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If she were to conclude that under the circumstances, doing something wrong is necessary, even if only concluding such due to her extreme panic, that would be perfectly alright with me, but in presenting her as having gone off the deep end, dropping all her marbles and sandwiches on the way down, this nuance isn’t there. I understand the humour of presenting Twilight as having gone crazy, and it lands just fine, but in this particular instance I think just a few seconds of clarity before returning to neurotic overreaction would work wonders to demonstrate that Twilight is in fact still herself and is merely making a mistake, even if it’s a little stretched in the believability department even then.
As it is, this episode very unfortunately makes Twilight come across as fundamentally selfish at some level to me, which I don’t think is true to who she is at all. The fact that the wrongness of making a friendship problem, of prioritising her needs over her duty to others, is not instantly and immediately apparent to her when she’s under pressure makes it seem as though she has to intentionally think about what is and is not selfish normally, such that she’s not naturally inclined to think of others when she’s not in the right headspace. I could believe that of Twilight in part 1 of Friendship is Magic, but I simply don’t believe that’s who she is after finding her friends and defeating Nightmare Moon. That is the magic of that moment, that Twilight goes from being self-obsessed to realising that friendship truly means something to her, that other people mean something to her. I can see that this is not a total overnight transformation, but neither is it the absence of a transformation, and if a degree of selflessness is just a code of conduct she has to consciously follow rather than an everpresent, perhaps small but yet growing aspect of her nature, then her ‘transformation’ feels like a lie, perhaps one even told to herself, most depressingly of all. That to me is the central issue, the thing that makes this episode deflating. I really do think I’d feel substantially different about it if there had just been a tiny tweak – instead of rubbing her hooves together and saying “If I can’t find a friendship problem… I’ll make one!”, saying at the very least “I’ll HAVE to make one.” Zooming all the way in to the microscopic level of my problem with this episode, it comes down ultimately to the fact that Twilight says she’ll make a friendship problem as a declarative statement rather than attaching qualifiers. It’s a lot like my issue with Return of Harmony part 1 in a way, although that was a larger, more complicated issue I had with that episode: both are fantastic episodes, well-written and lots of fun to rewatch, but just have this one aspect or even just tiny detail that spirals out into implications that I dislike. They are both flies in soup, ultimately not ruining much overall, but nonetheless managing to somehow sour the entire soup for me. Not by a lot, but by a noticeable degree, unfortunately.