Jan
29th
2017
Points of Canon: Friends Forever #35 · 6:08pm Jan 29th, 2017
Onto the next!
This one features Twilight and Starlight Glimmer, making this her first Friends Forever appearance.
- Twilight’s gift lists for Hearth’s Warming are meters long. Hardly surprising, but implies a hefty budget.
- Spike is reading what appears to be a Daring Do comic book.
- It’s strange that Starlight is complaining of having too many friendship lessons, when both her chapter book and Every Little Thing She Does imply that most of her time with Twilight has been spent studying magic of the non-friendship variety.
- Twilight says that “Star Swirl the Bearded helped build the castle,” which is, notably, not quite what the Journal of the Two Sisters says.
- Starlight says “the older the book, the stronger the spell,” which, for reasons too long to list here, really can’t be a general rule.
- The whole library is weird in that it appears to have no roof –
the time it was shown inCastle Mania,the library, in particular, still had a roofactually, no, the roof is mostly gone in the actual episode – and the books are supposedly dustier than when they were when Twilight went there the last time. They can be dirtier, but there’s no way in hell they can be dustier. - Spike’s comic books are titled “Aracnerd,” “Tin Stan,” “Flying Mouse,” and “The Pony Five” respectively.
- The Everfree Forest contains, and has contained back before Nightmare Moon, a species of plants called “Dust vines” or alternatively, “Squirm-spore,” which emits spores that cause agitation in ponies and “feeds off competitive hostility.” It is capable of tool use and recognizing that it’s in its best interest for ponies not to know that it exists, which implies sapience, if not speech.
- Starlight knows a spell that enlarges the target creature, with a corresponding increase in strength, for a period of time. The spell is single-use-per-creature.
- Twilight casts a spell with a verbal component which bears a strong resemblance to Star Swirl’s spell that made her an alicorn, and is directly attributed to Star Swirl the Bearded. These are still the only two spells which are known to have verbal components.
- This is the only comic to directly reference the Journal of the Two Sisters – specifically, it mentions an argument between Star Swirl and Melvin the Manticore, who is not mentioned anywhere else.
- “the creature took over a huge part of the forest, and kept growing as it headed towards town” the flashback says – but which town? Ponyville did not exist then, Canterlot is way too far, and there was no township surrounding the castle. Cruel and unusual geography strikes again.
I find this comic a bit dubious.
>Starlight Glimmer
>Fosgitt
I vomited for twenty minutes before and after reading.
One of these days, you're going to have to make your peace with JOTTS.
A few possibilities here. First is that a township could've been built around the castle sometime after JOTTS, though I don't like this because there's no other evidence for it amongst the ruins. Second possibility is another town that doesn't exist anymore for whatever reason, but I also don't like this. A third one is Thicket, but we don't know when Thicket was founded, and I don't think it would've been referred to as just "town" if it were around at the time.
The fourth I'll propose, and the one I like the most, is Hoofington. IIRC Trixie in Boast Busters referenced the ursa that she defeated in Hoofington specifically as coming from the Everfree Forest, which implies that Hoofington must be close to it (if Hoofington is even real at all and not just Trixie's invention). I think I also recall Revenge of Everfree referencing more than one town near the Everfree being overrun by vines, which implies that there are some other than Ponyville.
4401458
I have that beautiful theory that explains it nicely and is a plot point in my epic story. I don’t have to make peace with something I have already conquered. :) The dubious bits here are the roof of the library mysteriously vanishing and some of the magic.
It also doesn’t show in the flashback of the Celestia vs. Nightmare Moon battle, so if it existed at any point, it stopped by then.
That she did, actually. It’s not shown on any maps, but somewhere next to the Rambling Rock Ridge, between Canterlot and Baltimare, sounds like a good place for it.
4401463
I could see that working.
I put it on the west side of the forest by that little bridge in my fics.
She is, after all, the Princess of Friendship, so she probably gets an official budget for stuff like that.
On the other hoof, Every Little Thing She Does makes it sound like just about any friendship lessons could be "too many" for her.
So spells age like wine?
4401690
That’d be highly silly. :)
I think I have a rationalization for that line, but I’ll hold it until that next RTAC about magic theory.
Always glad to see a Spike story. Well, not see per say, because Fogsitt drew it, but read a Spike story.
Probably as a reaction to that episode Twilight made a bunch more, and Starlight feels she is over-correcting.
Has to be some kind of magical preservation spell on the library, which itself is probably decaying and has wonky side-effects. As for the roof, maybe the Green Dragon was drunk on Quartz and clipped the castle on the way home to her cave.
There is an entire extra level of the ecosystem on Equis, herbivores, carnivores, and emotivores (I dunno if lithovores get their own level, I only know of one species). It's actually surprising with 6-8 known emotivore species, that ponies are so shocked that love energy is a thing.
Good to know she eventually read the rest of the Journal.
4401458
Yes, glad to see other people interested in the geography of the show. And that makes the most sense to me as well.
4401716
6-8? Windigos, changelings, that plant, possibly that nonsense up on the moon and umbrum, but I don’t remember enough to make 6, let alone 8. Notice that all those have stayed out of sight or out of reach for at least a thousand years, and we’re pretty sure ponies have an even worse understanding of history than humans do.
Equestria’s geography is cruel and unusual. You can always expect the connoisseurs of cruel and unusual around this blog. :)
4401730 Discord certainly seems to feed on chaos, and the Sirens (not just the Dazzlings, all Sirens), makes 6. I admit I said 6-8 because I thought there might be one or two others I had forgotten about.
Maybe the Bookworm from the older comics? He seemed to be sucking in people's love of reading or something.
4402018
Discord appears to gain power from chaos, but not, per se, feed on it. Not quite the same, and chaos is not an emotion anyway.
The sirens, likewise, need to be adored directly, gain power from it, but I don’t remember them referring to this as food.
Nope.
So while emotivores exist in Equestria, most of them are extinct or were pretending to be so until very recently.
4402321 Discord seems to gain power from, well, discord, a state of anxiety and aggression between members of another species. The line between "feed" and "power my magic" seems to be a really blurry one. Tirek was powering his magic with magic, but it sure looked like he was feeding on it.
Are we assuming that Discord and the Sirens don't need chaos and discord to function biologically, and that therefore they don't need magic at all to function biologically? I would guess that Discord and Sirens (in their natural state) would eventually weaken physically and perhaps even die without their magic, which to me means they qualify as subsisting on it to survive.
4402541
Even if so, the other argument remains – all of these remained out of sight for a millennium.
4402608
Makes sense, being an emotivore means you need to prey on sapients (otherwise why would anyone bother harassing prey smart enough to fight back instead of just feeding on animals). Predators usually try to hide from their prey, if they're smart. Dumb emotivores can either end up killed, or in a super-predator situation where they've wiped out their prey.
When something is treated like magic, especially if wizards are protective recluses in towers or priests in temples with traps, understanding recedes and you get Artifacts of a Bygone Age. Contrariwise, science, shoulders of giants, sharing, distributed copies make it harder to lose a knowledge…which then tropetends to Dangerous Prototype instead.
Funnily, in Pathfinder/D&D, wizards always must decipher each others' spellbooks, while alchemists need not puzzle out formulae they find. (bonus: alchemists can read wizard spellbooks, no roll…wizards need to learn to read alchemist books.)
We can also go with Orwellestia, and slowly dropping powerlevels to "peacetime" levels… but I can't recall the instance of her casually violating somepony's mind in canon like the other five royals (Twi, Cadence, Luna/NMM, Sombra, Chrysalis, h.m. Starlight).
Still, the Starswirl wing is locked. Sorry, My Little Ponies, you don't need to know what merlin-newton figured out. Likewise Twilight's library tower.