My Little Pony - Twilight's Kingdom - Part 1 - 4x25

Ok, what can I say here that you haven't when it comes to Twilight's predicament here and how it hits home? During the song especially. It feels like I could say every word Twilight sang (except of course for the ones about being a princess 😅 --- though I could translate that to refer to my current station in life), and the Princesses' words are the kind of encouragement I'd receive. This certainly fits in next to Season 5 for the kind of emotional impact delivered. 😌 Btw (this is on the next ep) that was frustrating when you stopped at the moment of Discord's apology and you went on that "sorry isn't enough" tirade. Like, dude? You couldn't even wait and give him a chance to do more than that at the time? 😲

I always liked the double-episodes with their "more threatening"-plot. But this one I like especially, because it had some build-up. Unlike the others where it was "here is a new problem out of the blue, go and deal with it". We learned about the tree of harmony and the chest in the beginning of the season. We saw Tirek at the end of episode 3, hinting that there would be a "bigger villain" later on. And of course we had the whole "side-quests" with everyone of them having their "meaningful moment" where they would acquire their keys. We even had a episode with Discord showing how he slowly tries to become their friend, but still has his mischievous and chaotic nature.

I think this is the first time the show addresses the fact that there are other sentient creatures from other lands outside of Equestria. We have already seen Griffins, Dragons and Changelings but all of them have their territory within Equestria's borders. We see clearly here that Tirek is some kind of Centaur, but his brother Scorpang looks like a Bipedal Manticore. Unfortunately the more detailed information about the kingdom they come from it's located in the Cómics.... But it is really interesting stuff nonetheless.

Julio Castillo

This episode addressed a few things I thought were neat. First that pegasi do fly through magic, and that earth ponies also have their own magics. Something that's discussed in a few places is that plants actually don't grow if earth ponies don't nourish them. That's why in the 1st seasons they make reference to how scary the Everfree Forest is and one of the lines is "And the plants grow on their own!" For Discord, there's a scene in Legends of Tomorrow that this reminds me of. Basically timehopping group of superheroes, and one of the characters is a very slowly reforming villain/thief character. And throughout the series, like most of the ponies do with Discord, the characters are all constantly watching him, talking down to him, and making sure he's aware that they're not letting him get away with anything. So later on in the series he betrays them and one of the characters exclaims something along the lines of "After we took him in and trusted him and made him one of us how could he betray us!?" And another character responds "Well...did we really? I mean we've always kept him at a distance and never really did trust him...is it surprising he didn't feel like one of us?"

Lord451