Note: If you link to this post, the cut won’t be there, so be sure and let people know that if they don’t want to read spoilers for the latest My Little Pony series then they shouldn’t follow the link.

When I hear someone describing themselves as “good with” an entire category — “good with animals”, “good with autistic people”, “having a way with cats” — it immediately sends warning flags up. (Not absolute warning flags, but certainly warning flags.)

But I never expected a children’s cartoon to give such a good example of why. (I’ve had a stomach virus lately and for awhile children’s cartoons were the only thing I could follow.)

The following is a series of clips from an episode of the latest My Little Pony series. They deal with a character named Fluttershy. Fluttershy is a normally sweet, soft-spoken, sensitive person whose talent is basically “being good with animals”, whether butterflies or bears. (Each pony has an innate talent or affinity that they discover as they are growing up. Once they discover it, a symbol magically appears on their butt. Fluttershy’s symbol is a bunch of butterflies.) Given this characterization, I never expected them to show the dark side of believing oneself “good with animals” to the degree she’s normally portrayed as.

Don’t click on the cut unless you want spoilers for a fairly late episode in the series. I’ve done my best to transcribe it since there’s no captions. The clips show only Fluttershy’s parts of the episode. Some parts may not make sense without context, but the basic gist of it is pretty clear after awhile. And I have to say — some of that is barely, if at all, exaggerated from interactions I’ve had with people who believed themselves “good with autistic people,” “good with nonverbal people,” or whatever else in that vein they believed. I’ll write more about that after the transcript, because I don’t want what I say to give too much away about the episode.

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