Points of Canon: S7x03 - A Flurry of Emotions · 7:15pm Apr 22nd, 2017
I’ve had a rather bad day. Let’s see if ponies can make it any better.
This is a Flurry Heart episode, and as such, has a lot of bearing on episode chronology: Her apparent age is also a timing guide.
Nurse Redheart has her cutie mark changed from her previous appearances. Rumor says this is due to Red Cross being displeased about the use of the trademark. The irony. I’m not going to interpret this as cutie marks actually changing over the lifetime of a pony if you won’t.
- Friendship Castle, Flurry Heart are in evidence. But Starlight isn’t. Trixie and Sunburst are not present either. This episode has to occur after The Crystalling, but does not have to occur after To Where and Back Again. Where it is placed in the timeline depends primarily on its temporal relationship to the birthday of Flurry Heart, and other episodes will have to happen around it.
- Twilight is to visit sick foals. Princesses do these things, as has been established in multiple other sources, but I don’t think I remember the primary canon doing that often.
1. Well, it’s a little better than pony sniffles.
New disease name! “Horsey hives.”1 Apparently, this is one of those that mostly affects children and produces lifelong immunity, because absolutely nobody is worried about getting infected, and would get eradicated by now if everyone got their shots on time. The symptoms, however, are weird. I don’t think you would see the hives so clearly on a pony’s coat of hair if magic wasn’t involved somehow. It’s interesting that this happened on school picture day, and the symptoms appeared rapidly enough that the picture was not canceled.
- Notably, Twilight is not worried about Flurry getting infected either. Why?
2. Yearbooks and picture days are something not universal even across human cultures.
Notice that schools have picture days, which is not a given. Presumably, they also have yearbooks, which is also not a given.2
- It is also interesting that while logically, the picture would include everyone in the class, we see Cherilee, but no CMC or Diamond Tiara or Silver Spoon. This is the first clear evidence that Cherilee teaches more than one class, poor mare.
3. Remember that notion of the Gift Horse?
Twilight offers to bring gifts to the children. She definitely has a crown-funded gift budget!3
- Spike uses “knock on wood” as an idiom. The origins of this one in our world are rather peculiar, it is thought to come from Germanic folklore, where supposedly, spirits living in the trees could be invoked for protection in this manner. Did ponies ever believe in those, or did something actually live in trees?
- Notably, we never hear why the royal couple is in town. The idea that they couldn’t find anyone else to watch the princess for them is highly dubious. There was a reason why they happened to be there, but we don’t know what it is. And where is Sunburst? Normally he’s the one hauling Flurry around. Is he doing that Legends of Magic #1 comic with Celestia right now?…
4. Even though they have no reason to…
Flurry did not change appreciably in size from her prior appearances, and she still isn’t capable of much walking. At the same time she flies like a pro, but she could do this on day one. I’m not sure when ponies start walking, but month old Cake twins couldn’t walk. It’s difficult to eyeball how old is she right now, but I think we’d have to put it at about six months, probably seven. Cadance and Shining Armor are still tired out from caring after her, but she is already eating food other than milk, and apparently, pony children do develop at similar rates to humans.4
- However, Flurry is behaving extremely well-aware of the world, and is clearly using magic consciously throughout the episode, which the Cake twins definitely did not at the age of one month. She is using it far better than Twilight could at the age of 4-5, as seen in the Canterlot Wedding flashback, which suggests that either Flurry is that bloody powerful, or the childhood magic surge is a longer lasting phenomenon, and can continue even into the time when the child is conscious enough to apply magic deliberately, even though eventually it recedes and magic needs to be learned anew. I’m voting for the latter.
- If she were a human infant, she’d be about 9-12 months old mentally, or even older, even if she is a lot younger physically, she understands speech way too well… This is especially apparent later on in the episode when she’s searching for her plushie. Never had my own children, I’m basing this on developmental checklists, which may or may not apply to ponies. Any opinions?
- At this age, Flurry uses diapers. Notably, these are packaged disposable diapers,
which the Cake twins were known not to use. Either they’re a very new thing, or they were just too expensive for the Cakes, or the Cakes are just more traditional this way…~ Correction: The diaper change scene in Baby Cakes also involves throwing the diaper out, so they’re all disposable. - So Twilight has collected at least 15 different pre-packaged gifts for Flurry, picking them up as she went along, and hasn’t had an opportunity to bestow them on Flurry yet? Depending on the rate she acquired these at, this could imply not seeing her for quite a few months.
- Shining Armor states that Flurry’s favorite food at this age is mashed peas, but Flurry clearly disagrees. She still drinks milk from a bottle, too.
- So not only Shining Armor had friends in the Royal Guard, which was to be expected anyway – Twilight actually met that Spearhead fellow. In fact, they met so many of them, that both Twilight and Spike had difficulty remembering their very similar names…
5. If you want someone honorably discharged for medical reasons after the Canterlot Wedding, I think he’s your guy. I’m sure he’s mine!
Spearhead is obviously closely familiar with both Shining Armor and Cadance. How exactly did he transition from a guard to an artist, though?…5
- Both Spearhead and Shining Armor are intimately familiar with the practice of guarding dark corridors in total darkness.
6. Unless I’m too asleep to remember, but I’m sure someone will correct me.
I think this is the first time a supermarket-style shop with carts turns up on screen. Similar shopping spaces were seen before, but ones with regular shelves and carts to go with them, not really.6 Notably, Twilight refers to it later as “the toy store,” i.e. it’s a specialized toy store. I don’t think the town has enough foals to keep it afloat, so it’s probably yet another business aimed primarily at transients and tourists.
- What exactly are Bon-Bon and Lyra doing together in a store that primarily sells stuffed toys? I can imagine a lot of good reasons, I just want to know which one is the actual one here.
- One of the more common toys is a monkey. Monkeys have appeared previously in comics, but the closest thing to a monkey in primary canon before that was the yeti-like creature in Party Pooped. That said, the Cake twins had a monkey toy like that during their introduction.
- Twilight carries a pocket watch in an unseen pocket. See “cartoon resolution.”
- Twilight refers to a book, describing it as “Unabridged History of Amulets in Pony Latin.” Wait, “pony latin?!” Did they have to call it that? I’m going to write this without a space and see if anybody tries to stop me.
- “The Complete Collection of Ponyville Fables and Stables” is a book of fairytales. The name implies it’s a Ponyville-local book of stories, but Ponyville is at most 100 years old. Hm.
7. Which gives us that alicorns are a subject of modern pony fiction. Mary’s advice to Luna in Conversation 32 was correct!
“Alien Alicorns vs. Space Pirates” is a book with clear planets and orbits on the cover, and is definitely an on-screen example of pony scifi7 and evidence that ponies know other planets exist. See RTAC #9. Notably, Twilight calls the science in there “preposterous,” but that doesn’t tell us much of anything.
8. …within what?
“Brimferno, (sp?) warrior from within”8 is a pony book about a dragon hero. Who “slays evildoers.” This is kinda important and has far-reaching cultural consequences – I remind you that this is a book pony children read.
- “Gusty the Great” was one of Twilight’s favorite childhood stories.
9. The Cake twins still have those eyes omg.
Cake twins are out of diapers, unlike Flurry9 and are capable of full gallop running. So why are they out playing in the shop space? Where are the Cakes?
- While Pinkie lists Cherilee’s favorite treat, the only thing I can make out is “…cookies with yellow sprinkles.” Guess I’ll have to look that up in a transcript later.
- This balloon toy is quite dubious, it looks to be too heavy for the lift possible with the amount of gas – or vacuum – it can possibly hold.
- “Gusty the Great” story suggests that at some point in time, it was possible to reach Cloudsdale by marching up the hill in theory, even though this was not a feat considered practical. Probably, because it was parked on top of a hill at the time.
- Gusty is leading unicorn warriors there for an unknown purpose, too, because Grogar appears on their way, apparently, entirely out of the blue, at least judging by the reaction of the foals. Was he the goal of this military adventure or not?
- Grogar’s power supposedly derives from “fear,” though it is not entirely clear whose.
- A doctor is using a reflex hammer to, apparently, test the patellar reflex. Do ponies have that?…
10. No, this is not evidence for bone-derived gelatin, plant-based alternatives are quite common.
On one of the trays Flurry overturns, we can see what has to be gelatin capsules. In our world, the technology is actually older than it appears, dating back to ~1850.10
- So how exactly was Redheart planning to look into the patient’s throat while holding that stick in her own mouth?…
- If I’m reading that clock right, this search sequence happens five minutes past six. I’m not sure if this is relevant, but you bet that eventually it will be.
- I don’t think Twilight even unpacked the diapers, did she?
- Cadance mentions “next Tuesday.” Twilight’s reaction makes me think Tuesdays are indeed “special.” :)
And this post concludes with the obligatory update of my Season 7 bingo card.
- Baby Cakes were around quite prominently.
- While Grogar does not actually appear on screen, I think he is mentioned so profusely and unambiguously, that crossing out the “Old Gen Villain” box is quite justified.
- I don’t think the dragon is sufficiently established to mark him as the “new dragon” on my card, though. Grogar is someone familiar, at least to us, a dragon named just once, not really.
While someone might interpret Twilight getting shown up by Flurry repeatedly as “princess getting Worfed,” I think this doesn’t fit the definition of getting Worfed, because Flurry has already been an established character by this point, and we already knew how stupidly strong she is.
I kinda liked this one. Spike’s behavior has been exemplary throughout, which is not very common. It’s been very cute, better than could be expected, and as for Grogar… Nightmare Moon was an old pony’s tale, and Daring Do was fiction. I think we might be up for some Grogar in the future. But I won’t keep my hopes up. :)
Chronology tool has been updated to include this episode.
I thought they were there specifically for the art exhibition. And possibly to give Twilight some quality time with her niece, especially given the gift backlog.
I'm pretty miffed about Pony Latin too. They could've at least said "Old Equestrian" or something instead of bunting like that. I'm willing to say "lost in translation from horse noises" if you are.
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To be honest, I don’t buy it. While they do appear to be happy to see Spearhead, they clearly aren’t very interested in the art. See trashcan.
The possibility that they came specifically to give Twilight quality time with Flurry, with the visit to the art exhibition as the official excuse, sounds better, but there’s still something off about it…
I’m not. See perpendicular linguistic development. :)
I think I can find a lot of etymologies for the word “Ponylatin,” though. Like, being the original language the word “pony” comes from in the first place.
Shielding kids from violence is kind of a western thing. In other parts of the world heros even those aimed at children can be pretty brutal. Exhibit A from Kamen Rider Kuuga. Some might call that cheating because Kamen Rider is aimed at the 13 and up crowd but its in the same block as Super Sentai and Pretty Cure which are aimed at 8 and under. Lots of quite young kids saw that fight.
Speaking of Pretty Cure you should know full well just how dark Maho Shojo can get even in the shows aimed pretty young if Rika is any indication.
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It’s not so much about the violence as it is about who is the wielder of the violence. Notice that from Gauntlet of Fire we also know that saying you robbed some ponies is a good, believable excuse for a dragon to smell of pony.
Any ideas which race are the evildoers?
4506194 I suppose whether or not Brimferno has reduced any evil ponies to charcoal would be interesting to know.
Dude... organizing your footnotes like that kinda defeats the purpose of using that sidebar box in the first place. If you stick every note in a single box, at the beginning of that mass of paragraphs, then I have to scroll back up to read half the notes, which is only slightly better than having to scroll to the end of the blog to read the footnotes.
I rather liked this episode. Flurry was adorable, while powerful enough to confirm my fervent belief that she will be the series finale villain, and Spike was awesome. And of course, some good ol' Grogy!
This actually reinforces your point about To Where and Back Again being pretty close to Celestial Advice. If Cadance and Shining Armor have to dump Flurry on Twilight instead of just making Sunburst take care of her, then apparently Sunburst isn't as chained to Flurry Heart as I thought, so he has less excuse not to go visiting Starlight.
I think that's something real life modern princesses do a lot.
New theory. Not about canon, but about the writing process. Historically, Star Trek scripts would actually have the word TECH added by the writers to have a proper scienc-y technobabble excuse for the plot added in by the science adviser later. Between Horsey Hives and Pony Latin, I think the MLP staff does the exact same thing, except replace TECH with HORSE PUN. (On Pony Latin, someone obviously phoned it in).
That and the incredibly complex equations she writes up on the board that her current class has no idea how to solve. (Top Bolt).
Probably this is what she spends the Friendship Castle Security Budget on.
Your theory is a good one, or he's off with Starlight, which explains why she's not around either. I think the LoveBirds (Royal Couple Name, trying it out) got the invite from their jock-turned-hipster friend weeks ago and planned on skipping it. Then last night, at 4 AM while Flurry Heart was screaming her guts out and Starburst had already left town, they changed their minds and decided to go to the art exhibit, just so they would have an excuse to dump Flurry Heart on someone else and have some peace and quiet for a few measly hours. I suspect they don't trust anyone but Sunburst and Twilight to watch Flurry Heart, and given her magic that's a fair call. Notice how when we first see them they look exhausted (by Flurry), but after 4 hours away from their daughter they are completely refreshed?
I'm voting former. Magic surge implies uncontrolled magic, it seems a lot harder to imagine Flurry losing all this ability and skill and then having to relearn it. And she's possibly the first natural-born alicorn in existence, so there are very few setting limits on her powers. I would point out that I've seen suggested elsewhere Sunburst has forgotten to keep re-upping the magical limiter spell that is supposed to keep Flurry's magic restrained.
No ideas, so your plan sounds good to me.
Anyone else faked out that Spearhead wasn't a unicorn?
Good to know despite his connections and magic Shining Armor had to actually spend time doing grunt work.
This town is, but its hard to imagine that fertile land just below the capital sat empty for 900 years, no matter how many monsters live in the forest next door. At the least foot traffic on the way to Canterlot should have passed through the area, and travelers told stories about the monsters they saw on the edge of the woods to scholars while selling their produce, which got recorded.
Unless other planets are the preposterous science fiction?
The name sounds fairly dark, and so does the story. Brimferno seems a bit like a Punisher-style anti-hero. Of course, the foals and nurses still love him, which is interesting. What if Brimferno is the Shaft of Equestria? You could never have a pony hero slaying enemies in a story for children, but since dragons are this little-known, highly exoticised culture, the moral guardians see Brimferno as less threatening and not a role model for children.
In ancient times, before airships, and if the unicorns couldn't be trusted to enchant things properly, Pegasi couldn't really have a civilization in the clouds, because they couldn't store much of anything in the clouds. A mountain surrounded by a ring of clouds for defense, where the Pegasi could retreat to if their mountain fast fell, makes a lot more sense.
I missed a lot of that story originally, here's the story transcript in full:
Twilight Sparkle: [reading] "...and while nopony had ever tried to reach Cloudsdale on hoof, Gusty the Great was not deterred! She and her unicorn warriors marched up the hill. But suddenly, they encountered..."
Twilight Sparkle: "It was the treacherous Grogar..."
Twilight Sparkle: "...and Gusty could tell he was ready for battle. Gusty called out to the unicorn warriors—"
Twilight Sparkle: [reading] "'We can fight Grogar together!' And the unicorn warriors shot magical beams into the clouds that wove into one! The beam, stronger than a thousand armies, shined down!"
Twilight Sparkle: [reading] "It wrapped around Grogar and pulled him to the ground! 'Don't let him escape!', yelled Gusty!"
Twilight Sparkle: [reading] "Grogar was strong, for fear gave him power, and he broke through the bonds!"
What's really interesting here is you're right: Gusty was headed to Cloudsdale with an army of unicorn warriors, suggesting they were about to attack the Pegasi. Then Grogar showed up. was he allied with the Pegasi?
Unicorns could combine their magical beams into one using clouds. Did they develop this spell as part of an attack plan on Cloudsdale? Was Grogar being pulled into the ground because the hill is above Tartarus?
Finally, Grogar escapes and then we don't learn how the story ends. I assume in a kids story Grogar doesn't murder everyone, but perhaps he escaped at the end...
Easy, she just out her lower lip and tilts her head forward, her eyes should be practically down his throat.
Too late, I am at maximum hope for ol' Goatly!
Milk: confirmation that ponies are mammals.
Okay, so that probably wasn't in doubt, but it's amazing how rarely the show touches on details of reproduction. The teat on the bottle confirms that ponies have similar anatomy. I'm choosing to dismiss its impressive size as simply the art style.
The fact that Flurry doesn't just levitate and shoot energy, but uses a complex and specific spell like teleportation - in combination with what was said in the previous episode - tells us something about how unicorn magic works. Specifically, that it doesn't work through any sort of concentration, calculation and program emulation on the part of the caster, which is what you might have assumed given only Twilight Sparkle as your example. Flurry can barely navigate one dimension, never mind four, but she's able to teleport through sheer power and intuition. Trixie is told to visualise a teacup in all its specifics, but not to think about the process of the transmutation spell.
Is this the first mention of Grogar? Since it's within the pages of a book, we can't tell if Grogar is meant to be an ancient legend or just something made up.
Is there a Ponyville Publishing House? I can see this as being a book of fables from the Ponyville imprint.
If the story is to be believed at all, Cloudsdale (or something called Cloudsdale) is an old enough city to appear then. Given the transient nature of clouds though, it would not surprise me if the name got moved and re-used, kind of like Air Force One.
Ok, the key to this is one word: Focus.
The reason the CMC and DT are not in the class picture or the hospital is the focus of the episode is on Twilight/Flurry. Introduce the other named characters and the focus shifts.
The one single store has all the toys because that way you don't have to spread the focus out over multiple stores.
The Cake twins are playing inside Sugarcube corner because the scene is placed there with Twilight ordering treats from Pinkie. Putting them somewhere else waters down the focus.
The diapers are a one-shot gag. Showing Twilight changing diapers without some sort of plot element involved would water down the focus, so they didn't.
It was alright episode. I didn't have any major complaints.
But Flurry is still OP. Hasbro pls nerf.
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this is true
you can work around it by copying the sidebar out to something else
…or Hasbro is licensing some FiM diapers, possibly with a doll to soil them,soon.
You tack "-pony" onto every word beginning with a vowel, and move initial consonants to the end and tack on "-ony".
possibly referencing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within? IDK.
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"Mommy, I wanna be a dragon when I grow up."
(I mean, I've seen a comic of a dragon wanting to be a princess, fim-unrelated…)
First "a millennia" and now this. Are they trying to amplify linguistic drift??
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Pardon? Remember, the Everfree is unusual in having clouds move on their own, and Rainbow has to manually (ungually?) clear the sky. (S1E1-2)
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"No you don't dragons are savage brutes out to steal our gems and ravish our mares!"
I blame it on the lack of Equestrian teenagers studying pony latin anymore.
4506657 The comic in question about dragon princess ambitions.
Shone. SHONE.
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It’s not a mass of paragraphs, it’s a list – i.e. a block. Unfortunately it’s a long block.
Fortunately, in the near future we’re promised real anchor links, so I can just do proper footnotes. Until then, posts like this one will have to have endnotes, I guess…
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From a Watsonian perspective, I don't quite buy the notion that Ponyville doesn't have a population large enough to support some of the commercial aspects we have seen. Ponyville isn't small, so much as smaller than the more metropolitan population centers like Manehattan. Farming communities can be large enough to support a number of small specialized businesses, (Including a jeweler. My hometown is a small town, population around 1000, and it has a small family owned jeweler which has managed to hang on even as most of the town's businesses have failed in the recession.) and farmers themselves generally aren't really all that poor. They tend to have pretty large expenses, but that applies to any industry.
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That makes an unhealthy amount of sense.
That sounds quite a bit more plausible than anything I had.
Well, here’s an excerpt from my draft on magic theory:
I do think it makes sense. :)
What makes you think he isn’t? The absence of a horn? I did suggest “honorably discharged for medical reasons after the events of the Canterlot Wedding,” disability is very much one.
And now he has a pension high enough to waste it on making stuff hardly anybody in their right mind will buy and a lot of changes in his life to adjust to.
More probably, the book goes a step further and posits some nonsense like alien alicorns coming from the pony equivalent of Venus.
That also makes a disturbing amount of sense.
That assumes unicorns have a total monopoly on enchanting things. I don’t think this is really the case precisely because cloud cities exist.
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I have my own, more complicated take on it, which fits this. :)
In the primary canon, Grogar has never been mentioned before in any way. I don’t remember even a whiff in secondary canon either, but can’t search it quite as efficiently to confirm.
Of the three well-remembered early generation major threats, (Tirek, Smooze, Grogar) we have already seen two in one way or another, so a third was only a matter of time.
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If you’re going this way, you might as well say that “We’re dealing with a work of fiction that does not depict a universe that is in any way real,” but then discussion of, say, Twilight’s motivations will become entirely meaningless.
Doylist explanations for every silly thing seen on screen are so trivial that they’re not worth a blog post. :)
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Our best estimate is still ~4000. Businesses which trade in higher unit prices, like jewelers, might survive better off when serving a larger territory, but toys, I don’t really think so. There’d be a shelf at the general store, otherwise, the way I see them every time when poking my nose out of my metropolitan city.
Also, the whole point I’m putting this arguments in support of is that we have a large population of stated-to-be-Canterlot ponies turning up in Ponyville all the time…
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I think that makes a ton of sense and explains Pound and Pumpkin, as well as Flurry's shattering of the Crystal Heart. Flurry now though seems to be in total control of her magic. Lifting kids up in her telekinesis as she teleports under each bed to search for Whammy requires a fair amount of detailed thought and planning (also spatial awareness and object permanence, which I don't think kids get until they are like 4 or 5). But Flurry's magic always seems to be doing exactly what she wants it to do. I suspect we saw Flurry's surges in the S6 opener, and this Flurry Heart is the "nearly powerless" post-surge stage. Man do I want to short-sell real estate companies in the Crystal Empire and invest in construction firms up there.
More the presence of wings, actually. Though Spearhead the secret disabled alicorn sounds cool too.
Point. I would guess Pegasi can pack clouds tightly enough with magic so they can hold solid objects, at least with magic. Though I think there's rules about clouds losing their magic if they touch the ground and become fog, so I'm not sure how large volumes get up to the clouds. Perhaps the mountain is so earth ponies can pull carts full of food as weather-payment up to Cloudsdale?
Anyone else kind of disturbed that Hasbro seemed really invested in showing the audience the importance of buying toys for all the young children you know?
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Oops, I shouldn’t watch new episodes while asleep. :) Mind you, we don’t see him fly, so I think the whole story stands. In fact, with the way pegasi fold their wings, a damaged one would really be inobvious.
That would certainly do it.
But Flurry is the princess of toys! :)
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True, the toy store is a bit harder to justify, especially one that large. HOWEVER, one thing to consider is ease of transportation.
It is one thing for, say, a human to hop into his car, and drive about an hour or so from his small town home to a larger city to visit a mall or such for shopping for toys or the like. It would be something else to get on a train to make the same trip. And of course, their might be a greater degree of demand for toys from adults in Equestria as well. Not sure if it really justifies an entire toy store, but perhaps more than a shelf or two at the local Barnyard Bargains, anyway.
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Don't forget tourist trade. We've seen ponies like Fancy Pants and Fleur de Lis, who definitely don't live in Ponyville, walking around. Granted that probably doesn't affect a toy store much, but it would affect jewellers.
Regarding the unicorn warriors, why do you automatically presume they want to fight Cloudsdale and not, for example, go there to support them against some other kind of menace? Like Grogar infesting the local area? In which case the cloud combining the beams could be an inter-tribe project developed specifically to deal with powerful individuals. It would explain why Cloudsdale was reachable on hoof. Grogar's attack could have been unexpected, as they planned to confront him with a mixed task-force.
About class-photos, we had them in Italy but we never had a yearbook.
As for the toy-store, in Amending Fences we saw Moondancer play with her friends at the end, and we also saw a lot of adult ponies in the store. It is quite possible that the market for toys is not limited to foals at all, and that there are no cultural hindrances to adults enjoying them too.
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I'm imagining that Ponyville has been growing, pretty rapidly, ever since the show started.
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Idea: A Flurry of Emotions happens during the To Where And Back Again – in the gap it takes Starlight and Trixie to travel to Starlight’s village and back!
Why:
It generally fits the time period: It appears that Flurry was born in winter, and even a chapter book thinks so, while the best guess for this episode is autumn, and her apparent age is at least 6 and at most 9 months.
This explains the absence of Starlight.
It is far easier to kidnap Cadance, Shining Armor and Flurry Heart from a train on their way back, than it is to kidnap them from a castle.
Most of the rest of the Mane 6 are likewise absent – and probably alone, wherever they are, making it easier to capture them during A Flurry of Emotions.
It explains the absence of Sunburst indirectly: Whatever the reason Cadance and Shining Armor set out on this trip, they left him in the Empire deliberately, and he sent Thorax to call for help because Thorax can fly. How did Sunburst know of the kidnapping? Presumably, he revealed the doppelgängers that arrived instead of them, or Thorax somehow did.
This does not clear up everything with Chrysalis’
hand-out-idiot-ballsmagnificent kidnapping operation, but it goes a long way towards it.4507327 Have to think about it, but it sounds plausible. The key is Sunburst. I can't access the transcripts right now. Did he catch the changling kidnapping the Royal family, or did he figure it out after the fact like Starlight?
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The borough I live in is ~2k, located between a small city down the valley of ~30k, and a large backcountry of mixed farmland and mountains. We have one good sized dedicated toy shop, but not one with shopping carts. For whatever that's worth. Nearby big stores with shopping carts generally also have a couple aisles each of toys, but that's over by 30k-polis. Maybe they went over to lower Canterlot?
Does Canterlot have suburbs yet? Railroads usually herald the apperance of rail line suburbia around big cities.
BTW, Gusty sounds like a pegasus name.
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I think it has one suburb called Ponyville. Octavia and others seem to work in Canterlot and live in Ponyville.
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I like it. Let's just hope it's not contradicted in a future episode.
That wasn't Cloudsdale in the story, it was Tambelon, a castle that could transform into or be hidden by clouds. I don't remember Gusty being in that story, though.
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The story Twilight reads contains both a character named “Gusty” and a place named “Cloudsdale” rather unambiguously, though.
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Oh, I know what was in the episode; I'm talking about "actual" G1 events. The thing with Grogar happened long before Cloudsdale existed,[1] but the ponies did climb up a mountain to get to Tambelon when it was revealed. I wonder if it's deliberately garbled? A lot of old stories get conflated and cross-contaminated, and Gusty the Brave might be a nod to that.
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[1] Flutter Valley was the hip pegasus hangout back in the day.
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If I believed the showrunner is crafty, that would be my conclusion.
I don’t have a good reason to believe one way or the other, so I’m choosing to leave myself a chance to be pleasantly surprised later. :)
A couple other tidbits from the episode:
* Twilight says "Gosh." Notably, unlike in Celestial Advice, she doesn't swear by Celestia. As for what she does swear by, you can chalk it up to convergent etymology if you want?
* Pony Latin. Not going to touch this one except to say "Translation convention."
* Twilight's library doesn't have storybooks for foals. It isn't even that she doesn't want to bring one from the library; she makes a joke about how preposterous that would be. I wonder if Cheerilee took over the job of town librarian after the original Golden Oaks Library was destroyed, freeing Twilight to focus on books she herself would be interested in?
* Cheerilee's blackboard is a real blackboard, with real chalk.
* Spike and Twilight both say "guys" to describe a group containing Flurry Heart. There goes the idea that the female pronoun is default in Equestria.
* Also, there goes the idea that teleportation is a super-complicated spell: it might be difficult, but it's innate enough for Flurry Heart to grasp. What's more, the Blink-verse is going to have some horrible implications to play with here.
* Despite their two horns and profusion of servants, it took Cadance and Shining Armor forever to clean up the chocolate pudding Flurry Heart trod all over. Did she somehow make it immune to magic? Or is the castle itself immune to magic cleaning methods?
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Ponies also routinely say “oh boy,” which is, as far as we can tell, also a minced oath for us.
I have a suspicion the boy in question is actually Discord, with the origins of the phrase lost in time – ~1100-1200 years since his rampage is quite enough.
See above. Hypothesis: “Ponylatin” is the name of the language, and the word “pony” in modern Equish originates from that language. :)
Alternatively, “Pony Latin” is not a language at all. “Unabridged History of Amulets in Pony Latin” means “History of the use of amulets in the pony kingdom called Latin.” The language itself, which we know ponies use, is called something else.
I suspect ponies in Ponyville in particular are not very interested in reading in general, or at least prefer to own their books… While there is that common fanon that Twilight’s castle replaced the Golden Oaks Library as a library, there is no canonical evidence whatsoever that this happened – we don’t see outsiders in the castle unless they came specifically to consult Twilight, rather than a book that Twilight might recommend. With the exception of major social gatherings that don’t involve books at all.
They did that for most of season 6.
My take on it is that it’s not so much difficult, as it is difficult to reliably target, (See Trixie’s problems doing just that in All Bottled Up) and too energy intensive for the average caster to use at all.
…And of course it does not work on the transporter principle, it has to be either real space-warping or step-out-step-in, otherwise there would be no chance for a foal to do it instinctively without creating ye liveliest awfulness. Step-out-step-in is more likely.
Of course not. They just caught her too late, so every time they thought they were done cleaning, someone would find more chocolate pudding stains where they didn’t look.
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Makes sense.
Also, another explanation for Pony Latin: We don't have any other evidence of that name, so the title (if not the whole book) was written tongue-in-cheek by Celestia or somepony else who'd been looking through the Mirror Portal.
Watched. Ugh.
❧For some reason Spike doing the errands independently is just not an option. More reverse-maturation?
❧"Rubbish sack" and company (…the garbage art world keeps growing, so I can never find the original pieces…and onw ther are even multiple "janitor accidentally defaces art" instances)
❧Pinkie says "BRB"
❧Twilight holds the idiot ball and cannot conceive of "Pinkie, buy and deliver to the following list of ponies their favorite snacks" b ut instead must ask what each's is and then order some.