How magic works in Equestria · 12:43am Nov 5th, 2014
One of the most fun aspects of getting into any fantasy setting is learning how the magic is supposed to work. Good authors and creators have come up with all sorts of rules and systems for how magic is meant to function so it doesn’t become a catch-wall win button or plot-hole-filler. But magic in FiM doesn’t seem to have any rules or systems, and it actually has pretty much become (or has been since the very beginning) a catch-all win button and plot-hole-filler.
Whatever. Sometimes it’s not really fair to expect proper high fantasy from a cartoon, and just typing the words ‘proper high fantasy’ makes me feel like an insufferable ass hole anyway.
But magic does exist in the FiM setting, and it works somehow, and it can make for some great stories if you use it right, and you probably can’t use it right unless you get a sense for how it works, even if that only ends up being head canon.
So how does magic work in Equestria?
In the most basic example, a unicorn’s horn will light up, and that unicorn's surroundings will be manipulated somehow, usually in the form of things being lifted up in the air and tossed around a bit. Sometimes lasers happen. Sometimes friendship rainbows happen. All of which seems pretty cool, but none of which is all that exciting, really. A lot of times when I move my hands around, things end up getting tossed around, too, and I like to think that my cat finds that pretty cool, even though it isn’t. Lasers and rainbows aren’t totally outside the realm of human possibility, either. The point here being that the way unicorns use magic doesn’t seem to be any kind of otherworldly power from the Beyond. It’s just another means of manipulating the physical environment, but on some weird level that most of the other inhabitants of Equestria don’t seem capable of. Something in a unicorn’s horn seems to interact with something else in the environment, and then POOF, rainbows.
Not just unicorns, though. I don’t know if it’s ever been confirmed in the show, but earth ponies and pegasus ponies definitely have magic, too. They aren’t able to directly control their magic to interact with the environment, but it does seem to have some kind of passive effect that aids them in their interactions with the environment. Earth ponies seem to have some greater control of or connection to soil and plants, and pegasus ponies have some greater control of or connection to the atmosphere and weather patterns. Earth pony magic might have something to do with strength or endurance as well, and pegasus magic might have something to do with flight, but those are hard to confirm.
This still doesn’t seem like any kind of otherworldly power. There is a Something inside of the pegasus ponies, and a similar Something is inside of the clouds. A little focused interaction between the two Somethings, and you get rain (well, you get the moisture in the clouds to start condensing, the rain doesn’t just appear from nowhere). The ponies call this Something magic, but that term comes with a lot of weird connotations that don’t seem to apply to Equestria. Again, magic in Equestria appears to just be a means of interacting with the environment.
But then, what is magic? At least in Equestria? What about it allows ponies to manipulate their environment?
It’s worth taking a quick look at how we (and everyone and everything else) in the real world are able to manipulate our own environment. The reason we’re able to interact with our environment is that we and our environment are made up of the same stuff. We’re made up of, basically, matter and energy, and so is the environment. Matter and energy can interact with matter and energy just because… well… it just can. If we weren’t made out of matter and energy, or if we were made out of some other kind of matter and energy, it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption that we might not then be able to interact with the environment, because then we wouldn’t be made out of the same stuff anymore.
There are some real world examples of this. We and our whole planet are pretty well submerged in a particle called a neutrino that you will never be able to see, smell, hear, taste, or touch. Neutrinos are blasting at you from the sun at a constant rate, something like billions or trillions of them are rushing at you every second. Your body will never interact with these neutrinos on any level, not even molecularly or atomically. Neutrinos simply don’t interact with our physical world. They just pass on by. For all intents and purposes, neutrinos don’t exist to you, and you don’t exist to the neutrinos.
There are other sorts of matter and energy which we can’t interact with on any physical level, but which we’re sort of kind of averagely confident might exist based on possible effects we've seen on the universe from those unseen matters and energies, and those are called dark matter and dark energy (this is not a scientific definition of either term). That dark matter and energy could be literally anything, including a simple misunderstanding of how the universe works. But if you’re a science fiction writer, that dark matter and dark energy is a whole universe of galaxies, stars, and planets which are made up of something so fundamentally different than what we’re made up of, that we can never see or touch or interact with them in any way, much like we can’t interact with neutrinos. But those dark stars and planets would be perfectly capable of interacting with each other, because they would be made up of the same stuff as each other.
Which is the whole point of this digression. If and how we can interact with things in our environment is determined by whether we and the environment are made up of the same stuff. Since ponies can use magic to interact with their environment, it’s safe to assume that magic isn’t something that is willed into existence by ponies, or that just pops in and out of their world randomly, or that the ponies are drawing from someplace in the great Beyond, it’s simply something inside ponies that is also inside their environment. It’s probably something a lot like the matter and energy and molecules and particles that are inside of us and our environment. It probably is a particle, because everything is particles.
So I’m going to call it the Pony Particle. Pony particles interact with other pony particles to create rainbows. It’s crazy stuff.
Since ponies seem to be able to use magic (their pony particles) to interact with just about everything, it’s a pretty safe assumption that magic (pony particles) are inside of just about everything. Magic is in everything.
But none of that really answers the question, what is magic?
Well, I don’t know. What the hell is matter and energy?
That question doesn’t have any satisfying answer, never will. Matter and energy is matter and energy. It just is what it is. You can’t define it in any terms other than its own, because it literally is everything.
Magic in Equestria is the same. It’s just magic. It’s pony particles.
But where does magic come from? How do ponies get all these pony particles?
I feel like a broken record, but they almost certainly get it from the same place humans get their matter and energy. And we don’t really ‘get’ it from anywhere. Humans are matter and energy. A human is formed when one or two human bodies gather some matter and energy from the environment, and reshape that matter and energy into the form of another human. This is obviously a greatly simplified version of the actual process, but it can basically be simplified this way. Parturition is just the process of remaking a bit of the environment into the shape of something that looks and acts like you.
So ponies don’t get their pony particles from anywhere. They are pony particles. They are matter, energy, and pony particles made into the shape of ponies and given life.
But how does a pony use magic? How does a pony consciously control its pony particles?
Well, how do you lift your arms? How do you make your heart beat?
The fact is, we just do. No special thinking or reasoning is required. And ponies just use magic, because it's what they are.
To sum up, in Equestria, everything is made up of pony particles, and the interactions of pony particles with other pony particles manifest themselves in all the things we see as magic.
This means that:
Like how when a human dies, all of his/her matter and energy gets dumped back into the environment, from whence it came, when ponies die, all of their pony particles get dumped back into the environment.
And in the same way that the sun contains an enormous amount of matter and energy, the sun in Equestria probably contains enormous amounts of pony particles. Finding a way to directly connect with the sun would probably lead to a pony becoming crazy strong.
And how about alicorns like Celestia? They must contain absurd numbers of pony particles, all of which they must have taken from the environment when they were born or became alicorns, possibly creating a great imbalance of pony particles in the world.
Well, boy-howdy, Hoof ( I’m certain you’re saying to yourself right now) wouldn’t it make for an awesome story if alicorns had to periodically die so that their pony particles could be dumped back into the environment to renourish the world?
Well, hot damn, you’re right! I’d better post this fic tomorrow:
really liked reading this. totally cant wait to read that story.
I am honestly not sure what to make of this. Part of me wants to applaud you for pointing out the fact that what the ponies call "magic" is really rather mundane for them (I personally like thinking of it as a rough translation from Equestrian to English), part of me wants to facepalm at how badly you butchered physics, and another part of me is mildly annoyed that you did not actually provide any useful headcanon in the enormous rambling blog post about what magic actually does. Oh well, it was an interesting read if nothing else, although I do have to yell at you about this:
Not really. This is one of the major focuses of modern physics and is looking like we could be one breakthrough away from cracking it wide open. Also, you could make an argument that relativity and quantum mechanics already sort of answer this question and do demonstrate that it is one question, not two. Trying to find the real answer to this question is exactly what things like string theory exist and they might already be right, the problem is that we do not yet have anything that can produce testable results which would prove the validity of the theory in a way that is not completely explained by our established body of knowledge. Once we get something we can work with, it is entirely possible that we could crack this question wide open and discover some truly amazing things, we are just not quite there yet.
You don't, it does it on it's own.
I feel like an ass picking at your blog post...
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I guess I didn't explain myself very well. Firstly, I didn't say that there is not and never will be an explanation of what matter is and why it does what it does. That would be silly. Like you said, that's pretty much what physics is all about. I said I don't think there will ever be a satisfying answer to the question, 'What is matter?' because matter isn't made up language and language was never designed to define something so abstract as matter. Definitions are sort of like an endless well. Words describing more words describing more words. You can't ever reach the bottom. I was advocating thinking about it on a more fundamental level, not giving up on understanding it altogether. Matter can only be understood in terms of matter, not in terms any sort of common sense or day-to-day life, which is why physics is such a dense and difficult to understand science.
Anyway, the whole point of that wasn't really to make any statement on the scientific understanding of matter, it was that trying to understand magic in Cartoon Pony Land by defining it in terms of something else is the wrong way to think about it. You have to understand it for what it is. Magic is magic. You can describe it, but you can't define it.
Hey, how about you act like snobby, uppity jerk about it? Yup, that's probably the best way to respond when someone makes a mistake. Though I'd really like to stress that I was trying to show that magic in Equestria is a fundamental part of their existence, not something ethereal or that ponies create inside themselves, and I wasn't making any attempt at explaining how reality and existence work in the real world. No, dark matter/energy almost certainly isn't just a bunch of stars and planets that we can't see (but it makes for good science fiction). No, neutrinos aren't really a fundamentally different sort of substance than what makes up anything else (but they still don't interact much with other matter). And no, matter isn't able to interact with other matter just because they're made up of the same stuff (but I still think the concept is an interesting one to think about. If we and our environments weren't made up of fundamentally the same stuff, would we be able to interact with it in any way?). I was just using those concepts to try to understand how magic in a made up cartoon pony world works. Sorry if it wasn't up to your super sereal standards.
2574515 For the first part, I see what you are getting at now. When I go into a heavy duty world building discussion like this I am usually thinking in terms of hard science and/or sociology because a big part of what world building is is taking what we see in the cartoon and rendering it back into the known framework of the universe. When done properly, this lets us build up a plausible framework for how the things we see work in more general terms which we can then turn around and use to create new structures that fit smoothly into the world we see in the cartoon. As such, taking things in a literary sense threw me off big time because I was looking at it from a totally analytical standpoint.
For the second, it looks like I was the one being unclear this time.
The reason I had that in front of the quote was because it was pointed at the post as a whole, not one specific part. It was really more aimed at things like the way you described how babies are made which, while not exactly wrong, are still so obviously and excessively condensed that it is hard not to facepalm at them.
Damn, you've been putting a lot of thought into these stories that's not obvious on the surface, but actually makes a lot of sense. Do you have pontifications like this for every story you post?