It’s actually pretty easy to explain. The faults we see so easily in others are also ones we can be blind to when they are our own.

Besides, let’s not pretend that this was an out of the blue character moment for Twilight. She’d been an overachieving obsessive since day one. Look at her efforts to get to the bottom of Pinkie’s predictive powers. Look at the time where she decided to cause a friendship problem rather than fail to hand in her weekly assignment. Recall the incident where, not being able to pinpoint some potential disaster from literally monitoring everything, she decided that the sensible thing to do was stop time. She always had issues with getting carried away with what she was doing. The fact that it seldom resulted in this kind of problem is because she was seldom in a situation that involved making her studious obsessions a competitive sport.

Honestly, this episode was better than people give it credit for. And a reminder that even teachers sometimes need to learn their own lessons is a decent moral to show.

Non-Compete Clause is a stupid episode that is completely out of character for everyone involved. I fully agree with that. It’s just bad writing. Not as bad as the writing for S9, but still bad. This is the only episode from S8 that I completely discarded and don’t watch.

I’m more concerned about the fact she had to teach the same shitbags the same lesson twice

@Myoozik
OP just didn’t understand that characters are allowed to relapse or even just get overwhelmed in the moment and ignore the lessons they’ve learned. There are no questions, he was just trying to start shit lol

So did those question marks ever get filled now that the series is over?

@StormsparkPegasus
That makes sense

@Macaroni C-Pony
That’s not why she didn’t try to put up a fight. She didn’t try to put up a fight because she just had a nervous breakdown. She felt, at that moment, that she had failed and doomed her entire country. She felt defeated. It’s understandable. Magic in the FIM world is emotion based. Her emotional state would’ve made her magic VERY weak.

@BridleTimeout
For me it was the fact that she was treated as completely useless without her friends. She didn’t even try to put up a fight.

@Background Pony #67C2
I really liked that scene in the movie. We already knew that Twilight didn’t handle stress well. So what happened when the fate of her entire country was on her shoulders and she thought she failed? She actually had a nervous breakdown.

@Background Pony #67C2
For me, it was more the fact that they Flanderized the hell out of her for that episode.

Oh, no. Twilight having flaws? No, she should be perfect in every way.

G5 preparing to exist …

@TheSultanAkbar
I said it was “out of character”, meaning people have accused her of acting out of character there, when it was actually not out of character. The air quotes were there for a reason.

Twilight being assigned the number 42 makes my nerd heart soar. She’s the only pony in her friends group to have read Hoofhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

@Golden Eyeball
But it’s funny

An idea and the execution of that idea are two very different things.

The Idea: “Twilight becomes really competitive at a trivia contest. She is so focused on winning it that she doesn’t notice her attitude is damaging her relationships with her friends.”

The Execution: “Twilight enters a trivia contest, loses her mind, and turns into a nasty, unhinged, memefaced lunatic.”

@StormsparkPegasus
It’s out of character but also realistic? Which is it?

Non-compete Clause is a terrible episode, and I dropped it from my rewatches (because it makes no sense for Rainbow and AJ to be acting that immature). While S8 does have a lot of episodes I like, it was a huge drop in quality from what came before. Although S9 is much much worse, I only kept 3 episodes from that season - Point of No Return, Common Ground, and Going to Seed. I don’t accept anything else from S9 as having “happened”. Nobody says characters should be perfect and never do anything wrong. But they also shouldn’t act blatantly out of character either. Twilight’s nervous breakdown in the movie is a great example of something that is “out of character” but also completely realistic given her personality. The trivia episode from S9 I dropped completely, because it’s stupid, and just an excuse for the characters to shout fandom memes for 20 minutes.

It’s just a trivia game, not life or death. They can be competitive.

@Wayneponeth
Think you are spot on with this

That’s Twilight. She’s actually quite competitive in her own way and could be arrogant sometimes. The thing is, she herself knew she went too far and was too in the heat of moment to think straight. She realized she had tried to get Pinkie Pie out of her way just to win Trivia Trot. She was just too into the moment and made mistakes. Honestly a part of me wants people to stop treating these characters like they need to keep a completely clean rap sheet and never make a single error in their life. It’s not like none of us ever let emotions get the better of us and made hypocritical mistakes in our lifetimes.

My best guess is that the Trivia Trot was so near and dear to Twilight, given that she had spent weeks studying to win it a third time and be the first pony in history to do so, she let her emotions get the best of her and ended up not taking those lessons she taught to heart

@Background Pony #0C9B  
|| *hate speech ||