Dear Princess Celestia,
There's no delicate way to put this, so forgive me for being blunt.
With your permission, I’d like to further my necromancy studies, either on my own or under the tutelage of Princess Luna if she’s willing. I'm not asking because I enjoy it, I'm asking because I know I can do good with it.
Magic is neither good nor evil. It's a set of tools. I’m the first pony in centuries to expand upon established magic theory solely because I learned how to use a tool everyone else wanted to forget. And I'm still only an amateur. If I can master this tool, the knowledge I could apply to other fields of magic is invaluable. Even if I'm completely wrong and my knowledge of necromancy turns out to be useless for other fields of magic, I can still do good with it. I'm already doing good with it.
The Apples make their own fertilizer. They have a small compost bin behind the barn where they deposit some of their food wastes. The waste decomposes into a mulch they can spread over their crops. Decomposition is the final death of the body, so I've come to understand the process intimately. It's not much, but I was able to use this knowledge to enchant the bin such that it now alters the decomposition rate depending on the materials inside, resulting in a richer fertilizer.
Fluttershy spends the first two weeks of every spring looking for animals that didn't make it through the winter. Animals with young will sometimes starve themselves to ensure their offspring can eat. If the offspring are too young to fend for themselves, they will remain next to the body of their parent, eventually starving or being preyed upon. These are the bodies Fluttershy searches for. She takes in the orphaned animals and raises them until they reach maturity. I was able to help her this year thanks to my understanding of necromancy. The biological process of decay has a unique magical frequency, one I've become very familiar with. This familiarity allowed me to locate every recently deceased animal in Whitetail Woods in a matter of hours. Fluttershy now has twelve new mouths to feed, more than she's ever recovered from previous winters.
They’re little things, yes, but they serve as examples that necromancy can be used for good. And if you're still not convinced, remember that for a long, long time, teleportation was considered unethical due to it utilizing a process not too dissimilar to my cloning spell. Safe teleportation was thought to be impossible, but one stallion kept trying. He teleported over and over and over, tearing small pieces of his soul away until he had a complete understanding of how spatial displacement worked. He used this knowledge to create a new teleportation spell, a safe one. He took the tool everyone else threw out and did something good with it.
So I ask you again, Princess. Please, let me learn. I want to turn this into something good.
Your faithful student,
Twilight Sparkle
I believe Twilight is confused on a matter of essential terms. She's been studying biological decomposition, which is a matter of bacteria and fungus, life processes. Necromancy, concerns itself with, well, death, endings and cessation of life. Necromancy can certainly have practical uses, (as well as horrific abuses) but Twilight is using poor examples.
9981821
She’s not saying decomposition is necromancy, she’s saying she has a better understanding of it because she studies necromancy, which is what allowed her to help AJ. Thus a “good” came out of her studies.
Quick edit: how is the second part a bad example? Or maybe you only meant the first part, idk
9981821
This is a great example of how Twilight is smart, but not wise. She's approaching the right subject from the wrong angle, and thus getting what she believes to be benevolent application of a subject she has yet to actually broach because she's focusing on the dead body and not the departed soul. This actually brings a thought to mind. People call necromancy death magic, but given that it's centered on the influencing or manipulation of departed spirits, wouldn't it be more accurate to call it soul magic?
edit:
9981834
Yeah, just noticed your comment and realized that the actual context of the chapter slipped my mind when I read Ro's comment.
9981834
Well her experiences with necromancy have put her in repeated close contact with corpses, and this familiarity has informed her understanding of decay. But necromancy is not an essential step in developing this knowledge, she could have gotten this same knowledge from shadowing a coroner. If she wants to convince Celestia she'll need to come up with something unique to necromancy, that can't be replicated by more conventional/mundane means.
And that's how Sombra invented teleportation.
9981844
Eh, which universe are you in? Sometimes life and death magic are two opposing forces that actively seek to extinguish each other, sometimes "life" refers to the business of the body and "death" the spirit, sometimes it's all about the spirits entirely, and sometimes it's just hungry entropy eating away at reality like a metaphysical swarm of locusts.
Context is everything.
I feel like every example she's given can be done with either mundane processes or with other existing fields of magic, or are simply something that shouldn't be done. Fluttershy's saving of animals may be essential for certain populations, but others require checks and balances like that in order to avoid overpopulation. There's a reason why culls are called in for deer or other animals in some states in the US: Some factor is affecting the population and hunters are called to act as a balancing force in order to either prevent overpopulation or underpopulation. As for the compost, there exist additives you add to a compost bin in order to improve the biological processes within in order to make a rich fertilizer.
Twilight is, as usual, exhibiting her over reliance on magic and trying to come up with reasons why she should continue that over reliance, except this time with a banned field of magic. Hell, her teleportation example is kinda unnecessary as well considering how there are still a scant few unicorns capable of safely casting the spell ANYWAYS, and those who do don't use it to get around constantly like Twilight does. There's less expensive ways of getting things done the way teleportation does, and the only real expenditure is of time. Need to get something from one city to another in a few hours? Use a relay system in order to get that something from point a to point b rapidly while allowing pegasi to continue to occupy their biological niche in the equestrian ecosystem.
I swear, Twilight sees problems that don't exist, and then she tries to fix them and inevitably bad things happen in this particular version of equestria. Imagine what happens if pegasi stop working with weather because unicorns took over and they're more efficient: The pegasus population could suddenly have a huge number of individuals born with some sort of recessive disorder that prevents them from interacting with clouds and other weather features, and there would be little problem with that as it only necessitates not living in a cloud home. Unicorns are genuinely capable of taking over the roles that the other two pony tribes have in equestrian society, and Twilight is the type to see the inefficiencies in the other two tribe's ways of doing things and fixes them with UNICORN MAGIC. She's a natural if unfortunate catalyst for detrimental societal change and needs a short leash.
My first thought was “how can this go wrong”? My first answer was apple bloom and her friends playing hide and seek and one of them hides in the “enchanted to make things decompose” compost box. I could probably think of more. That was off the top of my head. This will go bad somehow though.
9981971
I was thinking something similar. The whole (surviving) Apple Family is seated around the table for dinner when Applejack looks around and asks "where's Winona?"
9981861
The original necromancy (Greece, Egypt, etc..) was pretty much what we would consider medium stuff today: divination, contacting the departing ones, putting evil spirits to rest, etc... rather than zombie stuff.
This is a completely rationally and reasonable argument, at least by Twilights standards, and clearly penned by her personally.
I can’t wait to see how horribly she shoots herself in the metaphorical foot in the next chapter.
9982240
Seriously, Luna better want to teach Twilight. Otherwise, she will indulge in self-study.
I can see it now:
Dear Sunshine Sorceress,
Using Applejack and AppleMac as anchors, I have successfully brought back the spirits of their deceased parents. Unfortunately, said spirits have now inhabited their offspring, and are attempting to rut like bunnies. I don't know if this is the spirits doing, or just hicks being hicks. Please advise/decree regarding intergenerational ghost incest.
Your Purpleness,
Twilight
9982432
yeah, pretty much.
I suppose there are a few good applications for necromancy...but most of which can simply done through other means (such as making a Bone Golem for an undead guardian instead of using something like Raise Skeleton (or whatever name variation). For the stuff that can't, I suppose after mastering it such magic could be associated with another school of magic so that no one else catches on that it IS Necromancy. In and of itself, speaking to the dead isn't really a bad thing, it's WHY you're doing it, and HOW you're doing it. Asking a murdered pony who killed them could be quite beneficial to the justice system, or asking a relative 'who gets what' if they died before completing their Will, or filling in blank spots in history could be called noble pursuits of necromancy.
Then we get into ABUSE of such research. Anyone who's played a an RPG with magic in it has probably fought with or against Necromancer magic at some point. Most of the time those foes are fairly easily dispatched, because they aren't normally very powerful mages (unless it's a boss fight or something). But Twilight? She's so powerful she WASTES teleport spells crossing rooms because it's faster than walking and doesn't seem the slightest bit winded from it. Her abusing Necromancy could end with her conquering the world with an army of undead, and when asked why she did it, her calm and possibly even cheerful reply would be "For science!"
If Celestia approves this, Twilight had better be kept on a very short leash.
That... Was actually a compelling argument.
I wasn't expecting this
10020338
I know!
... Let’s wait and see what havoc she can wreak with it.
Yes, but some tools are evil. Like witchcraft, heresy, and purple.
9981861
Real life necromancy is simply seeking advice or foresight from spirits of the dead and has nothing to do with corpses, binding, etc. I think that is the reference he’s making.
10180456
Are you kidding me? Witchcraft is simply the act of learning magic deeper than most, Heresy is just an act of challenging a potentially inaccurate set of beliefs to give them a chance to present themselves as either true or scam, and purple...
Uhh...
Purple is...
I mean...
Yeah, okay. Purple is bad.
Rationally. It is very important to support her when she finally got on the right path
It was a reference to "Blink" franchise?
9982173
Exactly. In its original sense, being a necromancer is actually a reasonably respectable profession (well, or would be if that sort of magic actually worked IRL, anyway) -- just another form of oracle, possibly crossed with a bit of ghostbuster. Heck, look back at the Odyssey and you have Odysseus himself acting the part when he visits an entrance to the underworld to consult the dead seer Tiresias (and chat with some of his own departed friends while he’s at it) and it’s treated pretty matter-of-factly...
The whole “all necromancers are nasty-piece-of-work villains” bit seems to have come only later, or at least from a different root.