Comic Review: Friends Forever #3 · 12:58pm Mar 12th, 2014
We're at the third issue of Friends Forever, and already we've reached Best Princess. Can Princess Celestia save the day? Of course she can, because she's Princess Celestia, and she's awesome.
Oh, and Spike's in the issue, too.
That's nice.
While holding court one day, Celestia receives a visit from Spike, now all by his lonesome. Twilight's birthday is coming up, and he wants to get her a new telescope as a present. Unfortunately, the local telescope maker, Starry Eyed, has run out of lenses, and the best ones can only be found on the Crystal Mountain. Only the bravest of adventurers can make that climb. And so Spike (who is not the bravest of adventurers) and Celestia (who is usually not an adventurer) set out to make the perilous climb. Can they survive the mountain's denizens and the sudden hazards that pop up on these quests?
I'll get the negatives out of the way first. The issue is drawn by Agnes Garbowska, the same artist from Spike's micro, and is in the same style. In other words, it's very simplistic and generically cartoonish, with rounded faces and muted colors. This is especially bad with the new beasties, the Rock Lobsters, who look like they don't even belong in FiM to begin with. The issue is also very exposition-heavy; much of it is simply a running dialogue between Celestia and Spike as they climb the Crystal Mountain in search of the Crystal Lenses to build a Crystal Telescope or whatever.
And now for the good.
The issue takes time to develop both Spike and Celestia. The dragon is presented as being unsure of himself, especially when without Twilight or the rest of the Mane 6 around for support, and yet isn't treated as a punchline or a chew toy. He's just a little guy who wants to do something nice for a dear friend, and as the story goes on, he's able to save the day not once, but twice. Heck, he jumps into a river of lava just to get the crystals back.
The issue also seems to go against the Faust-driven fanon that Celestia raised Spike, as she says he isn't her subject (apparently she's only princess to ponies, which doesn't exactly make a lot of sense considering there are more than ponies living in Equestria) and was practically inseparable from Twilight during his youth. At the same time, though, it doesn't go out of its way to say that Twilight raised him. (I've said my piece on that piece of fanon in the past, so I won't repeat myself here.)
Speaking of Celestia, I have a feeling this is going to be a controversial issue because it actually addresses something long since discussed in the fandom: why doesn't Celestia step in and deal with all the world-dooming crap rather than just throw Twilight/the Mane 6/a barrel at it? The comic's answer is that she could have dealt with many of them, but as Twilight's teacher, she had to step aside and let her handle things on her own. Of course, this opens the floodgate to accusations of her being more talk than anything, how horrible she is to let a nutcase like Twilight have almost free reign every time an issue pops up, and of course, how Discord and Chrysalis were both able to defeat her.
Except Chrysalis' victory was established even in the episode as being a fluke, and she did defeat Discord – she just couldn't a second time because the only weapons that could stop him were now bound to different ponies. The only fight we've definitely seen her lose was the actual battle part of Nightmare Moon's creation, and guess what? She “won” that one in the end.
The ultimate theme of Celestia's development this issue is that of an old adventurer helping a younger one on the quest. Her role isn't just to be the power or muscle, but to provide guidance and wisdom to the next generation. When they're finally placed in a predicament where Spike has no possible way of making an escape, she easily dispatches the issue. Even the ending moral is about how someone's role can change over time, with Celestia going from an adventurer to a princess to an adventurer for a brief moment.
Overall, this issue was a good one. I hesitate to call it great because, well, the art and the Rock Lobsters. The story is pretty fluffy, but it also offered a good view on both Spike and Celestia, and really adds to their characterization. It's just too bad everyone will be too busy complaining about how full of it Celestia is and how much better Princess “Let Me Do That For You, Stinking Peasant” Luna is.
Next time, Twilight and Shining Armor. Um, wasn't this supposed to be about new pairings? And the first person to mention the words “Francis” or “corn dogs” will be eaten from the inside out by live rats.
Also, I made it through the entire review without mentioning the B-52s.
I read
and immediately thought of
and
img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101002090406/borderlands/images/6/66/Larva_Crab_Worm.png
Desire to read, increasing....
So it was a pretty good comic then? I have my worries too about how Celestia is presented, for obvious reasons. Guess I will have to get it later today, even if I am disappointed in the apparent lack of Momlestia in regards to Spike
You missed the part where the lobsters are also mobsters. ;)
Hard to judge from only the descriptions, but it sounds to me mostly like this comic was trying to walk the tricky line between Celestia as presented in the canon of the show and the Celestia that has been perhaps overbuilt by fanon. The biggest issue pretty much being why she doesn't get more involved and instead constantly uses Twilight as a proxy. Part of that is certainly a training thing (especially now that we've seen it was all leading up to Twilight ascending as an alicorn herself), but I think an even better reason is that even Celestia herself has limits.
Early fanon built her up as some kind of GOD, but the show hasn't really ever born that out. No doubt she is powerful, probably even the single most powerful pony alive, but still it seems only a pony and not a god. She's a superhero, but perhaps one less comparable to DC's Superman (though I still love your fic where she is), and more comparable to Marvel's Captain America. That is to say, none of her powers are beyond the scope of human, or rather pony potential. Her abilities don't exceed those of mortal ponies, rather, they represent the absolute pinnacle of perfection in pony form, including being all three tribes in one. This of course includes magic potential as well, and not just the obviously versatile unicorn variety, but the innate magic of pegasi and earth ponies as well. Plus, she is also over 1000 years old, and as such a has had multiple lifetimes worth of experience by which to further hone her abilities.
That said though, because ponies have magic, the Superman comparison might still be at least partially valid, at least in so far as us mere humans are concerned. We just need to keep in mind that Equestria operates on an entirely different baseline scale. For example, Shining armor is a decidedly mortal pony, yet capable of projecting a shield around an entire city that can keep a whole army at bay.
Although speaking of Shining Armor...
I think this qualifies. I mean sure the show has told us that the BBBFF (a assumedly LSBFF), but really hasn't done much to show it. We've not gotten much more than the most basic and superficial of interactions between them and so seeing there dynamic better fleshed out could be really good.
1919827 I never understood why so many people thought she was immortal or a god. I never got that impression.
Celestia is best princess, something we agree on for once!
1919849
Well, it's hard to argue with the "immortal" part, what with being over 1000 years old. However, given that the episode Magic Duel introduced AGE magic, it seems like any sufficiently powerful unicorn could also choose to be be immortal.
Understating why many choose to interpret her as a "god" is also simple enough, since she does sort of fill that role by being the steward of the sun (and for 1000 years, moon as well). This is of course though where we must again remember MLP:FiM is not the same as our own world. The pegasus race are stewards of the weather in much the same capacity, and the Hearth Carol tells us that unicorns used to be the same for both sun & moon.
Admittedly, Celestia does alone what supposedly used to require the combined efforts of multiple unicorns (if not the entire tribe), however, I'd equate that to moving a car. It can take multiple people to move a car by sheer muscle, but one really strong person can do it alone without needing to be some kind of herculean god. Moreover though, a smarter person can just use the keys to drive it. To me that's really what Celestia does with the sun; she's not wrapping it in giant telekinetic field and literally dragging it across the heavens, but more so just popping the keys in the ignition such as it were.
1919863 Which would make Luna and Celestia more shepherdess than goddess, I suppose :)
Come on, Sunny. Time to get up. Rise and shine.
(muffled complaint) Don't wanna. Too early.
Come on, up and out from behind the horizon right now, young Celestial Being, or you'll wake up Auntie Luna.
1919893 I'm imagining filly Celestia saying those lines.
ComiXology was down (well, not down, but they expired all of their passwords and can't seem to send me a reset email), so I ended up finding a PDF of this issue to tide me over until my mail order copy arrives from TFAW.
I super enjoyed this issue, though I agree that the art is a little weak, as it was in Spike's micro. The character development Spike and Celestia received was quite good and was a a lot more in depth than I expected. Celestia declaring herself to not be Spike's ruler was a little odd, though.
As a general fan of Celestia, I thought it did her justice without making her a tyrannical chessmaster.
I do not have your restraint.
Ski-doo-be-dop...
Ooh, ski-doo-be-dop..
Ooh...
Oh hey, I just realised that the rock lobsters are named after types of rock; "Iggy", "Seddy" and "Metty".
I did like the comic, and anything that gives Spike positive action time gets points from me.
One thing that was subtly irritating me throughout was the unnecessary amount of bold-italic emphasis put on many of the words.
Nearly every single speech bubble has something in italics; not every sentence needs to have inflection spelled out for us! So yeah, that kind of bugged me.
It was okay. Far better than the first Celestia micro but still saddled (hur rhurr) with meh art and a ho-hum plot. I suspect I'll forget what it was even about in a few weeks, as I did with the second Friends Forever (seriously, can't even remember the pair that starred in it). Still, that's better than having it stick in my mind for how terribad it could have been, like the Pinkie and Applejack bait'n'switch. That was the first comic I couldn't bring myself to finish and deleted it to spare myself the agony of wading through its drek.
1919693
I see your Crystal Mountain and raise you a Crystal Planet.
Best issue of anything in months, IMO. I liked the exposition between Spike and Celestia.
Don't really see how Chrysalis's victory was a fluke. The episode straight up told us that Chrysalis boosted by Shining's love was more powerful than Celestia. Against Discord and Sombra she had Luna's help and the final confrontation against Luna was only a symbolic victory for her as the Mane 6 did the heavy-lifting.
Not saying Celestia shouldn't have a reason to shine, but when the reasons given ignore the feats of other characters it get's really annoying.
1919827
1919849
1919863 I've never seen them as immortal (just aging orders of magnitude slower than ordinary ponies) or gods either. Ironic, seeing as though I see them as being far more powerful than many of those who believe that they are goddesses.
1919863 Word of Amy Keating Rogers is that Celestia is dragging the Sun across the sky with nothing but telekinetic strength and that it is the same size as our own Sun, at least in her headcanon. While Word of God holds less weight in this show than in many others, it's something and what I've believed for ages. Of course, while that does imply that Celestia is capable of destroying a solar system with ease, that does not make her a goddess or above pony potential. Sombra was implied to be more powerful than Celestia and he's just a unicorn. So, I believe that unicorns, earth ponies and pegasi are capable of being more powerful than Celestia.
1921865 Agreed. Celestia may be very powerful, but that doesn't make everyone else weak. In my own verse, she's clearly not the most powerful being in the world. More like the fortieth. And she drops way down the list if you include the dead.
I do like the idea that Celestia raised Spike. I don't think that him not being her subject changes that, even if it's surprising.
1922041
No offense to AKR, but I doubt she's ever stopped to considered the sheer scale and magnitude involved (not sci-fi, but this trope probably still applies). To be fair though, she's only a writer on an inconsequential children's cartoon, and not an over obsessed fan with too much free time.
If Celestia had anywhere near a fraction of the power needed to move an entire solar mass through sheer brute force, then the battle between her and Chrysalis should have resembled something out of DBZ and the resulting beam struggle should have leveled half of Canterlot at the very least. Not to mention that if both Equestria's Earth and Sun are the same size as our own, it introduces a whole host of further fridge implications, as readily pointed out in things like certain fan comics.
The only other explanation is that not just every pony is nigh god-like in power, but that the whole world in which they live is basically a goodly realm. Such an Equestria probably couldn't even be a physical place as we humans comprehend it, but more like a representation akin to Star Trek's Q-Continuum. Old memes about all the ponies being made of dark matter asides, that just doesn't seem at all likely.
...
Now having said all that, I do still as previously said agree with the basic conceit that individual ponies are capable of equaling, or even exceeding Celestia, especially since as a pony she's still bound by the basic limitations of cutie mark affinity. Which would be, for example why, Shining Armor is the one in charge of shielding Canterlot. Now, arguably one could try to make a case that such is why it's okay for Celestia to move the sun through sheer brute force alone, but Equestrian magic is only supposed to be more difficult outside one's cutie mark affinity, not impossible. So again, even if Celestia could only use 1/100, or even 1/1000 of that power to do other things, the sheer magnitude of her power would be insane (over 1.8 MILLION times greater than the largest bomb humanity has ever made). A world populated by other ponies that can meaningfully measure against that kind of power probably wouldn't even need a sun in the first place.
Celestia is still amazing in my eye, but more so equal in power to someone like Marvel's Thor. Which might be the fittingest example, since Thor likewise is a demi-god by human standards, but merely an exceptional warrior compared to his Asgardian kin.
Am i the only the one think that Celestia trying to making up for perhaps
overprotecting Equstria too much and not teaching her "little ponies" to stand on
their hooves in the past before learning what a mistake that was ?
1922629
I'll ignore what you're implying here and move on.
Why? Why do so many people believe this? Collateral damage is a sign of ineptitude, not power. There are plenty of far more powerful verses than DBZ which fight in completely different ways. The entire point of a laser is to concentrate a ludicrously large amount of energy onto a ludicrously small point. So, if Celestia had missed, the beam would have drilled straight through the planet with ease without disturbing anypony else. Letting your fight blow up the planet you're standing on tends to be unproductive. And neither wanted their subjects hurt.
I see nothing wrong with a magical being powerful enough to move the Sun being powerful enough to deal with tidal forces, etc.
Why? Seriously? What's wrong with Celestia being that powerful and nothing else? I may not believe it, but I'm missing steps in your logic.
Well, yes. I don't believe that either. I do believe that they have ludicrous magical abilities though.
I'm well aware that Celestia's power renders our own insignificant. I'm not sure what the point of that is, but okay. Also, I beleive that Celestia's shields are stronger than Shining's. His are just bigger.
I think that you're misunderstanding me. I see a pony capable of equaling Celestia as more like a once in ten lifetimes event.
I may not be an expert, but I suspect that you're underestimating Thor. Marvel characters can be pretty powerful.
Well, yeah. I don't think that Celestia is particularly special compared to other alicorns, but that isn't what we were discussing.
Perhaps I've been spoiled by reading Medaka Box, but I see no problem with characters that powerful, and my fanverse is built with the assumption that Celestia really is that powerful.
1922712 Nope
1922718
There is truth to this, but the sheer orders of magnitude involved means that scale alone make collateral damage pretty much unavoidable. To move a stellar mass Celestia would need to be able to output power in excess of 1.8 BILLION of the largest bombs humanity has ever created. Even assuming that she can only convert a fraction of that power into a focused beam (1.8 million bombs) such as what she used on chrysalis, and even further assuming that they were both holding back to the extreme (1.8 thousand bombs), when those two powers collide all that residual energy has to go somewhere. Even if only 0.1% of such a beam struggle clash escaped as collateral damage, the result would still be 80% more powerful than the largest bomb humanity has ever detonated, which means no more Canterlot and probably no more Ponyville either.
Now I'm all for suspension of disbelief so as to facilitate rule of cool, but the excessive scale involved strains credulity. This is why I say that the implications of such power would be that the whole world of Equestria and its population would have to be made of Indestructium just to have survived being in visual proximity of such an event.
Which is perfectly fine. I'm not opposed to the basic concept of beings with unfathomable cosmic powers, but such entities do sort of need to operate on an equally cosmic scale.
If Celestia has the sheer brute force power to move stellar masses and if Chrysalis hopped up on love juices has the power to operate at that same scale, then there is just no way for them to meaningfully fight each other without leveling whole cities in the process. Any attack capable of injuring either of them is whole orders of magnitude greater than even the most powerful weapons dreamed of by humans.
One could maybe argue that what actually injured Celestia in that fight was the effort she had to exert containing the collateral damage. That however doesn't really work so well when we further consider the fight between her and Nightmare Moon , as seen in the S4 premier, where similar attacks were flung about with far more reckless abandon, and yet even the misses only caused relatively minor damage to their castle.
...
The only way I can really see such a powerful interpretation of Celestia working within the context of what we see on the show, would be a Celestia who doesn't just move the sun, but literally IS the sun. The pony we see being then only a magical construct, an avatar she uses to interact with mortals, and thus orders of magnitude less powerfully than her TRUE form. Which is actually an interpretation I've fancied at times.
1922902 Okay. You aren't getting it. So I'll spell it out for you. That beam contained over a hundred times the energy required to blow up the solar system and every. single. joule. was absorbed by Celestia's face (Okay, barring the light show, but for all intents and purposes). You don't have to tell me how that compares to human weaponry. I'm well aware that this means that if every bomb that has ever existed blasted all their energy onto her eye, she probably wouldn't even notice. Celestia and Chrysalis are that powerful (and yes, they're dwarfed by Discord). And I see nothing wrong with that. There is no collateral damage because they have the power to decide that their destructive blasts don't harm anything a centimeter away from what they want to harm.
EDIT: Basically, you don't have to tell me how that compares to a nuke, because Celestia is better than a nuke in every way, to the point that she renders them obsolete by such a huge margin that it's like bringing a nuke to a grasshopper fight.
1923414
I'm really not trying to pick a fight here, and if that's the head-canon you choose to indorse then more power to you.
What I'm trying to say, however, is that the sheer scale of power involved would make the lack of collateral damages ludicrously unlikely. The reason I kept comparing it to human bombs was to point out that even a miniscule fraction of that kind of power (0.0000000001%) would still be enough to wipe an entire city and its surrounding countryside off the map. Heck, we could even add another three zeros to that fraction and it would still be SIX times more powerful then the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
1923438 Level the city? More like the planet! I still think that you're not getting it. A being with that kind of ridiculous magnitude in their power has to have ridiculous control of their power in order to not destroy themselves. There is no small fraction! There is no fraction at all! The amount of power that Celestia puts into a beam has no effect on the way it looks at all because every joule does exactly what Celestia wants it to do. I don't have a problem with her being able to make sure that not a single atom outside the target area is affected. Because Celestia tells the second law of thermodynamics to shut up, sit in the corner and cry.
1924632
Occam's Razor -- for me it least, given a choice between Celestia and Chrysalis clashing in struggling utilizing flawlessly precise control over astronomical powers the merest fraction of which could crack whole planets in half -vs- them just not being so insanely powerful in the first place... well, I simply find the latter option the easier and more plausible explanation.
This is not to disparage the interpretations you use as the foundation of your own fanfictions. I just don't feel it's an interpretation that is actually supported in any practical way by what we actually see on the show.
1926791 Occam's Razor works differently in fiction than in real life. Because it has to deal with the complications of authors and the audience they intend to entertain.
We've seen multiple times that their solar system has other planets. Twilight tells us that comets work exactly the same way as our ones. Th comic shows us that the distance to the moon is large enough that it makes the circumference of the planet look small. And we know that it is still capable of eclipsing the Sun. All this is suggestive of a Sun which is similar to a real word star. They have the same constellations that we do. That tells us that they are in the same point in space as real world Earth. The preview of the next comic shows Luna struggling and exerting physical effort while raising the Sun. This suggests that moving the Sun requires physical exertion.
Dismiss the evidence if you wish, or decide that it isn't strong enough to convince you, but don't pretend that it doesn't exist at all.
1926893
1926893
...Seriously, I love the discussion, but it sounds like it's getting a bit personal.
1926893
You do realize that the same comic also showed the moon as much smaller in scale than our own, when it was dragged close enough to Ponyville for the M6 to walk to it. If Equestria's moon is smaller, than it's not hard to believe the sun would be too, especially if it can still be eclipsed by said smaller moon.
Besides, if Equestria really was in a solar system like our own, then Celestia wouldn't really be moving the sun anyway, she'd be rotating the planet (which admittedly would at least make her powers drastically less insane, if still rather extreme). Actually though she wouldn't even really be rotating the planet either, since like our own earth it would be presumably perfectly capable of functioning all on it's own.
1926917 I apologise if I'm getting too heated. I'll try tone it down.
1926926
I'm aware. I'm also aware that the size of the moon varied drastically between panels, so we can't use that as evidence.
Oh, I believe that their solar system used to work like ours, but that it's now a Tychonic Solar System, probably for the same reason that while the continents are still recognisable, they're grossly misshapen, that the water cycle doesn't work anymore and that plants require earth pony magic to grow in Equestria (bar the Everfree Forest, which has it's own issues).
1926917
Yeah, sorry to have an debate like this in your backyard, such as it were.
1927162
I could make further disputes, like how I don't think the water cycle and plant growth actually REQUIRE pony intervention just to function, but rather pony intervention is only used to regulate them and thus make life in Equestria more CONVENIENT, however, we really are both starting to get ever further away from what's verifiably provable using only what is seen on the show, and instead becoming more a matter of divergent head-canon interpretations.
Again, it was never really my intention to invalidate your own head-canon, just to explain why it's not something that really works for me.
1927181 Fair enough.