Talk:Twilight's Kingdom - Part 2/@comment-26973802-20140521025558/@comment-4531340-20140522171449

Argh, I had this awesome comment almost ready to go last night, before Firefox crashed and I lost it all. Oh well, time to try and remember however much of it I can:

Well, as Dogasu said in his epic writeup for "The Legend of Dratini" (that one Pokemon episode that was never dubbed/aired because of too much gunplay, presumably): "But you have to remember ... that the censors absolutely make distinctions between things that you and I wouldn't think twice about. There's a difference between actually firing a gun and simply pointing it at someone. A gun being held up close to someone and a gun being pointed at someone from far away are two different things, in the eyes of the censors.  A gun being on-screen for ten seconds might be OK, but fifteen seconds of screentime is taboo.  It's not uncommon to see rifles and bazookas allowed, but not handguns." Of course, he's talking about guns (for obvious reasons) but the same line of thinking can be applied to why that wasn't allowed, but the things you mentioned were. From what I know about Broadcast Standards and Practices logic, here's what I came up with:
 * The Plunderseed vine punching Rarity is okay because there is no plant in the real world that has the physical capability to punch someone, so it's purely fantasy violence (also, was Rarity punched in someplace other than the face or head? If so, that may have also factored into it)
 * The blasting Tirek in the face and smashing him into the ground are also fantasy violence; the blasting in the face is obvious because nobody has the capacity to shoot energy beams at one another (at least, not right now in this day and age). The smashing into the ground is a little harder, but if that smash left a crater and then Tirek crawled up, mostly unharmed (I'll admit my memory of the finale is just a little fuzzy), that is also pretty fantasy. Hell, even just the crater makes it fantasy; as I'm sure there's no one in the target audience for FiM that could pick up one of their friends and then throw them to the ground, let alone throw them so hard it leaves a crater.
 * Twilight punching Tirek in the face, on the other hand, is an action that would be easily imitable by the target audience of FiM; they could easily punch their friends/siblings/pets in the face, and then blame it on FiM. And I'm not saying that they necessarily would, just that they could. (Remember that kid who wanted to control sand like Gaara from Naruto, and so he had his friends bury his head in the sand [even though Gaara, at no point during Naruto, is ever depicted with his head buried in sand], leading to him suffocating?) I would assume that's the same rationale by putting those "Do not try this at home" warnings at the beginning and midpoint of each episode of MythBusters - so that if some "genius" does see the episode and decides to try what he or she sees at home, and ends up getting injured by it, then the people involved with that show aren't legally liable for it.