Points of Canon: S6x22 - Pony Point of View · 6:46pm Oct 1st, 2016
Back to our irregularly scheduled!
Irregularly, because things have a weird tendency to show up out of turn lately.
Boat trip. Why am I thinking of “Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog?)” Regardless, since the whole point of this episode is the Rashomon effect, much of the imagery presented is explicitly unreliable. They’re really want to make us doubt the narrator these days, don’t they? Keeping this in mind…
- Starlight Glimmer is not in evidence. Exactly how long she’s meant to have been avoiding everypony, again?
- Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy are attending their Cloudsdale Flight School reunion. School reunions are a thing. We already knew that they attended the same flight school, but more confirmation doesn’t hurt.
- Twilight uses tea bags. She’s not as serious about tea as you’d suspect. Notably, she’s uses the type of tea bag that was only invented in 1944 in our world.
- Opalescence is unusually friendly today.
- For the first time in primary canon, we see sailing ships directly attributable to ponies in detail. Ponies actually do sailing. I wonder, whose flag it is on the mast. And the stern part of the ship changes shape between shots. I guess we’ll have to attribute this to animation error…
- The buildings in port are all on stilts. Some, on very tall stilts for no obvious reason and with no visible means of access, must be pegasi dwellings.
- Rarity has a bag of holding, unless that’s just meant to be a visual gag.
- So Applejack got a treasure map for this trip. Is this a “real” treasure map, as in, possibly fake map to a supposed real historical treasure, some kind of entertainment map where the treasure is buried deliberately for the customer, or…?
- How exactly a seabound creature like the trihorned bunyon (sp?) acquire the taste for cucumber is anyone’s guess.
- And in the end they do fish a treasure chest out of the sea.
Not a whole lot except the fact that ponies are a seafaring culture which is significant, but not exactly very useful due to insufficient detail on the industrial applications of seafaring. The unanswered question for today is… Just where is that port? The nearest port is pretty far from Ponyville on the map.
P.S. Rarity’s outfit in Applejack’s version of the story is drop dead gorgeous.
Given how the ship's flag closely resembles that of British Columbia, it's likely that they're in Vanhoover.
Also, the trihorned creature was a bunyip, a creature from aboriginal Australian mythology... in Canadian waters. Go figure. And yes, that was actually an accurate portrayal of one description of a bunyip's physiology.
4235270
Nice catch on the flag.
That’s a really long trip to make for an unspecified friendship emergency though…
I think it was "bunyip", which is a Australian mythological creature. It is reputed to be amphibious, so that explains the liking for cucumber sandwiches perfectly.
It's interesting to note that we've seen two creatures thus far that would qualify as sea monsters, and both have been very friendly towards ponies. It would seem the writers, for whatever reason, like to bait and switch on that point.
Also, we have more evidence that the ponies (or at least the Mane Six) are very accepting and welcoming of any oddball they encounter, providing that they are at least vaguely civil. Twilight's response to the bunyip was to address it politely and welcome it to the festivities. More evidence against the fairly popular xenophobic ponies headcanon, in my opinion.
4235383
Xenophobic ponies are a Season 1 runaway meme. The only canon evidence for those is Zecora, who actually has other reasons to be feared by ponies, specifically, the Uncanny Valley effect, (she is not a pony, but looks almost like one) as well as the fact that she deliberately positions herself as a mysterious shaman, so putting two and two together ends up not in her favor.
There are a lot of runaway memes like that. :)
I found this to be a rather fun episode. Heck, the way Twilight was analyzing the details of the different stories she heard, putting them together and checking them against outside sources to come up with a logical theory of what actually happened, she'd fit right in as a commenter on this blog!
Ehh, it's a giant castle and we only see one room one time. I'm starting to feel like the absence of Starlight evidence is not the evidence of Starlight absence, though I will agree that A)Meeting friends at the train station and B)Holding a "burying the hatchet" tea party DO sound like great friendship lesson activities Twilight should be pushing Starlight to attend.
This happened during Friends Forever #18. So either it's a pretty strong endorsement of comics being canon, or a huge coincidence. Though the comic came out like a year ago..... I wonder if this episode could have occurred right before Flutter Brutter? Would explain why Rainbow and Fluttershy were both visiting Cloudsdale together.
This is actually a pretty big piece of canon here, Oliver. Not just Fluttershy, or Applejack with a well-trained dog, or even Pinkie with her weird powers, but Rarity can send her persnickety cat out to deliver a letter. How are the pets trained/intelligent to handle this? (I feel like Rarity would only entrust a letter informing a friend of her inability to miss a social gathering if she was quite certain the message would reach its target, because skipping an event without notice is quite rude.) Heck, I don't think anyone could do this with a dog either.
Want to agree with 4235270 's comment, saw that flag and it holds up. I think this is our first glance at Vanhoover. But then what is Seaward Shoals? The name of the Boat company? Also, why does the mainsail have an apple on it?
I assume all objects fitting in things they shouldn't fit in to be a visual gag, it happens way too often to be anything else.
Based on the ending, it looks like the final option. They pull a real treasure out and eat ice cream out of jewel encrusted goblets. I would guess costume jewelry.
I do wonder. Do ponies fish? I mean there are a lot of theories about ponies eating fish... Do they trade with other nations across the sea, or at least between different towns?
It's Rose's outfit from Titanic. images2.fanpop.com/image/photos/9500000/Rose-titanic-9513230-334-500.jpg
Isn't one of the comics about Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash attending a class reunion? Maybe that will help place the episode in the timeline.
4236248
I’d settle for a few days one on one with a real live pony who can answer questions coherently. :)
Meeting friends might or might not be something Starlight would be pressured into attending, but the tea party would definitely be required for course credit.
That does sound like a good idea.
Most of the time, Rarity actually has trouble getting Opalescence to do anything the way Rarity wants, and Opalescence shows few signs of understanding what is desired of her, so I really have no idea. I suspect Fluttershy’s involvement coupled with a huge bribe of seafood, but even that shouldn’t be enough to guarantee results…
A guess: They didn’t just rent a boat just for entertainment, but also wrecked it, and apparently didn’t suffer all too much for it, dirt and water damage notwithstanding. It’s possible the boat belongs to a maritime offshoot of the Apples, and Applejack got the opportunity to rent it cheaply due to familial ties. Notice how Applejack is the one with the map in all three stories.
There’s that infamous shot of Big Mac fishing, and also, the shot of Fluttershy feeding her animals fish, so in general ponies harvest fish at least occasionally. If my memory serves me right, somewhere in Season 5, there’s a shot of fish bones on a plate in a Canterlot eatery, so at least occasionally they also eat fish.¹ I’ll need to track all of those down to be very sure, not right now.
As for trade, there’s that stallion in Manehattan in Made in Manehattan who runs an “oat and hay import/export business,” and Bon-Bon’s “imported oats” in Slice of Life, so of course they trade, and since Equestria is pretty much alone on the continent, and much of the land to the south and north is not conductive to travel, most of it would have to be by sea, which is the cheapest means of transport anyway. But whether ponies actually sail themselves or leave the job to their business partners, that was kinda undefined, since all we had were those comic pirates who don’t do anything piraty. Generally, horses don’t swim that well.
Well, it looks much better on Rarity than it does on Rose!
4236262
Not really, unfortunately. Most of the comics are even more vague about timeline placement than the episodes.
4235383
Under the Sparkling Sea suggests that the sea monsters of Equestria's world have very good reason to be friendly towards ponies; they're basically all from an undersea version of Equestria themselves, complete with a Celestia-like benevolent monarch.
4236248
I had the exact same thought about the reunion. The Flutter Brutter theory sounds interesting, too. Good connection.
4236460
Makes sense to me.
Hmm... Would Equus even have tides? In several areas of fanon, at least, the moon is a fairly small body easily manipulated by Luna. Would its gravitational pull have any effect on the daily ocean level at all?
Nevermind all the Newtonian problems with moving the moon around at all... if a force on the planet acted upon the moon, Newton's third law of motion would completely devastate said zone on the planet.
4236817
As far as I can tell, no. Because the rest of the canon sums up to the moon being very small and not capable of producing tides. I wrote about this.
Tides cannot be a reason to build on stilts in this fashion anyway, because then, roads and the pier would be completely inaccessible at high tide – that part of the port is not built on stilts, and the pier is nearly level with the water. I.e. if tides exist, highest possible tide is today, and yet the houses are higher still.
4236460
Putting them all together, looks like there is a Apple branch in Vanhoover, the Sea Apples (sea apples are actually a type of sea cucumber, which could have the Bunyip in the first place). Normally the Sea Apples not only harvest sea apples, they also provide shipping and trade to and from the Pine Apples living on tropical islands.
Applejack rents their boat for a song, and its not a big deal when it breaks, because it's the equivalent of when one of her barns breaks, the Apple clan can rebuild that boat in a few hours.
4236884
Pine Apples? ...Don't those guys make explosives though?...
4236866
So... some kind of storm surge thing perhaps? Hurricane protection? In a world where the weather is controlled by the citizens?
4236892
Surprisingly, yes.
Suppose that natural cloud and weather formation occurs over the ocean without pegasi, i.e. like in Everfree, “the clouds move all on their own.” It cannot possibly be practical to patrol sufficiently large stretches of the ocean to prevent all possible hurricanes and storms. And specifically, it’s the catastrophic ones that the pegasi will be unable to break up by the time they reach the mainland – simply because they’re too strong and too dangerous to fly into.
So yes, hurricane protection would be it.
4236902 In Equestria, "hurricane protection" is code for extortion from the Pegasus Mafia. "Nice little seaside town you got here. Be a shame if a giant storm came through. You need hurricane protection."
4236946
So what do they use instead of a horse's head among the bedsheets, then?
4236982 Somepony's pet hominid, obviously.
4235285
Perhaps they are related to Kappas?
whole point is the Rashōmon effect and then they do a BadHolmes and have it be something we absolutely couldn't have foreseen, throwing all the Rashōmon stuff out. Ugh.
I was thinking, "If only there were some kind of magic, a potion perhaps, that one could use to see what really happened."
or she did it herself or her family did it.
4235476
dragon, changelings, Luna…it depends partly on how mainstream you feel the Flower Sisters are.
4236248
Makes the line about luxury cruises never sinking that much better!
4236892
4236902
❧Ocean has wild weather coming up, a storm they didn't expect; nopony bats an eye.
❧Silver, copper? coins of old,
❧❧even if plants, the idea of non-gold coins is there.
(*checks* yup, bejeweled silver chalice right on the 3.5 art object table. Admittedly lapis lazuli rather than amethyst, and amethyst has amusing connotations on a beverage-container, being believed by Greeks to prevent intoxication…)