tbh, I always thought Twilight WAS a little Mary Sue-ish

edited 19th Dec '11 2:46:46 PM by gingerninja666

I'm guessing that Twilight meant something along the lines of "most ponies have a few natural skills related to their talent". It's abnormal, but not impossible. Twilight loves making blanket statements about the way she thinks things should be, and rarely bothers to note the exceptions. It's a generalization, not a an objective statement about the way the universe always works.

Just because you are not talented at something doesn' mean you can' do it at all. A unicorn can still perform magic she isn't talented in, it just needs more effort to learn it than someone with the talent.

After all, big illusion spells aren't very well connected to gem-finding or dress-making, and yet Rarity seems to have them down pat.

And it makes sense, mark or not, that Twilight would be able to pick up a lot of spells, considering how much of her life has been spent learning the theory and practice of magic as a whole.

edited 19th Dec '11 2:51:59 PM by Enlong

Big illusion spells?

Suited for Success. She wrapped the entire room in enormous special-effects things that put Trixie's fireworks to shame.

Great, now Rarity can put Trixie to shame too

Yeah... I tend to treat magic as sort of a trick, and in a way an applied extension of the natural telekinesis. They can all do the telekinesis, so it's a good place to start it. More advance magic is just much more fine telekinesis, grabbing things like individual particles to change an object or grabbing light to make illusions. So the potential is always there, it's just about how you use it. Like how we all have arms, and we can all move our arms, but some people can use them to juggle, some people can use them to do magic tricks, and some people can use them to punch a brick in half. There will be people who just cant do those things due to disability or what have you, and there will be people who just have a knack for them, but in general the potential is always there. Some of them are just easier than others.

Nah, Rarity can just make them large-scale, but she doesn't have Trixie's finesse. Trixie probably could make them large scale if she wanted to, but she focuses on making lots of little ones, and making them very realistic by combining sounds and telekinesis. Trixie's biggest talent has always been performance, not really magic. Just remember Ginger, Weak, but Skilled. Much better than hax-power any day, if you ask me.

edited 19th Dec '11 2:56:29 PM by kegisak

Well, I certainly got my point to backfire...

Besides, shaming people was what Trixie did for like 90% of her episode.

Like tying someone up with light.

edited 19th Dec '11 2:57:21 PM by Enlong

Makes me wonder, is that illusion she created in the sky a spell? Or was it a potion of some kind?

The sparkles that turned into the illusion shot out of her Trumpet thingies. I don't think we've seen magic like that before.

edited 19th Dec '11 3:01:09 PM by gingerninja666

Being a unicorn, I'm pretty certain it was a spell.

With regards to Twi's short sightedness: she seems to be very bad at planning any kind of contingencies. It's like she always expects her initial plan to work, so she doesn't bother (the one exception being Dragonshy where she had an elaborate chain set up and then Rainbow Jenkins kicked the dragon). And when things go south, well... she's left improvising and she's pretty average at that.

The opening of Return of Harmony part 1 is a pretty good example of that.

That and Winter Wrap-up.

Her contingencies in Dragonshy sucked. Applejack kick apples at the Dragon that'll solve everything.

edited 19th Dec '11 3:11:53 PM by Badwolfwho

We never DID get to see AJ use those apples.

Probably for the best though, they probably wouldn't have done anything and AJ would've ended up being Worfed.

We also didn't get to see HER method of trying to get the dragon out. I wonder what that would've been

Citrus acid stings if it gets you in the eyes. It might've been able to buy them enough time to escape

edited 19th Dec '11 3:13:43 PM by gingerninja666

"Leave and I'll give you some apples"

Maybe if they hit the eyes. But Dragons are big and can blink.

edited 19th Dec '11 3:14:07 PM by Badwolfwho

Twilight's plans there weren't exactly contingencies, they were more fallback plans. A proper contingency is for a predictable situation, not for 'if plan A fucks up'. A contingency plan for that situation would have been "If he winds up getting pissed we scatter like scared bunnies, Rd and AJ distract him while I try to snipe him with a magic lightning bolt or some shit"

You could say that about anything though. She trusted that AJ would be skilled enough to hit the dragon where it hurts

unlike some people here, Twilight actually has faith in AJ's abilities

edited 19th Dec '11 3:17:10 PM by gingerninja666

Twilight is intelligent - but inexperienced. Her pattern indicates only two-dimensional thinking.

Yeah, Twilight is pretty bad about both backup plans and contingencies; not to mention that she doesn't tend to think to hard about the side effects. I think it's that as soon as she gets a spell to the point that she can use it at will, she doesn't bother perfecting it and moves onto the next thing; she has a huge number of spells, but not many of them are very practiced.

Also, given that war in Equestria involves throwing pies at each other, bucking apples at something would be the equivalent of a gun.

edited 19th Dec '11 3:18:17 PM by JapaneseTeeth

A dragon's eyes are it's weak point too; everyone knows that. It's a good place to aim for. They might not even have terribly thick eyelids.

edited 19th Dec '11 3:23:39 PM by kegisak

Clearly that was a mistake on her part. AJ didn't even fire the apples.

She should have levitated it or shot lightning at it or something.

I used a smiley. Obviously I wasn't being serious.

edited 19th Dec '11 3:21:13 PM by Badwolfwho

Why you always gotta do that?

Yeah, everyone knows that you aim for the dragon's eyes. But yeah. Twilight is quite confident in Applejak. She seems to be the one she goes to when she needs help.

I think that's mainly because it was clearly too late at that point. She probably assumed that bucking apples at the dragon after RD pissed it off would only make it angrier.

edited 19th Dec '11 3:21:50 PM by JapaneseTeeth