So, not many posts recently.  Normally I blame MMO addiction, and I HAVE been spending too many hours in Everquest, but I actually had some excitement over the holidays that has had me somewhat distracted.  The short version is that I wound up in the ER on Christmas Eve with some pains of unexplained origin and then wound up having surgery on New Year’s Eve to have misbehaving parts taken out.

I can’t actually say it was a thoroughly terrible experience.  I have some serious hospital phobias, and my wife has frequently expressed concern that I would resist going to the hospital even if I was in dire straits.  It turns out that pain is a fabulous motivator in overcoming phobias.

So that was a thing.

Now I will put that aside and talk about My Little Pony: Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks, the awkwardly-titled sequel to last year’s Equestria Girls, itself an anthropomorphized movie tie-in to an animated series based on an updated version of a girl’s toy line from the 1980s.

Other guys get to say things like “I like football” and everyone knows what they’re talking about.  I wouldn’t have a hobby you could explain in three words.

While Equestria Girls was somewhat divisive, I quite liked it, and I liked the sequel even more.  It’s bizarrely continuity-heavy for a movie aimed at young girls, with a ton of references back to the first movie and to early seasons of the show, which is rewarding if you’re maybe just a little obsessed but which might make it kind of opaque if you haven’t got a head full of pony trivia.

It also carries on the Friendship Is Magic tradition of going deep into the Monster Manual for its villains.  Really, this show is going to be responsible for girls having a surprising depth of knowledge re: mythological creatures of all sorts and sizes by the time it’s over.

The one concern I had going in was that, well, it’s a musical and I’ve been pretty disappointed with a lot of the music from seasons 3 and 4.  It seemed like several episodes have had songs shoved in where they weren’t really needed, and not many of them have been up to the standards set in the first two season.

Given music-themed villains and a battle-of-the-bands plot, however, there’s no reason NOT to have roughly half the screen time taken up with musical numbers, and they’re pretty definitively in the category of “catchy”.

I liked it.  10/10, would watch again.

Now to really geek out.  I’d recommend stopping here unless you want to see just how deep my personal rabbit hole goes.

So, in the first movie, Pinkie thinks she recognizes the humanized Twilight, but it’s one of those one-off lines that gets forgotten pretty quickly.  In the post-credits scene of this one, we find out that there IS a Twilight in the human world and that she’s become aware of the weirdness happening at Canterlot.

Now, pony-Twilight has had a steadily-increasing power level over the last four years.  She’s gone from getting winded by a simple teleportation spell to being able to, quite literally, level mountains.  Her one vulnerability is that she’s not willing to risk her friends.

I will leave it up to the reader to decide whether Celestia’s sending her to Ponyville to make friends was a deliberate move to make sure that her faithful student would always have an Achilles heel – or at least some distractions.

Human-Twilight, on the other hand, is presumably just as good at science as pony-Twilight is at magic, and doesn’t have friends to protect or to temper her single-mindedness.

I am now REALLY looking forward to Equestria Girls 3: Twilight vs. Twilight.