First off, I like how ‘Boast Busters’ is a double pun. It seems a fairly obvious pun but I can’t imagine it was all that easy to come up with, unless the title came first and the episode was built around it. Or maybe the showrunners were just better writers than me. I’m intrigued by the fact that Spike refers to Twilight’s moustache spell as ‘growing magic’, and that it’s one of ‘25 tricks’. I assume he refers to them as tricks because Trixie’s magics are also ‘tricks’ later in the episode, but it seems kinda weird to refer to them as that all the same, and I don’t think there’s much reference to spells as ‘tricks’ later in the show. I also ponder whether by ‘growing magic’, Spike really does mean magic that makes anything grow. Growth is a potential future state of a given object, so presumably that means that Spike already had the potential to grow a moustache of his own accord in the future. Does future Spike shave? See I’d assumed this the other way around – when I saw ponies with moustaches, mainly upper class types from Canterlot, I assumed they had theirs done via magic. Then again we have people like Starswirl and such… But dragon facial hair we’ve seen even less of, if any that’s naturally-occurring. Anyway, just a little nitpick.
Spike later follows this up by saying that most unicorns only have a small repertoire of magic that matches their particular talent, so that lends support again to the idea that this really was an example of Twilight mastering growth magic in general, as a category.
Trixie’s fireworks caught my attention. I was wondering how she sets them off, and assumed she used magic, which made me think – maybe her big hat is to hide when she’s using her magic? I suppose that could help make the act more interesting in a world where people know how magic works already – kind of like how you look for where the switch is in a sleight-of-hand, ponies might look for where Trixie might be using her magic in a given trick, even though in both cases the audience already knows in advance the general idea of what kind of trick will be done and the rough outline of how.
Then there’s AJ and Trixie’s competition – I don’t really understand what was going on with Trixie’s half. AJ’s watching the rope move about, and it’s not like she’s not used to seeing things moved around with magic, so why is she so distracted by it? Is Trixie using magic with like, an attention-grabbing property to it? Though sometimes it seems like the magic ‘glow’ is more for our benefit as an audience, and I’ve toyed with the interpretation that the visual glow is shorthand for the ponies being able to ‘sense’ the presence of magic – I guess this either confirms that the glow is in-universe as well, or AJ was distracted by a wiggling rope for some reason.
When Twilight runs from the show with the excuse ‘I think I hear my laundry calling’, it made me think – in this world, laundry would be done by hand, right? Well, by hoof. Unless she means it was hanging up to dry. Or maybe, being Twilight, she used a spell to get it to do itself.
Also intriguing was that Snails had trouble using his horn to light up the cave, whilst Snips didn’t even try at all. I took away two things from this: first, I guess light is more necessary for finding snails than snipping things, so Snails probably has this ability whilst Snips can’t use lighting magic at all, and secondly, given that Snails is so slow, I wonder if magical ability is tied to intellect. Now, that’s a fairly obvious seeming conclusion, after all Twilight spends so much time reading and learning spells, but I mean that if it’s so hard for Snails to even use his magic at all, perhaps raw ability is tied to raw intellect too. It seems fairly obvious for unintelligent characters to be less good at magic, but it hadn’t occurred to me to concretely tie the two together.
Anyway I like this episode probably the best so far, first we get to see Twilight do something really cool, and she starts to really properly find her place fitting in with Ponyville.