Nov
11th
2017
Points of Canon: S4x23 - Inspiration Manifestation · 4:35pm Nov 11th, 2017
In which we find out that the castle still contains all manner of dangerous trash.
- “The Ponyville Foal and Filly Fair is almost ready to begin!” Yet another, presumably yearly, festival in Ponyville.
- This one involves setting up temporary tents – at least, Mr. Cake is handling one, and we see them being disassembled once the festival ends.
- There’s a dart game with balloons where one needs to throw darts to make them pop. Sharp!
- I have no clue whatsoever what is Vinyl Scratch doing ponying a booth. She’s not spinning records.
- This is one of those very rare cases where we see Rarity and Sweetie’s parents on screen – this time, they’re hanging out with Sweetie.
- “Just because the attendees are young, doesn’t mean they don’t deserve my very best creative work.” The Foal and Filly Fair is a festival specifically for children.
- “Your favorite dragon? Aw, gee…” Again, the G word.
“This is awful!”
- Notice that the puppeteer has a cutie mark with marionette control bar on it, but he is a unicorn – an unconventionally pudgy one at that – and manipulates his puppets with his magic directly, so it’s probable he never actually used a control bar in his life.
- The requirements he expresses are purely practical – space for the puppets, ease of moving the whole assembly about – but notice he doesn’t complain that he won’t be able to fit inside.
- In a fit of creativity, Rarity made four legs on the box and still added wheels. For decorative purposes.
- I wonder if money was involved in this, because throughout subsequent scenes, Spike and Rarity refer to the puppet theater as her “contribution” to the festival, while the puppeteer obviously requires something that he will subsequently leave town with. He reappears in Forever Filly with the second version of the theater box, but we never see him in between, so…
- We can see the library of the Castle of the Royal Pony Sisters substantially cleaner than it was in Castle Mane-ia, implying that the cleanup conducted during Power Ponies happened in-between, and giving us a solid chronology lock.
- So why exactly is Spike searching for his answer in this castle, and not, well, anywhere else?
- “It’s for Rarity! The one who made you that bow tie you like so much?” When was the last time we saw Owlowiscious in a bow tie anyway?…
Spike instantly melts the padlock off a door.
- Padlocks existed over a thousand years ago.
- To do this at all, Spike’s flame has to produce temperatures well over 1500°C. Even more to get this to happen this fast. This time, the flame is green.
- So what exactly is casting this ominous green beam of light? We never see the thing. In fact, the whole chamber is strange – very large, completely empty, and cylindrical… Even though later Spike expresses the desire to return the book to the castle, this is impossible, because the staircase crumbles as he leaves the chamber – so apparently, he remained entirely unaware of it for the entire episode.
- While Spike was out, Rarity had the time to eat at least 11 bowls of icecream, which would be something like 5kg total and reflect on her figure rather drastically in the coming weeks. Despite being called “Vanilla Oat Swirl,” it has a decidedly pink color, which is strange…
- “Spike, precious scales, I already have magic.” This is actually the only time ever Rarity uses this term of endearment towards Spike.
“From in the head to out in the world, every thought to action. Hold close this book and through its spell, you’ll start a chain reaction. Projecting forth whatever beauty you see. Only when true words are spoken will you finally be set free.”
- Every other spell that has a verbal component at all that we know is associated with Star Swirl.
- It is clearly not a spell, though: It behaves in a way almost identical to the Alicorn Amulet, compelling the wielder to exercise its power, gradually driving them to further and further excesses, and preventing them from rejecting the book. This corresponds to a change in the wielder’s native aura color and glowing eyes. Compare to Magic Duel. The one difference is that the system is not anchored to a physical object, and destroying the book does not help, it has a behavioral end condition instead.
- Actually, if the book was so easy to destroy – get it digested by a dragon and you’re done, why hasn’t this been done before? Did it actually mysteriously reappear elsewhere in the world after Rarity was done with it?
- Even the initial form of the “book” is not a book – more like two stone tablets connected with metal loops. Rarity immediately transforms it into a proper book, but we never find out if anything is written inside, she never opens it.
- The book is either self-aware or convinces the user that it is: On the second day of exposure, Rarity speaks of it, “Won’t that be a fun little secret for the three of us to share?” – meaning herself, Spike and the book. I expect telepathic contact should be presumed, it is, after all, fully imagination driven.
- Twilight classifies the book’s effects on the world as “dark magic.”
- The book presents not one but at least two different powers, which work more like Discord’s magic than anything else: Transformation and materialization. There is no obvious energy, mass or even distance limit, though Rarity never affects anything she can’t see. We know nothing about the permanence of transformations, these objects never reappear and Twilight states that the magic was “reversed.” But the first thing Rarity creates out of thin air, the puppet theater, remains intact all the way into Season 7, so there is apparently no time limit if no “reversal” is done. That’s crazy OP.
- We skipped the entire festival. Notice that Rarity probably spent it hanging out with Sweetie Belle and watching the puppet theater, (compare to Forever Filly) and apparently, never used the Inspiration Manifestation throughout, remarkable restraint.
- Here, for the first time, we see a filly guide handle cookies. Filly guides appeared before, but the cookies didn’t. See 28 Pranks Later.
- “I’ve completed my fall line for the next fifteen seasons!” I wonder what actually happened to these in the end. Did any survive?
- “You’re lost? No, not that way, that looks like it’s the door to a… bedroom.” Fluttershy maintains her usual trend of talking to animals in Equish, being understood, and understanding their responses in whatever languages they speak in.
- The mare-iachi band first seen in It Ain’t Easy Beng Breezies reappears, the unusual brass instrument intact. It’s notable that as a result of Rarity’s manipulations, the band turns into Octavia and her band – as seen during The Best Night Ever – and the clown turns into Savoir Fare. Now, what exactly happened here? Was it a transformation? Then by the time the cleanup starts, do two Octavias exist? And if this is the real Octavia, what was she doing immediately prior and why is she continuing to play?
- “What? This? I just wanted to try out a new look.” Notice that Twilight believes Spike. Does he have enough of his own resources to try out a new look made entirely of crystal?
“Princess Twilight, the gazebo has been turned into solid crystal, and two ponies are now trapped inside its walls!”
- The thing she calls the “gazebo” is actually the town hall. Huh?
- Twilight extricates the ponies by magicking them through the walls directly, which is a spell we haven’t seen her use before or after. Why not a teleport?
- “Ugh… what happened?” Rarity has no memory of what she has been doing.
- Spike narrates a Friendship Journal record for this episode, and uncharacteristically for these, it refers to the events as having happened “today,” though this is not very chronologically useful since we had a later hard lock anyway.
“Princess Cadance and Princess Luna have much better things to do than help me clean up Ponyville! Do you have any idea how hard it was to reverse that much dark magic?!”
- It took three princesses to clean the place up, and it involved an unscheduled visit from Cadance – who has Equestria Games coming up. So why didn’t Celestia help out?…
- I expect the puppet theater box escaped being reversed, because the puppeteer left the town at the conclusion of the festival.
So, how many other Big Bad level artifacts are forgotten in that castle?
I always assumed Rarity was teleporting the real Octavia and her ensemble into place, and she continued to play because she's just that unflappable. Though, now that I think about it, it'd be the farthest-reaching magic that Rarity or Rarity-under-Inspiration-Manifestation has ever done. Maybe she was just changing the ponies' shape instead?
My belief is that the book became entirely nonmagical after use, the entire magic being in that spirit-like force that possesed Rarity. That's why destroying the book was easy and didn't accomplish anything.
4723094 Nothing else in the episode suggests that Inspiration has any teleportation-related powers, and as I see it that the only reason to think it does is denial about the unpleasant implication that Rarity turned three people into exact body-and-mind copies of three other people. And then to reverse it, Twilight had to kill clone!Octavia to bring back the mariachi player. We know Twilight has no reservations about killing magic clones.
4723105 But then, I don't think any Equestrian magic - except sort of the Mirror Pool - has been able to create "exact body-and-mind copies." At most, I think Inspiration Manifestation would be bespelling them like Twilight's friends in Magical Mystery Cure.
4723113 Discord can clone himself, and Inspiration shows a level of transmutational prowess second only to him.
Now that I think of it, they don't need to be full mind clones, just shallow clones that act how Rarity expects them to on stage.
I have to wonder how this happened in the first place. Did Claude just neglect to tell Rarity how big his puppet theater needed to be? Did Rarity just ignore his instructions? Was some kind of ridiculous Telephone game going on, so Claude’s detailed list of his exact needs for a traveling puppet theater got completely lost by the time the work order reached Rarity?
What’s really odd is that, when we next see Claude, he’s considering the doorway of Sugar Cube Corner as his new theater. It’s barely any larger than Rarity’s first theater, it’s even less mobile, and it has the added disadvantage of completely blocking off a business’s entrance for the duration of his show (plus however long setup and takedown requires).
Hmm... Rarity’s established as a good designer, even aside from her specialty in clothing. Her very first scene in the entire show involved her decorating Town Hall for the Summer Sun Celebration. But fast-forward to “Fluttershy Leans In”, and Rarity insists that her friend from Canterlot, Dandy Grandeur, would be a better fit for the job of beautifying Fluttershy’s animal shelter. I wonder if this episode is to blame for that. Rarity’s first puppet theater design was a complete failure—and then she only succeeded the second time because she used dark magic. This was a huge blow to Rarity’s confidence in non-clothes-related design fields, until she realized that even the esteemed Dandy Grandeur could screw up from time to time.
4723144
Quite possible, actually. I imagine there was a contract between him and the city, in which the city hires him to do a series of shows in Ponyville for the children, and he gets certain equipment out of it… Rarity, being the epitome of generosity she is, agrees to do it for free to help the festival out, and for her it means more primary business over time, since getting big city ponies into Ponyville is what these festivals are for in the first place, economically.
Actually, this is not that odd. The sequence I imagine is like that:
So he does.
Plausible.
4723105 *Or* the book is a residence for the inspiration spell, and destroying it while the spell was possessing Rarity was fairly easy, thus leaving the spell to go home afterward... and find out it doesn't have a place to hide any more. *poof*
Finally catching up. One point I want to make is this episode, more than any other, highlights just how much less dangerous the Everfree has become since the S4 opener. Spike dropped in a season ago and was almost immediately set upon by Timberwolves. Twilight wandered slightly off the path to Zecora's cottage and was now petrified. Between Castle Mania and this episode, anyone can just wander to and from the Everfree Castle safely. It suggests that the purging of the plundervines really effected the magical environment of the Everfree. Were Timberwolves just a side-effect of plundervine magic all along? We never see them after the S4 Opener, though we do hear rumors of them.
Also raises big questions about magical creation of matter. One unicorn with a dark magic artifact, created more gold in a few hours than exists in Fort Knox. The fact that alicorn princesses had to banish it means that gold exists permanently, which in turn means gold Bits have to be backed by government fiat or something, since no one would trust gold coins if they are that easy to replicate with magic.
On the other hand, those immense hoards of gold dragons have becomes a lot more understandable.