>>28995
>how much do they differ from one another?
A lot and very little...
To me, it comes down to their approach to the material.
I agree with the Look Before You Sleep anon, character interactions go a long way towards making a story fun. One of the main strengths of MLP is that it has six great main characters to write about. But it's also for television, and certain rules need to be followed.
Each script has the same three-act structure, and they need professionals who can write their stories to fit into those strict guidelines, like Amy Keating Rogers, for example. She began writing scripts in the nineties, and had worked with Lauren Faust on Powerpuff Girls. They also need to be able to write jokes.
Comedy makes up a large part of every episode of MLP, and for the most part, the jokes fall into two categories:
>character humor
>gags
There's usually a good mix of both in every episode. Applebuck Season is a great example of this. Applejack's stubbornness is the root cause of all of the gags in that episode (which are foreshadowed during the town hall scene early on.) She's too tired to actually help anyone, but she's also too stubborn to admit that she's not in any state to help anyone. Amy wrote Applebuck Season.
Merriweather Williams is another career writer for television. She worked on the show at the same time Amy did, and she also has a good grasp on the characterization of the mane 6, but her episodes tended to be formulaic, suffering from bad writing tropes and cliches that we expected from shows like Care Bears, not MLP.
Mysterious Mare Do Well is a good example of that. This was a divisive episode when it aired, but most people hated it. It has good parts to it (first appearance of the Rainbow Dash fan club), and we get a good look at some of Dash's insecurities, but it's all wrapped up in one of the most cartoony plots the writers room ever cooked up. The mane 6 put multiple ponies in danger throughout this episode, and it's all to teach Dash a little humility. The characters are effectively, for a time, rewritten so that they can serve the story. And Merriweather did this a few times, with Spike At Your Service being another example of that. I actually think that episode is funny, because the mane 6 do have some good lines in it, being great characters and all--but it's also a terrible episode too.
Sorry if that rambled. That's a hard question for me to answer, honestly.
>>29043
You've made me very happy Nonners. I unironically love Baby Cakes. Please write about your other slowburn episode.
One thing I'd like to add about Pinkie's character: Twilight. She comes back to help Pinkie out later, but Pinkie denies her. She tells Twilight that she doesn't need any help, she has things covered. Which are all obvious lies. Pinkie is clearly in over her head by this point, but now she's got something to prove, not only to herself but to her friends as well, and that is that she is responsible, that she is grown up, and that she can handle a little babysitting. She kind of digs her own grave by that point, but you also want to see her succeed too.
And the Cake twins, I think, are menacing in slightly different ways. Pound is more active, being the Pegasus, and while he's breaking things, Pumpkin is content to stay behind and find something to jam into her mouth. She was the more sinister one.
They're not good characters or anything, but I think they're more interesting than, say, the twins from Rainbow Roadtrip.