On Siblings (Or: FOME Rants For Several Paragraphs)

Like many of you, I watched the new episode of Friendship is Magic this weekend. Again, like many of you, I noticed Dinky Doo competing in the climactic race. There are probably those of you who are wondering how this will impact Elements of Harmony. Well, this is not the first time the canon of a show has shifted in a direction that might contradict an in-progress fanfiction of mine, so I'm going to react now exactly as I did then:

I'm going to ignore it.

By definition, a fanfiction is an alternate universe. It's just that most of them map closely to the events of the source material until the beginning of the story. As such, I can easily declare Dinky an only child, just as I could claim that she is a triplet, the forbidden lovechild of Prince Blueblood and a chambermaid, or a shapeshifter that has infiltrated pony society for her own dark purposes. Or, for that matter, one of a hundred other things.

Even without authorial license, this is the beauty of background ponies. They are empty vessels for us as writers to fill with whatever characterization we want, physical templates for original characters that will be infinitely more palatable to the greater fanbase by virtue of being based on some scrap of the original show.

As for my opinion about the sudden sibling situation? Again, they're background ponies. Three of the older competitors in the race were in the stands watching themselves compete. While in our hands they are wet clay waiting to be shaped, on the show they are incidental, interchangable, and ontologically uncertain. For them, canon is at best a crapshoot and at worst an exercise in futility.

Now that I've deposited my two cents for the zero people who care, I'll be getting back to chapter 8, which I'd call about eighty percent done. It's got some fun bits, including a non-Ditzy planeswalker for the card of the chapter.