EDIT: Well, there's hope after all. Applejack's 'Day' Off (S06E10) and Flutter Brutter (S06E11) were really good episodes. Good writing still exists in this show. I don't know why Starlight has been absent from the season, though. I guess it's not her redemption arc at all.

Got around to continuing My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic with the little downtime I have these days. I never sat down and watched anything past Season 4 in sequential order, just scattered episodes here and there. I'm on season 6 right now.

FiM is very, very dear to my heart. The writing is charming. I'll always appreciate any setting with an emphasis on (notably, female) empowerment, friendship, and self-actualization. It panders to its intended age group effectively, but isn't childish enough to turn away teenagers and adults. It offers a large scale of lessons to relate to pertaining to different personalities. It's pleasing to look at. It's fun! Lots to love about it.

Flattery aside, I've noticed that the series took a serious nosedive in feeling like a fleshed out, serialized cartoon. It was more "firm." I would skip very little, if any, episodes in Seasons 1-3, with 4 having some rather... questionable ones.

Facing such a stark quality drop was incredibly jarring. What the hell happened?

There begins a pattern of incredibly skippable or badly written episodes with the beginning of Season 5. Such as Newbie Dash (S0617), or, Rainbow Dash gets hazed and that's okay! Honestly, you could argue the point of it. It's just incredibly unsatisfying to watch, and you're better off skipping to the end to learn the supposed lesson. It's not written well at all.

What About Discord? (S5E22) is objectively worthless and is currently the worst episode in the series. It might as well be fan-fiction made for the purpose of being bad, and not "bad fan-fiction." It does not deserve to have that title. Don't worry, we got to fit some pop culture references in. We're hip.

Tinfoiling that episodes like these are made to piss off autists like me into writing dissertations. I also hate episodes where the girls act so painfully OOC for gags, like, no, Rarity is not going to stalk Spike out of a jealous fit. What? If you want a good Rarity and Spike gag episode that isn't an insult to the viewer's intelligence, Inspiration Manifestation (S04E3) is right there.

They like doing that to Pinkie because she's the resident "le random" character who clearly has no preexisting depth or anything. No matter, any episode related to her and her relationship with Maud or her other family members, is immediately top tier.

Buy our toys.

Frankly, I have no idea how FiM has gone on for another five seasons. Less is more, especially when there's a discernible degradation of quality.

They've essentially ran out of interesting characters to write about. I would say it's very difficult to top the O.G.s. This makes even more sense when you take into account that the show was not originally supposed to go on for this long. FiM was not written to be the long-standing multi-seasonal hit that it is today. The story was intended to end (somewhat) cohesively with Princess Twilight Sparkle and her best friends, yay! And then FiM was cleared for more episodes.

My complaints can be sardonically summarized; I don't like the development of characters outside of the Mane 6 and original supporting cast.

You would be mostly correct. I'm not going to make any excuses for my blatant bias.

I care very little about extremely minor characters getting longstanding development in this show because none of them are interesting enough to warrant that. The exception to this so far is Gilda's brief, but pleasant reappearance in season five. Emphasis on brief. That's the sort of loose end that gets tied up nicely to never be revisited again.

From a first glance, I'm incredibly disinterested in the non-pony characters that become integral to the show. Call me a pony supremacist. I don't care about the Yaks. I'm not really interested in the Young 6, either. I'm only looking forward to Cozy Glow because she's an insane character, and even then, she's probably best experienced in YouTube compilations or clips. I have pretty low hopes for the last two seasons.

One of the best.

The closest they've come to making something, rather, someone, as fresh and exciting as the original cast, is Sunset Shimmer. Whom... they've banished to the world of Equestria Girls in favor of Starlight Glimmer, the other counterpart to Twilight.

I will never understand why they chose to create another "anti-Twilight" (or, per their words, "proto-Twilight") when Sunset was right there. I haven't extensively looked into why, and am fueled mainly by misguided anger towards the writers.

Lauren Faust posts her reaction to seeing Equestria Girls toys for the first time. (2013)

I'm assuming that an unfortunate executive decision at the time bound Sunset to Equestria Girls for the foreseeable future. The idea of her being a long-term character within FiM had to be scrapped. Maybe they didn't want FiM to be related with EqG at all. With the overbearingly harsh reaction to EqG in mind, it's really no surprise.

Unfortunately, while I... think I like Starlight a lot, I'm not really interested in her redemption arc. It's a shame. I really love her as a villain. She's awesome. I'm not huge about her being our second (third, counting Sunset) redeemed villian and her addition to the cast.

It's difficult to see Starlight as her own character, because she kind of isn't... at the moment, I suppose. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised and eat my words once I finish FiM. I don't see that happening, though

Perhaps things would've been smoother and more interesting (to me) if, let's say, Cozy Glow and Starlight swapped places somehow. Starlight is the irredeemable, stunted, and jaded adult that Twilight could've been, while the misguided child, naturally, grows up and finds their place in Ponyville, or wherever, instead of being sent to Hell.

Throw some Sunburst development in there too. Lots of potential if you go along with the "irredeemable" Starlight route. Whatever. I don't know!

That sort of marks the end of my interest for the rest of FiM. I'm kind of like, "what am I watching this show for at this point?" Excitement or intrigue mostly evades me.

Referring back to my initial point. With the start of season 6, FiM has officially degraded into an episodic cartoon that you skip the "unneeded filler episodes to get to the good parts" for. It still retains the skeleton of a serialized cartoon, but is ultimately episodic in nature.

There's nothing wrong with being an episodic cartoon. Adventure Time is fantastic, however, it knew what it was from the beginning. It's to be expected to skip a fair amount of episodes in Adventure Time depending on your tolerance. I personally hate skipping anything in, well, anything, but it's very warranted sometimes. Naruto, case in point...

Everything isn't all so bad, despite my incredibly critical tone. I have no doubt that there are some great episodes on par with my standards twinkled throughout the rest of the shows lifespan.

This episode is centered around Twilight's neglect of her old friendships and how she comes to terms with it. Most notably with Moon Dancer, a friend she unknowingly hurt a long time ago by forgetting to attend her birthday party. This was, at the time, inconsequentially mentioned in season 1 (?), so it's cool that they were able to make it into an episode calling back to it.

This one is top 10, I think.

It has a lesson that really, really speaks to me. It's also a Twilight episode! We love Twilight in this house. Princess Twilight, not so much, but that's arguably still Twilight.

Twilight's Twilight-isms really shine in this episode. She acts a lot like herself in seasons 1-2. Moon Dancer is a delightful (and cute!) mirror to Twilight, while her backstory is in a somewhat similar vein to Starlight, there's way less at stake and it serves as a better plot device here.

Hey, we're still friends, right? Right? Absolve me of my guilt, while you're at it...

I'm projecting a lot here, so please bear with me.

Her incessant, overbearing, and almost controlling need to correct her mistakes is so relatable that it almost hurts me! Realizing how much time has passed without proper conciliation... I see so much of myself in Twilight in this episode. It feels like the writers pulled up a flowchart consisting of me and referenced it for this episode.

Time to relive your trauma in a grandiose attempt at an apology! This will do it.

I think an even better lesson would've been that you can't expect to be forgiven all the time. If someone doesn't want to accept your apology, or even your attempt at achieving '"closure", you'll just have to learn to live with that.

Even then, you need to accept that "granting" closure doesn't mean you'll have a functioning relationship again.

Sometimes, apologizing is actually the selfish thing to do, and the best thing to do is to simply walk away.

The episode could've ended with a mutual understanding and no continuation of their friendship. It furthers the lesson that you have to live with your mistakes, but pads it a bit by, at the very least, clearing major bad faith between the two. Maybe Moon Dancer realizes that she can move on with her life without their friendship, and that she can't let someone elses actions affect her to this point.

I wish that's what would've happened when Twilight extended her hand (hoof?) to her after her breakdown scene. I'm going to accept your apology, but things still aren't okay!

That is rather emotionally heavy, even for this show (despite there being a metaphorical episode centered around the death of a pet.) I don't blame Amending Fences for ending in that... way. It's weird how Moon Dancer did a complete 180 in personality, but, you know...

On the flip side, being in a somewhat similar position to Moon Dancer myself at some point, sometimes certain people are worth it enough to give second, third, or fourth chances.

Oh, that's 10 years before my very eyes.

Conversely, a modern one that I didn't like enough to write extensively about.

Crusaders of the Lost Mark features both the CMC's long awaited day and Diamond Tiara's redemption story.

...Shuffled hectically into one musical episode, for some reason. It does not help that I am completely disinterested in the grating musical aspect, the outlier being Diamond Tiara's solo. Stop showing me Pipsqueak being lugged around as a plot device, I don't care. Comparably, why is Silver Spoon being shafted so heavily?

At the very least, it should've been a two-parter for something so seemingly important to the series, regardless if they're side characters or not. It's been their "thing" for like, the entire show. Finding their cutie marks and all that.

Critically, their cutie marks are incredibly lazy, and one of the worst decisions in the show by far. There's a lesson to be made in the irony of them trying to find their individual passions, only to be bound by togetherness through a shared interest of helping others. I just don't like it.