@maverick159  
Welcome to the Nightmare.

@TexasUberAlles
 
Oh, the thing with gems growing in the ground doesn’t bug me much – that one I just write up to magic doing unspecified magic things in the background and fill the gaps in my headcanon, and that works out. If you want to get scientific, I just start with a world with magic having obviously different laws of nature and work from there.
 
Now – this, however, remains by a wide margin the most exaggerated and blatant example of lack of research I’ve ver seen. I accept that most shows will get things wrong, especially when watching a children’s cartoon about magical horses in a magical land, but… well, this still stands out – I have never, never seen a work flunk out this badly: I’m used to fiction getting things wrong, but I’ve honestly never seen any show or movie fail to get anything right to this degree.
 
And it really stands out because the context really makes it obvious they were desperately trying to sound smart and knowledgeable. Also, the terminology by itself was perfectly accurate. If it weren’t for the mass of purple crystal everything Sunburst said made absolute perfect sense – those are similar rocks, and created one from the other (phyllite->slate->gneiss) in the same process of metamorphism, and they all have obvious planar fabric. Combine this with the fact that they constantly get things right whenever rocks come up in the context of Maud and the rest of the Pie family (like the andesite thing when Maud guesses Applejack had been going sledding – that was very very clever) and the writers have made it obvious they are able and willing to look things up and get things right. So the only plausible explanation is that this time they chose not to arse themselves and dind’t bother.
 

 

That’s a huge gem

@FrustrationInExcelsis
 
@TexasUberAlles  
Are you guys seriously taking mlp seriously?

@FrustrationInExcelsis  
And how does that look like gneiss, phyllite, or slate?  
That jumped right out of the screen at me too, and all I can figure is that he was supposed to be talking about the surrounding body of rock in the cave wall itself, not the mass of purple crystals.
 
So much of the geology of Equestria is complete and utter hooey that it’s buck near impossible to get through some episodes without the MST3K Mantra. Lemon-sized precious stones just… grow in clay soil! In recognizable gem cuts!
 
This is even beyond the level of a show claiming bats are birds  
BATS AREN’T BUGS!

This scene honestly drives me nuts, because of these lines here:
 

 
There’s no fucking foliation! There’s no bloody fabric of any sort! That’s just a uniform mass of purple crystal with a bunch of wavy lines that randomly intersect! And how does that look like gneiss, phyllite, or slate? It’s just… I can accept less than prefect scientific accuracy in works, but this is preposterous! Embarrassing! Gneiss is made up of thin, black and white, very “crumpled” parallel bands, slate is a) usually dark grey and b) always present as flat, plate-like shingles so that any mass of slate looks like a mess of black roof tiles, and phyllite looks like slate except it’s silver-grey and less obviously sheet-like, which given that slate is probably the mostly obviously sheeted rock in nature – and it’s, I need to repeat, extremely obvious – that says little.
 
inhale
 
I guess I may be making a bit too big a deal over this, and it may be that I’m a geology major and feel a tad personally insulted here, but this is the most ridiculous level of lack of research I’ve ever seen on television. This is even beyond the level of a show claiming bats are birds or whales are fish because then there’s a vague superficial similarity to explain the mistake. Just… the only thing this says to me is that somebody just fundamentally did not care. You would need to take a few moments to actually look things up on Google or in a book, because I know that at least some of those rock names are not ones that people would know off the top of their heads – if that was it, they would have used marble or basalt or granite or any of the usual ones, certainly not phyllite of all things – and then stopping right there because you have the absolute bare-bones minimum, who gives a fuck about putting in more than the absolute minimum effort possible?
 
And what really drives me mad is that they clearly did some research when they named Pinkie’s family and all the other times they needed to have Maud rattle off some obscure rock facts, because they consistently get obscure things right in those situations, which makes this really, really stand out.
 
Right. Well then, that overly long rant is off my chest now. That was cathartic.

I feel this has excellent “varying degree of want” exploitation potential.