YMMV / Snowdrop (2013)

• Accidental Aesop: Do not be a Ridiculous Procrastinator. Finish your projects as soon as possible.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • At least one reviewer has pointed out that Snowdrop's teacher is kind of a jerk. She singles out one of her students and when he fails to find the answer it makes him look stupid. Similarly, Snowdrop not having a partner is partly her fault as well, because she should have known that Snowdrop would have had trouble with such a large project and assigned her a partner to help.
  • Snowdrop's apparent uselessness, as told by the other ponies is not much in evidence. What we're shown is nearly the opposite: Snowdrop has apparently been procrastinating on a project that most of the class is already done with, and when asked about it, she lies to the teacher that she's working on it rather than asking for help. She doesn't actually do it until the night before. In short, she doesn't really take any initiative in trying to finish the project until the very last minute. This leads some to speculate that her "uselessness" is a result of her own inaction and she's complaining about being lazy.
  • Snowdrop's procrastination could be a result of anxiety/depression from her condition and all the bullying she goes through, and her not asking for help could be because she has probably been teased about needing help before and she really wants to prove that she can do something by herself.
• Base-Breaking Character: Snowdrop herself. Either she's an interesting and immensely adorable character, or a Purity Sympathetic Sue.
• Broken Base: The video itself. Many fans see it as a well done tugging at your heartstrings tale with an interesting and relatable lead character overcoming the obstacles put in front of her despite her handicap. On the other hand, others see it as a painfully predictable, by the numbers sob story with a bland Mary Sue-esque character that focused too much on making the audience feel sad instead of telling an interesting story.
• Fridge Horror:
  • Snowdrop, according to Luna, was the only mortal pony who ever truly understood the night. It's heavily implied that Luna became Nightmare Moon after Snowdrop's death.
  • One could argue that Luna became Nightmare Moon (and then sealed into the moon) while Snowdrop was still alive. But for obvious reasons, Snowdrop was no longer alive to greet the reformed princess. Imagine the heartbreak she went through when Luna/Nightmare Moon was banished.
  • Though for the record, the short itself never states when Snowdrop died (aside from it being a thousand years prior to the main show). It's very possible that she lived to a ripe old age.
• Glurge: By (ab)using the Inspirationally Disadvantaged and Too Good for This Sinful Earth cards to full effect, rather than developing any real character to sympathize with, the work was trying too hard to tug at heartstrings for some.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Snowdrop's heartwarming little speech about why winter isn't such a bad season and should be given it's due, just like the other seasons. The sweet blind Pegasus's words are so moving in fact that they move even the mid-Face–Heel Turn Princess Luna.
    Snowdrop: Celebrating Spring is good, but Winter can't be all bad if it gives us these. It maybe cold, and dark, but that doesn't mean there isn't any good to it. Maybe, maybe Winter is sad that everypony doesn't like it. So, maybe we need to make wishes on the winter snow, just like how we wish on the night stars. Maybe then we can have a happy Winter instead. We already have a happy Spring, and Summer, and Fall. Can't Winter be happy too? Because Winter, it's important. Even if it seems useless, it can give us wonderful things.
  • Her speech is in fact so moving that it gets all the little fillies who had been teasing her almost non-stop before to actually be quiet and really think about what she's saying.
• Memetic Mutation: Minor one, but some genius took the film and made this beauty. I fucking love Tenacious D.
• Moment of Awesome: Is their a category for "Fridge Awesome"? Because it might take one a little while to realize that Snowdrop didn't just turn a very bothersome necessity into a thing of beauty, she completed the process of beating the sword of the Windigoes that almost killed all of ponykind into a plowshare... or rather took it from "plowshare that was obviously once a sword" into "elegantly beautiful plowshare".
• Strawman Has a Point: While Snowdrop's classmates are jerks, if Snowdrop puts the same effort into group projects that she does on her solo project (i.e. procrastinating and not asking for help when she clearly needs it), one can't really blame them for not wanting to work on a group project with her. One pony says: "I worked with her last time! You do it!", implying that Snowdrop was, for whatever reason, not pleasant to work with.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: It can feel as though the story is really about, or should really have been about, Luna. Luna looks almost heartbroken when Snowdrop talks about how people think winter is useless and dark, in a clear parallel to how Luna felt no-one appreciated the night and by extension, her. When Snowdrop dies Luna is isolated. Unlike Snowdrop, Luna is not attacked by everyone around her to elicit audience sympathy, and having known Luna from the original series can make the sad scenes with Luna in seem much more heartrending than the ones with Snowdrop in, and Snowdrop's struggle in the story could have just been used as a framing device to show Luna's increasing isolation, which it can be easier to feel sympathy for.
• Wheelchair Woobie: The first half of the video heavily emphasizes the hardships Snowdrop faces on account of being blind, amping up the Woobie factor and tugging at the viewer's heartstrings with all the subtlety of a yak on crack.
• The Woobie: Snowdrop. So much so, she ends up giving Fluttershy a run for her money.

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