Aug
20th
2017
Points of Canon: S2x22 - Hurricane Fluttershy · 9:58am Aug 20th, 2017
I’ll be done with Season 2 soon, 
- “Calling all Pegasus ponies!” Notice that this is one of those rare cases where “pegasus ponies” and “pegasi” are used together in the same episode. Usually, it’s either one or the other.
- “Mandatory meeting for all Ponyville Pegasi.” Mandatory is a strong word, and a running theme for the episode – this is some manner of government-mandated duty, and Rainbow explicitly calls it “tornado duty” later on. And seeing how Rumble attends the training, children are not exempt per se, even though no children end up participating.
- Rainbow being in charge of this activity firmly sets her position as the head of Ponyville weather management, whatever the establishment is actually called. I wonder, why don’t we see her around Mayor Mare more often? Is the weather patrol a federal organization?
- “Be cool or be mule.” More casual racism. In fact, in terms of casual racism towards other equine races – particularly mules, which would have to be pony-donkey hybrids – Equestria in general seems to be somewhere in an equivalent of 1980s. They already recognize it might be offensive, but ethnic jokes still don’t get you lynched and those offended aren’t very bothered. (“None taken.”)
Rainbow counts the pegasi attending the meeting.
- She can count. Not a given. :)
- She knows exactly how many pegasi to expect, and determines that Fluttershy is missing by the count, rather than simply by not seeing her in the crowd.
- All adult pegasi in town can fit into the library. Even though we know that buildings are rendered as smaller than they are from outside, pegasi are a minority in this town.
- Fluttershy’s firsuit is a unique artifact. Well, it’s not a fir tree, but you know.
- The meeting is obviously held in the library because the library has a projector, and it’s not in the movie theater because movie theaters would typically use 35mm film, while the educational movie is a 16mm film. At least, that’s my guess. And this is an electrical projector.
- Creating tornadoes is an application of pegasus magic, something we haven’t seen in a while.
- “Cloudsdale has chosen our own highland reservoir as a source of the rainwater they need for all of Equestria.” There is some sort of rotation involved, but what exactly is the rule here, why is the Ponyville reservoir chosen?
- Is it just me, or the word “reservoir” typically only used to denote bodies of water collecting due to a dam? The particular reservoir that is the focus of the activity seems to have the water trickle in from somewhere else across a pipe. If this mini-lake is just a “socket,” so to speak, to start the tornado, and the actual water is meant to be coming in from a much bigger body of water, it might even be enough to fulfill Cloudsdale’s rainwater requirements. Notice that as the tornado starts sucking water up, the level doesn’t fall – and neither it increases when the water drops back down. There has to be some kind of siphon here.
- “Not only that, but Spitfire, captain of the Wonderbolts, will be here to oversee the water transfer and record our top tornado windspeed.” I have no clue why would Spitfire be involved with something like that.
- The illustrative graphic used to denote Fillydelphia is our only proper glimpse of the city in primary canon, and it depicts a metropolitan-style city, with apartment buildings rather than individual houses as opposed to the Ponyville graphic.
- The graphs of wind speed Rainbow demonstrates have to be logarithmic, with 1000 being twice as tall as 910.
- Thunderlane coughs, which implies that he probably got infected just recently. The incubation of feather flu takes about a week, and the sufferer becomes infectious earlier than that.
- This is yet another distinct stadium in town that doesn’t match others. Ponyville sure seems to have a lot of those.
- “Stretch those glutes, Flitter!” Ponies have a gluteus maximus muscle, presumably. But why? Horses don’t seem to, or at least, the equivalent is nowhere as important for them.
- One of the pegasi is bench-pressing the same 1000-pound barbell that Apple Bloom used in Cutie Pox. With wings.
- “pony pox” is the illness Fluttershy pretends to have. It is typically non-threatening and the only known cure is bed rest. Is there a non-pony pox, or it’s like the pony sniffles?
- “Stop horsing around, Fluttershy.” Not a common expression, but it does come up. This is the second time, the first one was in Fall Weather Friends. I wonder what is the etymology.
“Just last week you went into that wicked nose dive to save that falling baby bird right before it hit the ground!”
- Weeks.
- Fluttershy and Rainbow had to be doing something together for Rainbow to observe this personally. Was it watching the butterfly migration?
- It’s a season when baby birds exist, but that’s not that much help, since most birds hatch in spring.
- Flight camp involves a standard procedure wherein the foals are pushed off a cloud onto a cloud below. This is Sparta! Though, with Fluttershy having that kind of problem flying, how could she navigate Cloudsdale without an adult’s help at all?…
- “This is an anemometer.” The units of wing power do not have a specific name, they’re just “wing power.” And I’m pretty sure they’re units of pegasus magic rather than actual wind speed, and this is what the device is in fact measuring. That despite what Rainbow implies in her speech, or what Twilight says. A mundane non-magical anemometer positioned this way would give results proportional to a pegasus’ surface area, rather than much of anything else – certainly, it would not tell Twilight anything about “accelerative velocity.”
“…thus gauging your cumulative H2O anti-gravitational potential.” I.e. the ability to apply anti-gravity to water.
- Twilight knows anti-gravity is involved in pegasus flight.
- It’s actually likely that the base interaction involved is magic-on-water, specifically – pegasi affect the water inside their bodies and it acquires anti-gravity properties, and to create a tornado, they do the same to the water outside their bodies.
“Please, we need to have a germ-free environment.”
- Germ theory of disease is a thing. Not a given, with magic and schizotech.
- Twilight uses an interesting disinfectant spray, which behaves like a compressed / liquid gas spray can. It does not appear to be a spring-operated nozzle.
- Twilight manipulates the spray can from at least fifteen meters away.
- Thunderlane loses a feather, which actually happens very rarely to pegasi.
- Thunderlane rates 9.3 wing power, when already sick, and this is considered impressive. Rainbow rates 16.5 wing power, and this is the highest number seen. Other numbers shown – notice readable Arabic numerals – are 8.7, 9.2, 9.7, 9.9, 5.2, 11.0. Fluttershy’s pre-training number is 0.5, with 2.3 post-training. And I suspect this scale is logarithmic…
- Portraits are used in place of written names again.
- When Rainbow flexes her wings midway, we hear cracking joints. Yep, they have finger-like bones in there…
- Here’s our first glimpse of Strawberry Sunrise. It’s probably a good thing Applejack’s not here.
- The dialogue between the animals and Fluttershy conforms to the model established in The Return of Harmony – Fluttershy talks normally, animals understand her, she understands what they’re saying, but nobody else does. See also Twilight’s “Do I look like I speak squirrel?” I wonder if they understand each other without her echoing their statements.
- Fluttershy’s training montage involves her planting head first through a tree with no observable ill effects. At the same time, she loses the tug of war to a butterfly. I think we have to chalk her abysmal flight performance to highly unstable pegasus magic, rather than simple lack of it. Fluttershy’s performance is distinctly affected by being observed.
- Fluttershy’s training outfit includes a hairband, wristbands and leg warmers, which is similar to Pinkie’s full-on aerobics outfit from A Friend in Deed, though far less elaborate.
- “feather flu” is a, presumably, pegasus-specific disease. And seeing how Thunderlane has been losing feathers, inducing molting of the flight feathers is probably its primary effect.
- Twilight moves four beads on her abacus when saying “eight sick pegasi,” and the moved beads are on the top wire rather than the bottom. Each wire only has five beads, and there are only five wires. I haven’t the first idea of how to use this form of an abacus, and seeing how eight pegasi translate to four beads, I imagine it’s something inobvious.
- Eight sick pegasi would only cost ~80 wing power if the required numbers are linear. Losing this many is enough to cost Ponyville the record and drop it under the required minimum for tornado formation. But the required minimum is 800, while the record is 910. This means that either Rainbow was ~30 wing power short for the record in the first place, or the missing pegasi had, on average, produced more than 13.75 wing power each. This is significantly higher than the pre-test numbers, it’s like the top hitters improved by 25% in a week! Rainbow has a solid future as a “Wonderbolts trainer” if that can be attributed to her – and if she did have a shot at the record, that is.
- With all these numbers, we should assume Ponyville has no more than 400 pegasi, accounting for children and everyone who could possibly ditch the tornado duty. ~10% of the population, tops.
- This huge horn on wheels is weird.
- The scale of the large “anemometer” is calibrated in readable Arabic numerals, which can only be seen in HD. The scale only goes up to 1000, which is rather strange, considering that Rainbow wanted to get “over a thousand” initially.
- Rainbow faceplants through a tree with no ill effects whatsoever.
- One of the pegasi is swimming. Front crawl. Which, I’m pretty sure, is beyond the joint bending limits of a horse.
- Spitfire neither says anything nor helps, even though her original business of certifying the record is moot now, and she should, in theory, be concerned about the water getting up to Cloudsdale at all. So assuming she isn’t just a total jerkwad, why?
- “Do it for Equestria!” Ponies have patriotism. Not a given. :)
- Spike is prancing around playing an odd three-barrel flute. Huh.
- Fluttershy ends the episode narrating a Lesson Zero-pattern letter to Celestia, and refers to the events as happening “today,” making it a hard lock against Lesson Zero.
- The final shots show the Cloudsdale weather factory chugging clouds out and letting them float freely. I wonder how exactly they are directed to where they’re needed.
The suspiciously round magic number of 800 to sustain a stable tornado suggests that the unit of wing power is derived from this tornado or a related practice.
Best case, validating the wingpower record. Worst case, calling in the 'bolts to make the tornado when the locals couldn't. That water does need to get to Cloudsdale.
That or the graph isn't to scale. After all, logarithmic measurements don't stack additively.
Pony glutes may help them perform bipedal locomotion, thus putting them somewhere between humans and horses in terms of the muscles' importance... though I'm not sure how that would help with flying. That seems pretty far back for flapping muscles. Though it may just be part of a full-body stretch to avoid any cramping during practice.
Applejack had to win funds for reconstructing Town Hall because the mayor's actually in the pocket of Big Alpine Horn.
Possibly testing Dash's determination and leadership skills. Possibly because she is a more or less complete jerkwad. The Wonderbolts aren't exactly the squeaky-cleanest outfit out there.
Not a safe assumption, given what we've seen.
4641689
Considering that ponies redeem everything, she’s only allowed to be an incomplete jerkwad.
I think she's being professional in that she is avoiding singling out her friend by any means that would appear to be unofficial.
Publicity stunt.
/agree
Also "highland" reservoir…hmm.
unless the axis is explicitly labeled as 0, it can just be linear but misleading. (And it's not labeled at all!)
The part where her parents live is so solid I didn't actually notice it was Cloudsdale until you pointed it out.
Unlike the tourist bit near the Cloudiseum.
Or she's engaging in sesquipedalian loquaciousness.
RD could destroy a tree, in another episode, after all. This means it really probably is a pegasus thing for flight crashes to be inconsequential. (And apparenly RD does it too this ep, you say.)
A real thing here, certainly.
That'd only make sense, given how easily weather can drift from one township to another.
I was hoping this would be some muscle in the breast, or even the back, so I could explain it as being connected to pegasus wings. Unfortunately, it isn't. And Rainbow should know which muscle is which. Sigh.
Or just dropping by her house? They're really good friends; they might do that.
She wants to get off the scale.
There's a fantastic fic I was reading that hasn't updated in several years. I can't remember the name of it, but it was an AU where Equestria was much more heavily militarized. Shining Armor and 5 other military ponies were supposed to wield the Elements of Harmony (which when you think about it, just seems a sane course of action). The reason I bring it up is, in this setting, literally every Pegasi is required to be in the military, at least get basic training. (Fluttershy was like a Reservist Private 3rd Class, if I remember). From this episode and the previous one where Rainbow calls on all the Pegasi to aid her in securing Equestria, I wonder how far this is from the truth. Is there some level of compulsory service that all Pegasi are bound to for at least weather-related events, if not an outright universal conscription? If so, I sure hope Pegasi get a big tax break or something.
Oh, and Spitfire din't help because she's the worst.
4641584
Given Wind Rider's age and status, he has to have been a role model to Spitfire, if not a mentor of some kind.
4642104
Using smaller formats for educational materials is actually pretty common, or was before the TV/VCR era, because a 35mm projector is not portable, and a school/library would have to install it permanently in a room.
16mm is just the next one down. There’s no reason to believe ponies share the same film width standards, of course, but the division between multiple width standards for the same reasons that we have those divisions is likely.
4642486
Yes, pegasi must flex their arse to fly. :)
Actually, in this particular case, notice that all the pegasi fly in a very specific posture, where the hind legs stretch out horizontally. Assuming that this posture is required for tornado spinning, which is likely because that’s how Rainbow always did it before, would imply that they do need gluteus for this one job.
4642760
There does seem to be some level of expectations, the “duty,” as Rainbow calls it, applies even to Fluttershy, who doesn’t even live on a cloud. Unfortunately we know neither the limits of this duty nor whether they get compensated for it or how.