13 Horrible Life Lessons My Little Pony Tries To Teach Our Kids

The Horrible Life Lesson: Two-faced friends are normal, and it's wrong to be upset by them.

Season 5's Make New Friends But Keep Discord focuses primarily on Discord's fear of abandonment after Fluttershy invites her new friend Tree Hugger to the Grand Galloping Gala instead of him. He gets back at her by inviting The Smooze, a jewel-eating blob who quickly turns the party into a disaster. Discord learns that it's okay to have different friends for different purposes, and that banishing Tree Hugger to an alternate sock puppet dimension as payback would be an overreaction.

That's right, it would be. The pony who deserves punishment is Fluttershy.

While it's true that we often have different friends for different purposes, Discord feels upset because he and Fluttershy only ever meet for tea parties in Fluttershy's cottage. In fact, a later episode establishes that most of Ponyville doesn't even know they're friends. He just wants to spend one night celebrating their friendship in public.

Not only does Fluttershy fail to see this from Discord's point of view, she also makes a deliberately two-faced remark when she privately tells Tree Hugger that she's funnier than anypony else Fluttershy knows - something she said to Discord verbatim mere days earlier.

Discord may overreact, but he follows by making a far more sincere apology to The Smooze for ignoring his/its feelings than Fluttershy ever bothers making for the same transgression. She never expresses truly honest gratitude for their friendship until Season 7's Discordant Harmony, when Discord works so hard to throw her a tea party that it literally almost kills him. Because that's what real friends do.