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@reversalmushroom  

 
 
I’m a moron.
 
I must say I agree with you, the episode would work better if that flute were to be a metaphor for a personality trait or something.
 
 
@DiscipleOfAndrewRyan  

 
I’m just bringing the points raised in the video, although I do agree with this particular point as glimmglamm kept using magic on ponies to get things her way. Could you elaborate on that?
 
 

 
Good point, I remember my mood improving when I quieted watching&reading rants 24h.

@Dsiak  

that might as well apply to Discord, Diamond Tiara, and practically every other reformed villain(ess)/antagonist on the show, especially Sunset.
 

it’s funny you bring that up since the only adversary it doesn’t apply to is Sunset (in fact, it’s the very inverse); for the rest of the baddies, reformed and otherwise, they are judged by their deeds.
 
don’t judge a book by its cover.
 

not a good thing to say about someone who is irrational and insults other people for not conforming to his/her tastes.
 

and be unnecessarily exposed to needless negativity? no thanks. there’s already enough of that on this site alone–we don’t need anymore of it.

@reversalmushroom
 
The episode messed up since even if Pinkie was the best music player in the world, Fluttershy would still not want her animals to be woken up in the middle of the night.

@Dsiak
 
Each 1 is saying what the other did, not what they did.
 
Pinkie Pie was still displaying problematic behavior and got her way, got away with it. She refused to change and made everyone else change. That’s…NO. That’s NOT how episodes are supposed to go. You’re supposed to have the character doing the bad thing change and acknowledge that how they were acting was wrong. You’re NOT supposed to have them stick to their guns and win and get their way and make everyone else cave in and the world conform to them. What the fuck?
 
This episode ends up leaving unresolved issues like the fact that Pinkie Pie was harassing everyone and pissing them off. What about that continuing? The only answer the episode provides is for the ReMane 5 to be like “If these yaks don’t like it, they’ll have to answer to us!”, so are we supposed to extrapolate that to the Ponyville residents? Are they just supposed to have to put up with it?
 
The episode also switches what the issue is. So they have Pinkie Pie harassing and disturbing everyone, but then the ReMane 5 tell her that the problem is that she’s not good and she should stop playing period because she’s not good, not to go play somewhere else and stop being annoying, and then she’s like “I should never play it again because I’m not good.” She’s never like “I should respect peoples’ right to peace&quiet and personal space. That was wrong of me.” The episode never addresses this and completely forgets about it.
 
Not only that, but the moral was actually that they had to support her behavior to be good friends, which means if they don’t support it, they’re bad friends. No. They should’ve just let her stay in Yakyakistan because she was being unreasonable instead of giving in. “This thing you’re doing is wrong and hurts others, but it makes you happy, so we’re going to let you do it to be good friends to you!”
 
And this is how one could call it a tantrum. Pinkie Pie can’t play her instrument, so she decides she’s just gonna mope around and then run away, both of which make her friends feel bad and are called being emotionally manipulative, and not come back til she gets her way. It’s like that South Park episode where Tom Cruise locked himself in a closet because Stan said he wasn’t a great actor. It’s being childish.
 
And if you wanna say being childish is in-character, they turned it up to the point of being out of character and to the point of making her unlikable, which is bad because what made this show great was the characters acting like real, intelligent, 3-dimensional people. You also don’t wanna end on the bad parts of characters. That’s supposed to stay in the middle and then change when they learn their lesson at the end. It would be like if in Putting Your Hoof Down, they didn’t have Fluttershy repent and just ended with her being a bully, and everyone else was like “Well, we just have to accept it.”
 
Is there really no place in or near all or Ponyville where she could play without bothering anyone? Even though that’s beside the point.
 
They make the yaks reverse themselves and be out of character. They’re supposed to become violently enraged when others imitate their culture because they can never get it 100% right. But here, they do a l80 and are like “It makes you happy; that’s what matters!”
 
And why is Pinkie Pie that obsessed with this instrument? To where she absolutely has to play it, or she will never experience happiness again? She only ever found out about it recently. “I need this thing I just found out about and lived my entire life just fine without, or I can’t function! I absolutely have to have this thing I just found out about!” It’s like how Peter Griffin keeps getting obsessed with things he just found out about and decides to make them his life path. Rainbow Dash actually asks this question, and the episode never gives us an answer.
 
You say she was “taking too much in the butt to try and please her friends”, but that’s not a normal reaction to not getting something minor (you just found out about). Other people can handle that just fine. Pinkie Pie is having this emotional breakdown because of her own bad mentality, not because something awful is actually being put upon her. It’s because of herself, not other things. It would be understandable if she was having to be crushed under some horrible burden like the Simpsons episode where to get Lisa into a private school, Marge had to do the entire school’s laundry. That would be “taking too much in the butt to please other people”. And remember, what you/she calls that is her simply not annoying people, not something valid. Doesn’t matter that it matters to her, and that’s what this episode gets wrong. Just because something matters to someone doesn’t mean it actually is important or that you should respect it, and that in order to be a good person, it should be important to you because it’s important to them, and you should enable it to make them happy from their bad behavior. Sometimes, what others want isn’t important and shouldn’t be respected or cared about, and they’re making a big deal over nothing, and they should be told what they’re upset about is trivial and isn’t a big deal, and they’re wrong to either be that upset about it or even upset at all.

BTW, I watched Yakkity Sax, that is not a temper tantrum. She had the opposite of a temper tantrum, a temper tantrum is a outburst, hysteric and loud, Ponks just sucked it up and kept it to herself. She didn’t even wanted it back she had completely forfeited it.
 
Her reaction wasn’t a healthy one sure, but she wasn’t trowing a tantrum to get it back, she was taking too much in the butt to try and please her friends.

@deathclaw2014  
He made a fair point on how Starlight got away with her crimes (her very serious crimes) under the guise of “But I’m reformed now!” Even tho she insists on overeating. He highlights how very discrepant words and actions can be and how it’s sensible to believe in the actions and not the words.
 
He sure is not elegant with his approach and is very passionate with his point, but it’s a very solid one.
 
You should watch it, avoiding other’s opinions is unwise. Know your enemy and all that.

@reversalmushroom  
I don’t know, but I do know that when it comes to talking about Starlight, it can’t be anything good. My guess is that victim-blaming is okay as long as it’s done to her specifically, and Lily will justify any and all harm done to her.

@deathclaw2014  
What is the concept of it?

@reversalmushroom  
I’d provide a link, but I’d rather not touch her stuff even with a 39 1/2 foot pole covered in velvet.
 
YouTube - Glass of Water punitive damages

@deathclaw2014  
What is it? Link?

@reversalmushroom  
I’d love to hear your take on Punitive Damages by Lily Orchard. I haven’t watch it, will never watch it, but given Lily’s work and her stance on binary morality, I am already physically disgusted by the concept of it.

@Background Pony #A367  
Correct. That part was annoying, and even back then without any nostalgia, I thought that was weird and went on too long.
 
@northern haste  
I’m fine with characters having sides we never saw before, but these new sides should gel with what we saw before, not blatantly go against it. Characters can have flaws and make mistakes, but they should still have a consistent level of intelligence, and there’s a difference between a flawed character making a mistake and a character’s IQ wildly fluctuating between episodes. You can make a character make mistakes and still feel like their IQ is the same and not down 30 points. I’m not against characters making mistakes. I don’t think Fluttershy and Rarity in “Green Isn’t Your Color” are “out of character”. Because they wrote them like normal people, and you could see where they were coming from. But in my problem episodes, instead of doing that, they make them behave cartoonishly, and often, the episodes aren’t playing it for comedy, but taking it seriously, so there’s no self-awareness like at least Somepony to Watch Over Me had as did Party of One and Lesson Zero. The characters frequently make mountains out of molehills that the vast majority of people would not care about, and with normal people, the problem would’ve either been solved way faster or not been a problem at all. But this is what happens when a show goes on indefinitely; they lower their standards because they start running out of ideas. Gotta fill those episode quotas. And also, the show is written like a sitcom now.
 
2 examples I can think of are Hard To Say Anything and Triple Threat. Hearts and Hooves Day treated the CMC’s plans like a scheme dreamt up by children; the other characters/very tone of the episode always treated it like it was wrong and dumb and gave it no legitimacy. There was self-awareness. But Hard To Say Anything actually treats what they’re doing with legitimacy and takes it seriously; it has them coming up with these crazy plans to get Big Mac together with Sugar Belle, and he, an adult, is actually listening to them, small children. It lacks self-awareness. The characters behave sitcom-like instead of like real people. If this were the Faust era, Big Mac would’ve immediately dismissed them and went on with his life.
 
And then Triple Threat does the whole cliched plot of having 2 characters the protagonist doesn’t want to see each other and running back and forth between them because shenanigans and was ridiculous.

@Dsiak  
Pinkie’s talking about Yakkity Sax

C’mon, it was awesome when Starlight blasted his ass, having that much was such a relief.
 
@reversalmushroom, I think the flaw in the episode was in the end too, and I think I have pinpointed the slip, if you would be so kind as to bear with me in this one it goes something like this:
 
Glimmglam said and I quote “I had to stop thinking like a headmare and start thinking like a guidance counselor to finally understand. You felt left out.”
 
This is a adult talking to a child, a child that “felt left out” and dealt with the bad emotions of rejection poorly and urrdurrfeefee. This whole line, whomever wrote it was thinking of an adult and a child. This episode would work perfectly fine with two changes: the antagonist is DE FACTO a child, and Starlight them didn’t blasted said hypothetical child.
 
The fact remains of course, that Discord is not a child. Far from it. And he deserves the full penalty of law, not compassion.
 
I re watched this episode 6 times by the time of this writing, with the last one just before and just to reply to you and I gotta say it is superb (((all around))).
 
“Spellvenger Hunt” is both exciting and drops a lot of lore, Cranky Donkey being an utter asshole under the impression he was on vacation not on duty was an very funny, Iron Will would be an excellent gym teacher, the aliens 6 were portrait in a likable manner with we surely need and Discord… Oh Discord… I pray the lazer beam was painful.
 
As for the moral, I hope the kids see Discord as their classmate, because having him being a “angery child” validates the apology from an adult whom neglected his feefee, I sure remember lashing like him for way less, and some smuches could have proven effective, but I digress.
 
It truly falls apart due to Discord NOT being a child in any sense, not even spiritually, but I forgive the slip up as I genuinely believe the writer tried to portrait Discord as a child and there was, if what I believe is true, no attempts to teach Canadian’s values of “taking in the ass with a smile”. It could be dismissed as the writer not having really watched the show, she probably never even saw S6’s finale. I will be looking into her previous non-horse work in due time none the less.
 
I haven’t watched the remain of the season because I treat new episodes with utmost regard and only watch them under perfect conditions, so I don’t know what Pinkie is talking about.

@Beau Skunky
 
He’s claiming that Twilight shouldn’t have cared so much about the frosting on the cupcakes at the start of Lesson Zero. Nothing to do with the fanfic.

@Beau Skunky  
Sometimes it just feel like ooc is pretty much becoming character not behaving the way I want them to

@reversalmushroom  
I think you’re taking it a bit too seriously, especially to write such an essay about it, but understandable. I suppose you might have a point that they’re overdoing the “character losing it” or “going overboard over something minor” gag, but to be fair, they’ve cut down on that.
 
Still, Twilight has been shown in some past episodes to have some… issues, like her obsessions on keeping things perfect, trying to fit in, ect. So her li’l breakdown isn’t completely OOC. She’s no “Hank Hill,” to be honest. She’s a li’l more like Peggy, except more humble.  
And to be fair, there are even some KotH episodes where Hank was a li’l “Flanderized” in some ways, as well. (Like his conservatism was exaggerated a bit in the episode “Get Your Freak Off.”) So he wasn’t always the straight man.
 
Though, I doubt the cupcakes thing was foreshadowing, or pandering, considering each episode is made in a year, so the script would’ve been written before “Cupcakes” was even a thing.

@Beau Skunky  
I don’t hate it, but my problems with Lesson Zero are…people justify Twilight going insane by saying Pinkie Pie went insane, but the problem with that is that Pinkie Pie is the comic relief character and already not all there. Her going insane is like Zim going insane, but Twilight going insane is more like Hank Hill going insane. You can’t use some characters going insane to justify doing it to others. It’s not all the same just because it’s a character going insane. It depends on character and context.
 
Imagine if because KOTH had that hilarious episode where Dale thought he had rabies and went insane, and that other even more hilarious episode where Bill went insane and thought he was his ex-wife, they then had an episode where Hank started acting really cartoonishly and then said “Well, these other characters did, so this is a thing the show’s done before. “This is a thing the show’s done before” is a slippery slope to more characters behaving more idiotically for smaller reasons.
 
Party of One lead to Lesson Zero, both of those led to Somepony to Watch Over Me, all 3 of those led to Tanks for the Memories, and all 4 of those led to Scare Master, the last 3 being my most hated episodes of the show.
 
What saves Lesson Zero from being garbage for me is the fact that Twilight’s psychotic (which also at least made it funny) whereas the other 3 are like “These characters aren’t insane; this is just a normal part of their personalities.” Whenever you want to make a normal character go insane, you have to fuck up their brains. This is why I find Applebuck Season hilarious but hate StWOM, because AJ in the former was sleep-deprived, whereas the latter is like “This is how Applejack is normally.” But if AJ in Applebuck season had just started acting like that without the sleep deprivation, it would completely change the context and piss me off even though the actions themselves are the same.
 
Also, Lesson Zero gave a (much) better trigger, which was that Twilight was going to fail the highest-ranking person in the land.
 
Also, it wasn’t just the Twilight insanity I kinda disliked; even the intro with the cupcakes foreshadowing it I thought was out of character, farther than she ever went with the OCD, annoying, forced, and something I wished would end.
 
But anyway, each instance of over-the-topness cements precedent even more, and 1 of the things I loved about this show was that characters actually (most of the time) acted like real, intelligent, 3-dimensional people, but we get more and more instances of characters acting less like the real people they used to and more like cartoon characters, things not as bad as my 3 most hated episodes, but they still take me out of the episode. Like Pinkie Pie in Wonderbolts Academy, Filli Vanilli, The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows, The Gift of the Maud Pie, Rock Solid Friendship, Secrets and Pies, and Yakity-Sax. Rarity in Simple Ways, The Gift of the Maud Pie, and Forever Filly. Fluttershy in Fake It ‘Til You Make It. Applejack in Applejack’s Day Off and Non-Compete Clause. Rainbow Dash in 28 Pranks Later, Grannies Gone Wild, and Non-Compete Clause. Twilight in No Second Prances, Celestial Advice, and Horse play. This is by no means my complete personal list as there are a couple episodes I left out for these characters and a bunch of similar instances for other characters.

@northern haste  
I think her role has actually gotten a li’l smaller ever sense becoming a princess personally.

@Beau Skunky  
I do remember someone saying that she was shoehorned as the leader or the one who’s always right after becoming a princess

@northern haste  
Yeah, I agree. Oddly, I don’t understand those whom bashed later episodes/seasons for being the “Twilight Sparkle Show,” ’cause honestly I felt Season 1 was the most Twilight-centric season.
 
Ironically, nowadays some are bashing the show for not having Twilight always be the main character.

@Beau Skunky  
allowing other characters to write friendship reports pretty much fixed twilight problems in season 1.  
because she was the only one who could write a letter she has to be in the episodes to learn something which could result in her being shoehorned into episodes and even making the episode a bit worse

@reversalmushroom  
lol I liked “Lesson Zero.” (It was no-more worse then Season 1’s “edgy” moments, like Pinkie’s breakdown, Fluttershy being barfed on by that ugly bird, and such.) I suppose I can see why some fans dislike it, but it’s still kinda tame compared to other goofier shows, and the ending was sweet-natured, and allowed other characters to write friendship reports too.
 
I think that’s what I love about MLP:FiM, it may get edgy, goofy, or even dark at times, but it never goes into “SpongeBob” levels, and still has a certain innocence about it, that it never loses.  
Most modern cartoons lack that innocence, and dignity, and too overcome with trying to be funny, edgy, or constantly self-aware.

@Beau Skunky  
Okay, I totally get why they feel that way with Lesson Zero, but the rest of the season is great.