@Badwolf: By the way, I actually like Star Fall and Astrid more than RD. They may not have the power of an ancient egasus, but come on! They're awesome!

Oh dear. One of the pictures for today's Drawfriend is Pinkie. She's had 52 cans of Red Bull.

Duck and cover.

Yeah, "Sleepless in Ponyville" was probably the best of the season.

Also, new blind bags!◊ They make molds for Flim & Flam, Lotus, Granny Smith, Gilda, and give Shining Armor a Palette Swap, but Fluttershy doesn't have her own blind bag mold? Didn't they show a new minature mold for her at the Toy Fair? Some things take time, I suppose....

I immediately want that Gilda.

Eh, so did I, but I think there are better ponyfics out there. Sharaloth's versions of broken Equestrias are better IMO.

Harmony Theory is awesome.

The Arher and the Smith is epic.

And The Heart Thief is beautiful.

@Red. Then I'm surprised you never picked it up before now. It's been in a pack with a Wonderbolt and RD.

edited 3rd Mar '13 2:46:38 PM by Swasfews

funny thing happened the other day. a train of thought led me to think of everyone's favorite maneating plant, Audrey, and when I tried to remember the name of the movie, I came up with Littlest Pet Shop of Horrors.

edited 3rd Mar '13 2:49:58 PM by Blissey1

Yeah, I knew it'd been out for a while. I haven't been in a location for easy shipping, though.

Oh right, Japan. Whoops.

Anyway, I'm just confused. It's apparently "Flim Skim" now. That's just kind of weird.

Its Trixie Lulamoon all over again! At least its not just "Skim" thus making it seem like the toyline completely and utterly disregards the show. Ya know, like they did with Lulamoon :P

I'm think why some characters get slightly different names in the toyline may be for copyright or tademark reasons. Maybe they couldn't, for some reason, just trademark "Trixie" and so they had to give her a surname in the toyline.

Well, Trixie is an actual real life name. From what I've heard, you can't trademark something if it's too common, so throwing around surnames or whatever else makes the product more distinctive.

IMO Season 3 was indeed subpar. Games Ponies Play was as bad as MMDW, Spike inexplicably became an utter dumbass to generate drama, and the season finale was a pacing disaster even worse than It's About Time.

But it was nowhere near bad enough to be called seasonal rot. There were some genuinely awesome episodes in there on par with the other seasons, awesome enough to flesh out even Rainbow Dash.

And Bad Seed wasn't really bad so much as taking the easy way out and making a contrived and oversimplified message even the kids have already heard before and know is BS as often as not — which is hardly unusual for a cartoon, but I was hoping they'd have the balls to make a more complex and honest statement about something that immediately important to their target audience.

edited 3rd Mar '13 3:20:55 PM by Pykrete

Out of curiosity, what would you consider more complex in that case.

As for other fanfics, I haven't read that many. I thought the beginning of A Delicate Balance had promise, but I never got aroudn to reading the rest.

One Bad Apple is a case of YMMV, like most of them. Some love it some hate it, same with ALL the episdoes. The only thing that seems to be agreed on was Sleepless was amazing, and Spike got derailed for Spike At You Service, and the fainle should have been two episodes.

And that last one, while agreed on, how much it doing being so ruins it is again YMMV, struck me as off the first time, but just got bette and better each time. There is just to much pure feeling and emotion and heart in it for me not to love it.

Also, well we ALL know how I feel about FOE

edited 3rd Mar '13 3:46:18 PM by Seraphem

Directly admitting that sometimes bullies don't have a convenient sob story.

We all heard the "bullies are just insecure and need love" spiel when we were kids. Sometimes it's even true, and of course being too eager to give comeuppance can easily make you just as bad. But cartoons are leery of even explicitly acknowledging that sometimes kids really are just assholes in a way they typically have no problem doing for adult characters, much less making a substantive comment on it that's rather desperately needed by children.

I mean, they even have an angle to do this. From what little we know of Diamond Tiara, her family is actually pretty wholesome if oblivious to how much they spoil her, and yet she's a manipulative sociopathic tyrant that ruthlessly intimidates her entire class into submission for giggles and (unlike Babs) likely fears no retribution from her peers. We don't know nearly as much about Silver Spoon — they could give her any amount of complexity in between DT and Babs including either extreme.

The problem is they don't even address it. When a kid tries to use the message they give instead on the wrong person, it backfires horribly, makes them a permanent target, and makes them feel inadequate for their attempt at friendship not working to boot.

That, and the big moment of retribution when Babs turns on them is in hindsight a hypocritical rejection of the moral they just got done saying, so it's not even a self-consistent cliche.

edited 3rd Mar '13 3:57:29 PM by Pykrete

The moral wasn't "all bullies just have a Freudian Excuse", it's "don't stoop down to their level, that just makes you as bad as they are".

This song? It is an awesome song, I approve.

edited 3rd Mar '13 3:58:29 PM by KylerThatch

Technically, the plant was Audrey II.

I think it mostly depends on whether you've had personal experience with bullying.

Except they didn't need Babs to do that one. If anything, they could've delivered that message even more powerfully with an unsympathetic bully.

Babs's entire narrative purpose was to turn into an antagonist when bullied and back when loved. She serves a very specific message that good people can be intimidated into doing bad things — and can't deliver the more important one of what to do when they're not intimidated into it.

edited 3rd Mar '13 4:04:41 PM by Pykrete

I guess that is true. I guess that particular story was just not something that I was personally expecting or that I thought was even necessary. I just considered the particular events that were happening in the story and I felt that the way it happened was fine, even good.

As you already know, they have done the moral that you said (even written by the same writer), so I guess you could argue that they didn't really want to retread that story again. And personally I don't think the fact that the characters in one story are older and the others are younger really change the situation since the target audience is meant to relate to both of them.

edited 3rd Mar '13 4:05:58 PM by Mio

@Pykrete: They didn't do it that way because they've already had "jerk for the sake of being a jerk" characters. Also, just because the episode didn't do the plot you wanted them to do doesn't mean that the one they did do is bad. What happened may not have been what you would have done, but there's nothing wrong or inconsistent about what happened in that episode.

And I basically think S3 has roughly the same average quality level as the first two seasons. Although I think it's morel like season one in that it had a more overall consistent level of quality, but it's top episodes weren't as good as S2. Like I think the average S3 episode is better than the average S2 episode, but S3 only had like two episodes that really blew me away qualitywise (Magic Duel and Wonderbolt Academy), whereas S2 had like half a dozen of those episodes.

edited 3rd Mar '13 4:06:48 PM by JapaneseTeeth

Yes. Adults. Who aren't in the peer group their target audience associates with on a regular basis.

Cartoons are very leery of admitting that kids are capable of same, and completely averse to focusing on it for any length of time as anything more than a vehicle for a thematically unrelated plot (DT is being a crazy J. Jonah Jameson and CMC have to be investigators).

edited 3rd Mar '13 4:09:18 PM by Pykrete

I'll admit that that's true, but it still doesn't mean that what they did do is bad, just that it's different from what you wanted.

Yeah, like I said what they did wasn't bad (aside from the fridge logic of the ending), just disappointingly old ground when they could've done something much more meaningful.

edited 3rd Mar '13 4:11:55 PM by Pykrete

That's just, like, your opinion, man.

Seriously, though, I loved having the sidestory of someone who succumbs to the dark side because they've been the victim before.