Complain About Pony!

@Dex Stewart  
Its 10 minute format would make it difficult to set up antagonists larger than a bully-of-the-week. My Little Pony Tales was also 10 minutes per episode and the closest thing to a “villain” was a recurring bully character with an inferiority complex and a weird love-hate relationship with one of the main characters. Magical Mystery Cure, the shortest FiM finale at 20 minutes, had no villain whatsoever. It seems like you need 40 minutes to set up an actual “villain” plotline.

@Twiface  

The only thing I really have against the show is the school of friendship. I didn’t like the contracting effect it had on the setting, and I didn’t like the way it replaced the Mane Six with a new cast of puds, so they could rehash the same lessons. The school broke the setting. How are any of the main cast, except for Twilight, supposed to dedicate their time to being full-time teachers? By season 8, they all have careers with major responsibilities.
 
The school makes no sense in universe. It isn’t an accredited educational institution. Its entire purpose is to instruct non-ponies in Twilight’s personal ideology. Why would any creatures send their young people to be culturally astroturfed? As of the last two seasons, the entire world has committed to manufacturing an Equestrian cultural victory over themselves.

@ANoobis  
I agree that the school was ill-conceived and poorly handled. The accreditation story of the Season 8 premiere was both ridiculous and ultimately pointless, but I understand they just needed some kind of antagonist, and were perhaps trying to portray said antagonist as a petulant obstacle to Glorious Social Progress ^TM. Perhaps a better story would have Neighsay as a city council member with control over zoning regulations. Then there would have been actual consequences (the school couldn’t be built) and they’d have to convince the ponies of Ponyville (and by extension, the audience) of the school’s merits instead of ‘winning’ by simply disregarding a legitimate authority figure and getting away with it because reasons.
 
I think the problem is that by that point in the show the Mane Six had seven seasons of friendship lessons under their belts and the only way the show could keep going was to shift them from being students into being teachers. They kind of did that with the friendship map, but even that seemed to be losing its appeal by the end of Season 7. The show has hinted that there were lands beyond Equestria since Season 1, and following the movie it only made sense to have the Mane six begin proselytizing their ‘friendship’ religion to lands beyond.
 
That being said, I think the problem is that the writers didn’t really commit to anything. Maybe the school could have worked if they had devoted more time to it, but they didn’t want to make the show revolve entirely around the school, so they threw in some slice-of-life and Map episodes as well, but as a result everything got half-assed.
 
I think it would have been better if they had focused Season 8 entirely around the school and fleshing out the Student Six (there were a few ‘Student Six’ episodes in Season 9 that I think really belonged in Season 8), then for Season 9 just hand management of the school off to some other characters so the Mane Six could do something else.
 
Alternatively, they could have just doubled down on doing more Friendship Map missions, which would have been kind of same-y, but would allow the Mane Six to travel to a bunch of exotic locations to keep the show interesting. Either way, the writing would have been a lot better if the writers just picked one option and stuck with it, rather than trying to do multiple things at once.
 
 

 
Lol
 
A lot of rich people in the real world send their children to foreign countries for education, especially if they deem another country as more successful than theirs. It’s a ‘find out what they’re doing right so we can copy it’ sort of a deal. This is why Chinese millionaires and Syrian dictators send their kids to Harvard.
 
*Equestria, as far as we can tell, seems to be a very stable, very wealthy, and very powerful nation.  
*Griffonstone is a failed state trying to reconstitute itself.  
*The Dragonlands is a chaotic wasteland whose new leader is considering doing things differently.  
*Yakyakistan is doing okay, but it’s a backwater and could certainly do better.  
*The Changelings just went through a regime change and need a new governing philosophy, and like postwar Japan, they’re wholeheartedly embracing the creed of their “liberators.”  
*The Hippogriffs are emerging from isolation and need allies.
 
There are plenty of practical reasons why these countries are sending their children to learn from Equestria, the cultural and economic hegemon, though the show didn’t really focus on anything except the idea that ‘FRIENDSHIP = GOOD’ for its own sake.

@Twiface  
The final section is why I emphasized the school’s lack of accreditation. This isn’t going to Princeton or MIT. The school isn’t giving them anything useful in Equestria. It’s a degree mill that’s just there for indoctrination.

@ANoobis  

 
The show had been searching for ways to replace the M6 ever since S6 tried to be the Glim Glam show. Whenever the decision was made that FiM would be extended beyond the original three seasons and would have continuity between episodes, they should have made a real decision: do they become a soap opera that can run indefinitely or have a series-long arc with a definite endpoint? They instead just wrote whatever happened to come to mind that day.  
The soap opera format is particularly well-suited to open-ended stories because a core component of the genre is its ability to swap protagonists as needed. Most other genres fixate on the current protagonist as the one and only possible protagonist.  
IMO, the reason the Students were such uninspiring puds is specifically because they did not have enough screen time due to a misplaced dedication to ensuring that the M6 remain the protagonists no matter what. Even when Starlight was added to the core cast, at least some of the writers had the foresight to recognize that the M6 were getting dangerously close to the natural conclusion of their individual series-long arcs while the show showed no signs of ending. Better to rehash the same lessons with a new cast than to teach Fluttershy to be assertive for the 16^th time.
 
That was a long way to say “I agree with everything @Twiface just said”
 

 
I agree bigly here. Flutters, Pinkie, and AJ all have day jobs. By Seasons 8 & 9, Rarity and Dashie both had careers that should have kept them so busy off-screen that they were no longer protagonists of FiM by that point. Sure, do a special episode or two each season to swing by and see how they’re doing (and have them in town to visit for Hearthswarming), but their lives no longer should center around Ponyville. Flutters, the pink pony, and AJ could give guest lectures at Twilight’s school once a month or something, but they have neither the time nor interest to be its core staff. The school is a project for Twilight and Glim Glam.
 

 

 
The point of Twilight’s school is specifically not about education. Its academic format is purely there to provide structure for networking after classes. The value proposition for the foreign species is the fact that species they’d otherwise have no business meeting also attend.

@πʊßƛįϰ  
That’s a very good point about Rainbow Dash. Being a Wonderbolt seems like a full-time job, and the others all live together in a barracks in Cloudsdale. I remember that at first they just made Rainbow Dash a reservist, which allowed her to technically achieve her dream of being a Wonderbolt without having to leave Ponyville (a good compromise), but then they just went and ruined it by making her a full Wonderbolt, which probably wasn’t supposed to happen until the very end of the show.
 
Then there’s Applejack and Rarity, who both run businesses. Earlier episodes often revolved around them being too busy with work to spend time with friends and family. But by season 8, they inexplicably found enough time to teach at the school while also running their businesses. Are we supposed to believe that they somehow found all this time just by maximizing their work-life balance? The obvious and realistic solution for them would be to just hire people to do busywork for them. All the writers would have to do is to add a throwaway line about hiring assistants somewhere and add a new background pony or two in scenes that take place at Sweet Apple Acres/Carousel Boutique and it would be believable. In fact, this could even apply to Fluttershy’s animal preserve, Twilight’s school, and Pinkie’s party planning service as well.
 
They could have also used this as a way to introduce new characters with their own issues while still keeping the Mane Six closely involved with the show. There’s a lot of missed opportunities they had in the later seasons. But maybe this is all too much to ask of what was originally intended as a slice-of-life show to entertain young children.
 
 

 
This is also a big reason why people attend Ivy League schools.

Not a complaint per se, but I’m not sifting through a thousand pages to find a better place to post this.
 
How the hell do pony glasses stay on? The ear pieces just float off in space, they don’t go anywhere near the ears. Why have them anyway?

@UrbanMysticDee  
They keep their glasses on the same way Arthur does.

The Nepotism Adventure Series was a great critique of the direction the show took in the later seasons. I wish it had lasted beyond two episodes.

@ANoobis