The problem with Luna controlling the stars · 2:37am May 21st, 2014
First: Luna is not confirmed to control the stars, in fact her name and cutie mark suggest only the moon is her domain. If she is able to control the stars then the universe suddenly becomes quite grim and dull in my opinion, and here's why.
If Luna can control the stars chances are they would not be what we define as a star, rather something much smaller and closer, maybe even an artificial construct, thus meaning they have no planets and therefore no life outside of the pony planet. If they are what we define as stars it actually becomes much worse, because it means Luna is a mass murderer with who knows how many accounts of genocide, as moving a star merely an inch in the sky would move it billions of miles in an instant and throw any planets orbiting it into deep space; killing everything on it.
(Not to mention that if they are like our stars, than even if she did move them it would take anywhere from decades to millions of years to notice the change because even at the speed of light the vast distances between stars would mean any shift in position, and therefore light, would have to travel all the way to the pony planet from the point of origin before it becomes a visible change in Equestria's night sky.)
Therefore, by having Luna be able to control the stars either way you look at it it's grim. Either no life exists outside of the ponies' planet because Luna killed them all by moving their suns, or the stars are simply orbs of light, possibly magical in nature, and didn't have, nor ever will have, any planets orbiting them.
This doesn't mean you can't have Luna control the stars, it just means that by doing so you make it to where alien life is pretty much not happening, except in completely separate galaxies where Luna wouldn't even be able to see.
I find this particularly annoying when you have a fic where the pony planet exists within our universe, and we find it via starship, mainly for the reason I stated above, which would be that her moving the stars would kill off life on any planets orbiting it. So humanity shouldn't even exist in this type of universe on a separate planet, or we've somehow been very lucky that Luna never moved the Sol system's star by so much as a millimetre in her sky. (Which is unlikely, considering typically in fics where Luna can control the stars she likes to move them, a lot.)
She'd have to be much stronger than Celestia
2130970 Well, since Celestia took up Luna's duties during the thousand years she was gone, I'm not so sure of that.
Now who said that Luna controls the stars? It's not canon, as we haven't seen her move stars in the show...
See, if anyone is able to move stars, it's Celestia. She already raises the sun daily. But I doubt the princesses have any jurisdiction over gas bodies that are lightyears away... The prospect of Luna controlling the moon AND the countless stars in the system seems a bit outlandish.
But Equestria being found by starships from the local universe? Definitely chalking that up to space magic.
2130977 Moving the moon? kək
2130995 How have you not managed to read a fic where Luna controls the stars?
Seriously, I read relatively few fics compared to others and I've read at least a dozen such fics.
And yes, space magic.
2131005 And taking control of Luna's political responsibilities and stuff... not that anyone would want more politics, as politics suck.
2131035 Politics must be related to your mother
2131042 I'd imagine most of the female populace, and some of the male populace as well.
2131051 Turn down the hwat
2131035
Of course I have. The thing is, I consider such stories to be non-contributive to actual canon, so I don't fret over them like some ponies.
2131079 *air horn*
2131061 Never.
2131079 First of all, I'm not a pony nor will I ever be a pony.
And it may not be canon, but it's a pretty damn popular fanon, so I think it deserves my opinion of it.
2131100
Oh, Steamer. You know what I mean, you overly-technical, smug little bastard.
And you never know, maybe the Conversion Bureau will be right all along!
2131100 :(
2131150 If the CB ever happens, I'm first stating every reason why forced conversions and the changes made to how the person thinks is morally wrong, and then I'm taking up arms against the ponies if I have to.
Also don't mock my smugness, you're just jealous you're not as smug about everything.
2131292
That's not to mention the literally astronomical amount of energy needed to alter the orbit of even one small star even a short distance, must less influence thousands of them at once over vast distances.
2133000 Trips!
2132774
Cute little pastel colored horses trying to bring the peace and unity that humanity has ideally longed for for millennia? Paddle Steamer dun care, viva la revolucion!
I normally am, but I learned not to try to contest you for the title of smugger!
(Heh. That word sounds funny. Smugger.)
2133260 If they want to bring peace to humanity then they should lead by example and be a beacon for what can be achieved, not forced conversion, genocide and brain washing.
I'm also a mugger, so I'm a smug mugger and I'm going to mug you.
2133000 Of course, but mourn thee who try and tell people magic in MLP isn't limitless.
2133282
Paddle Steamer, you poor misguided fool! Equinity aims to save humanity from ourselves! Only when we embrace our pony sides will we truly ever find peace. Abandon humanity's hateful and bigoted ways, my friend! Humans had their chance!
2133282
I don't have to, Tirek proved that it wasn't when he drained most of the magic from ponykind! If it were limitless he wouldn't have been able to achieve that, right?
GG ponywankers.
2133298 Abandon humanity? Never. Not when there's a light in the darkest of dark times of the world.
For the 12th and 9th Armies!
Keeping them safe 'til the river's been crossed
Nicht ein Schlacht, ein Rettungsaktion (Not a battle, but a rescue!)
2133299 Of course. If it were limitless he could just sit there and drain a wowly earth pony for eternity, and still not be done sapping.
But of course, "it wasn't Faust's vision" and thus is disregarded. Which I find funny considering they will count any instance of the ponies being powerful as the "true vision" in the seasons after she left, but anything showing ponies to be in anyway weak is not.
I swear, misanthropes and ponywankers probably take the top of the cake for hypocrisy.
2133334
Oh? And what if Octavia herself personally asks you to convert?
Wait a minute...
[Extrapolating Steamer's response...]
Oh, and nice music. It sounds so very familiar...
*Puts hands in pockets and walks away, whistling*
2133334 Yeah, they drive me up the wall as well when I point out all the horrible flaws in their arguments and why the show does not actually support the princesses being able to control the sun and moon (unless something changed in season 4, but I have skipped most of it and consider what I have seen as more guidelines than hard canon because all of the recent stupid), let alone do all the other crazy shit they propose. I could go into excruciating detail on this, but knowing you, you are probably already on the same page as me here.
2133371 Pretty much my response. Though since OctaScratch isn't canon I doubt I'd need to do that. She'd probably be freaked out enough that it even exists, let alone the clop of them.
Can't tell if still trolling, or being serious.
2133411 Actually Season 4 pretty much shows direct control of the sun twice, and the moon indirectly at least once.
But yea, I think we'd both have the same mind-set on what ponies can, and can't do, not to mention what they would do behaviour wise. Somehow I don't think genocide is on their list of typical and acceptable behaviour.
2133507 Is that conclusively done by someone other than Discord who does not count because he seems to be almost as potent as Q? I know he took control of the sun and moon a while back, but Q could probably make another sun with a snap of his fingers if he felt like it (and he might have actually done something like this, but my memory is rusty). The result is that moving celestial bodies would be trivial for Discord since reality itself is his plaything, although given my general attitude towards this season it does not really matter either way to my headcanon.
And yeah, I think we have more or less the same opinion on what the ponies can and cannot do.
2133567 Well, there was the opening episode where when Celestia a Luna were kidnapped the sun and moon stayed up at the same time with half the sky being night and the other half being day, and when the princesses were rescued they fixed the sky in about 2 seconds.
Then at the end of the season when Twilight has to raise the sun, not only does it not raise on it's own and she realises she forgot to do it, but when she does do it, it's all wobbly and stuff cause she can barely control it. So it looks like someone tied a fly to a piece of string.
2133567
...I think there's a few orders of magnitude between Discord and Q.
2133608 I thought Discord was behind the first one, but whatever. It is not really important either way.
2133714 Based on what evidence? The only limit Discord seems to have is the elements and his own choices which is one more than Q who seems to be essentially omnipotent. Given that they operate in more or less exactly the same way, I think it is only fair to say that Discord is very close to Q in actual capabilities, he just chooses to use his power differently.
2133745
——This already makes them vastly different.
Also, Discord was tricked and defeated by Tirek and stripped of his powers, obviously against his will. So that's a big two more than a Q.
The Qs' apparent abilities include instantaneous matter-energy transformation, teleporting (across millions of lightyears, through entire dimensions, and from other extradimensional planes of existence), moving entire asteroid belts and stars, traveling through time, creating alternate timelines, and affecting universal states of nature such as the gravitational constant (which is different from merely making things disobey gravity). Given what abilities we've witnessed Discord perform—and thus can actually prove he's capable of—he's not quite at the level of the Q.
So, Discord's like a severely limited Q whose range of influence is restricted to one planet (the sun and moon of Equestria are obviously not like real celestial bodies, so I'm not counting them as being their own bodies here).
2133795 Unless someone blasted Q with the Elements of Harmony in a Star Trek episode, that is not something we can objectively say is a difference. Grated it is still a point against Discord, but we do not really know much about the Elements and Q does have limits as well because he did get shut down by the Continuum a few times.
I am not really sure where you are going with Tierek, but I have very clearly stated my opinion on season 4 so that is out of the evidence pool.
As for the other stuff, Discord seems to be happy to just mess with Equestria so it is hard to say if he can do that other stuff or not when they could not tell the difference between messing with gravity and changing the gravitational constant. We also do not know what the stone prison and Elements did, although it is possible that they had a "zone control" effect of some form. Also, there is nothing keeping a Q from appearing to be around continuously on one world while using time travel to mess with other worlds in parallel and we have no evidence to say Discord did not do this. Remember, Discord was intended to be an expy of Q from day one so it is reasonable to assume similar power sets.
Also, Discord did move a star and a moon on screen so we can definitely add that to his list of confirmed powers.
2133856
No, it definitely happened and isn't an outlier, so it is canon. That your opinion of it may be so low as to disregard it is inconsequential to the argument. That would be akin to ignoring evidence pointing to excessive sugar intake being a cause of tooth decay just because you don't like the conclusion that eating sugar could be a bad thing.
All of this is baseless conjecture, as you can't confirm or even support it. Until we see Discord do something, you can't claim he can probably do it just because you assume he probably can—you need to actually support that assumption with evidence before you can make any claims of real value. You could suggest it might be a possibility... but I could also suggest that it might be possible for a man to jump to the moon if his legs were strong enough. Of course, until a man proves he can jump to the moon, we're all confident enough to say that no matter how strong his legs, it's not something a man can do.
...No, that is definitely not a reasonable assumption.
Except that the show's "sun" and "moon" obviously don't obey the laws of gravitation (else moving them would be completely unnecessary in the first place, not to mention difficult at the level of nigh-impossibility for the relatively lower-tech ponykind), which by all observation exists in MLP:FiM, meaning they cannot be physical objects with mass (and therefore gravity), and thus cannot be compared with real celestial bodies with mass. So yes, he moved the "sun" and "moon", but we don't know what that means exactly, since it's obvious to anyone with the most basic understanding of astronomy that their "sun" and "moon" fundamentally cannot be the same types of existences as our sun and moon.
2133886 Hate to tell you this, but you forgot to hit the reply button, so he never got your reply.
2133886
It's twelve weeks old, but oh well.
Editing a reply in doesn't send a message to the person.
2133856 In case you didn't get my last message 12 weeks ago, take a look at it now (above).
2378179 Yeah, it didn't come through until now. I will go ahead and reply, although I have lost the thought process behind it due to time so there are good odds I am forgetting something because I do not feel like reading through the whole discussion again.
I have no idea what was going on with the first part and do not see how it applies so I am going to ignore it, although my stance on season 4 remains unchanged.
For the second part, I have no idea where you are coming from. The quoted text discusses Discord's personality, the uncertainty associated with the Elements, and the known power set of a Q from Star Trek. That has nothing to do with what we have and have not seen Discord do beyond the fact that he is very clearly an expy of Q.
For the third bit, I do not think you understand what the term "expy" means. It is short for "exported character" which means that one work lifts a character from another with little to no modification, usually just the bare minimum to satisfy copyright unless the studio in question owns the character in which case there are very good odds it will be either the same character or something like an identical twin. Given that Discord is an expy of Q, that means he is as close to identical to Q as possible while avoiding copyright claims, which in this case is only the name he gives and the appearance he chooses to use. Given the power sets of the characters, it is entirely possible that it is the same individual in both cases using a different form and name with the possible addition of time travel to be in two places at once because time travel is one of Q's confirmed powers (Q takes Picard back in time to let him tinker with the past and see how it influences the present in one episode).
As for the last part, you are the one making assumptions now. The only incidents of messing with the sun and moon were Discord's doing and the long night in the pilot which could very easily have been a large scale application of illusion/light manipulating magic like what we saw Trixie use to direct light from the sun away from the planet (or at least that section of the planet, I do not think we have hard confirmation it had global reach). Given that body of evidence, the illusion requires far fewer assumptions than trying to come up with an alternative system which makes it the stronger logical position.
2378372
I want to thank you for respecting me by paying an appropriate amount of attention to the argument.
......That was sarcasm, by the way.
You're still wrong—Season 4 happened, and thus it is as a whole "canon" and part of the "evidence pool". Just because you don't like Season 4 doesn't mean it isn't counted among the evidence, and nothing you say or do is going to change that.
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In that aforementioned quoted text, you proposed (without any evidence) that A. "it is hard to say if he can do that other stuff or not when they could not tell the difference between messing with gravity and changing the gravitational constant" and B. "we have no evidence to say Discord did not [appear to be around continuously on one world while using time travel to mess with other worlds in parallel]".
——The fact of the matter is, claiming "we have no evidence to say Discord did not do this" is dangerously close to being an outright negative proof fallacy. Look, you can't claim something is true just because there is no proof of it being false—that's irrational. Sure, I may not have the evidence to disprove it, but you don't have the evidence to support it, either—and the burden of proof is on YOU, the one making the claim that Discord should be able to do such a thing.
And contrary to what you seem to believe, the "fact" (actually it's a claim, not a fact) that Discord is an "expy" of Q (which you also need to evidence for as well!) does NOT constitute as adequate support for the claim that Discord can do anything Q could do.
.
I know what "expy" means, and I also know that it doesn't mean jack shit in this argument. First of all, you'd have to actually PROVE that Discord is an expy of Q, and not merely inspired by the character "Q" (which is different from being an "expy"). Secondly, if Discord hasn't done something, claimed to be able to do something (which is dubious evidence), and the authors haven't confirmed that he can do it, you can't just claim he can do it on a whim. This is two types of fallacy:
• A "no-limits fallacy" (a variation of the "proof by example" fallacy), which is when someone claims that because something has not demonstrated any limits (or only certain limits) it therefore has no limits (or only the ones demonstrated), without actual evidence to support this.
• And more importantly, an association fallacy, which is when someone claims that since "A" has certain qualities, and "B" is in some way associated with "A", then "B" also has those qualities, without actual evidence to support this.
BASICALLY—no matter how similar they may seem to be, Discord is not Q, so you can't treat them as being the same without evidence directly proving that they are. Namely, feats of Discord doing things that Q has done or is known to be able to do.
First of all, they weren't assumptions, they were logical conclusions based on valid observations. Given that the sun and moon need to be moved around, they should not have gravity, since gravity is what causes "orbiting behavior", which is what causes the Earth to orbit the Sun and the Moon to orbit the Earth. But since the sun and moon in MLP:FiM don't seem to exhibit orbiting behavior on their own when Celestia and Luna were captured in Season 4 (which is, once again, canon as a whole regardless of what you think of it, and thus completely relevant), the sun and moon must not be affected by gravity (which is confirmed to exist in MLP:FiM, which Twilight even directly mentioned by name in the second part of the Season 3 opening) and thus it is completely logical to conclude that, because they do not act like objects with mass do under the effects of gravity, they likely do not have any mass (which is the prerequisite to gravitational fields) and are not equivalent to the real Sun and Moon in the slightest.
The "long night" of the pilot isn't even relevant here—that's probably just an example of the "law of subjective time" which is present in pretty much all story media: "don't spend too much in-setting time on boring and unimportant things, but don't rush the exciting and important parts". Ergo, the passage of time is subject to the needs of the story—this is not something that applies within the setting itself (that would be "breaking the fourth wall" in an unacceptible way that harms the audience's immersion into the setting), but rather exists as a convenience for the audience. Furthermore, if you were insistent on saying that it was a "long night", rather than some convoluted explanation using "illusions" as an excuse, it would be most easily explained as the product of NIGHTMARE MOON, whose goal was already to have an everlasting night—so it makes perfect sense for the night to last longer than usual.
2378716 Well, now it is looking like I made the intentional decision to ignore you for stupidity. Seriously, you are trying to claim that Discord is not an expy of Q when they went out of their way to get the same actor, gave the character the same type of omnipotence, and gave him a similar enough personality that it is not hard to argue that it is actually the same character in the two franchises. Really the only difference at all is the aesthetics and name which are quite literally defined on a whim, and the Elements which have nothing coming anywhere close to an equivalent in Star Trek being able to shut Discord down in some poorly defined way.
2378776
Looks like you also made the choice to ignore every point I made that completely tore down all of your points. Like the fact that your arguments are not only misconceptions, but also FALLACIES.
2378776
I guess homages aren't a thing, I s'pose?
2378776
Well, he didn't; but I will.
When interviewed about the character, Lauren Faust said that he was indeed inspired by Q, but clarified that they were not the same character. In fact, one only has to watch both shows to understand that fact.
Discord is like a grown-up child. Everything he does is only done because he thinks it will be amusing. Even befriending Fluttershy was a mostly selfish action.
Q, in contrast, does what he does because of two motivators: a feeling of superiority above all other beings, and a morbid curiosity of the measurement of humanity. True, he also shows childlike attributes, but more the ignorant curious side than the carefree selfish side.
2378776 2378790 With reading a single sentence from the two newest comments in this suddenly restarted debate, I give you my response.
2378814
picgifs.com/glitter-gifs/s/sorry/picgifs-sorry-5158967.gif
2378825 Is too late, for the great shitstorm of our time has already begun.
2378830
i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/2513721600/h5C9C254E/
2378808
2378372
2378163
2378814 Guys guys guys lets go jack off in a circle to the Emperor?
2378835
I'm not a WH40k fan, but even I am pretty sure that's heresy.
2378832
2378830
And to think I caused this all with a single sentence.
Top sentence in my original comment doesn't count.
2378835 The fire stoker has arrived.
2378837
2378845 Wot m8 beitch im a fucking Imperial Saint I know what is heresy and what is not heresy
2378850 Go away, shoo, you're only purpose here is to make the shitstorm bigger by being annoying.