Talk:Not Asking for Trouble/@comment-3292369-20170523195928

Pinkie Pie was very cute this episode, especially with her interactions with gummy and trying to act like a yak. The yak children were also cute, but their voices were kinda offputting, more on that in a bit. I also totally called the moral the yaks were going to get from the goat story the moment it started, what good for goat not good for yak!

Still, I had some problems with the premise and execution. I remember people complaining a lot about Over a Barrel being racist (that was actually my favorite episode of the season), but this episode was far worse in that regards. By reducing the conflict to the yaks needing help from ponies to get through what should be a fairly normal occurance in their climate, it makes yaks come across as inherently inferior to ponies, it's an old racist trope that justified colonization. Aside from various stereotypical things about yak culture, the other thing that bothered me was the when the yak children talked to each other, they were speaking broken pony. Realistically, children would talk to each other in their native language, so if they were speaking pony it implies that it is their native lanaguage, and they are just stupid savages rather than speaking it oddly because it's not their native language. That bit could have been fixed just by having Pinkie Pie directly speak with the children rather than just eavesdrop, and that's still realistic enough as children are much more willing to speak about things adults are too proud to discuss. Don't know how they could have fixed the general premise of the episode though without coming falling into the racist trope, best thing to do now is to just keeping using the yaks in the future and establish that their relationship is more mutual.