Couldn't find it on Netflix but I'm watching it as we speak, yeah.

...I was going to say that that's not the point but that actually is the point. Sparkles was right. The Cadence she despised was malevolent. The problem is that what she was right about had nothing to do with her original enmity. She didn't know or even think that Cadence was actually a sadistic shapeshifter. She thought that Cadence was a malevolent pony that wasn't right for Shining Armor and that's it.

She was accidentally right. She was coincidentally right.

She was right. But she didn't deserve to be right.

I may be going into vaguely defined semantics but being right is not becoming right. She was only right, not because she corrected her initial flawed conceptions or because she actually was right, but because the universe let her be right even when it had nothing to do with her original reasons for her enmity.

She drunkenly stumbled into rightness, not actually doing anything to be right but becoming right through the graces of the universe and not through her own pains to be right.

...In retrospect, Sparkles didn't really drunkenly stumble into rightness with Discord. She thought that Discord was trying to split her from her companions and she was right.

That really is odd.

Edited by fredhot16 on Nov 19th 2018 at 10:51:04 AM

The thing with "What About Discord" is that, while Twilight engages in more or less the same kind of possessive paranoia as she does is "A Canterlot Wedding", the episode treats is as just that — paranoid delusions without proper backing from reality. The focus of the episode is then on Twilight realizing she was overreacting, recognizing her own jealousy and growing past it instead of the story setting up a convoluted reveal to prove her right.

Then, at the end, it turns out that Discord was secretly manipulating everything to make Twilight be left out, which comes out of left field and just ends up working against everything the rest of the episode was doing. I don't really get that, honestly — if the point of the episode's moral was to have Twilight accept that she can be irrational and jealous and that she needs to get past that, why reward her for her original jealous ranting by proving it right? It's a really weird writing choice.

@Tobias. The actual scene where Starlight banishes Discord does make it look like Discord is intentionally needling her and pressing her buttons. Calling her an "incompetent, power hungry unicorn" and acting all Faux exasperated. Really, everything he did was an attempt to make her look bad, because he was operating under the logic that "Because you can't stop me, and because all this is happening under your watch, then you're a bad headmare." The fact that he's obviously the one being a dick doesn't matter to him. He's trying to prove that Star isn't competent enough to handle it.

That, and my feel of him coming back as a malevolent poltergeist just sort of proved how very little power Starlight had over him in the first place.

x4: There's a trope for that.

Edited by YamiVizziniX on Nov 20th 2018 at 9:17:07 AM

Post of the Day #2340

Posted by Crowfall on 20th Apr 2016 12:18:51 PM - Post #152409 in the new thread

He's intentionally needling her and pressing her buttons for the entire episode. It's literally all he's doing for the entire time he's onscreen.

What he does after the banishing is haunt and terrorize the students, reinforcing the reason for why she banished him. He never, at any point, plays his banishment for sympathy or to make her look bad. It's a stretch to say that he was trying to manipulate her in that scene into banishing him so that he could then win Sympathy Points by being a complete asshole as a ghost.

Discord was a shithead. Starlight banished him. Discord continued being shitty as a ghost until Starlight revoked his banishment. That is the sequence of events.

It doesn't, though? Because he's still having to be a poltergeist. He's acting within the boundaries of her spell, demonstrating that she actually does have power over him. Coming back as a malevolent poltergeist proves only that Discord is very creative and difficult to deal with even when you can match him blow for blow.

If the point was that Starlight is powerless to stop him, then Discord would have gone for a No-Sell. There is zero reason for him to permit her to banish him. It doesn't actually achieve any of the hypothetical rationales proposed for it.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 20th 2018 at 8:16:38 AM

The Cadence she despised was malevolent. The problem is that what she was right about had nothing to do with her original enmity. She didn't know or even think that Cadence was actually a sadistic shapeshifter. She thought that Cadence was a malevolent pony that wasn't right for Shining Armor and that's it.

But she wasn't "accidentally" or "coincidentally" right. Cadence was a malevolent pony who wasn't right for Shining Armor. Twilight suspected her because she saw her being malevolent. The fact that Twilight didn't deduce the exact mechanism that caused Cadence to turn evil doesn't make her wrong.

Isn't Discord a poltergeist in general though? His physical form is never what madehim dangerous. He was never punching people or anything. His strength was his magic, his ability to warp reality, and Star didn't touch that. As a poltergeist he was still doing everything Discord can normally do.

It felt to me like Discord was amply demonstrating that even if he played along with her spell, it didn't mean anything.

Though now I'm remembering how in Season 3, Twilight went off to find a reformation spell to force Discord to become good, and Discord stole the spells and ate them, implying that he wanted to get rid of them, implying they would've worked.

Edited by GNinja on Nov 20th 2018 at 7:01:02 PM

And there's also the idea that as an entity of pure chaos, he doesn't play by the traditional rules.

Like, let's say Twilight had used the reformation spell on him. He probably could have just laughed it off. Glimmy banished him from the school, but he still interacted with things anyway (and frankly, I wouldn't have put it past him to just humor her at first, and been capable of stepping past the spell regardless, but just did it in spirit form to mess with her).

He makes a big deal about how chaos doesn't follow the rules in his debut and subsequent appearance.

No. Discord is not "in general a poltergeist". If you are asserting that his ghostly form in "A Matter of Principals" is his normal, typical appearance that he always shows up in and thus proves that Starlight's spell had no effect on him whatsoever, then you are provably, demonstrably wrong.

This is pretty simple. Starlight casts a spell on Discord. Discord does not tank the spell, but rather has to work around it to continue to do what he does until Starlight revokes the spell. The implication, therefore, is that the spell worked. These are the events depicted in the episode, and there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that Discord could have set physical hoof on the school grounds while under the effects of the banishment spell.

No, the spell did not cure cancer, end world hunger, and turn all pigs into sheep. But it clearly affects Discord. He wouldn't have had to slightly modify his approach and adapt to it if it didn't. No argument, no logical debate, no prolonged headcanon, and not even an after-the-fact reinterpretation of the events by the writer, changes the indisputable fact of what happens onscreen.

I realize that you don't like the show's events being criticized, but it is what it is. "Discord was only PRETENDING to be affected!" is a headcanon. It is never suggested at any point.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 20th 2018 at 12:45:09 PM

Actually, what Discord IS is not very well defined, and contradictory at times. In one episode, his magic is taken away, and he seems to revert to a much more mundane chimaera. The same thing seems to happen with Chrysalis' anti-magic field: Discord is brought down to a much more regular being. But then that one episode shows up where Discord suddenly starts fading out of existence because he stops being chaotic. But wouldn't he stop existing without his chaos magic, too, then?

Another example of a cool idea that was not worked into existing canon very well.

Old team vs New team again. Old team was mindful of the universe's consequences, new team just seems to go "Oh! Let's put this cool idea in, and damn the consequences!"

I feel like I pissed you off and I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to say you couldn't criticize the show.

What I was getting at is that even if Discord had to work around her spell, Starlight did absolutely nothing to stop the main threat that he posed. So I don't see the ep portraying her as an equal to him like some people do. My remark about him being a poltergeist isn't literal, I was just saying that the VAST majority of the stuff Discord does, does not require his physical presense. Because most of what he does is messing with stuff with his chaos magic.

Edited by GNinja on Nov 20th 2018 at 9:26:06 AM

Hey hey hey. Let's not get into another "Discord is a Complete Monster" situation.

Regarding the issue with Discord not fading away when his magic is lost, I don't personally see a great deal of conflict between his state when his magic is drained and his situation in "Discordant Harmony".

The crux of the matter, for me, is that what made him fade away in "Discordant Harmony" wasn't linked to his magic use — it was linked to his behavior. To quote Fluttershy's conclusion, which the episode generally treated as correct:

The issue wasn't that he wasn't using magic — it was that he was behaving in a predictable, orderly manner, and cutting himself off from chaos and disorder in general. In fact, he used his magic rather freely throughout his "normalization" process — transforming his house, transforming himself, creating his posse of clones, etcetera. However, he still faded away despite all this because of his abrupt change in personality.

Likewise, Fluttershy saves him despite her inability to use magic by behaving randomly and chaotically — by copying what she knows of Discord's usual behavior. Again, Discord's fading is treated as an issue of personality, thought processes and "ambient" chaos rather than of his use of and access to magic.

By contrast, on both occasions where his magic was taken away, his behavior and personality changed very little if at all and he remained his chaotic, peculiar and irreverent self (in "To Where and Back Again", at least, but while his bit in "Twilight's Kingdom" was too short and depression-laden to get a good read on possible long-term personality changes, he certainly did not veer into the pathologically "normal" personality he adopted in "Discordant Harmony").

The point I'm getting at is that "Discordant Harmony" presented his fading as being fundamentally caused by a loss of chaos in his mind and personality, with little to no ties to his actual magic use — it was banality that was killing him, not a dearth of power. Thus, because this particular issue did not arise in either "Twilight's Kingdom" or "To Where and Back Again", I don't really see a conflict in canon.

However, this does rather unambiguously nix the comics' "Chaos Theory" arc.

No, that's my bad. I shouldn't have been snippy with you for defending a series that you love. I'm sorry for that.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 20th 2018 at 4:15:08 AM

Another potential read is that his MAGIC was what was killing him in Discordant Harmony.

Like, if his magic is born of chaos, and he needs to be chaotic, then him acting in a normal, orderly manner could've been causing his innate magic to react in a violent way. Like an immune system that's rebelling against itself.

But if something removed that magic from his body or nullified it, such as with Tirek or the Changeling Throne, then it couldn't have that reaction.

...This is it. I'm about to have a proper argument with another person on this forum by myself and since I've seen the relevant fiction today, I won't be afraid if I'm contradicting a thing that I haven't seen yet. This...this needs music.

Boys! Give me one with a beat!

Let's do this before we begin: Chyrsalis is not a pony. That is actually vital because when Sparkles did start saying that "Cadenza" was malevolent, she had no idea what "Cadenza" actually was. She knew nothing about the Changelings or Chrysalis. "Cadenza" was merely a malicious pony that she already thought shouldn't be with Shining Armor before she saw "Cadenza" doing magic on Shining Armor.

I'm not saying that Sparkles was wrong. Sparkles was right and that itself is the problem. She became right not through any pains to be right but only because she happened to be right because of factors that she was unaware of.

When I say "accidentally" right or "coincidentally" right, I meant that Sparkles became right even when the original reason or even the original premise had nothing to do with what made her right. "Cadenza" was malevolent but that's not because "Cadenza" was quite churlish, may be doing malevolent magic on him, and Sparkles didn't want to become any further from Shining Armor. "Cadenza" was actually Chrysalis, a malevolent shapeshifter that fed on affection. That is as far from what Sparkles had in mind when she thought Cadenza was malevolent.

The core of "drunkenly stumbling into rightness" is this: the character becomes right even when what they were right about had nothing to do with their original reasons for their enmity. "Cadenza'' was malevolent but, to Sparkles, it was not because she was a Changeling. She was right but the reason she became right had nothing to do with her own reasons for thinking so.

Edited by fredhot16 on Nov 20th 2018 at 9:03:11 AM

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Old team vs New team again. Old team was mindful of the universe's consequences, new team just seems to go "Oh! Let's put this cool idea in, and damn the consequences!"

I don't think the old team was any better at enforcing consistency. It's just a matter of the old team and the new team having different ideas.

Hey hey hey. Let's not get into another "Discord is a Complete Monster" situation.

That's one I haven't heard in a long time. That brings back memories.

the character becomes right even when what she was right about had nothing to do with their original reasons for their enmity.

But Twilight's reasons for suspecting Cadance is because she saw her acting maliciously, which was a direct consequence of the fact that "Cadance" was evil. Just because Twilight didn't try to guess the exact mechanism by which Cadance had apparently turned evil doesn't make her somehow unjustified in her suspicion.

There was also that one guy who kept asking about characters crossing the Moral Event Horizon. Fortunately, I have found the exact moment when Twilight crossed the line into pure evil.

Edited by marston on Nov 20th 2018 at 6:27:14 AM

The issue with Twilight, and with her being Right for the Wrong Reasons, is that the majority of her reasons for believing that Cadance was evil were rather overblown and had little to do with her actually being evil — her reasoning behind Cadance being evil was essentially that:

• A, Cadance lied about liking Applejack's treats and tossed some in the trash.
• B, Cadance had complaints about Rarity's dress (i.e., she wanted more beading, a longer train and some color changes — which given that it was her wedding day, I'd argue that she'd have been in her rights to want some changes and Twilight was making far too big a deal of it, but that's besides the point).
• C, Cadance disapproved of Pinkie's party plans and called them juvenile.

And those were Twilight's reasons for believing that Cadance was "an awful pony who doesn't deserve to even know Shining Armor, let alone marry him". These are, to be quite frank, personal nitpicks with someone else's manners and tastes — and definitely not proof that that someone is evil.

The point is that what Twilight thought was that Cadance was an unpleasant, demanding person and not right for her brother — that's rather different from Cadance actually being an evil villain in disguise. She opposed Cadance because she thought she was a b*tch, but the episode treated Chrysalis' reveal as proof that Twilight's suspicions were correct despite the difference between the two things and Twilight's beliefs and logic having little to do with Chrysalis's actual identity and plans. Essentially, Cadance being Chrysalis in disguise ended up being used to give justification to Twilight's rather overblown objections to Cadance's manners, despite the two things having no significant connections beyond boiling down to "this person is bad".

Twilight was right about "Cadance" being evil, but her arguments in favor of that had nothing to do with why and how she was evil.

Marston... come on, you know the real reason why.