Posts

@Background Pony #2F27  
That was me, by the way – didn’t mean to post anonymously.

@Background Pony #BF55  
…except when you don’t even entertain the notion of said evil being brought back, instead just blithely brushing it off with “nyehh, it probably won’t happen.” If Twilight genuinely didn’t expect or even plan for the PoS returning, then she was even more shortsighted than I thought, and I’m all the more glad I gave up on this episode five minutes in.

@Brony_Conundrum  
Firstly the evil was not otherworldly, it was very much of the world they were in, secondly yes bringing back someone intelligent enough to invent time travel and getting a second set of your most powerful world defending artifacts is probably worth the risk that you bring back an evil that was already defeated once before when the world had much less protection.

@Background Pony #BF55  
Do you really think that bringing an otherworldly evil into the world is a risk worth any reward?

@Brony_Conundrum  

 
Life is full of risk and reward, and again Twilight obviously didn’t think that the PoS would be brought back as well.

@Brony_Conundrum  
Well yes but summoning an angry trebuchet in order to get some of the greatest heroes/thinkers the world has ever known is a pretty good trade off.

@Background Pony #BF55  
Like I said earlier, a trebuchet isn’t as much of a threat today as it was in the past. That doesn’t mean it can’t cause serious damage if you aren’t expecting it.
 
And this new notion of “Oh, who cares, it’s not like it’s that much of a threat” is… horrific.

@Brony_Conundrum  
Well Twilight has already fought like a dozen evil entities so far, really modern Equestria is probably the strongest it has ever been so it’s not like Spooky McGoo was actually that much of a threat.

@Background Pony #BF55  
I don’t know about you, but if someone sealed themselves in Limbo to keep an evil entity sealed in there, I would say that the wisest approach was to leave it the hell alone.

@Brony_Conundrum  
Yeah but how was she supposed to know that bringing them back would do that? The pony of shadows didn’t appear with the others immediately which suggests that Twilight had specifically targeted those ponies and there was no indication that she knew that it could bring the PoS back as well.

@Philweasel  
Yeah, but fangirl mode is something else.
 
 
@Background Pony #BF55
 
Let me put it like this: I have quite the bit of interest in Erwin Rommel, because of how shrewd a tactician he could be, as well as how he treated his prisoners with respect compared to other Nazi officers. If I knew he was sent to Limbo when he died, I’d personally love to be able to talk to him in person if I could bring him back, simply because of how much I could learn.
 
But if I thought that bringing him back could also end up releasing a load of other Nazis from Limbo, all still hell-bent on world domination… nope, not doing it. Screw how much I could learn, it’s not worth the risk.

@Brony_Conundrum  

 
Is she though? From what I recall Twilight has a tendency to ignore the bigger picture when she gets too personally involved in what’s happening. (See: Lesson Zero)
 
And besides that she is getting the opportunity to bring back one of the greatest magical minds in history and her own personal idol, I seriously doubt that a physicist would turn down the opportunity to meet Einstein or a historian wouldn’t jump at the chance to interview the founder of Rome if such a thing were possible.

@Brony_Conundrum  
Twilight’s never been particularly wise. Hell, it’s half the premise of the show, and the point of most of her episodes.

@Philweasel  
A trebuchet is about a thousand years out if date. That doesn’t mean it can’t do some serious damage if you aren’t expecting one to turn up.
 
Besides, that’s not really my main gripe. Refer back to my last comment for why this leaves such a sour taste in my mouth.

@Brony_Conundrum  
Personally I don’t think the unsealing was the stupid part, rather the ‘not having a plan to deal with the PoS’ part.
 
Seriously the PoS was dumped down a thousand years out of date with the world, weakened to the point Twilight and Starlight could overpower him. If they’d just taken Discord, Celestia, Luna, Cadance, Shining Armor and perhaps Thorax and Ember, they could have stomped him flat.

@gingerninja666  
That doesn’t make it any better. It was still a stupid move on Twilight’s part. This isn’t like Discord or Tirek, where there was no control over them getting into the world. This was Twilight (albeit unwittingly) letting an evil entity loose because she was too caught up in fangirl mode to think things through. Completely different, and more to the point, she’s supposed to be smarter than that.

@gingerninja666  
There’s also the fact that they even end up admitting that the PoS is much less powerful in this time due to the lack of dark spaces.
 
Honestly, though Star Swirl’s ego would never admit it, the Mane 6 could have likely handled him on their own without having to seal themselves away. They’ve just got far more firepower than Star Swirl had.

@Megas75
 
I personally hope we’ll get episodes dedicated to them going to see what happened to their old homes. Somnambula’s namesake village, at least, is still thriving, and Mistmane’s homeland is if nothing else still around, but Meadowbrook’s village is almost completely deserted, and Rockhoof ha nothing but buried ruins to go back to.
 
@Nightweaver20xx
 
If nothing else, it helped that they said that the incident with the Pony of Shadows took place over a thousand years ago, so I think we can assume some rounding is taking place with at least some events. Tirek and Scorpan’s attempted takeover had to be before that – because Starswirl was still around – but not too much before that – because he was already old – so I’d say there were a year or two to a good few decades between those two events.
 
The battle with Discord shows Luna and Celestia as fully grown adults, and Starswirl implied (and the comics show, if we’re counting them) that they were still fillies when he knew them, so there had to have been enough time for them to grow up and for the Tree of Harmony to grow from a sapling to a fully grown tree in between. Let’s say Discord was defeated around a century after Starswirl vanished. Nightmare Moon obviously came after that, and Sombra’s banishment could have taken place at any point between the Sisters growing up and Nightmare Moon’s time.
 
Of course, this still leaves the question of what the fudge happened in the thousand-year gap between Nightmare Moon and the show.
 
MLP really does need more villain from the present day. Or just more recurring villains. Either would help, really.

Also, I’d really like it if someone made an actual timeline for the series so that we can get straight when all this shit actually happened. Like I said earlier, it seems like a whole bunch of crap was jammed into Spring Break weekend 1,000 years prior to the series.

I’d like to see not only the pillars trying to adapt to new life, but seeing them in a bit of a rut, reminiscing their old friends

@Brony_Conundrum
 
Twi makes the argument that the world would be better with someone like the pillars in it. Especially Starswirl. She points out that if he’d been around when Starlight was messing with time, he could’ve instantly solved it.
 
Ultimately she’s right, the Pony of Shadows actually had NO chance of winning. Seriously, from the moment he’s freed, he’s doomed again. Because he’s up against 13 of the most powerful characters in the setting.

@LightningBolt  
I would think that having ponies from that time period in the modern age, even though they were supposed to have been sealed away of their own choosing, would break the space-time continuum or something. Like a paradox. Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll be localized to only our own galaxy.

@FrustrationInExcelsis  
It’s still a stupid move to make. All I know is that the PoS is safe in Limbo. It’s safe. It’s sealed. It can’t get out. Why would you want to even try messing with it? You might want to only pull one person out, but what’s stopping the second one from grabbing onto the first one’s leg as you do so?

@Brony_Conundrum
 
If time never passes then technically they wouldn’t be able to take action in Limbo TO free themselves. They’d effectively be dead in suspended animation forever. At least, that was how I saw it.

@Brony_Conundrum
 
And I again, I genuinely don’t understand where this confusion is coming from. From what the episode showed, Twilight thought the spell worked like – to use a metaphor – someone tackling someone else into a pit neither person could climb out of. Jumping in with the second person is necessary to get them in, but pulling the first person back out does not inherently imply the second person being able to leave.