YMMV / Parting Words

• Anvilicious: Chapter Three sidelines the main story to call out the mentality of "standing up for yourself in any way makes you just as bad as the bullies" as being toxic, morally confusing, and only making things worse for genuine victims of bullying, especially if the adults that are supposed to prevent this consistently ignore it or fail to do anything even when it's happening in front of them. However, as this is based on the author's own experiences with being bullied (which he states grew so bad that at one point, he was afraid to even leave his house) and how the adults' poor handling of the situation and refusal to take it seriously out of the belief the boys would eventually "grow up out of it" eventually led to the Gang of Bullies that tormented him going on to torture and murder a five-year-old girl and leave her body in a gutter^note they were only 10-12 years old when they did that, it's clear why he was heavy-handed about it.
• Broken Base: The Cutie Mark Crusaders' subplot in Chapter Three; some find it a needless distraction from the main story, others find it justifiable and relevant.
• Fridge Horror: Seeing how jaded the Cutie Mark Crusaders are over the adults' failures to address their bullying leads to a disturbing rationale for why they easily forgave Babs Seed. By standing up for the CMC, she, someone who'd previously threatened them with physical harm, still showed more care for them than even one of their parental substitutes! It serving as the last straw for the CMC seems very justified as a result.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In this fic, Twilight Sparkle and her friends use the Elements of Harmony to seal away Sombra. Come the Season 9 premiere, Sombra destroys the Elements of Harmony.
  • Beyond this, several ponies throughout Ponyville in the story all made bets about what Celestia was grooming Twilight to become: some of them saying that Celestia was planning to make Twilight into a new ruler over Equestria. Taking into account Twilight's... tendencies caused by Celestia both in the story and in-canon, Celestia in the story chooses to apologize and assure her faithful student that she knows if she were to make Twilight into a ruler of Equestria (let alone any other country), it would be absolutely cruel to her. Meanwhile, Canon Celestia probably doesn't realize this, and chooses to have herself and Luna retire and leave Twilight in full control over Equestria...
  • The main plot of the fic is calling out how Celestia's Trickster Mentor methods endangered everyone by letting the villains cause potential harm and hurt Twilight's confidence because she didn't know if she was being tested. The Series Finale was the result of these methods backfiring exactly the way this fic warned, the differences being that Discord was the Trickster Mentor in question and Twilight's confidence was shot by the reveal that her accomplishments were staged.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Pinkie namedrops "Queen of the Seaponies" as a potential role for Twilight. Come 2017, it turns out there really is a Queen of the Seaponies in canon.