My Little Succubus: Love is Magic "A Canterlot Wedding" Review

Guys, I'm scared.

No, seriously, I am literally afraid of this review and of what happens after I publish it in my blog. I think I have never approached writing something while feeling the nervous grip in my gut that I am experiencing right now. I've reviewed every single episode of Season 2 in this blog: Everyone. I've been through the hard times with you guys, and we've shared opinions in really interesting conversations down in the comments. But this is the first time I feel things aren't going to be so peachy. You know me. If you follow my blog from Equestria Daily you know how I am and how I like to explain my thoughts. You know I don't simply wave my hand and say "This sucks, lol roflcopter", I actually take the time to explain my opinion. And even with that, even with all that, I have the feeling you are not going to like what I have to say. But I beg you to read to the end so you can understand my point.



This doesn't mean you are not getting a TL;DR. Of course you are getting one. I think they are one of the signs of identity of my reviews after all. Is this a good episode? Well guys, if you are asking that at this point then why are you still here? The widespread reaction to it is just massive. Is this the best episode of the season? Again, according to the widespread reaction, it pretty much is. Do I agree? No. And if you want me to explain please keep reading.

So the episode starts with a lovely picnic in the outskirts of Ponyville. The Mane six are having a relaxing time after an entire season of hijinks and character development when suddenly Spike comes in and belches a letter into Twilight's face. That Spike, he's always such a classy guy. Twilight reads in that letter that Princess Celestia has called for them to assist for the Royal wedding attending different tasks. Fluttershy is asked to bring her birds for performing the wedding march which makes her squee in anticipation. Rainbow Dash waves her hoof in disdain until she is told if she could perform a Sonic Rainboom, to which she pretty much punches the air in approval. Pinkie Pie is asked to organise the reception which, even though I don't know what it really entails, you know it will involve pinning the tail onto something. Applejack, being the good cook that she is, will take care of the bakery, possibly while she is well rested and not sleep deprived. But by far the best reaction comes from Rarity, who's face when she is told she will be doing the dresses for the wedding can only be described as a post-climax face. Seriously, she literally explodes in bliss, I think I have never seen her so happy in any other episode. And finally Twilight will organise everything. However, she is still confused as to who is getting married, which is something that didn't appear in the letter. When Spike shows her another letter (this dragon is as reliable with the mail as AOL) she suddenly learns that the wedding is between a certain Princess Mi Amore Cadenza and her brother. I would cue a "Dun, dun, Dunn" moment here if it wasn't for that TV listing that spoiled it.

We are then introduced to Twilight Sparkle's first solo song in the entire series. Yeah I know Winter Wrap Up had some moments of her singing, but that was a massive song with several other characters all singing at unison. This song is her all alone. It's about her and her brother and about how much she loves him. It's pretty ingenious the way the makers of this show introduce us to this character we have never heard from before but that is such a big deal in Twilight's life. Applejack says it better than I could ever put it:

"Your big brother sounds like a pretty good guy"

And he does. It only takes two minutes of song to get you invested in the character, because you see it from Twilight's perspective. She's not all that thrilled however to learn this from a letter and not from her brother, so she takes on the trip to Canterlot decided to demand an explanation from him.

And towels for Rarity. Lots of towels.

We then cut to the mane cast riding a train to Canterlot. It seems like that's the main type of transportation to reach to that place. This is like the third time they've done it in this season, so we can pretty much forget about the old ways of season 1 with their pony carried horse carriages from The Best Night Ever. However things don't seem quite alright when arriving to the capital of Equestria. If you think the real Royal Wedding had security measures then you have to check out that impenetrable force field of strawberry flavoured magic surrounding the entire city. It looks impressive, to say the least. Twilight doesn't seem to care at all, as she steps down from the train and right away confronts her brother at the entrance of the castle. And, what do you know, her brother is actually a really good guy! He is happy, he is nice, and he calls her the cutest name ever uttered by anyone in the surface of the planet. I promise I am going to have a pet just so I can call it "Twilie", it's just...the levels of "dawww" are off the charts here! But even with all that, Twilight is less than thrilled and more annoyed than anything at her brother's dodgy behaviour. He briefs her that the increase of security didn't allow him to tell her about the wedding, and that the protection spells is powered by his own magic. I like how they subtly explain that both siblings can do the same kind of spell. Also, Shining Armour is powerful as buck. Twilight is super powerful and her protection spell is only able to cover her library. He is covering an entire city! I guess a little more powerful and he could defeat Princess Celestia (keep this in mind for later). Even after all the explanations, Twilight is still angry at her brother because she doesn't know who the bride is. When he tells her that the bride, Princess Mi Amore Cadenza happens to be her babysitter Cadance, Twilight bursts in glee. We are given a flashback to when Twilight used to be babysit by Cadance and we see them as being quite close. It's good to know Twilight had friends previous to moving to Ponyville, it makes her even more three dimensional than what she already is and I thought that couldn't be possible.

Like making sandwiches talk. I didn't know that of her!

So after seeing Twilight phase into her childhood again we are presented to Cadance and that's when things start getting weird for Twilight. She approaches her doing their childhood's playful salute, but Cadance just ignores her and goes straight towards Shining Armour. I will explain this further in my opinion at the end of the review, but this is when I was starting to think on that South Park succubus episode. Twilight, being the one in charge the check everything, sees Cadance behaviour every time she checks over every aspect of the wedding, growing more and more suspicious about who her brother is marrying. She sees her as a rude, obnoxious, self-centred horse who only cares only about getting married and nothing else. The way the show makers put this together is quite intelligent. They only show Cadance from Twilight's perspective, and lets face it, all brothers will always see the one who's marrying their brother or sister as a potential menace. Of course it's all unjustified fear...Until Twilight sees Cadance casting a mind controlling spell on Shining Armour. That was pretty much the point of the episode that had Twilight running around her friends, Princess Celestia and her brother announcing that Cadance is evil, evil, the root of all evil in Equestria! Run for your lives! Stay away from my brother you foal! As one would expect, Twilight's attitude does her more wrong than right. After accusing Cadance to the edge of tears, Shining Armour scolds Twilight telling her that Cadance has being healing him with magic due to the migraines he is getting from casting the shield spell. Because her outburst happened in the middle of the wedding rehearsal, all of her friends were there to see it, and so they leave her behind, including Spike. Even Princess Celestia leaves with a mortifying ice cold voice, which finally breaks Twilight. She collapses on the stairs to the altar for a long enough time to have Cadance show up again, caress her cheek, and make her disappear through the floor.

Whoops, you got me! I'm evil, teehee! I guess you win a trip to the dungeon.

After the needless "To Be Continue" we return to the show only to find Twilight has been imprisoned in some sort of glass cave full of gems. In there Princess Cadance reveals part of her evil scheme in a very vague way, and starts teasing Twilight which makes the unicorn go crazy and zap around blasts of magic energy left and right. In one of those lucky shots she destroys a wall that reveals the real Princess Cadance. And how does Twilight know that's the real Princess Cadance? Well, because she knows their special childhood salute. After a rather heartwarming and touching re-encounter, Twilight and Cadance set to find an exit from Superman's Fortress of Solitude, while the fake Cadance and the real Cadance share what I can only describe as Disney meets Repo: A Genetic Opera. Seriously, two of the least likely things to be combined meet up in My Little Pony. If this isn't an indication of the times changing I don't really know what is. The song ends with a cliffhanger as Cadance and Twilight are approached by Fake Cadance's bridesmaids, ready to stop them from escaping. Will they live or will they die? Well, this is a kids cartoon, why don't you take a guess? I give you two.

We then cut to the wedding where Fake Princess Cadance is about to marry Shinning Armour, with Celestia acting as the minstrel. Everything seems to go according to plan for Fake Cadance, until Twilight steps into the room. The rest of the Mane cast, Spike and Celestia as well, roll their eyes at Twilight's attitude, but when the real Cadance steps inside next to Twilight things turn eerie and everyone in the room gets hit by the obvious realisation: Fake Cadance is not the real Cadance (now it's a good time to use the Dun, Dun, Dunnn sound, don't you think?). Tired of keeping the charade Fake Cadance drops her disguise in the most disturbing thing in this show ever. Okay, we have had quite a few moments that went between the scary to the just creepy. Luna turning back into Nightmare Moon was creepy. Opal coming out of Angel's mouth was scary. Twilight losing her mind and going insane was pretty creepy too. The transformation of the fake Cadance into Chrysalis Queen of the Changelings is down right nightmare fuel-ish. With her true identity revealed so come her real plans. She used Shining Armour's love for the real Cadance to power her own magic and so set her keen all over Canterlot, and from there to all over Equestria. I like how the makers of the show basically shoved in a very adult kind of mythological creature into this show. You see, the way Chrysalis feeds on the love of Shining Armour to make herself more powerful, so powerful she can actually defeat Princess Celestia, is very similar to how a succubus acts! And she fed so rabidly into it that her kind and her powers are taking over Canterlot without trouble. Celestia begs Twilight and her friends to go retrieve the Elements of Plot Convenience-I mean, the Elements of Harmony, to defeat Chrysalis and put a halt to her plans. What follows is a pretty well planned action scene that's very reminiscent to Power puff Girls in style, tone and editing, down right to the shadows over brightly coloured backgrounds. After making their way through an army of changelings they arrive to the chamber of the Elements, only to find it filled to the ceiling with enemies.

 So, defeated, they are taken back to where the wedding was being celebrated. Chrysalis has changed the ceiling ornaments into a Celestia trapped inside a cocoon, and she is revelling in her victory. She revels in her victory so hard and so reveling-uhm-ly that she doesn't notice Twilight freeing Cadance and have her use her magic to bring Shining Armour back. It's useless though, because he is way too weakened after Chrysalis consumed all of his energy to perform the spell that blasts the changelings away. However the Queen of the Changelings didn't take into account that Cadance still has a reserve full of magic energy inside her in the shape of the love she has for him, which she channels into Shining Armour and together they repel the Changelings and her Queen into oblivion Team Rocket style. So yeah, she gets defeated by the Power of Love. With the menace gone the wedding can now keep moving forward and finally conclude. Shining Armour and Cadance make out in front of everypony, Rainbow Dash performs her Sonic Rainboom, Princess Luna shows up at the end wondering if she missed anything, Vinyl Scratch pops up for all the bronies, and they all live happily ever after until Season 3.

All except for that poor flower bouquet.

So that was "A Canterlot Wedding", the season 2 finale of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and I had a lot of trouble going through this review without spilling my personal opinion on it. I think the best way to start is to make my initial statement on it, since I am going into personal opinion now, and then talk about what I liked and what I didn't like. My initial statement is that this episode doesn't feel like a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic episode; it feels like an episode of MLP:FiM trying to be a Disney movie, and for the parts that work they work amazingly well, but for the parts that don't work they really don't work for me. This doesn't mean the episode is bad, it doesn't even mean the episode is weird, or out of place. It's a very epic way to end a season that has left pretty much everybody satisfied, including me. I can't begin to describe how relieved I feel knowing this season did end in a bang instead of a raspberry.

Things I didn't like from this episode.

Now, what didn't I like of this episode? Well, the turning point at the end of the first episode where everyone ditched Twilight and left her alone. I didn't like that but not for the reasons you might think. I hate that cliche. I hate that moment in every movie, every book, every TV show, where the protagonist is pointing out the evil, devious villain and everyone just ignores him or her thinking that he or she is wrong. They did that to Twilight in here and it pissed me off beyond all repair. I was thinking "These friends are terrible, why don't they trust her!?". They have been through a lot already! They have conquered everything and worked hard together. They risked their lives, their possessions, their friendships, and the bonds that connect them should be really strong by now. So I guessed at this point they would give her the benefit of the doubt. But no, she's wrong, Fake Cadance is good, but then it turns out she's not, so we have to have a scene where the characters go "You were right, we were wrong", and I hate that! I can find reasons why this is happening though. It can be that Queen Chrysalis has everypony under her spell and they are all being controlled, even the Princess. It can also be that the writers of the show wanted to go for a more Disney-esche plot development, and that's exactly how it feels, music and everything. I also didn't like how everything solved in the end. Once again, it feels a bit forced how they shoved in the whole Power of Love compels you, and how careless Chrysalis grows after she takes over Canterlot and imprisons Princess Celestia. It is straight out of the Disney movies, how the villain grows over confident right before falling (Scar in The Lion King had this, so did Jafar in Aladdin, or the Evil Queen in Snow white). Hell, even Discord had it at the start of Season 2. It's a trope, it's a cliche and some people may like it, some people may not like it. I don't like it, no matter how you approach it. I also didn't like how absent the mane six are besides Twilight. It's pretty clear that the episode is all about Twilight, as we are dealing with ponies from her surroundings, like her baby sitter, her brother, but it feels like Megan McCarthy left the others behind to give all the focus to Twilight. Fair enough I say, but it still feels weird. Okay, wow I thought I was going to write more on the stuff that I didn't like. When it comes down to it I only hated two things, but they were quite big deals for me. They are like two red, glowing, pulsating dots that didn't allow me to see the big picture. But now that they are down there and gone I can focus on the other stuff.

Things I did like from this episode.

So I ranted long enough about what I didn't like, what did I like of this episode? Well, let me jump right into what I really, really liked of it: Chrysalis Queen of the Changelings. Oh my God, why isn't she more in this episode? No, forget that, why isn't there a toy of her already in production? Until now the antagonists in Friendship is Magic have been pretty flat in terms of motivation, going from just spreading eternal night to creating chaos for laughs, and not very creepy in terms of design. But Chrysalis! She is smooth. She is confident. She is sneaky. She is beastly. She has constant bedroom eyes. She wants to conquer everything because she wants to feed her minions. She is completely and utterly evil, and nothing could stop her. Hey, guess what? That's a perfect villain! That's the kind of villain this show deserves. A villain that doesn't just look like she could hold herself without a problem in a fight, but whose motivations aren't the simple shallow search for power. But a villain is only as good as his or her entrance is, and Chrysalis' entrance in the show is just wow. I mean, just wow. Like I said, her transformation is down right horrifying. I know, I know, it's a cartoon and all that, but she is terrifying! Those glowy green eyes, and that black skin, that featureless face that only has two massive green orbs, and her holed up wings and legs, smoothly broken voice, her fangs, her everything! If there wasn't a small subconscious part of your brain yanking nerves inside you and screaming and running away then you should check your pulse because you might be dead. My mouth was dry watching that scene. That scene alone deserves its own little Emmy award, I mean that was unbelievably good. Great stuff, seriously great. What else did I like? Well, I liked Shining Armour and Cadance. It goes to show for the makers of this series how easy and fast can they make you feel for these characters in just a couple of minutes. Shining Armour being Twilight's best friend reminds us that our brothers and sisters are, in the end, our best friends and that we should care for them. Also, the story of Cadance being Twilight's baby sitter reminds me a lot about that girl who was babysit by Lauren Faust and kept all the doodles of horses and ponies she did when they were little. So it's pretty easy to feel for them when things get bad. Another thing that I liked of this episode were, surprise, surprise, the songs. Yeah, that's not surprising at all, as I join the majority when I say that the songs and the music for this episode have been top notch. The duet between Queen Chrysalis and Cadance is just brilliant. I don't think I've seen anything like it in any cartoon and it feels really refreshing. I have to point out that, even though I felt a bit toyed with, I kind of appreciate that the big bad villain is not defeated by the Elements of Harmony. The only two times this cartoon has resolved problems through the use of (cartoon) "violence" have been in the two seasons premieres. In the first one they obliterated Nightmare Moon to pull Princess Luna out, and in the second they petrified Discord. So to see Chrysalis get blasted away with the power of Love (and tolerance too maybe?) instead of pulling out the elements of harmony feels like a genuine twist. At first I didn't like this, and I noticed that some other people didn't like it either, as it renders the Mane Six useless, but come on guys, we can't have the same six ponies save Equestria over and over again. Let's give other characters the chance to fight back, shall we? Other things I liked. I liked seeing Luna again. I liked to see her change guard with Celestia, and then at the end showing up and asking if she missed something. I saw some people getting upset about her being used as a throw away joke, and I can see why they are upset, but I actually find it funny. It's okay guys, it's meant to be funny and overall, Luna's been a very funny character since Luna Eclipsed. It was cool to see Vinyl Scratch again, as well as Twilight's parents, even though the HUB's promos kind of spoiled their appearances. And overall I liked the visual aspect of the episode as a whole. It shines like something beyond a two parter. It does feel like a movie, so if we will never get an MLP:FiM Motion picture this is definitely the closest we will ever get.

I'm throwing in another shot, because she's my new favorite villain. I mean, dayum!

I guess you are now wondering why I said I didn't agree with the people saying this is the best episode of Season 2. Well, while this episode had incredible stuff it also had some big deal breakers for me. They didn't really ruin the fun for me, and after analysing the episode I think I liked it more than I liked it before doing so. However, I'm not watching this alone again. No way. This should be watched the right way, in a big screen, with a good sound system, and with your friends. But then again, I really enjoyed more other episodes of this season than this one. Objectively, it is amazing. From my perspective, I enjoyed other episodes better. Will I put it in my Top Ten? I don't think so. It's not just because of the fact that I enjoyed other episodes more. I think that would also be unfair for both this episode and the rest of the season to be in the same category. You can't compare them. They are on completely different levels. Did I enjoy it? Of course I did. What fan of this show can't enjoy this season finale? It's what we wanted to have since the start of the season. We wanted it to end with a bang. And that's exactly what happened. If the bang had been louder then the planet would've been propelled out of its trajectory.

So that's it for Season 2 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I can't believe I made 24 of these during several months. Now that I have no deadlines to publish new episode reviews until Season 3 starts I can focus on other projects! Like "Cluedo: Ponyville". Or making lots of Chrysalis fanart.

Seriously, she might as well be called "Fanservisalis".

- Defining Moment: Chrysalis' transformation. Need I say more?

- Moral: Learn to trust your instincts, especially in the face of doubt. Now this moral isn't just something kids can learn. There are adults who would need a good dose of this as well.

SNAPSHOTS PROVIDED BY THE MLP:FiM WIKIA

AND PONIBOORU.