SoundMonkey44 wrote:Something I've been thinking about... Where do we go from here. I mean like others said, this felt like it could have easily been a series finale. Tirek felt pretty Final Bossish, Twilight now has her own castle & is oficcially the princess of friendship, her friends her royal council(?) so yeah...
I mean one thing I can think of is since I believe she mentioned something about teaching other ponies about friendship, perhaps have Twy & co visit other kingdoms. Or maybe more villian reformations(?). I mean seems Twys already best her part of the game, anything else is just a bonus round.
Of course we still have the others. The CMC still don't have their marks, Dash still isn't quite a full fledged Wonderbolt, and I'm still personally guessing Discord will want to work to make up his betrayel to Fluttershy somehow. It would be nice to see Spike get abit of permenant physical growth...
So I mean yeah, there's still things to do of course, but the writers will need to be on there toes now more then ever if they wanna keep up the quality and have the changes in S4 mean something.
I can't even guess, but I trust that the writers will come up with entertaining things to do. They did S4 with many of the same open questions in play following MMC, and they did an admirable job of it—making the season feel as much like the S1 experience as I could wish for, while
at the same time not ignoring or downplaying the realities of Princess Twilight. Sure, it was uneven, but you try writing a 26-episode arc where the main character is supposed to retain her relatable charm
and progress toward a position of power and royal authority
and show reluctance to leave her old life behind
and embrace her responsibilities and destiny
and do stuff with the semi-reformed Discord
and move the other Mane 6 along their respective arcs
and at the same time sell toys and keep good balance between character focus episodes and teach a good variety of morals and tie in with storylines set up in previous seasons and sell toys and spread it across a whole team of writers many of whom are new and do it all in a consistent and smooth manner that never shifts in tone and most importantly,
have fun! 
So now they've reached another milestone, one that's even harder to do all this stuff with, but the challenge they're up against is nothing new. There will be many of the same questions and conflicting goals to deal with. But I think they set themselves a hugely high bar with all this shit in S4 and they sailed right over it. Just as much as S1 ran rings around what I was expecting a 2010 flash-animated
My Little Pony reboot to be, the same otherworldly set of standards among the staff that made S1 such a revelation have proven to be thoroughly up to the task of achieving success at something far higher in complexity and intrinsic difficulty.
The longer the show goes on, and the more they consciously write traps and restrictions around themselves by tying the existing narrative together to inform later stories and by setting big un-ignorable character goals and arcs like Princess Twilight, the harder it will be to pull it off, and surely sooner or later we'll find the limits of what this team can do. But they didn't
have to do what they did with S4. They could just as easily have ignored the arcs and progressions; they could have gone to episodic continuity like in S1 where no one episode ever has any material bearing on any other outside of fleeting little one-liners and where the biggest thing they had to work towards throughout the season was a fancy dress party; they could have reversed the Twilicorn mandate as unceremoniously as they've whipped off-stage the little toyetic variants like the Crystal Ponies and the Breezies and the Rainbowified designs. But they didn't do any of that—because they didn't have to. These people know what they're doing. And I think they
like a challenge. Again, not saying they're perfect at it. But c'mon, freaking DS9 was uneven too. And I'd argue that the challenges the pony team has willingly taken on are equally, if not more, impressive even if just to have met on the field of battle, let alone
won.