Talk:Hurricane Fluttershy/@comment-74.12.16.111-20120326231422/@comment-68.46.218.162-20120329043613

@ Fire Eater

I'm not sure a better ending will fix an episode that has a number of other major issues in the writing. Pacing, for one, was handled rather poorly. In order to fill Mare-Do-Well with the quantity of gags and references that it possessed within a standard episode time frame, the plot had to move at a quicker pace. The Rainbow Dash fan club really didn't serve much of a purpose, as its only contribution to the episode was to emphasize that ponies think Rainbow Dash was great. And that detail was confirmed by her acts of heroism in act 1 after the title sequence.

Where the club stands it was just used for an opening gag, and to represent Rainbow's self-centered arrogance (she eavesdropped on her own fan club, and secretly provided contribution). Had the two scenes been switched (rescue first, fan club later), it would have made considerably more sense: already puffed up by crowds cheering her, her eavesdropping would have been more justified, and her transition from brash and boastful to straight-up arrogant egotist would have been more natural.

I believe if small edits like that could've been made, maybe when Mare-Do-Well was finally introduced, the other mane 5 wouldn't had come off as “riding a high horse” with their “obviously superior morals”. Maybe even do away with the Darkwing Duck reference entirely. Have the mane 5 be heroic as themselves; like the above poster suggested, why have ponies like Applejack hide behind a mask when she already has such a high disposition in the public eye of Ponyville? That would've made the episode stronger, and the cop-out ending would've been avoided by allowing more time for plot development.

Putting Your Hoof Down, I believe, suffers the same rushed plot that didn't allot the right amount of time for development. (And yes, I agree that Rarity and Pinkie were the best pairings for Fluttershy in that episode, but I could go on another spiel as to why they were undermined and how the episode distracted itself from its objective and ended up with the episode only reaching half potential.)