Thoughts on Equestria's solar system · 6:18pm Oct 22nd, 2013
In MLP:FiM Celestia and Luna make the sun and moon rise and fall. Most of the time this isn't a problem. Such powers are classic mythology, and I have no problem just accepting them as true. The problem comes when you crossover with a Sci-Fi universe or any other fiction which forces a real-world cosmological model.
The Cthulhu Mythos wanders between Sci-Fi cosmic horror and Fantasy supernatural horror. I could have perhaps set Equestria in the Dreamlands and explained its cosmology that way. Alternatively, I could locate it in a strange dimension where things are different, but the idea leaves a bad taste in my mouth. As soon as you employ 'soft' ideas like this, you lose the horror of infinity, the fear of the dark unknown, and that is at the heart of much of Lovecraft's work.
At the Mountains of Discord draws heavily from At the Mountains of Madness, perhaps the most Sci-Fi of Lovecraft's tales. If I was to stay true to my course I needed an explanation.
How can Equestria's sun and moon work as described? Do they orbit the planet? How does that even work? Some have answered these questions by labelling the rising of the moon and sun a lie but I don't like this either.
My solution works thus:
Equestria's planet orbits a long way out from its 'true' sun, such that it is just a bright star in the sky. Equestria is then orbited in turn by two artificial satellites – the moon and sun of canon. Twilight hints at this in the story when she says "Some images even suggested that [the Elder Things] set the sun and moon in the sky." This is almost correct.
Equestria's moon and sun are artificial but they weren't made by humans – that strange bipedal race known as Elder Things on Equestria. They are older than that, far, far older. When the Elder Things reached Equestria the sun and moon were already there, built by some long gone race and left deactivated, sleeping and dormant. The Elder Things saw these ancient artifices of wonder, and elected to settle.
They set their immense STL ships in orbit, studied hard and managed to activate the sun and the moon. The depiction of this act on the crystal mural is what Twilight saw and misinterpreted.
Of course some questions remain. What is Luna and Celestia's connection to the moon and the sun? How do they control them? What are Luna and Celestia? Some questions will just need to be unanswered for now.
Evidently great minds think alike, as this is the exact cosmological arrangement I've chosen to use for my SF-crossover take on Equestria, and for essentially exactly the same reasons!
(As for how the Royal Sisters control them - spoilered for any of my readers who might happen by - my answer was that one of the two really big ancient artifacts left lying around is the actual Canterhorn beneath the Canterhorn, that unusually symmetrical mountain - basically, a really, really scaled-up alicorn powered by a core tap. Attuning to that and using it as a massive power-amplifier is what lets Celestia and Luna move such massive objects around, and perform other feats on a similar scale mostly avoided, because unlike the Tree of Harmony, it's the exact opposite of a subtle instrumentality..)
I like the idea that even the Mysterious Precursors had their own Mysterious Precursors.
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Who probably had their own Mysterious Precursors in turn. I wonder how deep it goes? And if some new species will someday look at the works of ponies and wonder who they were.