Season 7 Episode 3: A Flurry of Emotions

I shall dub this episode:

CUTE: The Episode

Because that is exactly what it is. We have seen many episodes with cute fillies in this show, but this episode here is the epitome of this, the highest peak the cuteness can reach, for it is an episode with Flurry Heart!
And the sheer amount of cuddling and snuggling Twilight had going on with Flurry Heart after she arrived, makes me jealous and wish to be in Twilight's place.....
But, before I come to talk about Flurry Heart, I am going to talk about something else, because with this episode, a momentous occasion happened! An occasion you don't see often, a rare event of absolute delight, inducing pure joy in the hearts of everyone who could bestow it.....














PEACH FUZZ GOT A SPEAKING ROLE!

This is signficant. This is wonderful! A background pony does not get a speaking role often, especially not if it is a foal, but here it happened. And my heart is overflowing with happiness from this!
I love Peach Fuzz. Not as much as I love Applebloom, Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle, and I don't know what fascinates me about her so much, but I do.
I really recognized her for the first time in "Crusaders of the Lost Mark", without knowing her name yet (but got already a fic idea for her), then saw her again in "On Your Marks" and uploaded a .gif of her getting fed with cake by Silver Spoon, which was where I found out her name while searching for it on Derpibooru to tag the picture correctly. Followed by more uploads of pictures of her after seeing her in her cheerleader dress in "The Cart Before the Ponies".^^
I'm beyond every imaginable amount of happiness over the fact she got a speaking role now!
And her voice is pure perfection! It sounds really squishy, like you're gently squeezing a peach, it's like her name is describing her voice.^^
I'm absolutely in love with her voice!
And, of course, with hearing her voice for the first time, this goes hoof in hoof with finding out a few things about her personality as well!
For once, she really seems to be into epic adventure tales involving dragons. While Spike is reading, she is the one who is the most excited about the story, indicated by that broad smile that lifts her cheeks. And then she is the only one who points out that Spike kinda looks like the dragon in the book, with a huge grin on her face.
Additionally, she seems to adore Spike now, after she noticed that similarity.^^
The most interesting thing, though, that I really adore about her, now that I found that out, is apparent on the class photo that was made after she and her classmates got sick with the horsey hives.
On the photo, all of the sick foals look weak and sad, or even angry about having gotten sick like that, but she is the only one who is grinning widely for the photo! She manages to stay happy and swinging, even though she is sick and struck with that illness.
This does show an interesting aspect of her personality; Peach Fuzz always stays happy and optimistic, even during tough times, able to wear a happy smile and always keeping her sunny mood, even if she has to put up with something bad.
This is a remarkable feat and something that not many ponies are capable of! I said that I don't know what fascinates me so much about her, but I certainly have found something that fascinates me about her to no end now!^^

Good and now that I'm done with the fangasming over Peach Fuzz (for now!), let's talk a little about Flurry Heart and Twilight.....
I have to say, I'm baffled again what absolute amazing moral and message a new episode of MLP: FiM delivered here!
In this episode, we see Twilight obsessing over schedules so much again, that she even neglects her niece who she loves so much and treats her like an useless appendage. Even to the extent that she rips her tail out of Flurry Heart's hooves in a harsh way and, later, that she doesn't even notice that Flurry Heart is crying because of her, because she is so focused on sticking to her plan.
We get an interesting insight into Twilight and see some quite dark abyss of her soul here..... It is something I saw about Twilight a little in the past already (and now I regret that I never got around to write an analyzis about this), but this episode showed it in great detail, that Twilight can get so focused on something that she is not only forgetting everything around her that hasn't to do with a specific task, but can also become pretty cold and heartless in such a situation.
During the whole time, Flurry Heart gave her hints to what is wrong and, while Twilight at first tried to still pay attention to her, she started to become more and more ignorant to Flurry Heart the more time passed and the more she got behind on her schedule. Culminating in her not even noticing why Flurry Heart was so upset all of a sudden and just yelling at her that she should put them all down immediately. Causing Flurry to erupt into a crying fit and making her so disappointed that she didn't even want to see Twilight anymore.
We saw Twilight making one of the worst mistakes a parent or foalsitter can make here; neglect of the foal she cares for, causing stress in Flurry Heart with it, since Flurry just wanted to spend time with her and wasn't at fault that Twilight took her on despite having to do so many other things.
Twilight's ignorance is especially interesting when we consider how much love she showed towards Flurry Heart at first. We didn't see this before, but she loves Flurry Heart in a very intense way, more than you would expect from an aunt, which gets especially indicated by how she bought a closet full of toys for Flurry Heart, without even knowing when she is going to see her again!
It seems that Twilight suffers from a very interesting inner conflict; trapped between the desire of being there for the ones she loves and the feeling of duty to fulfill her tasks in a perfect way.
This also shows that Twilight probably would not be a very good mother. Even though she learned her lesson from everything, having to take permanent care of an own foal of hers would clash with her schedules and her obsession over planning everything she does through, resulting in the same emotional turmoil for her foal.
We really have seen an interesting and dark side of Twilight here and it brings along with it one of the most important and mature morals the show ever had, a perfect lesson for parents, foalsitters and big brothers/sisters alike!
It is remarkable that, after six seasons, the show is still able to do this, to include such meaningful and important life lessons, even though it feels like it already has taught everything that is to teach!
The strength of this show is something that should never get underestimated.

And, speaking of insights into personalities, we did not only get this for Peach Fuzz and to see something new of Twilight's personality, we also saw more of Flurry Heart's personality!
While we don't see many new aspects of her personality, we do see again that Flurry Heart is quite intelligent for her age; she completely understood everything Twilight said to her, was alerting Spike when Pound Cake and Pumpkin Cake began to fight where other babies would have just sat there and watched and she appeared especially mature towards the end of the episode, after Twilight yelled at her, her reaction and how she rejected Twilight more reminding on a preteen foal, than on a baby.
We also saw that she forgives very quickly, even after getting hurt, something that could really be either very good or very bad for her in the future, depending on how the rest of her personality develops and how she uses this strong sense of forgiveness when she is older.
Finally, Flurry Heart is a very well-behaved foal; which shows nicely in this episode with how she contrasts to Pound Cake and Pumpkin Cake. While the latter were busy fighting and even began to treat her quite brutal, she remained a level head and even tried to end their fight (even though her natural, foalish naivety let her go about this the wrong way).
Flurry Heart already shows the signs of a strong, resilient personality and I can't wait to see her growing further!

That points out the most important things about this particular episode already, but, there is more to it than that this time, because we got some interesting (semi-)worldbuilding as well!
Letting aside a few from the books Twilight talked about with Cheerilee; which are already interesting enough cause we hear about other, popular books in Equestria than just Daring Do books, even a science-fiction novel involving space travels (whose science Twilight called out as preposterous quickly, apparently, she's too much of a scientist to take enjoyment in the science-fiction genre^^), which might mean the concept of interplanetar travels is not completely unknown to Equestria, there is one special book Twilight read.....
To the foals in the hospital, Twilight is reading a book about a unicorn called Gusty and its soldiers going to war against an enemy listening to the name "Grogar"..... Sounds familiar?
It seems like Tirek is not the only one who does exist in Equestria as well, in an alternate form.
Grogar, though, seems to be only a fictional book character, from what we know so far. However, this might not make him any less dangerous.....
As attentive followers of the official comics know, there is a certain stallion who has the ability to bring book characters to life..... Remember this detail, this is probably going to be important later.


This covers the biggest and most exciting aspects of the episode, but even with all that said, "A Flurry of Emotions" still allowed for some more interesting observations to be made.....



Interesting Details on the Side or in the Background:


- Ponyville has a toy shop! I find that very interesting. Ponyville is a small countryside town, almost a village and shops are something we haven't seen there a whole lot, except for Quills & Sofas. Even a lot of the food is getting bought on a marketplace!
A toy shop is something one would expect in Canterlot and other big cities and that Ponyville's citizens have to travel there to buy toys, yet, Ponyville does have one. This is aligning with something I noticed while watching "Applejack's Day Off" and that I wrote in my review for it.
This toy shop does further the impression that Ponyville's economy is getting better and that the town is expanding.


- Why were Lyra and Bon Bon in the toy shop together? While there could be lot of reasons why they went there to buy toys, including buying toys for the birthdays of foals of friends, it makes you still wonder if that is a sign for something..... Could it be true and Tootsie Flute is indeed their daughter? Or somepony else?
I will keep an open eye for more things pointing into that direction.


- Cheerilee seems to be grieving over not being able to use magic. After Twilight had cleaned the blackboard that Flurry Heart messed up, Cheerilee was complaining over having to rewrite everything with her mouth. Right after Flurry Heart used her magic to draw on the blackboard.
It seems that Cheerilee is not really happy with being an earth pony and envious of the ability of unicorns to use magic, since that would make everything easier for her.


- Pinkie Pie's party planning cave is back in the show! And what is new here, Pinkie Pie can get there from the bakery itself as well, not just from her room. She even has a secret mechanism that gets activated by hitting a certain key on the cash till! If we wouldn't already know what this secret cave is for, I would start to theorize that Pinkie Pie is secretly a superhero now.


- Nurse Redheart had a speaking role again! This isn't as interesting as Peach Fuzz' first speaking role, but still unexpected, since it was in Season 2 (!) that she had her last one!


- Cadance and Shining Armor are jealous of Twilight because Flurry Heart likes her so much. After Shining Armor and Cadance returned to Flurry Heart upon realizing how much they missed her, they made quite unhappy faces as Flurry Heart was flying right back at Twilight.
A very classical case of parental jealousy here.


- And lastly, we heard about a new, equestrian disease! The Horsey Hives seem similar to the hives humans here on Earth know and come with some of the symptoms, as indicated by Peach Fuzz scratching over her welt-covered leg. Though, the Horsey Hives are evidently worse, since the foals sick with it have to stay in the hospital for an extended time, most likely due to fever that is caused by them.



And I guess this wraps it up. It took me longer than usual to write this review, this episode is as jam-packed with interesting details as Twilight's schedule was and I'm amazed by the sheer amount of infos we got!
The first two episodes of the season were already great, but this episode surpasses them with ease.
If the rest of the episodes are so packed with interesting stuff, I'm gladly sitting here for the whole night to write reviews for them!
See you next week!