The Doctor wrote:Given that the movie is pretty assuredly going to be a big action adventure piece, a more mellow tone this season, assuming this is the last season before the movie, would work well.
And it's fine by me. I think them one-upping themselves for threats to Equestria resulted in too many style over substance stories. This episode was a nice mix of having a threat, while not being over the top with it.
Didn't retcon that much, since it was a minor tale (in the grand scheme of things) 50 years prior to LotR. Closer to 80 years if you take into account that in the book has something like 30 years pass between when Bilbo leaves The Shire and when Frodo sets out himself. Basically just made the Necromancer Sauron and the Ring a big deal.
Considering that the title of the series is The
Lord of the
Rings, changing the nature of the Ring (and the riddle game around it in the bowels of the Misty Mountains, and thus Gollum, a character as crucial as Frodo to the narrative) and the nature of the Necromancer seems to be rather substantial. Tolkien was an amazing author with a staggering creation, but Middle-earth did not spring fully formed from his head (e.g., IIRC, he had no idea who this Strider fellow was, when the hobbits encountered him in Bree). Tolkien needed what was to become LotR to be about hobbits by the publisher's request, hence the second and third editions of The Hobbit. I can’t recommend sloughing through the History of Middle-earth (Christopher Tolkien must at this stage have published every scrap of paper his father ever wrote) for anyone but the highly dedicated fan, but
a lot of world building and back story was created ad-hoc as he went along with writing LotR. (And there is nothing wrong with that—if there are inconsistencies, we can just blame the compilers of
The Red Book of Westmarch for having imperfect source material).
The easiest way to handle to the inconsistencies of the MLP:FiM oeuvre would be a hierarchy of canon: The show, (the eventual movie), the books, the comic books, and the tweets and posts by the various authors and creators. As well as recognising that Equestria is a multivalent world with more than one truth:
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”, or possibly more current,
“It’s just a show; I should really just relax”. The character arcs are the important ones, whether the ponies change and mature over time in a believable fashion; I’ll let the fimfiction authors worry about the exact nature of the backstory for everything, accepting that props and backdrops are parts of stagecraft that serve to tell a story, even if I can sometimes tell they are made of paint and plaster.