Sta.sh
each ) on this giveaway.
It's easy to participate 
This journal.
3 x a 1 Month Premium-Membership
Yea... and if you don't read the rules, you won't get anything out of this.
What you have to do
Advertise; you don't have to but is looked up upon
Fanime was amazing but it totally left me sick for weeks 
after I got better, I went through the letters I got and found one that had nothing but $20 and a note describing one of my posters. It looked like someone made a mistake and accidentally gave me their money without getting a poster. I want to return that money so If it was you, please e-mail me at Yuumei.yan@gmail.com with your name and address.
Movingon
AKA: "Oh Yeah, I Said I Was Going To Write This, Didn't I?"
In my last Journal, I complained a bunch about the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Season 3 finale. I also said that it could have been done better, and promised to explain how. Are you ready? Here it is:
It should have been a two-parter.
For starters, it already felt like it was going to be. I'm not the only one who noticed, right? We came in on Twilight Sparkle preemptively declaring a Best Day Ever!! and receiving the rude shock that Bad Magic Stuff was happening in Ponyville. Only later did we get a flashback to the cause...but the flashback was staged in such a way that it looked like part of a deleted scene clumsily re-inserted. Basically, the episode felt like we walked in on Act 2 of one episode, rushed through the rest of it, and then crammed the high points of a second episode into the time remaining.
I am convinced that it was intended to be a two-parter and was partially completed as one, but executive meddling forced it to be trimmed down to one episode. Had it proceeded as originally planned, not only would we be spared the awkward cuts, but there would have been time enough for a more nuanced story than we got.
The first episode could have covered the same events as the first half of "Magical Mystery Cure," but more gracefully--instead of jumping in the middle, we would have seen Twilight receive her assignment and tackle it using more conventional research methods before resorting to casting the half-finished spell. Her discovery of the complications and quest to solve them could also have been presented at a more leisurely pace, allowing for a more natural emotional progression and some more detail in the resolution. The moment when the other Element Bearers blast Twilight with magic and she disappears would make a perfect cliffhanger for the second episode.
Said episode could then be entirely devoted to her meeting with Celestia, being transformed into an alicorn...and worrying about what this means for her future. Can she still see her friends? Will they even still be friends, given that she's so far above them now? What if she can't hack being a demigoddess? How could Celestia do this to her without even asking in the first place? These questions were touched on in "Magical Mystery Cure," but glossed over due to the time crunch. The happy ending came too abruptly, and while it's entirely possible that they'll go back to these issues in Season 4, it will feel cut-and-pasted into the wrong place, much like the flashback in the first part of the episode.
In any case, it's water under the bridge now--the episode aired, as a single episode, and felt rushed and forced as a result. My point is that it wasn't inevitable--it was the result of bad planning. Why were two episodes crammed into one? I have no idea--it's not as if the season would have run long otherwise. It's only 13 episodes as it is: half-length. Was it somehow important for it to be exactly half-length? I have no idea.
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But I am going to disagree with your first journal somewhat. It seemed to me that this whole Princess thing is a metaphor for growing up. And we don't get to choose when or how that happens. All of the sudden, we're expected to fill in a role we didn't have before, and we have to deal with the affects afterwards.
Heck, hitting puberty for young girls is a good example. We don't choose when or how it happens, but it will, and we have to deal with everything that means and what it changes after the fact.
In the first place, they already had the cutie mark as a metaphor for puberty, and a much better one than alicorn/princesshood since every pony can expect to get one. If becoming an alicorn means growing up, does that mean most ponies stay children their whole lives?
In the second place, the concept of "princess as adult woman" is very much at odds with the rest of our culture. Princess fantasies are generally considered suitable only for young girls--any adult woman who calls herself a princess is likely to be derided or accused of dodging responsibility and expecting to be placed on a pedestal and catered to.
In the third place, the execution doesn't match your interpretation--there is some token acknowledgement that this will be a Big Responsibility, but they closed the episode (and the season) with a sparkly celebration and Twilight in a pretty dress and golden slippers. That's not "a new phase of life begins"; that's "and they all lived happily ever after." Become a princess, boom, your troubles are over.
Now, a lot of this could have been avoided if they had devoted more time to this plot point...but even so, I would still have to grumble at the assumption on the part of the writers (or perhaps their overlords at Hasbro) that princess imagery is the way to go. For once, someone made a show for girls where the princesses were in the background and all the adventures were had by regular girls of varying temperaments, and then they had to go and reverse that by making the main character a princess. It's creepy how much princesses saturate girl culture. I recommend a book called "Cinderella Ate My Daughter" for a full critique.
I don't know that having a princess as part of it is such a bad thing. Because it doesn't negate the other girls and everyone will still relate to who they related too before.
I also see nothing wrong with the princess saturation. There are a variety of Princesses, from Ariel to Merida to really life ones like Princess Elizabeth. There is good in Princesses too.