YMMV / My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S3 E4 "One Bad Apple"

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• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Luster dust? It's a real thing, and quite common on dessert pastries.
• Awesome Music: Babs Seed, Babs Seed, what we gonna do? Got a bully on our tail, gotta hide, we gotta bail...
  • Of special note: this is the first time since "The Show Stoppers" that we hear Scootaloo sing^note not counting "Hearts and Hooves Day" since she didn't actually sing, and she has improved greatly (although this time, the musical number is rhetorical, not literal).
• Base-Breaking Character: Babs Seed. She's either a complex, sympathetic character or her actions, the lack of punishment for those actions, and her abominable accent have made it difficult to sympathize with her.
• Broken Base: There's a lot of argument over whether the issue of bullying and the aesop of the episode were done well, or in an unrealistic manner, especially in regards to how the CMC got Babs to stop bullying them.
• Character Rerailment: After Silver Spoon's Pet the Dog moment in "Family Appreciation Day" and being absent from the plot of "Ponyville Confidential", some fans were getting used to the idea of her being much nicer than she lets on. This episode reminds us she's still as mean as Diamond Tiara.
• Fanfic Fuel: Babs Seed in general. Not only is she an Apple relative, she's also got a nice bit of background set up. She leaves at the end of the episode to start a Manehatten branch of the CMC, which on its own is prime Fanfic Fuel.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The second float built by the CMC resembles a golden apple - which is what the original Apple of Discord looked like.
  • The title comes from the phrase "one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch." It almost did.
• Harsher in Hindsight: When we meet Diamond Tiara's mother two seasons later, it turns out Babs threatening to tell her about everything was more of a threat than Babs realized.
• Informed Wrongness: The Cutie Mark Crusaders are portrayed as wrong in for wanting to retaliate against Babs Seed, because it would make them be "bullies" themselves as opposed telling Applejack 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 was justifiable self-defense under those circumstances and a fraction of the severity of what Babs gets Easily Forgiven for.
• Jerkass Woobie: Babs turns out to be one when it's revealed that she herself was a victim of bullying.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • People are making one over a golden-colored Sweetie Belle, especially over her shiny rear-end.
  • The bit with Sweetie Belle drinking a milkshake at the beginning of the "Babs Seed" song has also started to be used by fans for various other ponies in the series.
• Ron the Death Eater: Applejack gets a lot of heat from the fans for not telling the CMC about Babs' problem back in Manehatten, and also for not attempting to stand up to Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon when they mock the Crusaders again but by the looks of it, Applejack would have stepped in, but Babs defends them, so Applejack may have felt she didn't need to.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Babs Seed. The main point of criticism for the episode is that her treatment of the CMC came off as far worse than what her Freudian Excuse was meant to cover. Her bullying the CMC in excess of, even without, Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon's influence, and the lack of any visible remorse for her actions while she was bullying them resulted in many finding her lack of consequences undeserved and undermined the anti-bullying aesop. Luckily, her subsequent appearance onward was positive enough to show her deserving of forgiveness, letting Babs increasingly live her bad rep down.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Twice in the song "Babs Seed", the CMC are being chased on a two-dimensional plane and then the camera angle changes to the edge of the plane, which the CMC fall off, in a three-dimensional fashion!
• The Woobie:
  • The CMC get hit with this. Not only do they look genuinely hurt by what they're put through, they did absolutely nothing wrong and are innocent victims in all this.
  • Sweetie Belle is more so after she cried rivers of tears that were done in non-hammy and heavily dramatic ways.

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