Not seeking to stir drama, but... is the new MLP like, badass or something? I mean, every fur and their dog seems to be watching it. :D I'm more a True Blood/Dexter/The Wire/Anything HBO has touched guy, so I dunno if there'd be enough violence for me. :D :D

Or is it just cuteness value? In which case, I may have to watch it. :P

If it's not to your taste, you don't have to watch it. I won't hold it against you. I watch it because I think it's genuinely funny (except perhaps the slight reliance on slapstick humor in the newest episode, but it hasn't become a trend yet, and I sure hope it never will.)

I'm not saying it won't be, I'm just curious as to why it seems to have attracted such a large adult fanbase. I mean, for me (aside from classics like Tom and Jerry) the only rather kiddish cartoon I've ever gotten into in a serious way was The Moomins (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiZ0eBFTH6k if you've never seen it. :D) and that's because some parts of it are just freak/cool/unbelievable imaginative. :D

Oh yeah, I live in Finland, the promised land of the Moomins.

Yeah, I'm intrigued too that it has such a crazy large audience, but hey, beats me. I can only speak for myself.

Oh, cool. :D

*Shrug* Yeah, gonna have to agree there. The whole setup seemed just a tad haphazerd.

I was a little disappointed that Twilight gave in like that, but the fact that they even touched on the subject of skeptism vs blind faith was interesting.

What bugs me the most is that in the end they made ALL THE WRONG CONCLUSIONS. Tsk, tsk, tsk, I thought better of you Twilight.

I actually can't possibly disagree more. With my science degree I'm very sensitive about this. A good scientist does not believe in what is logical and makes sense. A philosopher does that. It made *perfect sense* to Xeno that you could never reach the end of a bridge, and his logic was excellent.

You believe in what is proved to you, what is SHOWN to be true, and you do the best you can facing the fact that a person can only observe a tiny amount about the world in their lifetime.

Twilight's skepticism was a blind belief. The observable facts said that Pinkie Pie has a very bad, possibly terminal case of Clairvoyant Joint Disease. That it doesn't make sense to Twilight Sparkle is immaterial. That it wouldn't make sense to us is immaterial. Quantum Physics STILL doesn't make sense, but tests show over and over that it's real.

I submit to you that that is the lesson of the episode: Your biases seem obviously true to you, but the world is what it is. In their case it's a world with flying ponies and flowers that drop your voice 5 registers.

Aha, of course, but that wasn't my point. You must believe what is reasonable, and at the end of the episode Twilight had plenty of empirical evidence that the Pinkie indeed had powers of foresight. Based on that, believing that the Pinkie Keen is true IS reasonable. She can't give the mechanism it works by, but she does have evidence that it works.

HOWEVER, in her letter she attests that there are things which just cannot be understood and in which you just have to choose to believe. That's non sequitur. Just because she doesn't know how it works now, doesn't mean that she couldn't one day discover how it does, and just because she doesn't know the mechanism yet does not mean that it's not true.

It's not choosing to believe. It's believing because she now has the evidence that it does, even if the theory behind it is still a mystery. And that makes it reasonable to believe in the Pinkie Keen, not just something you "choose" to believe.

I expected you to make this argument - because it's a good one. But I put this to you:

The moral as Twilight describes it at the very end of the show is such an oversimplification of what happens in the episode as to be trite and unsatisfying - as it ALWAYS is in pretty much every episode. Honestly, I think they're doing it to appease Hasbro, but it's no different in this episode than others. The moral of the episode itself is much more nuanced, and I think correct even though it's jarring to those of us who automatically share Twilight's bias. But what the episode shows us is the importance of keeping an open mind, because we all have our unreasonable biases, and until one side is proven right what you want to believe is no better than what anyone else wants to believe. That is the moral of the episode. Yes, it's described in such baby talk at the end that it loses most of its meaning, but it's like that every episode.

True, true, it's always an oversimplification. But it still irks me because it's pretty much the oversimplification of the wrong conclusion.