Story Notes, Little Sparrow, The Long Twilight · 10:03am Jul 2nd, 2018
More about the Founding Six, this time. I tried to fold a number of ideas about the fates of the various Founders into this, and to blend some different headcanon, fanon, and official-book canon. The story about how Celestia came to control the sun is now more or less canon due to the episode about it in season 8; it apparently both endorses and makes problematic the version told in the Journal of the pony sisters. So I, who have never actually buckled down and read that Journal that Oliver is always cursing, decided to write a half-blind version of my own. Like a man building a statue elephant from reports of travelers, neither the sculptor nor his patron ever having laid eyes on the genuine beast itself; the end result will be... distinctive if not especially accurate.
Star Swirl is, as always, the fox in the henhouse when it comes to timelines and those three groups he ties together: the Pillars, the Founders, and the Royal Pony Sisters. He's everywhere; he's missing when he should be there; he's there when he should not. Were the Pillars and the Founders contemporaries? It breaks so many things if they were, they can't be. And yet...
They have a reputation for having founded Equestria, and yet, there the Royal Pony Sisters sit, square in the heart of the living, breathing nation. Equestria itself is both built of a narrative of tribal consolidation, and at the same time, subjugation under immortal heroines of superior worth. The failure of the unicorn celestial spell-chorus lies at the heart of this disconnect.
So I struck out the official version, or rather, placed it at a distant remove. What did that breaking of authority, that failure of tradition look like from a distance? What did the end of a world look like from down below, at the foot of Mount Sinai the Canterhorn? Sombra's version of events, of course, would make the participants, the heroines, the source of the very problems they solve. He is no Harmonist, no Equestrian patriot.
To him, the unicorn celestial spell-chorus looks like a deliberate policy of 'pony sacrifice'. And it's hard to not see that, if you're the sort to indulge in 'fridge logic'. And afterwards? He has room in his heart for only one heroine, and the little alicorn princess isn't her.
The bigger question is - why wasn't Gusty an eager convert to the new Equestria, the utopian project re-imagined as a monarchial union? Gusty isn't our narrator, and in many ways, Sombra doesn't really understand the thing he loves. Peering through his darkened glass, I suspect Gusty took the republican ideal a bit more seriously than other ponies, that the failure of republicanism in Pegasopolis affected her deeply. More about that in later chapters.
Actually, the only significant thing that might not be canon-compatible about Little Sparrow that I see is the supposition that crystal ponies have physiological differences from regular earth ponies beyond the cosmetic. Especially when treating the secondary sources other than the Journal as advisory-only, and they’re a mess anyway.
Even that is still open to interpretation.
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Honestly, in canon, I'm not 100% sure that crystal ponies are entirely earth pony in population. I mean, that's what it generally looks like, but then you have Amore and Sombra, and god knows who else.
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Actually, going from primary canon alone, that’s undefined:
Amore is never shown or even named on screen. Sombra’s origins are never detailed in primary canon either. From televised canon itself, we cannot conclude what a crystal unicorn looks like at all, and whether one actually exists. Comic present, most notably, Radiant Hope, who looks like you would expect and has no special abilities related to being crystal as far as we can tell, i.e. is a normal unicorn with crystal pony phenotype traits, so that’s something.
1. Hair and coat colors on guards could be subject to dye anyway.
Crystal Guard contains a number of pegasi, who do appear in televised canon several times. However, I just gave them a closer look, and I couldn’t find one of the two definitive crystal pony phenotype traits – the hexagonal eye glint. They behave like they’re local every time they get lines, though, which implies either that the hexagonal glint is not universal1 or that they’re naturalized immigrants who turned up before the Crystal Empire vanished. Which is pretty much the same thing.
I try to include as much secondary canon as possible, and with that, crystal unicorns and crystal pegasi definitely exist, but that’s just me.
2. Who has one crystal pony phenotype trait but not the other, and ages consistently with being Shining Armor’s generation – i.e. had to have inherited this trait through successful interbreeding with other ponies.
However, my grounds to conclude that crystal ponies are, physiologically, not substantially different, are mostly based on the existence of Cadance2 and the fact that exotic spa treatments like liquid crystal baths appear to work on regular ponies, while regular ponies have no problem eating exotic crystal pony food.
It’s all conjecture really.