Me too!

Zecora strikes me as an herbalist or a witch doctor, considering how much she knows about plants and stuff.

I'm doing nothing of the sort. That is literally exactly what it looked like to me. And I don't care if they were magical constructs or had very shallow personalities. The fact that they had any personality at all means that they deserve rights! Remember, I think plants deserve rights! You can't seriously believe that they were less capable of thought than plants.

You're going to have to be content to disagreeing with a lot of people, then, because (as you probably know) plants having rights isn't a very popular opinion.

They weren't even alive, they were just coherent magic given a basic VI flash imprint of a ponies personality.

There's an "over a barrel" situation happening this month in Brazil, but I'm not finding a good English language news link.

Plants don't think, man!

And those Pinkies only had a single annoying thought: "Funfunfunfunfunfun." I think sending a few magical constructs home won't do anything negative.

What Twi's spell did was collapse the constructs shell, reverting it back to pure magic and sending it back to the pool.

I too back the notion that they are just hollow, shallow, gooey magical constructs with only the surface personality of their parent.

I still think the Pinkie clones are all at the bottom of the pool having a wild party.

@Seraphem: but that would work on the actual Pinkie also >IMPLYING actual Pinkie is also a magical construct.

... what would explain a lot.

I wonder what does happen if you get hypothetically banished to the mirror pool. Are you trapped inside it like a rat in a cage, or do you find yourself in an whole different world where everything is visually in reverse?

Personally I'm not trying to interpret the episode as darkly as possible and I'm on Sereg's side. To me the scene looked like Twilight killing them.

I understand that it's an unpopular opinion. I'm just illistrating why it was completely horrifying to me.

Switzerland actually takes things further than I do. They declared that plants have the right to dignity. I think that's taking things a bit far, but I read the report and agree that it makes good points.

EDIT: They were capable of holding conversations, expressing emotion, experiencing indescision and regret. They certainly seemed sapient to me. And as I said, even if they weren't sapient, sentient would have been bad enough by far.

edited 20th Nov '12 10:00:28 AM by Sereg

@Sereg: Do you think that say, a computer AI deserves rights? Because that's basically what I view the clones as; they weren't really alive in any meaningful sense. I see them as a sort of magical computer being that had a given set of responses pre-programmed into it, but no potential for existence past that.

The thought occurred to me. I largely just shuffled it away under "cartoon" and "sure, magical construct. And not so much actually killed as just sent back to the pond."

Or something. Iunno.

TL;DR the episode is horrifying if you think the clones are persons, and not so much if you think they aren't.

@Sereg: They were capable of emulating those responses. There's no evidence that they were actual experiencing regret rather than the magic just going "Pinkie would probably be sad here so that's what the clone will look like". You can write a computer program that looks and sounds like it might be sad, but that doesn't mean that it actually is. To me at least, the conflict of the episode was kind of comparable to a friend creating a bunch of bots that imitated them so they'd be able to chat online with multiple people at once, and then realizing that the bots can only imitate the basic aspects of their conversation style rather than actually acting like them. The thing at the end was the equivalent of deleting the bots. The only difference being that the clones were physical entities rather than abstractions.

edited 20th Nov '12 10:05:15 AM by JapaneseTeeth

20 years from now it'll be a "banned episode"

edited 20th Nov '12 9:59:47 AM by osias

Yeah, those clone rights hippies ruin everything.

edited 20th Nov '12 10:00:56 AM by PurpleDalek

Hey, I wanted to do that!

On second thought, that looks pretty grotesque. Never mind.

Well, the "work on the real Pinkie" part...My best guess is that because she used the pond, she was saturated with the magical energy of it, enough that the spell would react and do...unpleasant things, trying to get her to go back.

And they aren't even AI, their VI

@Sereg They're not dead. They just got sent home. I don't see the issue.

@JT: If the AI was advanced enough, yes! As for emulating the responses goes, why would they need to? It has nothing to do with the purpose Pinkie created them for. And how do you know they were emulated rather than real? So, yeah, I never once saw the clones as non-people.

Maybe another bit of perspective. My country has the third highest murder rate in the world. Most of the population sees no value in human life whatsoever and will casually murder you so that you can't report that they stole your cell phone. As such, these things are quite important to me.

EDIT:After having their body destroyed. That counts as dead to me. Even if they are alive, they are trapped in a pool. That's even worse.

edited 20th Nov '12 10:13:03 AM by Sereg

That's a pretty big leap from valuing human life to holding all quasi-lifeforms as sacred. Then again, the mind can be pretty irrational in extreme cases.