But I'm just realizing now as others have pointed out, where is Sunset?!? Sunset needs to be part of this collection!

Except for the random face cutie marks, these look fantastic! This style is more how I imagined the characters would be humanized when we first heard about EQG back in ... 2012? 2013? I have a LOT of FiM merch, but NO EQG stuff just beacuse it's all looked... bad, to be frank. I'll definitely want to pick these up!

It was weird hearing Kristen Schaal's voice coming out of Pinkie Pie. But her voice sort of kind of fits. Of course I love Andrea Libman as the voice of Pinkie, but in some alternate universe I could see Kristen Schaal voicing Pinkie Pie (but Pinkie's character would have to be altered a bit, maybe to be more mischievous? I dunno. Schaal just has a mischievous voice.)

Greg (aka FFF and the voice of pretty much everyone in MAS) explains this in one of his "Personal Time with Greg" videos (I forget which one.. or it might've been in a Rainbow Dash Presents commentary... i dunno, it's somewhere on the FFF youtube channel). He says that he does like the show, and amazingly he likes Fluttershy despite the harsh treatment she gets, but basically the entire point of MAS (specifically with the negative (-) series) is go after the flaws in the writing of each episode, then have the characters resolve the episode's conflict in a much simpler way, and that usually involves either a more logical solution or, more frequently, a downright unethical one.

This fits with the significant lack of morals displayed by of most of the MAS characters, and especially Twilight. It is easy to see how this, combined with the significant cynicism in the post credits "commentary," could lead one to think he actually hates the show. But it's clear from his other videos that he doesn't. And lastly, he's been making MAS videos for YEARS. He must at least somewhat like the show and the characters for him to be that dedicated.

A good video of Greg's to watch (and it might even be the one I was referring to, I don't know) is this one, where he comments on the MLP Analysis community but also states a lot of his own opinions of the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYZv8LfwBhU

Remember it's not the streams that cause low ratings. For the vast majority of people watching the streams, that's their only way of watching the show live. Discovery Family isn't a basic cable channel, so even people with cable can't necessarily watch it legally, and then of course there are the huge number of people who do not even have cable, and then there are the tens/hundreds of thousands (possibly >1000000) of people outside the U.S. who can't watch it live legally. So the people watching the streams wouldn't be contributing to the Nielsen ratings if there were no streams. They'd just download the episode later (or buy it on iTunes etc).

The low ratings are due almost entirely to bad marketing. And Discovery Family excels at sucking at marketing. My guess is ep 100 will have lower ratings than expected, but it *won't* be because of the streams, it'll be due to the multi-week hiatus.

I'd love for the episode to break the viewership record or something but honestly, to the target audience, it's just another episode, and one that airs after weeks of no new episodes, and thus one they're likely to miss. I'd really like to be wrong though!

I.. what? Whether you liked it or not is one thing, but this episode was the exact opposite of boring! So much going on, so many great jokes and visual gags, and a very funny (if predictable-ish) story. Definitely not boring! Could you elaborate on why you thought it was boring?

Fantastic episode!

I uploaded it to derpibooru. Just search for Fluttershy's Cottage.

When I first watched this episode (missed the livestream) I had to pause the video and adore the newly redesigned Fluttershy's Cottage. It looks fantastic! And just last week I posted a comment saying that I hope they go back and touch up some of their old Season 1 flash assets to match the look of the ones that've been made from scratch for newer seasons, and sure enough they did! And man, they knocked it out of the park with the cottage!

Ever since they redesigned the CMC clubhouse in S2 and added way more detail and shading, I've been hoping they would redo the cottage. My wish finally came true! As a bonus there's a few frames from the 1080p iTunes version where there are no credits overlapping it, making a perfect desktop wallpaper. Other than the cottage, almost everything else looked beautiful in this episode too. Except for a couple of those ugly season 1 paper-flat apple trees.... Grr... :P

Edit: oh and yes this should be a regular feature, just taking time to point out stuff like this that a lot of people might not notice but contributes hugely to the overall quality of the show. And if BG artists see their work recognized on EQD, they're likely to try even harder to impress!

That's one of the main things I love so much about FiM's score: that William Anderson (and those he works with) continue to re-use old themes in new ways. Leitmotifs are very rare in children's television background music (i realize that's a pretty pretty specific category...), but the fact that it exists in FiM is just one of those things that makes the entire FiM universe feel so cohesive. Yeah there are some plot holes in some episodes and there are contradictions within the canon, but music has a way of tying things together in ways that no other part of the production can.

With music you can set or change the atmosphere of a scene, emphasize a joke or even change its implication, and of course you can bring back memories and, like you said, apply new emotions to those memories, all through the soundtrack. And William Anderson and Kelley Davidson are masters of that. Few other cartoons have/have had music as such an important part of the finished product. There of course have been some. Batman:TAS, Avatar:TLA and TLoK are a few that come to mind. If you've seen those shows you can probably almost immediately recall some of the musical themes they contain (and I mean beyond the intro theme, since you can remember that for pretty much any show).

Anyways, to summarize: William Anderson (and Kelly Davidson), you better not ever leave FiM! (I'm kidding, but if he/they do, whoever replaces them will have big shoes to fill.)