YMMV / My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S7 E14 "Fame and Misfortune"

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation:
  • While the intent of the episode is "You can't please everyone, but you can control how it affects you", the overall lesson could also be interpreted as "If you're going to put yourself in the limelight, then beware of haters and Loony Fans."
  • Fans aren't the same thing as friends or family.
  • Acknowledge your favorite characters' flaws as well as their strengths. Otherwise, you may as well be chasing a Mary Sue.
  • One comment on YouTube points out that sometimes, what you want to share isn't meant for everyone. Twilight meant to share the Friendship Journals with every pony who needed friendship lessons, and she thought she could accomplish that by sharing the journals with every pony in Equestria. But she learned the hard way that every pony who didn't need a friendship lesson read it and overlooked the whole point of the journals. Toola Roola and Coconut Cream were the only ones who needed it and made a point they personally appreciated it.
• Angst Aversion: The fans who did not like the episode point out how utterly mean-spirited the ponies are and that outside of the B plot with Toola Roola and Coconut Cream, none of the fan ponies really seem to learn their lesson and get away with their nasty behavior. It also didn't help that the townsponies all consisted of background characters that bronies over the years had gotten attached to, who wound up grabbing the Jerkass Ball, with the worst of it coming from fan favorites like Lemon Hearts. M.A. Larson at a panel said that he didn't like the concept either for this reason and actually tried to make the episode less mean-spirited, but the executives got in the way of that.
• Broken Aesop: The intended Aesop about not letting entitled fans, critics, or debate over your work affect you is broken afterward when the Mane Six realize they are still causing the same problems, and thus affecting them, such they decided they had to do something about them, and probably did given they're back to normal next episode.
• Broken Base: Pretty much inevitable, considering it's a giant Take That, Audience!. Some find the episode to be a fun yet necessary jab at obsessive fans, others see it as being petulant over legitimate criticism the show has received — especially where the Mane 6's characterization is concerned. A third group doesn't mind the episode's subject matter, but rather judges the episode as an actual episode, and found the Mane Six's treatment to be a bit too mean-spirited and the entirety of Ponyville to be more than a little unsympathetic. Yet another group argues that the background ponies are at the mercy of the writers and animators, and that the whole experience will blow right over by the next episode.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Toola Roola and Coconut Cream, the two fillies of the B storyline. Them getting over their fights with each other through reading friendship lessons endeared them to the mane cast and the audience, becoming the only truly nice characters introduced in the episode. It helps that the two are references to the G3 franchise.
  • Watch any blind commentary reaction to this episode and the absolute highlight of the episode (besides the song and stressed Rarity) will invariably be either the guy demanding to know if Pinkie and Applejack are related or the elderly mare who claims that Twilight was better before she got wings.
• Fanon Discontinuity: For the sake of sanity for everyone, fans and creators alike, people generally prefer to just ignore discussing this episode and pretend it never happened and move on.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Book of Friendship is an ongoing fanfiction started five years prior which is about two ponies who are dedicated to teaching the magic of friendship to others through the Book of Friendship which contains all of the Friendship Lessons that Twilight Sparkle learned throughout her lifetime.
• Memetic Mutation: Rarity's insane smile from when Twilight and Starlight walk in on her Sanity Slippage spread fairly quickly, becoming the go-to thumbnail for most reaction videos.
• Misblamed: In 2014, Larson branched into novel writing with the Pennyroyal Academy series, so some viewers took the episode as being based on his experiences dealing with their reception and his interactions with readers. Actually, Larson was handed the episode's premise by the executives at Hasbro, and even he didn't like how it turned out. This sprang from the misconception that Larson returned to the show for this episode, when in reality it was an old script he wrote before he left the show during Season 5.
• Older Than They Think: Although some bronies took offense at an episode they thought was mocking their subculture, the obnoxious Loony Fan behavior on display is so broad and generalized it can be applied to pretty much any Fandom. William Shatner was already mocking this very same behavior thirty years prior, in his infamous "Get a life!" Saturday Night Live sketch. Animaniacs did a skit on it as well, as a mock PSA.
• Realism-Induced Horror: As controversial as it was, a lot of the fans' behavior in the episode is uncomfortably reminiscent of real-life toxic fans from any fandom — stalking the creators of the work, refusing to realize that the creators aren't "in-character" all the time, and ruining their reputations just because they didn't like something they did, just to name a few.
• Strawman Has a Point: The Loony Fans are supposed to be disliked for getting away with harassing and criticizing the Mane Six over their characters and stories despite them being real ponies and events they had no control over. But it's intended as an allegory for fan complaints against the show, which would be valid as the characters and stories are in the creators' control and their job is to make them satisfying. From that perspective many of the criticisms and thoughts (such as characters learning the same lesson over and over) are generally valid.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • None of the journal readers have anything to say about Starlight Glimmer, even though she's the most infamous Base-Breaking Character in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (to the point where she has her own section in the show's Base-Breaking Character page) and has generated a lot of arguments in the fanbase over various elements of her character. On the other hand, considering that those arguments are a lot more heated than any argument presented in this episode, it was probably for the best that this episode didn't bring any attention to them. But then again, the episode could have squeezed some critique regarding her character without going too far into it such as her Fatal Flaw of using magic to solve every problem or her status as the show's Sixth Ranger.
  • Spike doesn't even get mentioned, let alone appear, which is very suspicious and sad as he contributed 10 friendship lessons throughout the series prior to this episode and he has 1 visible entry in the diary. Oh, the possibilities of some Loony Fans' reactions toward him and his sudden realization at the fact that he even had a fanbase in Equestria, as well as the possible reactions he might have had to seeing his friends (especially Rarity) harassed by them. Some fans have also pointed out that a lot of Starlight's dialogue, as well as her general role in this episode, seems to fit Spike better, and argue that he should have been there instead of her. This argument is only helped up by one of the writers saying that his original draft of the episode actually had Spike instead of Starlight, as the script was written before Starlight had her Heel–Face Turn.
  • Considering how the fandom has believed that Pinkie's "Pinkamena" side from "Party of One" is a big part of her character despite only appearing in that episode, it would have been an interesting topic for the townponies to bring up. Or at least mentioned.
  • Anyone think the Hooffields and McColts should have been the "Sweet Apple Admirers" alongside the cajun ponies?
• Unexpected Character: Who was expecting one of the Generation 3 "Core 7" ponies, much less Toola Roola, out of all of them, to make an appearance?
• The Woobie: While all of the Mane Six suffer from the harassment of the Journal's fans, Rarity got it the worst. Not only does Rarity get chewed out by the snobbish ponies, but her business suffers because of her haters' success in getting her boycotted. She spends nearly the entire episode in a crying mess.

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