Foxfyre wrote:Well, part of the point of, like, the whole series is how great friendship really can be. Yeah it's unrealistic that so many characters would put in the effort to help her, but that's the entire point of that scene - that Dashie may think she's stupid and worthless, but she still has
so many ponies willing to help her.
And yeah, Dashie's real problem is how poorly she handles failure - but from the way she acts, I see a lot of the same stuff I have to deal with due to depression. Brushing aside how uncomfortable it is for me to see this written off as 'she has issues', it's not unreasonable to connect her aversion to education with her belief that, because she learns different, she's stupid. Yes, that habit needs to be broken, but Rainbow Dash has twelve hours to study for the test and she thinks she's the most worthless pony in the world. The real problem is that she hates herself for not doing something she's not even good at, and while educating her is obviously an important goal, helping her realize there's
some way for her to learn is the real victory.
It's like that saying, 'if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it's stupid'. Maybe she's gonna have other battles to fight later on and she won't be equipped for it, but she's not going anywhere if she doesn't realize that she can still win
something.
I mean, if we're looking at this from the perspective of her being a student, it'd be more realistic for her to get an imperfect score, yeah, sure. But if we're looking at this from the perspective of her having a history of beating herself up, it's something she really needed. The point of this episode is to hit Dashie's low self-esteem with a mental Sonic Rainboom, nowhere near as flashy but with the same feeling of 'oh gosh oh gosh I am actually this good I literally can't believe it'.
Maybe I'm just too sensitive about this, because I spent a lot of my senior year of high school struggling with depression while trying to keep my grades up, and 'barely passing' meant I'd just hate myself more for cutting it so close, so I'm projecting quite a bit onto Rainbow Dash. I just don't think that this pushing-down 'realism' is necessary when the conflict is already about Rainbow Dash pushing herself down.
Ah, first off I want to say I didn't mean to offend with the 'issues' comment, that was a bit of poorly thought out flippancy and I apologize. As I mentioned I've been struggling as well recently so I can relate although my problem was that I found success easy and never really learned how to
strive for it, and here that coloured my perception and I didn't consider things from the perspective of someone who has always had difficulties.
I suppose to me, what I fear (as silly as that sounds when talking about an imaginary cartoon character) that Dash will learn the wrong lesson from this- that she won't use this as a boost to her real self-esteem, but instead as another protective wall in her bravado, if that makes sense. Filing it as a hollow "I'm even greater than I thought I was!", where it simply becomes another way for her to continue propping herself up while never truly learning to deal with failure. I think the question is in future situations like this, where she has to study, will Dash think "Now that I know I can study and learn on my own terms, I should be proactive about it so that I'm not in such a bad situation" or will she think "I'm awesome and can learn anything in no time flat, I'll just put off studying until the last day and get my friends to put on a show and then ace the test, it worked last time" and frankly her behaviour in previous episodes and similar situations makes me doubt her but I'd certainly love to be pleasantly surprised.
And to me it isn't really about "realistically pulling her down" but instead giving her a proper base that she (with the support of her friends) can build herself up. After reading your comment, specifically this line "barely passing' meant I'd just hate myself more for cutting it so close" I'll admit I was harsh there. I still don't like the getting perfect, not because it's not realistic or to punish Dash, but I think that it would be better for her, in the long run to have the incentive to continue putting forth the effort and striving to improve herself. Perhaps a solid 75% would be a nice compromise???
Honestly I think at this point something that would be good for Dash's mental health would be to, well, fail. In a controlled way over something not at all critically important but to still have her own Last Round-up type deal. I think that Last Roundup, along with Hurricane Fluttershy and Flight to the Finish are all follow-ups to Sonic Rainboom:
SR asks "what if you fear you aren't good enough" and answers "you are"
LR asks "what if you really aren't good enough" and says to take pride in your achievements, not fear your failures.
HF asks "what if your best is really quite crap" and says to not to define yourself against others but instead always try to better yourself for its own sake.
FttF asks "what if you straight up can't" and answers "don't define yourself by what you can't do, but instead by what you can".
These are all natural follow-throughs to SR, but despite being present for them, or actually teaching some of them, I don't think that Dash has really internalized these lessons herself...... although actually her gracious second place loss in the Games contradicts me. We'll see in S5, I think and here's hoping! I still think that Dash would be better off if she were to confront
real failure, or at least, not 100% pure best ever success- not what she fears failure to be, not something she can avoid, but just... to not be #1, to not be perfect, to feel what that's like and to realize she doesn't have to be, to be able to actually admit her flaws and be able to improve upon them because she wants to, not because she's in a critical situation where she needs a quick fix.
Wayoshi wrote:EPtothelimit - I suppose a good extrapolation of the worldbuilding of this episode, but it's just that - an extrapolation. I doubt AKR or anyone else on the team really cared about any of those implications. The point of the episode was its moral of learning methods, and it 100% delivered.
How are these two completely separate? In fact, I would say it could easily be causal - R.D. has trouble learning, so she avoids studying, leading to conflict and tangible failure that would lower self-esteem despite denial, like... flunking out of flight school. How many real students today end up really struggling because education systems are too uniform in their teaching method? You can't tell me that doesn't bleed over to careers.
This is probably a bit dark of me also, but my own extrapolation: R.D.'s weird style of learning perhaps contributing to her low self-confidence, as a big flaw of hers, while also leading to her excelling as a flyer, and also contributing to her laziness since she can do her weather job so fast? That's just beautiful in creating a well-rounded, organic character.
I agree on all counts here, just that, to me, TT123's resolution presented things purely as a "learning differently" thing, and that now Dash knows she learns through fly-by's everything is hunky dory. Maybe this will be the boost she needed to change things around, or maybe not. I'm totally willing to admit I'm being very pessimistic here, and in all likeliness yeah, this is a legitimate success and improvement for Dash, it's that Dash in this episode struck a chord with me and my own personal experiences say that this is just the start, and it's very easy to back-slide or find whole new pits to fall in.