Tenochtitlan, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb · 3:09pm Dec 9th, 2013
Anyone else notice that the mystical land of adventure in FiM, a Canadian-produced show, is really just... Mexico?
Haha, yes, Canada is America's hat, et cetera.
But let's follow that train of thought for a moment. Now, we've seen mythical creatures from other Earth belief systems before the Daring Do arc started pulling from Aztec mythology. Basilisks, griffins, minotaurs, manticores... so it was no big leap to add an ahuizotl, or even reference Quetzalcoatl in dialogue.
Here's the big leap:
"Daring Don't" established that the Daring Do series was, essentially, nonfiction. The author of the books was Daring Do herself under a pseudonym, writing about her adventures in Equestria. So characters, places, and events in the books are real.
In "Daring Don't", Rainbow Dash points out that "Ahuizotl has sought control of the Tenochtitlan Basin since book three."
Hold up... Tenochtitlan is a real place. Mexico City is built on its ruins.
As far as I'm concerned, this has cemented my personal headcanon -- that Equestria is North America, far in the future, and ponies have replaced humans as the dominant species on the planet.
Check out the official map of Equestria:
The shoreline's not right, that's true. There's a big bay south of Baltimare that doesn't exist today. And mythical creatures would have had to evolve from our current species, to populate Equestria with the basilisks, manticores, and griffins we all know and love.
But there's a simple answer to all of that, really: nuclear war.
That big bay, south of Baltimare? Looks to me like Washington D.C. got nuked so hard all that was left was a crater... which filled with water once the sea levels rose because the polar ice caps melted thanks to the extra greenhouse effect caused by atmospheric dust and ash. That also explains the changed coastlines... and the radiation helped trigger the genetic mutations (perhaps helped along by any genetic experiments humanity had been carrying out before the war) that resulted in mythical creatures and sentient horses taking over the planet.
After the precursors to the ponies we know and love evolved, as they resettled the changed North America, some human terminology and technology stuck. Linguistic drift coupled with an equine focus meant "Manhattan" became "Manehattan"; doorknobs hung around, because doors have always had them... as far as the ponies knew. Over the millenia, ponies continued evolving, and references to their prehistory -- our modern day -- slowly faded.
You heard it here first, folks: global warming and nuclear war will give us real-life ponies.
...Pffftttt.
And before someone makes a curious crossover with Fallout and this very suggestion...
~Skeeter The Lurker
Hmmm....
Headcanon accepted.
If I remember the episode correctly, though, the techasdasffasdasf basin was to the north west of canterlot on the map they had, wasn't it?
I'm pretty sure Mexico isn't north of the US
1589210
The map that Pinkie Pie painted? Gonna take her directions with a grain of salt.
1589212
Hey, PP painted the red line on the ground, it was Twily with the map
That's practically the background plot of The Last Human.
1589213
Just went and rewatched and the map itself is interesting; according to it, they went to just north of Smokey Mountain. It's admittedly kind of a hole in my theory, but I like my theory enough to ignore it completely.
EDIT: explained away by positing that the ancient ponies ran across references to the name "Tenochtitlan" but didn't know where it was and just used it somewhere else.
1589214
I linked this blog in a chat Patchwork Poltergeist and I are in and that was her first thought too, so woo!
I think that's what became of the Chesapeake. Though it does seem a bit bigger.
For reference, I live on the part of the horseshoe that's sticking out into the ocean.
You do realize that saying 'Global Warming and Nuclear War will give us Ponies' is going to encourage some not nice activity because frankly, that sounds awesome.
Except that Horseshoe Bay looks like a stylized representation of the Gulf of Mexico. Which puts Baltimare either in northern Florida or in South Carolina.
1589233
Chesapeake Bay's not a nice neat circle, though... a flooded crater would be.
i.imgur.com/QMl1ur6.png
1589246
It's way too small and northward to be the Gulf, IMHO.
1589236
Username relevant, eh?
You know, I've never given any thought to this theory, but you're right that there's a whole lot more to go on now. It would explain away all the "tank" and "bullet" nonsense anyway! :D
1589255
Yeah, that too. "May the Best Pet Win" was honestly kind of depressing, because it established that ponies knew what "bullets" and "tanks" were. I'm much happier with the idea that they just have this passed-down word that means "something really fast" and "something indestructible", but the original meaning is lost to time.
1589266
EXACTLY
but no, the fandom, led by the Fallout contingent, are all too happy to lord those words over all sense of tone, shouting "PONIES GOT GUNZ N FITE LOL"
we don't deserve nice things :|
1589269
>ponies
>guns
goo.gl/YPKBxf
1589266 Actually "bullet" comes from the French "boulette", and it was originally applied to projectiles shot from a sling.
1589286
That's actually really reassuring to know.
1589252 I dunno. It's roughly parallel to a city that's either supposed to represent Vegas or LA, depending on the interpretation.
1589292 Aye. Though I can't explain tank...
Explaining everything with nuclear warheads... Welcome to Fallout game series.
Woah, that actually makes a lot of sense.
1589270
That's what I said.
1589215
Another possible explanation: The axis of rotation of Earth changed.
The bay near Baltimare actually used to be Hudson Bay. The ocean to the east side of the map was once the Arctic Ocean. The "Frozen North" froze over only after the pole shifted.
Tenochtitlan isn't the one they couldn't find on the map and dropped it down arbitrarily. It's the only one which is in the correct historical place, and there are actual ruins there that match the ones we'd expect to see.
The other cities were founded in an effort to honor a past that they only remembered from maps. They tried overlaying their continent with the ones from documents, matched their north to map north, and sort of, approximately, put everything else in the "right place."
(This post brought to you by straight-faced crack-fueled speculation, a willful disregard for facts which don't fit my theory, and the number 7.)
1589598
I am intrigued. Spinning the Earth 90° would take quite the cataclysm, and those are always fun!
Nuclear war? Hmm... How about this, instead?
It's the near-future, and oil reserves are rapidly running dry. Even catastrophic mining techniques aren't getting us anywhere near enough resources to power our population.
Scientists all around the world are working on this dilemma. The uncover evidence of a hidden source of energy, apparently limitless and universal. They decide to tap into this power, in order to harness it for use.
However, things go wrong: The power isn't easy to control, and seems to violate the laws of physics as we know them. Huge storms of this energy ravage the planet. causing not only massive shifts to the tectonic plates, but also planting the seeds of major mutations.
The scientists have a name for this energy, but those who are impacted by it have a name of their own: magic.
1589604
st-andrews.ac.uk/~ulf/levsyndrome.jpg
1589608
And then, in The Incredibles 2, they all turn into ponies.
Wait, though... that movie had a character named "Dash" in it. And "Violet" could easily be a pony name. I think you're on to something, here!
1589601
Changing the axis of rotation 90 degrees while keeping it spinning violates physics almost beyond imagining, so here's a suggestion.
Old Earth's rotation never changed. It stopped. Maybe a huge meteor plowed into it at just the right angle, or Mad Science unleashed a doomsday device that counterspun the planet's core and wiped out our momentum.
Celestia and Luna were created in a desperate bid to save the planet from the inevitable global extinction that tidal lock would create. But because they were created by Americans desperate to save themselves first, and the western hemisphere was stuck facing the sun and about to broil into sterility, when they restarted the rotation the only way to give the American continent any hope at all was to get it out of the sun as fast as possible. They picked a new axis of rotation that would move America "north" (with north pole at 0 lat/0 long, south at 0 lat/180 long, and spinning clockwise), getting it back into twilight as soon as possible while their rotation was still spinning slowly up and temperature extremes were at their worst.
Of course, since the earth would still be moving around the sun on its old orbit and that sort of rotation would give both poles year-long day cycles while wreaking havoc with the day cycles of the new "equator" … um … HEY LOOK OVER THERE! A DISTRACTION! (*runs away*)
I'm sticking with Fallout: Equestria's geography, because it places Ponyville right where I live. (That's because Fallout was written by Bethesda Softworks, a mile down the road from where I worked.)
1589673
I like how we're jumping through all these hoops to explain away one name getting moved across a country by mistake.
That's not sarcasm, I really like it!
1593410
Hard to argue with that!
Well then. What are we waiting for?
Is telling people nuclear war will give us talking magical ponies supposed to stop them from destroying the world? I'm missing the logic here. And smart headcannon.
This comments section is zany magic-science, and I love it.
Global warning and thermonuclear war eh?
4898683
You should do something about that cold.
*Turns on all the lights*