Smolder: “Great job coaching the cheerleading squad, Professor Dash! And here I was thinking you’d be trying to avoid us or put minimal effort into coaching us just because you didn’t care about it or something.“

Rainbow: “Why would I do that? I LOVE cheerleaders! Somepony needs to tell the athletes how awesome they are!”

——-

Listen up, Brony squad! We’re going up against the FiM series finale in a couple of months (even sooner if China has anything to say about it…), and we need to make sure we have a good Season 9 Retirement Party to get through it! Let’s hustle! We can do it! Go team! …Okay, I’m done. This week’s comic is based on 2, 4, 6, Greaaat, aka: “Rainbow Dash Forgets the Importance of Cheering for Some Reason and Willfully Ignores Everyone’s Problems for 15 Minutes: the Episode”. …Yeah, I wasn’t too big a fan of this one. I mean, the Cheer Squad was great, and I loved seeing Snips and Snails again, continuing the little subplots they’ve been building for themselves, that was pretty cool.

The main thing though is that Rainbow’s whole motivation for her actions this episode was the idea that she doesn’t understand the purpose of having cheerleaders at sporting events and just sees the whole thing as a waste of time, which doesn’t really make sense. It’s one thing if she doesn’t want to personally be a cheerleader as she’d much rather be part of the actual sports, but as both a performer that loves to wow an audience AND as an egomaniac that loves hearing others praise her name, I find it very hard to believe that she doesn’t “get” why cheering is important. For Celestia’s sake, one of the most famous scenes in the whole SHOW involves her instructing Fluttershy how to cheer properly, and she clearly thought it was important then. And yeah, cheerleading routines are quite a bit more involved than just shouting “You can do it!” or whatever, but she could’ve put in a bit more effort than she did, and her reasoning for not doing so just seemed ludicrous to me.

On a more positive note, I am falling more and more in love with Snails. I’m with CMC—Scootaloo on this one: Snails’ special talent is absolutely Zen, and I feel like this is reinforced more and more with each new episode. He just seems so at peace, enlightened, and even wise these days, which is not something I would’ve expected from the character at all back in Season 1. …Though I guess that’s true of most of the characters in this show. Gosh this show is amazing. Even my least favorite episodes have elements that I love about them!

Hope you all keep your spirits high and score some personal goals! Looking forward to the next episode!