Stitching Pony Together: The Art of the Mess

It's really looking like Make Your Mark/Tell Your Tale is not going to show how the MLP:FiM civilization ended up shoe-horned into a Gen 2 reminiscent high tech walled garden sandbox. I can see why we're here, in this post-apocalypse, from a toy sales point of view: Hasbro did this already with Gen 2. Hasbro always recycles what it did the first time around with the merchandise aspect and Hasbro is trying to stay relevant and appeal to a market that is fixated on electronic media. It's the how you get to MYM and TYT from MLP:FiM that isn't so easy. The Gen 4.5 Pony Life episodes aren't much help either.

MLP:FiM is firmly in the fantasy genre of world building with castles, dragons, low tech, talking horses, fairy tale animals and magic. Magic is everywhere and the most adept at magic are the ponies. Ponies are not only the stewards of Equestria, they are the motive force that keeps all the natural cycles turning. Without the actions of ponies, everything grinds to a halt. The sun and the moon remain in the sky, the clouds and the seasons stop, and animals lack the guidance they need to migrate, nest, forage and wake up from hibernation. Magic is innate in MLP:FiM ponies and it resembles skills in that while some ponies are better at magic than others, all ponies have to practice to hone and grow their magical skill. Everything runs on magic and Equestria is just a hair's breadth from ecological disaster.

In MYM/TYT ponies, the only sign of magic existing is the appearance of a cutie mark (on only one side of the horse) and the adhesive and precision typing properties of their hooves. All three races think that other races have magical abilities but that they have none. That's it for TYT/MYM magic. The seasons, the days and the rest of the natural world just roll along on their own, no pony effort required or offered. Then in the climatic moment of MLP: A New Generation, a joint action of compassion made by the three leaders of the three main pony races caused magic to be released and once again be shaped by ponies.

After MLP: A New Generation, magic comes in 5 forms: flying, levitation of objects, accelerated shaped plant growth¹, cutie mark projection beams, dragon caused transformations, force field bubbles and laser blasts. The last two are alicorn exclusives. To do magic, there is about as much skill or learning involved as there is with breathing or with making rude noises by squeezing air between your hand and your armpit. So magic in Gen 5 MLP is about as fun and useful as bubble gum. It's the mobile smartphones that are keeping everypony entertained, magic is yesterday's news. If magic quit yet again, not much would change.

So how did Equestria end up this way and where did all those freaky mutant animals come from? The unicoons, flying snails and such the like probably came from Gen 4.5, Pony Life, via a parallel universe crossover rift episode I vaguely remember. Pony Life was a twisted, smartphone-centric, nightmare-in-hell mirror of Friendship is Magic and I could totally see Pony Life giving birth to MLP: A New Generation. The technology was already present, as were the mutant animals. I don't think ponies had anything to do with moving the sun, the clouds or the animals in Pony Life. So, stir in a pop-up Fire Alicorn looking for power, a snit dividing the pony races and Twilight somehow hiding that power from the Fire Alicorn and you get MLP Pony Life: A New Generation.

Otherwise, if MLP: A New Generation is Princess Twilight Sparkle's Equestria as last seen in The Last Problem (S.9 ep.26), the changes are severe. The fundamental physics of the Equestrian universe had to change so that gravitation and mass took over after magic ceased to move the sun and the clouds. Without magic, gone is the ponies' raison d'être as stewards of their physical and living environment. Without stewards, all life in Equestria had to become self sufficient. Perhaps only mutant animals survived the upgrade. The reason why would be yet another magic sucking entity threatening Equestria: Queen Opaline the "Fire Alicorn". She'd always been around somewhere, she's as old as Celestia and Luna; she must have just popped up like Tirek and went about mugging dragons or something. The only way to stop her was to modify some or all of the fundamental forces guiding the Equestrian universe (without killing everything in a Big Bang) while walling off nearly all the magic.

Magic in this new post-Twilight world just isn't the same as it had been. That could be the result of the change in how fundamental forces operate, or it could be that ponies need another Starswirl to come along and reinvent advanced magic... that is, if ponies can be convinced to drag themselves away from their screens long enough to get skilled.

So the bright and competent ponies of MLP: A New Generation, who have now become the inept, simple, narrow minded and compulsive ponies of Tell Your Tale and Make Your Mark, aren't going to explore Equestria, ask existential questions or study what history they can dig up. It would blow their little fuzzy minds.

So, we'll never know what happened.

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¹ I think an earth pony produced some magical snot in some episode or other. 'S not worth my while to check.