Sorry to everyone who expected this followup earlier! Let's not waste anymore time; join us below the break for
When she was a little filly, Pinkie's father strapped two giant wheels to his daughters' legs. For 2X years, Pinkie's life was filled with high-octane cupcake frosting and unreachable itches on her back. She comes to win Twisted Metal and become the party van incarnate of all Equestria.
Unfortunately for Pinkie, those were not item boxes. They were the Apples' last hope of an applebuck season ending in the black for once. Way to go, Pinkster.
I'm joking, how could you ever get mad at that :'D
How exactly did Pinkie learn about
It worries me a little that Equestria is the main exporter of "friendship" in the world of ponies. Granted, it's a badly-needed export at that, and it is hard to resist the product when its envoys are adorable, flower-scented ungulates who just want to curl up against your chest for a warm cuddle.
I'm not lonely what would ever make you say that
"Pinkie, do you even know how much paperwork goes into creating an official Equestrian ambassadorship? You gotta schedule all kinds of interviews, there's like five background checks, I'm pretty sure the laws still require a sacrifice ritual beneath the light of a blood moon--"
"And you like arranging all of those things, don't you?"
"Argh stop knowing me so well, just take this, f--- it--"
"Twilight, this thing has a pin and I'm not wearing any clothes."
"This is what you asked for okay, don't bleed on it."
The ribbon is actually a catheter port. With cardiac issues that inevitable from a daily diet of sugared sugar, everypony just decided this was better done ahead of time. (>inb4 cardiologists disputing carbohydrate intake with heart disease tho)
It didn't hit me until my second viewing that Gummy's perched right on the basket rail, thousands of feet above the ground. That is one rock solid reptile.
It did hit me on my first watching that taking an ectothermic critter beyond the frozen expanses of the Crystal Empire could have been less than the greatest of ideas, though...
I am always down for Argonaths in my ponies.
Nothing to say here, this is just good reaction image fodder.
The last time I remember seeing Pinkie's floaty trot animation here was when she was wishing ponies "happy birthday" way back in "A Friend in Deed." It's nice to see that coming back here.
I'm not sure how destroying perfectly good logs and pillars with facial battery fits into the yak ethos, because such things are perfectly good, ya dig me?
Never mind, I know I dig for these things a lot.
Where exactly did the proud, isolationist kingdom of yaks learn to be such jive turkeys with that kinda groovy 2014 language, anyhow?
... my suspicions float over to a certain pink pony in particular, actually. If you accept the premise that Prince Rutherford and Pinkie Pie are bona-fide pen pals, this is actually kind of cute.
"Pink Pony exposit to silent lizard, no dismiss as crazy. Yaks wait with respect until finished. Yaks understand."
The obvious joke to make here is how these same mud huts remained standing after those avalanches knocked out the city. Strains the limits of credibility, don'tcha think?
Presented without comment.
Pinkie's really loaded up on great faces this episode, and it was to my great sorrow that I couldn't include them all in here. Look how proud she is! Pinkie's amazing. I must protect her.
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You know Pinkie has this on macro.
Something I feel the show misses every now and then is how perceptive Pinkie can be in the moment -- it's really easy when she's not the focal character of an episode (or even when she's the antagonist) for her to switch on the "super crazy hyper comic relief" mode as an excuse for not doing anything interesting.
It's never really confirmed that Rutherford is completely out of his depth with the avalanche covering his city, but there's enough stammering and blustering to better frame the end of this episode for me. More on that later.
I can't find it, and it saddens me, but we ran an analysis video on this website a while back that posited that the magic of earth ponies lies in prehensile hair.
... True, we've seen Pinkie do all sorts of outrageous manipulations with her mane before, but I still think this is worth bringing up.
Could you launch into a complex and nuanced exploration of the metaphorical importance of yak horns made of snow, and how you introduce a beautiful irony through their ephemeral nature?
Yes.
If you'll remember the time Sugar Belle invented snow pies back in "The Cutie Map, Part II", I think she and Pinkie could have a very, very bad culinary venture between the two of them.
I'm guessing Sugar Belle is preoccupied with keeping apple seeds out of her newest creations anyhow.
Ponk continues making great faces any time she has to eat things that aren't tasty.
"Hm, 'Snow Music'. I like it."
The yak dialect is actually a fairly developed version of Equestrian doublespeak. Soon all yak will yak, and will mean yak.
I will probably never get over this bond, to be honest. We know Gummy's inner life to be deeply introspective, presumably with a great deal of loyalty to this eccentric pink horse who gives him all her love unconditionally. He was really the first Maud of the show, wasn't he.
Something about an unassuming yak casually chowing down on the fire warranted its inclusion in this followup. I was amused!
Sand-wiches.
God's sake, Pinkie, stop smiling, I can't be furious with your puns if you're gonna put on that face.
Even Pinkie's parable relied on "cow magic" to dig the goats out of their sand-covered hell. Let's skip the usual "unicorns are OP" discussion, because right now there these scribbles are good and pure and I would like to be friends with these creatures
I'm almost certain to describe my enemies as "weak and horrible" from now on. I'm really not sure how that latter word just makes the insult. Maybe it's that you only see "horrible" used as a judgment of moral absence in someone, never as an assessment of physical prowess (or a lack thereof).
And now we get back to perceptive!Pinkie. Rutherford's grown more confident in his bluster when it comes to dealing with the avalanche without pony help, which made it all the more satisfying when Pinkie began poking holes in his parable. Granted, the moment we saw this side of her back in "Rock Solid Friendship", the episode wouldn't have carried on much further because Pinkie backing off would've allowed Maud and Starlight to bond more quickly. I'm not arguing that she should have been aware of the pressure she was putting on her sister to befriend someone from Ponyville -- it was more that she was so over-the-top about it all that she felt like a different character from the one we see here.
And a small sub-lesson in the episode: direct, rational reasoning will get you nowhere with some people.
Twenty million questions? Assuming she pelted them out at a rate of one per second, she would have needed two hundred thirty-one and a half days before she touched down in Ponyville! Wow! If someone has a better QPS estimate for her, let me know, because I'm frankly impressed with her interrogative arsenal.
I really have to hand it to DHX for how well they handled yak expressions while largely denied one of their most important assets: eyes. You have mostly static head-shapes and bulky bodies. You could interpret the slight frowns and sagging heads as being mildly upset with Rutherford's bull-headed DIY ethic, but perhaps one feels soul-crushing despair, while the other is holding back barely-checked, incandescent rage. There's a lot to read in these kinds of things, I guess.
Scrunchy face.
There's lots of good two-pony shots in this episode, too -- Pinkie rushing past Dash at the beginning, Fluttershy helping Applejack clean up in Pinkie's wake, and now Rainbow Dash casually grinning at Rarity's high-fashioned fantasies. I reiterate that these two were fantastic together in "Rarity Investigates!" and I for one wouldn't mind more episodes focused on them together.
I do wish that Rainbow would give the "awesome" schtick a rest at this point, though. She has no one left to prove that to, much less to Pinkie.
Unfortunately for Pinkie, this ain't Pismo Beach.
"On second thought, bucking a literal ton of snow on my head may not have been the brightest of ideas."
It's a good thing Rarity is always on hoof to clean AJ up, just as she did in "It's About Time" when they came back from the Everfree Forest.
Will ya look at that? Since the events of "Magic Duel", Twilight has indeed learned how to make plants grow with magic.
Of course, you could probably argue that what she was trying to do then was speed the passage of time as experienced by a flower bud instead of inducing it to grow artificially. There's a discussion to be had there.
So suddenly the moral becomes that you should help someone even if they aren't asking for help, and it's weird given that Rutherford admits no wrongdoing in rebuffing Pinkie's assistance, right? To be honest, I think it's less Rutherford speaking for yak culture as it is him still trying to save face. Given his initial bewilderment in the moments after the avalanche, he's more glad that Pinkie pulled through for him without him needing to ask for her help.
Which still feels kind of strange, in retrospect. I'm a cider and a half deep at this point; I'm clearly overanalyzing this.
I'm only left to wonder where they got those yak horns for Pinkie from, anyway. Those probably belong to someyak's grandfather. Macabre.
Also pictured: the fleeting regret of finding oneself in for a brain massage against the walls of her skull.
I wanna finish up by saying that even after the Princess roller-coaster of "A Royal Problem", this episode held its own just fine and definitely deserves another watch. This is the kind of Pinkie I find ideal -- still full of bubbly, manic energy, but not to the extent that it precludes any kind of critical thinking on her part. We've seen the analytical side of her with her friendship files and statistical surveys, and I'm really hoping future writers can tap into this side of Pinkie more.
Thank you for reading. CouchCrusader, out.
