Disappointed at the scope of Celestia and NMM's battle? Here's your perfect rationalisation! · 10:11am Nov 24th, 2013
With a night and a dream between me and the premiere, I've had a little time to think, as have a few other, and I've noticed a common trend.
Two, in fact, but I won't get into all the people revelling in how many headcanons were destroyed (or the perennial "purge the heretics who dare to have ideas of their own" posts that still pop up occasionally).
The complaint I've seen most often is that the battle between NMM and Celestia was too short. I agree It was. It was certaily epic and it was certainly intense, but compared to fanon it was short. How do you deal with that, as a fanfic writer?
Accept it and cope? It's certainly one way. A lot of fanfics aren't affected by this one jot and can live with it.
but consider... this is a television show. A well-produced television show, but still just a television show. And no I'm not wheeling out the "it's just for kids" or "its entertainment" arguments, certainly not. The simple fact is, the transference of an idea to television automatically limits the available scope. Budgetary requirements, time constraints, executive meddling, and the inability to make real the unreal all combine to restrict what can actually be achieved. To portray a full-scale rebellion would have required an entire movie and thousands of dedicated assets that would probably never have been used again. They had two minutes to show the entire thing from start to finish.
This is how television works. It rationalises, it restricts in scope, it abridges and skips and minimises and cuts out huge huks of what really happened, until what you're left with is a symbolic representation of reality. Television is symbolism.
To pick another example that nobody seems to have a problem with: Canterlot as portrayed on the show would not fit inside the tiny blog of fanciful towers we see from the distance, and the palace itself is far bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Writers get around this in all sorts of ways but the most common one is to assume that the castle as portrayed is symbolic - that the reality is greater than we see it.
It's also worth noting that, aside from Celestia, Luna and Discord, there were no other ponies even present anywhere in the flashbacks. We don't assume that Celestia and Luna were the only ponies to have existed back then. The flashbacks are clearly meant to portray the essence of the past, not the reality of it. (thanks to Arcshod for reminding me of this).
Television is not the reality. Even in the most realistic of television shows, compromises take place to create the impression of reality rather than portray it absolutely. When you realise this, you realise that your headcanon is just fine. We saw only a symbolic portrayal of the battle between NMM and Celestia, and your headcanon is safe.
It's not like there isn't in-universe support for the concept. Take the Hearths Warming play. Three leaders and their seconds were completely responsible for everything? Yeah, that's historically accurate, I'm sure. Or, it's a simplification of actual events to convey the message while meeting the constraints a holiday play is under.
It's quite sad that this all needs to be pointed out. Obviously it can't show anything vast in scope for budget and pacing reasons. Even the parts that were shown were some high quality animation and no doubt took a lot of time and money (the transformation sequence in particular was excellent).
Really, the entire show itself is just a lens though which the 'actual' world is viewed, with considerable liberties taken for pacing, budget reasons, the limitations of a children's cartoon, etc.
This is basically how I view 'cities' in video games. World Of Warcraft's rendered version of Stormwind is nowhere near large enough to really be a decent sized city - magical or not - so I just mentally treat it as a representation. Mass Effect's Normandy is obviously part TARDIS - ie, bigger on the inside - and is definitely not supposed to be taken to scale. I take the same as being true for most TV shows and movies.
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That's another good example. It wouldn't make for compelling gameplay if it took you an hour to get to the other side of Stormwind, or weeks of travel to get to the other end of Azeroth.
It's kind of a shame, actually. If they'd cut the whole "let's send Twilight back to Ponyville, then realize we can't do s
without her" subplot, they could've gotten a lot more out of the flashbacks.
The way I see it, the confrontation we see in Twilight's vision is the cumulation of the conflict between Luna and Celestia. If a fanfic needs there to have been massed armies and months of battle, all that could have happened in the lead-up to Luna's visit to the throne room to confront Celestia. We know that Luna can take Nightmare Moon form even today post-darkness-purge so perhaps back then she freely swapped between the two forms and that wasn't her first transformation. There's still lots of room here.
The episode was pretty sweet, wasn't it? I'm super glad to be getting new pony! The Celestia battles were pretty intense. I loved the history lessons. So cool! Replacing the elements? Ballsy! 10/10 can't wait for the next one.
Watching a show like this, one with such a huge fan base which creates so much rich fiction on the show's events, it's easy to forget that the fan fiction fills those gaps that we naturally want to see explained in some detail. The good thing about this is that every new episode creates space for writers to insert new ideas and threads of thought. We rarely ever have to go in reverse - condense it all into a brief synopsis - unless it's simply as a plot device.
I'm chocking it up to being in a pseudo-dream state. When dreaming, our brains can only create things we've actually seen - sure it can mix those things we've seen into some pretty off the wall things, but they're still things we've actually seen - hence why the fight was so short and why there were no other ponies there. Twilight knows Luna/Nightmare Moon and Celestia, but wouldn't have known any other ponies of the time (She's never actually met Starswirl the Bearded)... Also, she's never seen real war or an actual, bloody fight to the death, hence why she never saw any of that either... That's just my personal take on things. If anyone wants to roll a story using that as a premise, feel free, I've got no plans to use it.
Also. Don't drink the punch. That is all.
One could simply argue it was the draft that made the vision so daft. For the truth they seek carries omissions which reek.:zecora: