Wallonia is the most violent region of Western Europe. It's long lasting phenomenon. I heard citizens blaming post-industrial landscape, but no substantial cause of the violence.
What I dislike about the episode is the fact that the 5 are humiliating Rainbow Dash at all. This is out of character behavior of worst kind. This isn't a friendship, but some kind of toxic relationship. As far as we know she wasn't harming anybody, so the 5 was suppressing RD for acting outside of social standard. Imagine bulling FS for being shy and spending lots of time with animals, or TS for reading too many books, etc.
It gives you time for adjustment to character design. While animation in MLP is seamless and fluent most of the time you may be unaccustomed to animated creatures in general or this type of them.
The series popularity derives from gentle character development, for me at least. I can say that I like everypony from Mane 6, because they all had some episodes focused on them.
The show is partially chronological. All episodes opening/closing seasons were happening in their screening sequence.
The "child cured of HIV" sounds catchy, but it's not significant. This therapy shouldn't work for most of infected population and cannot stop a reinfection.
It's the theme of the line of merchandise for this year. Last year was 'Crystal Empire', which tied in with season 3. Rainbow Power is suspected to somehow tie in with Season 4, but mostly ties in with the next Equestria Girls movie, Rainbow Rocks.
This pretty much means that the toy ponies will be decked out in rainbow-y tattoos (much like Stinky Pete à la Barbie at the end of Toy Story 2) for the rest of 2014.