>>5704 >Can Not Decide. >Season 8 has a more unified story but a lot of the elements didn't seem to be as unified well with the rest of the show. Perhaps at times not as well thought out (them never having a backstory for Cozy). Yet there is arguably build up and stuff around the school that they were intending to build up next season (Halo-Twi). Season 8 still had to partly contend with Season 7's story but it was more of something they had to get out of the way rather than build on it. this one is a weird case. I consider the 8th season as the normalization of the entire map of Equestria (like it happened to the Everfree Forest in season 4, fearful and strange first and then, became a typical place to visit) and focuses heavily on integrating all the parts of the entire world into one place and using them indifferently for any story. It still has its expansions like Mt Aris/Seaquestria (implying that one doesn´t take the movie into account),Saddle Arabia, the Kirin´s Village or even visit the mentioned Tartarus in its entirety, not to mention that the school itself held a hideout. They focus more on the traditions of the species and more on social commentary.
However, I understand why one would rank this season lower than the 7th season and it manages to scrap the entire build up of the pillars all of a sudden and except for a couple of episodes, their arc vanished completely. Cozy Glow is certainly confusing because if we knew about her origins, her twist wouldn´t work that well but that doesn´t justify the lack of her defined backstory like other villains had.
I would rank it somewhere in the middle,in a subcategory of lore under the top two....and you cannot call it exactly a fan service one either because the school wasn´t well received in certain parts of the community.
>Season 9:There was a story arch for sure but it wasn't something that was fully unfolding in a all the pieces combined storyline like 4 or 7. indeed, it was a subtler arc that didn´t follow a strong pattern except for the feeling of moving on in an abroad sense throughout the season. It introduced Grogar´s hideout and the villain´s arc for the bell that held ancient powers but many of the episodes came back to the slice of life style and it didn´t introduce much that we didn´t already know. Perhaps the events that happened in the Everfree Forest (cockatrices, The Tree of Harmony) and the myth around the Great Seedling could count as something refreshing but this season didn´t have time to introduce anything else.
>Yet one could argue that is better for lore than those. There also was Season 8's storyline which had been contended with, but it wasn't as swept aside so much as background presence with one aborted plotline (Halo Twi and the Tree house). Also there was a mad dash for fanservice. except for Twilight´s arc, I believe that the 9th season just stopped at introducing new things, packing the old ones up and using them at its convenience. This one could lean more towards the 5th season/6th season category but I could understand that both S8 and S9 could be seen together in this regard.
>Season 3:Hardest to choose. It had buddings of a unified lore for such a short season, yet it also was being done in fan service. One could also make the case that it is either the weakest lore season or a non lore season with lore and fanservice as a more thinly spread butter. yeah, this is the odd one. Nonetheless it introduced two relevant things: the alicorn concept (which existed before but it wasn´t all that well defined until Magic Duel and the finale) and especially, the Crystal Empire, where the Equestria Games arc would start for the 4th season. Perhaps the mirror pool counts but it only appeared counted times after the debut and if we took the finale seriously, we would start asking contradictory questions so we´d better not consider it as something really solid to hold on. As for the rest, the lore was less present than in the first two seasons...I have to agree with this one.
