Quote Originally Posted by Soras Teva Gee View Post
I find all attempts to put the episodes in anything other then airing/production order a bit fundamentally misguided. For all "they can be seen in any order" there's some pretty evident advancement. Just as always don't try to strictly analyze it. Stories are not made to fit into neat boxes like that. The episodes are all in order, screw that winter precedes fall in time under a year
You are entitled to your opinion, of course. And yes, there are bits of continuity - "A Friend in Deed" has to come after both "Baby Cakes" and "Read It and Weep", for instance.

But... I play Fluttershy in an ongoing RP thing. And if we (currently myself, a Twilight Sparkle, a Pinkie Pie, and a G4-ed Minty) tried to do every episode in order we'd have no hair left. We do things as they seem seasonally or narratively appropriate, and move on. We just finished "Hurricane Fluttershy", followed by a hoofwave of "Sweet and Elite"; "It's About Time" will be somewhere in the near future, with "Baby Cakes" and "May the Best Pet Win!" tentatively in about a month. Other episodes we may just refer to the events or repercussions thereof in passing. And I don't see any conflict involved there.

It's like the Young Wizards books. Each book takes place in the year it's written, as far as technology and culture and to some degree history are concerned. And yet the characters may have experienced something like two years since the first book, which came out in 1983. And there is no inconsistency at all. (Well, that's not entirely true. The way wizardry works in the earlier books doesn't quite match up with the way it works now. But there's no timeline inconsistency.)