My Little Canon · 6:01pm Apr 25th, 2016
I’ve been planning to write something of the sort for a while.
Because while I’m writing all those research notes about “canon,” I don’t actually elaborate what exactly “canon” is, why does it matter, and what all these posts with “canon research” tag really are for.
When someone asks why am I spending so much time on picking the show apart and trying to take everything seriously, my usual answer is that it’s the most fun thing to do with it. It’s a game of puzzles, I do that with just about everything that catches my attention. If I had a pony avatar, his cutie mark would be in fridge logic. But that’s not the only reason, just the enjoyable one. There’s another, very interesting reason:
Pony canon does not actually exist.
We tend to believe it does, but we’re wrong. A “canonical body of work” exists.(1) Which is the original definition of the word “canon,” but it isn’t what we mean when we say “telephones are canon,”(2) if you pause to think about it. The distinction may seem subtle, but in this case it’s important.
The idea of a “canon” itself is actually fairly recent, dating back no earlier than 1940 or so, and emerges with the social consumption of a large, serial work of art, consisting of multiple individual units. It is a statement of self-identity of that work: We agree, that when we observe the units of the work, that through them, we are actually observing elements of the same entity, a causally interconnected network of events in some imaginary universe.(3) The “imaginary universe” concept is common to most literary discourse, because without assuming that the events and characters depicted actually, in some way, exist, we cannot understand them any more than we can understand a Youtube cat video by plugging an oscilloscope into an Ethernet cable while it’s playing, and discussion of things like character motivations becomes entirely meaningless. But in case of large serial works, especially those existing in multiple mediums, determining the boundaries of the imaginary universe becomes its own issue.
Now, pretty much everyone knows by now that the author is dead, which merely means that whatever the author meant to say is not necessarily more important than what we actually read. But what about the author that doesn’t really exist?
Any sufficiently large expanded universe is inherently a platform for stories to run on, not a single story. The fabled “spirit of the show” is an emergent entity, resulting from a large set of ants pulling in different, disparate directions, and most importantly, does not reside within the show itself, it is intersubjective and exists between the numerous readers. When expanded universes emerged – and they are also a recent invention, that dates back to no earlier than 1930s, when numerous comic publishers consumed each other in an orgy of mergers and buyouts – not only the author died, but the entire author / story / reader triad died with them, to eventually be replaced by something substantially different, an authors / corpus / fandom triad.
When direction in a collective work is tight, you can observe the universe carrying a certain coherent “message.” The imaginary universe itself is, at least in someone’s mind, consistent, and canon, the unrevealed knowledge of that universe presented through its consequences, can exist. Some form of a virtual, collective author is built by the motions of individual ants. But when it isn’t, what we see is just the motions of individual ants.
And that, to a significant degree, is the case with ponies.
There is no question there are some ideas that drive the show. But there’s little reason to believe a “series bible” exists,(4) or even that the core ideas are all spelled out clearly somewhere in a writer’s guide. There are, allegedly, certain statements that define what the show should feel like,(5) but it’s a safe bet that there’s no exhaustively detailed behind-the-scenes document which defines how ponies live, how Equestrian government works, what exactly happened before Nightmare Moon or even in what order, what the thousand years of recorded history was like, whether ponies actually fight all battles with pie, what does Luna do every day and/or night… None of that is predefined. The ants are pulling everywhere at once and this results in arriving into lots of different places at the same time. Somehow. I’m not really sure whether it is someone’s virtue or good luck that lead to them arriving anywhere at all, I just know it did not happen by design.
Without that knowledge being in place, most events and objects appear on screen without an imaginary in-universe reason for them to do so. Ponies happen to live in a strange mongrel of a collective work, influenced both by the practices of episodic American television, where networks may shuffle the episodes(6) and the intended audience allegedly barely comprehends anything, and the world where Japanese television traditions, which evolved tight series planning and strong arc plots in animation,(7) are a significant competition, especially among the audience ponies actually got. We tend to interpret Equestria from the position of the latter, while the most of the show writers think starting with the former.
It so happens that this also makes Equestria a nicely nebulous place for derivative works, and actually contributes to the show’s success. The less defined a world is, the more holes you can find in it to add something of your own.(8) But what I’m aiming for in my posts tagged “canon research” is an intradiegetic perspective on as much of the available corpus as possible, including as many officially licensed works as I can. I have previously commented to that effect, and wish to reiterate, that I certainly do not want to begrudge anyone else their interpretation.(9) In fact, I must say that a strict canon interpretation is often the least sensible and usually, the least useful in terms of writing,(10) but so far, few people seem to be interested in building a complete one.
They’re perfectly justified in that. A grand unified theory of canon is of limited usefulness and questionable artistic merit. I’m trying to raise the collective author as a Frankenstein-style monster, which is a type of literary necromancy, sewing together limbs and organs left over from numerous people who definitely did not give their informed consent for the procedure.
Of course, what I end up getting is not the “actual author,” that never existed in the first place. It’s clear that many thematic shifts occurred during the show’s run, subtle and not.(11) The resulting monster might not be viable,(12) and is certainly less useful, when you just want to write a story about ponies, than any other moderately complete system evolved in fanon so far. I still hope my research will prove useful to others, if only as food for thought, or I wouldn’t be posting it, and posting it gives me an opportunity to discuss it, which stops me from running off into complete nonsense. But that is also a side benefit.
You see, it just so happens that it’s just the right kind of universe for writing a meditation on the philosophy of fiction.
The world of ponies breaks one of the basic tenets of fiction: The world is the same as the one we observe, except where otherwise indicated. Of course, few works include the full set of “otherwise indicated” within, but you read a space opera and expect it to have energy weapons and an excuse to bridge the distances involved, because it relies on a cultural body of knowledge that indicated those differences.(13) Spy fiction carries another set of assumptions, which, in the world observed, would be patently ridiculous, but you accept them, because other spy fiction has already made them. The same is true of other genres, and is certainly true of literature that calls itself realistic. Without this rule, understanding fiction would not be possible.
Ponies break this rule hard. They live in a world that has the appearance of being complete without actually being so, which has very good reasons to be entirely unlike ours. You can watch the show for hours, fully believing it to be predictable, and then suddenly stumble into a lamp with fireflies within and feel that entire world outside the borders of the screen flip. Ponies aren’t human. Very similar in many ways, different in some well known others, and yet different enough in ways unknown, that anything you believe about them might easily turn out to have been wrong all along, as an ant suddenly decides to go off on a tangent.
Some of that has to do with ponies being, well, ponies. A small portion might be deliberate. Most of it is just an accident of the production process, cartoon tradition, and the economic environment it has to exist in, a long chain of unintentional tomato surprises.
As a result, the most interesting thing about treating ponies seriously is in wondering about how we’re able to extract meaning from something that never had it. The state of the imaginary universe is not unimportant. It is central to our interpretations of characters, because we treat them as real people, and it makes a lot of difference to a real person what they eat, where they sleep and with whom, what exactly is it that they’re guilty of doing a thousand years ago… This information isn’t merely unavailable to us, most of it really does not exist.
Yet somehow, we still can talk about whether someone is “in character” or not, and more often than not, we can agree. Or at least say we do. I’m not sure. I am continually amazed anyone says they understand me at all, and have been for years.
I know empirically, that some real gems exist in those eight gigabytes of raw ponyfic. What results from this nebulous understanding of something that is barely defined… It’s too statistically unlikely to merely be a product of a finite number of monkeys.
I’m just not sure where does it really come from.
(1) And there are definitely no clear statements from the author(s) on which of the works are actually part of that body, even though some of them clearly contradict, which should tell you something.
(2) Originally, or at least back when and where I learned the word, the term would only be applied to a part of the work itself, rather than to something depicted in it. You could say “Episode X is canon and contains a telephone, therefore telephones exist in world Y,” but you wouldn’t shorten it to “telephones are canon,” which is a rather different thing to say. By now, it’s a linguistic fact that these meanings are conflated. I was surprised to stumble into the word “head-canon” when I started delving into ponies, which felt like complete nonsense to me – turned out, this is a recent invention to replace what we called “fan theory”, often conflated with the meaning of the word “fanon,” which is a widely accepted fan theory, while the word “fanon” itself, that we used in the 90s, seems to be on the way out… Sometimes, the language runs away from you.
(3) Presumably. It depends on whether any form of actual infinity can be thought to exist physically or not.
(4) If it does, the use of the word “moon” for measuring time, that starts with Equestria Girls and continues from then on where they previously used months, days of week and years, explicitly introduced so they don’t have to keep their chronology straight, makes their attitude towards the subject quite clear.
(5) Notably, “as little modern technology on screen as possible” attributed to Lauren Faust. Which hasn’t been followed particularly strictly since Season 2.
(6) There’s a longish essay I have written elsewhere on how movies are influenced by the economic conditions their distribution medium exists in, at times, even more so than the audience’s taste, and how the same applies to popular music, which I shall not duplicate here. Suffice it is to say, I can show you the influence is quite significant, and essentially determines what gets called a “movie” or a “song.” I get called a closet Marxist for a reason.
(7) Which also originates in economic considerations – Japanese animation industry works from a short season called a “cour,” which is a 12-episode block, and is almost invariably produced sequentially. Often, the last episode of a cour is not complete when the first one starts airing. Sometimes, an episode is actually incomplete when it’s airing… The way anime changed after the economic crisis of 1994 is pretty indicative of how these things affect the actual content.
(8) One other notable large work of fiction that has the same kind of issues is the Harry Potter series, and it is likewise, eclipsed by a gigantic cloud of derivative work. However, Harry Potter has the distinction of being the brainchild of just one person who doesn’t keep their world straight…
(9) If Ghost’s take on Equestria did not contain a thriving privileged noble class, it would be difficult for it to be the good story that it is. If iisaw’s series did not involve godlike alicorns, intimately involved with forces of creation itself, it wouldn’t work. Similar things can be said of many other notable fanfiction works. Canon gives us no opportunity to believe in either – and if that makes your story float, screw canon.
(10) I shall not elaborate on how, because I’m not a literary critic. I’ll leave that to the experts, like Bad Horse. Fandom has no oversight or pressure, has more people genuinely excited about their work, and there’s simply a lot more of it. In the long run, the longest run wins.
(11) One only needs to look at Lauren Faust’s recent stream of twitter posts to realize that she was never quite that detailed about the whole thing. To say nothing of her successors, who pull the blanket in a slightly different direction every season. Equestria is one of those worlds where you shouldn’t put much stock in the word of god…
(12) We’ll see about that yet.
(13) Most of it accumulated sometime in early XX century after Edwin Hubble published his results. Before he did, other galaxies were believed to be just clouds of gas, and the imagined scale of the known universe was much smaller. Look it up. These ideas, which have been with us since our childhood, are actually quite recent discoveries.
Reminds me of trying to systematize Star Trek technology, which was a minor hobby of mine back in high school and a bit after[1]--I still visit the DITL occasionally, and am subscribed to /r/DaystromInstitute.
I do still see the word fanon used in ponies, but I realize that I seem to have been hearing it less and less just over the course of pony fandom itself--it was pretty common back in S1/S2, and I hardly hear it at all anymore. I wonder if we've been trending younger and not teaching the vocabulary to those who have ponies as their first fandom.
Maybe it's related to the size of the fandom--it was easier for fanon to emerge when the fandom was smaller. Half the stories about Luna from shortly after Progress had some mention of or reference to her abacus, but it's hard for a story to have that kind of fandom-wide reach anymore--so nobody uses the word 'fanon' because really obvious examples no longer exist.
[1] Eventually I pirated the result for my own setting (after excising transporters, because I wasn't interested in the philosophical derail). If you start paying attention to firing arcs and the third dimension, the ships look very different.
3895565
Pretty much impossible once Voyager rolls in, I expect. :) Systematizing Star Trek politics and history, on the other hand, is much easier, they tend to keep it quite straight.
Star Trek also has the advantage of space being so bloody big, that it’s much easier for contradictions to not actually contradict simply by never coming into contact.
That does seem to be the case. The constant stream of Human in Equestria stories which step on every rake by the numbers feels very much like Eternal September to me…
Something occurred to me while reading your essay: History, real-world history, has many of the same problems. Cultures as closely related to us as early Twentieth Century America are alien. That time and place bears almost no resemblance to popular depictions[1] and the details are still hotly debated by historians. The further back you go the more wild the speculation gets, and the more inaccurate any popular depiction becomes.
As for MLP... Yeah there's a wide range of interpretations even within the show, but it isn't an even distribution. As far as "getting it right" when producing fanfic goes... I think it's hitting the crown of the bell-curve of expectations.
----------
[1] Movies and novels set in period can easily be considered the equivalent of history fanfic.
3895600
Voyager has a high density of wundertechs that are never mentioned again, but TNG has its share of technologies whose consequences are not fully examined. Of course, NuTrek managed to make starships completely unnecessary and then ignore it, so things could be worse.
You're exactly right about the politics and broad history. Those are the things that series bibles did exist for. On technology, writers were largely left to their own devices. I think it's actually a pretty good example of what you're talking about in this blog.
It's only now that you say it outright that I realize I've been saying "Don't you know not to do that?", or "Didn't we discuss the question you just asked to death like three years ago?" to myself with more regularity. Hm. I mean, I guess it's a good thing for the health of the fandom, but hm. There's no history book for Pony Fandom. You can't even point people at a handful of specific threads, because it's always been this big emergent consensus bouncing back and forth between FimFiction, EqD, the boorus, and the chans.
3895605
Cultures as closely related to us as 1950s America are alien. There’s a phenomena discussed somewhere in sociology of film, wherein people who actually lived through the events depicted tend to remember them the way they occurred in accounts known to be incorrectly fictionalized. Unfortunately that was one course I flunked, and I’m not sure the professor is still alive to ask. :)
In the end, the past branches just like the future does, but in un-directed fiction, it also twists into pretzels…
3895613
There are no history books for any fandoms that currently exist. Something of the sort sort of exists for Trek, because Trek is one of the major origins of fanfiction, and that has been the subject of some serious academic research.
By the time fandoms get to the stage when they attract academic attention, their history is a fossil record, and few fans have enough of an academic bent to actually start systematizing what the culture produces from the start.
Internet helped with that a lot because it’s much easier to search text that is originally digital, but at the same time it hindered the process, because the traces you leave on the internet are exactly as impermanent as you don’t want them to be…
3895632
Trek has some obsessive catalogers, though. The DITL that I linked earlier is all one guy's labor of love.
Thinking about it, what Trek fandom tends to do is provide reading/viewing lists. We compile 'best of'[1] episode lists with an eye to exposing the 'spirit' of one of the series in a limited number of episodes. The consensus on what episodes present that spirit is a sort of fanon, reached after much wrangling. "Which books do I read?" is a perpetually re-occurring question in places like /r/StarTrek, and there has likewise gradually emerged a consensus on which books best represent the characters and series being depicted. For both books and episodes, there tends to be a very small handful that everyone agrees on (The Inner Light, Darmok, Best of Both Worlds, In the Pale Moonlight, Imzadi), and then a larger nebulous halo of conditional recommendations.
So for Pony, I suppose one would try to compile a list of fics and tumblrs (because several of those have been very influential) that one felt started or popularized various fan concepts, which is not necessarily an identical set to 'favorite' or 'best'. I would not want to try to do that as a big collaborative project--I don't have the mental energy for that much wrangling--but it might be interesting for a few people to develop lists of their own. And then post them anonymously for the sake of their own sanity.
[1] And 'worst of'. Everyone agrees that Voyager's Threshold never happened.
3895620
People like a story. This phenomenon sounds like something you'd get in a Discworld novel.
3895664
That would need some people who were there from the very beginning, though, which I wasn’t. I’m still failing half the time when trying to trace the origins of common memes… And it would need someone famous to headline the project for it to gain any traction…
It’s certainly something to think about.
Which is why, when I got this comment on Aporia, I was very much amused. We don’t live in one? Is everybody sure, like really-really? :)
Back when I was still teaching, I tried to formulate a whole subfield in sociology based on the idea that since culture is a form of solidified experience expressed in semiotic systems, and its primary function is ensuring we don’t have to think all the time, by providing us with patterns to rely on, we can, and often do, perceive the social reality in story-like patterns. Mostly acquired from actual stories, slotting into roles kind of like described by Eric Berne – but in a much wider variety of contexts and in ways very different from what he theorized.
Then I realized nobody cares enough for me to have a living wage doing it, and now I’m in programming. Eventually, what remained turned into the concept of the Unlimited Library, and now I have characters arguing about it… :)
I might be able to help some--I'm from about halfway through Season 1 and my FimFiction account is #641. Back when EqD was the only way to get fanfiction, I had read literally everything rated 5 or 6 stars and a bunch of the 4-stars, so I've got a broad base--faulty memory may limit my utility.
Random old-man anecdote--you know Cupcakes? That came out two or three months before Party of One aired, which is why its crazy Pinkie isn't described with flat hair. It was the first gore/shock fic to gain widespread attention in the fandom, in an era when a fair number of people took the whole 'love and tolerate' thing fairly seriously, so it was considered more transgressive then than it would be now. Everyone knew it by reputation, even if they hadn't read it (it's not particularly good or anything, it was just first). So, when Pinkie went nuts during Part of One, the live reaction involved a lot of freaking out of various degrees.
That's basically how I tend to view culture, honestly. But my wife is a writer, too, and we're both Pratchett fans, so we've been in a self-reinforcing spiral of plot analyzing everything for about a decade now, so we're way down the rabbit hole.
3895759
Well, here’s a list of things that have no canon precedent I could locate which I’m wondering about:
Where did the notion that Luna moves the stars originate? I’ve been pointed to Past Sins, I’m pretty sure that’s not it.
The origin of Lyra’s interest in humans and hands is probably one of her early appearances where she sits in a pose that’s terribly anatomically inconvenient for a pony, but what codified it? For that matter, what codified her as a lyre player? Was it “Anthropology” or an earlier work?
Where did the idea of a wingboner come from?
Where is the origin of the use of “buck” as an expletive?
Who invented the Night Court/Day Court?
I’ve read Cupcakes, but I think this occurred sometime during season 2. This is quite a fascinating tidbit.
Random personal anecdote in turn: I have been collecting pony episodes since midway through Season 1 (I don’t get live TV in my Obscuria) and simply forgot to continue somewhere during Season 3. Somehow, I missed the Season 2 finale entirely, that is, I was completely unaware this two-parter existed. Nothing in preceding episodes suggested it would, and the Crystal Empire, while seemingly coming out of the blue together with Shining Armor and Cadance, did not feel out too of place.
Then, when I started writing Aporia and researching for it, that involved a crash course in pony fiction, and I kept wondering where did those bloody Changelings everyone mentions came from for months, until I finally noticed the missing episodes. :)
It’s an obvious idea because it’s true. :) But it also needs to be strictly formulated and analyzed statistically to be called science, which I don’t think anybody has done yet.
That said, I’m way out of touch with current research.
As far as I've been able to tell, the notion that she also controls the stars is an outgrowth of the bit of the pilot where "the stars will aid in her escape." People assumed from that that the stars were also part of her domain, since they were helping her. So not one that has a specific fanwork genesis, but rather a common early assumption.
Yes, it was the funny sitting that's at the basest root of this one, but the path between that and Anthropology is fuzzy. Anthropology was setting down ideas that I would say were already 'codified'. The obsession with humans came first, then the focus on hands specifically. The sexual tint to the obsession comes from threads on the chans, like most of the sex jokes do.
The lyre playing got codified by art more than anything, I think--the assumption that her cutie mark was that straightforward came immediately (the name 'Lyra' came immediately after her first background appearance, and was immediately attached to the idea that she played the lyre in the naming thread on whatever-chan that was), and artists depicted her that way.
Chans again. They liked (probably still do like) to post screenshots from the show of ponies apparently staring at each others' butts and basically go 'lol sex in a kids show'. In several of these, Rainbow happened to appear with her wings open. And so it went.
Applebuck Season spawned it's own threads of prurient jokes on the chans, purely based on the phonetic similarity. It stuck.
Good question. The idea that Luna would hold some kind of court was pretty popular immediately. I think it was Luna Eclipsed that started the notion that they would be these totally separate structures, because of the batponies in strange barding. I couldn't point you to a single fandom genesis of the idea, though.
That's a big fandom hole to have!
3895886
Thanks, that clears up some things. :)
And yet a disturbingly tiny canon hole to have all the way up until the end of Season 5... :)
3895675
3895620
This is so strong an actual aspect of how our brains function that, with the right inculcation and repetition, you can get someone to "remember" events that never happened to them!
The fandom origin isn't clear, but the precedent comes from the first episode and the line, "The stars themselves will aid in her escape."[1] Later, we see four stars converge on the moon and in a flash the Mare in the Moon vanishes. So it's canon[2] that she can move the stars, (or the stars will move for her) though maybe only under certain circumstances.
My headcanon[2] is that their universe is Aristotelian, and all the stars are mounted on a fixed crystal sphere. The planets, comets, and such run on (magical) rails with epicycles accounting for retrograde motion. There's even some evidence that this is what the ponies believe: Art in the storybook that opens the series matches up with some late Medieval depictions of the heavens. If such is the case, it makes sense that Luna tends to the stars as well.
I don't know, but I'd like to hunt down the guy who coined the term and beat him to death with a wrench.[3] Seriously, though, one of the clever visual tropes from the early episodes was to have pegasi flare their wings as an expression of surprise/delight,[4] and of course the fans had to drag that into the gutter.
The first place I ever saw it used was in Augie Dog's story Half the Day is Night, a very early fic that he started writing before the first season concluded, I believe.
Lyra... well, her cutie mark is a lyre, so that's a bit obvious if one doesn't keep in mind that CMs are often symbolic. I can't recall any specific person pushing the human obsession thing, it just seemed to condense out of the fan-mind gestalt. But something's niggling at my memory... It may have been a piece of artwork that lit the fuse of the hand thing.
Oh well... my two bits.[5]
-------------
[1] Which is a throwaway line that is incredibly poetic and mysterious. Damnit, Lauren, stop bein' all awesome and stuff!
[2] Aaaaand, now you've got me cringing when I use those words in that way.
[3] See also: Using "buck" as an expletive; using "plot" in place of rump, rear, butt, or ass; and using "flank" to mean outer haunch or thigh. (Yes, the show itself does this for the sake of a stupid foal's rhyme... but that's no excuse to generalize it.)
[4] Birds really do this.
[5] Which makes me wonder how many fans know that "bit" is a measure of currency meaning one-eighth of the standard unit of exchange.
Great essay. The lines of ants pulling things in different directions made me imagine you as an augar or oracle, interpreting chicken entrails to divine a coherent message in the randomness.
I don't know who to blame, but this was started 100% by Winter Wrap Up. Still shot of the part where the snow plow starts pushing on Twilight's backside with the text "I watch it for the plot" on it. That's where it started.
That reminds me. There is a difference between fanon and headcanon as usually used in the Pony fandom. Headcanon is personal, fanon is consensus.
I think you're right. I believe it is a joke that got used in art to represent 'obsession with humans'. They'd draw her as a human and she'd be staring at her hands, or draw her with a human and she'd be looking at their hands as a shorthand (har) for 'things about humans that are different from ponies'. It became such a common, easy shorthand that the notion got stuck in the gestalt.
3896020
And that is why I keep logs of all instant messages since those existed, and have emails in my archives that are older than half the users of this site…
Owl’s Well That Ends Well screws with it quite a bit by introducing comets. And mentioning multiple moons. Then it introduces a pet for Twilight with a name that is pretty much impossible to correctly spell and everyone forgets about it… :)
I thought it was related to this bit for some reason, since I never encountered such a measure of currency…
3896039
...damn, now I have that idea for a story about Fluttershy writing letters to an anthill she found somewhere. :)
But multiple moons? Hmn... going to have to go back and watch that. But comets (hairy stars) are well accounted for in Aristotelian cosmology.
Well, it makes for a nice horse pun, but yeah, bits started way back. It's fallen out of usage, but I still occasionally hear "two-bit" used as a pejorative for cheap or chintzy.
3896205
Twilight Sparkle: You know that really old big blue book on stars, moons, planets, the universe…?
Twilight Sparkle: (sigh) “The Study of Comets. Comets are small, irregularly shaped bodies that are made of non-volatile grains and frozen gasses. They…”
Twilight Sparkle: Now, where was I? Oh, yes. “…fragile and diverse with a surrounding cloud of material called a coma, that grows in size and brightness as the comet approaches the sun…”
Alas. A proper Aristotelean cosmology would involve far fewer superspells.
I was aware of the “two-bit” but not aware of its relationship to currency. Learn something new every day, I suppose.
3896219
Yeah... sorta implies it's orbiting the sun, too. It would have been hilarious if the writer had used the line, "…fragile and diverse with a surrounding cloud of material called a coma, that grows in size and brightness as the sun approaches it."
3896234
Which is why I eventually concluded that whatever pony comets are, they're not ice. :) See also the Secretariat comet in Friendship is Magic #1-3...
Indeed, that would be sweet.
3896108
3896234 I agree the MLP universe is a Aristotlian Sphere, though I always figured the stars were more like blobs of aether stuck up against the glass.
If in truly ancient times there used to be two moons, and now there is only 1 moon, then we've solved where the comets come from, right? I mean, if the 2nd moon exploded, pieces that accelerated away from the planet at first could eventually swing back around and hit the planet millennium later.
3896465
Hmn... there's a story behind that!
3896020
Random. It just occurred to me, that while the use of a lone "buck" as an expletive is annoying nonsense, the phrase "go buck yourself" is quite meaningful and sounds no worse than, dunno, "go jump off a cliff."
Yet nobody seems to use it.
3895829
Not sure about the Day/Night Court thing, but it must be a pretty early development in the fandom. AugieDog's Half the Day is Night started in mid-March of 2011, and it's an important element of the story.
+1
3896087
Nah, the plot thing was jargon way before ponies. It was usually used to refer to an anime that used barebones story elements to conceal its actual point: luscious anime waifus. Kinda like the joke about Playboy: "I read it for the articles!"
See:
images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/6115961_700b.jpg
3895829
I think this was just a logical progression from knowing that Luna moved the moon.
The most cited early example of an in-universe "wingboner" is Over a Barrel, where Rainbow Dash has her wings sticking straight up while watching Pinkie give her song in the burlesque dress.
3898368
That's certainly the origin Know Your Meme cites. But Winter Wrap-Up probably was the moment where 'plot' got applied to a pony's hindquarters and then mysteriously stuck on as an euphemism...
3898376
Yeah, probably. Either that or Bridle Gossip...
mlpforums.com/uploads/monthly_02_2014/post-9686-0-16703700-1392533052.jpg
Jordanis is right when he says blame the Chans for most of these things. The very basic building blocks of the fandom were decided almost entirely in late 2010 to mid-2011 on /co/.
3898382
Yeah, like Oliver says, there's the older, general definition of 'plot' as fanservice generally, and there's this really specific definition of 'plot' in pony fandom where it means butts specifically. It's the second one I'm blaming on Winter Wrap-up. I personally remember seeing the phrase applied to the still from Winter Wrap-up before the still of Fluttershy from Bridle Gossip, so that's what I'm going with. I suppose it's possible I'm wrong, though, because I joined the fandom after both of those had aired, IIRC.
3897217
I have definitely seen that phrase used in ponyfic; I'm just not sure where off the top of my head. It's rare, and more likely in comedies, because a story that is seriously invoking that phrase is likely to be willing to actually curse.
3899044
Funny you should say that. If you’ve been keeping up with Aporia, you probably have noticed the concept of perpendicular linguistic development that I have put forward. It is, on one hand, a canon welding tool, because it smooths over some of the more glaring things about the way ponies use language, but on another it’s a genuine observation: for a non-human culture, expletives would have to be different. That Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing book spends a lot of time discussing what, exactly, makes expletives such emotionally charged words and how exactly the two primary categories (obscenity and profanity) came about and when.
While I keep slipping into known examples from canon like “Sweet Celestia” and “horsefeathers,” not to mention “hay,” what ponies would use to actually swear is so far an unanswered question, and the substitutions they seem to use point at words we don’t really know. :) In particular, ‘hay’ has to be an euphemism, and not for ‘hell.’
3899788
It's short for Hades, clearly, which by some cultural quirk is a much ruder word than Tartarus.
I know a pony has used Celestia's name as a blasphemy at least once on-screen.
3899805
We could assume that Tartarus is the name of a location, while Hades is what's actually going on inside. :) Or otherwise, "Tartarus" is itself a taboo replacement for "Hades"...
Both Spike (in Castle Sweet Castle) and Rarity (in Twilight's Kingdom) use "Sweet Celestia!" In Tanks for the Memories, Applejack says, "What in the name of Celestia's goin' on up there?" and in Bridle Gossip, she exclaims "Thank Celestia!" I couldn't dig up any other examples.
That said, the crowd's reaction to Spike saying "A time when ponies were torn apart... by hatred!" in Hearth's Warming Eve makes me wonder if "hatred" is in fact considered a word that is in itself at least mildly rude...
3899811
Maybe there is a superstitious aversion to invoking the personage of Hades, since a place can't take you away. Or maybe the concept of a being that's in charge of Tartarus is so contrary to Equestrian values that mentioning him is considered very rude. Or a little of column A, a little of column B.
Ponies had better start taking Luna's name in vain, or she's going to be getting miffed.
Do you have access to transcripts? Because I don't think I'm up to a series re-watch in order to look for the word 'hatred'.
3900697
Even the word "lunacy" is never used.
Found them on mlp.wikia.com and ripped the whole thing to plain text/Markdown for easier searching. Want a copy?
3900707
Neat! I seem to have managed just in-browser. 'Hatred' only appears four times--twice in the Hearthwarming episode, and twice in the Crystal Empire two-parter.
The string " Hate" (so it doesn't turn up "whatever"), however, appears 63 times, as early as Boast Busters. It's used with what I would call the amount of casualness you would expect normal English-speakers to have. Rainbow Dash hates losing, and Discorded Pinkie Pie hates chocolate milk, libraries, and the Elements of Harmony.
3900736
Which makes me wonder if they're treated as synonyms or not.
If they are, that gasp at Spike's narration has to be a ritual thing. :)
This looks good - I'm going to read these posts with great interest.
One comment:
"The idea of a “canon” itself is actually fairly recent, dating back no earlier than 1940 or so, and emerges with the social consumption of a large, serial work of art, consisting of multiple individual units. "
This isn't quite true - "canon" was originally a religious(1) term, and indicates (amongst other things) the books that composed the bible (the canon of scripture). It also covers church law and a part of a bell (and a few other things - It's a big term) - The definition in my concise OED takes up 2.5 inches of rather small print. Scriptural canons date back to some time BC for the Old Testament, and (obviously) some time afterwards for the New Testament.
However, my OED and Etymological dictionaries are a little coy about how old the term is. According to dictionary.com the religious usage dates back to the 900's, and another source suggests that the secular usage starts around the 18th century.
(Granted, the oldest secular collection I've heard the term "canon" used for is the Sherlock Holmes stories, which would put the usage of the term in the 1900 - 1940 range),
(1) Which no doubt explains the intensity of modern "canon" discussions...
3983860
I kind of thought that the religious use of the term is common knowledge and needs no elaboration, while we're only dealing with the secular usage here. It may, of course, be that I was wrong on either count. :)
3983885
Fair enough.
I've read through most of the posts now (and for what it is worth made one other reply) - it has been a very interesting and thought-provoking series of ideas, and I really wish I had more time to sit and think about them. Thank you for publishing them.
3896087
Suddenly, I decided to look it up in the Urban Dictionary. The resut was quite surprising: Not only the “ass of a pony” definition is top of the list, it’s also the earliest and dates to summer 2011.
4523127
I guess Pony is the first place it became such a specific joke, rather than the equivalent of "I read it for the articles".