On Starlight Glimmer and Methods of Equality · 2:19am Jan 11th, 2016
I've been thinking about Starlight Glimmer quite a bit since the season finale, as many folks here have been. As of now, however, I'm not concerned with her antics in the finale, but rather a "what if" scenario about her appearance in the premier. I've been having trouble following through this train of thought to its conclusion properly[1], so I decided to post a blog here and see if any of you fine orbiting bodies have any thoughts you'd like to share.
To briefly recap: Starlight founded a village way out in the sticks where everypony could be perfectly equal. To accomplish this, she takes each Cutie Mark via what I assume is a self-made spell and tosses them in a cave somewhere for safe keeping. Everypony gains an '=' as a Cutie Mark, and suddenly nopony is better than anyone else at anything. And here, friends, is where my mind begins to wander.
In the episode every member of her village pretty much sucks at everything. Even basic skills like baking seem to have been totally expunged. Frankly, the Cutie Map could have been lazy and just waited until they all starved since none of them could probably farm worth a damn. It's not exactly stated explicitly, but the notion I get from Starlight's equality is that everypony's skill sets are equalized to the lowest value of the group. For example, if the Pie family were equalized by themselves, they'd still probably be competent Petriculturists since that's what they all do anyway. The lowest skill value in the group for Rock Farming isn't that low, so the overall reduction wouldn't be so striking. Add a random member to the group who doesn't know rocks from beans, however, and suddenly everyone sucks. The skill floor becomes the ceiling, basically, and excess values are truncated.
I ask you, "did it have to be this way?" And I say no. To achieve Starlight's version of equality there are, hypothetically, two other ways the spell could have functioned.
The first is to average out the skill stats. Take AppleJack and Fluttershy for example. On a scale of one to ten in raw strength I think it's safe to say Fluttershy is a 1 and AJ is a 10. With the average operation they both end up at 5.5 ([10+1]/2=5.5). This is a less civilization ending method than the canonical Lowest Common Denominator method, but still not great.
The second possible function is the most interesting, and frankly would have made Starlight Glimmer into a very difficult character to justifiably obstruct. If her spell instead raised everypony to the highest level of the Equalized group she and her town would be a force to be reckoned with. Imagine if every Pegasus was suddenly as fast and agile as Rainbow Dash, or every unicorn was suddenly the magical equal to Twilight. Holy hay fries, right? On the surface there don't appear to be any downsides to this method. Everyone's as good at everything as the best members of the Equalized group.
Anyone have any thoughts on this? It's starting to sound damned tempting to be honest, if only so I can finally stop sucking at Chess.
[1]Thought of a couple really good things while typing this up. Turns out writing is the cure for thinker's block. What a twist!
Hope you don't mind bumping an old blog...
I wonder if Starlight could have averaged or raised everypony's skills to the same level, but she chose to lower them anyway. That might say some interesting things about Starlight's character.
One potential argument why raising skills to the same level would be a bad idea: how well would ponies be able to control their new, turbo-boosted skills? If a pegasus gains Rainbow Dash's raw speed and agility overnight, but lacks Rainbow's wings-on experience flying at those speeds, will they be able to handle flying that fast? Or will they crash even more than Rainbow already does, and be a danger to themselves and others?
What about martial arts? Any dojo worth its admission fee ought to teach how to kill a pony with one strike, only after teaching the patience and self-restraint to never abuse that ability. Letting a large number of ponies skip to the end result without the character-building beforehand is a recipe for disaster. How many other skills like that are out there?
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Blog necromancy is always welcome.
Starlight a very clever pony. I don't think it's unreasonable to think she could average out or raise the skill levels if she put her mind to it, regardless of original spell design. Whether she would have, if she could back during the Town days, I'm not sure. Her control seemed to be entirely psychological, so as long as she didn't snag any Sherlock Holmes or debate team cutie marks her power wouldn't be in much danger. But, why take risks?
I'm glad you brought up novices suddenly having access to top-tier level power without the accompanying training and experience. When I wrote this blog originally, I couldn't really come up with a downside to everyone suddenly being good at just about everything. I hadn't considered Fluttershy accidentally face planting her way into a tree because she can't bank worth a damn. Or, hell, Trixie suddenly having access to Twilight's magical prowess without any of the training and discernment. We saw what she could do with some rudimentary transfiguration. I can't imagine what sort of trouble she'd cause with the power to alter the local direction of gravity at a whim.
It's very much a Superboy Prime sort of issue, now that I think of it. There's a lot of potential for making trouble for the world with this problem in mind. Thanks again for bringing it up!
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Now I'm reminded of that Justice League Unlimited episode where Gorilla Grodd's grand scheme turns out to be a machine that turns every human and superhero on Earth into a gorilla. It's played for laughs in the episode itself, but someone pointed out to me that the results could have been catastrophic if Grodd had succeeded. Everyone would have panicked at the change—and with huge numbers of panicking people, all of them as strong as gorillas, there would have been a lot of deaths and property damage.