FOE Mapping: Well, So Much for That... Plus a Little Vindication · 11:12pm Aug 4th, 2012
...at least, if there's any intention of trying to keep anything canon. Because here's the first canon map of Equestria.
Right off the bat, apparently it was "Los Pegasus" (Los Angeles) and not "LAS Pegasus" (Las Vegas). I'm far from the only one who leapt to the incorrect conclusion, but it's still wrong. That "distances not to scale" blurb in the lower-right corner means the official canon map is still really loose, too, meant only for giving a general idea of where stuff is located relative to everything else. Ultimately, the canon map kinda looks like one of those 17th/18th-Century maps of the world, where even with the best efforts of the day their estimates were way off, screwing up the shapes of entire continents.
*writes a few pages of commentary, reads it over, decides it's not really worth going over with a microscope, and deletes it*
Let's TL;DR this thing. There is NO WAY to reconcile the geography with any of the popular fan-made maps or FO:E fics. Just as one example, Manehattan is "really" to the northeast of Ponyville instead of southwest per Fallout Equestria. That pretty much throws off everything for every fic that followed, since everyone was going off Kkat's work.
The only map which got anything right outside the Ponyville/Canterlot area was, um... well, mine. Because I was adapting from a map of North America, which I figured the show was more or less doing, because they kept using ponified names of real-world locations. So I got Manehattan, Fillydelphia, Baltimare, Canterlot, Ponyville and a couple of mountain ranges right --- pretty much everything in the northeast corridor, I pegged.
So, I dunno, I might resurrect my mapping project now that I can hope --- HOPE --- to get less grief over it.
I was actually going to ask you about this, but you beat me to the punch. It is pretty cool to have a canon map of everything now, but that means certain things no longer click. Part of me wants to fix all my locations in Blood and Anywhere, and part of me doesn't really give a shit.
Still, you made a pretty good call to go with a mockup of America. I always assumed they were working with something more akin to Europe.
276816
Eh, I think it's going to boil down for a lot of folks to "no way in Tartarus". Even before this, trying to get more than a few FO:E fics to gel in terms of anything close to geography was a cat-herder's nightmare.
Ah well. Guess I'm just a wee bit masochistic like that.
well project horizons is worse of because hoofington isn't even there and the climate and rivers and stuff cant really make sense with the canon map really, I am a little curious as to what the badlands and the place called hollow shades. we can safely assume that the crystal empire is in the crystal mountains.