Queen Haven arrives for Zephyr Heights Royal Princess Portrait Day, and Zipp looks for any excuse to get out of it.
Tropes:
- Bland-Name Product: There's plenty of references of real-world smartphone apps: Dewdrop (AirDrop), Clip Trot (TikTok), Ponygram (Instagram), and Feedbag (Facebook, presumably, but Pipp made that one up).
- Brick Joke: After the sisters reconcile, Zipp playfully brings up Pipp's "Feedbag" statement.
- Brief Accent Imitation: Zipp asks Sunny how good an imitation of her she can do. Sunny's rendition isn't exactly convincing.Sunny: Uh... [lowers voice] Is that a mystery over there?! Cool, cool!
- Call-Back: Sunny bombards the sisters with questions about Portrait Day, just as she did during their first encounters with them during A New Generation.
- Cell Phones Are Useless: There's no signal in the cave once the entrance has been collapsed. Pipp eventually gets a bar when they find a hole in the ceiling.
- Chekhov's Gun: The "Portrait Day song" Pipp mentions early on is sung by the sisters when they reconcile.
- Comically Missing the Point: When the sisters arrive in Zephyr Heights, covered in seaweed from the cave, Queen Haven initially thinks they were out getting seaweed wraps.
- Companion Cube: Pipp refers to her phone as her "bestie".
- Full-Name Ultimatum: Zipp gets a dose of this twice during the episode — first from Pipp, then from Haven — to emphasize the importance of Portrait Day. When Pipp does it, Zipp complains that only their mother calls her Zephyrina.
- Hold Your Hippogriffs: Zipp tells Pipp that she doesn't "care a salt lick" about her PonyGram posts.
- Jerkass Realization: After Pipp breaks down over the idea of missing Portrait Day, Zipp apologizes to her for being selfish.Zipp: I haven't been a very good older sister, huh?
- Last-Second Word Swap: When one of the fillies gives her a flower, Pipp asks how she knew she was looking for one. Zipp nudges her to keep quiet, so Pipp amends this to "follower".
- Lured into a Trap: Misty uses an ocean lily to lure Pipp and Zipp into a cave and then collapses the entrance to trap them.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: By the time they find the ocean lily, Pipp is in such a bad mood that she can't bring herself to take a picture for her social media.
- Schmuck Bait: Zipp gets a message from an unknown person with a picture of an ocean lily, and immediately sees it as an excuse to get out of Portrait Day, never once questioning the motive.
- Sequel Hook: Upon being informed of Misty's failure, Opaline states that it's time she intervened herself. As she says this, her reflection in her magic pool changes to Sunny in her alicorn form...
- Skewed Priorities: While Zipp is concerned about the warning message from Twilight Sparkle, Pipp is more worried about them looking bad in their portrait, and having it published in Pegasus Weekly.
- Viewers Are Goldfish: There's a flashback to Twilight's message in the previous episode when Zipp reminds Pipp and Sunny about it.
- We Need a Distraction: Sunny gets Queen Haven to sing to buy time for Pipp and Zipp.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Pipp is not pleased when she learns that Zipp lied about getting the ocean lily for the portrait, and just wanted an excuse to get out of the preparations.
