Talk:Hearts and Hooves Day/@comment-98.122.179.166-20120219164813/@comment-4834734-20120225012715

To LYKA12345: I'll admit, it took me a while to sum up why I personally hate this episode, and to try to justify why it is the worst so far. After quite a bit of thought, though, I must admit that while I still hate this episode, it may not be the worst. I'll also admit that I may be being overly judgmental; normally I'm a cranky old fool...but I will say that I enjoy most of the MLP:FiM episodes. But I don't like this episode simply because I see it as nothing coming together to make it a good episode, and I think that's because, in my own personal opinion, this episode seemed lazy.

-The voice acting for two characters: Twilight Sparkle's entire dialogue seemed flat, and Sweetie Belle's was dull (like when she was explaining the romantic situation in the barn). -The animation was lacking in this episode (example: when Sweetie Belle pulled that feather out of Scootaloo's wing, and Scootaloo says "Hey," there's a noticeable period where there's no animation and no transition. That, honestly, was jarring to me, and though there weren't any other instances of that I can recall, there were other animation decisions I found odd). -That song: I'm not going to dock it anything for being childish, although there are some corny lines ("He might do/if he weren't so splashy?"). I fault it for a)throwaway-character mania (The old pony with a pipe? The “smelly” pony with a garbage can for a cutie mark? That Pony with a stepladder for a cutie mark, only meant to represent certain adjectives, such as 'short' and 'smelly'?) and b)For choosing Big Macintosh as the one to be after they searched through a bunch of others, and the way they sang about his entrance didn't make his possibility of being Cheerilee's special somepony didn't make it feel like Big Macintosh and Cheerilee could be together.

And I will admit that maybe that's what they were going for, that they weren't meant for each other, but...

-The ambiguity of the ending in relation to the moral of the story: And while I'm at it, -The moral of this episode: The moral of this episode was to not try and force wanted lovers together, and allow everybody(-pony) to choose their lovers for themselves. But this moral felt less connected to the episode and more of a tacked on lesson because there weren't any REAL consequences to their actions; the love poison produced the artificial crisis of being in a trance. Nothing really damaging came from this event—Cheerilee's and Big Macintosh's friendship probably wasn't endangered in any way—but it's even worse when these two hint at a relationship (as the comments here have shown, there isn't a clear-cut answer); what was the point of the episode then? Was it to allow people to take their time with relationships? If so, why didn't they just stick with that instead of going overboard with the love poison? I'm sure the CMC could've created just as much antics with their rushing relationships as they did with this plot point.

And on top of that, the characters were dull and the plot was disappointing to me. Overall, this seems to be the laziest out of all the episodes made yet. The plot didn't seem inspired, the characters were dull and uninteresting, and the moral was just crappy. Even the voice acting, singing and animation seemed lacking at times.

But these are just my opinions. These problems were too numerous and persistent to me for me to enjoy this episode at all. I still think it's one of, if not the, worst, and it's just my opinion. I will also admit that my opinions may be wrong, and I'm open to hear what I may or may not be missing. I fully respect your opinion of this episode.