Sunny organizes the first Equestria Games in Maretime Bay with each race competing against each other, but the competitors get a little too competitive and Sunny has trouble maintaining order.
Tropes:
- An Aesop:
- Being a leader is not an easy job. Especially when your team members have completely different personalities.
- Don't get too competitive while playing a game or things could get out of control. And Games are also not solely about winning but about working together and enjoying yourself.
- The Bus Came Back: Alphabittle makes his first speaking appearance after his brief cameo in Clip Trot. And the two unicorns from the Crystal Tea Room also make their first appearance after the movie.
- Competition Freak: ALL the ponies are this, particularly Zipp and Hitch.
- Dark Horse Victory: The beatnik unicorn wins the hoof race after Hitch, Pipp, and Sunny end up entangled in Hitch's magical vine.
- Disaster Dominoes: All the Pony teams for pretty much the whole episode.
- In the cold opening, they create a big mess when Hitch sets off lanterns and the unicorns' ribbon dance causes the pegasi to drop the balls they were preforming with, making them rain down on all the ponies.
- In a boat race, the pegasi team create a wind blast that knocks the unicorn team into the earth ponies and causes a big crash.
- Epic Fail: Every event in the episode is this, until the end.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: Sunny hopes that the Equestria Games will bring all the Pony kinds together. Unfortunately, with the Earth pony, Unicorn, and Pegasi teams fierce overly competitiveness combined with her inability to keep things keep the event in order, things spiral out of control in a boat race ends in epic disaster with them all arguing, which then causes their magic to glitch out. Sunny is left devastated that she only succeeded in driving the pony kinds apart, including her friends.Sunny: [horrified] This was supposed to unite us... [runs away]
- Hypocrite:
- During the hoof race, Hitch calls out Pipp for "flying against rules" and then proceeds to use his plant magic to tie her up, which is sabotage, thus cheating himself. Sunny even blows the whistle on him albeit with no affect.
- Later, he, Jazz, and Daliah use their magic to lift their boat out of the water to get ahead of the other pony teams, which is also cheating. Afterwards, he tries to use a Loophole Abuse to justify it.
- Never My Fault: After all the teams crash, Hitch, Zipp, and Izzy blame one another while not acknowledging that they all share the blame.
- No-Sell: Sunny tries to keep things in check by blowing the whistle every time anypony displays unsportsmanlike behavior. Unfortunately her whistle blows fall on deaf ears.
- Not So Above It All: Izzy, Hitch, Zipp, and Pipp, dispite their friendship, try to beat each other in all the events.
- Shout-Out:
- Sunny isn't the first pony to take on more then she can handle and disregard someone's offer to help.
- And the ponies teams over competitiveness is very similar to two certain ponies
who got too competitive and became bad sports as a result.
- Skewed Priorities: While Hitch, Zipp, and Izzy blame one other after the boat race crash and then worry after their magic glitches out, Pipp is too busy freaking out over being covered in seaweed.
