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This episode opens with the bizarre sight of several engineer stallions running along the tracks pulling the train that the mane six are riding out to Appleloosa – obviously it’s incongruent with how we see trains moving with the use of their own engines later in the series, and the immediate solution that comes to mind is that it’s broken down so it’s being pulled. I also considered that they might be doing it to avoid attracting attention from the buffalo, so the sound of the engine is not a factor, but they blow the whistle so that doesn’t work. The train also very much sounds like the engine is going. I think I’ve heard it said that this was perhaps the intended way for trains to work at the time, but if so the whistle, engine sounds and plow on the front are all very odd details. Poorly thought out, perhaps? Maybe. If so, it’s the first worldbuilding element that I’ve been unimpressed by so far.

Applejack reading to the apple tree is a great gag, though I don’t feel that this particular level of over-caring for her trees is necessarily going to be carried forward in future. It’s really more the sort of thing I’d expect Fluttershy to do – Applejack’s close to the soil, sure, but I never get the impression that she’s fond enough of nature to want to interact with it in such an impractical way. Besides, these trees are planted with an almost factory-type efficiency in her orchard, hundreds of them and no doubt sick ones have to be felled and the trees themselves, if we’re anthropomorphising them, I assume would be happier in the wild where they can freely let their roots beat back the competition for water, unlike at Apple Acres where they have to ensure all the trees are getting a roughly equal amount of water. However, this particular tree could very well be special to Applejack, and I could well believe that she’d want her cousin to get the very best of her trees. She does say the tree is “one of her favorites”, so I guess that checks out.

Next scene, we get both kerosene lamp and Fluttershy being ertree. The kerosene lamp has been noted as an example of a somewhat incongruous tech level shown in Equestria, but given the… Odd situation with the train’s engine, as well as Appleloosa clearly being quite out of the way, I could see this being an older train. Besides, even if newer magic/electric lamps are installed elsewhere in Equestria, I don’t know that it necessarily means it’s possible to install those things on a train. The train is very comfy, especially overnight. I’ve only been on a sleeper train once, it was going overnight up to Scotland. I don’t remember it that well, but it was similarly comfy, quite like sleeping in a ferry cabin. I actually enjoyed those parts of travelling more growing up than the actual holiday.

Then we come to the introduction first of Appleloosa and the settler ponies, then second of the buffalo, setting up the two sides of the conflict. I like the idea of showing ponies to have some flaws in some cases, but with as direct an analogy as this, and not only that but very nearly an ethnic analogy, I really dislike it. It makes it very hard to engage with the world as it is, which is what I want to do, because always my mind is trying to autocorrect to what I know the show is actually alluding to. It’s at times like this I wish I could actually erase good chunks of what I know about the real world and about history and politics, all things on which my opinion matters less than nothing and upon which I can affect no change – it would do me a lot of good in being able to engage more fully with the stuff I love without getting distracted, and I don’t really see a downside to not knowing about those topics.