My Little Pony VI: MUFFINS!

[darthbobcat]

Something that's been bugging me about the new episode:

Spoiler

Show

Doesn't the owl have to sleep during the day? I feel like that point would have solved a lot of the conflict, as Spike would still have his work during the day, and Owlyface (because heck if I can remember that name) would work during the night. Spike could have still been jealous of the owl's help, but later realized that he still was important. Meh, thinking too much about a show with talking unicorns, I suppose.

Oh gosh I've posted in a pony thread what have I done

You've become awesome, that's what you've done.

Also, that's the sort of thinking that's fine. I'd wondered about it myself. I assumed that he'd synched up his sleep schedule with Twilight's, while Spike, being a baby dragon, couldn't keep up with them.

It's not that unusual. Rarity and Pinkie both live in their places of business (Pinkie Pie doesn't even own her place of business). That's half the cast right without a dedicated building for living quarters.

It appears that ponies, as a rule, don't have houses. The only exceptions we've seen are Applejack (who owns all of Sweet Apple Acres and can therefore easily set aside a bit of land for a home), Fluttershy (who lives in an undeveloped area on the outskirts of Ponyville; works fine if your job is caring for woodland creatures and you dislike social interaction, but anyone else would consider that a lousy piece of real estate), Zecora (Fluttershy times a thousand), and Rainbow Dash (lives in the sky, so doesn't have to compete with two-thirds of the pony population).

There were a bunch of pony historiographers in here earlier who might be able to explain why land is apparently do expensive in Ponyville. Personally, I'd say the ponies are remaining densely packed as a defense against wandering monsters. Lots of extremely dangerous, extremely territorial creatures out there.



Really? I realize that lots of people disliked this episode, but I think it was much more tightly-plotted than Morrow's other episodes. I burned with rage at the "Who?" gag, and Spike's evil form just had me scratching my head and wondering when he was going to start hypnotizing people, but other than that I thought it was solid.

Conversely, "Winter" and "Show" had fairly weak conflicts that mostly served to string vaguely-connected scenes together. "Griffon" had a blatantly unsympathetic antagonist running around antagonizing people unsympathetically, so no one ever had any real internal conflicts to deal with.

Side note: I'm not in the animation industry, so could someone explain why everyone's been saying this is a "bottle episode"? It has a fair number of speaking roles, a variety of locations, a fight scene, a new costume for Spike (with a cape, even), and two new creatures (Owlicious and the Green Dragon--Though granted, the dragon may have just been a pallet-swapped Red Dragon).

I figured that it's because our cast of little ponies is still young. They haven't amassed the capital to have both a house AND a place of business, except in places where there's cheap and/or unclaimed land. Twilight is, I imagine, living off the public dole in one way or another (either subsidies from Celestia or taxes for running the library). Give them a few years to amass savings and get better credit ratings and they might have their own places.

Also, Ponyville is a densely populated place, judging from the crowd scenes. That'd certainly drive up property values.

Also, I think they're calling it a bottle episode because there's hints of a lack of care. Honestly, I think they just didn't do as good a job as usual and everyone has a bad day now and again.