Good picture. It’s cool that someone points out such dubious messages and decisions from the authors of this show.

Or they were mindless clones and this scene was meant to be a meaningless joke, and you’re reading miles too deep into it. I don’t know if you know this, but this is a cartoon for children, and the writers probably didn’t want to or intend to make the main character a murderer. You’re looking at a kid’s cartoon show from an adult perspective, when the entire thing was written to be viewed from a kid’s perspective.
 
You could do that to a lot of cartoons - ever wonder why in Scooby Doo, the villain never just shoots the main characters to avoid his money-making schemes being found out? They’re all the way out in the middle of nowhere, and it’s just 4 teens in a van. The answer to that is “it’s a kid’s show and that’s a terrible idea”.
 
That’s it. There’s no deeper meaning to this scene; it was a dumb one-off joke of “ha ha what if one of the Pinkie clones escaped and showed up and was all ‘oh jeez’ and ran away? The kids would laugh at that”. People forget that this show is for kids.

Maybe the book wasn’t entirely accurate, who’s to the the sorcerers and scholars got as far as studying the clones over time to see if they show signs of true intelligence

@TheMasterEraser  
I’m sticking with my theory that they reminded her, either consciously or unconsciously, of the last time she saw a bunch of Pinkie Pies, which was at her brother’s wedding. Mentally associating the Pinkie clones with the Changeling attack made it all too easy to see them as impostors rather than copies, dangerous intruders that the real Pinkie needed to be saved/protected from.

Maybe she read something else in the book that she didn’t say in a scene the audience didn’t see. Maybe the clones would end up exploding, or becoming more hyper. Perhaps there is some sort of cutie mark conservation law which would have resulted in Pinkie losing touch with her cutie mark – though that would’ve resulted in her being easy to find among all the ones who looked like she used to.

@AdmiralAbnormal  
MLP did it first when Twilight murdered all those clones of one of her best friends :3

Everyone here is getting trolled.

@PonyPon  
Oh.

@RighteousIndignayshun  
The book Twilight got the spell from said it would.

I have a feeling Twilight’s spell probably wouldn’t have worked on the actual Pinkie, but I could be wrong.

@Mare from Mane-sk  
Whatever helps you sleep at night.

tl;dr, sorry.
 
Twilight “sent the clones into the lake”. Teleported them. Clones are not human living ponies, so they didn’t have to die.

@Einsman  
All of them

@Vinylshadow  
which heads

@Scrounge  
Alright, “clashing text color it is”, I couldn’t figure out how to make tags and forgot about it for a while, but I think I’ve got it: You just edit the tags and type a new one in, right? I ask that because it shows up after you do that.
 
Sorry for wasting your time.

@Background Pony #72F1  
This is all you, dude.

@Vinylshadow  
Okay, fair point.

@Lawful Girly  
…Ponies are weird and probably best not thought about too hard else heads will explode

@Vinylshadow  
Because she was able to reassemble afterwards.

@Lawful Girly  
Remember when Pinkie literally fell to pieces?  
She was apparently A-okay with having her body chopped up, cutting nerves, muscle, bones, arteries and veins and not instantly dying

@Vinylshadow  
They could have conversations with each other; even if they were exaggerated versions of Pinkie, they were still sentient in their own right.
 
But yeah, I’m sure swelling up like a balloon and exploding felt fantastic and didn’t end their capability to think.

That’s because the clones were never alive to begin with
 
I really hope that was a Changeling who just happened to be mimicking Pinkie Pie
 
Hence the horrified reaction upon seeing the original, since if the Clone had left town, it wouldn’t know the other clones had been harmlessly dispelled to the mirror pool and wouldn’t have reacted in surprise

@Lawful Girly  
It’s just annoying to read, because of the tracers you mentioned and no, I’m not colorblind.  
I’m surprised nobody’s made a tag for bad text color yet.

@Background Pony #72F1  
Are you sure you aren’t mildly colorblind? It is clashing, yes, but while the tracers at the bottom of the letters are annoying, it’s not hard to read. Not an insult, genuinely curious.

@Scrounge  
So, since “illegible”’s a strong word for this, though it does take a few seconds for the eyes to adjust, at least for me, do you think “bad text color” or something like that (“clashing text color”?) would be better?