YMMV / If Wishes Were Ponies

• Catharsis Factor: Most Harry Potter fans have an intense dislike for Dolores Umbridge and at least a mild dislike for Rita Skeeter. Thus, it's more than a little satisfying to see them both receive punishment here, even if they're caught much earlier:
  • Rita Skeeter attempts to sneak through the portal to Equestria to get some dirt on the "Atlanteans". She attempts this by transforming into a beetle and hiding on the head of a courier... and then finds herself turned into a slime-green unicorn when she goes through. She's held prisoner in quarantine for several hours, is tricked by Twilight into admitting her schemes, and spends the rest of her career knowing that both Twilight and Dumbledore know about her status as an animagus and can tell the Ministry, meaning that she's essentially under their thumbs unless she confesses to being an illegal animagus.
  • Dolores Umbridge scares Minister Fudge into attempting to capture Prime Minister John Major and Prince Blueblood. Her reason is solely her belief that wizards are superior to Muggles, and humans superior to everything else. The existence of non-human creatures that can do things even the best wizards can't and want to be seen/treated as equals irks her to no end. Fortunately, the Equestrians had helped the humans create anti-magic defenses in all of their official buildings, and the only thing their mission accomplishes is their being captured by the Muggles and getting a poetic "The Reason You Suck" Speech from Prince Blueblood (who, top it all off, sounds bored the whole time). The only reason she isn't immediately imprisoned (along with Minister Fudge) is because the three cooler heads in the room realized that this incident would likely cause a war between the Muggles and wizards, the fallout of which wouldn't benefit anyone. She's then later outed as a half-blood pretending she's a pure-blood, which not only (due to laws she wrote) earns her a stay in Azkaban, but puts her political career into the toilet.
  • The Dursleys also get their comeuppance. After Harry and Twilight tell Lin Yueshi that the Dursleys abused Harry for eight years (and after he goes and more-or-less investigates them himself), he reports the Dursleys' abuse to the police. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley are arrested in front of all of their neighbors (ruining their reputation) and Dudley is taken away by Child Services. Dudley isn't seen again in the fic or its sequel, while Mr. Dursley and Mrs. Dursley are both sentenced to several years in prison.
• Heartwarming: Harry's arc as a whole. Twilight, her friends, and the CMC do everything they can to help Harry recover from the abuse he suffered from the Dursleys, and the fic shows how he slowly but surely starts to open up and become more trusting, as well as channel his fears of strangers and distrust of adults into protectiveness of his friends and family. Twilight's adoption of him also counts; the chapter where Twilight officially adopts him is easily one of the happiest chapters in the fic.
• Moment of Awesome: Several characters get these throughout the fic:
  • Twilight dressing down the wizarding community (usually Dumbledore) again and again for their bias, their lack of common sense, their failure to protect children, etc, etc. Plus, she kicks the absolute crap out of Quirrell at the end of the school year by hitting him with everything she's got. Do NOT hurt her son.
  • Twilight deconstructing the defenses for the Philosopher's Stone, using her magic to disarm several of them (even walking through walls at several points), pointing several of their flaws (such as the light-repelled Man-Eating Plant being in a dark room, where the first thing a wizard would do is to produce light), and installing a few upgrades.
  • The Equestrians managing to take out the Basilisk with a combination of magic, melee combat, and careful planning. While we don't get to see Luna deliver the coup de grace, we do see the aftermath; the Basilisk shrunk down to the size of a the size of a garden snake and trapped in a forcefield to be delivered to Tartarus.
  • Scootaloo, instead of Harry, is the one to stand up to Draco when he steals Neville's Remembrall, gets him busted for flying without a teacher's permission (which gets him suspended for two days) and gets away with it because, as a pegasus, she didn't need a broom to fly and thus didn't break any rules.
  • Castor Searle (a Badass Normal and Papa Wolf to boot) utterly tears down any remaining bias Dumbledore has about muggles by revealing just how much they've learned about the wizarding world in the last few months, including the exact location of several important wizarding locations and the fact that their weapons and war tactics could cripple the wizarding world in seconds, with or without magic.
• Tear Jerker: The abuse Harry suffered at the hands of the Dursleys left some pretty noticeable scars (and not just the physical kind). He's been starved to the point that it's obvious to Princess Celestia when she first meets him, and the scars over where a Cutie Mark would otherwise be (scars most likely left as an extension of his trademark scar, given that they have the same distinctive shape) horrify every pony who sees them (to the point that he had Rarity teach him illusion magic so he could hide his not-Cutie Mark). The psychological trauma of being abused, however, is most obvious. When Pinkie Pie first meets him, she gets in his face, shouts about how happy she is to see him and thrusts out a hoof for a hoof-shake. Harry panics, getting on the floor, shouting that he's sorry, and hiding behind a couch until Fluttershy can coax him out.