Natasha Levenger wrote this one. I had to look her up, she also wrote the "Make New Friends but Keep Discord" one (the one with SMOOZE) and also Pinkie Apple Pie.
I liked the episode with one or two reservations I'll mention later. Overall, I liked the moral of the story a lot: "Just because your friends like something doesn't mean that you have to, also, and it doesn't mean you should force yourself to take part in it after you've tried it and determined you don't like it." And with the secondary, but not explored, moral: And your friends shouldn't be jerks to you about it. (Oh, so much of the agony of the Internet is people mocking others for liking different things from them).
It's Nightmare Night again. And Fluttershy is making her usual plans to hide inside her house. Fluttershy doesn't like being scared - though I'd say equally as much, she doesn't like being STARTLED. I don't like being startled so I can empathize. And a lot of the "scary Hallowe'en stuff" is really as much about catching someone off guard and startling them as it is being really and truly scary.
(Actually, the "frights" Fluttershy tries to establish in her Tea Party of Doom are, in their own way, much more ADULT fears than the simple "A rubber spider drops down in your face" kind of thing from cheap haunted houses. For example: "Turn to you left. Oh, no, that guest is not there! You invited a friend to your party and she didn't care enough to come!" And I wonder, am I reading too much into it there that it's directed at Pinkie, who went low-grade nuts in a first season episode when she thought her friends didn't want to come to a party?
And anyway: the whole "Your friends are all DISAPPOINTED in you!!!" is, to my way of thinking, a more grown-up type of fear than, I don't know, fear of the dark or something. I have a pretty highly honed fear of failure and also fear of others thinking badly of me....and that can be more difficult of a fear than, say, a fear of bees (which I had as a child but have since overcome)
Anyway. Harry the Bear (Name is a call-back to the first season: again, the continuity here is so fun; there must be a Show Bible the writers consult) is helping Fluttershy prepare. Along with Fuzzylegs the Spider. (Yes. Fluttershy is afraid of many things but not spiders. Not snakes, either, as I remember). Fluttershy has a blanket fort under her bed! We see a shot of it - it has books, and pillows, and stuffed animals, and apparently a jar of peanut butter. Because of course you need peanut butter in your blanket fort....
But the whole event that drives the episode, that means we don't just get 22 minutes of Fluttershy hanging out under her bed reading to Harry and Fuzzylegs, is that Angel Bunny is out of carrots.
(Angel Bunny is a jerk. Or, at least, he can be a jerk. Though it's possible what he's doing here is tough love.)
So Fluttershy, instead of going, "Well, you should have thought of that before, you will just have to wait to tomorrow morning, for All Pony's Day to dawn, and THEN I'll go out and get carrots for you. You won't starve," decides to go buy him some carrots.
So she goes to the market, where she runs into Granny Smith, who so does not get it and who scares her, and Big Mac, who apparently does, and makes a pained face when Granny Smith is like "What's gotten into that girl?" after Fluttershy runs away.....
And she winds up at Twilight's castle, where the rest of the Mane Six are telling scary stories, and they somehow persuade her to join in with them in celebrating the day.
Rarity tries to get her in costume, and Fluttershy turns down a lot of her choices with a series of increasingly ridiculous "what ifs?" And I admit, as someone who can "what if?" with the best of them, I was slightly annoyed by this. Now, I can't tell if it's that they gave a particularly heavy Idiot Ball to Fluttershy to carry this episode, or if the whole "Look at how ridiculous her worries are" hit too close to home, but that part bugged me. (Then again: later on Rarity tripped over her mermaid tail and remembered Fluttershy's concern about long, draggy costumes. Of course, thing being a KID'S show, Rarity was not the horror-movie victim and she got away okay).
So next they go to Sugarcube Corners and play "pin the horn on Nightmare Moon" (I'm guessing Luna has reconciled with her alternate reality self being the image of Nightmare Night). And Pinkie Pie made candy bags for each pony (And, again, the little things: the drawings she "did" on the bags of each of her friends are hilarious). And Fluttershy even worries about the candy ("What if a sticky toffee pulls out my crowns" [oh, wait, that's me] - "What if a sticky toffee glues my mouth together so I can't scream if I'm in danger?")
And finally, Hoplite Twilight* persuades Fluttershy to try to scare her friends, rather than being scared herself.
(*A word on the costumes. Fairly neatly done: Rarity is a mermaid (or maybe a sea pony?), Rainbow is an astronaut, Applejack is the Cowardly Lion (she was a scarecrow the last go-round), Twilight is a Romanesque soldier, complete with brushy helmet, and, best of all: Pinkie is Roller Disco Pinkie, with short-shorts and Afro poofs.)
And that's where we get the Tea Party of Doom, complete with the suggestion that maybe Fluttershy reads manga (given the "Uninvited guest" ponies that she has drawn on cardstock)
The other ponies are fairly unimpressed by Fluttershy's attempt to scare them (though I admit, as I said, those are much more grown-up fears than the typical Hallowe'en scare). Fluttershy persuades them to go on to the corn maze without her, that she's fine without continuing to participate....
And, not to go all spoilery, but with the persuasion (and help) of her animal friends, she helps be a scare-er at the corn maze - Fuzzylegs makes a web to trap the ponies, Harry dresses up as a swamp monster straight out of Scooby-Doo - and in the end, Fluttershy wearing a Flutterbat costume (and apparently, red contact lenses) swoops down and GENUINELY scares her friends.
At which point, she realizes: you know, this really isn't for me. I don't like being startled or scared, and I don't like seeing my FRIENDS scared. And so, the (again) remarkably grown-up moral of "It's okay to do your own thing. If you don't like a particular holiday you don't have to participate, no one should try to force you to, but at the same time, let your friends enjoy what THEY are doing." And so we see the closing shot of Fluttershy in her pretty-nice-but-not-quite-epic blanket fort, reading, and Harry fitting as much of himself under the bed as he can so he can sit with her.
Oh, and as is typical of this season, there is one Ridiculous Expression (at least) per episode, the winner from this one is this:
And heck, another screenshot (both of these ganked from EqD):
Angry Rainbow Dash, Apple-obsessed Applejack, Sexy Rarity, Derpy Twilight, and Apprehensive Fluttershy. NAILED IT! (Also, you can see Pinkie's truly epic Afro poofs)
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