On the Weight of Ponies. · 8:47am Sep 9th, 2015
There's something in the fandom that's always weirded me out a little, and I'm going to give it a name. I'm going to call it Foam Pony Syndrome, and it's when you have humans in Equestria playing with Ponies by wildly whipping them about, tossing them up on their shoulders and generally behaving as though the Pony in question is either about as heavy as a sack of sugar or made entirely out of styrofoam. Mind you, the imagery is cute, but it rubs me wrong, because ponies that large should have some mass, you know?
I'm getting close to going live with a new chapter of Deathless, and this is bound to come up, because I'm not going the generally accepted Foam Pony route. In fact, I'm going to assert that your average pony weighs around two hundred pounds.
Bear with me. I'm going to use research.
If we all agree to bow to the authority of the infamous and widely accepted Pony Candy Cane Height Chart, then the Average Pony stands, head-height, at just over 42 inches. Mapping to real-world horse anatomy, we can also see that Rarity's withers in that image stand, arguably, at approximately the height of the average Cutie Mark Crusader, who's around 30 inches -- and from the withers are typically how horses are measured.
30" translates to 7.2 hands high* in the horse world, and if you Google for miniature ponies that height, you get about what you see in the Candy Cane chart.
Now, have a chart:
This chart doesn't have numbers as low as 7.2hh, but it does have them at 9hh, and that puts donkeys at that height (which, for reference, is only 6" taller) at a plenty-respectable 150kg / 330lb. Now, I can certainly see losing some of those three hundred pounds on the way from 9hh to 7.5hh, but I'm not anywhere near the 'sack of sugar' mark.
Going further, general FAQs on the Miniature Pony sites give an average weight for an average pony somewhere between 150-250lb, which sounds about right. And finally, we have this page, which asserts that, statistically speaking, the average miniature pony is 32.8" and 225lb.
Accounting for that extra 2.8", I drop 25 and arrive at roughly 200 pounds.
So no, Ponies in Deathless are not made of foam. They're short, sure, but they're at least as massive as humans. This also makes them more feasible as physical combatants, which has some importance in the story; in a 1v1, a human and a pony would be equally matched, at least with regards to mass.
Alas, Paul won't be giving any inverse pony rides to Twilight any time soon. Not that he'd really be inclined to, but there it is.
* just for reference, hands as equine measurements only have four increments between one cardinal value and the next -- so you can have 7hh, 7.1hh, 7.2hh and 7.3hh, but never 7.4hh, because that's actually 8hh. To make things more confusing, that last site doesn't respect hands notation, and just uses decimal representation of the inch measurement, but the averages are still valid, even though they're not correctly identified in hand notation.
I sort of ignore the candy cane chart and stick with a couple of other charts I've seen but can't find offhand--one chart uses apples to measure the characters with the assumption that a Sweet Apple Acres apple is about 4 inches tall (a specious assumption but not terrible for a ballpark figure), and another I don't even remember but it made sense at the time. Both of those charts end up measuring ponies as a few inches smaller than the candy cane chart, and it looks better to me because, among other things, Equestrian pony eyes are so enormous that I'll accept any reasonable-ish interpretation that assumes ponies are as small as possible without actually being below knee-height.
I put Celestia at maybe 5'6" as measured from the fuzz on her head; she's too round of feature and spindly of limb to be horse-sized so far as I'm concerned, and just I can't picture pony heads being larger than human heads. This puts regular ponies at a little below waist height.
And this'd put the average pony weight at, I don't know, 160 lb? Still couldn't be thrown around like a stuffed animal, and that suits me. It's never struck me as cute. This fandom has a lot of stuff I don't think is cute, kind of like a lot of this stuff that's supposed to be sad is actually funny. Either I'm dead inside or yall are bad at emotional blackmail.
3379850 Your approach sounds completely reasonable; I mainly went with the candy cane chart because it seems to be ubiquitous, and because I like the size/dimensions of the Ponies that result. Both of our results seem reasonable given our assumptions, so here's to that.
As for cute/noncute, I'm clearly not much of a judge there either; I know a lot of people find Foam Pony Syndrome cute, but obviously I found it irritating otherwise I wouldn't have written a rant about it. I'm curious now though, what 'sad' have you found that you don't find sad? This kind of thing always intrigues me.
No waffles?
As for sad that doesnt work, this is often cited as a good example.
They simply tried too hard, in my opinion, to deliberately manipulate the viewer. Perfectly legitimate of course, but it shouldn't be obvious. I think of it as the Hallmark cards approach to sentiment.
3380527 Waffles soon, but you knew that.
Hallmark cards, say no more, I get where you're coming from. Sentiment is fine, but like respect it has to be earned to be of any real value.
I've avoided that video until now. If I watch it out of boredom it's all your fault.