YMMV / My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S4 E20 "For Whom the Sweetie Bell Toils"

• Accidental Aesop: In addition to the lesson of how spite and jealously can drive one to do terrible things, Sweetie Belle also demonstrates how one can become so emotionally invested in their own work that they might fail to see its flaws and shortcomings.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Sweetie Belle has a nightmare about Rarity shutting herself off from the world because of her critics. Three seasons later, it comes true.
  • Luna admits to occasional moments of resentment because Celestia glows so brightly. Come Season 7, it becomes enough of an issue to require outside intervention.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Although the episode was written and storyboarded a year prior to its release, it amusingly aired right after a real pop star released a music video with a boatload of ancient Egyptian glitz.
  • Sweetie Belle wrote, produced, and starred in her own play which otherwise came off awfully bad, not unlike a certain filmmaker.
  • The show would do another parody of A Christmas Carol two seasons later.
• I Knew It!: Most fans correctly assumed that Luna was going to make a parallel between her feelings of jealousy towards Celestia to Sweetie Belle's situation.
• Moe: Sweetie Belle's five-year-old self is so tooth-rottingly cute it has to be seen to be believed.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • While it would have been satisfying to see part of Sapphire Shores' concert, it would have distracted from the episode's moral.
  • After Luna's allusion to her jealousy of Celestia (and depending on how you read into it, the implication she still is sometimes) you would expect that to be addressed more, but it would have taken up time spent on the main plot.
  • We don't get to see most of Sweetie's play either, but considering what little we did manage to see, it probably was for the best. At least the costumes were great.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The animators completely go for broke throughout the entire dream sequence.
• The Woobie:
  • Sweetie Belle. She starts as a Jerkass Woobie for thinking her sister was trying to steal her spotlight since her fifth birthday, (assuming she's around 8 to 12) half of her life! Then she realized Rarity was trying to help her and she was about to ruin her for it!
  • Rarity as well. All she wanted to do was help her little sister with her performance (and went well out her way to do so), only for it to get thrown back in her face.

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