“Miss me yet?”

don’t forget  
it’s a “feminist” show  
which really only means to reduce male characters to mere props rather than gender equality
 
they wouldn’t even have to put away the focus from the female cast, but “feminism”. that’s all the reasoning behind it.
 
not saying that i don’t like MLP but every time a male character other than twilights effeminate pet dragon does anything it carries no weight for the story.
 
and even spike used to be a much better character when he was allowed to be clever and snarky rather than whiney and a slapstick prop.

@Background Pony #5A14  
Flash is no more or less a generically “nice guy” than Timber. Flash has the benefit of having three movies of characterisation to (barely) give him some kind of depth beyond just being “generic nice guy”, but he’s still ultimately just Generic Nice Guy Love Interest #2263473. He serves a minor role in the plot in the first movie in a way that feels just really tacked on and pointless, and is utterly meaningless after that.
 
Though I’ll admit to entirely personal bias, I actually kinda like Flash’s repeated moments of weirdly awkward character growth so far, and I actually think if they try to reintegrate him as a supporting character after this new development, it could be really positive.
 
Timber, on the other hand, is exactly the same Generic Nice Guy but without any of the character development so far. Given time, he could surely become a vaguely meaningful supporting character in much the same way, but I’m sure that if we do see more of him, he’ll just continue to be an obnoxiously Generic Nice Guy Love Interest and nothing more than that.
 
I guess my point here is that, if they’re going to introduce new characters, they should do something with them. Designated Love Interest is not doing something with a character, that’s just lazy.

@Background Pony #5A14  
Flash was the nicest guy besides the mane cast members so he gets special mention. Plus while he was under the spell at one point he was still friendly with Twilight, but as the sirens got stronger Flash got meaner.

@Background Pony #4BC7  
His only good deed is the first one, anything besides are complete straw grasping and circumstances that you a trying to sign as Flash’s accomplishments.
 
“he demonstrates how powerful the siren magic is in the second movie”  
Yes him and everyone else from CHS, it’s pretty dumb to count this as Flash’s own merit.

@Background Pony #5A14  
Not delusions, facts. Lets review: he saves Twilight from a frame up in the first movie and acts as her love interest, he demonstrates how powerful the siren magic is in the second movie and demonstrates how it turns some of the nicest people into jerks, he was one of 12 wondercolts chosen to compete in the friendship games in the third film and met Twilight’s human counterpart and stared in a short, and finally he helps Sunset get some feelings off her chest in the fourth film. He is a nice guy. So who’s the delusional one? The answer: you.

@darknessRising24  
I didn’t see literally no one saying Timber is far better than Flash, I think it’s just flash fans inferiority complex and paranoia.
 
>At the very least Flash tried to contribute SOMETHING  
Well it’s Timbers first movie appearance it’s foolish to expect everything from the beginning, he’ll have his time.  
But his start was undeniably better than of Flash.

It’s also so fun to watch flash fans grasping at straws trying to convince everyone that Timber is so much worse than Flash and trying to redirect hate for Flash towards Timber but it didn’t quite works out.  
Also for his first movie I think Timber did quite all right, no far from perfect of course, but fine compared to Flash in EqG1. On the other hand Flash was remaining a failure for 4 damn movies, so it’s no wonder flash fans desperately trying to cover Timber with dirt so Flash would look better.

@Background Pony #53EC  
The point is that while everyone whines about him being “better”, they ignore the fact that he pretty much didn’t have a big impact on the two driving conflicts of the entire movie.
 
At the very least Flash tried to contribute SOMETHING, even if it was minuscule at best. Timber had all of two rolls:
 
Red Herring  
And Scu-Twi’s safety net.

@Background Pony #4BC7  
>Flash is way better than Timber  
>he’s nicer and less self-centered  
>he contributes to the plot of each movie  
Pure delusions: the post.

Flash doesn’t either, so what’s your point?

@Alexlayer  
I’m not saying they should write Twilight and Sunset into a romance. I’m not saying I even expect them to ever entertain the idea. I know myself and plenty of others would totally like that, but I don’t think it’s necessary at all.
 
What I AM saying is that their relationship as it stands is far and away the best-written part of the entire film.

@Background Pony #49B1  
Mh, well, pretty much everything you said is true. I personally didn’t find the Red Herring thing to be particularly annoying but really, it’s just like the romance here. If it’s annoying, it’s because of how badly written it is.
 
Also…
 

 
ONCE MORE FOR THE PEOPLE ON THE BACK, PLEASE!

@Alexlayer  
I could rail on about how the sudden love-at-first-sight interest is a stupid boring cliche that needs to die. I could rant about how abrupt and jarring it is, or about how I just can’t empathize with Twilight’s supposed affection and thus am alienated by it, or any number of other things. But that’s not why I particularly find this one irritating. Timber commits a crime far greater than Flash did, and Flash was already a ridiculous squeaky-clean good-guy hamfisted spontaneous love interest with a confusing and nonsensical inter-dimensional sideplot thing going on that….what even was that crap seriously. But no, Timber is way way worse for one reason.
 
Timber has only one purpose in the narrative: to be a red herring.
 
Introducing a romantic interest can be really good for a story. You can flesh out brand new aspects of a character and explore entirely new avenues of development. You can cause all kinds of interesting conflicts by injecting romance into things. Flash already failed utterly at this, because his appearance doesn’t give Twilight any more new growth as a character or cause her to come into conflict with anything in particular….but at least he actually did something plot-related, however useless and tacked-on it was.
 
Timber, on the other hand, literally exists just to mislead the audience into assuming he’s the bad guy and then turns out to not be. Oh. Well. What a shock. But his presence as a love interest still doesn’t add anything to Twilight’s character, he’s not a particularly interesting character on his own since the movie isn’t about him and everything about his relationship with Twilight is just a paint-by-numbers cookie cutter generic sudden teen romance cliche.
 
It also doesn’t help that the movie kinda crams this cliche garbage teen relationship thread in full of bland, stale lack-of-effort, directly calling attention to exactly how bland and trite it is by its immediate proximity to an infinitely more well-written and engaging relationship that is literally central to the main narrative of the film.

Clearly when the staff was constructing Timber’s character, they wanted to avoid some of the mistakes that are usually brought about in regards of Flash, such as “Not having any purpose in the story outside of a relationship with Twilight”, for example, and probably the general blandness of Flash’s character.
 
That, however, didn’t advert that him being a love interest for Twilight is still both forced and unnecesary, and that, while he is much more characterized than Flash, he still falls rather bland in comparison to the whole main cast.
 
And while they tried (and arguably didn’t even succeed) to fix those two problems, they instead brought others issues to the writing, such as the amorality of him, a camp counselor, hitting on a student under his charte, or the question of how old appart he and Twilight are (the novel claims they’re both teenagers, but the movie never addresses that and let’s be real, of everyone who’s seen the movie, how many actually read the novel? Bottom line, you could easily headcanon them several years appart and there’d be little argument against it). Plus, I’d argue the character derailment on SciTwi is even worse than what’s been done to Princess Twilight…
 
See, Hasbro? This is why you gotta stop trying to shove these forced heteronormative romances that nobody asked for down our throats!

Flash is way better than Timber, plus he’s nicer and less self-centered. Everyone complains how Flash has no personality but all those people are wrong because they aren’t seeing what’s there and how he contributes to the plot of each movie. Timber might be a good brother, but besides that he’s worse than Flash in every way.

@Beau Skunky  
It’s not about shipping, it’s about how everyone’s overlooking the fact that he did very little in the actual plot, the very same thing people whined and complained about when bashing Flash.
 
@sharpshadow  
He didn’t “set the bar”, and he at least DID something that tied into the plot, even if it was very minor.

Yeah, that’s how low Flash set the bar.

To be fair, he did try to cheer her up, at times. Also, Flash also cleared Twi’s name when Sunset (people forget she used to be evil) framed her, and tried to get her in trouble with Luna back in the first movie. That’s actually more then some popular bit characters ever did.
 
Though, this Twi’ is a different one then the one Flash had a crush on, as pointed out by Sunset in the movie. So it’s unlikely to “work out.” Sorry, ’shippers.

While I agree that the thing between Timber Spruce and Twilight was unnecessary and not super-helpful to her, he did function well enough as “guy who kinda knows what’s going on and who cares about Gloriosa”.