Stream announcement, we're watching the following.
1. The Good Place - 5
2. The Good Place - 6
3. X-Files - 316 - Apocrypha
Next week's Thursday is Thanksgiving, meaning probably no stream then, but we'll see. Then after that we're in December, meaning Christmas streams. So this will probably be the last normal stream of the year.
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Feats of Friendship #3 (end)
Thus we reach the end of the miniseries, and it unexpectedly doesn't resolve Swift Foot's storyline, seemingly leaving it for the "season 10" comics coming later. Also I guess I was just mistaken about the Storm King symbol, since they don't mention him at all.
The Student Six fight and Swift Foot realizes she didn't actually want this. We get a flashback, which has a color filter that confused me at first, because only Swift Foot herself serves as a color reference, and I assumed at first that her hair is naturally a different color and she changed her hair when coming to Equestria, but I realized otherwise. Anyway, through the flashback, we see Swift Foot's sisters, who have nice designs.
The king of Thrace, Diomedes, decides for... reasons, that they need to break up the Student Six in order to demonstrate that friendship is weak. He already has a full write-up of them and forged documentation for Swift Foot to use. It's a bit contrived and a bit inexplicable, but it works well enough for MLP's setting I suppose.
Back in the present, we get a really nice sequence of the Students all making up with each other, despite Swift Foot being sure this would be the breaking point. It turns out the others actually had been learning Yakkish, though they still can't speak it well, and everyone apologizes to each other, all without realizing Swift Foot's role in their fight.
They then team up to fight an illusory hydra and easily take it out by working together, though Ocellus does most of the work by turning into a hydra herself. Seriously, Ocellus has been pretty OP this miniseries.
During the award ceremony, Swift Foot is absent. She decides to go back to Thrace, hoping to convince them that friendship is good.
Overall, I thought this was a really good miniseries. It was nice to see more exploration of the conflicts that would naturally come from different species mingling and becoming friends for the first time, and Swift Foot is an interesting character. In retrospect, I'm a bit surprised we never got a "villain is befriended who then has to face their former superiors" character in FiM before; that was actually fairly common back in the first G1 cartoon.
Silver Quill's review mentions the
Mares of Thrace of Greek mythology, who Hercules / Heracles had to tame in one of his Labors. They were fierce man-eating horses, which explains why Thrace is anti-friendship here in MLP. Even the names of Swift Foot and her sisters are all references to the Mares of Thrace: Podargos (the swift), Lampon (the shining), Xanthos (the yellow) and Deinos (the terrible). MLP-ified, they are Swift Foot, Shining Light, Blonn Di, and Terri Belle. And of course, the king, Diomedes, is named after the man who owned the Mares of Thrace. Clever. Though Blonn Di and Terri Belle still aren't good names.
He also points out that Swift Foot realizing she was wrong on her own is better than her being rescued by the Student Six and realizing they're good that way, which indeed is a direction they easily could have gone.
Silver Quill is suspicious about whether we'll get a followup, given past plot threads that have been dropped, but I think we'll see Thrace and its mares again.
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Watched the The Toys That Made Us episode about MLP
The Toys that Made Us MLP episode was pretty good. Best of the season, I'd say.
I was worried they'd focus too much on G4, but they spent the perfect amount of time on it. It was also a pretty good move getting Lauren Faust in early as just a G1 fan, explaining how girls played with the toys.
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Round 1 Match 26 features "At the Gala" in the lead, with "Rules of Rarity" in second.
Round 1 Match 27
A. Piggy Dance
B. Find a Pet
C. Silent Night
D. One More Day
E. Under Our Spell
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Though it's still pretty clearly robotic, this is still impressive. If this is gone, it's an automated version of Twilight's voice reading the marine copypasta.
