On Pony Power Levels, Magic, and the Subject of Innocence · 4:59am Aug 12th, 2014
This is a blog about things that bother me when people write fiction about ponies. It's gonna be long because I want to get this all off my chest in one go so I can write something serious.
One of the most widespread examples of what I believe are misunderstandings about the pony world is the fic that presumes that ponies are basically innocent. Actual violence repulses, disturbs, and somehow completely incapacitates them, leaving them stunned and unwilling or unable to act. You can most often find these in fics where humans, or something that has an unethical or illogical way of thinking, goes into the pony world and wrecks everybody's shit. To everypony's dismay, they realize that they are completely at the mercy of this superpowered being, their magic usually fails automatically against it, and they simply cannot take the sheer level of brutality and violence before them. Sometimes the ponies are not only terrified, but in awe of this being. In essence, this kind of fic is something of a wish-fulfillment fantasy wherein the character is able to indulge in terrible, powerful things and everyone else can only gape at the sheer majesty of ludicrous violence.
This really ticks me off. It also really, really doesn't help that usually I see this trope in fics where some jackass human magically becomes the most powerful being in Equestria, and oh he's also amoral so he can be a dark anti-hero and do bad things while looking cool. And for some reason this human and his supporters are the only ones capable of waging total war.
This is objectively a bad idea, yet I see it everywhere.
There is nothing in canon that even suggests that ponies instantly go into some kind of coma when they are confronted with violence. Naturally, anything that has a soul and a conscience is disturbed and horrified by violence, but the extremes I've seen authors go to to tell the reader "NO, YOU SEE, THE PONIES LITERALLY CANNOT COMPREHEND AT EVEN A BASIC LEVEL WHAT VIOLENCE IS" gets extremely ridiculous. The ponies have been in dangerous, life-threatening, even soul-sucking peril on multiple occasions in the show. Discord warps their entire world and takes away everything they love, literally brainwashing them until they are the opposite of who they were. Sombra flat out attacks them as a cloud of terrifying smoke and enslaved and stole an entire kingdom. Chrysalis pulls the wool over their eyes and attempts shock and awe by beating down a demigod (Celestia). Nightmare Moon attempted to actually kill the main cast by throwing them off a cliff, siccing a manticore on them, and then getting into a jousting match with Twilight with the presumable intent of bodily harm. Tirek steals everyone's magic and cutie mark, which I can only imagine is like losing a part of your soul or essence or whatever you want to call it. He did not just "steal magic," he actually takes away your purpose in life. That's pretty mind-screwy if you ask me.
Then all of these villains get beaten by what?
Sorry, by what?
THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP AND ALSO RAINBOWS.
Ponies, or at least the Elements of Harmony, never once shied away from danger and mayhem. They confronted it. They suffered through it. They overcame it. That's the point of the show! The amount of mental gymnastics I have to go through to believe "these ponies are just too cuddly-wuddly to even think of fighting back against MY AWESOME POWER" just makes it not worth reading that kind of fic.
So on to my next point: ponies can kill gods just by shooting them with rainbows. Tirek, who had the power of all four alicorns and all the magic of nearly every pony in Equestria? Basically making him the most powerful being on the face of the planet? He was defeated because Twilight had friends. Think about that. The most powerful being on the planet... defeated because one or more ponies were friends with each other. Not even trying to break those friendships works, because so many villains have tried that already I'm pretty sure the bonds are impervious now. Sounds dumb, but... it's canon.
Ponies are not by any means helpless even without the magic of friendship. First of all, let's look at the basic earth ponies. We've all seen what they can canonically do when under stress, and even when they're just wandering around doing their jobs.
Earth ponies can kick every apple out of a tree, without breaking the tree, with their bare hooves. This alone is literally better than anything any animal on Earth can do. You know what else can even come close to knocking down a tree, or at least shake it around a little? This guy...
And this guy.
They can knock over things because they are really big. Ponies, as the very title of the show suggests, are little. They are much smaller than trees, buildings, and other things that they can seemingly without effort just push, shove, or kick right over. Sure, only Applejack and Big Mac have displayed this capability... but the mere fact that anypony at all can learn this feat opens a staggering array of frankly terrifying martial arts. Imagine a hundred ponies getting together and just kicking down a wall around a fortified city. Just the wall, mind you, and it comes down in exactly the way they want it to fall. Or how about an earth pony controlling when and where his kinetic energy goes when he punches you? Shattering just your armor or just your bones or just exploding your heart in your chest?
Pegasi can create tornadoes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters that even we humans are powerless to stop. Not only that, they control where they begin and end, and can throw them around like golf balls. Imagine you're a besieging army that's trying to take, oh, Manehattan or something. Everything's going fine. You somehow managed to defeat that earth pony army that can pulverize things by touching them. But then, suddenly, clouds form. Rain comes. Freezing, awful rain that turns roads to mud, encourages disease, and absolutely will not stop. Your army is flooded, cold, and demoralized, making them perfect prey for the laser-guided tornadoes that rip through and actually chase them down with malicious intent. Your scouts and outriders? Dead before they could even see the supersonic pegasi that killed them.
Let's assume the invading force is a human army that decides to shoot missiles at them. Surely high technology will—whoops, the unicorns turned all the missiles to chocolate pudding before they got off the ground. Also they cast a time-travel spell that let them learn all humanity's secrets two hundred years before they invented missiles. Also Discord says "Your guns are now diamonds!" and then every gun on earth turns into a diamond and everyone wonders why we were fighting in the first place. Everyone is now a diamond-owning millionaire and world peace is achieved.
I'm writing this because I'm mostly tired of people not getting more creative with how ponies might make war or violence upon those who threaten them. I know the show doesn't do this because, well, little girls. Let's see the ponies actually rise up to the challenge, people. Let's see them look at that god-like being and go "Friendship, sucker." Let's see them use inventive and clever tactics on and off great battlefields. What about sunken caverns looking for treasure? Logistics of a great journey or quest? Put ponies through their paces! Let's see ponies actually be ponies: essentially good, but never willing to back down when their homes and loved ones are under threat. Don't make ponies the Mary Sues, but please... don't make them the child-like wimps we keep harping on earlier generations for. Just be creative with them, because the ponies are versatile enough for basically anything you can throw them at!
Because taken to their logical conclusion?
Ponies, and this includes the enemies ponies face, aren't just magic. They're terrifying.
Some of the best stories on the site have a conflict that cannot be solved by simply waving a magic wand (or horn). Pinkie Watches Paint Dry. Hard Reset. Princess Celestia Hates Tea. Whom the Princesses Would Destroy.
I needed something similar when I wrote Diplomacy by Other Means. I needed a powerful villain group that could be fought far away from the Elements of Harmony, and I chose the obvious by using the Griffon Empire, structured as a loose confederacy instead of a giant intermixed Star Wars type Empire. The key was that if diplomacy failed in this one aerie, it could drag the rest of the Empire into the conflict, and then I stacked the deck against the diplomats. I think it worked out fairly well, if a little bloody.
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True, but I'm talking purely about conflicts that may require a wave of the horn. Slice of Life and such of course doesn't need super magic, but super characterization, which is another matter entirely.
I do agree that this trope is dumb, though, to be fair, they don't seem terribly violent as a people - on the other hand, they are confronted by monsters and the main characters, at least, don't freak out, and the royal guard tried to fight back against the changelings (and failed miserably).
However, there is an important consideration: their world has "soft magic", which means, narratively, it can't be used to solve problems - that's the penalty of a soft magic system.
How powerful they are is pretty hard to tell. Really as far as we can tell, the alicorns, Twilight, and Shining Armor don't only stand wings and withers above everyone else, but they tower over them; only Rainbow Dash has shown an even remotely comparable amount of power (supersonic flight and the Sonic Rainboom, which she alone can perform). It is true that those six ponies are extremely powerful, as is Discord...
But it is also worth noting that Twilight, Celestia, Cadance, and Luna are approximately as powerful as literally everyone else in Equestria put together, including Discord. This also implies that Twilight, by herself, is probably roughly as powerful as every non-alicorn in Equestria combined (though this depends on how much power Tirek actually gains per victim).
So it isn't really that ponies in general are superpowered so much as that a small number of ponies are hideously powerful. Celestia, Luna, and Twilight all are capable of teleportation, and Cadance and Shining Armor seem likely to be as well... but they're the only creatures we've seen teleport other than Discord.
I mean, humans are capable of constructing ICBMs and cruise missiles and rail guns and assault rifles and all sorts of nasty stuff, but most humans don't know how to do that stuff. Ponies vs humans would really more or less be "the most powerful ones vs the human military", and suffers from the problem that, while humans are largely interchangeable, the ponies are not, and thus humans could pull million to one casualities and still win simply because they only have to eliminate the princesses, Shining Armor, Rainbow Dash, and Discord.
A lot of people underestimate just how nasty humans are capable of being; we can attack from well beyond the curvature of the earth, and indeed can attack from entirely different continents and send things in at supersonic velocities. The truth is that if humans get desperate, they can do some very, very horrible things. We simply don't because, well, why would we?
One other quibble: their time travel spells are essentially useless, canonically. The only one we've seen allows you to go back in time once and appears to create a stable time loop, meaning that you can't even use it to change the past as things are always internally consistent.
I just don't know why humanity would get in conflict with ponies. The level of violence and brutality exhibited by humans probably wouldn't shock them into being comatose, though - we live pretty nonviolent lives, and yet, we can play Call of Duty just fine.
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If you were to actually have them resolve problems with magic, you'd have to actually define what the limits of their magic actually are. The world relies on soft magic because they don't resolve problems with their magic.
This is known as Sanderson's first law.
Or alternatively:
I will disagree only on the point of unicorns. It is stated that most unicorns only know a few spells directly tied to their special talent. So war mages, while badass and formidable, would be rare. A modern human army would not be bowled over.
Dear god, someone write this fic now...
What makes this whole concept laughable to me is the simple existence of the royal guard. Somehow a country with a standing army (with weapons and everything) is completely made up of innocents and pacifists? Say what?
Well, actually, the supply of diamonds is now glutted to the point where the price of shiny carbon drops precipitously, but the point stands.
In any case, yes, ponies can be terrifyingly badass. They need to be. Equestria is honestly kind of a deathworld, and not just for Breezies. In addition to the big bads, there are all kinds of magical predator species out there. Still, ponies have triumphed over them through the power of conventionally weaponized friendship, also known as banding together and beating the ever-loving crap out of anything that sees them as meat on the hoof.
The only thing I can think to say to this is that they never go looking for trouble. If anything would be abhorrent to the pony psyche, it's waging war. But they're certainly no pushovers when threatened.
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I've seen quite a few stories where it's suggested the Guard are just ornamental, existing solely for ceremony. I mean, we never really see them do anything both military and effective in the show, after all. (inb4 examples of just that)
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I also don't see the ponies as either placid, weak or innocent. In fact, as I discovered the show it became apparent to me that the emphasis on Friendship as a core value of Pony mentality and culture is plainly a self-defence mechanism: ponies are EXTREMELY powerful beings even as individuals. Any unicorn, pegasus or earth pony could literally destroy entire towns if they wanted, and they ONLY thing that can keep them living together without daily disaster is a strong degree of self-restraint, constantly reinforced at the social level.
Worse still from my perspective are all those war fics that depict humans armed forces wiping out pony armies without even breaking a sweat. They depict ponies as simpletons and tree huggers, without offensive capabilities, air power, effective communications and intelligence, or even a decent infantry.
What they don't seem to realize is that ponies have all the skills to do a complete run-around of all these advantages: magically deflecting or transforming projectiles into flowers, turning guns into turnips, manipulating atmospheric conditions and the characteristics of aircraft until they fell from the sky (imagine unicorns casting the cloud-walking spell on human aircraft and seeing them crash into clouds generated by pegassi), or small teams of ponies teleporting into human military installations and completely wrecking their defensive capabilities from the inside, and then turning our bases into apple orchards, just to show that they aren't bad ponies!
But, what REALLY irks me the most is the frequent depiction of Princess Celestia as a primitive or an idiot! This is a being with thousands of years of experience dealing with multiple species, some of them even more potent than ponies on an individual basis - such as dragons - and if she were to come into contact with humanity, she would far more likely find a way to make sure her little ponies came out of that contact the better for the experience. And if any group of humans attempted to make war on her I think them would soon find out that she - and her little ponies - would by no means be pushovers.
They're so pleasant in the show because if you scratch the surface, they're pastel furry bundles of fury. If the mask slips--if they lose control--it would be total carnage.
Now I'm going to have to take down my pony posters. They're too frightening.
But I rarely read stories like that. How are you finding these awful stories? It's your own fault if you click on things in the featured box. Don't do that! Don't ever do that. There are so many good ways to find good stories here. That isn't one of them.
First off, diamonds are already dirt cheap. We can even manufacture perfectly fine fake diamonds, which we do. Constantly. It's just that the diamond supply is currently under a monopoly, so they set the prices stupidly high. But hey, sign me up for a free diamond rifle. It would make a great club.
Secondly,
4.bp.blogspot.com/-LNN9wal0Fzo/UaP2W7jZysI/AAAAAAAAAsM/ca3m661DRWc/s1600/ApplebuckSeason3.jpg
With that out of the way, Twilight was capable of hauling Tom around even before she became an alicorn. And Rarity was capable of the same. Rarity. That rock probably weighed as much or more than a cow. Cows are heavy.
Meanwhile Big Mac lifted a cupboard with just one leg. A cupboard that, might I add, was presumably full of all sorts of kitchen stuff.
And let us not forget that pegasi are capable of surviving impacts at speeds that would turn a human into jelly. Remember when Twilight was crushed by an anvil, a piano, and all manner of other increasingly heavy objects? She recovered within a single day. Miraculous. (disclaimer: it is my headcanon that there is a vast and invisible tapestry of spells woven into the fabric of Equestria that protects ponies, makes their lives easier, and even lets them more easily manipulate objects with their hooves)
All that said, we mustn't forget that ponies are not people. They don't think like us, at least not exactly. Common ponies appear to be rather lacking in curiosity, notable exceptions notwithstanding. The mane six may always be ready to leap into a fight with their bare hooves when in danger, but let us not forget that they are heroes. Heroines. Whatever.
Then there's the important distinction between having the potential for great power, and knowing how to use it. The Apples are capable of bucking apples out of trees, which demonstrates their ability to direct the kinetic energy of their extremely powerful kicks. But do they do this on instinct, or through very careful martial-arts-esque training? I imagine Big Mac would gladly pontificate all day on the finer mechanics of applebucking, but Applejack would probably just answer your questions with "I dunno, I just do it."
And using it in a fight? That's a whole 'nother can of beans. Having the ability to bend the weather to your will is great, but what experience do modern ponies have with using such power against their enemies? Obviously Rainbow Dash and the Wonderbolts would have no problem, but it's a well known fact those pegasi are significantly more awesome than most.
Twilight is supremely capable even in her regular form. As an alicorn she's more potent than ever, and once she absorbed the power of the other alicorns? Holy wowcow. And yet... she only used the basics when she fought Tirek. Lasers, more lasers, bigger lasers, teleportation, and flying. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that both Twilight and Tirek are incredibly powerful, but untrained. Her moreso than him.
This subject is one of the reasons I continue to obsess about Swordpony, and why I may yet end up getting back to that story. I've had many arguments on the nature of pony violence thanks to it. As a result I've developed quite the headcanon. But medieval fighting ponies are a different breed than the ponies of modern Equestria, so accustomed to living in what amounts to a utopia. And yes, I'm aware modern Equestria is not truly a utopia. But it's a damn sight closer than a lot of bronies think.
I'll use some examples from that headcanon. Red Pommel is an earth pony with the limited ability to sense things through his hooves, such as the strength and make of a wall. But he's not all too physically strong. He couldn't knock a tree down with a kick, for example. Instead he's acrobatic, flexible, and highly dextrous. I'd even go so far as to say his main strength is his perceptive abilities. He's a pony who has fought in battles, killed in self defense and worse, and perfectly willing to fight dirty.
But does he beat knightly-trained unicorns because he's just that good? Not really. The overwhelming majority of Equestrian knights in Swordpony are for the most part foppish pretenders. Even the nice ones. Were they to fight the knights of old, or a pony like Commander Hurricane, they'd get their asses handed to them on a plate. Red Pommel's good, but he got to where he is in life because most everypony else was just that bad.
There are characters in Swordpony who can well and truly fight. There's a character only mentioned and never seen, Dusky Oatis, the previous Master Swordpony of Everfree and a talented horn at many spells besides. There's a unicorn who could cut his way through a horde. Still not quite a match for the heroes of old. The character of Sworn Shield, seen in the journals attached to each illustration, is an earth pony quite capable of great feats, and a survivor of battles that made the Bloody Pasture look like a bunch of untrained idiots playing pretend war. Stormwind, a pegasus in Shetland, is capable of bending the wind to his will and conjuring up powerful tornadoes, though in a straight fight he's nothing special. Another pegasus, Lady Hail Stormwalker of Equestria, is almost on Commander Hurricane's level and can command lightning (as a rule of thumb, pegasi in Swordpony fight scary). There's an assassin earth pony in my notes named Put Paid who's almost as acrobatic as Pinky Pie, but he's a glass cannon. Another earth pony named Breath, also from my notes, is perhaps the only character I have truly capable of such feats as you described. And on the other end of the scale, an otherwise competent unicorn mare like Lush Renvers wouldn't think to conk an attacker on the head with a bottle if she got in a bind.
TL;DR --
The secret weapon that counts the most is not being capable of violence, it's being familiar with violence. And such familiarity is always hard-won.
Pictured: familiarity hard-won. fc01.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2013/235/6/d/thousand_yard_stare_by_majorfreddy-d6ihh7q.jpg
I think the modern Equestrians could handle anything thrown at them if they had to. They always do. But I don't believe for a second they're masters of war.
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Most of my reasons for clicking through bad stories comes from my post at Seattle's Angels. When the deadline is closing in and you're desperately hoping more people had spontaneously gotten creative in the last couple days, it's easy to go a little crazy!
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Agreed that the magic rules seen in the show are "soft." But that comes back to the point I'm trying to make: a lot of people don't realize you can do pretty much any dang thing you want where the ponies are concerned. My main point hidden under all the rambling is: don't be afraid to think outside the box once in a while.
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Maybe not bowled over by war spells, but by the rainbow wave of friendship that covers the planet and turns us all into ponies?
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See me when I get comments about how some people don't think Equestria is as (potentially) violent as the show implies. Oh, you mean besides all the stuff that tries to kill them?
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Maybe I went a little overboard because it was late last night. I don't think ponies are masters of war by any means, but I meant to just say that I enjoy stretching my imagination a little when it comes to what ponies might be capable of, up to and including the art of warfare.
Another problem is that we're also limited by what the show tells us onscreen. Sure, Twilight and Tirek just used LAZERS, but that's probably because it was the easiest thing to do on screen for the creators. But it's easy for us to write down Twilight using her powers to trap Tirek in ground that becomes quicksand, Tirek trying to incinerate Twilight with the Sun, Twilight forming a towering battlemech out of rocks and trees and both of them going all Rock-Em Sock-Em Robots on each other...
So don't be afraid to do that is all I'm saying. It might be silly on the drawing board, but hey, a show about pastel ponies has managed to keep our attention for this long, right?
So don't stop being as creative as you are in that single post! Thinking like that is what I like to see.
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So, the powers of Harmony would forcibly change an entire race of people, who may actually have viable reasons for the conflict, just because?
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I'm just saying the fight would not be one-sided, and immediately assuming that humans would lose is kinda silly.
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(The Conversion Bureau, bro, I was making a funny out of it)
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I wrote a blog post about how the tree of harmony was a symbotic organism of some sort of which manipulates the ponies into promoting its own propagation.
Sadly I never actually came up with a good story idea around it.
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As fanfiction writers we have two choices when it comes to Twilight vs Tirek and other scenes from the show: A) to interpret them as they are, or B) to rewrite them into what we want them to be.
Objectively I say it makes sense for Twilight to be powerful but untrained, especially when enormously PO'd at the loss of her library and home. It's more surprising for Tirek to be powerful but untrained, but if you think about it... it makes sense. After all, the villain of "Ponies Make War/The Immortal Game" was the same. Who needs skill when you're literally the most powerful being alive and anything you hit will fly into the nearest mountain with ten kilotons of force? In a way it's like people who have amazing internet connections and play video games. They may have a super high K/D, but you take away that sexy connection and they'll drop to the bottom of every leaderboard. At least until they get hard and mean again from the crushing handicap of lag/no power.
SOooo yeah, they couldn't have Tirek punch Twilight because it's a kid's show, and they didn't have the time to showcase Twilight using more over-the-top spells, and that's the reason why we got what we got. I'm the kind of guy who prefers Option A, though.
AND SH-SHUT UP! I DON'T NEED YOUR KIND... ENCOURAGEMENT... WORDS OF NICE!
2364579 lasers are light. making focused light with technology is an incredibly taxing and complicated process. With magic though, you just make it closer together. Unicorns may not understand what a laser is, but making one with magic is an entirely different, and most likely easier process. Trixie can make neon lights in the air, why not more focused? In fact lasers might be the most common unicorn combat spell, because manipulating light is just an advanced form of illusion and easier than say, fire, or other elements.
One interesting idea is what about everything else? They basically live in D&D land with all the low level threats stripped out, so since everything with hooves seems like it might be sentient, even if the pigs and goats didn't talk, then what is everything else like. What can elephants do? How powerful are the zebras if they've been living with them over in africa equilent without getting wiped out. Does it make make sense for all raindeer not being capable of flight? Are the Deer the pony version of elves? ( I saw yes, even if cannon makes it harder.) Moose, antelope, and on and on. There are so many neat possibilities, and with a war you could have various races with various strengths and weaknesses on both sides. Far more interesting.
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Elephants don't have hooves, so I see no reason why they'd be sentient magic-users.
Then tell me why in the premiere of the show, Rarity skillfully dodges the swing of a manticore and counterattacks. TAKE THAT, YOU RUFFIAN! But in "A Dog and Pony Show", a diamond dog not even half the size and ferocity of a manticore casually tucks her under his arm like a loaf of bread and carries her away without a fight.
Tell me why the mighty Applejack, who can kick trees left and right to get apples, cannot remove her hoof from two small rocks. Tell me why Rainbow Dash, who can shatter an entire barn with a single charge, can't remove a trapped feather from a boulder. How can a god-like entity like Celestia, who moves the sun back and forth across the sky on a daily basis, be easily ambushed and captured by a random fucking vine? Why would an entire village of these super-strong and magical ponies be thrown into a panic by a stampede of bunnies?
Look, we can argue about "objective" power levels regarding the show until we're blue in the face and our keyboards have shattered. MLP:FiM operates on a few simple rules: rule of funny, rule of cool, rule of children's television, and rule of selling merchandise. To sort out these power levels in a manner that everyone in the fandom would be satisfied is nothing short of utter futility. There will always be fanfic writers who turn ponies into worthless balls of fluff blown away by a single human and there are fanfic writers who turn ponies into a race of super beings that blow away all other races. For me, both instances suck.
A wonky power level system is just one symptom of a fundamental failure in a story: the failure to make your reader care about the fates of the characters in the story. A human who blows everything away with his COD leetness is not interesting. Ponies constantly running and losing are not interesting. Ponies solving everything easily with rainbow powers are not very interesting too. Struggle and in-story consistency are more important than incorporating every incident in a show into a single power level system.