Informed Wrongness / My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

• "Boast Busters" kicks off its plot with Twilight and her friends attending a stage magic show by "The Great and Powerful Trixie". Rarity, Applejack, and Rainbow Dash complain about Trixie describing herself as great and powerful, setting up the episode's intended moral against brazenly boasting and showing off. Except that for a stage performer such as Trixie, boasting and showing off are basically part of the job description. Trixie does continue boasting (and acting generally arrogant) after her show, but the other ponies didn't wait for that before criticizing her.
• "Bridle Gossip": The episode's moral is not to judge a book by its cover. However, the ponies aren't just judging the "witch" Zecora by her appearance: they're also judging her based on the fact she comes from the dangerous Everfree Forest and that her behavior comes off as threatening^note Her habit of dragging her hoof on the ground is a show of aggression for ponies but is how zebras search for water. The ponies wake up the next morning under the effects of Poison Joke, which they immediately blame on Zecora having mistook her warning as a threat. In a world where magic and curses are very real, this is not an unreasonable thing to believe. While this may not have been quite enough evidence, at the very end Twilight witnesses Zecora behaving and speaking in a manner which strongly suggests that she's going to cook a pony (which she is not).^note She describes a hot pot of water as being "the perfect temperature for ponies", when actually she was going to draw the ponies a bath. The ponies are reasonably concerned, but still portrayed as wrong for judging her.
• "May the Best Pet Win!": Rainbow Dash holds a contest to choose a pet from a group of animals. Fluttershy pressures Rainbow to allow a tortoise (who would ultimately be known as Tank) to compete, despite having been told several times that Rainbow is looking for an animal that could fly alongside her (for example, many real-life joggers often seek a dog who are able to run alongside them). Her initial rejection of the tortoise is lumped in with her focus on "coolness, awesomeness, and radicalness" over love and companionship. While she was legitimately wrong on not making love and companionship the biggest priorities, her insistence on a pet that can fly is perfectly justified. Rainbow Dash lives in a house built on clouds (not unlike the city of Cloudsdale), and she spends most of her waking hours flying. As such, an animal that can fly would be a much better fit than one that can't. One would think that someone like Fluttershy would know a thing or two about choosing a pet to match one's lifestyle. Tank does get his propeller backpack, but that isn't presented as an option until after he is crowned the winner via Loophole Abuse.
• "Just For Sidekicks" has Zecora swipe a gem from Spike because "there's no worse mojo than dragon greed". That may be, and yes Spike is doing a thoughtless job of what he was paid the gems to do, but he's not motivated by sheer greed but rather to earn a quantity of gems to bake a cake. He's effectively doing the equivalent of a kid mowing some lawns to earn some cash to buy something they want, which Zecora presents as an entirely wrong thing to do with no consideration whatsoever.
• "One Bad Apple": The Cutie Mark Crusaders are portrayed as wrong for wanting to retaliate against Babs Seed, because it would make them be "bullies" themselves as opposed telling Applejack or Rarity who could have resolved this. However, Babs showed no signs of her redeemable traits or backstory and continued to bully them when they tried to pull their punches, and Applejack failed to noticed the bullying or do anything more than frown when they were being bullied in front of her after giving the "if you're bullied tell an adult" moral. Many watching felt the Crusaders fighting back would be justifiable self-defense under those circumstances and a fraction of the severity of what Babs gets Easily Forgiven for. Especially after the episode ended with Babs retaliating against the other bullies, by intimidating them into falling into some mud, to stop their bullying.
• "Bats!" had the main conflict be between Fluttershy and Applejack over whether Applejack should allow a swarm of vampire fruit bats to remain on her apple farm. Applejack wants them gone, because in the past they've caused massive amounts of damage to the crop and nearly wrecked the farm, while Fluttershy wants Applejack to cordon off a section of the orchard for the bats to stay in for the sake of the bats.^note She does point out that the seeds left behind by the bats grow better trees than other seeds, but it's only mentioned once or twice as an afterthought. But then, a magic spell which can remove the bats' appetite for apples is suggested; Fluttershy has moral reservations about this "solution". Considering what happened when a similar spell backfired in a prior episode, this is understandable. However, this solution fails for reasons entirely unrelated to the prior debate (Fluttershy turns into a half-pony half-bat hybrid), and then Fluttershy's solution is attempted and somehow works. The episode (and Applejack) ultimately end up siding with Fluttershy, even though Applejack's argument (that her farm might be ruined if the bats are allowed to stay) has perfectly valid points that are never addressed and nobody seems concerned that the last time Fluttershy gave a pest a berth because she thought it was cute it backfired tremendously.
• "Equestria Games": Spike's Heroic Self-Deprecation was meant to be him unfairly failing to realized his worth. But Spike failed the important task of lighting the torch and didn't know the anthem of the winning team with his improvisations being seen as offensive, embarrassing himself in front of thousands during a very important event. His saving the day which was supposed to prove his worth amount to being in the right place at the right time with Spike rightfully saying anyone who had his powers could have done it.
• "No Second Prances": We're supposed to side with Starlight Glimmer when she calls Twilight Sparkle out for not trusting Trixie and, by extension, not trusting her despite preaching trust and forgiveness. But Starlight had recently committed the most dangerous and seriously-played evildoing in the series thus far, so much so that even Starlight herself doubted she deserved to be so Easily Forgiven, she still consistently struggled with basic concepts of right and wrong, and had a really nasty habit of abusing magic and making poor decisions. Twilight Sparkle has every valid reason in the world to not trust Starlight Glimmer at this point, especially when Trixie wasn't giving Twilight much reason to trust her given her prior redemption seemingly didn't stick. Also the reason Twilight was wrong to not trust them despite being right about Trixie^note Trixie did initially only befriend Starlight to screw around with Twilight, but ultimately became a genuine friend in the process, that Celestia gave Twilight the freedom to develop her own friends, is broken as it was implied and later confirmed she had intended and arranged for Twilight to befriend specifically them meaning it was more luck that Starlight and Trixie's friendship worked out. It certainly doesn't help that a previous episode actually supported Twilight's decision to trust her gut instincts about other ponies, or that Starlight would continue to screw up and make terrible decisions for many episodes to come.
• "Amending Fences": The premise of the episode is Twilight returning to her old home to apologise to ponies she used to know for being a bad friend. The viewer has seen Twilight in the first episode of the show turn down invites to parties, so it came off more like she wasn't interested in friendship than she was actively hurting others. Sure enough, when she gets home and apologises her three old acquaintances laugh it off. Where things start to get frustrating is when the episode introduces Moondancer, who is a clear reflection of who Twilight used to be and would have become if she hadn't met the others - a bookish shut-in not interested in other people's company. Given the show has alternated between episodes where being an introvert who prefers their own company is a bad thing and recognising different people have different needs, you might expect some kind of middle ground aesop when Twilight encourages Moondancer to open up. Instead it transpires that Moondancer became a misanthrope principally because Twilight didn't go to one of her parties and stayed that way for years, snapping at Twilight when she tries to throw her another party. Where this fails is that the show never established that Twilight should have realised Moondancer considered her a friend and really wanted her to go the party - in all the flashback scenes they're merely studying together, never joking or having fun, and to make matters worse Moondancer didn't even invite Twilight to the party herself, the three other ponies did, so Twilight had no way of knowing Moondancer would be so personally hurt if she didn't show (and she was also worried about the Nightmare Moon situation at a time when no one else was, a concern which turned out to be valid). The three other ponies also showed up for Moondancer's party, so it wasn't as though her first attempt to make friends ended in failure, which makes her subsequent shutting herself away and snapping at Twilight look like an overreaction (and she then proceeds to avoid all the other ponies, which is exactly what Twilight did to her that she was so hurt about).
• "Parental Glideance": Rainbow Dash is meant to be unappreciative for being angry at her parents who embarrass her by cheering her on all the time. But it's shown their cheering alienated ponies from Rainbow in her childhood and was interfering with her job at present, their showing up at Wonderbolt HQ to cheer unannounced was stated to risk getting Rainbow in trouble with her superiors, and their shooting fireworks during Rainbow's air show could have resulted in someone getting hurt.
• "Going to Seed": Applejack is portrayed as being an annoying stick-in-the-mud for reminding Apple Bloom that the Great Seedling might not exist, and eventually it turns out that she's only acknowledging it because she used to believe wholeheartedly in him but fell into her own Seedling trap when she was a foal. However, she both had a point about Apple Bloom spending too much time trying to catch the Seedling and not enough time harvesting and was perfectly reasonable for believing that the Seedling may not exist because she never said that he definitely wasn't real, she only said that there were plenty of non-Seedling-related explanations for what was going on and was essentially thinking of rational explanations instead of outlandish ones.

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