As rationales go, you shouldn't allow first-year Gifted School students to have a project fair for the same reason you don't test dynamite by kicking it into the nearest wall. But since everypony else has moved on, the current school staff decided to show Celestia just how they were going to repeat the same old mistake. Because while this day may host ideas waiting for their time to come, that time is not now.
No matter how much anypony wants it to be.
Read it here
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Tropes include:
- Ambiguous Innocence: The fact that foals may be innocent, but that also means they don't understand why doing something might be bad, is one of the reasons why project fairs have been repeatedly banned from the Gifted School's curriculum.
- Awesome, but Impractical: A Black Comedy version; one of the students seen at the project fair has decided it'd be easier to invent a spell to turn off the sun than to just move their bed so the morning sun through the window doesn't get in their eyes.
- Can't Believe I Said That: "I'm impressing it onto the palace staff. This is now a Royal Frog."Inner Monologue: I've been alive for more than twelve hundred years. I'm almost completely sure that's the stupidest thing I've ever said.
- Composite Character: Downplayed, but Sunset Shimmer is introduced using mirrors as a focus not for her canonical dimension-traveling magic, but for time-traveling magic, similar to Starlight Glimmer.
- Creepy Child: Two of the foals seen demonstrating their projects include a foal who wants to snuff out the sun because it shines in his eyes through the window early in the morning, and another who invented the "turn a frog into an orange" spell. These two foals singlehandedly convince Celestia that the Gifted School needs both mandatory ethics classes and an ethics-based screening for recruits.
- It Only Works Once: In the Continuum, every unicorn has a trick, a personal spell that is the fundamental expression of their inner self and which they simply know how to cast without having to be taught. It will be reliable, controllable, often fully understood from the moment of casting, and is usually one of the first true spells the young unicorn learns. Unfortunately, just as you only have one inner self, so you only have one trick: no other spell will ever come with that same effortless ease.
- Irony: Sunset Shimmer, the one filly who Ms. Newmaths very specifically did not want to be part of the project fair, to the point of checking to make sure that she wasn't in the room before bringing Celestia in, turns out to be a magical prodigy and the only one to come up with an actual novel, interesting, and most of all functional spell.
- Stuff Blowing Up: The major reason why project fairs are considered a bad idea, and have been repeatedly banned over and over again across centuries of the Gifted School's operation; they sound like a good idea on paper, but in practice, a bunch of powerful young unicorn foals trying to craft theoretical magic based on childish logic tends to just lead to a lot of property damage.
- Take That!: The "turn a frog into an orange" spell from canon makes its in-universe debut here... and Celestia thinks it's the stupidest, most pointless and ethically questionable spell she's ever seen, repeatedly asking its inventor why he came up with the spell and what purpose it could possibly serve. That his answer is For the Lulz cements it in Celestia's mind that the Gifted School needs to incorporate mandatory ethics classes/screening.
