Tag Archives: twilight sparkle

Cookie Fonster Reviews Every MLP Episode Part 82: A Royal Problem

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Season 7, Episode 10

It’s been a while since my last MLP review, hasn’t it? While I’m unemployed I need something to do when bored, and working on my blog is one such thing. I wonder how much of this post series I can get done in 2025. Also, today is my 26th birthday!

And just to recap, I will no longer be releasing my MLP reviews only on Fridays, but instead on the day I finish them. I’ll continue having all of my posts cover either one or two episodes.

Season 7 Episode 10: A Royal Problem

In five words: Starlight swaps princesses’ cutie marks.

Premise: The Cutie Map sends Starlight Glimmer on a mission to Celestia and Luna’s castle because they haven’t been getting along as of late. To help them see eye to eye, she swaps the sisters’ cutie marks.

Detailed run-through:

It’s been over a year since I last reviewed a MLP episode, so forgive me if I struggle to get back into my groove. But I will try! The good thing, this is one of the fan favorite episodes of season 7.

To start the episode, the map sends Starlight Glimmer alone on a mission to Celestia and Luna’s castle. Twilight Sparkle responds with some good old Twilighting, doubled by her motherly treatment of Starlight.

Twilight Sparkle: Don’t worry. For all we know, it’s something small. Like, maybe the cooks are fighting over who has the best butternut squash soup. Or the royal hairdressers are fighting over a comb.
Spike: Or you know, maybe the royal sisters aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on something
Twilight Sparkle: NO! That’s just crazy. Luna and Celestia would never fight. … Again.

Thinking about it, it makes sense the map would send Starlight to solve this conflict for multiple reasons. It’s not just because of Starlight’s brash impulsiveness as the episode later discusses. The Mane 6 and Spike wouldn’t see the sisters’ conflict from an unbiased perspective, because Celestia knows them (especially Twilight) much better than Luna does. And the Cutie Mark Crusaders would be just as biased towards Luna. The map needs a neutral party to solve their rivalry. Moreover, I’m sure the map knows that last time Celestia and Luna got into a conflict, Luna got banished to the moon, and that had better not reoccur.

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Cookie Fonster Reviews Every MLP Episode Part 78: A Flurry of Emotions + Rock Solid Friendship

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Season 7, Episodes 3-4

Sorry this post took so long! Admittedly, I procrastinated on it in favor of writing Eurovision reviews. My latest review is 1990, so I have 33 posts left to write. I wonder which blog post series I’ll finish first: Eurovision or MLP?

Season 7 Episode 3: A Flurry of Emotions

In five words: Twilight’s turn to attempt babysitting.

Premise: To prove herself as the Best Aunt Ever, Twilight Sparkle tries to squeeze time into her busy schedule to babysit Flurry Heart, whose parents are attending an art show.

Detailed run-through:

Obligatory mention that the nurse pony’s cutie mark was redesigned because her old one violated the Geneva Conventions.

This episode begins with the nurse pony telling Twilight she will have to spend the day with a group of sick foals, which she eagerly agrees to do.

This scene was probably meant to redeem the criticism that last season, Cadance didn’t look exhausted from taking care of Flurry Heart.

I still don’t get why Cadance and Shining Armor decided it was a good idea to drop in unannounced and tell Twilight Sparkle she has to watch over their baby. Wouldn’t it make more sense to leave her with a Crystal Empire resident, like Sunburst? And why did they just assume Twilight had nothing better to do? The best explanation I can think of is that it was a hasty decision because they were sleep deprived.

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Cookie Fonster Reviews Every MLP Episode Part 77: All Bottled Up

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Season 7, Episode 2

Remember when I said I might write a blog post about GalaCon 2023 (my first pony con)? Well, I ended up making a video about it instead, and released it on the tenth anniversary of when I first watched MLP:FiM. You should watch it if you haven’t! If you like reading my MLP reviews, I promise you’ll enjoy this video too.

I promise I’ll speed up with my MLP reviews for at least the first half of season 7. And yes, it’ll come at the cost of slowing down another post series.

Season 7 Episode 2: All Bottled Up

In five words: Trixie drives Starlight to insanity.

Premise: While Twilight Sparkle and friends are off for a friendship retreat, Starlight Glimmer practices magic with Trixie and gets annoyed with her friend’s careless mishaps. Luckily, she can store all her anger in bottles and ignore it forever… or so she thinks.

Detailed run-through:

This episode begins with a slice of life scene featuring a fan favorite pair of characters, where Starlight Glimmer makes cupcakes for her friends’ trip and Trixie practices magic. When Starlight explains how to do a transfiguration spell and Trixie does it successfully, it first seems like happy fluffy friendship moments…

This scene does shows us that Trixie isn’t quite as reformed as Starlight is, which I admire.
It’s nice that different villains (or villain-ish characters) are reformed at different rates.

… but the moment Trixie hugs Starlight overly tight and makes her spill frosting, the episode’s conflict becomes clear. It’s a similar style of cold opening to Make New Friends but Keep Discord: we see a friendship established a season or two ago, and since we already know they’re friends, it doesn’t take long to introduce their conflict.

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Cookie Fonster Reviews Every MLP Episode Part 76: Celestial Advice

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< Part 75 | Part 76 | Part 77 >

Season 7, Episode 1

During my trip to Germany (which is where I am as of this post’s publication!), writing a Eurovision review on my downtime somehow didn’t seem fun at all anymore. Those blog posts are fun to write, but the difference between them and my MLP posts is that while I enjoy almost every MLP episode, the Eurovision songs that truly interest me are few and far between. Therefore, it requires a higher degree of boredom for me to write a Eurovision post.

By the way, this trip has been an absolute blast so far, and it will include my very first pony con soon: GalaCon. I might write a bit about it on my blog.

Season 7 Episode 1: Celestial Advice

In five words: Celestia’s side of season 1.

Premise: The only season premiere not to be a two-part episode. During a celebration of Starlight Glimmer and friends’ overthrowing of Queen Chrysalis, Twilight Sparkle doesn’t know what to do next with her pupil and consults her mentor for advice.

Detailed run-through:

I’ve already said it before, but I love Starlight Glimmer so much.
Well OK, most fans who hate Starlight hate the late seasons in general.

Unlike the last three seasons, I’m not going to take my sweet time analyzing the first minute of the premiere, because not much happens in it. Season 7 of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic begins with a typical casual Starlight Glimmer/Spike conversation about the upcoming celebration, where Spike desperately hides the gift that Twilight Sparkle is working on. It’s a mirror where Starlight will see herself surrounded by her friends each morning.

However, I am going to analyze in detail the pictures on Twilight’s mirror a minute and a half in, because it has some interesting details.

First off, on the top left, we see a picture of Celestia and Discord. This implies that even though Discord is so… Discord, Twilight Sparkle by now considers him a good friend. Something even more subtly sweet is the picture with Moondancer on the bottom right. It suggests that Twilight has a special attachment to her childhood friends, even the ones she doesn’t see often, which I can easily relate to. Does this mirror have anyone else Twilight considers important to her? We have Cadance, Spike, the rest of the Mane 6, Owlowiscious, and everyone in the group photo. Aside from her relatives and maybe Luna, the list seems complete.

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Cookie Fonster Reviews Every MLP Episode Part 74: Top Bolt

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Season 6, Episode 24

I feel bad that I’ve missed so many weeks when going through season 6! Though my love of this show is as strong as ever, my motivation for writing these posts has decreased over the past few months. That’s how it always is with my ambitious projects: motivation comes and goes in waves, leading to months at a time of hiatus. Once I am done with season 6, I’ll take a break during which I’ll scratch an itch to start a brand new blog post series—I’ll announce what it is later today. (It wouldn’t be quite as long as my Homestuck or MLP post series, but longer than my Regular Show post series.)

Season 6 Episode 24: Top Bolt

In five words: Bookworms discover well-intentioned lies.

Premise: The Cutie Map sends Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash—the Mane 6’s bookworms—to the Wonderbolts’ flight camp, where they encounter two childhood friends in training who have unknowingly been holding each other’s flight skills back by secretly giving boosts.

Detailed run-through:

Going by the position of Rainbow Dash’s shadow, it looks like her locker is fifth from the right, on the bottom row.
This will be important later.

The start of this episode is a clever bait-and-switch. As she prepares to go back home, Rainbow Dash banters with her fellow Wonderbolts. Spitfire grumbles that she has to run trials week, then admits she loves putting on her aggressive act. This seems like it’ll just be a quick reminder that Rainbow Dash has fully established herself as a member of the group, making viewers think the rest of the episode will take place somewhere unrelated.

Indeed, when her cutie mark starts glowing, she flies right to Twilight’s castle and excitedly asks where the map will take her. It turns out she needs to go back to Cloudsdale, much to her annoyance. Twilight Sparkle could have easily gone there earlier to find Rainbow Dash, but instead she waited for her friend to show up and waste time flying. Maybe this was a deliberate prank on Twilight’s part? Maybe she has a skeevy, trickstery side that she normally hides? Or maybe Twilight was a bad friend and forgot where Rainbow Dash was over the past few days.

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Cookie Fonster Reviews Every MLP Episode Part 73: P.P.O.V. (Pony Point of View) + Where the Apple Lies

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Season 6, Episodes 22-23

Season 6 Episode 22: P.P.O.V. (Pony Point of View)

In five words: Mystery solved through conflicting tales.

Premise: Applejack, Rarity, and Pinkie Pie have come back from a boating trip with their friendship in shambles, and Twilight Sparkle tries to piece together their contradicting stories.

Detailed run-through:

To start the episode, Twilight Sparkle is excited to hear how three of her friends’ boating trip went. We get an excuse for why Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy didn’t go on the trip: they were at a Cloudsdale flight school reunion. This leads me to wonder, why did the show choose Rarity, Pinkie Pie, and Applejack, out of all character combinations, to go on the trip? I’ll discuss this peculiarity in the overall thoughts, so that I don’t get ahead of myself.

I refuse to believe Rarity didn’t bring at least ten spare outfits to wear in case her current one got dirty.

The three ponies depart the train in separate directions, refusing to talk to each other. If they’re so mad at each other, why did they go home in the same car of the train? My best guess is that the rest of the train was full of excited ponies who had a delightful trip.

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Cookie Fonster Reviews Every MLP Episode Part 72: Viva Las Pegasus + Every Little Thing She Does

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Season 6, Episodes 20-21

We’re almost done with season 6! My plan is to split the last five episodes into three posts: episodes 22-23, 24, and 25-26 (the finale). If I release the next three posts every week, I’ll be finished with season 6 on May 5.

Season 6 Episode 20: Viva Las Pegasus

In five words: Selfish hotel owner gets overthrown.

Premise: The Cutie Map sends another odd pair (Applejack and Fluttershy) to another odd place (Las Pegasus) to deal with another pesky two-faced celebrity (Gladmane).

Detailed run-through:

Before I begin, I’d like to say that this episode has me at an awkward position. I’m so close to an episode that I am extremely excited to analyze, in no small part because it’s a Starlight Glimmer episode, but I first have to pick apart an episode that I feel neutral about analyzing. That’s why I procrastinated on starting this post for about a week.

If the Cutie Map sent her to Appleoosa, I could already hear Applejack’s delighted “hoo-wee!”

The cold opening of this episode is short and effective, only 48 seconds long, since we know the map episode formula. Applejack and Fluttershy both aren’t very thrilled to enter the noisy party town of Las Pegasus. I find it amusing that Applejack has the worst luck when it comes to cutie map missions: seasons 5 and 6 both sent her to a big city that she’d rather not be in. It’s the exact opposite of Rarity’s level of luck—she got sent to both the cities she adores the most.

The efficient storytelling is continued through what TV Tropes calls a Gilligan cut. Applejack says that Las Pegasus probably isn’t as bad as they think; take a wild guess what happens next.

You guessed it! It’s even worse!

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Cookie Fonster Reviews Every MLP Episode Part 70: The Times They Are a Changeling + Dungeons & Discords

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Season 6, Episodes 16-17

This post took a little longer than the last few because spent a few days (March 15-18) on a trip to New York City where I met several Internet friends and a friend from school. During that trip, when waiting for things to happen in my hotel room, I wrote the first half of my review of Dungeons & Discords.

Season 6 Episode 16: The Times They Are a Changeling

In five words: First step resolving changeling discrimination.

Premise: The Crystal Empire is under threat by a changeling spy, and when searching for the culprit, Spike discovers a sensitive changeling named Thorax who merely wants to be his friend.

Detailed run-through:

For some reason, pretty much every episode taking place in the Crystal Empire starts with a train ride there.

To start this episode, Twilight Sparkle demonstrates a severe lack of fourth-wall awareness when she says Flurry Heart has grown a lot and she probably won’t even recognize the baby. If she was aware of the fourth wall, she would know that babies in a cartoon NEVER age until the time skip finale. Starlight and Twilight have a friendly discussion that shows good progression in friendship lessons, which makes it surprising that in the next episode focusing on Starlight, she royally screws things up.

Spike keeping a plush of his pony waifu wherever he goes was clearly inspired by bronies doing the same.

Pretty much every episode taking place in the Crystal Empire also has a reminder that the crystal ponies obsessively worship Spike. Spike has a variety of goofy disguises prepared, and I wonder… could this be a hint that he’s soon to befriend a member of the race whose specialty is impersonation?

One difference from pretty much every episode taking place in the Crystal Empire is that this time, it doesn’t feature all of the Mane 6—instead, it’s only Twilight Sparkle, Starlight Glimmer, and Spike who visit. The minimization of the cast helps give supporting characters some spotlight time that would have otherwise been taken by Pinkie Pie gags.

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Cookie Fonster Reviews Every MLP Episode Part 65: The Saddle Row Review

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Season 6, Episode 9

This episode was originally going to share a post with Applejack’s “Day” Off, but the review turned out long enough that I changed my mind. I’ll do more paired-up posts until I reach an even-numbered episode that’s worth giving its own post—my current candidate is The Times They Are a Changeling.

Season 6 Episode 9: The Saddle Row Review

In five words: Mockumentary tells boutique’s clumsy beginnings.

Premise: Rarity has finally opened her boutique in Manehattan, called Rarity for You, and it gets off to an incredibly bumpy start because her friends all are too concerned with the question: “What would Rarity want?”

Detailed run-through (aka The Saddle Row Review Review):

“The Saddle Row Review Review” is a joke I came up with before I even started this post series.

This episode starts with five of the Mane 6 running in panic, hoping they can stop Rarity from reading the review of her new boutique. Given the highly anachronic order this episode is told in, this is quite amusing. Even after successfully setting up Rarity’s boutique and admitting they screwed things up along the way, they still feel a desire to maintain a perfect image to her friend. Normally, Rarity is the one obsessed with keeping a perfect image, but this time, the rest of her friends take this role while Rarity happily embraces her friends’ quirks.

Rarity looks angered when her friends arrive, but it turns out she was merely exhausted from waiting. Then she squeals in adorable excitement because she wanted them to read the review together.

Rainbow Dash: Um… I have an idea. How about we don’t read it?
Twilight Sparkle: What she means is, before you read it, we should probably tell you about—
Rarity: No, no, darling. Please, no spoilers.

I’ve previously talked about a pattern in Rarity episodes where the rest of her friends are clumsy but well-meaning, always trying a little too hard to make Rarity satisfied. Though I consider it a Rarity episode, this episode plays with the pattern by focusing on the rest of the Mane 6 and what they think of Rarity, rather than on Rarity herself. This episode is all about playing with patterns and unusual storytelling styles, and I enjoy it very much.

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Cookie Fonster Reviews Every MLP Episode Part 64: Newbie Dash + A Hearth’s Warming Tail

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Season 6, Episodes 7-8

Season 6 Episode 7: Newbie Dash

In five words: Nickname ruins Rainbow Dash’s dreams.

Premise: Rainbow Dash has finally gotten into the Wonderbolts, but at the cost of regaining her old embarrassing nickname: Rainbow Crash. She is not happy about it.

Detailed run-through:

This episode starts with Rainbow Dash flying over Ponyville, with everyone’s favorite middle-finger-shaped castle in the background. The shape of the castle is clearly meant to indicate how Rainbow Dash will feel when she gets her new nickname, making this one of the cleverest pieces of obviously completely intentional foreshadowing the show has yet done.

Rainbow Dash has a little chat with Scootaloo about her supposedly small role in the Wonderbolts’ next performance, but then three of the Wonderbolts come in so that Spitfire can drop the news: Rainbow Dash isn’t just a reserve, but now will be flying with the Wonderbolts full-time. Scootaloo’s reaction is how Rainbow Dash would have reacted to this news back in season 1, while Rainbow Dash has the face of someone who was just told that something they have waited years for has finally happened.

Then Rainbow Dash’s face turns into that of someone who has processed that something they have waited years for has finally happened. Surely nothing will go drastically wrong on her first day, right?

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