kefkafloyd wrote:Their hands are tied. If they could, they would say her parents are dead, but people above them say no, so you have to do it in whatever way possible. It's not rocket surgery.
I'm not saying I don't understand why they don't explicitly say why the parents are dead. And it's not like I'm completely rejecting the idea that the Parents are dead at all. That doesn't really make these episodes where we have ill-defined shifts in characterization any better though, because it's a matter of execution. It's an unfortunate situation, but it doesn't mean that the episodes are above criticism when the motivations are weak.
SoundMonkey44 wrote:it doesnt take a rocket scientist to see
AJ has done her best to make up for that aspect in her life be it taking care of the farm or taking care of Applebloom.
This is the part I disagree with, because it's pure speculation. Unless I missed something, we have never seen anything (barring arguably the Star scene but we already covered that) from AJ that implies she acts over protective to "make up" for anything. As we've seen it, She works hard because that's been her life and what she enjoys doing, and she's worried about AB because...I guess she's a normal sister.
I don't really care about whether AJ's parents are alive or dead, since as far as it's been presented this doesn't really matter to AJ's motivations. I care about actually getting a reason for why AJ acted more paranoid in this episode than in recent memory, not speculation. If the writers really intended it to be because of some hidden detail from last season which wasn't clear, then it's simply a faulty writing mistake for something important to be hidden so. They can have whatever excuse, that's fine, but it doesn't make the episode any better.
ZamuelNow wrote:
A lot of my argument, and the reason I mentioned cultural shift, is that I view it as non obscure and common knowledge
though it's fallen out of use. Was incredibly surprised by the number of people who
didn't get it when AFR first aired. It was subtle...but that's simply being in good taste compared to the various "My parents are DEEEEAAD!!!" comments many, myself included, make at times.
You kind of answered yourself there. I think time's have changed from whatever that standard you were describing was, or at the very least I would not expect a supposedly big character motivation to be behind this kind of small detail for a kid's show. To put it in example, you could put that kind of scene in Aladdin and it would be fine because nothing in the original Aladdin was reliant on Al's feelings about his parents, but you'd need Al's monologues/feelings and the setup in Aladdin 3 because the whole movie is about Al and his father and requires more detail since it's so crucial.
And I don't think going super subtle as to be only in the background, if it's actually that crucial to AJ's motivations, is the only way to handle this in "good taste". Saying things explicitly isn't necessarily Bad Writing, you just have to not write it badly.
ZamuelNow wrote:But I don't see this as being as OOC as some complain considering some of AJ's past actions and reactions.
Like I said before, I don't completely disagree with this. I do think there is some precedent to AJ's behavior here, and I actually felt AJ was perfectly spot on for what she should've been in this episode.
However, even if I feel that way, it's still very clear that the recent trend of AJ's personality has been completely different from what we see here and the episode made no effort to explain why AJ was acting this way. If this episode came out in S1 or early S2, I wouldn't think much wrong, but it's definitely very late to be pushing this considering we have multiple season's worth of interactions of AJ/AB to go on.