Concerning the dates that the EqG portal is active · 6:59am Apr 12th, 2017
You know what sucks? Fucking dates. Keeping an organized timeline is the actual worst thing. There’s already two points that don’t line up properly in the Who We Become timeline (namely, Sunset’s and Spike’s ages both jump at some point) because of my sloppy timekeeping early on, so now I try to be more thorough. What follows is a bunch of nerd stuff, that might help other authors and might be somewhat interesting to other nerds. I guarantee neither of these things, but I don’t think anyone else will have any reason at all to check this blog out.
With Looking Glass, that meant keeping up with when the portal would be open. But that’s easy enough, right? It opens every thirty moons, and since a moon is basically a month that just means 2.5 years, right? Nope! This is something I knew before starting this story, but I just kinda didn’t realize until recently, but a moon is one lunar cycle, which is twenty-eight days (Note: There's a stronger argument to be made that one moon is not the same as our twenty-eight-day cycle. Check this blog post for a better explanation of that). This makes thirty moons 840 days, closer to 2.3 years. And when the timeline is as large as Looking Glass’s is, that seventy-two days makes a large difference.
So I mathed. I don’t think anyone would have ever noticed this error if I wasn’t pointing it out here, but fuck that noise I demand accuracy. The short of it is that in the first act of Looking Glass, I said it was autumn. It was actually early Spring. I also said Sunset had been in the human world for almost a year by the end of act one. It was actually less than half a year. I’ll make these changes at some point, but it’s hardly story changing information 
My main reason for making this blog post is so that other people won’t have to math like I did for their own Equestria Girls stories. Granted, the amount of people that both follow me and are writing an EqG story that requires knowledge of when the mirror would have been open is probably pretty small, but whatevs.
An important thing to note is that we don’t know an exact date that Twilight went through the mirror in EqG1, which is the basis for this whole timeline. I decided on the year 2011, because of reasons I really don’t remember (I decided that long before working on Looking Glass, and just have to assume I had some logic). In hindsight, 2013 would’ve been the better year since that’s when EqG1 came out, but I’m not doing this shit again, so 2011 it is. From there, we need to decide when the Fall Formal was. The first day of Fall is September 20th, so that sounded pretty good to me. However, September 20th, 2011 was a Tuesday, and who the fuck holds a big school dance on a Tuesday? So I decided that the actual Fall Formal was on the 23rd, since that’s the first Friday of Fall, and thus Twilight goes through the mirror on the 21st (since it’s open three days). So base point is September 21st, 2011.
From there, it’s just a matter of counting back 840 days. Easier than it sounds, since it just requires jumping back two years, fifteen weeks, and five days (only four days if the two-year jump covered a leap year). Basic use of the desktop calendar app. With that we get the following days that the portal would be open:
March 20, 2000 (this is when Sunset first goes through the mirror in LG)
July 10, 2002
October 27, 2004
February 14, 2007
June 3, 2009
September 21, 2011
The only one of these that I could see being at all helpful to other people is June 3rd, 2009. Following my possibly arbitrary decision to make EqG1 take place in 2011, this would be the previous time that the portal is open, which is usually when people assume Sunset first entered the human world. So there you go! Anyone writing a fic about Sunset’s history should be aware that she first came out of the portal in June! The significant thing here is that she would completely miss freshman year of CHS this way (if we assume that EqG1 is senior year, that is). Her first year would be as a junior, since if school is still in session on June 3rd, it’s way too late to do anything about getting into it. And it’s quite impossible to go any earlier than June, since that would require the Fall Formal happen before the first day of Fall to fit in with the rigid thirty moon timeline.
Again, the days could be different if I had used a different year as the base (like 2013, which I’m constantly wondering why I didn’t use). Because of leap years, it’s not exactly as simple as moving the year but changing the days. Plus I accounted for days of the week; if you were to use 2013, you probably would want to use September 20th as the actual Fall Formal, since it was the first day of fall and a Friday. Doing that would mean Twilight first goes through the mirror on September 18th. Feel free to math that out if you want, but I’m done 
You know, I was wondering if you were going to point out the maths at some point. Silly me of course you would ^^ And why did you use 2011? It was the year of the rabbit of course but I'm sure you knew that already (and that it is a valid excuseU.U" )
Hey, that is a lot of work. But well, an Equestrian moon is actually, not necessarily an Earth's moon.
I believe in a panel somewhere the writers said, a moon is an undetermined period of time.
They really work hard on leaving time periods and character ages as obscure as possible.
There are stories that use a time that is faster in Equestria in contrast with the human world. it is interesting what people come up with.
I personally played with the idea that Equestria didn't need the "none sense" that WE use to time years, since times of dawn and sunset are controlled by actual sapient beings. In my story (that may be completed one day, hopefully) I made a little research, and then made a big explanation about how Luna actually created their calendar, similar tu ours, that has a moon cycle every 30 days. In my universe that would be an Equestrian month. In other words, if I ever desire to write a EQG story, I would have to do the math differently.
But I wouldn't honestly, I am lazy 
I probably would never mention dates.
But yeah, impressive work; and is good to know that in your universe both worlds work the same way, and a moon is 28 days. So, kudos.
4493505
Using that logic, episode 1 should've been in 2010 since that was when FiM first premiered.
Well, if that wasn't the reason before, it is now
I think it had something to do with deciding to place the FiM series premier in 2009 (and logicking out that EqG took place roughly two years later somehow), but I also don't know why I decided on that
Bah, your answer just makes more sense, so I'mma go with that
You wish. Depending on which levels of canonicity and even which episodes you take into account, I can produce canonical evidence to substantiate a “moon” that is week scale, month scale, and a few spots inbetween.
As a matter of fact, I did, in this blog post, which I would prefer to avoid copy-pasting into a comment in its entirety.
Also, I am pretty sure that time in the world behind the mirror and Equestria proper does not flow at the same rate, and the rate itself is not constant, but that would again require relying on comics as evidence, which not everyone will agree with…
4493507
Yeah, I thought of that too. But or lack of knowing how long an Equestrian moon is, I based it on Earth's lunar cycle. And I've read that comment from the writer's as well, but I just like hard rules more than wishy-washy terms left open to interpretation
Oh sweet babies, I do recommend that. I keep a record of exactly which date every chapter falls on, but I never use the dates in the stories themselves. I rarely even like saying which day of the week it is. Makes it much easier to fix timeline errors that way, should the need arise (and it has!)
More nerd stuff if you're interested:
In my series, both worlds do work on the same twenty-eight-day lunar cycle (for convenience sake more than anything; I can accurately measure that without coming up with new things), but Equestrians have a completely different calender. Since our months were created over time as part of human history (and then added to; a calendar used to consist of ten months), it wouldn't make sense for Equestrians to use the same system. I have not made an Equestrian calendar, but I imagine it would be based on moons, not months, resulting in a thirteen moon calendar, which is 364 days. The extra day (again, just for the convenience of keeping a 1:1 time sync) would be the Equestrian New Years, which is also Hearth's Warming. Since having a year system based on Jesus makes zero sense for a bunch of horses that don't have the Christian religion, I decided Hearth's Warming is a perfect New Years. It's reasonably close to our New Years Day (I placed Hearth's Warming on December 20th), and as the founding of Equestria, it's just all around perfect. I like to put Hearth's Warming significantly in the past, so the series premiere takes place in the Equestrian year 3051, which is equal to the human year of 2009.
4493511
A very fair point, and the blog looks to be highly interesting. I'll read it in its entirety in a bit. But as you say, the time of a moon is poorly defined, which is something I hate to accept. For convenience sake, I'm making it canon to my stories that a moon is exactly equal to our lunar cycle, but we'll see if your blog post convinces me to change that
As for the flow of time across the two worlds, I've disregarded the parts of the comics that suggest it's different. I have a general policy of drawing on the comics only when it doesn't make things unnecessarily messy. The whole idea behind Looking Glass was to figure out a way that the two worlds do sync up in an even flow of time. It forces some events to be a bit more scrunched together than I would like and gets even shakier as time goes on, but my WWB series is incompatible with later canon anyway, so I can still get away with it
4493516
Far be it for me to begrudge anyone their interpretation. I must say I do think that our lunar cycle is not a very good thing to assume, though, for reasons detailed in that post and others. But that’s just me.
This fandom has never been married to canon in the first place, because of how undefined the canon is all over. :)
4493516 Ah using Hearth's Warming is a good idea. Your world building is well thought, and is always nice to know more about it.
Since I started my story before the holidays episode was a thing, I used the Summer Sun Celebration as a kinda New Year, and is basically the summer equinox. It is also the anniversary of when Nightmare Moon was sent to the moon, with the series starting on the year 1000. I used the 12 months, making 360 days a year, and it is explained as part of an agricultural project. Didn't mention the names of the months, but I'm guessing they would label them with numbers like: The first month of the thousandth year.
I know some high schools start at 7th grade though.... I'm not sure what they call the 7th and 8th graders before freshmen, sophomore, junior, senior. It can't be Peon (arguably another word for rabbit and the lowest ranking foot soldier)because that's what they call a High School graduate. I'm also not entirely sure what they call someone with an associate's degree, I know anyone with a bachelor's is a paraprofessional, but someone with an associates degree is only half way to being a paraprofessional.
4493524
If I stick with twenty-eight days, it will certainly only be out of convenience, and not at all because it's the more likely answer.
Upon reading your blog post (which was great, btw), I find myself generally agreeing with it. I may even wind up rethinking what I do after all
4493525
Trying to use the Summer Sun Celebration was what messed me up lol. I was using episode one as year one (1 LR for Luna's Return), and using negative numbers for years before. Somehow I messed up with that though; between having New Years be in June and messing with negative years, I just screwed myself basically.
And I never noticed that a twelve-month calendar system works so closely to our 365 day years. Your way certainly makes a lot of sense as well
4493527
True, not everywhere has four-year school systems. But if it's longer than four years for high school, it would only make it more notable that Sunset wasn't there for all of them. As for terms, I also have no idea there
4493794 Yeah, using June as a new year, while trying to keep our calendar intricacies, sounds messy.
In my case, yes the equivalent to first month would be June, but they don't celebrate the passing of the year. They wait until the Summer Sun Celebration, that is always on the 20th. In my story, the point of the calendar is that Princess Celestia and the Ponies adapt nature to it, so everything is periodical. Solar events, changes of seasons, harvesting times, everything has an specific day that, in theory, doesn't change; ponies don't always hit the mark though.
One Moon = one night = one day
I don't know why it's so hard for people to understand this.
In Equestria Girls Princess Luna says the portal will be open for three nights when the moon is at it's peak, which is the cycle of a full moon, roughly 30 days/nights/"moons".
I mean no disrespect, but I stopped looking for something other than a floating/ sliding timeline in cartoons a while ago. I mean, Ash Ketchum is still 10 years old even though more episodes representing the days of a year have passed. I was thinking of it more like the immortal alien babies from Invader Zim. Antedating the the events just causes confusion in the long run, especially when twenty years from now the characters will be the same age and that's not even considering the possibility that the universes move at the same speed only while they are connected and at least ten years may have passed while sunset lived five or less.
4493933
Not that I'm too much better off now (I don't have an actual calendar system, after all), but at least now I can maintain consistancy with myself.
It seems like you've got a better calendar system than I did when I was using the Summer Sun Celebration as New Years
4494571
Because there's no indication anywhere in the series that a moon is only a day, while there are indications that it's longer than that. In Equestria Girls, what Luna says is:
Note that there's no indication whatsoever how long a moon is here. She later says:
Again, this doesn't explicitly state how long a moon is.
But elsewhere in the show, they use the word 'day' when they mean day. It's a regular part of their vocabulary.
) In almost every instance (aside from some early inconsistencies), a moon is used as an ambiguous, yet significant, period of time. Take the yak declaration that peace will last between ponies and yaks for a thousand moons. A thousand days is about three years, and that's not a peace worth mentioning. Meanwhile, Twilight mentions that nopony's seen Yakyakistan for hundreds of moons. Hundreds of days isn't that long a time period. Hundreds of months is.
Nowhere in the show do they use the word 'month'.(Edit: I've been proven wrong on this one. WhoopsSo moon is generally taken to mean one lunar cycle. In our world, that's twenty-eight days, from one full moon to the next one. Now, in a world that involves magically moving the moon (which never appears to be anything but full), how they measure a lunar cycle is pretty up in the air, but it's definitely implied to be significantly more than a day.
For a much more thorough look at how long a moon actually is, check out this blog post. Oliver, its author, has definitely given this a lot more thought and provides a lot more evidence than I have or am able to.
4494756
I feel you, but I'm not writing a cartoon. I write stories where characters grow up, and which have an internal consistency that is always adhered to. The passage of time is important in this series, and I want it to make sense. On the subject of the possibility that the two worlds have their own time, I've rejected that outright for my stories. There is a consistent 1:1 time sync on both sides of the portal in Looking Glass, and every other story I write. Of course, none of this is to say anyone else needs to interpret the world this way, this is all just what I'm personally doing.
4493933
4493794
My response to you two got rather long (and a bit off-topic), so I've split it into its own blog post and ran with that format. The key points I made there are:
• I use the Summer Sun Celebration for the new year as well
• My ponies have a standardized calendar now, but timelines are a bit more complex
• I can't bring myself to not have ponies counting in octal, and so use 32-day months
• Lunar cycles are actually 27 or 29.5 days, depending on how they're measured
(and most relevantly):
• We may as well say ponies standardized the lunar cycle along with months
• If we say that time passes at equal rates on both sides of the portal, a day and night take the same length of time, and the human world has a 28-day moon while Equestria has a 30-day one, beautiful things happen -- namely:
• The portal opens exactly once every other time the worlds' lunar cycles match up, which is exactly once every 30 human-world moons
• The same thing works for 32-day months, but it's "every third time" and the "30 moons" needs to be in octal
• Almost all of the times the phrase is used in the movie, it's specifically referring to time in the human world.
By the way, I still have a twelve-month year, and for some reason never thought of connecting that to the pre-Discord natural cycles until I read through your posts, so thanks y'all!
4494784
4494571
...And following that up with correcting you, Krickis, isn't the nicest thing to do, but ponies do (admittedly rarely) use "month", and as recently as Newbie Dash. The reason people say a "moon" is almost a month is because it's a (somewhat archaic) term used in our world to describe a full lunar cycle (look at definition 3). Krickis does definitely give some nice numerical arguments for it as well, though.
4495110 Oh, your explanation of why the door opens is cool. Thanks for sharing your ideas.
Tbh I considered giving ponies a numerical system with base 8, and then I realized that was lots of trouble and just didn't.
Your way is better.
4495133 I've definitely painted myself into long explanations whenever I use the base-8 for anything. It's why I translate everything to base-10 if it doesn't rely on the representation of a number, like, say, "1000". On that, though, 512 years seems like a rather short time for Celestia's rule -- I'm more inclined to go with "2000" or 1024 years. Even beyond the clock tower, base-10, as optimized for our hands, never seemed to make sense for ponies to use. I imagine their version of "finger" counting being "tap with the tip of your hoof, tap with it flat, continue to the next hoof".
Besides, I'm a programmer. If there's one thing that becomes second nature, it's the powers of two. If there's a second, its the multiples of eight. It just feels comfortable to me.
Glad you liked it!
Thankfully any EqG fic I write is post Rainbow Rocks, portal open anytime makes portal history somewhat mute, but I will file this away pending any mention of portal history. I will not let your rather brilliant math go to waste.
The trouble we'll have is the extent of damage such as what was revealed at the end of Legends of Everfree. If said damage even has an effect on frequency of portal use. While the natural frequency should in theory stay the same as depicted in canon or in your quite easy to adopt timeline. So until they address that issue I'm going to assume frequency of natural opening and closing will remain the same regardless of Twilight's force opening device. So I guess future set stories are a toss up to the author on portal frequency and stability of use if they seek to address the ending of Legends of Everfree portal issue.
I dunno, we're writing fan fiction, not sending rockets to the moon, but I applaud your dedication to making it realistic on more than a few fronts.
4495110
I'm confused as to why I thought that the lunar cycle was twenty-eight days now. Your ideas seem very solid, and I'll look through your blog post once I get a chance 
I'm getting the impression I ought to have just asked people for headcanons rather than try and figure these things out myself
By all means, please correct me if I'm ever wrong. It seems that I was here, as well as about the length of our lunar cycle. Whoops
4495402
Yeah, post-Rainbow Rocks is definitely the easiest way to go. Plus the most appealing, since Sunset is altogether more likable by then
Did I miss something in Legends of Everfree? I don't recall anything that would've proved problematic for the portal. I've only seen the early leaked version, though, so I might be missing an extra scene if there is one (or I might've just forgotten lol)
4495425
At the end past all the credits. I didn't see it till either till the fourth time through I let the credits play out.
Nothing wrong with bad girl Sunset. I shall quote a unfinished work. "I broke them once, I can do it again, and little miss entitled rule doesn't extend that far."
4495425 To be fair, I hadn't even looked at the portal until you brought it up. The timing was just something I checked on a whim, and which turned out as nicely as I could have hoped. In my opinion, half a day in twenty-eight is easily compensated for, given the nature of what we're trying to synch up. An hour being exactly the same length on both sides of the portal seemed a bit artificial anyway, and we can say that the moons themselves have some effect on aligning the flow of time -- something vaguely similar happens in our own world.