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  • Alternate Aesop Interpretation: While the official moral is "Stealing is wrong", the general consensus is that a much stronger (and less blatantly obvious) one is "think about the consequences before you act." Granted, the second one does come up in the same letter, but it's still a little awkward.
  • Ass Pull: Pinkie's use of the potion that enhances a pony's special talent enables her to travel through dimensions, despite the fact that Pinkie's special talent isn't the ability to alter reality, but throwing parties, or, more broadly, making other ponies happy. The sole possible explanation is that Pinkie Pie's fourth-wall-breaking gags were Flanderized into her defining trait.
  • Audience-Alienating Premise: The Crossover aspect is an interesting example, because it was kept a secret for as long as possible, meaning viewers who weren't interested in it didn't feel alienated until after they spent their time watching the episode. Especially since it was advertised solely as a My Little Pony fan-episode. Some people have not quite gotten over it to this very day.
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
    • In a way, most of the Townsville sequence. Really, after Pinkie retrieves Dash, no mention is made of the event's specifics and aside from Pinkie stealing Bloo, there is nothing else too out of the ordinary happening. RD could have gone anywhere and the results would have ended up the same.
    • The bit near the beginning when Twilight finishes the potion could also count; when she finishes it, it inexplicably bursts into a massive cloud of smoke with a trollface in it, which cackles before vanishing back into the potion. There's no explanation for why this happens, and neither Twilight nor Rainbow Dash comment on it.
    • The moments with the side characters during Dash's flight through Ponyville are amusing but they're never mentioned again, and most of them drag on for twice the length they should.
  • Broken Base:
    • Fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic either see this as a nice tribute to the show, its creator Lauren Faust, and her husband Craig McCracken, or are disappointed that for a fan made project that was supposed to be "accurate to the show", it ended up having a poorly paced plot that's similar to fanfiction and littered with cultural references and memes. The fact that the crossover aspect was a completely unexpected plot twist also didn't help.
    • The crossover parts in general. Loving tribute to Lauren Faust and to Craig McCracken? Or unnecessary waste of time that wasn't accurate to what the show would do?
  • Fanon:
    • Some fans felt the use of the Fanon idea of Pinkie Pie's reality warping went against the concept of staying true to the show.
    • People have also criticized the Scootachicken joke, as it came without context, is focused on too long to be a Funny Background Event, and ultimately is a huge non-sequitur for anyone who doesn't understand the joke—exactly how not to handle a reference.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: The whole sequence where Rainbow Dash floats through the void from The Hub universes to the Cartoon Network universes is this now that The Hub was cut short when Discovery Inc. wanted one of their channels back, especially because a lot of the shows used to represent The Hub universes ended up being Cut Short because of it...
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • The episode had been in production for quite a while when the Rainbow Dash Micro-Series comic came out. The comic also features a Double Rainboom, which damages Rainbow's wings. The comic only came out a few weeks before the episode premiered.
    • Ironically the officially licensed comic even went for the "Double Rainbow" meme, which the Reference Overdosed fan episode avoided (or at least downplayed).
  • Nightmare Fuel: The destruction of Ponyville. It feels genuinely devastating and there are barely any jokes to lighten the mood. You're almost glad it's not treated as such a big deal when Rainbow gets back.
  • Padding: If you felt that the pacing was off, it was because the episode was an animation project for an art school, and one of the requirements was a 30-minute running time, which means they were forced to add eight minutes of padded scenes and filler to the 22-minute script.
    • The Derpy cutaway scene is far too long, completely destroying the momentum of the scene.
    • The opening shot of the episode is a solid 30 second long of Twilight mixing potion ingredients while making random facial expressions. It goes on for so long that it starts to feel like an Overly Long Gag, except there's no gag. It's just Twilight sitting and mixing ingredients. The reason for this is it was originally a promo to show off their production values, which they then just decided to leave in the episode unaltered.
  • Pandering to the Base: Fans who didn’t like the episode accused Zackery Rich of focusing too much on many of its references to the shows memes, running gags and fanon interpretations.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • The entire fanbase is built on interesting plots, unanswered questions, and giving spotlight to background ponies. This fanmade episode does not in any way take advantage of this.
    • Rainbow Dash accidentally obliterates Ponyville! Characters are shown weeping over the wreckage and it is most certainly not played for laughs. This only exists as a reason for Rainbow Dash to get a punishment for stealing, and Twilight seems greatly irritated, more than anything (she's seen one of her friends inadvertently level the town more than once before, after all).
    • Not to mention that some people who liked The Powerpuff Girls section felt that the crew should have just made the episode a straight PPG/MLP crossover from the get-go rather than wasting the PPG material on a handful of gags with little plot relevance.

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