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SilentWanderer


Walking alone, watching the stars.

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Dec
5th
2015

Thoughts about time travel · 6:26pm Dec 5th, 2015

Posted originally as a comment to alarajrogers' blog post about the season finale.

To me, the most interesting detail is Zecora's reaction in the Chrysalis timeline.

She immediately declared that it was her and her followers that "should not be". That means it's not a simple "alternate timeline" scenario, where changing the past creates a new timeline, perhaps erasing the previous one at the same time. To me, Zecora's reaction indicates that it's similar to the spell shown in the Magical Mystery Cure episode (where the Mane 6 cutie marks were switched): the spell rewrote reality to conform to the key changes (in MMC, the cutie marks having "always" been different; in TCR, the Sonic Rainboom never happening). Given that both spells were originally written by the same unicorn, it's not surprising that they would work in a similar way. What Zecora saw using her potions was probably an indication that Twilight and Spike (who were both unchanged by the spell) were "more real" than her and the others.

Since changing reality in such a scale would need an enormous amount of energy, the spell had to keep the divergence to a minimum. That would explain, for instance, why everypony's cutie mark didn't change: it isn't a necessary result of the key change, so not doing it saves energy. In the same way, the spell tried to keep the number of villains being released to a minimum, either by finding another set of heroes to defeat them, or somehow preventing their release (a freaky set of circumstances might have led Celestia to reinforcing the seal on the Crystal Empire before it's broken, for instance). On each iteration, things get worse, either because the spell is getting weaker (thus not being able to prevent stronger villains from being released), or because the spell is getting stronger (thus not needing to reduce the divergence as much).

Once the key change is undone, by letting the Sonic Rainboom happen, there's no more need for any divergence, and the still-active spell undoes all the changes, thus minimizing the amount of energy needed to maintain the divergence. An interesting consequence of all that is that both the "AlternateTimelines are destroyed" and the "AlternateTimelines are left in a hopeless struggle" scenarios don't happen, since there's only one timeline.

Now, as for some of your observations:

I saw someone ask why hasn't Discord changed the past, then.

In my theory above, the spell was more like a high-power RealityWarping effect. Instead of changing the past, it changes the present to behave as if the past had been changed. Discord already is a RealityWarper (though not as powerful as that boosted spell).

Twilight Sparkle edited a spell by Starswirl, became an alicorn. Starlight Glimmer edited a spell by Starswirl, didn't.

The original spells were probably different, and the objective of the edit was different. Starlight Glimmer edited it to change the past; Twilight changed the spell to complete it. It's no wonder that the effect was different.

Unicorns apparently can't memorize worth shit. Starlight wrote that spell and cast it like a dozen times. Twilight cast it several times herself. Yet once the scroll is destroyed, no one can ever use that spell again?

Starlight Glimmer didn't write the spell, she edited it. As others have noted, the spell was probably held in an "executable" form within the scroll. Starlight reverse-engineered enough of it to make her modifications, and perhaps to transfer it from a book to a scroll, but not enough to rewrite it from scratch. Once the scroll holding it is destroyed, it has to be rewritten from scratch.

The destruction of the scroll is also an interesting scene. It didn't seem to me like an accidental effect of the damaged spell scroll; it seemed like an intentional act by whatever controls the Map, destroying the spell only once all its effects were undone. What is the real nature of the intelligence behind the Map? Is it an automaton? Is it some sort of Higher Being? Or something else? And how prescient is it? Did it plan the whole thing since the beginning as a ploy to redeem Starlight Glimmer, or was it caught by surprise by the turn of events?

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