Jan
29th
2017
Points of Canon: Friends Forever #33 · 4:35pm Jan 29th, 2017
I’ve got some time, but no energy to write.
But I can analyze canon in my sleep. :)
So here we have the first source to feature Cherry Jubilee in forever…
- Cherry Jubilee’s farm has a silo marked with a cherry symbol. Whatever they keep inside is a mystery, because a cherry orchard wouldn’t have much hay to store, we see no cattle, no fields. Cherry pits?…
- So Applejack helps out Cherry Jubilee for some reason. A little bit contrived, but possible.
- The reason Cherry Jubilee is in need of help in the first place is that most of her crew is sick with “equine flu.” I’m guessing this is a scientific name for “pony sniffles,” which I snarked about already. Applejack further comments the disease is seasonal.
- “Wild west shows” are a thing. Which is strangely ambivalent in an environment where wild west is itself a thing. The actual name “wild west” has nowhere to come from. Moreover, the regions observed in primary canon which are associated with “wild west” aesthetic and lifestyle are actually in the south and southeast of Equestria, rather than west – q.v. Appleloosa and Dodge Junction. This is a major snag and annoys me a lot about this comic. I currently have no theories to explain this away. Thoughts?
- Calamity Mane misuses the term “moon” by saying that her troupe requires “a few moons” to recuperate from equine flu, which is consistent with week-scale moons, since any disease that requires multiple months of bed rest to recover from, and is as debilitating as shown in this comic, is surely grounds for seeking a hospital. Also, “one week later,” the troupe is ready for performance. See my general stance on moons – like other cases of week-scale moons, this is best interpreted as misusing the term “decimoon,” due to the weight of primary canon requiring month-scale moons.
- The stage name “Buffalo Bull” is very interesting in that the wearer is neither a buffalo nor a bull. Even Cherry Jubilee comments on it, and I can’t help but wonder why exactly would this name be considered “flashy.”
- “Buffalo Bull’s Amazing Wild West Show” appeared in Ponyville at least once while Applejack was “a filly.” Which means that Cherry Jubilee is nearly twice as old as Applejack, since at the time that happened, when she was Calamity Mane, she was a young adult. She can be even older than that, because it’s not clear whether the Calamity Mane observed is the next one after Cherry Jubilee, or just the latest.
- Applejack comments that Calamity Mane “hasn’t aged at all.” This Calamity Mane is clearly new, but the very fact that Applejack comments on it implies that age differences in the age bracket between young adult and mature adult are observable to ponies themselves, even if we don’t see them due to the limits of cartoon resolution – because Applejack is surprised at not seeing them.
1. If you have any interpretations how it isn’t, I’m all ears, because it’s stupid.
The phrase “None of your cherry-bucking business!” uttered by Cherry Jubilee is ambiguous in tone and sounds like it wants to imply that “bucking” is in fact, an expletive.1
- The amount of cherries Cherry Jubilee bucks out of a single tree in her anger has to weigh somewhere in metric tons. It would surely stain her and Applejack’s coats something fierce, but somehow didn’t.
- One of the ponies in Dodge Junction has a cutie mark of a heart with an arrow through it. I wonder…
- The Dodge Junction library has a poster with the face of Princess Twilight Sparkle on it and a simple slogan: “READ!” “or else” is probably implied.
- Dodge Junction has a periodical called “Junction Journal.” It’s not entirely clear if it was a newspaper or a magazine, because while the format seems to imply a magazine – observed newspapers have always been much larger – the content is more appropriate for a newspaper. Might be a small format weekly newspaper.
- That Junction Journal contained a recognizable picture of Cherry and Buffalo Bull, implying that the technology to print photographs in a newspaper – which would imply offset printing – has already been widespread in Equestria at least a decade ago.
- “Haytona Beach” is a place.
- I have no clear idea what “Apple Con 23” means. Probably, a 23rd convention in Applewood, unless anyone can offer a better idea.
- Buffalo Bull proposes to Cherry Jubilee with a diamond ring, which is too small for her to wear on anything.
- Cherry Jubilee somehow worked her way up from ground level employee of the ranch to its owner, and there’s probably an interesting story behind it that they aren’t telling us.
- Cherry Jubilee’s “It’s Cherry Jubilee now, and has been—” (emphasis mine) implies that the name she used before becoming Calamity Mane might have been different still.
I am frankly very annoyed at the way this particular comic misuses language and tries to destroy my already strained suspension of disbelief. It’s a shame, because I like the art in it better than most others.
In regards to the newspaper, the little town where I live has had multiple newspapers, most of them amatuer publications (in fact, one of which was the inspiration for the Ponyville Newspaper being filled with grammatical errors and misspellings). One of them is a--for lack of a better term--'college-sized' newspaper. The pages are 22" by 22" (unfolded). The next one is smaller; it's the same 22" width, but only 11" tall. And the last one was just a bunch of 8.5" by 11" sheets of paper stapled together, since the owner of the bowling alley self-published, and that's what his printer could make.
So my assumption would be that that Junction Journal is locally published using whatever printing press and paper they happen to have.
4401258
They’re more likely to use the school’s printing equipment than anything else. Especially considering how the title peels off onto sleeping Applejack’s face.
That said, there is considerable confusion regarding printing technology available in Equestria: the machine depicted in Ponyville Confidential looks most like a stencil-based duplicator, i.e. a mimeograph. It definitely stains everyone around with black ink, which would exclude a spirit duplicator. At the same time, it mysteriously prints color pictures, which is very hard to do with a mimeograph, but requires muscle power to operate, which would exclude magic-based methods.
Your link on "pony sniffles" goes to Wikipedia's article on "silo" - could you fix that, since I'm really interested in what you had to say on pony sniffles?
4401294
Ack. Fixed.
Given how the Friends Forever issue between Granny Smith and the Flimflam brothers takes place during Apple Con 45, I'd say it was a similar such convention 22 years before that one.
4401301 Snark snark snark.
So Pony Sniffles is apparently a serious disease which alicorn healing magic (if it exists?) can't cure. And it affects earth ponies - maybe only them, or maybe not. I'm guessing it's also the same unnamed disease that Coco had in Saddle Row Review?
4401314
Alicorn magic isn’t particularly big on healing as such, as far as I can tell. Q.v. Radiant Hope and her panacea spell, which was novelty enough that she was considered a princess candidate.
Quite possibly. Crystal Empire is almost entirely earth ponies, Buffalo Bull is an earth pony, and so is Coco, and the Apples were hit with it “earlier in the season,” so it may in fact be tribally specific.
4401312
I really appreciated that little bit of continuity. Respect to Tony Fleecs for that.
With more recent comics, there seems to be a non-fatal pandemic of equine flu running around, almost like the Spanish Influenza outbreak. I guess one symptom is having a temperature of 101 Moons.
Wild West shows were only a thing after the West was Won, or whatever. Maybe the North-Western region of Equestria was settled first, inspiring Equestria's imagination with its culture, and Appleloosa and Dodge Junction are immigrants/descendants from that area (slightly east of Vanhoover).
Pony names are definitely flexible, as we learned in this comic.
4401691
Actually, the whole Appleloosa starts sounding like historical reenactors then. Because they have “wild west dances.” You know, the ones next to “mild west dances.”
Well, stage names definitely are.
4401711 That actually does explain a lot of the weird pun-based stuff we saw in that episode, if ponies were honoring their grandparents by having horses draw horse-drawn carriages and the like. It also explains how despite Appleloosa only being a year or two old, the Rodeo is this huge competitive sport that has been around for a decade or so and moved all around Equestria.
4401722
Incidentally, that’s probably where Granny Smith came from, because she plain didn’t have much of anywhere else to come from: North of Equestria has to have been settled before the south.
And Manehattan’s original name was probably Dirtville.
4401739 Was she ever from a fixed location? I kind of thought Granny Smith and her family had been nomadic wanderers since the early days of Equestria. Though as I'm typing it, the idea that there's a group of ponies specializing in farming and seeds that live as nomads for centuries sounds really dumb.
4402027
Well, in American mythology/actual fact there's Johnny Appleseed, so maybe not as dumb as you think.
4402027
Her family is described as nomadic – the word used is “pilgrim” though – but they had to have originated somewhere, and I kind of doubt they wandered Equestria ever since the colonization.
4401722
Which makes me note…canon point for "horse" being acceptable language, known, and applicable to ponies.
4403068
Good point.
I think ponies do consider themselves descended from bigger horses somewhere deep in the prehistory, and we have the Saddle Arabians, who are much more horse-like than ponies... It's probably the equivalent of calling humans "primates" - technically correct, but colloquially done mostly in jest.
4403068
4403091 I was actually thinking about this a bit, and wondering if the original West (you know the one north of the Everfree that must have been settled first) was settled with the help of immigrants from Saddle Arabia.