May
12th
2017
Points of Canon: S1x07 - Dragonshy · 5:29pm May 12th, 2017
Oh boy, that’s an odd one…
- Fluttershy’s front yard contains five extra bunnies which it usually doesn’t.
1. Or are they weasels?
2. Remember, she has been feeding the fish in Griffon the Brush Off – and now the fish goes to the ferrets. Does anything eat the ferrets?… How much of a food chain are we talking here?Fluttershy feeds fish to ferrets1 who live in a hole underneath her bridge. She does this by holding the fishes in her own mouth, too. This establishes Fluttershy as being perfectly capable of slaughtering animals to make food for other animals,2 while not being outwardly squeamish about it. Secondary canon does insist she can see fish as animals, see Friendship is Magic #12-13. She further reinforces this by feeding earthworms to birds, also holding them in her mouth, though she does make a spitting noise after that one.
- I do wonder why the ferrets live in a hole under the bridge with a quay and no visible land access, though.
3. Also a soft lock on Ticket Master – at some point, Angel moved in with Fluttershy. I don’t think she’d hang out with him in town until this happened, which is required for him to be able to steal tickets for her.
Angel Bunny has his own home. Almost all subsequent portrayals depict him directly in Fluttershy’s room, but in this one, he lives in something like a separate
dograbbithouse. It’s even marked with a carrot, and is visible in the same shot with Fluttershy’s cottage. It’s not there in Swarm of the Century, or Stare Master or A Bird in the Hoof, or any other case of Fluttershy’s cottage except here, which means Angel moved into the cottage after this episode and his rabbithouse was disassembled – it never turns up in an outside view shot. The wiki also agrees. That gives us some new chronology hard locks, including a very unexpected lock on Putting Your Hoof Down.3- Angel is the only animal that mimes to Fluttershy. I wonder. Many people do, actually.
- As I mentioned before, carrots seem to take the place of sausages in pony diet. And Fluttershy feeds them to Angel. I thought I’d just point that out.
- It’s Angel who notices the smoke cloud first, not Fluttershy herself.
- Apples are on the trees… but there are always apples on the trees.
- Canterlot Friends are, once again, present in the crowd in the park.
- So there’s a ball-bouncing record in Equestria. Rainbow counts to 247, but she’s actually counting much slower than she is bouncing, I don’t know what’s up with that. Human records in the area typically don’t count individual bounces, but rather, the time spent, and the record I’ve been able to track down says it’s 24 hours 30 minutes nonstop… According to Applejack later in the episode, the pony record is 247+5 = 252 bounces, which is comparatively pathetic. Which is strange.
- The infamous shot with Lyra sitting “like a human” is from this episode and this scene, and actually it’s rather tame compared to other poses ponies took since.
- Rainbow Dash takes off with the ball still under her wing. Later episodes feature her flying with just one wing, but usually, not quite so fast.
- So, just what has to happen to a dragon for his snoring to create an ecological catastrophe across the entirety of Equestria, or even just a small portion? Because, as it has been established in later dragon-related episodes, at least hundreds, and possibly thousands of dragons of this size class exist, and at least one other dragon like that lives within walking distance from Ponyville. At least some of them would be asleep at any given time, and many would presumably be snoring. There’s the Doylist explanation that apparently, Equestria was to be much smaller than the map says it is, and then that changed, but we don’t do Doylist here.
- The shot of the library actually has wasps – or whatever insects do live in there, they’re only tiny dots in the shot – swarming around the nest under the balcony, this time.
- Applejack’s “What in the name of all things cinnamon swirled is a full-grown dragon doing here in Equestria?” phrase is interesting in multiple respects: “cinnamon swirled,” as well as a statement that full-grown dragons typically do not live within the borders of Equestria. Compare to Torch’s “Dragons of Equestria!” address in Gauntlet of Fire
- That horse head statue in the library is not attached to the stump (?) it’s standing on, something to keep in mind.
- The actual logic behind sending the Mane 6 to “encourage him to take a nap somewhere else” has been called out as dubious many times before. It could only be expected to work if the dragon was aware that should he refuse, the next time they wouldn’t be asking, for one, which implies that the dragon should be so aware, but not necessarily is. But even then, there’s a question why should the Mane 6 in particular be doing it, and not, say, a squad of pegasi guards. So why?
- Twilight’s “If we do, Equestria will be covered in smoke for the next one hundred years” implies that a typical time for a large dragon’s nap is that long. However, she does not say how exactly is this known, which would be the most interesting part.
- Twilight’s phrase “Let’s meet back here in less than an hour” is strangely awkward.
- Second time we see Rainbow’s cloud mansion. The altitude it’s at is still about the same as in Griffon the Brush Off, because treetops can be seen below it, but the location seems to be different.
- The waterfall of rainbow on the said premises is actual rainbow in its liquid form, because Rainbow dips her hooves in to paint her face. In the airing order, this is the earliest instance of liquid rainbow. Notice that painting the face does have some symbolic meaning in pony culture, though I’m not sure just what it actually means to her.
- Granny Smith turns up on the Sweet Apple Acres as the whole family is packing AJ’s bags. Still no zimmer, but she is not seen walking, either. Apple-marked bottles of an unusual cokebottle-gourd shape are the primary contents of AJ’s saddlebags. What’s in them, I wonder? I don’t remember seeing those anywhere else.
- Rarity is wearing a camouflage infantry helmet while packing. This is particularly notable because the function and construction of such helmets is nothing like a knight’s helm: They’re meant to protect the head primarily from artillery shrapnel. Against sword strikes, they wouldn’t be anywhere as good as earlier helmets. Against a dragon’s breath it would be useless. Rarity quickly swaps it for a wide-brimmed hat in a camouflage pattern, which is a bit more sensible, even though she does it purely on style grounds.
- Fluttershy comes out in a strange ensemble of a catcher’s chest protector, an American football helmet, a ring buoy and something on her legs which I don’t recognize. Ponies do have baseball, as we find out much later, but the distinctive football helmet does not seem to turn up ever again.
- And most of that equipment vanishes as they assemble. Looks like Twilight talked some sense into them, though I don’t see what did she have against Rarity’s hat.
- The mountain is relatively close, because Twilight expects to reach it by nightfall, and in the end they do, with time to spare. If they did spend a night up there, it was never shown, though I do wonder just how they managed that.
- Rainbow’s “The higher you go, the chillier it gets” suggests that some laws of physics do work for this messed up atmosphere. The clouds, however, are typically far lower than they should be otherwise. My aviation buff friend mentioned that the altitude Cloudsdale is typically seen at has to require the use of oxygen masks. Nobody in Cloudsdale seems to need those, not even the unicorns, and they don’t look like they’re cold either. So how tall is this mountain?
- Twilight says: “Wait! You have to come! Your way with wild animals will surely come in handy.” Full stop. Are dragons animals or not? Later, Twilight says “Fluttershy, you’re the expert on wild creatures. What do you think the dragon will be like?” again, making this even more ambiguous. This continues throughout the episode. Dragons might be barbaric by Equestrian standards, maybe even wild, figuratively speaking, but they definitely do have their own culture, don’t they? The one that ponies know nothing about?…
- This is about the only episode where the issue of who takes care of Fluttershy’s animals while she is away is handled: The job is given to Spike, this time.
- Fluttershy was literally afraid of her own shadow.
- Rarity says “I hear the only thing that sparkles more than a dragon’s scales are the jewels they use to build their nests.” So we don’t see Spike’s scales sparkle only because of cartoon resolution. Ok. Though, Spike eats the jewels. That would imply they aren’t actually seen as building material by the dragons, are they?
- So how exactly are the ponies climbing a 50-degree slope?…
- At one point, Rainbow stops in the air while flying upside down. I’m sure it conforms to pegasus aerodynamics. Somehow. Actually, she does this a lot in this episode.
- Fluttershy’s fear reflex is to fold her wings and curl up into a ball. Were this a reflex shared by other pegasi, most of them would be dead, so I wonder how exactly did Fluttershy acquire it.
- Pinkie mysteriously wins 35 games of tic-tac-toe in a row against Rarity. I doubt that Rarity is that stupid, which means that more reality bending is involved. The ten games actually visible are actually two identical endgame positions, counting mirroring as the same position.
- Ponies are very attached to their tails. Otherwise, Applejack dragging Fluttershy up by the tail for so long would probably result in severe hair loss.
- Pinkie teaches Fluttershy the hop-skip-and-a-jump song. This comes up later in Feeling Pinkie Keen and is a chronology hard lock.
- The geography involved in skipping is itself rather wonky. We don’t see any splits in the mountain like that from the ground, while when looking down, it appears that the mountain is split all the way and there’s a stream running through on the bottom. Also, they’re jumping away from the snoring dragon, rather than toward him.
- The map is detailed enough to include information that they are passing through an avalanche zone. Ponies would have to visit this mountain rather often for this information to be available at all.
- Remember my comment about twenty metric tons for Boast Busters? As long as Twilight can lift this much, she can hold one of these boulders and Applejack wouldn’t have to save her. As long as she can exert this kind of force all the way into the Everfree forest, she could strangle the dragon in his sleep without endangering herself, even, thus motivating him to run away from the place where he won’t get any sleep.
- Those little gestures, like rubbing faces together, seemingly disappear in later seasons. In Season 1, however, we see Twilight do this with Celestia in Friendship is Magic, now, with Applejack after getting saved…
- Rarity’s spare scarf is transparent. I call animation error.
- I think that’s the first time Pinkie uses a rubber chicken. If we only knew what is she using it for.
- I question the effectiveness of apples “if he decides to attack,” but Applejack, apparently, doesn’t. Is this the earliest shade of the notion of war pies?
- Rainbow mentions the manticore from Friendship is Magic, purely for continuity’s sake.
- Among the epithets Fluttershy applies to the dragon is “sharp-scale having.” So once again I ask: Why are the scales sharp?!
- Twilight’s “But, if you’re so afraid of dragons, why didn’t you say something before we came all the way up here?” is sincere, and frankly, this is very horrible of her.
- Rarity mentioned gems, however, there are very few gems in this dragon’s hoard. Instead, it’s almost exclusively gold and gold artifacts, all of them pony-scale – primarily coins, but also chests, crowns, swords, and other stuff. So where exactly did all of that come from?
- Twilight says “my friends and I are residents here in Equestria,” which is a very odd and very suspicious word usage.
- Rarity mentions jewels, and the dragon reacts – but there are still no jewels around.
- The background of the cave contains very obvious carved columns and brickwork. Either the dragon actually fashioned them himself, or, which is significantly more likely, someone did so before him – the bricks are far too small for him, the entrance can’t be comfortable either. So what was this cave, before it became a dragon’s lair?
- Fluttershy says “go pack your things.” I’d pay to see just how dragons pack their things, because this is one of the big unanswered questions. But regardless, the dragon leaves immediately, without actually doing so.
- Pegasi are employed in smoke cleanup back in Ponyville. Must be another of the pegasus powers.
- Spike is not on good terms with Angel when left alone. Luckily for Spike, this doesn’t happen often.
- Rainbow looks genuinely scared of Pinkie’s imitation dragon roar, which is quite rare.
The big hole in the wall “why are the Mane 6 doing this at all?!” has been with us for quite a while, but that cave’s history is suddenly very interesting.
Chronology project has been updated with new hard and soft locks.
252, actually. Slightly more pathetic than projected.
My personal favorite explanation for why this dragon's nap is so potentially catastrophic is that he's an asthmatic.
I believe Applejack forces a series of American football helmets on Apple Bloom in "Somepony to Watch Over Me," though I can't check at the moment. It's possible that they're bike or batting helmets.
That said, I believe one of the roller derby foals from "Call of the Cutie" may have a similar helmet. And there's always the cutie mark of Rarity's father when it comes to reminders that handegg exists in Equestria.
With regard to the twenty metric tons: The first instance can be blamed on unthinking panic. As for the second, can you really picture Twilight Sparkle choking anything to make a point? This is the future Princess of Friendship, not Darth Vader.
By the same token, I suppose Celestia was hoping for a diplomatic solution before having to bring in the cavalry, though that still doesn't explain why she gave the task to Twilight and friends.
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img12.deviantart.net/f613/i/2016/031/5/b/dark_side_twilight_sparkle_by_e_e_r-d9q08qr.png
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Ack. In my defense, it’s not entirely clear just which number is “five away from the pony record” when Applejack says that.
Well, that’s about the only reasonable one we actually have, anyway.
They’re some other kind of helmet. – though I’m not sure which.
Mmm… Can’t find it at a glance. You might be thinking of one of the two Nightmare Night episodes, though.
She should have a picture of her father on the field somewhere, I wanna see it! :)
No, but applying force to a piece of rock for a demonstration, to show the dragon who’s boss? Maybe. She was told to “encourage him.” Emphasis hers.
If anything, approaching the dragon to “wake him up” sounds like a bad idea.
Alas.
I've never understood the confusion over why they were sent, myself. They're just supposed to be asking him to leave, not attacking him; Twilight is Celestia's nearest representative in the area and supposed to be studying friendship at "Elements of Harmony" level, so negotiating with an annoying neighbor seems right up that alley; and despite their fears the dragon doesn't seem likely to do much to them until Rainbow does try to attack.
I'm not sure why Celestia wouldn't send Twilight and her friends, with plans to send the guards if that doesn't work.
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The sensible practical reason not to is that only two of them can fly at all. But assuming that Celestia wanted to send specifically Twilight-as-her-representative, why wouldn’t she send a taxi to get her there? Going on their own nearly got them killed by a rockslide. The turnaround time would actually be faster if she sent a taxi, and isn’t time of the essence here?
Also, is dragon a neighbor, a subject, a citizen, a foreign national, a monster, an animal? Depending on which view you subscribe to, the best person to send to negotiate with him differs. Twilight only fits a very few cases, even as Celestia’s right hoof. Notice that Twilight herself seems to speak of the dragon as she would speak of an animal more than anything else, while speaking to the dragon as if he were an overlord instead – the words “residents here in Equestria” are particularly strange.
Dragonfire, dude. As long as a dragon maintains personal control over a secure location, he can feel free to breathe all over his hoard and transport it to said secure location. And that's before we even form the idea that dragons might be able to hold teleported items in their system for needed storage.
These bottles...
vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/9/9a/Apple_Bloom_with_bottles_S1E07.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/640?cb=20121228055310
...also showed up at the very end of "Applebuck Season", but a different color for some reason.
vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/3/37/Applejack_with_the_ponies_S01E04.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/640?cb=20111011041204
They look to me like inflatable arm bands, aka "water wings". Except on humans, they're supposed to be worn closer to the shoulder.
You know the mythology about dragons sleeping on top of piles and piles of stolen treasure? That's clearly what's happening here. (Though it's unclear if this treasure is stolen or not.) We see the dragon sleeping on his pile—and in light of that, Rarity's use of "build" is in the sense of "adding to something (like a pile), making it larger".
It is a little odd that dragons use treasure as both bedding and food... Wait a second, have we ever seen Spike eat gold? Maybe that's the solution: gemstones are dragon food, while gold and precious metals are dragon bedding. That would explain why we see so few gems in this dragon's hoard.
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Been suggested. Moderately plausible, the one problem with it is that nobody ever tells us how dragonfire works and what kind of rules does it have, all we have is inferred. As a side note, we don’t see Spike receive letters from anyone other than Celestia either: Cadance, when sending an invitation to the crystalling to Twilight, sends a flying snowflake letter instead.
There is that incident where Spike writes a letter to Luna, but that by itself is not very good evidence to think that it necessarily gets to her directly.
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Missed that one, thanks.
I do wonder what’s in them. It can’t be cider, because Granny Smith says cider doesn’t keep. :)
Well, it’s clearly not made by dragons, all of it is pony scale, so if he paid for it, I wonder what with. Also, the cave…
Not that I remember, no.
Plausible, I suppose. A pile of gold bedding as a radiator, maybe?
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Would have been even faster if Twilight had used the freakin' hot air balloon that Celestia knows that she has, but you can't blame Celestia for that one.
As for what the dragon is, I accept the implication that in Equestria the lines between animal and being are somewhat blurry, and that would seem natural to them. In my mind, if somepony told Twilight that she needed to talk to the king of the bunnies, she'd just wonder when the bunnies seceded.
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No, I can’t. Because nobody knows who the hell owns this balloon, and we actually have no evidence whatsoever to suppose Twilight does, except the opening sequence, which is dubious for many other reasons. :) See in particular the sequence in Spike At Your Service.
It would make a difference in whom to send to talk to them, though.
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At the very least she has access to it for spur of the moment visits to Cloudsdale in another 9 episodes...
That's actually what I'm saying, I'm not sure it does in Equestria. I think in Equestria the only difference in who you would send is whether the being can communicate in more-or-less pony speech or if you need Fluttershy, whether the being in question is openly hostile (therefore requires the guards,) and whether that being represents their entire species/kingdom/what have you in a legal sense or not (therefore requires some sort of show of respect.) The dragon understands pony speech, at least, isn't hostile, and isn't the dragon lord. So Celestia can send whoever might get the job done. Twilight is fine thinking of the dragon as both an animal and a neighbor (albeit a huge, firebreathing neighbor to be treated with the utmost respect.) They treat animals as neighbors on a regular basis.
Edit: (I also don't think "residents here in Equestria" is that strange. A certain type of person might tell someone in another apartment in a building "We're residents here, and your music is too loud." It makes the point that you're not here visiting someone, so you're going to notice regularly if the problem isn't fixed.)
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That's based on how real-life unpasteurized apple cider has a shelf life of mere days.
Theory: Sweet Apple Acres cider (the stuff that ponies line up for miles to buy a mug of) is made from a specific variety of apples which can only be harvested at a specific time. The Apples don't pasteurize this cider or put in any preservatives because that would hurt the flavor—and the scarcity created by the shorter shelf life just means increased business. But during the rest of the year, they still juice some percentage of their non-cider apples, then pasteurize it, bottle it, and sell it to retailers as apple juice. Or, I suppose it's more likely that Sweet Apple Acres sells some percentage of their non-cider apples to the juice-makers.
Either way, that's what these bottles are. Apple juice: a pale imitation of sweet, glorious cider, but good enough for drinking the rest of the year.
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Balloons do have altitude limits, I’m not entirely sure it should be able to get there at all. But never mind, let’s assume it can get there. The problem remains that no matter how we spin it, it’s one of the two:
1. Twilight (and friends) have an idiot ball. (Twilight uses the most dangerous way to get to the dragon, even though a safer and quicker one is available, nobody thinks to correct her.)
2. Celestia has an idiot ball. (Sends Twilight to deal with the dragon without supplying the means to do the job quickly and safely, even though those are well within her power.)
I’d rather have neither.
Possibly. But the above described issue remains.
Maybe it’s just me, then…
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You do realize this one is almost exactly "Why didn't Gandalf call the eagles to take them to Mount Doom?" right?
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To be “almost exactly” like this, you would have to assume the dragon is already hostile, in which case you kind of defeat your own point.
No, it’s not like this at all.
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I'm more willing to assume that Sauron's vast army has some kind of anti-air interdiction available to screen Mordor against eagles than that a sleeping dragon is going to be woken up by a hot air balloon and react with hostility, myself.
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I'm sorry, I meant from a story perspective. "Why did a supposedly smart character ignore a canon resource that would have negated a large part of the suspense of the story?"
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I don’t understand why would anyone think this isn’t a legitimate question. (Why do these people get a pass when I don’t, for that matter?
)
And if it is a legitimate question, shouldn’t it have a legitimate answer? A supposedly smart character ignored a canon resource that would have negated a large part of the suspense… A supposedly smart character cares not for our enjoyment or suspense, unless they’re explicitly aware of us, which is a level of meta we’re not dealing with here. Therefore, they have a reason to ignore that resource, somewhere, they just didn’t tell us.
Us figuring out those reasons is how stories grow sideways, because we write about those characters too.
Good answers make for good stories.
I wrote about this, didn’t I?…
Couple of key points. It's established that Twilight and everyone else knows practically nothing about dragons, so we can set aside anything she says that is contradicted anywhere else.
Regarding the "napping for a hundred years," I think that's not a normal thing adult dragons do frequently, or the Everfree dragon would have been emitting smoke. My guess is that the red dragon is pregnant or something, or some other weird but rare dragon biological happenstance, that normally dragons only do in the Dragonlands, where they probably lay their eggs.
That layer of smoke is also why flying up the mountain could have been a really bad idea, by chariot or balloon.
Perhaps Diamond Dogs did the carving in the cave, since I believe this mountain is right above Diamond Ridge.
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4530110 You guys remember Sauron was an All-Seeing Eye on top of a giant tower right next to Mount Doom, and had a strike force of 9 unkillable wraiths with flying dragon-mounts, right? Every flying eagle on the planet as a unit wouldn't have made it within 500 miles of Mount Doom, and that's assuming Sauron can't just shoot fireballs out of his giant eye.
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I have no problem figuring out good answers for these things, but I'm not sure I read where you wrote about good answers making good stories.
A perfectly good answer is "Celestia asked Twilight, thinking she would make use of the balloon. But the balloon had a hole, and this was, as you note, time sensitive. Twilight decided they could handle it between them."
This is a perfectly valid explanation; nice and simple and occam's razory. It's also boring, would have added unnecessary complexity to a part of the story that wasn't important, and therefore wasn't presented and isn't canon. It's not really worth discussing.
But it's an answer.
Fun fact: If you throw a series of half-hitches around a horse's (or mule's) tail, you can literally haul them off the ground by it. I've never done that, exactly, but I did pull a horse out of a wrecked horse trailer by her tail, which was roped to a tow truck. (She was fine in a week or so, BTW.)
Well... the original definition of jewel meant any piece of jewelry, whether or not it was a gem... but that's probably giving the writer too much credit.
4530014 Oh no, I just realized... If Equestria really does have a means of quick-heating packaged foods and drinks in order to remove most microorganisms and preserve them for longer... then the process must be known as pasturization. Named for its inventor, Louis Pasture.
ah, trophic levels create budgeting difficulties.
I suspect what's going on with "Equestria" is that it means different things at different times: continent, principality, world, the civilized [pony] world.
Hoof-grip extrapolation.
Don't forget Fluttershy's extensions.
AJ practices bucking them precisely (see: "buckball season" as well as now), they're readily available to her…and, now I think it, some form of Earth Pony magic is involved in having them not splat on her hooves on the way out, since they don't seem to be using the soccer notion of how kicks that have longer contact time work better. So, I suspect she can use it beyond that, to get a nasty fastball.
wildguess: she has a Maleficent Apple Tree somewhere on the farm…
"…and you are trespassing upon our hospitality."
The expansion beyond water is noteworthy, yes.
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No, she'd tell Fluttershy she needs to rein in the reign of Angel I.
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Well, if we’re going this way…
Equestria has a well-developed chemical industry, which, among other things, requires rather large quantities of oil, which primarily goes into producing plastics, but no oilfields. Oil is among those substances that proved impossible to grow naturally on a rock farm, so it is a scarce resource, and Saddle Arabian sheiks are of the opinion that friendship is all well and good, but drilling for oil costs money. To reduce the economic dependence on foreign powers, Equestria introduced a plastic recycling program, wherein plastics are recycled back into oil using earth pony magic.
The process looks outwardly simple: They dig a huge hole, fill it with plastic scrap and associated trash. Once it’s full, they cover it with the earth and call in the neighboring villages and volunteers from the entire region – all comers are welcome. The ponies gather up on the mound, sing songs and dance vigorously for about a week, and generally have a good time, and once the dance is done, they drill the mound and pump the resulting mini-reservoir of the recycled hydrocarbons out.
A very specific musical style had to be developed for the needs of this process, and a whole culture grew up around festivals like that. Since the oil was originally called “petroleum” or “rock oil,” the activity is now called “rock music.”
P.S. Oh, and you “shred” on a guitar because plastic scrap needs to be shredded before going into the hole.
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Bloody Nacirema. :)
Probably…
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A valid explanation does not necessarily mean good. A good explanation is one that leaves an opening to write a non-boring story relying on the invisible part.
But if you think it is not a good idea or a worthy activity to look for those, why are you even reading my blog?…
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"World" has this property, though much less now than through history. Implicit domains ("the greatest/best" without specifying where) also do.
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Mentally replace “Equestria” with “America” in Coloratura’s “Equestria, my home” song. I suspect they match the syllabic structure so easily for a reason. :)
4530672
I agree that a lot of questions can be answered if the word Equestria used here refers not to the entire country shown on the map, but to a much smaller province / county / prefecture / state of Equestria, most likely corresponding to the country that hosted the original Equestrian Accords that led to eventual political unity in the much larger Equestria we see today.
In this light, the show's introduction
takes on a new meaning. Was the principality / nation / settlement of Equestria significantly more magical than other pony lands surrounding it? If it contained both Canterlot and RPS, quite possibly.
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I'm not sure how you're getting here. I'm just saying I'm not sure a question counts as a "big hole in the wall" when there are possible simple, boring explanations that had nothing to do with the story and therefore should have been left out of a 22-minute episode focused on an entirely different character. As was saying at the start of all of this, it seems like a minor, understandable, and easily fillable crack to me, and I'm not sure why people would let that bother them. The fact that filling the crack doesn't open up more story ideas does not mean the crack can't be filled.
That was the only point I was trying to make.
A lot of interesting headcanons came out of the comments on this one...
I'm not sure that this means that the mountain is taller than Cloudsdale is high, necessarily. More likely, I think, is that Cloudsdale has some kind of magical heating and oxygenisation to support comfortable living there. After all, if it's a mobile airborne city, it stands to reason that it may change altitude sometimes. If it does, then having an adjustable atmosphere around the city would only make sense.
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Pegasi would need to wear oxygen masks when flying, then.
Actually, it looks like the clouds are much lower than they should be, instead, which is why they have to be made in a factory at all – his estimate of the altitude of Cloudsdale was based on how far it is above other clouds. Coupled with the general weirdness of the atmosphere we get what we get.
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...All this would be so much easier if Equestria had either natural weather or artificial weather. It's the fact that both exist in this world which really screws with us.
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I'm inclined to agree. I can understand the use of in-canon explanations only... but making it a rule that explanations always must be story fodder? That's not Hard Mode; that's Downright Unfair Mode.
I suggest this policy: Go with the more interesting option when possible, but use the simple one when you have to.
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Life isn’t fair. I think you wanted a fair-y tale. :)
Seriously though, I wouldn’t especially seek a story fodder explanation if idiot balls weren’t involved. In my experience, people often are idiots. Including smart people. But when smart people are being idiots, they always have well reasoned elaborate excuses.
And I just don’t like the premise on this one, because while Twilight might be a “friendship student,” she does not have an education in diplomacy or even talking to people, and sending her to talk with a “huge, gigantic, terrifying, enormous, teeth-gnashing, sharp-scale having, horn-wearing, smoke-snoring, could eat a pony in one bite, totally all grown-up dragon” for any reason is weird.
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All I can think is that it's another manifestation of Celestia's precognitive ability, as briefly seen in "Twilight's Kingdom." She may not have known exactly how, but she did know that sending the Six would be the option least likely to end in a bloodbath.
Actually, this makes a good explanation for a lot of the puzzling decisions she makes. And you can't argue with her results.
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I can argue with anything. :)
There are two problems with Celestia’s precognitive ability…
1. It is unfalsifiable. That is, it is not possible to imagine a situation Celestia’s hypothetical precognitive ability would not explain. As such, it is inherently uninteresting.
2. I am not entirely convinced it exists. That is, what we have briefly seen of it is not sufficiently conclusive to determine what it actually is, and incidents like the dialogue in A Celestial Advice make it look like it’s far less of a thing than what we’d need to explain each of her puzzling decisions.
I do have my own take on it, which makes slightly more sense, but it’s one of the plot points in Aporia, so I’ll refrain from voicing it here. :)
One thing I always found odd about the ferrets'* diets is that here they're shown eating fish, and in later episodes they're always shown as vegetarians -- they're fed a bowl of leafy greens in "Winter Wrap Up" and eat the same chopped celery as the rodents and rabbits in "Magical Mystery Cure". Despite ferrets being obligate hypercarnivores.
I always assumed that ponies use "Equestria" like we use "America" -- intermittently as the name of both a discrete country and the entirety of the continent that country exists in. Except that rather than being strictly the name of the continent and being secondarily applied to the country, it'd be the other way around. In this case, Applejack would have meant Equestria-the-country, and Torch Equestria-the-continent.
* Weasels don't have facial masks and body markings like those -- they're solid reddish-brown with white bellies. Those markings are very characteristic of ferrets and polecats (polecats being the ferrets' wild ancestors -- like dogs and wolves, or cats and wildcats).
That being said, it's worth mentioning that biologically speaking ferrets and polecats are weasels -- as in, they're members of a species within Mustela, the weasel genus. They're just a different species from the one people usually mean when they say "weasel". The common weasel is Mustela nivalis, whereas the polecat and ferret are Mustela putorius.
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That was my assumption as well, but there’s a huge snag: According to all official maps, Dragon Lands are on another continent entirely.
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True. In that case, however, I could see Torch's "dragons of Equestria" comment referring to the provenance/"nationality" of the dragons he's talking to right now -- i.e., a shorthand for "dragons who come from Equestria". It could refer to where they come from and normally live, rather than to where they are right this moment.
Of course, that would leave open the question of why he'd have only called Equestrian dragons to him -- either he's ignoring the dragons of other continents, for some reason, or almost all dragons live in Equestria despite their "capital", such as it is, being on another continent. If the former, then combined with the ages of the participants it would seem as though Torch was being extremely selective about the Gauntlet's participants, although I can't think why.