Season 8 Episode Discussion [Spoilers, possible leaks, rumours etc.]

@Miss Shy
 
That child is evil I tells ya. EEEEVIL.

I think Cozy Glow is probably just a “victim” now. There’ll be some parallel.

This is why I’m pro-child punching.
 
Do not trust the demon child.

Her first step into supervillainy.

We’ll never get a companion episode of the Student Six visiting Las Pegasus and causing trouble.

I just saw The End in Friend, and I really enjoyed it.
 
This episode has it all. Continuity, an emotional journey for its main characters, adventure, discovering new things about the characters. I think my favourite part of the episode was how the books Rarity and Rainbow Dash have read help inform their abilities and motivations. It gives the episode a unifying motif. Rainbow Dash is more adventure-oriented, where Rarity is more thoughtful and investigative.
 
What I like most about the skills is that they don’t just exist to solve problems; they tell us something about the character using them. Rarity has always had this “Femme Fatale” quality about her, so picking locks feels like a skill she’d have picked up at some point.
 
I think that’s about it. I realize that I’ve only talked about the third act. This is because I don’t have much to say about the rest of the episode. I found it entertaining, and there are a bunch of nice little setups that pay off in the third act. Sometimes, that’s all you need.
 
Just one stray thought. I think if there are any two members of The Mane Six that could carry a show by themselves, it’s Rarity and Rainbow Dash.
 
Overall, I thought this was a really solid episode.

@DerpyFast  
Same

What episodes do you predict will be bad?

@Background Pony #584F
 
Like, none? it’ll be a unpleasant surprise if any turns out to be, though.

@Background Pony #584F  
Second half of this season had so far only one good episode, so a better question would be which one can you predict is going to be good.

@Esteban  
What was this ,,good” episode?

@Sweet Blast  
Hearth Warming Club was a good Student6 episode and the first one where they learn a lesson while Mane6 act as actual teachers. Most of the episodes is doing it backwards.

@Esteban  
,,The end in friend”.  
Nuff said.

@Sweet Blast  
More like The end of the hype

School Daze:8.5  
The Maud Couple:9.5  
Fake It ’Til You Make It: 9.0  
Grannies Gone Wild:8.7  
Surf and/or Turf:8.0  
Horse Play:9.4  
The Parent Map:9.4  
Non-Compete Clause:9.1  
The Break Up Breakdown:9.4  
Molt Down:9.2  
Marks for Effort:9.0  
The Mean Six:8.0  
A Matter of Principals:8.5  
The Hearth’s Warming Club:9.5  
Friendship University:8.8  
The End in Friend:∅  
Yakity-Sax:9.0
 
>>1798158t (merged)>>1798117t (merged)  
>>1798190t (merged)

How is S8 as a whole?

@Background Pony #584F  
For fuck’s sake, Quit asking this every time a less than remarkable episode airs, or just every time an episode airs period. If you don’t like the show just quit watching it

This is definitely an episode where your mileage will vary. I should probably mention why this idea of “character regression” doesn’t bother me. There are two reasons.
 
Both reasons have to do with what a mess of continuity the show is. I think I subconsciously treat The Movie and everything after it as a soft reboot. This is something they might as well do. The kids who watched Season One are now in junior high, and there’s a good chance that the current target audience never watched Season One in the first place.
 
I don’t think most of the character growth for The Mane Six was even real in the first place. This is my second reason. I think there are layers of confirmation bias at play.
 
A quick summary. Confirmation bias is the tendency to see things in a way that supports your own viewpoint, and ignore or downplay things that contradict that viewpoint. Everybody does it, myself included. Anyways…
 
You might be thinking:
 
@DerpyFast  

 
“But that’s ridiculous. We’ve watched The Mane Six accomplish goals and learn lessons for the past seven seasons.”
 
Fair warning: what I’m about to say may retroactively ruin the show for you. Or it may let you enjoy the show more. I noticed a weird pattern in the show. Then I read a book on persuasion, which helped put the pattern into perspective. Between the book and revisiting Season One, I can’t look at the show in quite the same way.
 
||  
If I asked people at what point each of The Mane Six transitioned into responsible adults, I would get a mess of conflicting answers. Some would argue that Rarity and Applejack started out as responsible adults, since they run their own businesses. Others would counter by mentioning episodes like Look Before You Sleep or Fall Weather Friends. You can go to literally any season, and find examples of each of The Mane Six being responsible adults, and also find examples of them being immature. And that’s where confirmation bias kicks in. Since everyone has their own idea of when The Mane Six matured, everything after that point is “character regression”, and everything before that point is “part of the character’s journey”.
 
But it gets weirder. Earlier, I said that I didn’t think most of the character growth for The Mane Six was even real in the first place. Even as I write this, I experience a weird cognitive dissonance where I both do and don’t feel like the characters have grown. It feels like The Mane Six should have changed. After all, a lot of goals have been accomplished, and a lot of lessons have been learned. However, if you go back, you might notice that there there was never a definitive moment of maturing. You might also notice that there have been plenty of examples of character regression as early as Season One. What if I told you that the plot of Sweet and Elite is Rarity’s storyline in Sonic Rainboom, isolated and stretched out into a full episode. Right down to her being saved from a fall and learning the same lesson.
 
So what’s going on? You might have guessed that it has to do with confirmation bias, character arcs, or both. My guess is that it’s both. If you want to think something, your brain is more than happy to oblige. Let’s say a character learns a lesson. If you want to believe that the lesson stuck, then your brain will look for ways to interpret things as examples of the lesson sticking. As long as nothing comes along that directly contradicts the lesson, that sense of growth will stay with you. Even if that lesson is never applied again, the fact that they learned the lesson will continue to stand out. This is what makes stories about unique, specific scenarios so effective. It feels like the character has grown, and they’re not likely to encounter that scenario again and possibly ruin the magic.
 
It gets even weirder. This applies to entire story arcs. Going back to Sweet and Elite, nothing ever came of that episode. But there’s a good chance it felt like it did. People are hard-wired to fit things to patterns. One such pattern is the interest curve, which is why stories use it. A good character will have important moments built into them. A good example would be Rainbow Dash adopting Scootaloo. It feels like something that’s supposed to happen. This is why it feels like a payoff, and creates a sense of progress. Even though this doesn’t change how either character is written. Not having to change how characters are written is important for an episodic show cast with static characters.
 
These character moments are the key to creating the illusion of progress in an otherwise episodic show. You have to do four things to make this work.
 
One: Have a list of all the important character moments, and arrange them in order from least impactful to most impactful.
 
Two: Strategically spread these moments throughout your collection of self-contained stories to create an interest curve.
 
Three: The bigger the moment, the more important it is not to contradict it. On the other hand, people are more likely to remember how something made them feel, and less likely to remember details.
 
Four: End the story at its logical conclusion, which should be shortly after the biggest character moment.
 
If you do all four of these steps, your audience will automatically filter out anything that isn’t a big character moment, arrange these moments into an interest curve, and feel a sense of resolution when it ends. Even if it’s only 12 episodes out of 200+.
 
You might be able to guess where I think the show went wrong. There wasn’t enough long-term planning. The writers actually arranged the character moments remarkably well, for what they had. They just ran out around Seasons Six and Seven, and they didn’t end the story at the logical point. That’s the sort of thing that can happen when you’re making it up as you go, and when you don’t know how long your series will last.
 
Another thing that went wrong is that confirmation bias turned against them. As time goes on, you have more and more plot points rubbing against each other. Once you start to doubt the effectiveness of the continuity, confirmation bias will prove you right.
 
Which brings us back to me. I don’t care about character regression because it’s always been there. Knowing what I know, it doesn’t seem fair to criticize it. Meanwhile, I’m too invested in the growth and emotional journey that never happened to stop watching. I’ve embraced the cognitive dissonance. ||

@Whomps
 
I’ve been watching the show too long to stop now.

@Background Pony #584F  
Then just stop watching the show nobody is stopping you

@Spike_Lover  
That could be said for a lot of people in this thread, honestly.

@Background Pony #584F
 
That’s exactly like saying that “I have to get my money’s worth out of this shitty movie, so I’ll watch the last hour of it”, when in reality, you’re still down the same amount of money, and you’re also wasting time on top of that for something you won’t even enjoy.
 
In other words, the “sunk cost fallacy”. In reality, if something just isn’t doing it for you personally anymore, you can stop anytime.

I want to know what the last episode is in S9. I hope they do an Angry Beavers. That’d be awesome especially if it was VAs reading fan mail impromptu in the recording booth and then the flash animation was made later on based on what happened.

I mean, props to making a Flim/Flam episode without involving the Apples at all.
 
Man they are going in with the racism.
 
Like, Bridle Gossip was fear of the unknown kind of racist. This is just straight up discrimination and hatred, egad, Brain.
 
Nothing else I have to say, pretty unremarkable episode, but not bad at all.