Sexual Orientation of My Mane Six · 11:06pm Jan 30th, 2015
Note that in my fanon (future events are indeterminate, and there are both alternate futures and pasts):
Twilight Sparkle: Primarily heterosexual, extremely inexperienced (never even kissed romantically), and highly monogamous, as of the start of the show, I chose to give her a Reincarnation Romance with Luna, which works out because If It's You It's Okay (Dusk Skyshine and Moondreamer Finemare of the Age of Wonders were very much in love). Twilight becomes Luna's Consort, and after Celestia's Sacrifice they rule Equestria together.
This is very unlikely to happen in canon, and I knew it when I wrote it.
Rarity Belle: Strongly and exclusively heterosexual, somewhat monogamous. Seduced and betrayed as a young adolescent, as of the start of the show is quite romantically active but avoids full intercourse largely because she does not trust stallions. Slowly falling in love with Spike over the course of the show. Eventually marries Spike, who greatly aids her in building Rarity Enterprises into a major international corporation. They become the parents of a whole clan of ki-rin.
Rainbow Dash: Bisexual, weak sex drive, virginal as of the start of the series. Her deepest love and strongest personal loyalty is to Fluttershy, whom she has known and cared for since they were little fillies. Loses her virginity to Fluttershy in Season Two. Has an unfortunate tendency to fall in love with those who seem dependent on and very appreciative of her emotional affection, which has twice led her to fall in love with part- or full Changelings. Slightly polyamorous, not at all promiscuous, and extremely loyal to any and all lovers.
Fluttershy: Bisexual, strong sex drive, polyamorous but not promiscuous. Was seduced and betrayed by a strange stallion in late adolescence, and at the start of the series is terrified of sex in general and stallions in particular. Recovers, falls in love with Rainbow Dash over Seasons One and Two; later falls in love with Bulk Biceps and Discord. Winds up marrying Discord; the two and their strange spawn travel the stars terraforming lifeless worlds, making whole ecosystems in their creative delight and contributing to the spread of Earthlife throughout the Universe.
Applejack: Heterosexual, moderate sex drive, extremely monogamous even by the standards of her fairly moral clan. Before Luna's Return, she was in love with Landscape Carrot, an elder brother of Golden Harvest "Carrot Top" Carrot, and gave him her virginity. They would have been wed, but her family opposed the match and the offended Landscape went off to seek his fortune so that he would be worthy of Applejack, and disappeared. She's still faithful to him, though she knows he may never return.
Later she discovers that Landscape is a Captive of Hive Evergloom. She leads a rescue mission which has the result of saving not only Landscape, but the survivors of Hive Evergloom, now his loyal followers, from the forces of Queen Chrysalis. The Evergloom survivors dub themselves "Hive Carrot" and settle in Ponyville. Applejack weds Landscape, whose decade-long immersion in Changeling culture proves key in the Reconciliation of the Changelings, and the Equestrian victory over High Queen Hunger.
Pinkie Pie: Primarily heterosexual, weakly bisexual, largely because she is aware that some alternate Pinkies are lesbians. Virginal and monogamous at the start of the series, largely because of her rather conservative upbringing. Falls in love, for the first time ever, with Cheese Sandwich. They eventually marry, and among other things they and their kin and descendants play an important role in the Restoration of Paradise and its relations with Equestria. (Of the alternate Pinkies, many wind up marrying Big Mac, and a few Rainbow Dash).
Great to hear from you it has been a while. Always enjoyable to see what you think. I really enjoyed the latest story with your interpretation of the Winningverse Pinkie. My personal favorites for Pinkie is Rainbow Dash, Twilight Sparkle, and Big Mac in that order. I seem to recall you also saw something between Pinkie and Twilight due to past lives but both of them have others hold their attentions and both are primarily not Bi in your stories.
Glad to be hearing from you again Jordan, I'm currently rewatching all of season 1 of MLP in preparation of making my story. I also have you to thank for becoming one of the writers on this site that got me inspired to create my own stories.
I imagine that being aware of yourself in numerous parallel timelines would blur the lines of your sexuality, yes. Sort of a "Which one am I, again?" effect.
I find it interesting that Dash seems to be the only one with no defined romantic fate in your stories. Romance is hardly compulsory, but there's an irony to the Bearer of Loyalty being the only one without a dedicated partner. Of course, the operative word there is "seems."
Everypony is gay for Braeburn. There is no exceptions. :)
Also i always found Applejack to be more plausible as a lesbian than Rainbow Dash was. People take her family background as the main cause of being heterosexual but she seem like in the closet to me. And she seem even less attracted to males than Dash
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Trenderhoof is (I go by Scoots2's "Slice of Life" in that respect), but Braeburn doesn't like him back that way.
The problem with that is that she's never been shown being romantically-attracted to any mares, either. The closest she comes to that is the extreme rapidity with which she comes to like Twilight Sparkle, which seems to be a matter of kindred spirits recognizing one another (they are both extremely honorable, responsible Ponies, proud of their own capabilities; with the key difference that Applejack is focused on physical and Twliight intellectual excellence).
Applejack is sweet to any and all of her friends -- she's an enormously kind Pony, in some ways kinder to Ponies than is Fluttershy herself. And she's affectionate -- she'll hug and nuzzle given any excuse. But she doesn't seem aroused by anypony, not even the kind of endearingly-goofy way that (say) Rainbow Dash sometimes is. The two ways I could read that is that either she's asexual, or she loves somepony who has been gone from the scene for a while: I read it as the latter.
My Rainbow Dash isn't a lesbian. Nor is my Fluttershy. They're bisexuals -- both of them also become sexually-involved with males. (Not lots of males -- or females for that matter -- but then they're not promiscuous, either).
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Pinkie can tell the difference between events that her specific self has personally experienced and those she merely knows of through her temporal senses. For one thing her memories of events she's experienced in her own worldline is much more vivid ... she may be able to call up lists of details about one of her other selves' marriage to Big Mac (including all sorts of sexual information that this Big Mac would be horribly-embarrassed to realize she knew about him), but it's more like reading a book or watching a movie than experiencing it personally for her.
Also, while Pinkie is dirtier-minded than she usually appears from the outside, it's more a matter of curiosity and sense of humor -- she doesn't spend her time obsessively reviewing the sex lives of her other selves -- many of whom, of course, are as virginal as herself. Most of her life doesn't center around her sexuality.
Where her knowledge of other Pinkies becomes romantically-important is that she's aware of possiblities and probabilities of which she would be unaware otherwise. For instance, her terrifying battle with Winning-Through-Degradation made her aware of the Degradingverse Pinkie Pie, and this in turn made her aware of the fact that this Pinkie Pie was saved from madness and healed from her psychic injuries largely through the love of that worldline's Rainbow Dash. This made the Shadow Wars Pinkie Pie grateful and thus more friendly toward her own worldline's Rainbow Dash than otherwise might have been the case.
Now, the Shadow Wars Pinkie Pie isn't bisexual. In fact the reason why the Degradingverse one is bisexual is that this was part of the way in which Winning-Through-Degradation altered her -- to Degrade her, Winning needed sexual contact, and since Winning's host Cloud Kicker is a mare, Pinkie Pie had to become bisexual. But the Shadow Wars Pinkie Pie is sufficiently pan-romantic that the idea of loving Rainbow Dash didn't repulse her, even though Shadow Wars Pinkie had no desire to make love to her.
Indeed, what touched Shadow Wars Pinkie's heart about the knowledge was that Rainbow Dash was willing to love her, and quite seriously, even after what Winning had made her do, and made to look like Degradingverse Pinkie's own choice (*). This made Shadow Wars Pinkie realize what an incredibly good friend Rainbow Dash could be to her, and thus Pinkie went out of her way to befriend Rainbow Dash. Shadow Wars Rainbow Dash was at that point primarily interested in Fluttershy, anyway, and in any case Dashie only has a weak sex drive to begin with -- for Rainbow Dash, friendship is always the most important part of love (which is, of course, a sentiment with which all Pinkie Pies would very much agree).
Likewise, when the "Magical Mystery Cure" made Pinkie Pie aware that many of her other selves fell in love with (and at least one had made an early marriage with) Big Mac, it is not so much that she was overwhelmed by lust at the awareness that she could probably have him (Pinkie could have a lot of sex if that was all she wanted, as she's friendly with -- and well-liked by -- literally everypony in town). It was that she became aware that Big Mac was capable of the kind of extremely-loyal and lasting love that she's seen Igneous Rock display toward Cloudy Quartz, and moreover that he was highly-intelligent and emotionally-complex behind his shy facade. That was why she eventually (in "Pinkie Apple Pie") made herself his fifth cousin twice removed -- to get a chance to know him better in this worldline (note that the degree of kinship she chose would not impede their love; in the Shadow Wars worldline, Big Mac and his third cousin Apple Fritter at different times had crushes on one another, and saw nothing immoral about their sentiments.
Pinkie loves Cheese Sandwich more for one big reason. He's the only stallion (or for that matter, incarnate Pony of either sex) she's ever met who can even remotely understand her. Big Mac could come to love her, but could never actually comprehend her reasoning. Cheese can't totally understand her (he perceives the signals he gets from his alternate selves as purely-unconscious drives or physical sensations, as is the case for some of the less-capable alternate Pinkie Pies), but he does understand her values and what drives her better than do most. And Cheese Sandwich is also capable of serious and loyal love.
The key to understanding a lot of Pinkie's actions is simple: she thinks in terms of effects rather than causes. She automatically knows what to do -- in many cases in considerable detail -- in order to achieve anything within her power. What she does is think of her desire, and in response she knows the sequence of actions she must perform to achieve them. If the sequence doesn't involve doing anything she finds too disgusting or immoral, she then performs those actions.
What she doesn't always understand is exactly how these actions will achieve her ends. This makes a lot of her behavior -- from the outside -- look stupid or random. ("Just Pinkie being Pinkie.") Far from it; actually, her intelligence is supergenius level, just like Twilight Sparkle's. It's just slanted the opposite way -- Pinkie is much more intuitive than rational, while Twilight is more rational than intuitive.
Example: in "Filli Vanilli" her desire was to "help Fluttershy be less shy." To do this, Pinkie had to compete and win against Big Mac in the hog calling contest. She had absolutely no idea why she had to do this. All she knew was that in the worldlines where she did this, Fluttershy becoming less shy became much more probable. So she did it.
She checked a few other things first, of course -- that she wasn't also making Big Mac's, or anyone else's, death or serious harm likely. Pinkie Pie is highly moral -- a Pinkie without morality would be a monster, and one perhaps even more dangerous than Winning-Through-Degradation (**) -- and she very much wants to avoid hurting other Ponies (and this, too, she perceives in alien wise: she sees it as wanting to move events in the direction of Joy rather than Sorrow).
What she knew was "If I win the hog calling contest against Big Mac, Fluttershy will become less shy" and "neither Big Mac nor anypony else will be much harmed by my actions." She had no idea exactly what would happen, or how the cause of her actions could produce the effect of her goal. Nor did she much care -- Pinkie isn't concerned with the small details. And from her point of view, that's all that causal chains are ... small details.
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(*) There are alien aspects to Shadow Wars Pinkie's perception of love and sexuality, due to her strange consciousness and reasoning methods, but Pinkie knows exactly what it implies abut one's character if one is literally willing to have sex with almost anyone you meet, and Winning made Pinkie no more fastidious than it had made Cloud Kicker (causing Pinkie much more damage, as even Promiscuous variants of Pinkie Pie are normally not that promiscuous). Degradingverse Rainbow Dash completely refused to hold this against Pinkie, because she loved her too much to entertain that sort of despite toward her. Shadow Wars Pinkie understands what this implies about the depth of Dashie's love and loyalty.
(**) One of the reasons Degradingverse Pinkie was so damaged was not only that had she been forced for years to behave in complete contravention of the morals she had learned from her parents, but (perhaps even more seriously from Pinkie's point of view) in defiance of her purpose as the Joy-Bringer. The Degradingverse Pinkie really would have seduced somepony and then found their love in return to be merely funny, slept with married Ponies, and so forth. She had very little control over her own actions, and was causing a lot of damage (as Winning wanted, since it helped mask the tornado of Sorrow that Winning was having Cloud Kicker produce in order to weaken the prey). Had not Winning necessarily neutralized large portions of Pinkie's super-equine intelligence and psychic abilties (so that it could control her), Pinkie might have been even more destructive; she could have massively warped reality to better suit her parties -- in fact, Pinkie would probably have become Nightmare Granfalloon.
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Terrifying and appropriate. I knew the Night Shadows wanted to ice all life, but I didn't realize some would resort to Ice-9.
Nightmare Granfalloon?
I love Pinkie's unique perspective on causality. It really emphasizes both her alien perspective and the genuine benevolence that differentiates her from most Things that deserve a capital T. (If I may be self-centered, it even works quite well with my latest story, A Perfect Barnstorm. At least, it does if you assume Pinkie knew what the ultimate outcome would be. I admit, even I'm not sure if she did.)
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My headcanon is more like that
Fluttershy - straight(comics - Sombra scene) or asexual (not really any legit sign of attraction toward any gender as she usually act the same toward Angel)
Rainbow Dash - bisexual and mostly impressed by the heroic acts of whatever gender, she think that dating is "yuck" anyway
Rarity - straight (also affect other species in comics- like deers)
Applejack - asexual (literally not even uncontrolled reaction toward males like Sombra or the pirate in the comics) or closet lesbian
Twilight - obviously straight and apparently not a single problem with other species (I'm suprised she had a crush on a first human male whatsoever, I woudn't be able to recognise their gender if i was Twilight at that time)
Pinkie - pansexual just like Discord. Although Cheese seems to be her more likely love interest i think both of them would marry whatever intelligent being or object they could find. Even a living tree. Pinkie is just extremly tolerant and Discord was just never adjusted to living in one culture with one preferation of species
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Fluttershy definitely has a sex drive -- as you point out she's aroused by Good!Sombra just as is the amorous Rarity. In the show she demonstrates attraction toward three beings: Rainbow Dash, Discord and Bulk Biceps. She's thus bisexual and capable of xenophilia; I think she's more attracted toward males than females, though. My Discord is alien, yes, but he's been raised a Pony and spent most of his time even as a lazy global tyrant hanging around Ponies. He thinks more like a (very) weird Pony than a true alien; that is why he can grasp how to be friends with Fluttershy.
Rainbow Dash is bisexual, but her sex drive is weak. She has a very strong capacity for friendship, and looks at sexual love as a very strong and romantic friendship in which the intimacy of friendship makes it okay to do things which she would otherwise find rather disgusting or at least embarrassing. She's not much for flowery declarations of love, but she's capable of loving a friend very strongly, and she would do almost anything for a true friend. Fluttershy is her best friend ever; Applejack and Pinkie Pie close runner-ups, and she feels very comfortable with Twilight Sparkle. Of these, Fluttershy's the only one sexually attracted to her.
In my fanon, she also falls in love with the (imported from Phoenix Dragon) OC Azure Sky, who is male. And not half a Changeling like Fluttershy ... he's a full Changeling, though she didn't know this when she first met him (neither did he, which is why she forgives him the deception). This happens during a time she and Fluttershy are on the outs, and it makes her love life complicated.
Rarity's straight, and her romantic charisma affects not merely members of other mammalian species but also archosaurs, mot notably and obviously Dragons. In canon she charms three Draconids -- Spike; the Dragon I named "Red Haze" (though this doesn't last long) and Steven Magenta the River Serpent (in his case it probably isn't sexual, given ... well, you know). Rarity flirts a lot, she even fools around a bit, but by no means does all this behavior indicate deep attraction. Rarity likes to play at falling in love; the only love she has that she seems at all serious about is Spike, whom we know in canon she would willingly risk her life for at the drop of a hat.
Why does everyone find it so hard to imagine that Applejack is merely very self-controlled and very choosy? Given her (almost insanely) strong sense of honor, I don't think she'd easily back out of a love affair, so she want to have reason to believe it was really likely to work out and lead to marriage before she got involved. She doesn't react to Good!Sombra or the Pirate because neither seems like anything likely to lead to anything both serious and good, and Applejack doesn't "trifle." I gave her a lost True Love to explain, though, why she's totally uninterested in courtship.
Well, Twilight's very cosmopolitan. Her second mother-figure is an Alicorn, as was her babysitter / sister in law; her adoptive younger brother is a Dragon; and she's been raised at Court where she's probably met ambassadors and traders and other visitors from foreign lands. She seems to have high morals and ideals, but these very same ideals doubtless incorporate a concept of the equality of all sapient life. (Note that she was initially the one least afraid of Zecora, for example). So while she wouldn't have casual sex with anyone, she could conceive of marrying a Dragon or Griffon ... or a Humanoid from another dimension, if she met one who suited her.
Pinkie's probably more panromantic than pansexual. She loves everyone, but I don't know that she's willing to have sex with everyone. At least not Shadow Wars Storyverse Pinkie -- though some of her other selves are Promiscuous Pinkies.
First thing's first, is it okay to post something with blogposts already so old? I wouldn't want to impose and I will refrain from doing so should a situation like it come up again, if you would rather I don't.
Secondly, I notice how almost no discussion of Pinkie's sexuality mentions the fact that her family entrusts their romantic futures to a rock.
Oh, I bet it's a lovely rock, this Choosing Stone, but you have to admit that this has the potential to seriously screw up a young mare's ideas of romance, love, and sex.
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I love when someone reawakens an old post.
The Choosing Stone wasn't revealed until "Hearthbreakers." Having said that, we don't know how the Choosing Stone works or exactly how it is used in the subculture to which the Pies belong. Does it pick a mate out of the blue, or does it confirm (or reject) existing choices? Is it sapient and magically-gifted, or is it just a Magic Feather to make newlywed couples more self-confident? All we know is that it seems to have worked for Igneous and Cloudy, who are obviously still in love.
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Indeed it worked for them, and judging by their reaction to Granny Smith's question, they believe it can help other ponies too. There are some things pointing to it actively shipping rather than merely judging an already existing attraction:
By the way, I messed up its name. I'm pretty sure most people call it "Choosing Stone", like I had. Weird.
Anyhow, what's especially topical for this blogpost is the question how this affects Pinkie Pie. As in, maybe she doesn't explore romantic love herself because her upbringing was totally fatalistic in that regard? She's remote from her family, yes, in humour and colour and even distance, but she obviously cares deeply for them. Family is one of the things she's ready to get angry over, as Starlight and Trixie both can attest. And Pinkie lives in a world of probabilities and precognition as it is. It would make sense for her to leave her love live completely to the whims of this stone.