I don't even know where to start with this mess.

Firmaments, matriarchs, existential crises, gods, creation, music, details, seeing the forest for the trees, memory, the list of things to talk about goes on. I will say this, there's a lot of meat here to chew, but a more than significant portion is fat; this has no bearing on entertainment derived from banter nor the legitimacy of analysis.

Honestly, there is so much that it's hard to know where even to start writing a critique, let alone not ballon to the size of one of the story's infamous chapters.

So, I figure a good enough spot is the theme of memory, what it means to remember and how memory defines life. Can we trust memory?

Eye-witness testimony is the least reliable of all evidence.

Memory is defined as much by what you are as what you have seen.

We can never have 100% certainty of any memory we have; they change ever so slightly every time we call it to the forefront of our mind. In this story, it seems that we can trust what we remember less than what we forget.

In Background Pony, Lyra is very limited in how she can interact with other ponies. The only way they can fully remember what she does does is for them to never acknowledge her presence in the first place. Every now and then, something Lyra says will impact a pony deeply enough for it to affect them, even though they can't remember the source of the idea. But Lyra's most powerful weapon against her curse is music itself; ponies tend to be more consistently impacted by music than anything else Lyra can do. This is most clearly demonstrated in XII - What Sound a Stone Makes and XV - Being There.

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The only way they can fully remember what she does does is for them to never acknowledge her presence in the first place.

I really loved this theme early on in the story since it really strikes at the heart of what it is to "be in the background." That, and it really feeds nicely into the overall questions of identity and introspection.

I'm curious to see if this all ends with Lyra having to truly fade into said background. If her identity is music, since music is how she cements memory, is there ever an escape for her or will she be forced to fade into the fabric of reality as a series of notes leaving a subtle effect on eternity?