Re: S04E23: Inspiration Manifestation

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ShieldedDiamond
- Joined: Dec 13, 2013
Moderators: Perrydotto, Dexanth, Venusy, Wayoshi
Ragnar wrote:Claude was awesome. Spike walking off with an evil magic book like it was no biggie was pretty cool too, as was Twilight at the end.
I have a problem with this whole "making Rarity crazy" thing, though. This worked far, far better with Twilight because Twilight is a sane and practical individual for the most part, while Rarity is mostly a basket case anyway. I'm also not clear on how the magic actually affected her abilities, if it did at all. Did it make her more creative? Maybe it did literally nothing except remove her inhibitions and then give her a little boost in transformative magic.
I like dark magic as an idea, though. It's easy, it's potent, and it's always a bad idea. I like it when Equestria is dangerous.
Niels Olof wrote:Ah, one of my favorite albums (sadly, I won't get to see her in concert). Though cloudbusting was supported to make it rain rather than disperse the clouds...
WandereringPony wrote:Also, did anyone else notice:
Is that one of Twist's parents with her, like Filthy Rich was with Diamond Tiara? Also, hi Tag-A-Long!
Tears wrote:
The way I took it wasn't so much that the spell changed Rarity. Okay, I'm mis-speaking slightly and this is the last time I'm gonna caveat myself in this post because I wanna talk about the ideas the episode set up for me, so inaccuracies abound below. Non-canon.
So yeah, the spell clearly changed Rarity slightly, it made her ideas run away with herself (was the book explicitly black magic? I'm gonna ignore that for convenience' sake for now), so much as the capacity to just create, with none of the painstaking time and effort the process of creation takes, was what made her crazy.
Take a hugely creative person, and remove all the roadblocks on that creativity, so that she can just make things. No sketching, no stitching, just make make make make. Just conceptualise a thing, and it exists. And it's great on one level because she can make a whole season's outfits in ten minutes. But it's also a form of imprisonment, because everything else falls away in the wake of the ability to create. She doesn't sleep, she doesn't eat, there's nothing else other than the mania of untrammelled creative potential.
And it's not just dresses anymore, she suddenly has the power to remake anything to fit her ideas. Suddenly architecture's in play, food, people. Wouldn't it be great if the town hall was made of marble and vermillion lace? Done.
I guess if Spike hadn't nipped the whole thing in the bud she could have made the whole of Equestria into a gleaming mass of lethal fabulousness. The ground is solid gold! The trees are crystal! The ponies are starving! A whole jewelled world of dazzling splendour as inhabitable as the surface of Mars.
Maybe the spell channels the subject's creative drive into that kind of crazed myopia, but I feel like part of that's inherent to Rarity, that with the limitless capacity to create she loses the agency or desire to do anything else. Shakespeare starved and shivering in an endless labyrinth of manuscripts. The spell might trigger all that, but I feel like Rarity's own character drove her to that point as much as anything else. Not so much that the spell makes Rarity crazy, as the sudden removal on any constraints on her own abilities makes Rarity crazy, or both. If it's a Very Special Episode, it's about cocaine: everything is possible, and everything is a great idea.
SoundMonkey44 wrote:honestly it just...I dunno, I like it overall, but despite Dark Magic crazy Rarity, it feels, I dunno, a lot more generic then usual.![]()
Wayoshi wrote:Yep, pretty much this. There's not a lot of wow here, it's just "that's nice, I guess."
A disappointing season for Powell overall.
Fizzbuzz wrote:And this is why I hope for an episode featuring Rarity and Pinkie Pie in S5. Time and time again, we've seen that Rarity is almost as nutty as the pink one. She just keeps it hidden behind a sometimes-thin layer of class and grace.
Niels Olof wrote:
While I expect we'll never get the answer to these questions, the notion of spells that are activated as you read them is rather fraught. Do you have to read it aloud for it to be cast, or is just reading it enough?
Wayoshi wrote:Yeah, it's way too early to say on Powell. The only writers honestly we can have definite conclusions on are AKR, Meghan and Larson, IMO.
Fizzbuzz wrote:It didn't really feel hollow to me, but there are a couple of things to consider: One, I'm pretty sure I like Spike more than most people. Coming into this, I was particularly excited since this was the first time he and Rarity have done anything major since SoME and I wanted to see what they thought of each other nowadays, and this episode didn't disappoint. Two, even though I can't relate to Rarity quite as well as the others, I still felt a lot of sympathy for her here, despite knowing full well how overexaggerated her behavior was. I suppose she really does have a way of communicating her feelings, as it were.
Fizzbuzz wrote:I wanted to see what they thought of each other nowadays, and this episode didn't disappoint.
ThunderBunny wrote:Tabitha St. Germain manages to take a character that could be reeeaaally grating to me and uses her fantastic acting skills to transform that character into someone I truly feel for, even when I realize how ridiculous she is being. When Spike returned and Rarity had amassed a whole heap of empty ice cream cartons, I just thought it was so adorable and pathetically sad, despite being way over the top. Not that that specific gag is testament to Tabitha's voice acting skills, but rather that her interpretations of Rarity's dialogue sets me up to like everything about the character way more than I think I would if she was voiced by someone with less attention to nuance and sense of humor.
Wayoshi wrote:I'm not sure what was so new here.
In fact, I would say a shortcoming was that there was not much depth to this dynamic at all, instead it all came from Rarity vs. Ponyville and Spike vs. Owl-whatever.
Fizzbuzz wrote:Oh yeah, one other thing. I was disappointed that, once the spell was broken and Rarity was back to normal, it turned out she was possessed and she didn't remember anything of what she had done. I don't think she should've been totally absolved of responsibility for her acts today, as she apparently was.
Corpy wrote:The mariachi she turned into Octavia was a stallion
VoidChicken wrote:People were hoping for a resolution for Spike's crush on Rarity this episode, and I say we got it.
From the start of the series, we saw Spike having romantic feelings for her. As time passed, Rarity discovers them and, ahem, utilizes them from time to time. But eventually she makes it clear that she has no intention of reciprocating.
And in this episode we see that Spike has finally accepted that it's not to be, but they're still close friends who still care about each other.
That's a damn good lesson, four seasons in the making.
Star Platinum wrote:"I let you become Something Awful!"
Niels Olof wrote:Huh, that show never made it to my part of the world, but this must be the referenced scene:
<snip>
Seems a good deal funnier when Spike does it.
SlateSlabrock wrote:I thought the episode was fine, if not amazingly impressive, but if I had to complain about one thing, it'd be the background work. The animators typically throw a lot of unscripted detail into episodes, and some scenes in this one are very detailed, but there are also a lot of shots where the foreground was clearly the only part of the scene that got attention:
It makes me wonder if really busy episodes like last week's sucked up too much of their time, and this one had to be pared down to just the important visual elements to finish in time.
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