Canon Conundrums · 5:39pm Jul 24th, 2014
I'm contemplating starting up a new project soon, a series of short stories about the the Mane 6 and several ancillary characters growing up in separate circumstances (mostly because I think there's interesting material to be drawn from, say, Rarity and Applejack growing up in the same town before the rest of their life-long friends have arrived). As part of this project, I've been drafting a timeline to make sure my concepts remain internally consistent, including the age of basically as many characters as I can cram in there.
I've also been reading the MLP comics lately, and unfortunately, I'm running into things that thwart my goals of making nice neat timelines. For example, I'd been running under the assumption that Cheerilee is a Ponyviller roughly the same age as Rarity, because we saw a filly exactly like her participating in Rarity's school play in The Cutie Mark Chronicles. But the comics from IDW explicitly place a late-teens Cheerilee with silly '80s hair in Canterlot at Shining Armor and Cadance's school somewhat before the events of TCMC--not something easily reconciled. Given that one character is explicitly stated to be Cheerilee and the other isn't, that suggests that I should lean toward the older interpretation for her, but I had ideas about her and Rarity in Ponyville, blast it.
The canonicity of the comics is a topic very much up in the air, I think, and I already know I'm rejecting some things--like Ditzy Doo living in a hole in the ground with a mailbox labeled "D. Hooves". But the comics also give a lot of supplementary material that can prove very useful to someone wanting to engage in world-building (which is pretty much my entire thing).
Bluh.
IIIRC, Katie Cook find not catch that scene in CMCh. Just go with whatever. Also, she could have moved to Canterlot in the intervening years.
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The story in Canterlot takes place before the events of TCMC--Twilight is a filly with no mark. But yeah, giving the whole thing a shrug and a willingness to do whatever is probably the correct course of action; while not a proper background pony, Cheerilee would hardly be the first minor character with a tendency to show up in places that they really shouldn't be (at least she has the grace to remain an earth pony when she does).