I put on my robe and tinfoil hat. · 9:51pm Apr 24th, 2017
I've actually been kind of hesitant to write this, but I found something out that made this seem slightly more reasonable, so I decided I'd take the risk of spouting insane tinfoil hat conspiracy theories and looking like fool. Besides, I at least found something, even if it is only a coloring error.
It's just a little thing I noticed while reading the first issue of the new Legends of Magic series.
Here's Sunburst on the show, levitating some books.
And here he is doing the same in the comic.
You may have noticed his magic. Specifically, its color. Now, that may just have been a simple mistake. However, when it comes to a pony's magic turning that particular color, there are some...
...implications.
Originally, the main reason I didn't want to say anything about this was that it happened in a comic. A new spinoff series, as well. And the comics don't really have anything to do with the show as it's currently airing. In fact, it often takes a few months for the comics to catch up to the show.
However...
There is the fact that the current arc of the main series ties into this season. So they're clearly starting to build up a multimedia platform for the show. Then there was this little tidbit from an interview with the writer and artist of the first few issues of Legends of Magic:
The first is that Hasbro has given us access to know the future of MY LITTLE PONY in ways that I've certainly never had the chance to know before. While somebody looking at it from the outside might say that trying to write a story that ties into a season of the TV show is constraining, it actually gives us a place to launch from. While they never sat us down and said "this is the story you need to write" they did say "this is where we're going and we won't have the space to tell all the stories we're suggesting exist". I mean, that's a pretty amazing feeling, especially considering the TV series has always hinted at the rich and exciting past of Equestria.
So they know what' going to go down this season, which makes me think that the color change might be intentional.
Now, since this is half a joke anyway, let me play my own devil's advocate.
First off, the simplest explanation is that they just made a mistake. They're human, it happens. It's always important to remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by a mistake". (The original saying is "...by stupidity", but that seemed offensive, plus it didn't adequately convey what I was going for here, and I figured it was more important to be clear than stay true to the original aphorism.) And remember the time the title was misspelled on the splash page of a comic? (Andy Price is an amazing artist, but he might need a spellchecker) With a character that's had a screen time of maybe five minutes, max, it would be pretty easy to mess up on such a tiny detail as the color of their magic.
And second, that's not even the right green. Changeling green, Queen Chrysalis's in particular, is far more vivid and saturated. (I compared against the Siege of the Crystal Empire comics—which, coincidentally, had the same colorist as this comic. So she knows what she's doing.) Although, Sunburst's magic here is its normal color at the center, with a gradient that transitions to green. So maybe that was just their way of making it not too blindingly obvious. (The other characters in the comic do have gradients on their magic as well. However, all of those gradients match the color of their magic—it gets brighter and more intense at the center. Sunburst was the only one to have the color change completely. I am looking too far into this and overthinking things? You bet!)
But really, what characters do we know that can transform and have magic that's even close to that shade of green?
Oh, right.
(I actually took both images into photoshop and did a comparison with the eyedropper tool. They're pretty darn close, with the green from the show being slightly more saturated—RGB vs. CMYK, perhaps?)
And finally, an aesthetic explanation is that Sunburst's magic is pretty much the exact same color as Celestia's. They may have just not wanted it to clash, and took some artistic license with it.
Wait...
Sunburst's magic is the same color as Celestia's?
And his name has something to do with the sun, despite him not having a talent that involves the sun at all?
New theory: SUNBURST IS CELESTIA'S ILLEGITIMATE LOVE CHILD.
BRB, working on a new post.
*** Edit 5/1 ***
Just read an interview with the editor of the Legends of Magic series. There's two pertinent quotes:
There's a bit more coordination and reference accumulation with Hasbro as there may be elements at play that won't be referenced for a while elsewhere.
And
If you're more interested in the present day cast and world, then you may find some intriguing links to what's going on now.
I mean... it doesn't really confirm anything about what I noticed, but it does make it somewhat more likely, at least in my mind. He's practically saying "Stuff happening in these comics will tie-in to the current season."
I actually have a bit of a theory on what it is, but it's way out there and the only link I have is extremely tenuous, involving a bit of dialogue in the second panel of that snippet I posted. If I do end up being right, it will only be because I used the same strategy I used when I guessed the twist of M. Night Shyamalan 's The Village.
(hint: I guessed the twist by yelling out every possible twist I could think of while watching the movie, and one happened to be right. I'm still disappointed it wasn't 'everyone is robots', though.)
Tinfoil hats all round then.
pre08.deviantart.net/5846/th/pre/f/2017/112/9/c/evil_cakes_by_lynx318-db6sf6w.jpg
The implications of Pumpkin cake worry me in this part of ep03....wings....horn??
Honestly, I'd be surprised if there were anypony in Equestria who couldn't claim direct descent from Celestia at this point. A thousand years is a long time, to say nothing of however long she reigned before Luna went mad.
His magic in the comics is BLUE, just like his eyes.
Unicorn magic color is usually the same as their eyes.
Starlight's magic is blue, just like her eyes.
That might be why Sunburst's is yellow in the show, as he and Starlight both have blue eyes.
4508672
That's just G.L.I.T.C.H.E.S
4508730 24.media.tumblr.com/c9436e05d99a640491bc902c394f460c/tumblr_msgx0z4bPh1sxbejoo2_400.gif
4508728
Oh God. Arguments about what color something is are never good, particularly on the internet, but...
Sunburst's magic in the comic is most definitely green. I even just went and checked in Photoshop to make sure.
Starlight's magic on the show is green as well; I'd call it a seafoam green.
As for pony's magic matching their eyes, Trixie, Rarity and Lyra are the only examples I can come up with off the top of my head. As I said, I would call Starlight's green vs. her blue eyes. Twilight is magenta and purple. Shining Armor is blue(I think?) and magenta. And then Starburst is blue and yellow.
Then there are the alicorn's; none of their magic matches their eyes. But they don't count.
So overall I'd actually call it about 50/50 on magic matching eyes, unless things are really skewed on some other background/minor unicorns.
(and I named all those eye/magic colors from memory. The perks of having spent waaaaay too much time drawing ponies. One comic per episode for two different seasons!)
4508672
So... what you're saying is... they're changelings too?
Clearly this whole thing goes much deeper than I first thought...
(but really, don't they just pull these character models out of a big flash library they've built up? This must have been the first time those two have ever been in that pose.)
4510223 I wonder how much editing really goes into this show sometimes, not the first stuff up. Only saw it cause I went to get a snapshot of a scene like this for a comment elsewhere about the evil cake twins attitude towards Flurry and had a 'Wut Da?' moment.
I'm kinda whatever when it comes to the color of 'magic' in the show, as it feels more like something for the audience to use to identify who is doing what rather than the ponies themselves. Heck for all we know the light emitted be simple telekinesis spells could exist outside the visual spectrum (excluding spells which are specifically creating visible light and physical manifestations which would reflect visible light)
PLUS it would make changelings as unicorns absurdly easy to uncover, and the premise of Chrysalis's debut 100% implausible since the obvious change in magical color would be just too much evidence to ignore. plus Twilight would have picked up on that very quickly, and probably known the implications thereof since she is something of an expert in the field of unicorn magic.
there are other color theory explanations that could be explored as it being tied to the soul but again, nobody in world seems to care even when it would be relevant to something they are trying to do or figure out.
4515886
Yeah, I think the 'color is tied to the casters soul' theory is what I went with in CCR. More specifically, I tied to to the caster's particular specialty.
But, in regards to it making Chrysalis's impersonation of Cadance impossible, and Twilight picking up on it... her magic did change in that episode. You can see it when ChrysalisCadance takes the bag of apple fritters (at least that's what I recall them being) from Applejack, and it's even more obviously evident during the This Day Aria. That's where the idea of an impersonating changeling always having green magic came from.
Sure, it's completely implausible and it effectively means changelings can't reliably impersonate 1/3 of the entire Equestrian population, but it was a neat bit of foreshadowing, and a nice Easter egg for followup viewings.
4516790
again, WE see it but Twilight did not even though she was obviously scrutinizing 'Cadence' by this point. It's a great bit of foreshadowing and Easter egg but shitty world building, inmyopinion, hence my theory that the magic isn't visible in the traditional sense most of the time.