YMMV / My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S4 E9 "Pinkie Apple Pie"

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• Awesome Music: "Apples to the Core", a joyous, high-spirited number that perfectly encapsulates the Determinator spirit of the Apple family. When it was first shown at the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con, it got the entire audience clapping along until the end.
• Broken Base:
  • Apple Bloom sing-songing something similar to Tara Strong's "Twilightlicious" video popularized by the fandom has set some into "They're pandering to us!" mode, while others like it or are ambivalent to whether it's pandering or not.
  • This trope is potentially why The Unreveal occurred, though this also divides people over the fact that it was The Unreveal in the first place. Even with The Unreveal, some feel that Pinkie being accepted as an honorary Apple makes it a moot point regardless.
  • Goldie's hoarding is played noticeably straight, as is her animal abuse (via neglect, not physical abuse). This gets a negative reaction from some who think it's Played for Laughs, while others find it genuinely amusing. There's also the camp who view it completely straight, since the whole Apple family is visibly shaken by the sight.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • While they never state if Pinkie is connected to Goldie, there are several similarities between them, Goldie is able to pull a book from the bottom of a pile without toppling it (like Pinkie with the genealogy scrolls earlier), apparently loves eating sweets like gingerbread houses for lunch, has a puffy hairdo like Pinkie, has a similar naming pattern (Pinkie / Goldie), and ends her greeting sentence with "yourself".
  • While Big Macintosh's water wings and ducky inflatable tube may look silly compared to everypony else's life vests, as the only stallion on the road trip, he'd have much less bodyfat than the mares and therefore a higher overall specific gravity; put simply, stallions sink faster than mares. The air in inflatable pool toys provides much more buoyancy than the foam in the typical life vest, so it makes sense for a stallion to wear inflatables as life preservers.
  • Whether it was an intentional reference or not, when Goldie blows the cat-shaped dust pile away, some have taken this as a shoutout to Dusty Katt, one of the better-known figures in the fandom (aka "The Manliest Brony in the World").
  • Each of the ways that the Apples "fail" in the road trip is directly in contrast to when the family "re-introduces" themselves to Pinkie at the start: Big Mac's the strong one but the wagon breaks because he overloaded it; Apple Bloom's playful but her antics caused the map to get lost; Granny's the one with loads of wisdom but her bad memory led them to the cave, and Applejack's the one that provides guidance but her stubbornness to take control leads to the wheel being lost.
  • Despite the episode being about investigating into whether or not the Pies and the Apples are related, Pinkie's own explanation of their relationship spells it out clearly. "A fourth cousin twice removed by a fifth cousin," when charted out, looks like this◊, meaning that a fourth cousin twice removed on Pinkie's side married a fifth cousin from Applejack's side. While this means that Pinkie Pie might be tied into the Apple Clan, it also means that there's no possibility of Pinkie Pie or the Apple Family sharing any common ancestors.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • This bit from 2013 EFNW with Andrea Libman (Pinkie's VA) and Peter New (Goldie's VA) playing Jenga, when you realize both Pinkie and Goldie did a bit of that within the episode. For themselves it's likely an injoke because both of them had probably long since finished the voice acting for that episode and, but the REST of us wouldn't get the joke until the episode released.
  • The Apple family dressed as pirates in the comic series.
• One-Scene Wonder: Goldie Delicious only appears for the one scene at the end, yet her unexplained fixation with cats, and the voice work by Peter New, has made her a standout character.
• Pandering to the Base: The reference to the -Licious meme was accused of this by some.
• Rewatch Bonus: Some skilled-eyed Bronies noticed a blink-and-you-miss-it movement in the background of one scene, which upon closer inspection◊ reveals a figure many fans believe to be a ponified Slender Man.
• Squick: The episode depicts hoarding in a way that's disturbingly true to life. Goldie Delicious's home is nigh unlivable◊, littered with days old food and cats that leave hairballs (and likely other bodily secretions) on the floor. Then there's the cat that might be the◊ equivalent of a dust bunny◊, but it could just as credibly have been dead for so long that it turned to dust. Worse, it's all Played for Laughs.
  • Pinkie's duck face◊ has been seen as a minor example.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: At least one viewer has confused Goldie Delicious for a guy with her obviously male voice actor. Also her eyelashes, normally a sure way to identify a pony's gender, are not visible for most of the time.