royal Problem", at least one has now been shown.
• It kind of itches my brain how Twilight, a powerful unicorn pony even before becoming an Alicorn, was unable to use her magic to give another pony their own cutie mark, but Starlight Glimmer, a talented unicorn pony in her own right, was able to put a cutie mark on another pony, but remove it as well. This coupled with her possible Green-Eyed Monster motivation when Twilight blocked one of her attacks. How exactly would that be possible, unless that's her talent?
  • Whether it's her talent or not, the reason Twilight wasn't able to do it is probably because this is very different from what she tried to do to Applebloom. She was trying to give Applebloom a mark from nowhere. Starlight took marks that were already there out/off of ponies. She was removing magic that was already there, Twilight was apparently trying to create the magic out of nothing.
  • "It is far easier to destroy, then to create." Twilight was trying to create something out of nothing. Starlight was simply altering an already existing thing.
  • It might also be that Twilight simply never had any desire to TRY and learn or create this spell at all, since it's very likely most ponies would consider a spell to remove Cutie Marks to be morally wrong.
• Did Starlight truly believe in the rhetoric she preached (even after her hypocrisy was exposed)?
  • She seemed to anyway. Even after she was exposed and knew there was no going back to the way things were before, she still kept talking about how much better life would be if everyone were equal. It's likely she was able to rationalize her own hypocrisy to herself by thinking something along the lines of "I need my magic to make ponies equal."
  • Later confirmed in the season finale that, yes, she did.
• Wouldn't have the cutie marks returned to the ponies after Tirek was defeated rather than going back to the cave? Or... did the cave protect/hide the contained cutie marks, or is the town so far in the boonies they escaped Tirek's notice for the time being?
  • That or the village was founded after Tirek's attack. Granted, it doesn't leave us much time, but it could have been an ghost town that Starlight appropriated for her plans.
  • The town was pretty remote, it all depends on whether Tirek could sense magic and follow the trail, or if he just went to every populated town he and Discord could find. Or maybe they did return to the ponies who owned them. And then were promptly given back to Starlight. It's not like they were taken by force, it seemed like what they were doing with the mane six, IE capturing them and forcibly taking their cutie marks, was pretty unusual.
  • Basically, as said above, it was pretty remote. The Map showed it to be basically the middle of absolutely nowhere. It's highly unlikely Tirek or Discord found it worth it to go there.
  • Alternately Tirek did come out there and Starlight successfully hid from him and Discord. Neither have displayed omniscience or really even above average intelligence. If Tirek came to a village and the first dozen ponies he found had no magic and identical cutie marks he might put a pin it for later but it's doubtful he'd go one by one until he found the only pony there with magic. As is noted back in Twilight's Kingdom Discord wasn't being entirely forthcoming with information so even if he had noticed Starlight he very well might not have volunteered the information.
• It's heavily implied that there was a deeper plan that Starlight had for the town ("They'll finally understand what we're trying to accomplish!"), especially given that she wanted to keep Twilight's cutie mark really close to her. It's never revealed or stated what she planned to do with the town or the Mane Six (once she converted them). Was it just wanting power over other ponies under the guise of equality? Or is it something that'll be revealed further down the season?
  • The most popular interpretation of the season opener is that Starlight really believed that what she was doing was a good thing. She never mentions any kind of evil plan, or that she had been lying about anything other than her own cutie mark. When she talks about the power of Twilight's cutie mark, or having a princess endorse her ideals, she doesn't seem to be lying. She might have some big plan to force everyone to accept her way, but it seemed to be all for her equality cause. She seemed to actually believe in it.
  • She's basically a cartoon communist. Her evil plan really is as simple as make everybody equal so there are no winners or losers.
  • I kind of believe it's a combination of both- I do think she intended to take Twilight's cutie mark for herself because of how she speaks of it, but that she also genuinely believed what she was doing was for the greater good of Equestria. She likely wanted Twilight's cutie mark to make her magic more powerful, so she could take even more cutie marks at a time than she already can, or so she can remove a pegasi's ability to fly, since she removes a unicorn's magic and presumably an Earth pony's natural strength, or even have the power to painlessly remove horns and wings like Discord. I don't think she truly intended to ever give up her own cutie mark, even if the entire world lived under her ideals, but maybe less so she could rule over them, and more as a precaution. I think her ideals were self-contradictory so she always came out on top, but without the intention of ruling, exactly, and functioning more like everyone's mother than their, say, queen. You will notice that her house is different from everyone else's as well, so it's possible she wants to be the same as everyone else, but yet distinct.
• So, to what extent was magic taken from the ponies? Obviously the pegasi can still fly equalized, and Sugar Belle has been shown to use magic to levitate her notepad when taking the Mane Six's order.
  • Only the magic that was directly tied to their Cutie Mark. That's why Rainbow could still fly, but was very very slow.
  • All ponies had all abilities perfectly in line with everypony else. They could all fly at the same speed, run at the same speed. All of them were as exactly equal as possible.
    • But not all ponies can fly, and not all of them had overt magic.
    • Some very fundamental physical differences remained. Presumably, the mares could still bear foals. The sexes weren't completely equalized with each other, so it makes sense that the pony types likewise kept their abilities. They were as equal as they could be, while still being functionally the same physical beings as they were before.
• Are we supposed to assume that the equal cutie marks brainwash ponies, or is it just the propaganda broadcasts that are doing it? Starlight clearly expects Fluttershy to givee manes, and we see the marks pulsate a few times as they drain ever more of the uniqueness out of the ponies, which suggests they up the pony that showed interest in th have some sort of effect, yet the fact that someone had an interest at all would suggest the marks don't do it on their own (or at least they're not foolproof). Just seemed a bit hard to follow.
  • My take is that it's all in their heads. The village ponies all want to ignore their talents, at least most of the time. Having their individuality drained does have an inherent physical sensation, but nothing more; how the ponies react to it is entirely psychological. As for Starlight and Fluttershy... maybe the former has just been doing this so long with an apparent 100% success rate that she's started to believe she can, in fact, force ponies to do things against their will.
  • I think it's More than Mind Control. Having the cutie marks removed takes away much of their passion and willpower, but they still remember what they were before. That's where Starlight Glimmer's brainwashing comes in, as they are now far less resistant to it.
• So out of all the cutie marks, why was Starlight Glimmer more interested in the Mane Six's cutie marks and singled them out??
  • Despite appearances she most likely wasn't more interested in the Mane Six's cutie marks. She was more interested in Princess Twilight Sparkle's cutie mark. The other five are Twilight's friends however and provide her with leverage. Remember two of the other three Princesses raise the sun and moon, defeated Discord, Tirek and King Sombra. Even a princess beat half the Tartauros with a nerf bat is quite possibly a huge threat to a standard unicorn.
• What would happen if a non-pony wanted to join the village, such as a donkey or griffon? Since they don't have their cutie marks (but probably still have some sort of magic within them), how would they undergo the equalization process?
  • Starlight's desire for equality stems from her hatred of cutie marks and cutie marks specifically, so, besides being brainwashed, a creature without a cutie mark probably wouldn't have to do anything.
• Minor issue, but where/when exactly did Fluttershy get a bucket full of water to try and splash and expose Starlight Glimmer?
  • Bit WMG, but maybe she set it up the night before in preparation for the reveal, hid it away, and then grabbed it offscreen while Twilight and Starlight were talking.
• Was Party Favor being sincere when he agreed to rejoin Starlight Glimmer or was he simply acting as part of the main six's plan to stop her?
  • It could go both ways, but the way he exaggerates his expressions even more so than normal suggests that he's faking it. It could also be argued that someone having underwent torture would seem more distressed. Regardless, he sure was quick to notice and wipe off Starlight's fake cutie mark...

5.03 Castle Sweet Castle

• So... does Ponyville officially have a new library now, or does Twilight's castle still double as the town library?
  • No library at the moment I would think. Unless there was something about Twilight moving or acquiring books that I've forgotten/missed... Could totally see Twilight having a library in the castle though, it'd be right up her street
  • For what is worth, Rainbow Dash does mention the castle having a library.
  • Rainbow Rocks started with Celestia and Cadence donating books to Twilight (including the book Sunset Shimmer used to communicate with Celestia conveniently enough). She had to put them somewhere.
    • Fair enough, just watched the start of it, Twilight's new castle does indeed have a well furnished looking library.
• What's keeping somepony like Discord from just summoning another Golden Oaks Library?
  • Discord didn't learn the layout of the library %100. He could make something similar, but he couldn't get it perfect, or replace everything lost in it.
  • I'm sure summoning something permanent and consistent would be pretty difficult for Discord. I'm not sure we've ever seen him cause anything with his magic that's stuck around long term.
    • There were the Plunder Seeds from the season 4 premiere, but they were relatively minor compared to a lot of his other antics.
    • Also, it's been established that Discord just loves to screw with Twilight. So even if he could make one, there's no reason to think it wouldn't randomly reorganize itself every night while she sleeps or something.
• So, the Mane 5 uprooted a building sized stump, cut it down enough to work as a...chandelier I guess, fashioned magical gems containing memories of Twilight's past in the library, carted it through town, somehow got it into the castle, somehow set it above the Cutie Map...all in a matter of hours at most? Without anyone noticing? How?
  • The episode never said that nopony noticed. Just Twilight, and she was being kept busy by Spike.
  • Magic? Even if it wasn't shown, Fluttershy could have easily asked Discord a favor. Or the whole town...
    • Because MLP isn't a fighting or sports related show at all it makes absolutely no effort to establish baseline Power Levels. Which would be useful in this case. In general Rarity is shown carrying larger and more numerous objects than Twilight. Twilight is generally accepted however as having more raw power than Rarity. If we go back to Season 1 Twilight, with considerable strain, lifts an Ursa Minor which mind you was stepping on buildings. If Rarity can muster a full half of Twilight's brute strength carrying half the library wouldn't even be a challenge for her. However there is no way to know where Rarity falls strength wise and there likely never will be since it's almost completely a non-issue.
  • Rarity has been established as capable of shocking productivity when faced with a nearing deadline, Fluttershy has tons of animal friends who could lend a paw, Rainbow Dash is easily among the fastest ponies alive, etc. They're better suited for this project that is immediately apparent.
  • Discord did it.
• Did Ponyville just decide to leave the destroyed, rotting library there? Did no one think it would be better to renovate or excavate the area? Because if you wanted to show new ponies to your city, you certainly wouldn't want one of the most eye-catching attractions to be an ugly, destroyed former library.
  • An ugly, destroyed former library that was wrecked in a huge battle between a Princess wielding the power of four Alicorns against one of the most powerful adversaries Equestria has ever faced. They could easily have decided that it would make a pretty good monument commemorating the battle. "Here's the ruins of our old library" wouldn't really impress anyone, but "these ruins mark the spot of Princess Twilight's battle with Tirek" probably would. It might not have much practical purpose, but it would definitely be of value as a historical site.
  • More mundanely, the local authorities probably decided to let Twilight decide what to do with it, since she technically outranks them and she's the one who lived there. And she's probably either too busy with other princess stuff to deal with it, or the library holds too much sentimental value for her to want to get rid of it.
  • I'd figured it wasn't high on the priority list of "Things To Fix After the Battle With Tirek", since nobody seemed to actually visit the library for any reason other than to see Twilight (and she by then had a new place to live, of course), and everyone needed the rest of the buildings they had to fix, such as the schoolhouse. We do see towards the end of this season that they still hadn't fixed all the damage. It's likely they focused on one or two things at a time to bring them back at a more rapid pace than spreading out the work among fewer ponies would, especially considering how hard it is for ponies to do things outside their talents at times.

5.04 Bloom and Gloom

• So, a profession (like pest control) that has almost nothing to do with apples can still be apple-related... so long as the cutie mark has an apple or two on it?
  • Pest control is important to any farming. Plus, it's a kid's dream. Logic isn't going to be consistent.
  • As the troper who answered before me said, it was all a dream. And even the dream acknowledges it had nothing to do with apples.
  • Yes? The potion making Cutie mark also had an apple, presumably she would be able to do non-apple related potions.
  • If you look closely, Bab's new cutie mark is also somewhat apple related: The handles have a seed each making them resemble the inside of an apple if you cut it in half. Luna did say that a cutie mark is a representation of who a pony is, rather than just their talent, and it was established in Call of the Cutie that no two ponies have the same cutie mark. (The fact that cutie marks tend to be identical on background ponies can be forgiven as an animation shortcut; you try designing dozens, maybe hundreds, of different cutie marks, and then try to remember which one goes to which pony each time there are a bunch of background ponies in a shot.) Presumably, regardless of the actual talent, cutie marks are customized a bit for each pony.
  • To answer the original question, it would technically be apple-related, assuming most of Apple Bloom's pest control work would be done on Sweet Apple Acres.
• Conssidering stuff like the Fruit Bats, the Parasprites, and then the Flyders, isn't pest control a reasonable profession? Come to think of it, Apple Bloom lives and works in a farm...wouldn't she be already an expert at pest control?

5.05 Tanks For The Memories

• Twilight and Rarity using their magic to levitate things. Do they get a pass because Twilight's a princess now?
  • You're thinking of Winter Wrap-Up. Nowhere is it said that bringing in winter follows the same rules.
• Fluttershy's Tough Love may seem out of character for a second but when you stop to think about it, as Ponyville's main animal caretaker as well as one who appears to facilitate pet ownership for many Ponies in town just how many Ponies with hibernating pets do you think she's had to counsel in the exact same way she did for Rainbow Dash?
  • Even with that said, it may just be a sign of character development after It Ain't Easy Being Breezies. In that she learned that sometimes you need to be tough to somepony to benefit them in the long run. She was just acting on that lesson here.
  • Also, she has known Rainbow Dash the longest out of anyone. She knows her well enough to know that you need to be blunt with her. Much like how Rainbow Dash took the soft approach in Hurricane Fluttershy.
• So according to this episode this is Rainbow's first winter with Tank. This brings two question involving time. First, if this is her first winter with Tank then what was that Hearth's Warming Eve episode then? Second, are you telling me that everything from season 2 to now has taken place over the course of less then a year? Considering how much happens that feels very hard to swallow.
  • Considering Winter Wrap Up aired before Fall Weather Friends when both episodes take place in the same year (it was confirmed in Princess Twilight Sparkle that all three previous seasons took place in a year), it's safe to say most of the episodes in those seasons are out of chronological order, so Hearth's Warming Eve could take place before May The Best Pet Win.
  • "Princess Twilight Sparkle" did not confirm that all previous seasons happened in a year; Celestia's phrasing is fairly ambiguous there. As for this episode, Rainbow Dash says this will be her and Tank's "first winter together". If you really, really, really need to think that more time has passed, it's possible that Tank was somewhere else, for some reason, during the previous winter(s). It might help explain why Rainbow is so excited, having missed at least one entire season with Tank previously and not wanting this one to pass without him as well. You'd think such a thing would get a mention in the episode though, and that Rainbow would already be mentally equipped to deal with his absence, having experienced it before. In short: The writers clearly intended that less than a year passed since "May the Best Pet Win", but it's possible to make enough headcanon contortions to say that more than a year has passed.
• Pinkie Pie has her own reptilian pet - Gummy the Alligator. I'm not expert on reptilian biology or behavior, but I'm certain he'd be affected by the cold weather as well (if he were to make an appearance). Wouldn't Pinkie Pie have mentioned something about her pet alligator, since both he and Tank are reptiles?
  • If she did, it, of course, went right over RD's head.
  • She probably was going to mention Gummy, but Rainbow sudden outburst of anger made her decide against it.
  • Yeah, they aren't experts either, or figured that trying to explain the distinction between brumation and hibernation would just go over the target audience's head and cut into good story time when it's close enough anyway. Either way, they are indeed in the same boat.
• Pinkie Pie emotionally cripples Fluttershy, and all other Mane Five give her a Death Glare. But when Fluttershy emotionally cripples Rainbow Dash, suddenly it's OK? And come to think of it, how is this any different than how she treated Rarity and Pinkie back when she became "New Fluttershy"?
  • Because Fluttershy was being blunt with the hard truth. She knows this better than RD because she takes care of animals for a living and has more than likely dealt with the offscreen deaths/illnesses/natural life-changing processes enough times to rationalize it as nothing you can change. If you mean "Filli Vanilli", Pinkie Pie was insensitively bringing forth Fluttershy's insecurities, so it would genuinely come off as hurtful. Fluttershy wasn't. In fact, she was doing such for Dash's benefit. As for "the new Fluttershy", she was being mean to others at the slightest provocation under the mistaken belief that it was "assertive", but she really was assertive in the right way here.

5.06 Appleoosa's Most Wanted

• I get that Applejack would punish the CMC for running off when they were told not to, but if they hadn't, they would never have been able to help Trouble Shoes rediscover his talent, and everyone in town would still see him as an outlaw.
  • It's likely a matter of taking responsibility for your actions. Troubleshoes might not have meant to cause problems, but his actions at the beginning of the episode nearly crushed the CMC. Similarly, the CMC didn't mean to cause trouble, but trouble they did cause.
  • They also got Trouble shoes in trouble by not coming clean about them sneaking out and him helping them, basically lying to Applejack.
• What was the point of Sweetie Belle levitating the cell keys out of the jailhouse? The CMC could have just grabbed them when they snuck into the jailhouse moments later.
  • The CMC have never been ones to really think through a plan and it's only recently that Sweetie Belle has displayed any real control over her magic. She might still think that it's cool.
  • Or to make sure that the Sheriff didn't grab the keys on his way out.
• How did nobody noticed Trouble Shoes sneaking into the rodeo or instantly recognize him? While I'm certain there are other horses in the world this is the first time we've seen one and he's bigger than Celestia. It would be different if the episode and thrown in even a couple pallet swaps of Trouble as it stands it's basically like Shaq sneaking into a midget convention because because he put on some make up. And I know it's a children's show and some suspension of belief is necessary but the show (within the context of magical talking ponies) tends be less absolutely insane.
• That green mare in the Cold Open with the boot spur cutie mark. Boot spurs, in a universe where racehorses and workhorses don't have jockies and riders.
  • They were developed as a fashion statement?
  • Or they could have boots with spurs. Ponies do seem to wear shoes over their hooves sometimes.
• So... are they in Appleloosa from the earlier seasons or is this a different town with a very similar name("Appleoosa")? from the flashback it seems Trouble shoes grew up in the town(EVERYONE knows who he is) but Appleloosa was only recently founded...
  • They know who he is because he's got a reputation. They want to have a rodeo and Troubleshoes has been going around the rodeo circuit trashing rodeos. As for where he's from: Appleloosa is likely not the only desert town out there.
  • The episode features Braeburn as a local resident and Sheriff Silverstar is in charge of the town pokey. This is the same town that was featured in "Over a Barrel"; the show writers just refined the spelling.
    • It also features a big forest area... I mean, unless the Apple trees became a forest, that's pretty much the opposite of were they founded Appleloosa.
• How could Sheriff Silverstar identify Troubleshoes Clide as the culprit just by looking at his hoofprint? Excuse me, but the entire population of Equestria are horses. They all leave behind horseshoe tracks. And also, last I checked, real world law enforcement doesn't identify culprits by their footprints, either.
  • By size? Trouble shoes is twice as big as normal adult ponies, and his.. "shoe" size would equally scale up. Since there is no one else that size...
• Appleloosa is a prairie town. How can they have a lush enough forest nearby to get lost in?
  • For that matter, wasn't it in the middle of the desert last time?

5.07 Make New Friends But Keep Discord

• Discord has seen Fluttershy with other friends before. One of the opening scenes even depicts him smiling while she is feeding a rabbit.
  • That's a rabbit. Tree Hugger is a pony.
  • Further, Discord obviously sees he has more than one friend and so does Fluttershy. What he appears to be threatened by is the idea that Fluttershy has a friend that threatens his place in Fluttershy's life.
• Wouldn't Fluttershy have immediately picked up on Discord's sudden and irrational behavior?
  • Discord is a spirit of chaos. His behavior is always irrational.
  • Fluttershy's complete and undivided attention was on her new friend Tree Hugger. To the point that Discord's overreaction aside it's difficult not to see how he would have felt slighted. He had to clear his throat to the point of nearly shouting to get her to even acknowledge him at the Gala.
    • Fluttershy herself has been show to be bad at making new friends, with only the mane six(and animals) being her constant companions. All the mane friends would express themselves loudly if they felt ignored, the would animals too, so she honestly didn't know she was doing anything wrong.
• So... are there different kind of tickets, or did Celestia change the rules? Last time was one ticket per person, and now is one ticket means one plus one guest.
  • Either explanation works. Either all tickets became invitee-plus-guest (since Twilight herself helped organize the event it's possible she wanted it to be more inclusive), or there are indeed two tiers of tickets and the Mane Six got "upgraded" between the last gala and this one (again, possibly courtesy of Twilight). In the end, it's just a minor plot point to set up the rivalry between Discord and Tree Hugger.
  • Since the Mane Six have saved Equestria multiple times and become more well-known since last Gala, it makes sense that they all now get their own special invitations and extra ticket. Maybe one of them mentioned to Celestia that the CMC really wanted to go to the Gala so she gave out extra tickets and it would be only fair to let all of them bring a guest after that.
  • Actually, it makes sense if you assume 1 invitation = 2 tickets (one for you and one for a guest). In "Fall Weather Friends" Twilight got one invitation, which included 2 tickets, one for her, and one for her +1. At the end of that episode, Celestia bent the rules and gave the rest of the mane cast tickets, essentially turning Twilight's +1 into a +5. In this episode, each of the mane cast got their own invitation, which comes with 2 tickets.
• At the start, why can't Discord just summon a ticket? Does the Gala have anti-counterfeit scanners or something?
  • He seems to be trying (to an extent) to live by Equestrian rules and standards. After all the old Discord wouldn't have cared about even having a ticket, let alone a valid one, if he wanted to go somewhere.
  • He wanted to go to the Gala as himself. That ruins any of the more obvious things he could do. He didn't want to ruin the Gala, at least not right away, and he sticks out and Celestia would realize he was there uninvited. Despite actually being invited, but he didn't know that at the time.
  • Of course Discord could have summoned a ticket, or just shown up. That however wouldn't have solved his real problem which was feeling unloved by the ponies in general and Fluttershy in particular. Notice how all his anger is aimed at Tree Hugger and any pony else was just collateral damages. Notice how much of his interaction with Smooze is clearly about making Fluttershy jealous. If all else had failed he probably would have crashed but he is trying to be good.
• Wasn't the entire point of The Best Night Ever that the Grand Galloping Gala is a fancy elitist social event where a strict code of conduct is required? Why would those stiff-upper-lip Canterlot blueblood invite Discord, the God of Chaos?
  • Celestia invited him because she wanted him to make the Gala more interesting than it usually is.
    • She invited the God of Chaos to liven up her party...that's like Tony Stark inviting Loki or Dormmamu to a Stark Industries party "to make things more interesting"...
    • It's really not that bad, Discord is chaotic and likes causing mischief but he's reformed now. While that doesn't make him harmless or even well behaved it means he's no longer hostile or destructive. A bit of mischief goes a long way to spice up a dull evening and Celestia can get away with inviting him because not inviting him could be taken as an insult which could lead to him deliberately ruining the gala. As things went there were a few surprises but Discord undid any mess he made and everyone was fine.
• How did Rarity manage to get her gala dress back after Discord sucked it away in a vacuum in a failed effort to clean the slime off, let alone have it on good condition so fast?

5.08 The Lost Treasure Of Griffonstone

• So Rainbow, to put it bluntly, hates the griffins (because of a bad experience with one of them, but that's not the point). And yet in Breezies she reveals she wants to be turned into one. So what is her stance?
  • Rainbow's stance is that she's not too bright when it comes to other sentient beings. She assumes all Griffon's are jerks because of her fight with Gilda. It's not the body she has a problem with, it's the mind. Griffons are half eagle and half lion. Rainbow Dash probably thinks that would be "awesome."
• Twilight Sparkle has knowledge (at least theoretical) of a lot of things and was the disciple of Princess Celestia, for whom she used to run errands back in the day. How is it that she didn't know of the collapse of the Griffin state?
  • This reason for this is stated in universe: after the loss of the idol they stopped recording their history. Heck, by the time Rainbow and Pinkie showed up, the griffons had become so apathetic that even they thought the idol was just a myth.
    • The problem is that doesn't really hold up nor answer the question. Griffindor doesn't seem to be that far away and while her not knowing about Idol seems odd because Celestia had to have known not knowing about the collapse is very odd. Maybe she wouldn't know the story of how it got that way but she'd know it was a failed state. The truth is Equestrian News and history is shown to be incredibly poor. Everybody thought Nightmare Moon was a myth, had never heard of the Crystal Empire at all, didn't seem to know anything about Discord or Tirek. It's hard to pinpoint when in history MLP thinks it is, Manehatten and Applosa look like they're separated by at least fifty years people knew about Roman Emperors, weren't entirely ignorant of European Royalty or Egyptian royalty. Chalk it up to they need a reason to explain it to the viewer. Why they don't just have someone else ask and Twilight explain who knows.
• Equestria comes across as being somewhat isolationist. Does even Celestia know about Griffonstone?
  • She might, but why would she care? Griffonstone isn't some little village in need of help, it's an old town that's falling apart because the residents just do not give a shit about their town unless they've got some priceless treasure to be proud of. The people living there are the ones letting it fall apart, not much Celestia could do, or any reason she should care about it in the first place.
  • To expand on the above point: the show subtly hints that ponies and griffons don't really have that good of a relationship. Things between them are apparently okay enough to send a delegation to the Equestria Games, but that's about it. It's not entirely unlikely that Celestia had a bad experience with them in the past, and so chose to turn a blind eye to their misfortunes out of spite. Granted, this is somewhat unlikely given Celestia's character, but not impossible. Alternatively, as stated above, the griffons just more or less withdrew into themselves after the loss of the idol, and Celestia was unaware of the fact and/or simply didn't care enough to send a pony to find out what happened.
  • All thing point to Griffonstone being a kingdom on its own(It *is* small, but that probably doesn't matter). If Celestia offered her help and they refused(for whatever reason), there is nothing she can do. And to be fair to Celestia, she does allow to citizens of Griffonstone to move to Equestria territory and have the same rights and opportunities as Equestrians(Gilda herself and Gustav, to put some examples)
• Twilight calls Griffonstone the "coolest kingdom in all of Equestria". So is Equestria a country where the ponies live? Or is it what they call their world?
  • The truth is the writers goof and quite a bit unless you throw all logic right out the window. A few possibilities come to mind. First that Griffonstone is some kind of vassal state and there may be others like where the minotaurs, goats, donkeys and horses hail from. They are considered 'in' Equestria from a legal stand point, they could also be similar to the EU (Equestian Union) and all the countries collectively gather under the banner of the strongest nation but are otherwise separate. There is also an off chance that Equestiria is the name of both the planet and the Kingdom. Basically a much vainer version of New York, New York.
  • I have always thought of it like Narnia: It's both the name of the planet AND the name of a kingdom in said planet.
  • For what it's worth, a popular fan theory is that Equestria is just the name of Celestia's kingdom or, at the most, the continent the show is set in. Hearth's Warming Eve seems to imply that not only is this the case but that the name of the planet is not Equestria (a common fan name is "Equuis" or something similar). The writers however seem to use Equestria to interchangeably refer to both the kingdom and the greater pony world, probably because the name of the pony world simply isn't important enough for us to know right now.
• If (according to the episode) griffons in Griffonstone can't bake then how did they have Gustave even participating at Canterlot Dessert Competition with his éclairs which everyone loved?
  • Gustave is a natural born Equestrian citizen? It's not like non-ponies living in Equestria is uncommon. His parents simply left Griffonstone before he was born and he grew up with the same opportunities to learn to cook.
• Why was Pinkie so forgiving of Gilda? It was Pinkie who noticed Gilda's monstrous behaviour and was suitably outraged by it. Sure, Gilda betrayed Dashie's trust, so Dashie has legitimately good reason to hold a grudge towards Gilda...but so does Pinkie. True, Pinkie is naturally forgiving, but treating Fluttershy like Gilda did is a serious offense.
  • Pinkie simply doesn't hold grudges for very long. She can be angry in the moment, but after a little while to calm down, she always reverts to her fun-loving, friend-to-everyone personality. Even in "Griffon the Brush-Off" Pinkie threw a party for Gilda to get her to mellow out. She never even considered any form of shunning or revenge. It's just who Pinkie is.
• In order to fill this episode's aesop, Gilda chooses to save Pinkie and Rainbow rather than the Idol of Boreas. But, the Idol was already in a completely safe place; it was only in danger because Gilda pulled it to the very edge of the rock. Why didn't she just pull the Ponies up first and then save the Idol? Was it just Greed?
  • Very possibly; after all, this episode establishes Greed as a character trait common to every griffin. Also, Gilda probably wasn't thinking too clearly at the moment.

5.09 Slice of Life

• How the hell did that changeling get past security? You'd think that after the big attack in Canterlot, Equestria would be a lot more paranoid about these creatures.
  • He had an invitation?
    • That raises further questions. Why would anypony invite something as dangerous as a changeling to a wedding? Especially considering (like I said before) that attack on Canterlot.
    • One: for all we know, there are different factions and Cranky met a friendly one. Two: what exactly is one dude going to be able to do against a room full of people including 4 alicorns, the captain of the guard and a giant sea serpent?
  • You mean how was he allowed to stay actually. Given the strain it put on Shining Armor and the Royal Guards to keep up that force field they clearly aren't going to do it without a clear and present threat. And he could easily just walk in, he's a shapeshifter for crying out loud. Only Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie are implied to be considerably more powerful than average for their race. AJ and Rarity are never shown as being more powerful than average for their species and Fluttershy as the plot demands is implied to be weak. Considering the Mane 6 thrashed an army of Changelings on their own, we have little reason to think that the average citizen of Equestria would be truly threatened by a single Changeling as opposed to the utter swarm that attacked Canterlot. And certainly in a room with three Princesses he's not starting anything unless he's Too Dumb to Live.
    • Well, you'd think that at least all of Ponyville would be in a panic, because one changeling implies that there might be many more waiting to attack.
    • They're already quite blasé about the bugbear. A single changeling isn't really more threatening than that. Plus, the princesses are right there, and they're not worried. The constant stream of disasters and monsters besieging Ponyville has probably given most Ponyvillians a thick hide by this point. Plus somepony vouching for the changeling was probably enough, much like how the Mane Six got everypony to open doors for Zecora.
  • It's strongly implied that he's one of Cranky's friends, and they met while Cranky was traveling Equestria searching for Matilda. He most likely has an invitation to the wedding. As for why the princesses and Shining Armor don't do anything about it: A single changeling does not an invasion force make. As long as the changeling isn't actually doing anything wrong, there's no reason to consider him a threat. We should assume that Equestria has some kind of reasonable justice system, and "being a changeling" seems unlikely to be a crime, while arresting him as a prisoner of war doesn't hold water if there's no actual Pony-Changeling war happening at the time.
  • So far nothing in the show has indicated the changelings are widely feared or discriminated against. That's purely a fan theory. Unless it's the comics, but things in the comics are only canon to the show if specifically said so. Not to mention it was probably them poking fun at the various "changeling in ponyville" stories written by the fandom.
  • According to Word of God, he's a friend of Matilda's.
    • Which just raises further questions. Where and how did she meet a changeling? Did she go on her own adventures?
    • It was pretty firmly established in the ep that both Matilda and Cranky are each a Hero of Another Story. We may never see what happened on the show itself, but it's likely that fanon will fill in the blanks.
  • He was not violating any laws, or otherwise causing trouble. What right does anyone have to prevent him from going where he wants to go? A better question would be, why attend as a changeling? Why not attend as some random pony?
• Cranky and Matilda invited Princess Cadance and Shining Armor to their wedding. They also invited a changeling. Did they seriously not know, or did they just want to instigate a fight?
• Just so we're clear, this is a friendly mockery of the various ideas and assertions made by the fandom about these characters, right?
  • Yes but "friendly mockery" might not be the most appropriate term. A better word might be "homage." The show staff actually can't confirm fanon outright because of legal reasons and TV broadcast standards (e.g Lyra and Bon Bon will never be anything more than "best friends" because having a lesbian couple on a children's show would still raise holy hell with the Moral Guardians even in 2015) so this is as close as they're willing to get. They're essentially applying Broad Strokes to fanon, saying things like "yes, this is how these characters are, but they're not exactly as how fans described them." And then you have a bunch of other one-off gags, like Lyra sitting on the chair, Steven Magnet's name and so on. The episode wasn't so much of a "mockery" of fanon, as it was an appreciation for the fact that the fans even came up with these crazy ideas in the first place.
  • Yeah, about Lyra and Bon Bon never being more than just friends...
• Why would Celestia shut down the secret anti-monster agency when the bugbear escaped? That sounds more like reason to shore up the agency, maybe add more field agents or reorganize it. What she did sounds as illogical and counterproductive as disbanding the local police force because of a prison break.
  • Perhaps this was done to protect the identities of the anti-monster agents. Or maybe because the agency itself is so deep into black ops that shutdown was preferable to exposure. It's also possible that Sweetie Drops' team were disbanded and a new team was brought in to take over.
  • Maybe Bon Bon just made it up to impress Lyra? Like all these people on the internet who claim to be former special forces members.
  • Their services were no longer required and/or them continuing their job would be more dangerous than beneficial. Remember at the same time the Bugbear escaped so did Tirek. We have no way of knowing what he was doing between season 2 and the season 4 finale but I doubt he was fasting that entire time. Do you really want highly trained and thus theoritically more powerful than average ponies going down dark allies to check stuff out with him around?
  • Considering it took all of the mane 6 to take down the bugbear, it can be surmised that it took a considerable force to capture the bugbear the first time around. Princess Celestia knew that if it ever escaped it would want payback against those who captured it. Note that Sweetie Drops mentioned the bugbear broke out years ago, so it's unlikely to have been the same time Tirek would have escaped, much less a time when the mane 6 became the de facto Equestria defense force. The organization was likely forced underground in order to make tracking them down harder for the bugbear, and Sweetie Drops mentions as much.
• So Cranky and Matilda's wedding apparently got the attention of three (potentially four) princesses? What amazing feats could these two have done to prompt royal alicorns to attend?
  • Maybe he's just friends with Twilight (and maybe Celestia), and the others came at their request.
  • Cranky apparently goes on lots of adventures we've never seen, with his pal the sea serpent Steven Magnet. He's also apparently friends with a changeling. Who knows what else or who else he knows. He might just be friends with either Celestia and/or Luna.
  • They did meet at the Grand Galloping Gala, so they do have some influences in Canterlot. That or they send the invitation as a sort of joke and the royals decided to attend anyway
  • Both Matilda and Cranky must have met Celestia if they were attending the Grand Galloping Gala and Luna could be a plus one. Celestia and Luna might want to attend despite not knowing Cranky and Matilda well since they could visit Twilight at the same time and it is nice to pay a visit to Ponyville after so much has happened there including the Tirek fight. Who knows about Candence and Shining Armor and how they got invited however.
• So the combined skillset of the Mane 6 are needed to take down the Bugbear: Twilight and Dash are powerhouses in magic and speed respectively, Applejack's a seasoned wrangler, Fluttershy's animal knowledge and stare could come in handy, and Pinkie Pie makes an excellent distraction. Where the heck does Rarity fit into this mission?
  • She's a rather efficient Action Girl on her own. Remember she kicked a Manticore right in the face in the second episode.
  • Actually she's generally shown to be considerably better in a fight than Applejack (and has got the drop on her several times). Her skill set isn't exactly 'giant monster' specialized, but she can certainly lend a hoof.
    • Plus Rarity simply doesn't maximize her skill set all but might under enough pressure. The Art of the Dress gives us an idea of how many objects she can focus on at the same time. There are lots of rocks in Ponyville I imagine.
• Regarding the Bugbear, the moment this troper saw it, it seemed like another Everfree Forest creature for me, but it's later revealed to be a Tartarus escapee. So it makes me wonder, while I do see it's a pretty strong, powerful and dangerous monster and gave the Mane Six a hard time, it doesn't seem as powerful and threatening as Tirek, so what's so dreadful about a bear/insect hybrid?
  • It's shown to be stronger than it first looks. It shrugs off magic blasts from Twilight, so it may possess some kind of magic resistance. It also seems to be very powerful physically, has multiple arms and a stinger, and it flies, which makes it a rather terrifying combination of strengths and no apparent weaknesses to speak of. It's clearly prone to unprovoked attacks, and if Bon Bon's story about it tracking her down is true, it's also a Super-Persistent Predator. It may look silly, but it's definitely dangerous.
  • Perhaps nothing at all. My Little Pony has not and most likely will not ever directly address death. But the Greek Tartarus was the literal afterlife. And was guarded by Cerberus so clearly this is supposed to be the same location. It's not impossible that the Bugbear died at some point. Even Tirek, while Celestia uses the term "defeat" that could just be a case of Never Say "Die".
• Okay, it's the ending, the mane six share a cute hug.... that's ruined by Rainbow's bite wound? Seriously?! What logic is used here? It CLEARLY had Pinkie Pie and later Rarity in it's grasp, and yet THEY get away scar-free, yet we're supposed to believe Rainbow Dash-who I must remind you, did NOT get visibly caught by it- somehow got BITTEN by this thing? I would understand if she was bruised from smashing into a house, or if maybe PINKIE PIE OR RARITY WERE ALSO BITTEN! Instead, we get a gag about Rainbow ruining the moment from a nonexistant bite wound. What did Dash do to deserve this?!
  • We didn't see the whole fight, and the fact that the others didn't complained doesn't mean they weren't injured, just that they weren't touched on the ouchie.
  • Dash is also the most reckless of the six, so she probably got caught by the bugbear's teeth through flying near it's jaws to antagonise it, and Dash strikes me as the most whiny when injured insignificantly of the six. I don't think the writers were victimising Rainbow, if that's what you're thinking. Just that's how it was written because Rainbow is the most likely to actually get injured and complain about it.
• Why on earth did Shining Armor, the same guy who didn't show up to his own sister's birthday party, bother to show up to two donkies' he was never to shown any relationship with, wedding?
  • He was invited? I mean, "Sweet and Elite" was before any of Twilight's friends even knew he existed, so it's probable no one invited him. Or she had a small gathering with him and her parents, or he was in Royal business that day. Alternate explanation: Candance was the one that was invited, and she made him go.
  • And remember Twilight's birthday party was an impromptu thing. She was planning to have the party in Ponyville but they abruptly moved it to Canterlot at the last minute when Rarity couldn't go. And since they thought that Opal was sick, Twilight might just have wanted to keep the guest list to a minimum - which is why no one else was invited either. And other episodes show that Twilight really is terrible at keeping in touch with people when she moves away.
• In one scene, Cranky stated he needed his ring. How do donkeys wear rings?
  • The same way Earth Ponies and Pegasi do, I would assume.
• Cranky says near the beginning: "I'll never understand the ponies in this town! Everywhere I went, they were all gussied up and lookin' at me funny!" ...Where?! I mean, I haven't seen the episode proper, just looked at every picture in the gallery on the wiki, and didn't find a single pony wearing more than normal! Even if I'm overlooking somepony, that's still most ponies in normal attire (or none)!

5.10 Princess Spike

• The plot is kicked off when a series of ponies want Twilight to do some task while she's supposed to be sleeping, and she's apparently been doing similar miscellaneous tasks for three days straight. Why is there literally no one at all officially designated to represent her if she's otherwise occupied? Most Real Life leaders have multiple such representatives, and they aren't regularly sent to fight monsters like Twilight is.
  • Problem is Twilight doesn't currently rule over anything, which means she has no subjects and therefore no staff at her disposal. She fixes this somewhat once she taken in Starlight Glimmer but until then all she had was Spike, who is a child.
• Couldn't Spike just soundproof the room or find earplugs for Twilight instead of trying to lord over everypony to keep it down?
  • Yes, probably, but he didn't think of it. Spike hasn't had a great history when it comes to good judgement, especially when it comes to important jobs asked of him. He is still just a kid. It could also be the early stages of his power tripping: after being ignored by the delegates, he was hoping to prove himself by getting someone to listen to him. After gaining respect from name-dropping Twilight, he developed a taste for (indirect) authority and let it get to his head.
• Couldn't somepony (probably an Alicorn) have set up some sort of security spell against dragons instead of planting something that would potentially do more harm than good in terms of dragon protection (as we've already seen from a dragon with GOOD intentions)?
  • And let Spike get zapped every time he came to the palace?
• Are those trees new? They never gave Spike problems before.
  • Spike's never had a reason to go near them before.

5.11 Party Pooped

• Exactly how far is Yakyakistan from Ponyville if only takes a quick afternoon trip to travel between the two areas?
  • Far enough to join a band, amass success, become influential, fall from grace, and break up over creative differences. So, about 10 years. All joking aside, Artistic License – Geography comes into play for this one considering Pinkie also managed to get back on a sled by accident.
    • Also it is fanon that Pinkie is a Chaos Magic user, like Discord, just not as powerful. If this is the case, Pinkie would certainly use that Chaos Magic to get their and come back "in time", that is, she compresses the time enough to give her more than enough time (the aformentioned ten years) while at the same time not aging.
    • If we go by that theory it just raises another question: Why doesn't Pinkie just use her chaos magic to take another trip to Yakyakistan in a short time instead of acting like all hope is lost when she gets home by accident?* Yakyakistan is to the north. According to this official map of Equestria◊, Dodge Junction is to the south of Ponyville. So why did Pinkie's train to Yakyakistan pass through Dodge Junction when that city is in the opposite direction of where she's going? Especially since the image shows that Dodge Junction is a terminal station, so no trains should be "going through" that town.
  • She does ask if her train went the wrong direction and Pinky is clearly a low tier Reality Warper. Also the official map of Equestria seems to be inaccurate. According to the map the Griffins live across the sea and Pinky and Dash are able to reach it by train. At least no boat is mentioned. Finally the map even if accurate in scale and location wouldn't contain every detail. If the train turned around at that location because it's the only train they have it could very well head south before north. It certainly wouldn't be the most bizarre thing in the show thus far.
• Why does Twilight get all the credit for the diplomacy work that Pinkie Pie did?
  • Welcome to politics, where the people in charge because they're "racially superior" get all the credit the ones not in charge work for. Also maybe Pinkie wanted her to have the credit.
    • It has nothing to do with politics or racial superiority. It has to do with life and how life functions. Twilight Sparkle is the Princess of Friendship, not Pinkie. Twilight was the one who made contact, and made the arrangements. The credit rightfully falls to her. The same way that had Yakyakistan declared war she wouldn't be able (even if she wanted) to get away with "It's not my fault we're at war, my idiot friends can't make authentic Yakyakistani products!" That how credit works in nearly every structured organization on the planet. The boss gets the credit and or blame and the worker bees work.
    • Except that happens all the time. Plenty of "worker bees" (nice dehumanization there, good job) get disciplined because they fail at some aspect of their job even when the task itself is unreasonable or impossible to complete for reasons beyond their control. Also, Pinkie Pie spent the whole episode serving as a diplomat/ambassador who averted a serious incident. That was her job, which she did as agent of Friendship, a position she was given by the exact same magical destiny that gave Twilight her cutie mark and her destiny as the Princess. Saying she's just a worker bee who doesn't deserve credit or blame because she's Twilight's lesser is a messed up way of looking at this.
    • In that scenario it's really not Twilight's fault. It's the Yakyakistan's diplomats and guests for going to war over something so trivial when they are the guests to a nation looking to make friends.
    • Twilight invited them. Any consequences of their visit good or bad are by burden of leadership her fault. If they had come on their own then it not only wouldn't have been Twilight's fault it would have been Celestia/Luna's fault(s) for putting the youngest and least experiences Princess in charge instead of taking the helm themselves. That doesn't mean the Yakyakistanis are right or wrong. They are clearly wrong, but I've never seen a business where the excuse 'the customer is being unreasonable' flies.
    • And I can't imagine a business where you can act like the Yakyakistanians did and not be rightly removed from the premises, either forcibly or by stating or implying that force will be used if you make it necessary. This is more like Diplomatic Impunity.
    • This might just be how the scene came across to me, but it seems also like Celestia was trying to calm Twilight down when she congratulated her. Considering that she was clearly stressed out still.
• Pinkie despairs over not having brought anything back from Yakyakistan, but she did bring something back: the sled. The decision to make the party an Equestrian one instead of a Yak one was obviously the right thing to do, but it's odd that never got mentioned.
• Did the yaks really not have anybody who was far more experienced in diplomacy or was their prince the best that they could do?
  • It may be that the fact that he's a prince trumped all other concerns in their minds.
    • Considering how the yaks had no contact with Equestria, it's possible that they just where about to end an extended isolationst period and considering where they live, they probably managed to have no contacts at all, which means that they didn't have any real diplomats and the role of the diplomat was defaulted to the prince.
• Equestria has three Goddess Empresses, an elite fighting force in the Wonderbolt, firebreathing dragons, and six particular Ponies who have face heinous horrorsand survived. Why are they so afraid of war with Yak Yakistan?
  • A violent conflict is a violent conflict, regardless of how easily one side can beat the other, and at best could be considered simply a necessary evil. Twilight wasn't afraid of losing a war, but rather having inadvertently been a part of what started one.

5.12 Amending Fences

• In Over A Barrel, it is shown that salt licks are the pony equivalent of alcohol. So why are kids making them in school?
  • Human students often make dangerous products during lab work. Ethanol (drinking alcohol) is stocked in many labs. It's not unthinkable that ponies learn the chemistry behind making saltlicks but are forbidden from consuming them.
  • Teachers have used the wine-to-brandy transformation to demonstrate distilling. Besides, Equestria may have rather lenient rules when it comes to underage salt-licking.
  • Alternately, there simply might not be any pony equivalent to the human (and especially American) social taboo against minors consuming alcohol. Equestria may be a very permissive society that lets children get buzzed on salt.
    • Alternatively to that salt licks probably aren't the equivalent of pony alcohol.
• How on Earth has Twilight never spoken to Lyra since she left Canterlot? Given how Ponyville is supposed to be a friendly and tightknit community, I find it unlikely in the extreme that Twilight and Lyra have never met or spoken to each other since Twilight moved there; doubly so since Twilight became the fricking Princess of Friendship. Was Lyra just avoiding her all that time?
  • My vote's on Lyra being too busy hanging out with Bon Bon/Sweetie Drops.
  • It's not necessary to think that they never spoke. Twilight was probably focused on her new friends and settling into her new life for a while, and Lyra was probably doing the same. They just never hung out as friends in Ponyville, never made plans, and never talked one-on-one beyond a simple "Good morning". Lyra simply assumed that Twilight didn't want to continue their friendship, and didn't fight it, while Twilight was just oblivious and forgetful. (Heck, she forgot all her previous friends' names!)
• Just what was Starlight Glimmer doing by herself in a fancy restaurant? Was she simply dining alone, or was she watching Twilight? Has she had Twilight under surveillance the whole season?
  • Spying on Twilight seems the most likely of options. Maybe she's trying to pick-up on some secret spells or abilities that Twilight might know, so she can try and steal them later.
  • I think Starlight was just having dinner with all her friends.
• I get that Twilight is not the kind of pony that would play this kind of card, but wasn't the main reason she couldn't attend Moon Dancer's party was because she was trying to find a way to stop Nightmare Moon's return?
  • Most likely, Twilight never imagined that her simple but obviously important decision to skip the party would have had such serious consequences in the future, especially regarding her friendship with Moon Dancer.
  • Actually... no. When Twilight decided not to attend the party, she was still researching the Elements of Harmony, and hadn't yet found out about the threat of Nightmare Moon. And when she did find out about Nightmare Moon, she was immediately told by Celestia to let it go. The passage of time is a bit vague, but it looks like she made the journey to Ponyville (which was an actual duty) the next day. She had no excuse for missing Moondancer's party.
  • I think it's less the party, and more moving away without saying goodbye and never writing. Moondancer seemed to see Twilight as a peer who understood her, and Twilight clearly not giving a damn convinced Moondancer that she wasn't worth a damn and no one could ever care about her.
• How did Twilight's old residence stay untouched for so long? Did Twilight not think to take her old possessions when she moved to Ponyville? Did nopony bother to see if it was still in use after she became a princess? Did she forget that she has a residence in Canterlot every single time she's visited?
  • She originally left it thinking she was only going away for a few days. Once she got to Ponyville and stopped Nightmare Moon, she simply stayed there, not giving much thought to her old home. It's not that she forgot about it; it's more that she didn't care. She had better things to do. Even during her visits to Canterlot, she was busy with the Gala, Discord, etc. Since she never saw it as important enough to revisit, we can conclude that it didn't hold much emotional investment for her (unlike the Golden Oak Library), which says something about Twilight's personality.
  • As for anyone else checking up on it: Given the flashback in "Cutie Mark Chronicles" it's a safe bet that the tower belongs to the Sparkle family. It's private property, and the only ones who would have reason (or even right) to enter would be Twilight, Shining Armor, their parents, and Spike. It's possible that Shining Armor and Twilight's parents moved elsewhere, and gifted the tower to her, making her the sole owner. Nobody else checked because it's Twilight's house, and her responsibility.
  • In the DVD Commentary for "Mare in the Moon", it is referred to as "Twilight's dorm", which suggests the writers meant for it to be her living quarters at Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns. As Twilight was Celestia's personal protégé, wouldn't disposition of the residence fall to the Princess herself?
    • "Cutie Mark Chronicles" shows that Twilight was at this location, with her parents, at night, before she was accepted into CSFGU (and before she got her cutie mark). The most likely explanation is that it was her family's home.
• How was Moondancer supporting herself if all she did was study at home or in the library?
  • Family money?
  • Unemployment benefit? She doesn't exactly seem like a big spender, living alone with her lifestyle she could live quite easily on what most countries give.
  • Student benefit is something many countries give out as well. And if she is doing some research so could get money from that.
• From a set dressing perspective, I can see how Twilight's old home and Moondancer's house would have Cobwebs, but what's with the one in Minuette's living room? Is she just too busy being a perky pony to keep house?
  • Maybe she just hadn't noticed it?
  • She befriended the spider who made the web, and you don't just go and wreck a friend's house, do you?
  • She's almost never home, apparently.
• So we were led to believe in the first season — unless there's a missed nuance somewhere — that Twilight had no friends until she came to Ponyville. (Not counting, of course, Spike and B.B.B.F.F. Shining Armor.) And then this episode comes along and... we find she had five? Makes her childhood seem a little less sad, but still... did she just not realize that that's what they were until very recently, and about the same time she realized that she wasn't as good a friend back?
  • She probably didn't consider them friends back then. Just ponies she sometimes talked to.
  • It makes her not knowing Shining Armor and Cadance were getting married a little less odd. Twilight is clearly terrible at keeping in contact with ponies from her past (she likely has a 'letters from family, must read' pile arranged in alphabetical order).
• In "Friendship is Magic, part 2" Twilight was sad because she had to leave her friends from Ponyville cause she "learned how wonderful was to have friends". Why didn't she feel the same when she left her friends in Canterlot? (Which BTW was something she ALREADY learned before heading to Ponyville)
  • She simply didn't appreciate her old friends. She outright says that in the episode. The Mane Six, through their adventure, ended up being different, and she truly appreciated these ponies for helping her, and finally knew how important friendship was.
• The conflict in this episode stems from the fact that Twilight never really paid much attention to Moondancer or anyone else back in Canterlot despite their overtures, and moved away without a word. Okay, fine. But why are we suppposed to think she did something wrong? As it is, it doesn't seem like Twilight ever considered Moondancer or anybody in Canterlot a friend in the first place, which means that from her point of view she never had any obligation to attend Moondancer's party, or write letters, or anything else. If Moondancer felt differently, that's unfortunate, but no matter what, she was never entitled to Twilight being friends with her. If romantic love isn't something you're owed, friendship isn't either.
  • They were at least acquaintances, seeing as they not only sat next to each other in foalhood, but still hung out with the other unicorns even in adulthood as seen in the photo. And pretty much everyone considered Twilight and the other unicorns have been friends in the episode, from Minuette ("I tried to tell my co-workers we used to be friends back when") to Twilight herself (she repeatedly refers to the others as "her old friends"). In fact, Spike says Twilight had a reputation for being a bad friend, not having no friends. The problem wasn't that she wasn't friends with Moon Dancer, as they were already friends, rather that Twilight, in her own words, "didn't really appreciate" her friends and "didn't know how important friendship was". It wasn't that Twilight wasn't friends with her, it's that she was, and yet treated her with such casual disregard. So yeah, in her point of view, Moon Dancer's party wasn't important, but since they were friends, it speaks more about Twilight's own social problems, and yeah, Moon's entitled to have some value to the pony who calls herself her friend. Moon Dancer, unlike the others, also clearly already had some major problems, being pretty shy and having to be convinced by the other three that she had value and that other ponies would like her. And then Twilight, the one other introverted, nerdy pony that she thought she could relate to, her friend from foalhood that she thought she could trust, not only doesn't bother support her when she tries getting out of her shell, but never even speaks to her again, never says goodbye, and simply leaves, proving her feelings of worthlessness right in her eyes. Then Moon Dancer tries to go on with her life, more insecure than ever and just focuses on her books, and years later, that same pony (now ironically crowned "princess of friendship") waltzes in and acts like they could immediately be friends again. Considering that, yeah, I can understand if Moon was a tiny bit pissed off. If Moon Dancer had just been some random pony, then yeah, Twilight wouldn't need to have even said goodbye, but she simply wasn't.
  • Moon Dancer's problems and Twilight's reputation are both irrelevant; what matters is if Twilight thought they were all her friends or not. If she did consider them friends, then sure, you could say she was neglectful, but if she didn't at the time, then she owed them nothing, regardless of what Spike says.
• This episode goes to great lengths to show how Minuette, Lemon Hearts and Twinkleshine consider Twilight their friend...but after this episode, all three just wander off into the background, never helping Twilight with her problems and/or interceding in Twilight's favor.
  • You don't have to remain in constant contact with someone to consider yourselves friends, and they clearly weren't torn up by the lack of contact they had with her. They might not have seen reason to reach out if Twilight didn't do so first.
• Why didn't Twilight simply tell Moon Dancer that the reason she couldn't go to her party was because Princess Celestia had sent her to Ponyville? She may still be a little pissed, but she'd probably be a bit more understanding.
  • It would not excuse that she never contacted her again. Let's be honest, there isn't much of an excuse for that.
  • Also, Twilight didn't get the order to move to Ponville until after she declined the invitation.
• Everyone seems to put the blame on Twilight for not bothering to contact Moon Dancer after leaving Canterlot. But if Moon Dancer really admired Twilight as much as she claimed, why didn't she personally invite her to her party or try to contact her herself afterwards?
  • From what we see of her, Moon Dancer has had incredibly low self-esteem for most of her life. So Twilight missing her party hit her harder than it might for someone else. She'd take it very personally - as an indicator that Twilight doesn't want to be friends. And then she moves to a new town without saying goodbye. Moon Dancer sure could have contacted her afterwards but in the mindset she was in - feeling hurt and rejected - she'd cope by simply letting Twilight get on with this new life that was more important.
  • Sometimes for those with anxiety or low self esteem, they won't actually ask people directly to come to a party because they don't want to be told no. It's easier to treat it as a casual thing like "yeah, come by if you want" because asking someone to do something with you personally can be terrifying - and the potential rejection can really hurt.

5.13 Do Princesses Dream Of Magic Sheep?

• When does this episode take place? I ask, because Rainbow Dash's pet, Tank, is up and active. Does it take place before or after Winter? That's one issue with having an episode that doesn't follow a timeline chronologically: it's hard to tell which episode should come first or second.
  • I'd like to say autumn, but I'm not sure why I think that. And let's face it the timeline of the show will NEVER make sense.
  • Tank is not dead, he was just hibernating, so it could perfectly not be winter anymore and he may have already woken up.
• So does this smoke creature have something to do with Luna turning into Nightmare Moon, or have they basically dropped the idea that something influenced her?
  • Whether or not something outside influenced her to become Nightmare Moon is irrelevant to this creature's creation. Luna outright states that she created it as a means of self-inflicted punishment for her tenure as Nightmare Moon.
  • Many fans have theorized that it's inspired by the Nightmare Forces, but as an in-universe entity, it has no direct connection. Blending storylines from the B-works could confuse the viewership, and is generally avoided as a rule.
  • To more directly answer the question, the Tantabus only turns Luna into Nightmare Moon because that's her worst nightmare. If Luna were afraid of something else, then the Tantabus would be preying on that nightmare instead.
• If the ONLY way to defeat the Tantabus was for Luna to come to terms with her past as Nightmare Moon, why didn't she say it sooner, instead of making everyone waste their times with that lucid dreaming fight?
  • Because Luna didn't know. She was unaware the Tantabus fed off her guilt until it was pointed out to her. Surely if Luna knew forgiving herself was how to defeat the Tantabus, she wouldn't have created it in the first place.
    • Also, forgiving herself was not something that she could just do whenever she felt like it. That is not how a conscience works. She needed the reassurance of others to help her and Luna seems to be a rather private person, unlikely to reach out for help with something so personal.
• The Tantabus was very efficient at figuring out Rainbow Dash's worst fear and using it against her...why doesn't it use that against the other Five? Why doesn't it summon a giant quesadilla monster in Twilight's dream, or use Rarity's fear of becoming greedy and selfish against her, or use Pinkie's fear of loneliness against her, or torture Applejack with images of Apple Bloom getting hurt, or torture Fluttershy with neverending chants of "FLUTTERSHY, FLUTTERSHY, FLUTTERSHY CAN HARDLY FLY!"?
  • Note how Rainbow Dash's is the second-last dream it gets into. The Tantabus is only used to visiting Luna's dreams, so of course it knows what the princess is afraid of. But it has six new dreams to go into and feel out. In Rarity and Pinkie's dreams, it goes for the most obvious scare. In Applejack's and Fluttershy's, the horror is slightly more psychological (Fluttershy being attacked by a friend, Applejack being reminded of an unfortunate memory). Finally when it pops into Rainbow's, it's got a better handle on how to corrupt these new dreams.
• If they could do anything in their dreams, why couldn't they imagine the Tantabus didn't exist?
  • Because the whole point was the Tantabus couldn't be so directly controlled by dreams anymore.
• Everypony in Ponyville is able to become a dream warrior in the fight against the Tantabus; Big Mac even transforms into an alicorn. How is it that Celestia alone "has no power in the realm of sleep"?
  • If you’re thinking about "Royal Problem", perhaps it has to do with Luna (who was pulled from her dream to Starlight’s dream) hasn't powers for manipulating someone else dream... (because she had Celestia’s powers). In DPDOMS episode, Luna shared dreams only with Ponyville citizens, and they had power in this dream because it's, well, their dream.
  • The shared dream was just that-one big lucid dream. Luna is the only one who can create and manipulate Dream-worlds with her specific magic.
• This episode implies that she sleeps during the night? What ever happened to being the "Guardian of Dreams". How does she dream of the Tantabus and monitor pony's dreams at the same time?
  • Luna occasionally has business during the day to deal with and would need to at least catch a nap during the night to make up for it. At the end she'd strained herself nearly to the breaking point and so fell asleep.
• Before uniting the townspeople of the dream to fight with them, Rainbow Dash mentions that the Mane 6 can't keep fighting the Tantabus directly because they are "too busy saving ponies." As cruel as it may sound to ask at first, why do they need to save the other ponies in the dream at great expense of their general vital objective in this situation? There's no hints at all of a pony dying in the dream resulting in them dying in real Equestria or anything like that. I have two theories, both of which, to work, you must assume the Mane 6 were somehow very aware of:
  • A pony being killed in the dream somehow weakens the integrity of the entire shared dream, so too many casualties causes a collapse.
  • Getting killed in the dream is frightening enough to heavily buff the entire Tantabus from just one pony's experience.

5.14 Canterlot Boutique

• Sassy's resume was impressive enough for Rarity to hire her right away. At the end of the episode, Sassy reveals that they apparently all failed. So, did Rarity never check how are those businesses doing now?
  • No, she didn't. She "hired her right on the spot" after seeing Sassy's resumé. Not a smart move on Rarity's part, but absolutely Truth in Television, as many employers, especially fresh, inexperienced ones, will simply trust a potential hire's word on their experience without checking up their references.
  • Just because a lot of boutiques she worked at failed doesn't mean they all did. Rarity said Sassy worked at some of the finest boutiques in Canterlot; presumably the ones she was referring to were the ones still standing, likely after the owners realized what was going on and gave Sassy the boot before they were run into the ground.
  • There's always the possibility that they failed for reasons unrelated to Sassy, but which inspired her to adopt her current business model. Boutiques that produced incredibly famous dresses, but who's owners didn't produce enough to break even, or lost themselves in creative block, or who didn't gain attention outside of the industry.
  • It seems pretty clear that Sassy's business model was exactly what works in Canterlot, so if the business failed, it wasn't because of her. It's also shown that Canterlot's fashion scene demands a soulless grind from its designers because they all want exactly what the trends say is hot, so chances are it was the creative stifling that sank Sassy's previous jobs.
• When suddenly facing a mountain of initial orders, shouldn't Rarity or Sassy have mentioned the idea of hiring temporary seamstress staff? Furthermore, when it is becoming obvious that the workload is not going to let up, the idea of a permanent production crew should have come up.
  • Chances are, that, considering her "Rules of Rarity", she'd take on the initial orders herself anyway. Plus, considering the huge initial orders, it's not like she could train, say, 4-5 permanent workers to her standards. By the time she snapped, she was already too exhausted to think straight, even when Sassy Saddles brings up the automated line.
• More importantly, it's rather absurd for a top of the line fashion shop to essentially sell endless copies of just one kind of dress; the lines would've surely dried up at the point when more than one notable individual goes to the same gathering wearing an identical wardrobe.

5.15 Rarity Investigates

• How can Wind Rider have the speed record when Rainbow Dash is known for being the only one who has broken the sound barrier? (You know... The Sonic Rainboom.)
  • Speed and distance I think is the specifics of the record. Rainbow Dash is the fastest in a short bursts with the above Rainboom, but Wind Rider has crossed the farthest distance of any Pegasus the fastest. Dash herself admits to tiring out in long treks.
• Why didn't the Wonderbolts ask Princess Luna about Rainbow Dash's alibi, i.e. she was dreaming at the time?
  • Princess Luna is nocturnal. Safe to say they didn't want to disturb her. Also, Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep? showed that Luna can't monitor everyone's dreams at once, so even if they did ask her, there's no guarantee she'd know for sure.
    • And even if she were generally up and about at that hour, she'd probably be busy. (Yes, she went out of her way for Sweetie Belle, but that was only because the situation hit so close to home.)
• Why's Wind Rider so quick to confess? Given his entire motive was his reputation and there was only circumstantial evidence against him that he was denying.
  • He seemed arrogant enough to assume his fame would protect him.

5.16 Mane in Manehattan

• Twilight's clearly pretty bummed out about not being sent to Manehattan. Couldn't she just... go by herself? It's not like Twilight is explicitly forbidden from going anywhere except if there's a mission to be completed.
  • She was more upset by not being called by the map, and even if she technically could have gone with Rarity and Applejack, she either doesn't trust herself not to intervene with the friendship problem, or doesn't want to imply she doesn't trust the others could solve it by themselves.
    • Or she wouldn't be at home when it called her. We're never given any reliable markers for what time period passes between any two episodes or even how many quests the map gives them. It's entirely plausible that it's sending them out fairly rapidly and we're simply spared the times it takes them five minutes to solve the issue.
• Wasn't Coco Pommel a fashion designer the last time we saw her? Why is she suddenly working with a theater troupe? Yes, the ending her has working in Bridleway...as a costume designer, not as a producer.
  • Because she wanted to in order to help the community.

5.17 Brotherhooves Social

• Horses and ponies are digitigrade. Their hooves are the equivalent of our toenails, meaning they tiptoe everywhere. What exactly would wearing high heels accomplish?
  • What do high heels accomplish for us anyway? They're for aesthetics and fashion.

5.18 Crusaders of The Lost Mark

• After Diamond Tiara says, "Our new student pony president is gonna be kicked out of office, and I'll be reinstated!", she runs back to the schoolhouse. Was she really looking forward to booting out Pip, and the Crusaders just happened to convince her to pull a Heel–Face Turn in the nick of time, or did she actually make a silent Heel–Face Turn after visiting the Crusaders' clubhouse, thus faking those words and truly wanting to donate money to the playground the moment she said those words?
  • I'm thinking the former. It could also be the fact that her mother berated everyone infront of her that cemented the change.
  • I personally think she made the decision at the climax of the song, just before turning. She looks deeply torn by the decision, then that expression is suddenly replaced with a look of determination as she heads for the school.
• Since when could a candidate for an election vote for themselves? Since when were they even allowed to vote at all if they're running for office or presidency?
  • It's actually common for candidates to vote for themselves in all kinds of elections, from school president candidates to even national presidential candidates.
  • It's absolutely standard in elections in the United States for a candidate to be allowed to vote. In fact, candidates casting ballots (presumably for themselves, though with secret ballots, you never know) are often photo-op events.
• Back in "One Bad Apple", Diamond Tiara became frightened when Babs threatened to tell her mother about her bullying behavior. But here, it's shown that her mother encourages that kind of behavior. Why was Diamond scared in the former what that's what she's being raised to do?
  • Maybe she only has a problem with Diamond getting caught, thus hurting her social standing. Maybe she's just a Hypocrite that way.
  • Considering Spoiled Rich frowns upon the idea of her daughter associating with "Blank Flanks", she could have just been afraid of her mom learning she'd been friends with one for a brief time.
  • Spoiled Rich doesn't want her daughter to be a bully, she wants her to be a winner, with the proper decorum her status requires. Being a common bully would likely strike Spoiled Rich as embarrassing, undignified and a waste of time better spent hobnobing with the social elite and winning trophies.
  • Spoiled might be the type who lays down the law just because she can, and Diamond is scared of giving her another excuse.
  • I think it wasn't so much her mom finding out but how her mom would actually react.
• Why does Spoiled Rich care about blankflanks at all? It's clearly a magical combination of puberty and finding your place in life. A bunch of children making fun of each other for being the last one grow a mustache or. . .mature into a woman makes sense. It's because kids are vicious, evil monsters with few exceptions. But for an adult to be holding that same standard is absurd.
  • Given she referred to the CMC as "confused" (among other things) may mean she regards not getting a cutie mark by their age to be a sign of mental inferiority, lack of direction in life, etc.
  • The implication has always been that "blank flank" is just an excuse for Diamond Tiara to bully Apple Bloom, so her mom might be the same way: For some reason, she dislikes the apples and the only PC way she can say bad things about Apple Bloom is to refer to her as a Blank Flank, which DT picked up.
• So the playground got wrecked during the epic battle with Tirek, but the schoolhouse is just fine? What are Ponyville's buildings made of?!
  • Most likely just a priority thing, while a working playground is very nice to have a school house is a necessity.
• How did the playground get wrecked fighting Tirek? The fight took place around the Castle of the Two Sisters which was far away. Twilight went there specially to avoid collateral damage.
• In Bloom and Gloom, Luna mentions "the day the Crusaders finally get their cutie marks". Sure enough, in this episode, all three of them get them on the same day. Did Luna just predict the future?
  • I think what she meant was how one day they would finally start to earn their cutie mark.
  • Luna was referring to each member specifically, not as a whole.
• Why does Spoiled Rich send Diamond Tiara to Ms. Cheerilee's school and join its school board if she obviously feels everyone there is beneath her? Wouldn't a parent like that send their kid off to a fancy boarding school instead?
  • "Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven". I can easily believe Spoiled Rich's family isn't as rich or important as she would like to think it is. They may have money, but perhaps only when compared to other residents of Ponyville. If she sent Diamond Tiara away to a fancy school in Canterlot or something, she'd probably stand out as dirt poor (relatively speaking) and would just end up being a humiliation for the family.
  • It's probably more likely that they are every bit as rich and important as Spoiled thinks they are, but she doesn't want to send her precious daughter far away, not unlike Narcissa Malfoy and why her son doesn't attend Durmstrang, which is more in line with their family beliefs, or Beauxbatons, which is more fancy. Since Filthy Rich seems on good terms with the Apples and with others in the town, it's possible he's content with staying where he grew up, even if he's about fifty rungs higher on the social ladder than anyone else in town except Twilight and maybe Rarity. I mean they have enough money to buy an entire playground for the school and a huge statue of their daughter and still be extremely rich.
    • Perhaps just as rich, but not 'quality'. Considering the attitude of ponies in Canterlot, they might have been seen as upstarts that don't belong in 'good society'.
• So the asshat who has spent the last five seasons bullying and domineering others learns that her true power is to... bully and domineer others nicely? And our heroes True Talent is to be glorified Student Counselor's... yay?
  • While I agree on the first thing, the CMC seems to be more than that: They can help fillies that are in their same situation, but they will also be able to help ponies like Trouble shoes, who didn't know what his Cutie Mark really meant... or they might be able to help ponies who are in crisis about their purpose in life. They are basically polar opposites of Starlight Glimmer, helping people be happy with their cutie marks..
  • It's been noted in several episodes that Diamond Tiara is smart, persuasive and strong willed, she was a good editor for example. The thing is Diamond Tiara always saw it as a means to an end, she acquired herself leadership positions to stroke her own ego and please her mother. The CMC demonstrated that she could use her talents to do good, useful things that ultimately would win her real respect, not the fake respect of fear and mutual benefit.
    • It might also mean that she'll be learning how to influence other ponies without, as you put it, "bullying and domineering", becoming a better leader and a better pony because of it.
  • It seems like a natural progression for the CMC. Previous episodes have shown them worrying not just about getting a mark, but also having to split up the club after getting their marks or the idea of ending up with marks they don't want. Their actual marks take care of both concerns by giving them a new purpose that can let them help all kinds of ponies that are facing the kind of crisis that they're uniquely qualified to understand (it's what they've been dealing with for so long). They proved their maturation by helping someone who's been their worst enemy to date become a better person by applying her talents in a positive way, allowing them to finally understand what a Cutie Mark is and earn their own. It all shows how far they've come from the insecure, bullied girls they were in the beginning.
    • And their talent may be desperately needed. The whole 'getting a cutie mark and then figuring out what it means' thing seems to be a pretty common issue. Diamond Tiara herself comments that she is not really sure what to make of her own mark. Meanwhile, I don't think we've ever seen any kind of therapist pony.
• Why in Celestia's name does Apple Bloom's cutie mark have a heart and an apple on it? Her talents before were implied in the past to relate to construction, art, and design, and the other two's cutie marks relate to the talents they were implied to have. Apple Bloom's just comes off as ridiculously generic by comparison. The apple I could maybe understand, since apple is a kind of wood with various uses, but why a heart? Why not an apple and, say, a hammer or a paintbrush or a pencil?
  • Applejack proves adept at construction in Made In Manehatten, despite her talent—apple farming—having nothing to do with construction. Makes sense, considering how many times her barn has been rebuilt over the course of the series. Maybe she just picked up a few tricks from her sister, rather than it being a natural talent.
  • Call it an interpretation, but it was Apple Bloom who got the ball rolling to create the CMC, that would make her the "heart" of their organization.
  • The symbols in a cutie mark can be both literal and symbolic. She likely has an apple in her cutie mark because being an Apple is an important part of her life and identity, even if farming them isn't her actual destiny. As for the heart that could easily mean something like passion or being a loving pony.
• Where in Celestia's name were Sweetie Belle's parents during the entire end part of the episode? It's one of the most important days of their daughter's life, and they're nowhere to be seen.
  • Probably vacationing. It's pretty much established that Rarity takes care of her sister when their parents are off town. It was a sudden thing, so it's not like they knew in advance and could plan according... now Scootaloo's family...
    • Scootaloo's family is later revealed to kind of be in a similar predicament, their job requires them to constantly travel so they aren't able to make unplanned visits anywhere.
  • Perhaps they are vacationing but are on the way there. The end celebration is implied to be the same day, so maybe Rarity contacted them and they're travelling back for the Cutecinera Pinkie plans to throw. The party in the street is just the reaction to them getting their marks. Families will be around for the Cutecinera where everyone can properly celebrate. Scootaloo's family...well have we actually seen them before? Producers probably just don't want to introduce them in the last two minutes of an episode. We can just assume they congratulated her offscreen and let her play with her friends.
• In "The Pony I Wanna Be", why did Diamond Tiara have an Imagine Spot of the Cakes?
  • She's wishing her mother treated her with the same love and affection the Cakes gave the twins. Note how she briefly looks forlornly at a stallion and his daughter happily chatting and laughing together just before that imagine spot.
  • With the twins being so young, she probably sees them out with their parents a lot. This might prompt her to wonder if her mother ever showed her the same affection the Cakes show their children.
• So...what happened to Silver Spoon after this episode?
  • She makes brief appearances in a few episodes here and there. Obviously since she's not acting as an antagonist anymore, she and the CMC are probably getting on much better.
• What about the Aesop of "One Bad Apple"? Was the Aesop of standing up to a bully makes you as bad as one contradicted by Diamond Tiara standing up to her mother's bullying being presented as a good thing? Did they realized how inept the Aesop was and try to move away from it.
  • Spoiled Rich isn't a bully, she's an abusive parent, that's very different. Fighting with a bully just leads to further problems and drags you down to their level. Standing up to an abusive parent allows you to break free of their bad influence and start to heal.
• Spoiled Rich is revealed to be grooming Diamond Tiara to be a Social Climber/Gold Digger like her and scolds her for having the gall to be friends with the CMC... who have direct connections to 4 of Equestria's greatest heroes and have a Princess as a teacher on a weekly basis. It's the equivalent of not sucking up to a person who has the Avengers on speed dial while having access to the White House. If anything, Spoiled Rich should have been asking how many favours she could get out of the CMC. Ok, maybe the siblinghood is kept private but how is she not aware of the parties being thrown in her mansion during "Twilight Time"? The one time Screw the Rules, I Have Connections! can be applied positively and this crossed no one's mind?
  • Did she even know the CMC were in such a position? It's possible her biases against blank flanks prevented her from thinking about them such to realize they had any potential worth. Stupid Evil is a thing.

5.20 The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows

• Why does Pinkie Pie, the creator of the "break it and you're dead to me" Pinkie Promise, finding it so hard to keep Cadence and Shining Armor's secret? She has seemingly showed no problem keeping secrets for others all the way back to "Green Isn't Your Color".
  • The nature of the secret was entirely different. In "Green Isn't Your Color", the secrets were uncomfortable truths that were told in confidence to avoid hurting feelings. In this episode, the secret was a joyful, life-changing announcement. Pinkie loves spreading joy and happiness, but she was forced to hold off on sharing the happiest piece of news she had until the proper time.
• Would the writers/animators have gotten away with explicitly saying Cadence is pregnant and/or showing her baby bump?

5.21 Hearthbreakers

• Was Maud REALLY pushing as hard as she could? This is the same pony that could punt a smaller but still large rock across the horizon with no effort (albeit we didn't actually see how much effort she used as we didn't see her throw it).
  • Look closer at the scene and you'll see that her hooves are shaking. So Maud really WAS pushing as hard as she could. It's just that Haulder really IS that heavy. Its also for the joke that even when straining her voice tone doesn't change.
  • It's kinda like Big Mac struggling to carry a cake when he could lift stoves with no effort. Maud was struggling because she didn't want to accidentally destroy or hurt the rock.
• When the Pies try to move Holder's Boulder, Artistic License – Physics takes effect and the boulder does not behave like an egg-shaped boulder should - even when it's moved, the boulder does not rotate in the slightest, when it should be unstable due to its shape...
  • Pinkie Pie warps physics all the time.
• Wouldn't giving Big Mac the top bunk be extremely dangerous to anypony sleeping underneath him?
  • Big Mac's big, sure, but he doesn't seem THAT heavy.
    • He's clearly squishing Apple Bloom. He is too that heavy.
    • Apple Bloom doesn't seem to care though so there's no problem.
• The Apples reacted to the Pies' Hearthswarming customs with bewilderment. How would the Pies have reacted if the situation was reversed (the Pies visiting the Apples)?
• I know the moral is about respecting other traditions, but shouldn't the pies have helped make sure the Apples felt at home? You know, explaining why their traditions the way they are instead of just expecting them to go along with it? They were clearly confused, so some explaining could go a long way, even if Applejack is stubborn as a mule.
  • I could be wrong here, but I get the feeling the Pies suspected that the Apples already knew about their traditions and celebrated it the same way, much like how the Apples would have suspected everypony else to have similar traditions to theirs.
  • When the Apples where discussing with Pinkie about each other traditions, they were always saying they did "the same". With the Apples never mentioning anything, Pinkie and her family just assumed their traditions were exactly the same, not "the same, but different"
  • And remember the lesson Pinkie learned in "Party Pooped"? There she realised that it's best to not try to recreate someone else's home when they're on vacation - but rather to make them feel at home in the new place. So Pinkie invited them over precisely to experience the Pies' traditions. Had she been visiting the Apples, she would have expected to go along with their traditions. But since this is a lesson she's only just learned, you'd expect some kinks.

5.21 Scare-Master

• Why is there a pony dressed as a griffon (another sapient race)? Isn't that, like, the pony equivalent of wearing blackface to a Halloween party or something?
  • Considering a lot of the cultural and technological cues are from the 1940s and earlier, I don't think that'd have the same stigma it does now. Besides, maybe it's a costume of a specific griffon, either historical or fictional.
  • Blackface is a taboo in in US because of unfortunate implications because how it was used in the past. In many counties such taboos do not exist and there is no reason to think there would be a reason a costume would be a taboo in Equestiria.
• One of Fluttershy's "unplanned guests" in her Epic Fail of a haunted tea party is very clearly meant to be Rei Ayanami, which implies that Fluttershy has seen and likely enjoyed Neon Genesis Evangelion. So Fluttershy can handle a pony version of Neon Genesis Evangelion but she can't handle a few plastic spiders and some obviously fake bones? How does that even work?
  • Random Shout-Out I would guess. Alternately she saw the book cover and didn't think to actually read the manga.
  • Maybe the plot's different. Maybe everypony gets hugged and turn into mustangs.
  • Reading a scary story (or manga) is different than having someone sneak up behind you dressed up as a monster and give you a Jump Scare. Fluttershy might be more okay with fictional books containing Nightmare Fuel because she knows they're not real, but maybe encountering ponies dressed as monsters/other scary things on Nightmare Night feel too real to her (and she's expressed that she hates being startled before, too). Plus, with Fluttershy's social anxiety issues, she's more afraid of other ponies than she is of most other creatures (aside from full-grown dragons), so the fact that she knows they are ponies in costumes who are often outright trying to be scary on purpose would add to her fears as well.
  • "Implies" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. A paper cut-out of a pony that looks like a character in an anime that the viewers might be familiar with does not imply on its own that this anime exists in Equestria with every nuance intact except for having pony protagonists.
• Fluttershy is scared of fake spiders, but not real spiders. How?
  • Maybe she thought they were dead and was scared at the idea that an animal might be dead? Or perhaps she just got Jump Scare'd by them?

5.22 What About Discord

• It has been more than a half season since the Mane 6 (including Twilight) officially befriended Discord and Twilight still thinks he's able to place that kind of spell over them?
  • True, but remember, even after the official befriending Discord caused all that trouble in Make New Friends but Keep Discord. The chaos spirit is still Reformed, but Not Tamed, and can relapse at any provocation. At the very least, that's the kind of justification Twilight would use.
• In The Return of Harmony Part 2, Discord takes Twilight back in time as an observer. Why couldn't he do it here to keep her on the jokes?
  • Because Twilight not being in on it was Discord's plan.
• The Season 4 premiere showed that Zecora can make a potion that allows the drinker to view events from the past as they happened. Why did no one think of using that? Twilight even visits Zecora at one point during this episode! Forget that. Why doesn't Twilight ask Discord to use his powers to show what happened as he could do in the Season 2 premire?
  • The potion was a special thing Zecora wouldn't normally have on her, and since Twilight (correctly) thought Discord was messing with her, she assumed he wouldn't have if she asked.
  • The point was Twilight was unwilling to be upfront about her feelings so she would have been just as unwilling to ask.

5.23 The Hooffields and McColts

• If the Hoofields suck at construction then where did they perfectly bake that giant cake and even more load it with ponies?
  • The McColts established that they could go to market and buy food despite being terrible at growing crops. The Hooffields could likewise use their savings to buy cooking utensils or appliances.
• The families have been fighting for generations and the valley's been suffering ever since, so how come we only find out about this here? I know the castle is still new but shouldn't have this at least been the first friendship problem they were sent on?
  • A couple other Friendship Problem episodes come with the implication that the ponies involved have to have a certain level of development before they can be sent on that particular mission. A good example is The Parent Map—Starlight and Sunburst couldn't be sent on that friendship mission until their own friendship was restored. For one reason or another, this is how long it took before the map decided that Twilight and Fluttershy were ready.
• "Like a bullet to keep up with me"...Equestria has guns, so why were they throwing food at each other?
  • Fantasy Gun Control. If they exist, it's not in a practical form. The Royal Guard would have used them otherwise.

5.25 & 5.26 The Cutie Re-Mark

• Each Bad Future supposedly being worse than the last. So King Sombra, a borderline Eldritch Abomination with Domain Holder/Fisher King powers and a penchant for And I Must Scream curses, is supposedly the least-dangerous option? And Flim and Flim, of all Ponies, are the worst potential rulers of all?
  • Well Sombra hasn't won in his future. There's a war going on and that world seems to stand the biggest fighting chance. Celestia is strong enough to keep him at bay. It's of course not an ideal future but they do have a fighting chance. In Queen Chrysalis's future, the resistance has to be in hiding for example - and their fighting has to be done in secret. Flim and Flam meanwhile appear to have nearly destroyed half of Equestria. The others at least seemed to want to rule over it and leave the population somewhat intact. Flim and Flam just cause senseless destruction.
    • By that logic, Flim and Flam would be behind Tirek because he was just destroying Equestria just because he could whereas Flim and Flam were aiming to maximize their business and profits and either didn't see the damage they were doing or didn't care. (Though which one is worse could have some YMMV issues).
• In every alternate future where we see members of the Mane Six, they all have the same exact cutie marks as before. I thought the time travel to prevent the Sonic Rainboom would have prevented that from happening?
  • Just because Starlight Glimmer prevented them from getting their cutie marks at the same time it doesn’t mean their special talents changed.
  • It wasn't their special talents or cutie marks that made them heroes, it was the connection their cutie marks had to one another.
    • I'll note that in some futures it would make little sense for them to keep the same cutie marks, such as Pinkie Pie in Sombra's. The artists obviously anticipated this however, as Pinkie's cutie mark is completely obscured by her uniform.
• In the alternate future where Discord took over, we see him tormenting Celestia and Luna. Yup, Luna. Without the Mane Six around, how did she get redeemed?
  • Discord turned her back. Wouldn’t want a competing supervillain around.
    • Remember, Discord himself was only freed because the Elements of Harmony bonded to the Mane Six, which caused the spell on him to start to undo. So for him to be free at all somepony must have bonded to the elements and purified Luna.
  • Discord's reign happened BEFORE Luna became Nightmare Moon. With all this chaos going on, she had no time to become jealous.
    • But his first defeat had nothing to do with the rainboom. How would stopping the rainboom affect something that happened hundreds of years before it?
  • Someone else turned her back. Or maybe even Twilight and her friends, blooming a little later than normal. Unfortunately their friendship ultimately wasn't enough to take on Discord.
• Just me or was the timeline kinda off? While the variety of bad futures (present technically, but same difference) was fun and all, but given the actual time that the spell was bringing them back to, Nightmare Moon would have been the first villain to come back on the scene chronologically... the episode has Sombra and Chrysalis come first though - and even more notably, despite the lack of the manes, it's only ever one of the villains at once. Logically, lacking their defenses, Nightmare moon should have come back first, then Discord breaks free, followed by the crystal empire reappearing with Sombra with Tirek being the most recent. (Chrysalis doesn't really need to fit a timeline, and could in theory appear at any time). Of course, one could assume that whichever villain gets there first took care of the competition, but the ponies of the altered timelines never mention any other malevolent forces beyond the villain-de-jour.
  • Most probably, every time Twilight and Spike were sent back to the present, they were transported into multiple alternate timelines, where each time events played out differently in a way that allowed different villains to usurp control. Presumably, the Butterfly Effect is in full... erm, effect here, given that every method Starlight used to prevent the Rainboom from happening was different from the last.
    • They give that a full hoofwave which Zecora explains about tiny changes cascading down stream and Twilight repeats to Starlight about tiny changes snowballing. So yes it's the Butterfly Effect it just doesn't make sense here. It was just an excuse to show multiple bad futures. Seriously they were only in that future for a second but apparently there is a future where all the major villains are defeated and Flim and Flam go full evil and destroy everything.
  • Given that they DO tell us the Butterfly Effect is here and strong it's possible that whatever details differ from the main timeline altered the order of the villains. The Crystal Empire just sort of shows up with no explanation in the main timeline for example. Discords seal was weakened by the Luna and Celestia losing control of the Elements of Harmony but given when we see the heart beat that woke him up it seems the Cutie Mark Crusaders arguing in his precense actually woke him up.
  • I suppose it's possibly Celestia found somepony else to carry the Elements of Harmony (she certainly was anticipating Nightmare Moon's return) but her replacement wasn't very good at it. There were heroes, and they did defeat some of the villains, but ultimately one proved too much for them.
  • There's also the fact that while Nightmare Moon and Sombra were due to appear at a specific time, Discord and Tirek had to escape their imprisonment, and might not have managed it in a specific timeline.
  • So, let's draft out the most obvious possibilities. Nightmare Moon future: Nightmare Moon was freed, defeated Celestia and imprisoned her on the moon. Discord was not freed because the Elements were not touched. Queen Chrysalis does not invade because there's no love anymore. King Sombra returns and is defeated faster than in the King Sombra bad future because of Nightmare Moon's different war tactics, possibly because she created a better military, something Celestia would not have done (considering she was surprised at the Empire's return, she wouldn't plan for war, unlike Nightmare, who would do that just because). Alternatively, he is welcomed by Nightmare Moon, as Faust says she planned to usher in an era of evil. Tirek either did not escape because the circumstances making Cerberus bored were changed, or he escaped and was defeated because Nightmare Moon found him in her dreams.
    Discord future: Celestia finds alternative bearers that defeated Nightmare Moon. This broke his seal, but these bearers could not beat him. Alternatively, Celestia used the Elements on Luna, and this still freed him. Changelings want nothing to do with Discord, King Sombra is curbstomped, and Tirek is another victim of Discord's world as he can never amass enough power without Discord quickly noticing and shutting him down.
    Changeling future: Nightmare Moon and Discord are defeated by Elements, Chrysalis' invasion is not circumvented. Alternatively Nightmare Moon wins and is defeated by Changeling infiltration, or Celestia won without the Elements against NMM and Discord wasn't released. Sombra is also defeated by changelings disguising as his army and teaming up on him. Tirek... er, hm, he should be able to drain changelings regardless... Maybe the love the changelings amassed made them each too strong for Tirek to ever drain?
    Sombra future: Celestia wins against Nightmare, Discord isn't free, changelings also defeated, no Elements for war against Sombra. Tirek... should win? Unless either he doesn't get free or Sombra cuts him down before he can absorb much power, maybe?
    Tirek future: He drains everyone. Duh.
• Also, where was Starlight when she wasn't interfering with the past? She clearly wasn't travelling forward as Twilight was, given her surprise/suspicion when she's brought to that wasteland timeline. Is she just lost in time when she's not being summoned back by the spell or something?
  • The episode appears to happen roughly in real time. Starlight may have simply found some way to kill time until she got yanked back and then waits for Twilight to appear each time.
  • There is no reason to believe Starlight had to wait for Twilight at all. From her perspective, Twilight was only gone for a split–second.
  • I think she planned to take The Slow Path for a bit, just to watch them suffer, because she says she gets dragged back to the past whenever Twilight uses the spell. I expect she planned to return to the future eventually, but chose not to immediately, knowing she'd get called back to the past very quickly anyway.
• Did Starlight expect Twilight to give up eventually, or was she fine with being stuck in the past forever?
• Twilight and Starlight visited the same point in time multiple times. Why did they never run into their past/future selves?
  • Starlight only visits one future and the easiest answer is she and her little village simply weren't involved directly in ANY of those scenarios.
  • Twilight Sparkle is a very heroic, bold sort even without her friends. In the first episode she attempted to confront Nightmare Moon alone. It's quite possible she didn't survive any of the bad futures.
  • That's not what I meant. They both went where and when he sonic rainboom would appear. They'd both been there multiple times, but their past selves were never there. All Starlight would have had to do was stop the rainboom once, then stop Twilight and watch her past self do the job over and over. In It's About Time, it was established that time travel allows the same pony from different points in time to interact with oneself.
    • Stopping that from happening would be the first thing Starlight would build into the spell (and she's clearly capable), as her plan involves them repeatedly returning to that point. As the three targets of the spell, they are all following a linear route no matter where or when they are.
    • And perhaps Starlight was worried about Twilight encountering a future version of herself that she could use as an ally? Starlight is powerful enough to keep Twilight at bay - but if there's a second one...
• Whatever happened to the past Twilight of the bad futures? We've seen the rest of the Mane 6 affected in some way (Rainbow Dash as a rebel fighter with a mechanical wing in the Sombra Time, Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy as tribal fighters with Zecora in Chrysalis Time, Rarity as a guard/designer in the Nightmare Moon Time, etc.), but whatever happened to the Twilight Sparkle in those times?
  • Nothing Is Scarier?
• In regards to Sunburst being sent off to Canterlot Starlight states "I never saw him again". Wait, so neither one of them ever attempted to contact the other? Starlight never states that his family left, so why didn't she ask them to let her write to him? Even if they did move, she could have just taken a trip to Canterlot and tracked him down. I can understand that she might not have known his exact location, but if Amending Fences is any indication, it isn't that hard to track old friends down in the MLP: FIM verse despite the world's lack of modern technology such as the internet. Why does Twilight not suggest that she tries to track him down in the present after they return for that matter? Did that seriously not occur to either of them?
  • Given that people who feel slighted/left behind often especially as children miss important details that would have occurred to adults in general and us as viewers in particular it's possible that neither of them thought about it until it was too late. Also Canterlot Magic schools is a fairly big deal, Twilight had to pass some kind of interview to get in. Sunburst appears to have been drafted.
    • Okay, but why didn't either of them try to contact each other at any point in their adult lives? Surely after all of those years Starlight would have known that she could have taken a train top Canterlot and tried to track him down. I know years would have gone by at that point, but even if she didn't know exactly where he lived, she cold have done research to find out just like how Twilight found out where Minuite was living. Even if Starburst was no longer in Canterlot by that point, she could have contacted his old school to find out if they knew anything. She could have gone through records and checked with the police or hospitals for his files. I can understand that by that point in her life, she had already started her village, but even if that was the case, why did Starburst never try to contact her? For that matter, why does it not occur to Twilight to suggest to Starlight that they try that after they return to the present?
  • Starlight is clearly mentally unstable, it's quite possible she refused to have anything further to do with him out of a sense of betrayal. Or that he tried to continue contacting her by letter, but Starlight's replies became so clingy and passive aggressive that he decided to stop.
    • Or he might just be a regular pony not the uber nice ones we tend to see on the show. While Diamond Tiara is clearly the worst if the Cutie Mark Crusaders are roughly an average example and not a worst case scenario ponies with cutie marks don't hang out with blank flanks any more (or less) than college kids hang out at the local high school. Sure there is that ONE guy but it's not normal.
  • It's possible, that Starlight (whether as a blank flank foal, or a grown mare) may have tried to reconnect with Sunburst. But it didn't work out.
  • Be honest with yourself, how often do you actually try to get back in touch with friends you lost contact with as young children? And how often does that actually work out? They might have written to each other for a bit, but since they couldn't play together or anything for quite a bit, it probably just got less and less frequent until it stopped completely. And just randomly tracking someone down and going "Hi! We've been friends about 10 years ago!" might sound kinda weird, especially if the pony in question felt so hurt she didn't want to start any new friendship (Twilight's case is a bit different since, well, she's the Princess of Friendship, and she's been living close to her friends until early adulthood, and getting back in touch after one or two years should be easier than after ten or more). Not to mention that it's probably really hard - I'm not sure if Twilight just visited her friend's old house or actually tried finding out where she lives now, but even if it's the latter, she's a princess, which probably makes such things much easier. Schools, hospitals etc are, as far as I know, not even allowed to tell you where someone lives (If they're nice, they might ask for your name and number/address and then tell the person in question so they can contact you), so all Starlight could've done would be run around in Canterlot and asking ponies if they know somepony called Sunburst.
  • Another possibility is that the two never reached out to each other for differing reasons. Starlight may have fallen into a depressive funk (and thus not written because she just didn't have any drive to), while Sunburst was ashamed/afraid because he wasn't the pony Starlight had seen when he got his mark. He was just.. a dude
• The reason Starlight never saw Sunburst again is that he was magically gifted and got sent off to Celestia's school. Except, Starlight is also explicitly magically gifted. All Ponies are shown to get their Cutie Marks while young enough to go to school. Why didn't she end up at (or choose to enroll in) Celestia's academy after she got her Mark?
  • Celestia's school is shown having an entrance exam and notably Twilight is shown getting her cutie mark mid exam and Sunburst appears to have been drafted upon getting his. The Cutie Mark Crusaders are implied to be abnormally late but stand as proof that you do not have your cutie mark at any fixed time. Additionally while it's probably animation errors there have been adult ponies shown without Cutie Marks. Starlight may very well have just developed too late to attend despite her natural gifts. Additionally her town is shown to be out of the way and she went to extremes not to have anybody show off or gather attention. Flying under the radar accidentally or not would have been simple at that point.
• What is Starlight's cutie mark? A sparkle with two streams?
  • I like the falling star interpretation personally. Like most magical talent cutie marks there's a prominent star motif, but the meaning of the rising streams are ambiguous.
  • Her special talent is magic. The sparkle is a star (designed similarly in the manner of Twilight's cutie mark), and star cutie marks usually symbolize magic. Either way, her raw magical talent would definitely suggest that that's her specialty.
• How exactly is there a world where Flim and Flam take over? Nothing we've seen suggests they have either the temperament for true malicious evil nor the raw power to fight off any of the villains or even a mildly motivated group of ponies.
  • Well, maybe all the other villainous heavy hitters took each other out? Leaving Equestria a broken, ruined, landscape and Flim & Flam stepped in to 'help everyone recover' and before you know it, they're in charge and taking whatever they want.
    • I am not entirely convinced that they did take over Equestria. We only see that world for a few seconds at most, and all we see is the two of them driving around in a machine uprooting trees in a green area that looks like Sweet Apple Acres. Perhaps they just gained ownership of the farm and industrialized it. Alternatively, they just industrialized Ponyville. I seriously doubt that they took over the entire kingdom.
  • Maybe they ushered in a industrial revolution across Equestria, and became rich enough that they pretty much brought out the country. Any villains they defeated through guile and backstabbery, or just superior firepower. To be honest the Flim Flam brothers may not be murderous, but I'm not sure it makes them any less evil than some of the other villains.
  • Maybe they succeeded in their first appearance and won Sweet Apple Acres. Since that's a huge part of the town's economy, they started getting more and more of the adjacent areas.
  • Most likely Flim and Flam are a symptom of what went wrong in that Equestria, not the cause of it.
• Why Fluttershy didn't got her Cutie Mark in the first re-do? The other were a direct result of making the Rainboom(Rainbow Dash) seeing the rainbow created(Pinkie Pie and Applejack) or being affected by magic after effects(Rarity and Twilight). The rainboom affected her by scaring the animals (who she had already befriended). Here they just turn their backs on her and leave, and she does nothing.
  • In the prime timeline, after the Rainboom scares the animals, Fluttershy gathers the courage to try and calm the animals down, speaking to them, and gaining their trust. Thus, Fluttershy discovers her talent for dealing with animals.
• For that matter, without the Rainboom that led to the earning of their cutie marks and the branding of their friendship, how does Twilight Sparkle remain a princess?
  • It could be explained that Starlight changed around Starswirl's time travel spell (specifically to make Twilight suffer). Either that, or since Twilight herself is going through to the past, she's not affected.
  • The same way Starlight still wants revenge on Twilight for causing trouble in her village, despite Twilight never becoming a princess and getting a castle with a map that brought her to the village, thus removing Starlight's motivation for revenge.
  • Likely the same reason they don't keep bumping into themselves, the spell protecting them from paradoxes.
  • Notably Starlight doesn't change or get a new set of memories to go with the alternate future. So it's entirely possible that the universe knows something isn't right - Zecora seems to sense it as well. So although the various bad futures exist, the Tree of Harmony remains the same and so does the map - because their natural state is to be in the real future, and Starlight's spell is keeping that from happening. Alternately the spell can't reset the memories of anyone who's involved in it.
• Was Starlight's actual plan just to troll Twilight for eternity? There seem to be two big problems with her plan the first and biggest being that she seems to have little motivation to add the loop part of the spell in. It would have been easy to just send Twilight to a bad future, vengeance complete and go live your life. The way she went about it however presumably eventually Twilight would have beaten her in combat. After all as presented the spell completed itself and self destructed upon Rainbow Dash performing the Sonic Rainboom. Which means even if Twilight loses 99% of her battles with Starlight she only needs to win once.
  • Starlight's plan was to make Twilight miserable. The spell self-destructed because Starlight sent them back to the proper timeline, in which the map (which Twilight explains is an extension of the Tree of Harmony) destroys it so that it cannot be used again. Had Starlight not given up, she could have simply used the spell again if Twilight succeeded, which is why Twilight says this fight would last an eternity.
  • Starlight's end game is never really explained, but I can imagine that once she was bored of tormenting her nemesis she had a plan to permanently dispose of Twilight and abuse the spell for her own benefit.
• The three villains revisited in-depth, King Sombra, Queen Chrysalis, and Nightmare Moon, all have strange differences. King Sombra is taller and his crystals aren't black. Queen Chrysalis no longer has a voice filter, and Nightmare Moon's head uses new assets, with (once-again) redesigned fangs.
  • They all emerged in slightly different circumstances I suppose. Sombra never really achieved a truly stable form or real sanity in his first appearance, Nightmare Moon is from quite some time after she first escaped (maybe Rarity gave her a makeover?) and Chrissi... eh, I've got nothing.
    • Chrysalis could have Power Makes Your Voice Deep after absorbing Shining and Cadance's love.
• How can Starlight be so powerful? She never even attended any magic schools in Canterlot, and yet her magic rivals Twilight ("My magic couldn't stop her", "She obviously has more talent for magic than almost anypony I've seen", "I can't stop you. But you can't stop me from trying, and we could be stuck doing this for all eternity!"). Starlight isn't an alicorn, she's a unicorn, and she's somehow able to rival Twilight? How is that possible? Twilight was gifted from birth, studied under Celestia herself, and ascended into princess-hood, while Starlight is just a unicorn who never even attended a Canterlot university. With the power she possesses, if she herself were to become an alicorn, could she possibly rival or even surpass Celestia herself? How can any unicorn just be that powerful naturally?
  • This seems to come up with every fight in MLP and because they are so infrequent we don't have much in the way of benchmarks to compare them to. We don't know for example if magic is simply something you're born with, i.e. Twlight Sparkle is stronger than Rarity because she was born better and that's all there is to it or if it it's a matter of hard work. Twlight Sparkle is stronger than Rarity because Rarity cares more about dress making and the only spell she cares about is the levitation one all unicorns seem capable of. Given the amount of work Twlight is constantly shown doing the easiest answer is that this is a classic case of hard work vs natural born talent. Starlight is to magic what Rainbow Dash is to flying. Simply born with an innate skill they don't have to work at very much. Twilight on the other hand is constantly studying. Cadence has never been portrayed as abnormally powerful and Celestia and Luna are over a thousand years old. That's a lot of practice even if it was just casual.
    • Season 6's opener The Chrystalling gives us a bit of insight into this. Starlight appears to be simply born better than most unicorns in terms of raw power. What she lacked by comparison to Sunburst was a true purpose at the time. Sunbursts was despite early signs to essentially be a scientists. He lacks any real power but has an encyclopedic knowledge that seems to dwarf even Twilight and Celestia. Starlight is at the time like a young Rainbow Dash.
  • We don't know she didn't attend a magic school, her history is never much elaborated on. Maybe she attended a magic school later in life after she got her cutie mark, but failed to fit in. She has always struck me as much older than Twilight, maybe even in her late thirties, so there's plenty of time to do so. She could also be self taught, or even found a independent master to study under. At the very least we know she studied magic "for years" (she specifies studying the shield spell for years but Twilight interprets it as her studying magic in general for years). She's also only a real fair threat to Twilight in her second appearance, so she's likely spent the last few months reading 'How to beat an alicorn' parts 1 - 27.
    • But there were only 22 episodes! So she only read parts 1-22! Seriously, though, you're right; she likely mastered all the most useful spells for combat, and then some. Obviously, to deal with a flier she'd learn self-levitation and cloud-walking (spells which Twilight herself learned but never needed after becoming an alicorn). To give herself an edge in combat, she also probably invented that freezing spell, but didn't expect Twilight to copy it.
  • Twilight is a very young alicorn; if we go by the fact that Rainbow Dash hasn't spent a winter with Tank until this season (she adopted him back in Season 2), then Twilight probably hasn't been an alicorn for even two years, or even less. She probably does not yet have the insane raw power that comes from age, like Celestia and Luna have. After Twilight grows more, she'll probably be a lot more powerful. And as noted above, Starlight comes off as being older than Twilight.
  • I think it's that Twilight's bad at fighting, and wastes a lot of magic. Some examples from their fight: 1. Twilight flies a loop in the air and shoots down a row of beams. Starlight doesn't even move from her position, and only two or three beams hit her shield. The rest spread out nowhere close to Starlight. What a waste of energy! 2. Twilight teleports from an attack at least once, which Starlight never does. If you recall Friendship is Magic Parts 1 and 2, Twilight at this point uses no effort levitating Spike and other objects, while she gains a headache from teleporting the distance of a 5 second run. So, it's obvious that teleporting is a huge magic drain. 3. She's inaccurate. Starlight is not once shown to struggle when dodging her attacks, while almost every time Twilight dodges, she seems to be exerting herself. By this, it can be said that Starlight wastes less energy on shields. In fact, the only time she uses a shield in the battle at all is when Twilight does the retarded loop thingy. 4. Starlight used the time travel spell once, while Twilight used it twice already. As well, Twilight just came out of a chase with changelings, while Starlight has had plenty of time to rest up from the minor magic she'd done.
  • While it is debatable exactly how powerful Starlight is, keep in mind that Twilight said she "has more talent for magic than almost anypony I've seen". Assuming she was excluding herself, this implies that there are other unicorns out there who possess immense magical talent, just like her. Candidates include Sunset Shimmer. Also, it's not unprecedented for unicorns to gain insane raw power; King Sombra is evidence of this (though admittedly, we don't know exactly how he got it, dark magic and all).
    • Anypony includes Celestia and Luna, not just unicorns.
  • Also, keep in mind that the time loop gave Starlight the advantage by letting her show up whenever and wherever she wanted. Twilight, on the other hand, had to fight through insane, exhausting, apocalyptic futures and fight Starlight.
  • I personally think it's an oversimplification to say that one magic user is better than another. In truth, I think that Twilight and Starlight just have different talents. Twilight's special talent is magic replication. She can duplicate most spells almost instantly, and instantly copied Starlight's shield spell which she worked on for years. The spells Twilight learns are all from other ponies or from books, so they are generally pre-existing spells. Starlight's talent, however, seems to be magic invention. She seemed to demonstrate this by creating the equality spell, the time spell (okay, she modified Starswirl's spell, but that still counts as invention), the freezing spell (which Twilight copied), and possibly that flight spell. The only time Twilight seemed to create new magic is in "Magical Mystery Cure" (what exactly did that spell do, anyway? Aside from earn her princesshood). Really, this kind of fits in with the show's theme of individual talents and traits that make you special.
• Why didn't Twilight ask Discord for help when she went to that future. Now hear me out. Discord is the spirit of chaos, which in this world is essentially the anthropomorphic personification of chaos, with the reality warping abilities and such. So changing the timeline wouldn't affect him at all. As the spirit of Chaos something like Order wouldn't really affect him. Time and its laws mean nothing to him. So it would make sense that he was just enjoying all of the hoping around in the timeline and reveling in the chaos. Twilight, being as smart as she is, should have realized this and went to him. hey would talk and she would bring up Fluttershy and he would go to her in the past and snap his fingers and be done with it.
  • That would have been incredibly risky, Discord is more capable than any other villain of hijacking the time spell to become a truly horrifying threat. Not to mention Twilight's consistently the pony who trusts Discord the least, just after Rainbow Dash.
  • Saying things like "changing the timeline wouldn't affect him at all" is pure speculation, based on a fanon interpretation of Discord's nature. There's no evidence for it. What little was shown on-screen suggests that Discord was just as affected by the changes in the timeline as anyone else.
  • In addition to the above comments, Discord's Magical History Tour reveals that while he can Time Travel, he can't actually change anything anyway.
• Twilight states at one point in the episode that everypony's friendships are important to (the fate of) Equestria. But didn't the whole episode basically just show that the fate of Equestria hinges so much on the Mane Six's friendship, thus rendering that statement kinda moot? Or did Starlight showing Twilight her backstory cause Twilight to realize that one broken friendship really did have a great impact on the present, and to realize that her friendships with the Mane Six aren't the only ones that matter to Equestria?
  • Twilight does admit that she doesn't know why her friends are so vital to the future but there is no evidence that her friendships are the only ones that matter. It's to some degree implied but we don't know exactly when each timeline branches off significantly from the established story. The Mane 6 at best stalled Queen Chrysalis, that victory belongs to Cadence and Shining Armor. You remove one of them and it's probable that Queen Chrysalis is successful. Similarly it's likely without those two that King Sombra wins. Regardless of how it ended Twilight's epic battle with Tirek is the result of the friendship between the Princesses. Had Luna and Celestia not made up or Cadence for whatever reason not been on good terms with them (to say nothing of Twilight not being guided to princesshood) things there would have gone radically differently. Additionally Discord's genuine friendship with Twilight provided the final key.
  • Discord was freed by the Cutie Mark Crusaders, who would almost certainly never have met in a no-Rainboom future. Even if we assume that Tirek could have freed Discord to drain him, he needed Discord's help to even get that far. The rest of the Mane 6 made the fight against Chrysalis harder by thwarting Twilight's attempts to expose her. And the important factor in Sombra's defeat wasn't the Mane 6's friendship, but Spike's friendship with Twilight; no Rainboom, and Spike hatches later and doesn't become her assistant. The timeline branching is honestly a mess, and the order in which it happened makes no sense at all.
  • The alternate futures prove that the Mane Six's friendship is important, but another recurring theme throughout the two-parter is that small choices lead to enormous consequences over time. While we don't know what outcomes some random given ponies in Equestria becoming friends or not might lead to, we can infer that those outcomes are radically different from their alternatives.
• If Sunburst was really Starlight's childhood friend, why does he immediately rush outside to celebrate his new Mark rather than stay with her?
  • Getting your cutie mark is marks the moment a pony knows what their purpose in life is and hitting puberty all rolled into one. He can hardly be blamed for losing his head over it, especially since it's implied that Sunburst and Starlight were late bloomers.
• Why didn't Starlight change the past to prevent her friend from getting her cutie mark? It's not as if she lacks equalization spells.
  • She's too enraged at Twilight ruining everything - she only cares about her petty revenge scheme than something like that.
    • Even at her calmest, Starlight wasn't exactly rational to start with.
  • If she accomplishes what she wants to and steals all cutie marks eventually Sunburst will join her ranks at some point. It's more important for her to a) get revenge on the Mane 6 and b) get her biggest obstacle out of the way.
  • She cannot prevent it from happening. He would have gotten his cutie mark sooner or later anyway. using the equalization spell would not change anything, because the Mane 6 would eventually show up and undo it, just like they did in The Cutie map.
• Why is Starlight singling Twilight out for revenge? Fluttershy was at least, if not more, active in ruining her Town.
• Given that almost every villain the Mane 6 fought is accounted for in the previous timelines, what caused the "lifeless planet" version of Equestria in the final timeline? Ahuizotl or dragons or somesuch might conquer Equestria, but seem unlikely to wipe it out completely. The only potential world-ending threat left unaccounted for would seem to be the Smooze, and he would have left a Smoozed Equestria as per G1, not a lifeless one. Lavan, maybe?
  • The Parasprites?
  • One theory that all or most of the villains ended up freed over time and empowered enough that they could fight each other all at the same time, resulting in such immense destruction that the land died. Another possibility is that the repeated use of the time travel spell damaged the timeline so badly that magic itself died (we see in the next season that a land where all normal magic is nullified looks as dead and barren as the wasteland future). This is hinted at in the repeated statements that every time the future was changed it became worse, as if using the spell was having a cumulative damage effect on the timeline.
  • Well with Season 7 debut of Daybreaker (Evil Celestia) abet as a stress induced nightmare, there's another possibility. A universe where she's not just a nightmare and actually exists/existed and scorched all life from the world.
  • Tirek could have done it. Perhaps this was him again, but he had been released a little earlier and we just see the end result.
• The writers have said that a lack of sunlight would kill all the plants, the animals that feed on them and the animals that feed on the animals. So how is Nightmare Moon's Equestria still, well, flourishing years after she trapped Celestia in the moon?
  • Something was obviously worked out. Given the only wildlife seen are the Timberwolves, and the plantlife is wild and weird looking, maybe most of the life on the planet has died, and been replaced by nocturnal variants.
  • Maybe, since Celestia is trapped on the moon, the moon can now give off enough solar energy to keep everything warm and alive. Alternatively, since Nightmare Moon seems to be a Pragmatic Villain, she figured out the problem and agreed to raise the sun once in a while for this reason on the condition that everyone sleep through the day instead so they could still enjoy her nighttime.
• Why would Twilight Sparkle immediately believe Starlight Glimmer's Freudian Excuse when she knows full well the pink power-hungry punk herself is fully capable of deceit such that she ran a whole town through that ability? After several attempts on her life, at that?
  • 1. Twilight actually saw it happen due to time travel. 2. Starlight was not in the frame of mind for such thought-out manipulations. 3. Twilight using to talk Starlight down, it she believed it or not is irrelevant.
• Starlight destroying the scroll and keeping her and Twilight in the past ignores something: Twilight is now an alicorn and can take The Slow Path with relative ease - changing her name, using her knowledge of magic to her favor while learning more - while Starlight herself would die of old age as friendless as she was before. The only problem lies in how Twilight reconciles her time in the past with the present scenario.
  • 1. It would have prevented them from fixing the timeline if something went wrong. 2. If you mean Twilight would have eventually been able to recreate the time travel spell and Set Right What Once Went Wrong, we don't know if that would be possible, given she was already under the influence of the time spell. Not being able to return to her friends would still be horrific. 4. Twilight being immortal or Long-Lived is fanon that's at odds with Word of God that she "will not outlive her friends."
• Why was Our Town so quick to trust and forgive Starlight Glimmer despite her deceiving and doing more to harm them than anypony else? I can understand everyone else forgiving her since the montage implies plenty of time for her to be The Atoner assuming they're even aware of her actions. But Our Town was surprised and initially not amused by her return, so why did they almost immediately accept her afterward?
  • Everyone from that town joined Starlight's cult willingly and gave up their cutie marks because they believed what she was saying. They were angry at her because 1) it didn't work like they thought it would and 2) she lied and kept her own cutie mark when they were supposed to be equal. To them it seemed like she was just a power crazy mare who was using them. Having her return and explain that she both meant what she'd said genuinely and now understood why it was wrong would go a long way to get them to forgive her. She wasn't using them, she was just wrong and took longer to see the error of their ways.
• In the beginning, why didn't Twilight Sparkle just immediately cast a spell to incapacitate Starlight Glimmer and instruct Spike to go out into the hall and write a letter in order to warn Celestia of the manipulative mare's uninvited presence/capabilities? Even if Starlight had somehow upgraded her magic during all that time after her initial defeat, Twilight didn't know that at first and there would've been ample time before the time-travel spell was activated to try and prevent it from happening.
  • Because Twilight was so surprised she didn't have the time to recompose herself enough to cast one. Anything more than basic unicorn telekinesis, lasers, or shield take time and thought to cast, such the only time we've seen them used in battle was when Twilight had the time loop to plan it out. She's not a trained solider who'd have the mindset or inclination to immediately attack, and with their military as is, I doubt such training exists in Equestria. Starlight's ability to do so is talent such they decided it was worth redeeming her.
• We now have Word of God that it was Celestia who feed Nightmare Moon at the start of the series (they're no longer involved in the show, but they were at the time). So why'd Celestia free them in the Nightmare Moon timeline where the things that she was counting on (Twilight Sparkle as her student, the rest of the Mane Six as friends she knew of in "Celestial Advice") didn't exist? Anything besides Characterization Marches On for Celestia since then? It is however noted that Lauren says that her word no longer applies due to no longer being the main showrunner.
  • Well, as you said, Faust's word is somewhat irrelevant to the show since she only worked on the show for two seasons of its nine season long run. If something she says doesn't make sense with what was presented in the show, you're allowed to just disregard it.
• In the Chrysalis timeline, when the titular villain has revealed that she has practically won by discovering and overwhelming Zecora's resistance, she offers a chance to surrender. Twilight, of all ponies actually considers her offer and tells Zecora to accept, despite knowing her track record of keeping the truth is practically nil. Was the situation so hopeless that Twilight would actually consider that offer or did her brain cells take a dive in that situation?
  • Twilight has every intention of erasing this timeline and everything in it. It doesn't matter if Chrysalis is lying or not, either way buys enough time to get to the map and go back in time. Twilight also tends to be fairly trusting, she hasn't had much experience dealing with Chrysalis or if she'd keep her word (assuming the comics aren't canon).
    • This despite the fact that Chrysalis disguised herself as Cadence (i.e. a former babysitter who dropped by regularly) so she should know more than anyone else that the Changeling Queen herself cannot be trusted.
    • In that case, she was only untrustworthy insofar as she was hiding her true identity and motives. This is a different enough context, where she had such an advantage that weren't making a serious effort to hide anything, there was seemingly better odds trusting her than defying her.
    • Chrysalis did that so she and her subjects could feed. A big part of the fanbase considered that a sympathetic motive for her actions, no reason Twilight wouldn't think so too. Plus, as I mentioned, Twilight is planning to erase this timeline, so it doesn't matter is she's lying or not.

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