YMMV / My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S8 E14 "A Matter of Principals"

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Would Discord have actually hurt the students? Or was he simply trying to scare them with an illusion?
  • When Starlight manages to banish Discord from the school, did she actually do it? Or did Discord simply let her do so in order to lull her into a false sense of security for the third act? A post from one of the writers reveals Discord was completely unhurt by the spell, and wanted Starlight to blast him in order to prove his point, supporting the latter.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • The full story behind the artifacts used for the scavenger hunt.
  • The Mane Six's experiences during the bogus friendship mission; the brief details we hear, plus their appearances upon returning, make it seem like it was quite a wild ride.
• Fanon Discontinuity: With how needlessly nasty Discord treated Starlight for a reason as petty as getting a position he wanted and the episode treating him as the victim despite his actions, some fans pretend this episode never happened.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Discord "hires" a tree as a teacher. Guess what a tree actually does just a few episodes later.
• Informed Wrongness: It falls to Starlight to apologize to Discord for not recognizing his feelings about matters and ignoring them, causing him to lash out. Except that Discord "lashed out" by sabotaging Starlight's attempts to run the school, terrorizing the school's students and disrupting their classes, and insulting Starlight by bringing up her evil past in relation to her being unfit to run the school. The original idea for the episode would have averted this by making Starlight too Proud to hear Discord out.
• Never Live It Down: Discord's Jerkass Ball behavior is viewed by many as Season 8 ruining his character. This is despite it being on-off as his other two appearances this Season, before in "The Break Up Break Down" and afterwards in Best Gift Ever^note technically set between Season 8 and 9 had him behave normally and were uncontroversial. This also spilled over into backlash over Discord's controversial actions in the series finale despite it being a wholly well-intentioned effort that backfired as opposed to maliciousness as he's criticized for this episode.
• Paranoia Fuel: The idea that not even the Cutie Map is immune to Discord's tampering raises some very disturbing implications...
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Starlight apparently knows Spitfire now, as she brings her in alongside Maud and Trixie as replacement teachers while the Mane Six are out of town. It would have been nice to see an episode where they actually met, especially as a followup to her not knowing who the Wonderbolts were back in Season 6.
  • We never got to properly see friendship lessons by Trixie and Spitfire thanks to Discord's meddling, and we don't even get a scene establishing what Maud was teaching.
  • A multi-episode example, we never get to see what happened to the Mane 6 after the "map" sent them off on a wild goose chase, nor do we get to see how they figured out it was all Discords doing.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: We're meant to sympathize with Discord for feeling left out, but given that he expressed that feeling by insulting his supposed friend to her face, ruining her day and terrorizing innocent children rather than just ask to be included, it can easily seem like Disproportionate Retribution. Unlike Discord's prior instances, he doesn't regret or apologize for what he did before it's all brushed under the rug. The writer commented that the original story idea gave him better reason to do so.

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