Catastrophic overanalysis of "Equestria Games" · 3:14pm Jan 7th, 2015
Okay, hear me out.
Cloudsdale was trailing Ponyville by one medal going into the Ice Archery finals.
The Ice Archery finals had four competitors, two of which were from Cloudsdale. There were no Ponyville competitors.
Medals are awarded to the top three competitors.
Ponyville still wins in terms of overall medals won.
Ergo, they did not award medals for Ice Archery that year. Presumably because of the frozen cloud of death debacle. That must fscking suck for the ponies who had a shot at Olympic gold that year and who will be out of their athletic prime in another four years. "Oh, sorry, that one brown pony scratched a shot so now NONE OF YOU GET ANY MEDALS AT ALL."
Who was that guy, anyway? He looked like Dr. Hooves. What uniform is white with three stripes on the front?
Why do I care about this?
Boycott the games!
Whoa. You know what this means? Whooves had to go to that point in time in order to scratch in that specific event, likely because Spike's spiraling sense of shame drove him to madness, causing him to become a wrath dragon and slaughtering millions!
2706527 I can kinda get behind the idea of that whole event being a bizarre, arbitrary nexus of catastrophic time-fuckery.
I like to think that they never actually award medals for the Ice Archery finals. I mean, given it only took one arrow hitting a cloud to threaten everypony there. I figure something always goes wrong to disqualify that event. The contestants are just happy they actually got to the finals. Some years Ice Archery gets stopped in the very first round.
All the medals for that event were awarded to Spike, and counted for Ponyville. That's not dodgy at all, is it?
2706524
I'm trying to figure out how Pinkie engineered the whole thing, frankly, since Ponyville was absolutely going to either lose or tie if the event went off without a hitch.
I find the whole "tiny-town-beats-everyone" situation highly suspect, suddenly Ponyville is the sports mecca of Equestria? I think a certain Princess with a history of casting spells over her entire town needs to be investigated, specially after she was caught displaying such disturbingly obvious bias during the opening ceremonies.
2706536
IMPOSSIBLE
THEY ONLY WON BY ONE MEDAL
EXPLICITLY
IT'S LIKE YOU'RE NOT EVEN PAYING ATTENTION
2706527
Very nearly headcanon'd. There's a fic there, I think.
Something something biathletes ruined it.
Seriously people, nine whole comments and no one mentions this?
2706544
My memory SNAFU is not a symptom of Alicorn mind control magic. Not in any way, shape, or form. I am not a loyal but unknowing servant only waiting for the keyword to be broadcast so that I may pick up arms and crush the two-leggers.
Anyway, here is a correction. The medals were all awarded to Spike, and counted for the dragon nation, not Ponyville. There is still nothing questionable about this in any way, and it definitely does not imply a massive level of corruption on the part of the Equestria Games Committee.
(Also I was confused by an error in the post: Cloudsdale was trailing Ponyville by one medal, not the other way around. I had to go rewatch that bit and check.)
Temporary dyscalculia is a rare, undocumented side effect of the unicorn security spell. Sadly, the medal tabulator was sacked for incompetence. Ms. Harshwhinny then led an EGC task force to reclaim the misappropriated medals from Ponyville. The negotiations between Harshwhinny, Rainbow Dash, and a certain strabismal quintuple-medalist were the inaugural use of the Palace-Tree's conference room.
Do you mean Ponyville was UP by one medal? Because if they were down they lose no matter what. If they are up, though, and medal count is like Ponyville 10-9-10 and Cloudsdale is 9-10-9 then as long as Cloudsdale doesnt take gold Ponyville wins in medal count
2706558
Yeah, uh, maybe you were influenced by the fact that I typo'd it in the original post. Corrected now.
IT'S LIKE I'M NOT EVEN PAYING ATTENTION
2706576
Yeah, that's why it doesn't make sense! Ponyville is up by one before Ice Archery, but if Ice Archery goes off without a hitch, Cloudsdale has to win one and is likely to win two. The only way Ponyville can win the medal count by one medal, as they say in the epilogue of the episode, is if Ice Archery is completely a loss and no medals were awarded at all. (EDIT: Which is to say, yes, I put the names of the towns in the wrong order. Fixed now. Sorry!)
This entire comment thread is olympic gold
I imagine that In the investigation following the incident, it was determined that the Cloudsdale team was lacing their arrows with Windigo blood platelets for extra iciness. They were both disqualified.
All part of the systematic way the games try to stick it to Cloudsdale by never letting them host, blatantly mocking their anthem and cheating them out of the medals count win.
2706543
To be fair, Ponyville does have how many pegasi who got the chance to go to the Wonderbolts' academy?
Clearly that town is full of ringers. Applejack won a bajillion ribbons at the Equestria rodeo, and Rainbow Dash's team somehow got second in the relay despite one of their members being blatantly awful.
You don't need to win every event to win the medal count, you just need to do well enough in enough events.
Regarding the four-year gap between Games, I honestly can't remember if this was mentioned on the show or not. It could be an annual event. Or, it could be a once-a-decade event, which would really suck for those poor ice-archers.
It was an assasination attempt! Whoever interfered with Spike's fire breathing, they must have hoped that when Spike breathes on the frozen cloud, it will be sent to Celestia and crush the Princesses.
2706640
The interval is never explicitly mentioned. Going with "ponified real world equivalent unless proven otherwise" rules!
The fact that it's based on total medal count at all is baffling. So you can "win" the games as a whole by racking up a ton of bronze medals and beating out communities that win fewer medals, but takes home all golds? And since when would officialdom care about total medal count anyway? That's something for the know-nothing newscasters. You get another medal for winning more medals? This is the Equestria Games, not Mario Party.
... wait, hold on. Why are we speculating here? Somepony in a position to know this is runs an open question-and-answer session here on the aethernet! TO THE ASK BOX.
2706695
I think that sounds like an excellent fic!
2706656
THOSE BASTARDS.
2706682
I hope you find Ms. Harshwhinny's answer satisfactory. It can be summed up as "basically everyone is wrong."
2706797 Well, let's be honest here. All of the Inspector General's responses can be summed up as "basically everyone is wrong." :)
(I'm very proud of the amount of information I crammed into the character-limit Ask box. In particular it was hard to come up with a plausible reason for why I couldn't find the relevant information elsewhere that was also brief. We all know Lovingcup hates it when we don't do our own research, after all.)
You've been on a roll over on the Harshwhinny tumblr lately, by the way, Sky. The holidays season saw a long string of good stuff, like Ms. Harshwhinny in her scrooge outfit. Although the Hotel Soarovski storyline seems like it kind of stumbled to a halt. (I bet doing all that special text encoding was pretty difficult, tho.)
I guess what would annoy me about the episode, at least as far as the medals goes, is how the emphasis is on winning the most of them. As though it would be some kind of Bad End if Ponyville didn't get the most medals. I mean, it's a small town with not much in the way of athletic tradition or facilities. They'd be lucky if they win anything.
Which - if we're going to focus on the medals at all - should be the goal. Can Rainbow & co. get a medal or will they go home with nothing? Then when they beat the griffons and the Wonderbolts, they can be heroes for winning Ponyville's first ever gold medal. Then there can be a brief closing shot of the gold being displayed back at town hall with a handful of bronzes won in previous years around it.
2706815
We're still working on the H̫̄o̮͝t͚͑e̟͝l̻̓ ͕̀S̡͐o̞̒a̢͝r̰̚ŏ͓v̰͠s̨̈́k̻̐ÿ̫ bit. It's harder than some because all the askers seem to have a different idea what's going on and it's hard to incorporate all the asks without excluding any of them. Captain Skywanderer is apparently *staying* there and dispatching mechanical birds that are harrowing Ms. Harshwhinny every time they deliver a message. Super Trampoline thinks Lovingcup is personally endangered, and Nurse Dan has his eye on the place and is apparently trying to bring it down. It's a lot of disparate asks to coordinate!
The text encoding is actually very simple due to some clever people on the Internet who are not me: Clicky clicky.
2706580 Well, that actually explains a whole lot. The evidence of the past twenty-four hours is that I am unable to call you on stuff until someone reminds me that you are mortal and only really good (rather than perfect), since I didn't even really notice that.
2706695 Premise rejected; insufficient time-fuckery (see 2706532) (but really, it's good, and anyways you should trust Skywriter's word over mine like a billion times over anyway).
2706797 SPOILERS: wrongest are biathletes.
ETA: NO I WON'T GET SICK OF THIS JOKE AND YOU CAN'T MAKE ME
2706847 Yeah, the ongoing Hotel California aspect of the place is why I've been staying well clear of it; I wouldn't feel like I could contribute properly to that kind of uncollapsed waveform. (Although I do like the theory that the Hotel Soarovsky is always true for everyone, for a certain standard of "true.") I think I submitted one vague ask re: golem maintenance and that was it.
Also too, it isn't like you need more people jumping into that pool. When Super Trampoline and horizon are actively involved, plus a guy with cool mechanical rocs, the storyline is probably as full as it needs to be, you know? You just kick back and watch at that point.
I do kinda wish Jellybean were staying there, because his relentless good nature and extremely grounded personality would mix interestingly with the place, but one can't have everything.
Other unconsidered possibilities:
- Two Cloudsdale athletes won medals, and then one of them promptly defected to Ponyville.
- There are two Cloudsdales, and the Ice Archery competitors were from the second one.
- The IEGC took the long view for once, and when they realized that a dragon with long memories and a personal connection to Princess Celestia got involved, they retroactively made him a competitor and awarded him the gold.
- Ice Archery judging is so hideously complicated that medals are awarded based on the previous Games' performance, and the event we watched was actually the one that will be scored and medaled in another 4 years.
- "White with three stripes" guy, who was not from Cloudsdale, was retroactively awarded all of the points (all. of. them.) and all three medals, because destroying the playfield in Ice Archery is like catching the Golden Snitch in Quiddich.
2706657
In that case the answer is obvious! The ECG apparently is corrupt as FIFA and IOC.
- Filthy Rich must have "donated" a "small" "gift" to the commission on behalf of Ponyville.
- Rarity and Applejack (through their respective work contacts in Canterlot and Appeloosa) must have wondered aloud to the ECG just how much it would be a shame if the Games lost their advertising revenue if Ponyville did not win.
- HSH Twilight casually mentioned off-hoof that she (and the Equestrian Revenue Service) could find plenty of time to audit the ECG if Ponyville did not make it to the games.
- HSH Cadance threatened to boycott the Games on behalf of her sister-in-law, former foal-sitee, and fellow princess, if the judges did not rule in Ponyville's favour.
Wow, dick move. D:
2707279
This is my favorite explanation yet. I officially dub them "Cloudsdale Prime" and "Shadow Cloudsdale."
I like the fact that Rainbow Dash started acting like the North Korean Olympic coach, where she was carefully strategizing everything to maximize medal count. I do wonder if Cadance, as the official host of the games, felt maybe she owed Ponyville a little quid pro quo for securing the Crystal Empire as a host site, but this is the faux-Olympics we're talking about, not the faux-World Cup!
"Trailing by one medal" might've referred to trailing by a GOLD medal. If Cloudsdale didn't get one, then obviously, they wouldn't have won the cup.
Another possibility: we didn't see all of the competitors due to them having multiple sets of the event (i.e. too many competing athletes/teams and not enough targets or it was a safety issue, so the event was run multiple times). If this is the case, then Cloudsdale might have had two athletes competing, but if both failed to place....
And then there's the stuff everyone else has already mentioned.
2708326
Hm. Not sure! Dash seems to think the aerial relay silver she won contributed to the medal count win, so I think they count all of them. It's true that if there are multiple trials and only four targets (rather than four competitors total), Cloudsdale might conceivably fail to medal with both.
Thinking about this really really hard is obviously the best use of my time.
2707561
Oh, so THAT'S where bat ponies come from...
2708742
Yes, and also evil Misty or whoever that jerk was in "Rainbow Falls."
2709312
Fleetfoot?
2709736
Yes, That wench.
2707561
A spokesmare for the Cloudsdale Weather Corporation had this to say at their morning press conference:
"The CWC vehemently and completely denies the existence of a so-called 'Shadow Cloudsdale.' It definitely cannot be reached by coating yourself in rainbow juice and flying, at speed, into the deepest, darkest heart of the permanent thunderhead kept in the Weather Factory for cloudsmithing needs. Once you fail to arrive there using this nonexistent and terrifying method of transit, you will not... I repeat... will not encounter a black and twisted parody of our fair city, where a horrible death sun hangs overhead, illuminating all with its terrible un-light.
"It is also not inhabited exclusively by ponies who are exact physical duplicates of everypony you ever loved who died, but who profess not to know you and whose curiously soulless eyes follow you endlessly. Furthermore... and we cannot stress this enough... you cannot, in this non-existent city, find for purchase industrial quantities of the so-called 'forbidden colors.' The CWC would like to remind everypony that infragreen, mega-yellow, forsaken blue, and awesome black do not actually exist. Which is why the possession, manufacture, import, or export of them are illegal. Because they don't exist."
At this point, the representative paused and made eye contact with each pony in the press corps, individually, for an uncomfortably intimate period of time, reiterating with hoof-pounds to podium: "They. Do NOT. Exist."
She continued, "This impossible city is also not the source of the black..."
And here she paused, and whispered "So very, very black," before continuing "... of the black piezoelectric golems who form the new security details for important CWC and Senate personages, as well as our most secure facilities. These golems... which are colored a perfectly normal and non-awesome shade of black... are manufactured in perfectly normal facilities in a perfectly. Normal. City. I was escorted to this press conference by two of them this morning; they are standing behind me right now and they are, as you can see, perfectly normal."
When questioned by reporters as to the apparent conflict between her statements and the "Product of Shadow Cloudsdale" labels affixed prominently to the flanks of her golem security detail, the spokesmare snarled, "NO MORE QUESTIONS" and, along with the golems, vanished in a burst of clouds and lightning, as is the normal end to all such press conferences held by the CWC.
Coming up next: a special report on alicorns. Could your foal secretly be one?
-
This is part one of Welcome to Cloudsdale. The next part may be found here.
The Welcome to Cloudsdale masterpost may be found here.
2711327
If you see something, say nothing, and drink cider to forget.
(Remind me why you have zero stories again?)
2711457 Laziness and lack of drive, mostly.
I can just about manage to do comments, criticism, and general editing work. I don't seem to have the mojo to write many stories on my own. Sometimes something hits me right in the head like "Shadow Cloudsdale. Of course there's a Shadow Cloudsdale, and of course it has forbidden rainbow colors, and of course I'm going to write about it." That's unusual for me, unfortunately.
I wish it weren't.
Pfft, you care for the same reasons the rest of us do.
Because ponies are everything.
2711645
Well, if that ever changes long enough for you to squeak out something resembling a story, I'd love to help beta it.