RTAC #11: Moon · 11:04am Sep 24th, 2016
If you’ve been reading my posts regularly, you’ll know my special hate for the word “moon” as a measure of time.
So I dedicate this post to one of the biggest unanswered questions of chromatic hippology: how long a moon actually is? Because it’s clearly not a synonym for a month.
I’ll go right out and say that we have no canonical means to determine the length of a moon as of today, none that I can work out. But first, I’ll list all the sources I have and then offer a theory which isn’t well substantiated, but at least makes sense and is useful.
There are very few cases when the word “moon” is used with any kind of qualifier permitting any reasoning regarding its length, and most of them are contradictory:
Sources
Apple Family Reunion:
Chronologically in terms of air dates, this is the first instance of moons being used as a measure of time, and it is also the most convoluted one.
Granny Smith mentions that it has been “almost one hundred moons since our last family reunion.” and further goes on to say “We’ve been hostin’ these things at Sweet Apple Acres every hundred moons since we first planted roots here in Ponyville.” This statement is hugely problematic, because of a statement by Applejack in Applebuck Season, where she says that the numerous Apple ponies introduced on screen to Twilight on the day of the Summer Sun Celebration were there for the family reunion.
Family reunions aren’t normally long affairs, since, as Applejack points out right next, “They actually live all over Equestria and are busy harvestin’ their own orchards.” They have other things to do. No matter how you spin it, the reunion depicted in this episode has to happen sometime within the year, at worst, two, after that Summer Sun Celebration, which would put the length of a moon at anywhere between 2.4 and 7.3 days. Since among the other Mane 6 members, Spike also assists Applejack with her preparations, it is patently impossible for this story to be the story of that same, or any prior reunion. (And it would wreak havoc with the chronology anyway.)
One interpretation that surfaced since is that while in Applebuck Season, Applejack refers to a local area family reunion, Granny Smith refers to a grand family reunion that assembles absolutely every Apple that Granny can get her hooves on. In which case, Granny Smith has photos of the entire family in front of the barn, that start with Granny Smith being a filly. With the way the album is laid out, it contains at least ten such photos, with the last one already containing both Applejack and Apple Bloom. As such, we can make no guesses regarding the length of the moon based on the scenes with baby Applejack attending a reunion, since it wasn’t her previous one, and we don’t know how many she lived through. We just know that Apple Bloom existed and was old enough to stand on her own at the time the last photo with the barn was taken, but Granny’s statements do not necessarily make those photos exclusive to grand family reunions either.
I.e. if this is a “grand family reunion” that Granny Smith is referring to, we can’t get any good estimates for a moon’s length out of it.
Equestria Girls:
1. Yes, I like that name for the Equestria Girls world and I’m sticking to it.
2. I shall skip the long line of arguments demonstrating that time in Pedestria and in Equestria not only flows at different rates, but also that these rates are probably not particularly stable.
Luna opens up the Pedestria1 plotline with “This is no ordinary mirror. It is a gateway to another world. A gateway that opens once every thirty moons.” Unfortunately we never know when is the previous time it opened exactly,2 nor when the next one would be, since in Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks, Twilight bypasses this restriction entirely.
Princess Twilight Sparkle:
Discord’s statement regarding “thousands of moons ago” is not at all very helpful, since it can mean a moment of time anywhere within the past thousand years.
Pinkie Apple Pie:
Granny Smith mentions that “A Ponyville snail can hibernate for up to forty-eight moons!” Unfortunately, we know nothing else about a Ponyville snail. If it is anything like our snail, which can hibernate up to seven months, and live for up to five years, that would put the length of a moon at ~4.37 days.
Party Pooped:
Twilight mentions that “Remember, Equestria and Yakyakistan haven’t opened their borders for hundreds of moons.” and the friendship with them is expected to last “a thousand moons.” This excludes very short lengths of a “moon,” because Twilight’s phrase weakly implies that the previous time Yakyakistan was in contact was not in living memory. Any attempt to deal with the yaks for a thousand moons would be a worthlessly short time with week-scale moons, as well.
Reflections (My Little Pony #17):
Fluttershy mentions that “The other magical mirror only works once during each cycle of the moon.” Which would sort of make sense if the moon was equal to a day. Unfortunately, there’s no way it can be that short, and Fluttershy has to either be mistaken entirely or thinking about some other kind of moon cycle, like a cycle of cycles.
Friends Forever #4:
Comics are generally even less consistent with time than the series, and this case is one of the worst. According to Shining Armor, the rule of King Sombra was “hundreds” of moons ago, while the Crystal Empire, according to Twilight, spent “thousands” of moons out of the time stream. This is basically useless.
There are other scattered instances of moons in the comics, but they are typically without any qualifying numbers or even a clear range of time attached. Chapter books also rarely mention moons, and almost never in any fashion more specific than Princess Twilight Sparkle, so I won’t bother listing them here.
3. Well, there’s also one in The Gift of the Maud Pie which has nothing to do with Granny Smith.
Notice that most3 of the cases where the estimable length of a moon ends up on the scale of a week, rather than a month of a year, are statements traceable to Granny Smith. Essentially, we have nothing specific that would be better than common sense. There’s a statement by Megan McCarthy that Equestria Girls and Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks are separated by six moons worth of time, but like all word of god regarding ponies, it is especially suspect, since the latter is never consistent, very rarely sensible, and usually boils down to “we haven’t thought about it.”
Hypothesis
The purpose of my canon research isn’t just to assemble a hypothetical author from body parts, however. It’s also to produce something I can actually use, and I think I stumbled on an idea that works very well.
- As I have determined while studying astrophysics of Equestria, the moon shines by itself. Even if you discount all the secondary canon, primary canon makes it abundantly clear that the moon goes where and when the princess wants it to, and since we never see it change phases on screen, it’s also pretty clear that if they exist at all, they are not connected to the moon’s position relative to the Sun or Earth.
- This makes it quite reasonable that a moon cycle, whatever it actually is, is a natural magical cycle not controlled by anyone specifically. I’ll just go on and say this is the only reliable magical cycle known to equinity, which thus serves as an objective measure of time.
- An hour (rather than a day) is defined as a 1/1000th of a moon, i.e. a millimoon, exactly, and day length is tuned to be 24 hours. 24 hours is close enough to a pony’s natural circadian cycle for Celestia to adjust the solar cycle against hour boundaries. Unless something extraordinary happens.
4. That does mean that Granny Smith is something like a hundred years old. Which, to me, sounds about right.
This produces a sensible length of a moon at 41.6 days – close enough to a solar month to be sometimes conflated, but nevertheless quite distinct. A thousand moons that the treaty with Yaks is expected to last is ~114.15 years measured against the more reliable lunar cycle. Thirty moons that the mirror to Pedestria opens on is a period of exactly 1250 days, or ~3.4 years, quite a substantial period of time for a young adult like Twilight. A hundred moons is a period of ~11.57 years, which is perfectly fine for a grand family reunion of a very large clan.4
- Certain types of time span which are too long for hours but require actual precision are also commonly expressed in moons, and the use of the term is common in historiography, even though in casual speech mentioning moons in historical context, numbers are typically omitted in favor of just “many” or “hundreds” or “thousands.”
- The term and accompanying measurement saw a resurgence in popularity when Luna started turning up in public, because she insisted on using moons due to old habits, built up in the time when Celestia was younger and used to sleep in late every now and again, or stay up working late, which would skew days back and forth. Manehattanites, who typically care less about the solar cycle than most ponies, due to the frantic pace of life in a big city, embraced moons and its subdivisions with particular enthusiasm.
- Some particularly silly ponies, i.e. the really old fashioned like Granny Smith and the really trendy like Manehattan rock pouch salesponies, occasionally say “moon” when they actually mean a decimoon, or a time period that is 1/10th of an actual moon, equal to 4.16 days. That accounts for many discrepancies in the estimated length of a moon.
That won’t stop me hissing every time they use the term, because I know why they do it, but at least it allows me to get my own timings straight. :)
Wait, wouldn't a centimoon just be ten hours? Or did you mean a decimoon?
4223902
Oops. Yes, counted zeroes from the wrong end. A moment...
With the Apple family reunion, I went with the assumption that 1 moon = 1 month, which would place the last reunion eight years and a bit before the one we see in the episode. Which works okay, I think; it would make Applebloom too young to remember things properly, and Applejack would have been approximately a young teen, not really part of organizing things.
I handwave the Apples in the pilot away as only being there part of an impromptu "reunion", helping AJ and the rest with the catering for the Summer Sun Celebration.
Unfortunately, as you point out, the rest of the references don't sync up very well, however...
Makes sense, the sticking point for me is the Yaks. They haven't opened their borders for hundreds of moons, so what, a few decades? I thought Yakyakistan had no contact with Equestria before the return of the Crystal Empire.
What would that be in rels?
sandalsandsocks.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d00d69e201347ff52d5e970c-pi
4225491
I think so too, but here’s a thing. Remember that comic in which the yaks and the griffons have a diplomatic conflict and Celestia has to run away from the plot to prevent war?
Well, maybe the generally isolationist yaks did have contact with other polities of Earth, like a griffon polity currently unnamed, and kept that border closed. And now that they decided to reopen the border, Equestria, or more specifically, Crystal Empire, suddenly turned out to be a direct neighbor.
4225907
I suspect rels are relative :)
Alternatively, is it possible that the different tribes each had a different value of "moon" measuring different things entirely? Earth ponies measured it, let's say, as the time between planting and flowering for a moonplant, which owing to its sensitivity to tidal cycles was a very predictable nine high tides (4.5 days). Whereas unicorns, who historically spent a great deal of time with their eyes to the skies, measured moons in the time it took for the moon to complete one whole rotation on its axis (since it self-illuminates, they would be able to trivially observe its features), or about 38 days. It's the Equestrian metric vs. imperial problem, exacerbated by both sides' stubborn refusal to give up their terminology.
The benefit of this system is that when they come up with some episode which clearly refers to one moon as a single-day (or multi-year) time period, we can retroactively justify it as pegasus "moons" being batshit insane.
4225925
This is indeed a clever option, but for me it's not ideal. I'm trying to build a consistently usable picture, not to explain the inconsistencies away. In this case, an explanation that introduces constraints while maintaining consistency with the existing corpus is typically preferable to an explanation that relaxes constraints further.
Yours is a bit prettier though. :)
This all works for me. Thank you for doing all the legwork on this one. I was nowhere near prepared to tackle this subject myself.
4225922 That's a fair point. Given how janky Equestrian maps are, I could see the borders of Yakyakistan covering the entire northern mountain range (which is technically named the Yaket Range) up to the Celestial Sea, which is really narrow at the far north (basically an straight). I mean, no one else really wants that territory. However, Griffon raiding parties from Griffonstone could totally fly over and attack the eastern edge of Yakyakistan for whatever wealth they have. Heck, now that we know Griffonstone is a functioning state, Griffons do also like living in cold mountains as well. I could see Griffonstone trying to seize western Yakyakistan so they could control the straight of the Celestial Sea.
If you want Griffonstone to be in a state of anarchy until Celestia held the Friendship Summit there, it still works, since anarchist states are famous for breeding crime and violence that spills outside their borders, so I could see roving gangs of angry unemployed griffon youth raiding Yakyakistan on their own.
In conclusion, the whole military/political side story about Griffonstone and Yakyakistan should have been its own main story. Did Celestia have to rush the Mane 6 on an emergency diplomatic tour of Yakyakistan to calm their anger after Prince Rutherford learned that aid money from Celestia's Friendship Summit had allowed Griffonstone to rebuild and expand their army? Oh, and this started as a post about moons. Shoot. Maybe the Yaks preferred to be isolationist, but were forced to maintain contact with Equestria to maintain an alliance against expansionist Griffonstone, but after their giant horned friend the Aramaspi stole the idol of Boreas hundreds of moons ago and Griffonstone ceased to be a united threat, the Yaks were finally able to close their borders like they always wanted to.
4225925 I kind of like your idea too. It's simple and fits with a lot of Equestrian lore. Oh, and for Pegasi, considering the height of Clousdale and how low that tiny magical moonlet needs to orbit, the length of a "moon" is the period of time between when you have to duck whenever you go outside.
4226339
Except the Umbrum, that is. Given how they seem to treat the Siege of the Crystal Empire arc and all the problems involved in it, I think the primary canon is going to pretend they don’t exist and subtly contradict them the first chance they get.
As a side note, it’s probably Sombra who’s returning in Season 6 finale…
That sounds close, though the yak behavior during Party Pooped makes me suspect they were itching to pressure Equestria into something with a threat of war…
4226498
I feel the existence of Umbrum were already subtly contradicted by the season 5 finale. Sombra declares total war on Equestria, where are the Umbrum? If they existed in canon they should be leading the charge against Equestria.
That's a good point. How about Equestria broke ties with Yakyakistan because Celestia knows, or at least suspects, they were involved in the Aramaspi attack. She eventually relents after the Crystal Empire's presence means Equestria is a lot closer and more tied to the northern region than before, and there is a fairly vulnerable city right near the capital of Yakyakistan. The yaks are still insulted that Celestia cut ties with them, and now that there is a nearby city they can threaten, they want to badger Equestria into giving them something (cut off trade with Griffonstone, something else?) Not sure what.
4227105
Playing poker with Twilight Sparkle's younger sister, who's going to show up at Flurry Heart's bat mitzvah in Season 8, kicking off a grand sweeping retcon reminiscent of Dawn's first appearance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
4227421 Twilight will totally have a younger sister named Dawn Glisten.
4227105
Not necessarily – he could have failed to free them, for example – but possibly. I suspect the returning old enemy of Season 6 finale is Sombra (like, who else is left) and huge chunks of secondary canon are going down the drain.
Which is more than a bit annoying.
That works if the yaks can get involved in the Arimaspi attack. I wonder how that could have happened, though.
4227421
Cutie bar mitzvah.
4227460
I guess Chrysalis, because Thorax has laid the groundwork. It seems to me freeing the Umbrum would be Sombra's best bet to quickly defeat Equestria. The only reason he wouldn't is if he couldn't spare the ponies to both dig them out and fight simultaneously.
No idea. He didn't seem like a dumb monster though. Attack a heavily fortified castle to steal a single object, then run away? He was on a mission.
I believe they prefer Markmitzvah.
4227763
Him being a mercenary feels more than a bit odd though.
4227424
Oh my gods, she'd better.
4227460
> Cutie bar mitzvah
> Markmitzvah
Now I'm tempted to photoshop Jack Skellington into Luna's Nightmare Night carriage from S2 and make a "bat mitzvah" joke, except that relies upon like four layers of references several of which are obscure. (And I'd have to photoshop in a female batpony anyway.)
Oh well, it's funny inside my head.
4228216 "Dawn's in trouble, must be a Saturday. "
How have we has so many stories about Thestral culture, but I've never seen a reference to a batmitzvah before?
4227789 Maybe not mercenary. But Aramaspi are mythological enemies of griffons, perhaps the Yaks just let him know about the idol's existence and he did the rest.
4228226
4228216
The following stories appear to contain the search string “bat mitzvah”:
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/70658/i-don039t-know-who-you-think-i-am
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/101138/octavias-day-alone
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/120191/the-lovely-pony
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/145333/nothing-gold-can-stay
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/152327/four-hooves
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/153834/pony-police-operative-and-nonpareil-youths
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/189294/two-background-ponies-revisit-season-four
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/206843/if-you-give-a-pone-a-pancake
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/268927/even-mountains-erode-over-time
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/293792/equestria-girls-secrets-beyond-the-stars
Someone beat you to it. :)
4228302
… I'm not so sure we've been beaten to it, actually. <.<;
I searched the last four stories of that bunch as a representative sample, and all four referred to b.m.s either in the Jewish context (a bat mitzvah is for a girl, a bar mitzvah is for a boy) or else in a generic context. None appeared to use it as a batpony joke.
Derpibooru has only a single image tagged both "jew" and "batpony" and it's not holiday related.
Ah, damn it, I'm going to have to write a story about Jewish batponies now, aren't I.
4228325
With this kind of corpus, this approach does not work. For example, the pun “astronomares” occurs in a grand total of one stories.
With such a stupidly low search result count? Yours is pretty much guaranteed to be the better one, so yes, you have to. :)
4228226 4228302
Research update:
Of those ten stories, two no longer exist on FIMFiction (Oliver, do you have downloaded versions of #70658 and #153834?), and the other eight do contain the phrase as a reference to a holiday. However, in none of the stories are batponies specifically referenced. There are one or two which seem specifically Jewish or which are for non-thestral fillies, but the rest are in a grey area of "might be a thestral pun, might just be a ponies-are-Jewish thing, but the identity of the pony in question is too nebulous to tell". I suppose the only way to be sure is to ask each of the authors.
But given that our fandom has produced literal nazi memes e.g. The Diary of Aryanne Frank
and yet even that cesspool has somehow not connected the dots of thestrals=Jews … I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that this thread is breaking new ground.
Hell, even I didn't think of thestrals when I first mentioned bat mitzvahs up above. It took a round of wordplay for me to connect the dots.
oh sweet stars. and they don't celebrate hearth's warming they celebrate hauntnukkah
nightmare night is cultural appropriation
4228346
4228400 Make sure to mention Batsover.
Georg has written several stories about Thestrals as a very unique and ancient tradition, including an ancient book each family carries.
4228390
I have the entire set of Fimfarchive, how do you think I’m doing full text search. :) I have the whole thing extracted into a 12-gigabyte sqlite database with full text indexing, and I have the original archive, so I can do arbitrarily complex searches as long as they don't require conditions based on character tags, because Fimfarchive index does not include those. I find that full text search beats them any day, though.
https://transfer.sh/r4vaO/i-dont-know-who-you-think-i-am-70658.epub
https://transfer.sh/xZpbW/p-o-n-y-police-operative-and-nonpareil-youths-153834.epub
These links will self-destruct in a couple of weeks.
…horrifying, isn’t it?
4228416
Of those final two: in one, Pinkie Pie is Jewish, and in the other, the one grumbling about bat mitzvahs is what appears to be a classical Judeo-Christian demon from hell. So, both nos.
4228412
Gorgeous.
I have to ask only because of the second part of your comment: was that one yours or George's?
4228477 That one was mine.
To return to the original topic of the thread, 4224074 's explanation for the Apple Family Reunion is really good. The reunion's scheduled at Sweet Apple Acres every hundred moons, and that's tradition, and it won't be changing. Sure, just about everypony showed up there for the Summer Sun Festival when the Princess herself was coming - but that wasn't on schedule, so it didn't count as a proper family reunion. Q. E. D.
(Of course, we still have all the other "moon" references needing some other explanation...)
Full(usual) and crescent moons have been visible.
4225907
An earth kilohour ("moon") appears to be 4.32 megarels.
4226339
…this brings me to a Pretty Good Name Pun.
A traditional five-
handhoof-long dagger known as the Yakety Sax.4308567
Wait a minute. If Equestria is a geo-centric solar system where the moon and sun rotate around the planet, shouldn't full moons be incredibly rare, and lunar eclipses a lot more common? If the sun is rotating around the planet, a full moon would only occur right before dawn, and right after twilight, right? Then the moon quickly wanes, you have a 4 hour lunar eclipse in the middle of the night, and another quick waxing and full moon before the sun rises again.
So either Oliver's right that the moon generates its own light through magic, or Celestia is playing merry hell with the sun while it's on the other hemisphere, whipping it around and using it as a spotlight to deliberately maintain more a full moon. Explains why no one but the changlings can live on the opposite hemisphere.
4308820
When I get alternatives like that, I tend to choose one that makes the characters look less stupid / evil / inconsiderate. :)
4308828
That might be a fundamental difference between us, I assume people will generally be lazy unless it occurs to them not to be, and my predictions/interpretations flow from there a bit.
That said, Celestia isn't automatically being stupid or evil if she's doing that with the sun. If when she took the job the other hemisphere was already unpopulated as far as she knows, a full moon probably saves lives in Equestria every night as fewer ponies up at night trip and break their necks falling. It would make sense to keep using the sun in such a fashion.
So I find this largely agreeable, to the point where I honestly have no qualms with your logic. The only thing I find odd about this explanation is the 41.6 days thing. It seems to me that no one of any species would routinely use a measurement of time that forces the use of a fraction of a day. Take, for example, leap years. One solar rotation is not 365 days, it's 365.25 days. But it would be outright ridiculous to try and account for that extra six hours every New Years, so we just wait until we can combine all of the fractions of a day into an entire day every four years. Simple, since .25 is a remarkably easy number to work with.
So here's the only logical amendment I would say is likely: A moon would vary between forty-one and forty-two days. Over a period of five moons, there would be three that are forty-two days, allowing for a pattern where they go 42-41-42-41-42 and repeat (beginning again at forty-two, and so having two moons of forty-two days in a row). Or anything else that allows the distribution of the fraction of a day spread out as whole days (possibly forty-one days four times in a row, with a leap moon that is forty-four days long).
Alternatively, is there a particular reason why you settled on exactly 41.6? Even 41.5 would be easier to work with, and of course, any whole number (forty-one or forty-two) would be even easier still. Perhaps I'm just not seeing the logic for why 0.6 was specifically chosen, however.
Not really a counterpoint, but I'm curious now: What do you make of Equestrian years? Do you think it's a set number of moons? We know they measure in years because Nightmare Moon has been banished for a thousand of them (along with other references that I've forgotten, likely). It's unlikely that it's based on the sun, given that Celestia controls it, so it's more probable that it's just the way they divide up their seasons. Possibly completely arbitrary, but it does seem to me they would make is a set number of moons.
4494789
This is all based on the logic built up from the astrophysics post:
1. Once all the evidence is totaled up, I end up with a very small planet (with an inexplicable ~1g gravity) with clearly artificial sun and moon, which are known to move according to the will of Celestia and/or Luna, who are only limited in guiding this motion by custom and requirements of the ecosystem. The ecosystem might have problems handling a difference thirty days long, but five or even ten days a year is clearly within its capacity for natural adjustment.
2. Yet occasionally, they talk about moon phases and a moon cycle. But when both sun and moon are artificial, the regular means for a moon to have phases – being observed at varying angles to the sun – becomes patently impossible.
3. It follows that the phases are the result of a natural, stable cycle of some kind, presumably magical in origin, which might not be readily apparent to us due to the limits of cartoon resolution, but is apparent to ponies. Moons do seem to be used exclusively when diplomacy comes up, nobody ever talks of treaties and agreements in terms of years.
4. It could have no relation whatsoever to other time measurements ponies are known to use – minutes, hours, weeks, months and years, notably, were all observed in primary canon at some point – or it could be related to one of them. If so, which one?
5. Tying it to months would make months synonymous with moons. However, ponies do mention months, and do it rather often. The word ‘moons’ turns up 27 times in episode transcripts, but the word ‘month’ is used 40 times. If the moon is a whole number of months, which would prevent them from being synonymous, it would produce excessively long moons. So months are out as our ruler.
6. Moons could be a whole number of days instead. However, I’m left without a good number to pick that wouldn’t feel completely arbitrary. Thirty? Twenty? Why? The same problem applies to weeks.
7. Eventually I settled on hours, because a thousand hours comes out as a moon 41.6 days long, and a decimoon 4.16 days long – both reasonable stretches of time to account for the two observed usages of the word “moon,” and in hours they remain even numbers – 1000 hours and 100 hours respectively. When you’re working with a process that needs to be accounted for in hours, this would be a clear advantage.
And there you have it. The only other alternative I can think of that makes reasonable sense would equate a moon to three or five weeks, while the month is always four, or a similar calendar arrangement. But for the purposes of my dramatic presentation, using moons to count hours was more useful, because then the phrase “Moons pass, and you’re counting every hour, but she never even writes.” becomes so much more heart-wrenching. :)
I chose to assume that they settled on a 360-day year, with even, 30-day months, adjusting to the natural biological cycles, and this is the predominant system of time measurement in use, with moons mostly turning up in situations where years might have gotten skewed, but the moons certainly weren’t. That, however, is just me. :)
The explanation I offer to the fact that Nightmare Moon’s return is predicted in terms of years, rather than moons, is magical: This event is tied to the motion of the moon, rather than it’s natural luminosity cycle – specifically, to the number of individual celestial motion events Celestia invokes to move them. I.e. every touch weakens the seal.
4494799
I think I'm going to have to go through all your RTAC posts soon.
Ah, gotcha. I figured you'd have a solid reason
Thread necromancy:
4308567
Nice! We'll have to hang it on the wall next to the Ox-Ford Kama.