@Background Pony  
She said she was still her student but not the same way as before. She still has a lot to learn. Besides, the jokes and stories just write themselves.

@Background Pony  
Twilight is her friends’ teacher now, not Celestia’s. If anything I wouldn’t be surprised if they have the other Mane 5 sending her friendship reports now.

The alicorn matter is just icing to me, really. The main thing is Twilight becoming a princess. When it happened, didn’t Celestia basically say that in some ways Twilight was the teacher now?
 
To that end, I put this question to you. How would you feel about a princess-focused episode ending in Celestia sending a friendship report to Twilight? Could be interesting.

Cadance doesn’t really have any defining personality traits, although considering that the writing in season 3 was overall lower quality than Season 2, and that Season 3 was when Cadance’s characterization needed to be fleshed out, it’s not really that surprising.
 
For now, Cadance is just a generic princess– Celestia Jr., if you would. There’s not really anything remarkable about her other than being pink. Unfortunately, instead of taking a blank slate and writing an interesting character on it, the writers have basically left Cadance as a blank slate. “She’s nice” isn’t really a personality.

@The Smiling Pony  
My two nieces love both Cadance and Alicorn Twilight. Given the fact that Hasbro has been selling to little girls for decades, this isn’t surprising.

@The Smiling Pony  
Citation found after realizing I’d paginated comments and clicking back through 6 replies…
 
It’s anecdotal, though; The little girls in my family (which amount to one, but oh well), loved Canterlot Wedding’s Cadance (don’t think she’s seen any S3 yet).

I’m over it by now. Took a bit, but I warmed up to Twilicorn. Some thought. Plus, I enjoyed the episode (even though I feel it should have been a two-parter). My initial “WTF” reaction was mainly due to the shock of it actually being a thing in-show.

@Background Pony  
Little girls find Cadance to be a pretty pony but a stupid character.  
Citation needed.

@Itsthinking  
Scapegoats for what? Little girls find Cadance to be a pretty pony but a stupid character. On the other hand, I find it to be a terrible character who looks generic. Both of these have been positions ever since she appeared. What are we scapegoating?

@Background Pony
 
Yeah, I’m sure.
 
Cadance almost died to save her people she isn’t useless.
 
You guys just want punching bags/scapegoats.

@Niggoslav_Krawczyk
 
I was never actually complaining about the people that had issues about how the episode was handled, I was complaining about the people that acted like it was all Hasbros fault and that it never would have happened unless they forced to, when the whole “Twilight becoming an Alicorn” thing should have been obvious from miles away, especially the further into the show you’d get!
 
@Trickquestion
 
Well, she has her flaws just like everyone else in the show,heck we honestly don’t know exactly who or what Celestia really is, for all we know she and Luna could have been normal ponies, that upon collecting the elements of harmony, could have thrown a desperate reckless plan against Discord that just so happened to work, maybe she grew to thing that all her reckless and dangerous plans would always work, and heck, so far they have, or maybe she’s secretly insane and that’s why she wants Twilight to take her place?
 
I’d also love to see Twilight fail against a big bad, one that would cause terrible repercussions, like to have her face a big bad half way through the season, only for her to spend the rest of it fixing the problems her failure caused, and to finally trump him/her after all the work she did.

The difference between Cadance and Twilicorn is that with Cadance, she was just another character. With Twilicorn they did something to a well-liked charcter that made a lot of us angry, and that’s not something that can be easily fixed.

@Trickquestion  
I feel very proud to say that the little girls in my family that watch the show all have called the show on all its bullshit up to now all on their own. It was mind blowing and made me so very happy.
 
They enjoy it, they just don’t think it’s all that great. That part actually made me a tad sad.

@Littlecabbit  
See, in that case, while the plan was pretty reckless, you are correct on stating that not a whole lot of options existed, though some kind of token effort towards making Twilight friendlier over time was probably warranted, but that could have ended in failure.
 
And when Discord escaped, he quite obviously completely outclassed Celestia, so it made sense then. Of course, this raises the question of what made her think the magic glue she stuck on the Elements would have lasted a second against Discord’s power had he stopped messing around. After all, we saw what happened the last time she tried to use a spell to keep the Elements from him.
 
But then came Crystal Empire. Celestia throws her temporarily insane student against a mad God Tyrant (and regardless of my feelings on King Sombra, that’s how the show built him up) while knowingly causing Twilight to put limits on herself when the fate of the entire world explicitly hangs in the balance, instead of taking herself, her sister, and the elements (both jewels and ponies) to kick Sombra’s ass together. And even if she could have stepped in should Twilight have failed, how much damage would have been done by then? There is a time and a place to test your student Celestia, and that was not one of them.
 
I honestly want to see Princess Twilight fail in Season 4, just so we can see if Celestia actually has backup plans, which I doubt.

@SeraphimDawn  
It’d make sense. Gather up friends, then Mystery Machine around Equestria solving problems and learning lessons on the way, such as Over A Barrel.
 
 
@Background Pony  
Makes you wonder how many times she ‘derped’ learning the ropes and snagged brother and sister, or sometimes brother and brother! (I bet you that kinky bitch Celestia didn’t undo it either!)
 
 
@Littlecabbit  
Honestly it’s probably the writing for the episode being so trollacious that got everyones jimmies rustled. That last song especially with the ‘everything is going to be fine’ line. Maaaan you would have thought someone made a guard tower joke at the world Jewish conference by the way the /mlp/ livestream exploded ready to tear everything to pieces. If they’d have shown Celly physically watching her and Twilight actually doing magical equations n stuff instead of solving everything during musical numbers it would have passed over a whole lot calmer. (Or heck, even showing her fixing her friends, and then showing off that she can cast and control that spell at will that even her idol couldn’t.)  
Basically she ascended like any other ‘disney princess’ with barely any effort, when all signs pointed to a way more ‘brainy’ solution. She passed her friendship and ‘epik magic battle’ tests already (in fact, got one extra by accident due to Trixie) and all that was left were intelligence and/or wisdom. All we haven’t seen Twilight do is actually solve an economic or personnel problem (which might result in her running herself ragged fixing things personally like a pony Castro), but the intellectual test was kind of mishandled in HOW we were shown it. Behind the scenes, she probably did solve Star Swirl’s last spell that way, but all we got was a deluge of only partly related songs. I hope there’s at least a ‘teaching to rule’ episode or two in s4.
 
 
@Background Pony  
Yeah, a lot of us held out hope that Cadence was purposely pink so as to demolish Standard Useless Princess cliches and she’d be an intelligent and cunning Action Princess but nope, they made her go straight along that line with no deviation. That’s why ACW has such a large hatedom in spite of its good qualities.

@Trickquestion
 
Of course she’s reckless! she knew when Nightmare moon returned, that she’d be sealed in the sun or whatever the heck Nightmare did to her that she’d have to send Twilight to Ponyville, hoping against hope that Twilight would go against her nature and make friends! or that none of the other potential Element bearers wouldn’t have decided to go on vacation days before the incident happened!

@Littlecabbit  
Well, the first Alicorn Twilight pic appeared mere days after… well, the third episode. Everyone knew it was going to happen, they just expected it to be something we could actually see her working towards to other than some quite nonsensical thing about her making new magic (despite Star Swirl clearly making most of the work for the spell while still lacking the final component) and some claim she has shown more the qualities of all her other friends in episode we never go to see. Then there is the whole thing about her becoming a princess bit, but not the time.
 
I tried for a while to meet it half-way, but MMC kind of spat on that, and then it just went downhill from there.

@Background Pony  
She made a cool arrow, …that’s really all i can think of.

I just want to add how Cadence still is a terrible character that has appropiately only been used a prop for more interesting characters to do more interesting things. Like Chrysalis, the one reason we all don’t hate A Canterlot Wedding. And Spike in Crystal Empire, although I still say he didn’t save shit. And that weird chick I can’t pronounced her name but was essentially cute incarnated that we only got because of the whole Crystal Emprire thing.
 
Candance is still a terrible character, luckily the writers know this and give all those cool things above.

@Trickquestion
 
Given the track record of the existing princesses, Twilight can be nothing but an improvement.

How many television shows have ended a season by defeating the protagonist’s nemesis, only to have the TV execs say “hold on, we need another season now!” And thus, a “new enemy” shows up, which is really a lot like the old one.
 
Well, Twilight Sparkle can’t really start studying a new kind of the-most-powerful magic-in-Equestria…

@Littlecabbit  
I actually like the alicornification. It solidifies the minimal characterization we have for Celestia: she’s a sort of naive schemer, if that makes sense. She’s very intelligent, but builds her plans around this one pony she has absolute faith in: Twilight. This works because Twilight is the main character of a children’s cartoon, but when looked at objectively, Celestia’s plans are super goddamn reckless.
 
Thus, with what we know of her character, of course she would makes the neurotic, control freak, socially awkward political disaster waiting to happen a princess. Because she has endless faith in Twilight.

@PonyPon  
>really piled on that she was messiah of friendship
 
Your mileage may vary.  
We’ve seen Celestia praise all of them to high heavens all the time after they saved her ass and nothing about them changed afterwards.  
The only difference now was that it was just Twilight receiving the praise.

It would have made a nice series finale.

>After all the show’s writers did good things with Cadence…
 
Did they?