My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic/Headscratchers/Season 2: Difference between revisions

== 2.07 May the Best Pet Win ==

* Right at the beginning of the song there is a vulture sitting on a fence in the background. Why didn't Fluttershy show that to Rainbow Dash? Vultures can fly and (in my opinion anyway) are incredibly cool so I'm sure Rainbow would have liked it.

*** Tank managed to last as he did for two things: He was accepted in the first place to humor Fluttershy, and he never let the little fact that Rainbow Dash told him he had lost(several times) intimidate him.

*** No, it wouldn't. The vulture shown in the episode isn't depicted as awesome at all, or at least, Dash didn't find it so.

* Fluttershy taking care of otters and seals. Okay, its probably a river otter. But a seal? How is she taking care of it that far from the ocean?

 

* This is a relatively minor issue, but I've noticed that Fluttershy's flying ability seems to fluctuate over the course of the season. She's canonically described as a poor flyer, but while disguised as MDW we see her whiz past Rainbow Dash at a speed so great it makes her (briefly) dizzy. Combine this with the fact that she was able to keep up with Rainbow Dash ''while towing a 500+ pound hot air balloon'' just earlier in the season; it seems like she can magically turn into a competent flyer whenever it's convenient to the plot.

*** I assumed RD wasn't going at full speed, but was flying fast enough that she assumed Fluttershy would never catch up to her.

** Fluttershy does not like to show off or bring about attention to herself (e.g. the perfect antithesis of RD in this episode). The only time we've ever seen her fly badly was in "The Cutie Mark Chronicles" and that was because she was a lanky filly then. (Her inability to fly in "Dragonshy" due to fear doesn't count). Thus to anyone else, a pegasus pony that stays close to the ground and rarely shows off her flying abilities is likely to be seen as a "poor flyer". But give her an outfit that completely disguises who she is, and she's probably all ~yay~ and ready to speed off to do what it takes for her friends.

*** If this is the first cider season after "[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic/Recap/S1/E04 Applebuck Season|Applebuck Season]]" it might not have occurred to the Apples. There's nothing to say that they won't get the Mane 6 to help out in future cider seasons, now that they trust them and have seen the difference their help makes.

**** The problem with having the Mane 6 help is that they already ''have'' jobs. Even if they're willing to help, they may well be too busy next year or the year after that.

* Flim and Flam's names are probably supposed to indicate their nature, but…how? They're certainly not nice, but they're not ''dishonest'' either. Their machine works exactly as they claim it does, and until they press that button, nothing indicates their cider is of lesser quality. Granny Smith tries some of it, and her reaction suggests that it is indeed as good as her family's, though she's not about to say so. Even when the brothers ''do'' put quantity over quality, they're perfectly willing to lower the price of the cider, if only to get ponies to buy it. So while they're definitely ruthless and callous towards the Apple family, what evidence is there that they're actually cheating anyone?

** They could buy the apples, they could offer an actually fair deal to the apple orchard they join businesses with, they could sell/lend their machine, they could start their own orchard...but no, they simply go from town to town, offering a ridiculously one-sided deal that's almost certain to shut down the business they get the apples from. They don't want to invest a cent beside their machine, and as far as we know, their challenge might be a clever trick they pull on all the orchards they come across. Instead of starting from the beginning, they made their machine and tried to take over another business with it, take it as you will, but I doubt that's standard business in Equestria.

** They're [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bad%20apple bad apples].

** When you put their cutie marks together, they make a whole apple. It means they work well together. They just use their particular talents(special and otherwise) for [[Jerkass|swindling]] instead of good.

** I think the best and only answer here is that Ponyville simply isn't Soviet Russia. The ponies are all forgiving, friendly, and closely knit. Even the bitterest ponies seem more likely to mope to themselves than actually start a confrontation.

*** Hogging cider is distinctly unfriendly, so by the transitive property so is helping someone hog it.

** Pinkie Pie was the ''first'' pony to get cider. It's possible that, at the beginning, they overestimated the amount of cider that would be available, and thus they saw no reason to ration it.

*** Except they do it every year. They run out of cider every year, and they sell too much to Pinkie Pie every year. If they haven't realized the pattern now, then the Apple family is significantly stupider than we've been giving them credit for.

** Pinkie was so enthusiastic about the cider that nopony wanted to tell her that she couldn't have her fill. (She was the very first in line, after all. In fact she's apparently ''always'' the first in line, every year, because she loves cider that much.)

* Moreover. They know how much cider they've got, why the hell don't they announce it, so that everypony knows for sure whether or not they'd get any and not waste time?

** It would appear to be a moment of fridge logic: Why on earth would two reasonably intelligent businessponies give the worst cider to the first customers? Then the switch is made to Fridge Brilliance when you realize that, since the barrels were stacked, all the good stuff was at the bottom.

** The cider might not have been the issue so much as how pissed off the townsfolk were at that point. They were probably already upset (to some degree or another) by the brothers' cruel treatment of the Apple family on their way out, and that the two were willing to sell them crappy cider at all put the nail in the coffin. Flim and Flam likely figured that pushing the citizens any further would result in an angry mob, and that the only feasible option was to get the hell out of Dodge.

 

== 2.16 Read It And Weep ==

** Dash is too worried that Twilight might find out that she enjoys an "egghead" hobby to risk going directly to her home. Sure, it'd be easier, but RD's pride has always been able to override her logic.

** Perhaps she'd rather rob an establishment that she had no personal connection to, than her friend.

* How the hay do the hospital ponies keep up with Rainbow Dash? She's shown that she can easily outrun all the ponies in Ponyville except Applejack and Pinkie Pie. They should be falling further and further behind.

** Well, the pain from her wings could had crippled her running speed, and the one time we really saw her run against someone else was during a marathon, this was a sprint. Ponies also tends to demonstrate greater physical abilities when pushed, having a thief break into your establishment, especially after a patient claimed he was robbed sure seems like a great way to push the medical staff and a security guard... and an insane patient, apparently.

** For the first one-two books - probably. Then the initial rush should've toned down.

* Why does Rarity wear her false eyelashes for bed? We see them on when she's waken up by the chase.

 

== 2.17 Hearts and Hooves Day ==

** Fluttershy doesn't seem to like using the Stare in general, and didn't she say she can't exactly use it at will?

* Iron Will is a minotaur (half-bull/half-human) does this mean humans exist on this show?

** Why can't he just be a bipedal bull? I know traditionally they're half human, but with old mythology there's room for new interpretation, particularly in a world with no humans.

** The lower half of his body looks like the hindlegs of a pony/horse, so he might just be Equestria's version of a Minotaur.

** Sadly, the above. In the past, Cheerilee has let students be teased in front of her and watched the CMC get into a physical scuffle without intervening. She's sweet and loves her students, but she's never been a terribly reliable teacher.

** We don't see her after the first meeting until the end of the episode. Perhaps she was out of town on sabbatical, or at a teacher's conference. She might have been unaware until she came back and found out what had happened.

* How did the CMC manage to dig up dirt on Trixie, if she had left Ponyville a long time ago?

** For that matter, how did the CMC get dirt on Celestia? Three fillies managed to hop a train to Canterlot without any supervision?

** Maybe they just liked the name.

** Maybe they heard about the idea of pen names and figured that using one would help them earn their cutie marks.

 

== 2.24 [[MM Mystery]] on the Friendship Express ==

*** The indications are that Celestia simply ''is'' more powerful than the normal ponies, and indeed probably one of the more powerful entities in the setting. She can control the sun as a single pony -- the play somewhat implied it took more than one normal unicorn to do it. She broke a spell cast by Twilight Sparkle -- herself a force to be reckoned with on the series' power scale -- as if it were nothing. She wielded the Elements of Harmony both with the help of her sister and single-handed -- something it currently takes six ponies to accomplish. Queen Chrysalis very, very obviously didn't consider beating her in open combat even a remote possibility until it had already happened. Does this mean she's a goddess? Not necessarily... but it ''does'' mean that Celestia is a force to reckon with. Combine it with her apparent immortality... and "goddess" is the word that would spring to most people's minds.

*** Ultimately, speculations about Celestia's "power level" are just that -- speculation -- because we don't have all that much solid ''information'' to go by. Moving both the sun and the moon on time for a thousand years during Luna's/Nightmare Moon's exile is arguably her most impressive feat to date, but that's really only ''one'' trick (and one that could be [[Hand Wave|explained away]] as an expression of her personal special talent and her specifically being Luna's sister if need be), and beyond that we don't see her exercising whatever personal magical powers she may have much at all. Perhaps worse, her known track record in facing [[Big Bad|Big Bads]] by herself (i.e., without the Elements of Harmony) is three losses out of three so far: Nightmare Moon is strongly implied to have imprisoned her offstage easily enough, she's not even shown to ''try'' taking on Discord herself when he breaks free, and against Chrysalis she finally officially loses onscreen. [[The Omnipotent]] who simply decides to [[All Powerful Bystander|keep losing on purpose for some reason]]? Just a literal [[Incredibly Lame Pun|one-trick pony]] with [[100% Adoration Rating|great PR]]? Something in between the two extremes? [[Your Mileage May Vary|You decide.]]

** Or it's possible that Celestia simply held back on unleashing her full power out of fear of the other ponies in the room getting hurt, using only the bare minimum she though would be needed, then taken out by a sucker punch.

* If changelings feed off emotions, why do they have fangs?

 

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[[Category:Headscratchers]]

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