//------------------------------// // S1E2: Pure Bread // Story: The Starlight & Pals Magical Half Hour // by Cold in Gardez //------------------------------// “I’ve been thinking about the earth pony problem,” Starlight Glimmer said. “The… is there a problem with earth ponies?” Twilight Sparkle asked. It was a brisk day, and they were out lounging atop one of the gentle rolling hills that hugged the woods south of Sweet Apple Acres. The mid-spring sun toasted their coats, while the wind kissed and chilled them. Twilight relished the sensation of being caught between the seasons, and she let her wings rise to caress the air with each gust. It was Starlight’s day to choose their activity, and Twilight had barely finished asking Starlight what she wanted to do when the answer exploded from the unicorn: “Kites!” And so they found themselves on Ponyville’s premier kite-flying hill a few hours after breakfast with all the instruments of kite-making laid out before them: balsa rods of all thicknesses, many-colored panels of fabric, rice-paste glue, miles of twine, metal pins, ribbons of every hue and a 64-flavor pack of artisans watercolor sticks. All were held down against the wind with rocks or hooves or little spots of magic when they ran out of hooves and rocks. They’d agreed on box-kites, which Twilight knew only from picture books as a foal and glimpses of Starlight’s kite collection. She went for the simplest of designs, a rectangular prism wrapped with two panels of fabric. It didn’t look like something that could fly, but even half-assembled, with the glue still drying and the twine yet unattached, she could feel it grabbing at the gusts, threatening to lift off her hill and into the trees beyond. It wanted to soar. Starlight crafted a far more ambitious design, a pentagonal prism that lacked the easy structural strength of a cubic design. But she’d already improvised a complex internal bracing far more elegant and clean than Twilight’s rather crude glue-and-twine foal’s play. Starlight’s kite looked like something a pony astronaut might use. Then out came the watercolor sticks. By unspoken consensus they’d agreed on animal motifs, with the requirement that the animal in question had to have the same number of limbs as the kite had fabric panels. So Starlight drew dozens of five-armed starfish on each face of her kite, alternating colors and sizes until each face was more starfish than fabric, and her hooves and lips were smeared with waxy traces of the watercolor sticks. Twilight gave her own eight-paneled kite an octopus motif, after briefly considering and then rejecting a spiderweb design. An octopus would better match Starlight’s aquatic-theme, anyway. She spent the hour drawing a single twining limb on each panel, adding suckers and spots and rings as fancy took her. She spent a bit of extra time detailing a hectocotyl arm – for her octopus kite was a colt octopus kite – which provoked a minute of giggles from them both. Finally it was time to fly, and they let their kites spool out into the brisk wind rushing up the hillside. The taut strings, decorated with fluttering ribbons every few feet to make them visible to pegasi, hummed in the air. And that was when Starlight brought up the earth pony problem. “No, not a problem with them,” she said. “I mean, I certainly don’t have any problems with them. I like them! But society has a problem with them, right?” “I… don’t think I follow you,” Twilight answered. Her kite wobbled a bit in the wind, threatening to start spinning. “Like, discrimination? There are still some older unicorns who say—” “No, it’s deeper than just attitudes,” Starlight interrupted her. Her eyes were on her own kite, which held its position like a rock despite the gusty wind. “Look, you know I have a thing for equality, right?” “Yes, I’d noticed that.” “Right. So, have you ever noticed how unequal things are for earth ponies?” Oh. It was one of those arguments. Twilight arrayed her mental cards and began to deal them. “All ponies are equal, Starlight, they’re just equal in different ways! Sure, earth ponies can’t use magic or fly, but they have durable family bonds and greater physical strength, and nopony can grow things like an earth pony—” Starlight snorted. “Come on. You don’t really believe any of that, do you?” “I–” Twilight frowned. “Of course I do. It’s all true.” “It’s true, but it’s wrong,” Starlight said. “Earth ponies have larger families because they’re traditionally farmers who live in multi-generational households. They’re stronger because they have to be stronger – do you think Applejack has magically powerful legs, or maybe she can kick like that because she spends all day bucking trees? Maud’s one of the strongest mares I know, because she grew up breaking rocks with her hooves. It’s not magic. Any unicorn or pegasus could do the same thing if they grew up under the same circumstance, but no earth pony is ever going to cast spells like a unicorn or fly like a pegasus. How is that equal?” Twilight reeled her kite in a bit, tugging it down from the stronger upper-level winds. When it stabilized, she pulled out her second card. “It’s equal because it’s harmonious. Unicorns and pegasi have abilities that earth ponies don’t, of course. Nopony would argue that. But pony society functions because each tribe uses its abilities to benefit all the tribes. The ancient Hearthswarming stories warn us about what happened when the tribes were separate. For Equestria to flourish, all ponies are needed, no matter their tribe or their abilities.” “That’s the same argument traditionalists use when they say earth ponies should only be farmers,” Starlight said. She did something with her string, and her kite described a wide circle in the sky. “And pegasi should just be warriors. And of course unicorns should be all the nobles. Because we’re the natural leaders, right? That’s still harmonious. Society worked great that way for centuries. But it’s not equal, not by a long shot.” “Okay.” Twilight discarded all the mental arguments she’d arrayed and deployed a new one on the spot. “How about this. Say you have two unicorns, one taller than the other. Being taller gives you certain advantages in life, right? So they’re unequal. But is that unfair?” Starlight shook her head. “No, that’s part of a standard distribution. Some individuals will be tall, some short. Some pegasi can fly fast, some can’t. The individual might think it’s not fair, but for everypony at large it balances out.” “Right. Don’t think about ponies as earth ponies or pegasi or unicorns.” Twilight said. “Ignore the categories. Instead some ponies can fly and some can’t. Some can use magic and some can’t. It’s part of that standard distribution, and as a society we’ve decided to call the ponies who can fly pegasi, and the ones who can use magic unicorns, and the ones who can’t do either earth ponies. But while that may be unfair for individual earth ponies who wish they could do magic or fly, it’s not unfair to earth ponies as a category because that category has no objective reality, any more than pegasus or unicorn. They’re just descriptions ponies used to conveniently sort each other by ability, and over time those descriptions became a part of how we organize our society. But they’re still just descriptions – there’s no such thing as earth ponies or unicorns or pegasi, just ponies.” Starlight shook her head again. “That’s replacing reality with theory. We don’t break ponies into tribes based on height because height doesn’t matter in the end. Magic does. Flying does. Earth ponies will never get to do any of those things, and even if you only think of them as individuals, that’s still unfair. From birth they’re frozen out of so much potential that you and I take for granted. How many earth ponies have become princesses?” Uh. Twilight was suddenly very conscious of the wings fluttering at her sides, and she pulled them in tight. “Well, none. Yet. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t!” “You’re a poor liar, princess.” Twilight bristled. It took her a moment to realize Starlight was deliberately baiting her, and she let out a slow breath. “Okay, fine. Let’s say you’re right about everything. What can we do about it? It is a unicorn’s nature to use magic. It is a pegasus’s nature to fly. It is an earth pony’s nature to do neither of those things. If I thought earth ponies were broken – which I don’t – and there were some way to fix them, I would. But we can’t, and if happiness means accepting the things we cannot change, then you’ll never be happy as long as you think life needs to be fair.” Starlight was silent in response. She watched her kite, so far above them it appeared as little more than a pink dot against the blue sky. A few pegasi occasionally detoured to dance around it before going on their way. “What if we could?” she finally said. Her voice was quiet, almost lost to the wind. “Uh…” Twilight’s string shook, and she realized she’d been ignoring her own kite too long. It bobbled dangerously near the treetops, and she pulled the twine to give it some more lift. “How… do you know something I don’t, Starlight?” She shook her head. “Just something simple. There’s no way I know of to give earth ponies horns or wings. But that’s not the only way to make ponies equal.” The chill that swept over Twilight wasn’t born of the wind. “You can’t—” “I could, though,” she mused. “Just cut off my horn, and I will have made earth ponies equal to at least one unicorn.” Twilight’s eyes slid to Starlight’s forehead. “You don’t seem to have gone down that path.” “I know.” Starlight’s shoulders slumped and her ears sagged. “Does that make me a hypocrite, or just a coward? It was the same back at Our Town. I was so happy to condemn all those ponies to a life without their cutie marks, but I wasn’t willing to do it to myself.” Twilight licked her lips. The past was always a tender subject with Starlight, and she had to set her hooves carefully. “And it was wrong back then, wasn’t it? This thinking is all just repeating the same mistakes.” “Maybe it wasn’t a mistake. Maybe the only reason you and your friends tried to stop me back then was because you found out I’d been lying about keeping my own mark. But what if I hadn’t been, Twilight? What would you have done? Would you have just… left?” “I, uh…” What would they have done? There was no law against removing cutie marks; they had only confronted Starlight over her lie, and everything had spun out of control after that. She could imagine it. Leading her baffled friends back to Ponyville, never having solved the problem of Our Town. They’d have abandoned Starlight to her insane plans, if only she’d been insane enough to really believe them. “Where would that end?” Twilight asked. “A world with wing-shorn pegasi and dehorned unicorns? I don’t think any earth ponies want that. Certainly none that I know.” “Sometimes the right thing to do is hard. It requires sacrifice. And you could… do it at birth. There are painless ways. And then we would all be earth ponies. Can you tell me why that would be wrong in a way that doesn’t also explain how terribly unfair the current world is to them?” “It’s not our job to make the world fair!” Twilight said. “We can only try to be the best version of ourselves that we can! To… to mutilate yourself because your own gifts are unfair would be the first step down a path of annihilating every difference, because the only perfectly equal world is a world of perfect entropy where all things are flat and cold and gray—” Something snapped high above. They looked up to see Twilight’s kite, some internal spar now broken, falling to the ground. The unmoored fabric panels fluttered like flags as they plummeted. It hit with the crunch of thin sticks breaking. They both winced. Twilight picked the mess up with her magic and drew it closer. Little remained that resembled a kite. “Well,” Starlight said. She drew in her own kite and snagged it once it was in range. “It was a good kite while it lasted. And I liked the octopus!” “Yeah.” Twilight folded up the ruins as best she could. “Hey, Starlight?” “Hm?” “What about… if a unicorn uses their magic to make life better for others, especially ponies who can’t use magic, is that still unfair?” Starlight was quiet for a while. She detached a single spar from within her kite, and the rest of it folded up neatly. She wrapped it with a bit of spare twine and set it on her back. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “Who is the master, then?” “Maybe there is none.” Twilight collected all the little scraps of their kite-making morning, putting them in her saddlebags. “Wanna talk about it over lunch?” Starlight smiled. “Sounds great.”