Onto the Pony Planet--Chapter 7 Notes · 4:08am Jan 11th, 2014
Onto the Pony Planet: Chapter 7
A huge thanks to my pre-readers: Humanist, AnormalUnicornPony, metallusionsismagic, Woonsocket Wrench, and my parents.
The proper way to make tea (according to some internet research) involves several steps of heating the leaves in water. Dipping a teabag (or tea ball) is the lazy man’s pony’s way of doing it.
Night Soil is a friendly euphemism for the contents of a pit toilet. Since we don’t see much evidence for plumbing in the show, I’m assuming that most of the homes have non-flush toilets (oddly, the outhouse in Dodge Junction does flush). I also suspect that many of the homes in Ponyville don’t have indoor plumbing, although some certainly do. There’s a water tower in one episode, I believe there were pipes in at least one episode, and Pinkie Pie at least has a bathtub and sink with a faucet.
(I just wanted an excuse to use that picture)
A properly thatched roof can last nearly a century before needing to be re-done. It stands to reason that there would be pegasus experts at thatching, since they could do the job without having to worry about ladders and scaffolding.
One of the best thatching materials is reed. Before the days of commonly available cheap string, many people who harvested reeds would tie the bundles (called fathoms, since they were about six feet in circumference) with willow switches, and they’d plant willows in their reed beds so that they’d always have an ample supply.
A gambo is a two-wheeled flatbed cart, with removable stake sides—the perfect thing for long lightweight loads.
Rough Tumble is the fan name for the injured pony that Rainbow shared a hospital room with.
Wattle and daub is used as a siding material. The wattle is wood, woven into a flat panel. It’s put between the supports, and then the daub is added—a thick mix binders, aggregate, and reinforcement. The recipe varies from place to place. Once it dries, it’s traditionally whitewashed.
A lifting beam is an extended ridgepole to which a pulley can be hooked to lift bulky items to an upper floor. They’re common in older homes in Europe and on barns, and many of the homes in Ponyville have them—Rainbow Dash perches on one in Applebuck Season while she’s waiting for AJ.
A kailyard (also spelled kaleyard) is usually a small kitchen-garden, filled with a variety of vegetables and herbs. Sometimes they were decorative, or in the case of former farmers, a miniature version of the old farm. Since Ponyville is a mostly earth pony town, that would likely be a standard feature of every property.
(the eagle is perched on a lifting beam)
IRL horses like bitter pea, which is a type of shrub.
For those of you who have not read Celestia Sleeps In, Hastings High school colors are blue and yellow, and their team name is the Saxons. (You can’t imagine I would have missed that little detail, eh?) I can also tell you that what is now the middle school was the high school when Dale would have attended.
I decided to leave the dream images out of the blog post. If you’re curious about them, you can click on the links. The last link is graphic, possibly not safe for Woona—but it was published in the New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize, and was named the World Press Photo of the Year in 1972. Proceed at your own risk.
Dream imagery:
She found herself standing in an open field as Dale looked through a telescope. He seemed smaller than she’d imagined. Flashes of memories of giant rockets launching into the sky begin to appear around the mini-Dale. Vague bits of speech rang out, but she couldn’t understand the words. There was a brief sequence of some white-suited creature slowly walking down a ladder onto a desolate gray landscape, and then she saw giant oval-topped tripods shooting magical energy beams at tall stone and glass cities that reminded her of Manehattan. Odd self-propelled wagons rushed towards them, but they were destroyed in brilliant flashes of color. An instant later the dream was gone, and she found herself in a world filled with short bear-like creatures, jabbering like primitives as they tossed simple weapons at men wearing white armor. A human mare walked along a line of soldiers, sticking flowers into tubes that the soldiers were carrying, while another ran in terror from a flaming village.
Well, that was a fun chapter. I liked all the dream sequences (if only because i could imagine what Luna saw, which was pretty cool.), and I do hope there will be another one later on.
I wonder if Night Soil has a wife called Honey Wagon, and I thank you for that, FiM has covered so much that almost noone else even acknowledges.
Having the Moon Landing memory, and Luna doesnt ecognise it ue to the tye of imprisionment, so far is the greatest achievement in space.
I just wonder if Dale has a memory of the greatest piece of planetary civil engineering ever?
There is a place so far up, there is no down. A little lower, a small white arrow tore across the top of the sky, outrunning the sun, crossing in hours an ocean that was once the edge of the world.
It looks like its going too fast, even when standing still.
I remember that girl. Phan Thị Kim Phúc, living in Canada these days.
A kaleidoscope of war images both factual and fictional. And something of a sad commentary on the human race that it's not more fictional and less factual...
Oh, it's THAT image. I'm surprised Luna didn't get an eyeful of the napalm burns that were on that poor girl.
1704970 I'm doubly surprised Luna didn't recognize it, as she and Twilight examined pictures (and correctly figured out what they were) in the astronomy book back during Celestia Sleeps In.
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There were no pictures of the lander in the book that Dale gave Twilight (believe me, I was holding the book Dale was using in my hands when I wrote those sections). Remember, since Dale didn't want to give away how far behind our space technology was (since he was certain at that point they had arrived on a space ship), he deliberately chose a book which didn't show the iconic moon landing photos.
How does Luna know what a rocket is? I know that they have fireworks, but a Saturn V is a far cry from a bottle rocket.
1869868
Well, rockets--and the word rocket--have been around for a very long time. The word "rocket" is used in the Battle Hymn of the Republic, for example (1814), and a Saturn V looks pretty much the same as a bottle rocket, it's just a whole lot bigger.
I suppose I could have used a different term, though. Giant towers supported on pillars of smoke and fire?
1869910
I guess that makes sense, and because she can't tell what is a real memory and what is not, she does not seem particularly impressed.
1869941
The real question is going to be how she's able to tell what are real memories and how many are false memories. That is, would Dale's memory of watching Star Wars or the moon missions seem like something he saw first-hand, or second-hand? We know they have movies in the show, but given that Luna's been out of it for a thousand years, how familiar will she be with that type of entertainment?
1873869
Science fiction movies also probably still look like this:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Le_Voyage_dans_la_lune.jpg
Or maybe this:
stevenbenedict.ie/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Frau-im-Mond.jpg
1873908
Very true--from what we've seen in the show, special effects are likely to be very primitive. That would give credence to the idea that Dale had actually seen all those things in person. (An aside: I'm not convinced they would even have sci-fi movies yet; my headcanon puts them at the very beginning of the sci-fi genre [and, in fact, in one chapter, Twilight makes a mention of the new genre and a book by "Winter Rye" (which was a ponification so obscure nobody got it)])
That having been said, I'd think that Luna would know that dreams are not memories, and would use due caution in anything she tries to interpret from a dream.
1874614
Science Fiction shows up almost as soon as film does, that famous movie "A Trip to the Moon" was made in 1902 and the first adaptation of Frankenstein was made in 1910. It makes sense that Science Fiction would be so readily adopted so quickly by the fledgling industry, the latest technology being used to show how technology might progress in the future.
I'm afraid I can't think of what Winter Rye could be in reference to.
1874652
That's very true, and perhaps I'm not giving the ponies enough credit. To be honest, I don't personally classify Frankenstein as sci-fi (although I can see how it would be). I usually consider Wells to be one of the first sci-fi authors. However, out of curiosity, I just now checked Wikipedia and see that my definition is way too narrow, so I will concede that the ponies undoubtedly have a genre of science fiction of some sort, and probably have for a while. Whether or not it was classified as sci-fi to them? Well, I'll leave that up to the pony scholars.
As for the author? Issac Asimov, whose family name meant 'winter crop' in Russian, and rye is one of the grains which has a winter variety.
1874716
Well, magic is science, so anything which involves speculative magic is arguably science fiction. That being said, ponies don't seem as interested in pushing the boundaries of the known as humans are. At least that's how I interpret your interpretation of the ponies.
I think I remember hearing that about Asimov before. Will Winter Rye be playing a role later in the story?
1875521
That's somewhat debatable--we've seen Twilight do research of various types, and, of course, since in their world magic = science, we've seen her do some magical research. We've also only seen a small slice of Equestria, and that for a fairly short period of time, so we really don't know. Evidence in Ponyville, though, certainly does suggest that they're generally very conservative when it comes to new things; furthermore, we've seen that the ponies in Ponyville prefer to do things the 'traditional' way, even when there are more efficient alternatives available (Applebuck, Season, Super Speedy Squeezy 6000, Winter Wrap-Up).
Probably not in the main story, but in a side story? Perhaps....
1875701
In the show certainly, but in your story we have seen how the ponies have been largely uninterested in exploring the heavens. I really can't comment on canon, but in the Celestia Sleeps In universe ponies seem especially conservative.
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We haven't seen that many ponies interested in the night sky besides Twilight, and I also had an idea to kind of jab at the modern people who think space exploration is a waste of money. Plus, the whole Nightmare Moon thing suggests that the ponies haven't really cared too much for the night sky, and probably would be even less interested if the alicorn controlling it was out of the picture.
Yes, that's a good observation. In a way, I see a lot of parallels between their society and China's peak and decline in the fourteenth (?) century [can't remember exactly when it was]. While I don't see enough evidence in the show to draw a firm conclusion, I'd say that there's a fair bit of complacency on the part of the ponies--much like I unfortunately see in a lot of Americans.
1877444
How so?
1877469
China?
Well, they had printing presses, paper money, rocket launchers, the best navy in the world, seismographs, had developed the three laws of motion, and heaven only knows what else. They sailed their ships to every part of the known world, said "We're the most advanced culture in the world," (which was true) "so there is nothing more to discover." (which was false)
They dismantled their navy, closed their borders, and lived out the next several centuries with a smug look of satisfaction on their collective faces . . . right up until the nineteenth century, when they realized that the world had moved on, and they had not.
This is something I see and hear a lot of from our largely conservative clientele, although they cloak it in a general suspicion of government demanding that they adopt technology that they're unwilling to understand or even investigate (LED or CFL light bulbs, hybrid or electric cars [or even computerized engine controls], cleaner sources of energy, improvements to any vaguely government enterprise, AMTRAK or any other public transportation, environmental regulations, vaccines, etc.). The net result, I'm afraid, will be a society that largely falls behind in the world, when other nations do adopt newer, better technology. Some of it, perhaps, is a fear of change, and perhaps I've been blessed to watch older technicians fall by the wayside because they were afraid to learn new technology, and the old stuff just isn't there any more.
The fact that the ponies of Ponyville have been willing to put up with spending an extra day on Winter Wrap Up instead of adapting new ideas (maybe unicorn magic would help them finish faster) or to consider the advantages of the Super Speedy Squeezy 6000 [legend of John Henry, isn't it?] could be a concern as other societies, such as the griffons or minotaurs, do adopt newer and more efficient technology, and the ponies' knowledge base and skill base falls further and further behind.
Or, I could be completely overthinking things.