Talk:Sleepless in Ponyville/@comment-27578467-20180309081001

I realize I've yaked on about this episode a lot recently but I just wanted to point out how distinctly effective Scootaloo's character flaws are. In many episodes there's a sort of 'deus ex machina'-style resolution, where the climactic reversal involves something that would probably not be plausibly that effective in real life. I think this is much more egregious in season 6-7 because the writers are often trying to be much more specific about a moral lesson and therefore play the resolution straight-faced even when it's grossly exaggerated (the subject of my blog post on Spice Up Your Life, third paragraph after the picture). The reason why I'm alright with it in many other episodes is because the focus is more on a silly story, and so the conflict is just as silly as the reversal that resolves it.

In this episode, there is a sort of 'magical' element in the reversal in that Luna is able to get Scootaloo to identify her fear in her dream and then remind her of it later, but here's what I like - when Scootaloo wakes up after her dream, her main concern is the headless horse, NOT disappointing Rainbow Dash. That to me is solidly realistic. It's true that in her dream she specifically identified appearing scared in front of RD more than being chased by the headless horse, but much like in real life, because the emotions we reach in dreams are disconnected from logical connectivity they usually don't directly carry over into real life upon waking. The somewhat deus ex machina dream was not the moment of reversal, and the writers rely on the audience to understand that; otherwise Scootaloo would then and there stop being afraid of the headless horse and instead confess to RD. But she doesn't - she acts as her character has been established to do without any magical intervention, and only when circumstances naturally create a situation where she has to explain herself, headless horse threat removed, does she resovle the conflict - a very real one - with a small reminder from Luna.