The Great and Powerful Trixie and the Alicorn Illusion · 8:13pm Feb 5th, 2014
An insightful comment by Mooncalf led me to clarify some points about Trixie and her relationship to the alicorn, Illusion.
Trixie is at present a mortal avatar of the Concept of Illusion (aka Imagination in its positive version, Insanity in its negative version). Illusion is a young Concept, and has never fully Manifested among ponies before. Generally, a nascent Concept goes through a number of mortal avatars before one reaches the point of Ascending to become an immortal avatar. If Illusion were truly a mammalian life form we would say she was in her fetal stage, but being a Concept it's far more intelligent and capable than this might imply.
Illusion first Manifested -- reached out to our world with a small fraction of its full Cosmic power -- through Trixie, in An Extended Performance. This is not the same as Ascending, which would be the appearance of an immortal Avatar -- among Ponies this would be an Alicorn. Ascending is a difficult process which requires great emotional and magical growth, and usually takes years from the point of the first Manifestation to the point of the final transformation.
Because Illusion doesn't have a full immortal Avatar, Illusion used up a lot of stored energy (both herself and Trixie's) to be able to do what she did in the story. She really did have to go sleepies after that. If she hadn't, she probably would have burned out and killed Trixie, and then had to wait until a new Aspect of herself was Incarnated before resuming her growth to Ascension. Illusion wouldn't have wanted to do this for that reason, and also she loves Trixie and would not harm her.
If Trixie is able to Ascend, what will happen is that Trixie will bodily transform and become a baby Alicorn -- the state which Twilight Sparkle reaches at the end of "Magical Mystery Cure." This is roughly analogous to the mammalian process of giving birth. Baby Alicorns, like normal baby Ponies, have a lot of growing to do. Most of the physical growth will be accomplished within less than a normal Pony lifetime; the spiritual growth takes many such lifetimes.
From that point on, Trixie would be biologically immortal (because her body will as a matter of course regenerate damage due to aging) and thus live until killed by some external force (and Alicorns are fairly hard to kill, as Celestia and Luna demonstrate in their flashback fight in "Princess Twilight Sparkle"). She would, in effect, be a Physical Goddess in the same sense as Celestia and Luna, though of course they are much more powerful examples of the kind.
One should distinguish between the Concept of Illusion and its Avatar, Aspect or Manifestation. The Concept of Illusion is a multi-dimensional pattern embedded in and transmitting through spacetime; when it takes full form in our dimension it would be gigantic and only vaguely equine. Fully-present Concepts are far too powerful and super-intelligent to safely interact directly with ordinary mortal beings; even their Immortal Aspects barely comprehend them and can glean but fragments of knowledge from their thought processes.
A good example of this is the relationship between Luna, the Cosmic Concept of Gravity; Luna, the Princess of the Moon; and Dr. Moondreamer Finemare. Luna, the Cosmic Concept of Gravity, came into existence when gravity separated from the orginal unified force within the first second after the Big Bang. Two of her many Aspects are Princess Luna and Moondreamer Finemare. Princess Luna is an immortal alicorn; Moondreamer was a mortal earth pony.
Princess Luna can only dimly understand Cosmic Luna. While their personalities are linked, they are similar rather than identical, and Cosmic Luna's personality frankly terrifies Princess Luna since she sees her Cosmic self as cold, callous and emotionless.
(This is untrue, but Princess Luna both can't comprehend Cosmic Luna's actual emotions and doesn't realize her own lack of comprehension in this instance. In particular, Princess Luna doesn't want to face the fact that her own love of combat and engineering are exact analogues of Cosmic Luna's joy in destruction and re-creation. Cosmic Luna is very much a Shiva-like being, a facet of Princess Luna's own personality that the Moon Princess fears in herself).
On the other hand, Princess Luna fully grasps Moondreamer, to the point that she finds herself falling in love with the reincarnation of Moondreamer's beloved Dusk Skyshine, despite the fact that in his current incarnation, Dusk is a mare, Twilight Sparkle; and despite the fact that Princess Luna is heterosexual. Some loves are simply that strong. Unfortunately for Princess Luna, Twilight doesn't remember any of Dusk Skyshine's life. Yet.
Moondreamer could understand Princess Luna better than Princess Luna could understand Cosmic Luna; the gap between being a brilliant normal pony and a superintelligent immortal meta-pony is smaller than that between the superintelligent immortal meta-pony and the Cosmic Concept. Moondreamer lived around 80 years, Princess Luna has been alive for a bit over 2500 years; Cosmic Luna has lived since the first moments of the Universe, 13.5 billion years ago. The gaps in experience and power are much greater between Cosmic Luna and Princess Luna than between Princess Luna and Moondreamer.
To get back to Trixie and Illusion, while Illusion may well have had previous incarnations, this is the first one in which Illusion has become conscious of the mortal world. This means that the experential gap between Trixie and Illusion is not that great. Trixie is the only Aspect of which Illusion is consciously aware. As such, Trixie's personality and experiences are very important to Illusion: Trixie is forming Illusion's fundamental sapient character. (Thus, White-Beard / Wisedreamer's concern: if Trixie became evil, this might affect Illusion Herself very strongly).
A note about sex and gender here. Trixie, of course is a female weakly-heterosexual pony. Illusion (note the neuter ending) is technically hermaphroditic in that she can both impregnate and be impregnated (and reproduce by several other means, unavailable to mammals, to boot). Technically speaking, if Trixie ascended, her Alicorn would properly be called "Illusia" (note the feminine ending) because Alicorns are true mammals and either male or female (far more usually the latter). Illusia would be an immortal Avatar of Illusion.
This is getting very technical. Just as Twilight Sparkle keeps her birth-name, so most likely would Trixie in this instance. After all, she is already in her own mind Great and Powerful.
SO if Trixie is going down the road to Alicornhood, and this is (if I've understood this correctly) the first time her concept has reached out into the mortal world in any real way, then who else might be a concept?
I mean, doesn't this imply there might be other alicorns scattered about the world, waiting for the incarnation that they become immortal?
Also, one more line of questioning, you said Luna is the concept of gravity correct? And that she existed right when life began basically? if so, what does that make Celestia, and were I to translate the cosmics into a hierarchy understandable by human standards, would those two be among the higher tiers of said hierarchy? Since they're among the most ancient and fundamental?
Why yes. It most definitely does.
I'm assuming that Gravity is much older than organic life. Gravity and Her sister the Nuclear Forces aka "Fusion" aka "Celestia" were among the first two Concepts born: they are why the stars can shine. And yes, they're very powerful Concepts. They're so powerful that they are directly embedded in the most obvious physical laws.
1799959 I'm guessing Entropy is a higher level concept than Luna and Celestia... is Discord the spirit of 'chaos' instead? In the 'chaos theory' sense where an infinitesimal difference in the starting state can make arbitrarily large changes after several iterations?
1800017
Technically Discord is an Avatar of the Concept of "dissonance" or "cross-purposes." My fanon is inspired by Alex Warlorn's, and I go with his idea of their being two great families of Concepts -- those of Order and those of Chaos. Discord, obviously, is of the Chaotic variety.
1800446 Yeah, but I thought that part of him was like Luna = Moon and I was wondering what the Luna = Gravity part was.
1800017
Yes, as per Warlorn I'm having Entropy be a high-level Chaos entity, one of the level above Cosmic Discord, etc.
1800476
My reasoning is that Celestia is obviously the Concept of the Nuclear Forces (since she is attuned to the Sun), so if Luna is a roughly-equal Concept attuned to the Moon as it affects the Earth, she's Gravity.
1800476
This doesn't preclude, of course, all sort of secondary powers and skills. Luna is also a dreamwalker, an illusionist and an extremely good strategist, tactician and fighter.