A Legion of Pinkie Pies · 2:15am Jun 15th, 2012
I feel that Pinkie Pie is like a good joke: explain her, and she stops being funny.
I don’t think I’ve read a fanfic yet that set out to explain her without ending in a horribly-depressing way. And that’s just wrong.
A Pinkie Pie fic should be light. It can get dark in the middle, but it really should end on a note that leaves you grinning for at least a few minutes afterwards.
Nevertheless, even if it’s not good form to explain Pinkie Pie to others, an author must be able to explain her to themselves, in at least some form, or she comes across all sloppy.
I have been thinking on this matter for many months, and I have concluded that no single explanation can possibly cover every aspect of Pinkie Pie as shown in canon. Of course, you could say that a lot of her more-implausible stunts were merely jokes and exaggerations by the screenwriters, and should be disregarded. But I consider that to be cheating.
No, I think for somepony as impossible as Pinkie Pie, the only way to go about it is to have multiple explanations for her, and then try to hold them all in your head at the same time.
There are multiple explanations that can be fit into this “Legion of Pinkie Pies”. If you want to be melodramatic, you can see her as a young human woman in an insane asylum, who has completely abandoned reality for her own unique version of the My Little Pony series she watched as a little girl in the 1980’s. Or maybe it’s not a dream, and she actually created this reality with the power of her mind--I call this variant the “Alys Buckman Pinkie”, in which case poor Dashie is her Jason Taverner. Maybe she’s an escaped Looney Tunes character (and yes, I have read a couple of fics that suggested that). Maybe she’s Loki’s agent of insanity, the eight-legged horse Sleipnir (“two and two and two” indeed), but has slacked off from her duties of raising terror because she’s having too much fun. Or maybe she’s the true creator of Equestria, appearing as a mortal pony to inspect her handiwork.
There are two explanations, though, that I find completely explain Pinkie Pie between them: Monster Pinkie, and Dreaming Pinkie.
“Monster” Pinkie grew up in a grim environment. If not an actual rock farm, then something equally depressing. As a filly she was judged by those around her for her seriousness, and found wanting. The result of that difficult foalhood is incredibly-low self-esteem. She is convinced that she is useless, a monster, and will be rejected by her friends if they ever discover who she truly is. Pinkie constantly needs to be told that she’s a wonderful pony, or her own doubts will eat her alive. She constantly strives to be worthy of praise, by giving parties and doing everything in her power to keep the ponies around her happy. Being around serious ponies makes her nervous, because she fears that at any moment that seriousness could be turned against her.
To combat this gnawing fear of hers, Monster Pinkie has an incredible ability of perception, at a mostly-unconscious level. Pinkie is constantly picking up information from everything that happens around her. If she walks past a pair of ponies discussing their worries in private, she will probably not even notice it consciously, but when it comes time for the “Guess What It’s Tuesday” party, she will “just know” to give them just the right presents to make them feel better.
The “Pinkie Sense” works the same way. She is able to pick up cues that nopony else would notice, and translate these into specific warnings, similar to how certain animals are able to predict earthquakes. Her instinctive knowledge of how the world works is also invaluable in her inventing. Here she is truly a genius, creating machines that nopony else had ever imagined but, typical of Pinkie, she never thinks of using them to become famous or even to improve the lives of ponies, but only as a means to strengthen her emotional ties with others.
A relationship between this version of Pinkie and Rainbow Dash would be a very bad idea, in my opinion. Dash is the one who inadvertently liberated Pinkie from the hellish world she used to live in, and she’d be a completely-adoring slave to the pegasus. Dashie, on the other hand, would get a constant stream of praise from Pinkie, which as we’ve seen will go straight to her head.
For my other explanation of Pinkie, imagine her as a goddess. Not, like Celestia and Luna, a mortal possessing long life and magic several orders of magnitude greater than any other being on the planet, but a true immortal with limitless power to shape reality. Imagine her as one of the grimmer of the goddesses, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse-level grim, in some universe probably inspired by a video game franchise.
After tens of millions of years of doing her job, this goddess takes a nap...and dreams. Mortals create fantasy worlds in their heads for their dreams. Gods visit other universes as unlike their own as possible when they sleep, and live lives as mortals.
The goddess sees her life as Pinkie Pie as a game with rules to be followed. But she gets bored easily, and is prone to bend the rules of what she should be able to do as a mortal. The one rule she never, ever breaks is this: Don’t get caught. If the others figured out what she was, they’d probably put her in charge, and running Equestria would be no fun whatsoever. So she cheats like mad to keep from getting caught.
Her primary cheat is time travel. Of course, we watching the show don’t get to remember the “before” and “after” versions of reality, so here’s a hypothetical example:
The ponies are in Twilight’s library, looking for a book that has the obscure information needed to stop the monster rampaging though Ponyville. Said rampage has caused all the books to fall from the shelves, which means that Twilight can’t find the one she needs. Everypony’s helping her to find the book. This goes on long enough to get Pinkie bored--a solid two minutes. So she just reaches out without looking and grabs the book and gives it to Twilight. Ah, but Rainbow Dash catches her at it, and calls her on it. Twilight being Twilight, instantly decides to obsess about this little book trick instead of, I don’t know, saving a couple dozen buildings from being demolished. And Pinkie’s secret is exposed.
Well, we can’t have that!
Pinkie goes back a hundred years, disguises herself (badly) and gets an apprentice position with the author of the all-important book. In this way she makes sure that the copy of the book that ends up in Twilight’s library has a bright yellow cover. Then she jumps to a week before the monster rampage and goes into the library to very loudly consult the book to copy out a drawing for a party she was planning, and she makes sure to show the garish cover to Twilight and joke about what kind of book cover Rarity might sew for it if she ever saw it.
Now when Rainbow Dash says “Hey, you found that book without even looking at it! How’d you do that?”, Pinkie can reply “Because it’s only the most glowiest-yellowiest book in the library!”, and Twilight will say “Oh that’s right, you showed me that book a week ago.”
Problem solved.
“Monster” Pinkie couldn’t appear in a mirror. Dreaming Pinkie would never have a nervous breakdown. She somehow has to be both at the same time. With two or three other Pinkies thrown in as well.
I’ve got a couple more explanations of Pinkie that I don’t think I’ve seen anybody suggest yet, but I’m saving them for a couple of fanfics that are pretty far down in my pipeline of stories to write.
