Points of Canon: S7x10 - A Royal Problem · 6:20pm May 20th, 2017
This is being written up immediately after the Canadian airing, so burn before reading as usual.
People interested in theorizing about the Other Sith, take note – this episode is relevant.
You have been warned appropriately.
- So Starlight gets a Cutie Map mission, thus demonstrating that the Map is not limited in picking assignees to the Elements, at least.
- This is also the first solo mission shown, even Twilight makes a point to comment on that.
- Twilight mentions the previously unseen palace staff: cooks and hairdressers. Plural for both. Notably, they remain unseen.
- Butternut squash soup is a thing.
- Once again, we see the Infamous Throne Room where Celestia and Luna receive Starlight. They really do seem to use the place for daily business, rather than a quiet office.
- Celestia and Luna call each other “sister” for the entirety of the episode. No “Celly” nor “Tia.”
- Twilight knows a long-distance communication spell that permits her to manifest as a ballerina on a music box. I expect it’s not limited to presenting her like that, though I wonder what the actual limitations are. She calls it easy, but that’s Twilight.
- Celestia claims to really enjoy cooking breakfast personally, at least for guests – though it’s obviously about Luna. Similarly, Luna devotes time to replacing dried lavender in a corridor every night.
- This episode mysteriously still manages to leave the issue of whether Luna is nocturnal or not up in the air, or at least, not settled to my satisfaction. Celestia and Luna receive Starlight together, and it is at most evening, seeing that Starlight gets a guestroom afterwards with no obvious events between the cold open and the scene where she first enters it. The scenes at breakfast suggest that Luna just woke up and did not get enough sleep, Celestia even says, “you spend your evenings flitting around giving ponies lovely dreams,” emphasis mine. The scenes with Celestia taking Luna’s place go full nocturnal instead, as Celestia wakes up right after Luna went to sleep for the night, and in the end Luna flies off saying “The sun is up, time for me to turn in.” It’s almost like Luna does not actually have a stable sleep cycle at all.
1. Fandom, at different times, would suspect either.
It is pretty solid at stating that Celestia is a morning pony, though.1
- I’m not surprised that Luna can chew a pineapple without cutting the skin off, but I can’t fathom why would she eat a banana peel and discard the banana itself.
- Both Celestia and Starlight eat pancakes using two forks.
- Celestia does guided tours of her own castle at least for some kinds of visitors, which Luna refers to as just “dignitaries.” One of the three visitors is a crystal pony in a non-crystal state.
- I’m going to use “horndesk” as a verb at some point.
- MitchH pointed out that they stepped face-first into the question of “what was going on in the dream realm while Luna was exiled” without answering it. They so did. Celestia appears both unappreciative of Luna’s dream magic and ignorant of the extent of what goes on there.
- Starlight has a spell that swaps two cutie marks around, and it is so automatic, that she is capable of using it in a moment of emotional turmoil without thinking of the consequences. Starlight further goes on to say that this particular spell lasts 24 hours and cannot be undone until this time elapses. I wouldn’t put it past her to be lying at this moment, though, because the only plan she has of solving the situation depends on the spell not being undone, and in the conclusion of the episode, Starlight outright says “Wait, I’m not doing this” when the marks swap back with no visible provocation.
- The staff receiving the announcement of the sisters switching places includes four guards, one maid, and two butlers.
- The list of public appearances scheduled for today includes “store openings” and “judging the royal rose contest.” Rose contest I get, but store openings?… What does one have to do to get a princess for a store opening?
- Canterlot Friends are attending one of the said store openings. This Minuette knows exactly where and when she needs to be to get on camera, doesn’t she?
- Luna finds it easier to tear a ribbon with a hoof than to get the scissors to cut it. Now, the scissors can just be dull, and someone needs a smack with a rolled-up newspaper for that, but how exactly does she tear it with a hoof?
- The School for Gifted Unicorns turns up on screen. Notably, all four foals present during picture taking are mark-less.
- This results in a newspaper named “Foal Free Press” (wait, what?!) writing an article titled “Princess Luna unhappy with student fundraiser.” Even the SGU has to raise funds for a field trip.
- SGU has field trips.
- The bottom side of the front page has some unreadable text, part of which has to be a pie chart.
- The todo list as presented on screen contains somewhere on the scale of 100 items for this day. Luna’s list only contains three items when Celestia cites it, but then she says “My list was three times as long.”
- “You need to dispel rumors of timber wolves in White Tail Woods, the nearby towns have been in a state of panic for weeks.” Notably, the only nearby town we know is Ponyville.
- “Ready for the town hall?” asks Starlight. This has to be city-level representative government, don’t you think?
2. Even for humans, the club swinging motion is highly unnatural.
“Still on for golf?” Ponies play golf. I do wonder how exactly do they hold the clubs.2
- “Moon raised. It’s even easier than raising the sun!” Hasn’t she done this for a thousand years?…
- So when Daybreaker talks to Celestia, what exactly is it? She pokes a bit too deep into Celestia to simply be Starlight’s nightmare, even though she is referred to as such.
- According to Luna, Celestia’s magic does not work in the dream realm, and the dream magic is strongly tied to the cutie mark – to the point that Luna cannot do anything because of having Celestia’s mark at the moment.
- Luna says “there’s the sun, time for me to turn in” and then flies off. Where does she sleep?
This was sweet and at the same time, it’s going to make things more messy, rather than less.
This episode is largely incompatible with Micro-Series #10, where something exceedingly similar happens: Luna gets Celestia’s spot for a day and finds it anything but easy. In the comic, Celestia gets to relax for that day, rather than do Luna’s job, but Luna’s reaction would be really strange if she previously had an opportunity to spend a day in Celestia’s place. Notice this also indirectly screws with the My Little Pony #17-20 (Reflections,) since the plot of that hinges on Luna replacing Celestia for several days.
I need to meditate more on the full implications of this, because that’s the only primary canon source on Celestia and Luna’s private life together since forever.
No new squares this time Correction: Nightmare counts for dark magic, and for armor on non-guard.
Chronology: Twilight’s reaction to Starlight’s assignment makes me suspect that this has to precede To Where and Back Again, rather than follow it, because if you say your student graduated, you don’t hound her like that. But whether Starlight would be welcomed so warmly by the Sisters before that or not, I can’t tell. In either case, there are no hard markers preventing this episode from being backdated that I can see.
Friends Forever #38 is also an exceedingly similar situation to this episode, and I think could also be called incompatible for the same reasons. The characterisation of the sisters is rather different in that comic, and they have conflicts for different reasons which they seem to rather definitively solve by the end. Also, FF38 explicitly says that Celestia did Luna's dream maintenance job in the thousand years of banishment, which... yeah.
I liked parts of this episode, but it bothered me a lot. I know the show writers ignoring the comics is par for the course by now, but I don't like when they ignore them this hard, especially while simultaneously lifting ideas from them. And it doesn't help that they're actually ignoring good comics this time, while Shadow Lock's Adventures in Confusing Motivation get to directly tie into upcoming episodes (or so we're told).
I dunno. Maybe it's me. Maybe I've just grown too cynical for this.
I have strong headcanon that time in the dreamworld is highly variable, and in order for Luna to properly police all the nightmares of Equestria, she'd either need extra 'subjective' time, or wade into 'how does Santa Claus visit every child's home on Christmas Eve' paradox territory. So maybe Luna's average night can last for subjective weeks? That can exhaust even an alicorn with earth pony resilience.
Nice to see the writers remember that Starlight has experience in screwing with cutie marks.
I think I love Daybreaker's design. She's clearly a relation of Nightmare Moon's, what with the megalomaniacal dialect and the fangs and blown-out color scheme, but she's also nicely sun and bonfire-themed, all flames and fire. Cold in Gardez is doing this pre-Nightfall action-adventure guards story with a pre-Nightmare Luna who literally exudes lunar coldness - a bitter chill which makes it physically uncomfortable for mortal ponies to be in her presence. It's one of those things, you wish the showrunners had thought of it back during the pilot. Daybreaker, on the other hand, almost has heat-shimmers distorting the video around her.
Oh, that's the easiest mystery of all to solve. It's the "she's half asleep and isn't paying attention" joke that you often get in cartoons.
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Taking a page from Doctor Who’s books. Literally. At least one of the 10th Doctor era episodes was lifted from a short story released in the interim that obviously used a completely different Doctor.
Doctor has the advantage of being timey-wimey, though, they don’t.
You can never be cynical enough with these people. :)
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Celestia looks wrung out after what, ten subjective minutes? :)
Oh, crap, someone just pointed something out in one of the Discord spoiler channels. Starlight's little trick with the cutie marks is more or less a modified, controlled version of Starswirl's Unfinished Spell, the one from Magical Mystery Cure. Did Starlight and the hypothetical Other Sith pick this one up as well while she - or they - were raiding Starswirl's archives for what eventually became the modified time-travel spell?
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Two things:
Star Swirl’s Unfinished Spell manipulated much more than cutie marks: Instead of just swapping the marks around, it swapped ponies in their social circumstances and nobody noticed – except Twilight. “Applejack is trying to make dresses!” Despite possessing Rarity’s cutie mark at the time, Applejack shows no aptitude for making dresses whatsoever, continues in a social situation that is patently not hers, and the same is true of all cutie marks swapped in this manner. I’m not entirely clear on what the hell was it that Star Swirl’s Unfinished Spell actually did, nor what it was supposed to do, but swapping marks around seems more of a side effect than anything else.
What is Starlight’s own cutie mark removal spell other than a swapping of a mark with a pseudo-mark consisting of an equals sign?
I.e. no, I don’t think the Unfinished Spell is directly related to this one. But it is possible that whoever is the Other Sith was related to Star Swirl in some manner, if only because the time travel spell can’t be that easy to modify, and Starlight had the requisite theoretical knowledge to do it.
Good catch on Starlight likely lying about how the spell works, especially given the later exclamation.
Also, interesting note: The sisters switch magic colors along with cutie marks. Luna couldn't do anything in the dream realm because she really did have Celestia's magic.
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Disregard this; Oliver examined it in far greater detail just before I posted this.
I got opinions!
I loved this episode, people who were crying because they felt All Bottled Up wasn't a real Celestia episode can unrustle their jimmies now. Yes they obviously stole the plot of Micro-Series #10 (they read it, there's no way that's a coincidence) and yes this de-canonizes both that comic and FF #38. But it was still a fun, fantastic episode! It even builds on that hint of characterization between them we saw in Slice of Life. And how awesome was Daybreaker?
So canon:
Could just be Mane 6 and Starlight though. Remember Starlight has interfaced with the cutie map multiple times, even helping to fix it, so it might have picked up her signature.
Well, they meet guests there. Twilight would have had Spike send a letter ahead about a friendship problem in the Royal Palace, so they knew to expect Starlight.
I too am immensely curious. Is Twilight's unconscious form lying on her bed, or has she physically transported herself there? Was she just astrally projecting herself into the box the entire time? Was that a normal music box that she altered with her magic, or did she create it? Why is she so afraid of the guard finding her?
And it looks like Celestia makes/eats pancakes every day, with lots of fatty whip cream. Pancakes are obviously the cake of breakfast...
Reaallllyyy?
Luna has the habit of waking up to greet important visitors when they get advance notice, such as a mare being sent to solve a friendship problem in the castle by an all-knowing magic rock. (Also they are probably smart enough to both suspect unconsciously they are the problem from the beginning).
She has the exact same tired-eyes effect Celestia has at the end after sleeping all day and being awake all night.
Seems pretty unambiguous to me.
I think she's nocturnal and she doesn't have a stable sleep schedule. Luna nominally sleeps in the day, but whenever there is an important event that happens both sisters have to be awake to deal with it, and those always happen during the day, so.... (except the Canterlot Wedding, because after a week guarding Canterlot at night Luna passed out from exhaustion). But she's not sleeping at night, she's just tired and grumpy a lot.
This does lend credence to your idea about a confederacy government in Equestria. I could see "dignitaries" being the equivalent of congressional representatives.
I assume ponies just sucked it up and had nightmares.
I think Celestia basically won't say no to any request from her ponies unless she is busier with something else (almost always), and this happened to be a really slow day for her.
Which means it isn't the SGU, it's Magic Kindergarten instead, where ponies are all still blank flanks.
Has to be. I guess the Princesses act as the mayors of Canterlot as well, rather than Fancy Pants doing it, as has been previously implied. Also noteworthy: the two important Canterlot townspeople that can command 3 hours of a Princess'es time are both earth pony stallions in fancy clothing, presumably part of the Canterlot Elite.
Probably why it's easier for her.
I guess as an inexperienced dream walker, once Celestia sees Nightmare Moon and feels emotionally charged, her own psyche gets tangled with Starlight and manufactures Daybreaker from her inner ID, just as Nightmare Moon was created by Luna. That would also explain why the ongoing nightmare could do permanent damage to Starlight's psyche, if it is caused by a foreign magical/psychic element in her mind. (Which we all suspect isn't exactly in pristine shape in the first place, after all ;) ).
Another tower across the courtyard, I assume.
So, back in our discussion of the other Sith, I said that Starswirl traveling to the future was a strong candidate. He has the magical knowledge, the means to find Starlight wherever she is, and a way to convince Starlight not to tell anyone about him even after she reforms ("damage to the temporal continuum!"). What we lacked is motive, and I think we just got it. Starswirl was the personal tutor of both sisters, and according to LoM #1, more of mentor/father figure than anyone else they had. He's also notorious for being an arrogant jerk not too concerned about collateral damage. Would he teach Starlight cutie mark swapping magic, knowing she'll use it to build a cult for some random losers and put them through the wringer for a few years, then almost destroy reality (but not actually destroy reality, which if anyone could know ahead of time would be Starswirl)? Yes he would, if he thought this spell by Starlight at this time was the only way to preserve the relationship of Celestia and Luna, and prevent Daybreaker/Nightmare Moon from becoming a threat.
Other important points in canon: This confirms that except for extraordinary events, Luna doesn't actually do any normal day to day governing, Celestia handles the laws and budgets and meetings, Luna defends the country from monster and bad dreams, full stop.
Also, Daybreaker: "Join me Celestia, and you could have everything you could ever want"
Celestia: "You mean like ruling the country, living in a giant gold palace, the respect and admiration of everyone?"
Daybreaker: "Yeah.... but.... like, less meetings, and also cool fire powers."
4540377
Could be. Then again, the whole reason Starlight required the map for her time travel spell is that “That map of yours is connected to every part of Equestria,” so it might not be limited at all.
Former. Why: At some point, Starlight stuffs the musicbox into a drawer to shut Twilight up. Were Twilight to physically transport herself there, she would get out of the drawer.
Unknown, but probably the former. Why: It is unlikely that Twilight can arrange which guest room Starlight gets. It has to be some kind of “take control of an inanimate object somewhere in the vicinity of the target” – the big mysteries are “how far can you go,” “which objects are suitable” and “is the resulting control an illusion or material in any way.”
Twilight isn’t. Twilight is afraid that the guard will think Starlight is insane for talking to inanimate objects. Starlight is also concerned about this.
Well, I’m not entirely happy. It’s a strong implication, but – other sources mess it up anyway. On the other hand, it just invalidated half of them on other grounds…
…And nightmare entity possession. :)
Could work, I suppose.
The building is SGU though.
What I don’t get is why she’s getting excited that it was easy.
That works.
A bit dark-ish, but yes, that theory did get more plausible with this episode. :)
Yep, though I thought it was pretty solid as it is at this point.
She just needed to say “less meetings, more cake.”
4540377
Maybe a modified version of Haycarte's method from "Amending Fences", except she's imbued a music box instead of a book?
And you'd think that "almost destroying the time-space continuum" would out-rank "fixing a sororial relationship which always is going through cycles" in the time-traveller's almanac of "excessively nasty side-effects".
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I think Oliver's version is the right of it, astrally projecting your consciousness into an appropriate object. Why that music box is appropriate is unknown.
Right, but why? Why not say "oh don't mind us guard, Princess Twilight is projecting herself into this room and talking to me." Twilight "Nice vigilance soldier, now back to your post!"
Right, and nightmare entities seem pretty darn comic-only now, unless Daybreaker was supposed to also be a nightmare entity. Based on the comics, I think either you have to be an alicorn tied to their homeland on the moon, or the moon has to make an exceptionally once in a millenium-close orbit of Equestria (Luna was feeling really lazy that night) for the entities to reach someone. If Nightmare entities were frequently possessing ponies, I think Celestia might have researched the dream realm more.
Is it? Or is it the same classroom we saw in Amending Fences with Lemon Hearts running around with a flask on her head? I'm pretty sure that is magic kindergarten, and the building looked like that. Of course, I think Twilight's friends also went to SGU with her later.
I think Pedestria would agree with me. :)
You would think that, and I would think that, but Starswirl:
A) Is an antisocial jerk who as far as I can tell, only really cared about Luna and Celestia because he tutored them. (Maybe Clover too).
B) Knows or believes that unresolved fighting between the two sisters could lead to another actual rogue alicorn situation, which could possibly end all life on the planet.
C) Can see the future, so if he knows he can steer things so reality isn't then destroyed, but needs Starlight to steer things so Celestia and Luna can get along, he may not see it as a real risk.
4540493
A guess: It is appropriate because it has a pony figurine on top. I.e. you need to animate an existing image or existing sculpture to look like you. If Twilight didn’t find a music box, she would have to make do with a newspaper photo.
A guess: Because only the intended recipient can see that the ballerina figure actually has Twilight projecting over her, and therefore Starlight cannot demonstrate that she is speaking the truth. And Starlight already looks kinda shifty by definition and is in a high tension high security situation.
It’s possible that they do, they just don’t register as nightmare entities. I.e. their connection to the world of dreams is inobvious.
Compare to Friendship is Magic #40 and The Cutie Re-Mark. I’m pretty sure it’s the same Flash asset, it’s quite distinctive.
Blast... I was saying, there are credits for the episode of a Mayor of Fillydelphia and a Mayor of Baltimare, they're men, I think those are those two guys talking about golf after leaving that three-hour session of 'town hall' in the Princesses' throne room.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but one thing I've really sensed about this season is the seeming relative carelessness they approach previous episode continuity with, and this is a major example.
One way to interpret this line might be in remembering that because Celestia had to perform double duty for 1000 years, the physical, mental, and magical strain of doing both really wore on her (raising & lowering the sun and moon for a total of 1,460,000 actions over 1000 years). It would be a real drag to hold down a kingdom alone, as well as raising and lowering her possessed sister and her moon every morning and evening for all that time. Now that Luna's returned and Celestia's had a bit of a break, the moon seemed much easier to deal with, all by itself.
Razor-sharp horseshoes!
Really, she eats the spiny rind of a pineapple without flinching. Luna confirmed for bad-ass.
An old pony in Ponyville had crossed golfclubs as a cutie mark. So much for ponies not being inherently evil.
Not in Canterlot, that's for sure. In the wedding episode, she has to come from outside the city, through the shield, to take over the watch from Celestia. Visually she comes from the Moon on screen, but as to wheter she sleeps up there... no guesses.
Well, we know there can be independent entities on the Dream Realm. Reflections of things that might have been?
If I may be horrifically cynical, Twilight doesn't want the guards to discover her because at some point in the next month, someone's going to write a clopfic about a guard finding her animated music box.
As for why Celestia randomly says raising the moon is easier than raising the sun, this is a single line in the middle of a whole paragraph of talking to herself about how Luna has it way easier than Celestia, reasons for which include that it is easier to magically tell a huge rock where to go instead of a ball of flaming gas.
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Probably. Mind you, episode credits are not reliable information. They misspell names left and right and insist Derpy is called “Muffins.” Whoever writes them knows who the actors are, but not necessarily anything else.
4540688
You aren’t. It’s almost like they’re expecting that the end of the season will reveal that most of the past series was a dream imagined to fill holes in Shadow Lock’s memory wipe, or something.
4540707
Hoofblades of various description is the only thing that comes to mind, indeed.
Maybe they play the cute golf. You know, like PangYa.
So you suppose she was locked in a bedroom she was banished to? :)
4540819
Twilight confirmed for metafictionally aware. :)
(pout) I don't, so I don't see why she should either.
You previously suggested that Minuette had an "Interesting stuff is going on"alert. Taking this literally though, is Minuette aware of the camera? In a Maud Pie falls in love with the narrator kind of way?
Things I noticed:
- Luna's cutie mark does include the black splodge surrounding it. That isn't just her background pelt colour the way eg Sunburst has white patches.
- When the cutie marks get swapped, they don't peel off the way we saw in the cave in Our Town. Instead they disappear and reappear in place. It's possible Starlight has multiple cutie-mark manipulation spells.
- No sign of Raven Inkwell
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Well, unlike Pinkie, Minuette never calls or writes, or acknowledges the camera in any way, so I don’t know. But she’s always there whenever a chance to get on camera presents itself. That’s kinda kuudere…
4541109
Incidentally, that makes it the largest mark on record in terms of area, whether taken proportionally to the size of the rump or not.
Nor of Kibitz.
I think it was to show how very tired she was. As for the moon raised thing, I think Celestia was just bragging.
Celestia really reminded me of Pearl from Steven Universe in this episode. Right down to the voice.
After the cutie marks are switched, the color of Celestia and Luna's magic is switched also. This no doubt has deep consequences.
Did we see Philomena?
Yes, those were the mayors of Fillydelphia and Baltimare in the 'Town Hall'. A 'Town Hall Meeting' is something with a pretty flexible definition in US politics, but it usually implies a campaigning politician (whether for his or her own re-election or for a major piece of legislation) showing up somewhere that normal citizens can attend, listen to his speech, and then ask (often carefully vetted) questions.
That doesn't really fit with what seems to have gone on there, but the term is currently a hot fad term on US political TV, so I guess it just got appropriated as shorthand for 'tedious political crap'.
I presume that Daybreaker knew Celestia too well because Celestia was in the dream and, being a dream magic neophyte, was busily leaking her own psyche all over it.
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4541115
Daily reminder that internal consistency is a thing that other shows have:
vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/c/cd/Luna_without_part_of_her_cutie_mark_S4E26.png/revision/latest?cb=20140512101056
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Nope, no Philomena.
4542064
That's it, Luna needs a bath to settle the issue.
4542346
Relevant.
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4540377 I entirely agree with your theory on Daybreaker (which's a pretty good name!): Celestia's own psyche's getting mixed up in it.
4540547 Alternative: Twilight doesn't want anypony, even the guards, to notice she's there and maybe infer she doesn't trust Starlight. She's like that.
4540688 Good explanation. Very good. A lot of fanfics have gone further and argued that Celestia could feel Nightmare Moon as she was raising and lowering the moon, which would make things even worse for her.
(Alternative: Do we know this's the first time she noticed the moon was so much easier than the sun?)
4541099 Minuette's obviously taking lessons from Pinkie Pie.
4542064 4542346 That's it. Luna was holding back some of her magic just in case. Good thing whatever backup plan wasn't actually needed.
4540688 Other interpretation from /u/Chinoiserie91 on Reddit:
4546196 I like your explanation for Twilight's paranoia.
4546196
This is pretty confusing stuff. I would assume, if Luna had any magic left, that Tirek would have been able to take it, but she had nothing to give him. And yet she still had that partial mark when she was thrown into Tartarus.
A possibility is that the princesses weren't just transferring their magic to Twilight, but were explicitly giving her their special talents as well. Might've been an effort to make absolutely certain that Twilight had the innate ability to raise the sun, in case alicorn physiology and raw power wasn't enough. In that case, we can assume that Luna split her talent rather than giving it over wholesale. She gave Twilight the part that governs her ability to raise the moon, but the inky splotch is somehow representative of another component. Her dream magic, maybe? That would be useful to keep, since we know she can send messages with that. It may not even require magic, as such. It might just make it easier for her to lucid dream.
But the problem with this theory is that, again, Luna has no magic, and the mark needs magic to manifest. That, I have always presumed, is why everybody else's marks disappeared when they were drained of magic. Unless Tirek was also explicitly taking their talents at the same time, and a cutie mark doesn't normally require magic to manifest? But that wouldn't make sense either, because cutie marks and special talents have got to be magical. They wouldn't suddenly appear otherwise. Ponies would just be born with them. Plus, if Tirek was stealing talents, not just raw power, one would expect him to use some of them.
Gah. Season 7 is a mess. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm going to write this off as an animation error, although an error on which episode's part is yet to be determined. As far as I'm concerned, Luna having or not having the black splotch as part of her mark is officially an unanswered question again, and it won't be settled until we get another canonical depiction of a markless Luna to compare against. Personally, since Royal Problem is the one that made a mistake and ignored continuity, I'm counting this episode as the animation error, and proceeding with the assumption that Luna's cutie mark doesn't include the splotch. But equally, it can be argued that the version of Luna's cutie mark in this episode appeared for longer and was more recent, so anyone who disagrees can feel free to accept the retcon.
U.S. airdate
, time to participate.
♪"Luna and Celestia would never fight…again."
Reminds me of the doll spell from EGS. (Notable about that one, it creates a doll were there no pre-existing vessels.) I suspect it's more that she's inhabiting a pre-extant music-box ballerina…which, in Pathfinder, if it resembles her, would be Enter Image.
∃Ballerina music boxes
Celestia makes pancakes. Passable ones, apparently, as Starlight is not very good at self-censoring.
♪"Princesses…not the best" Twilight is putting not only Celestia, but Luna as well, on a super-pedestal. This is usually a lot more implicit and low-key.
❧❧It also soft- implies that she doesn't think of Cadence nor herself as a Princess.
admirable summary of the spell.
❧Hey, we're using a cutie-mark swap spell for good--
wait, Starswirl's unfinishedlooks like this is in the comments.The Princesses have no especial resistance to it, either, soft-implying that Starlight Glimmer could have toppled the realm much as Tirek did, glassware/geology allowing.
♪"Good choice, not that you had one" Starlight is still mentally a controller at base.
❧If Luna is nocturnal, then no account is made for her having been ready to sleep, nor any nods to it. She's treated as having woken up.
❧Starlight is acting as Luna's secretary, preventing any new character from showing up and showing who's got Princess Celestia's timetable under their hoof.
She's a wizard and cutie-mark-knows "exactly when she intends to", to the correct Minu[et]te.
4546201 has my answer: cutie mark ease plus familiarity plus well-restedness.
as "Sheep" heavily implies, entering somepony else's dream allows your psyche to influence it, too. Also, we finally have an official name for the Celestia analogue of Nightmare.
Celestia's horn is ridiculously long.
So that's what the dream realm general [rather than LAN shown in "Sheep"] looks like: bubble space.
I was expecting Oliver to have freeze-framed for some of those individual dreams that flew past. I don't have a version I can.
♪Luna@Celestia on NMM vs DBS: " I've seen a lot, but I haven't seen this before." Depending on how many of the realm's nightmares Luna visits per night, this can imply that literally nopony has dreamed of Daybreaker.
♪Celestia@Daybreaker:"You are not real, and you will never exist again!"
These two sentences are individually innocuous…but together, imply that Daybreaker has been real outside a dream at one point. Also, per the previous, that Luna didn't see it.
most responses in next…
Oh, also
♪"Equestria needs balance!" …soft-implies that Starlight has not been told in any detail about alternate timelines, such as the "forever night' one Twi saw.
Really coy about showing DB
S's power level, showing it only in a dream, of a powerful magic user…but that sunfire-spherewave is quite something.Twilight can teleport long-distance and can scry long-distance, enough to listen and join in mid-conversation. This also caps the casting time and concentration requirement for teleporting fairly low for her now. Most D&D players can tell you that this combination (plus attack spells) is why wizards can short-circuit just about any plot: "scry-and-die".
❧It may alternately be interpreted that she's hiding nearby, but that doesn't fit well with the music-box-inhabiting spell.
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Dream-bubble-contents are visible from the outside…and Luna's magic works in dream realm, so I suspect she has an auxiliary spell to sort them out. Or instinct. Celestia had no trouble picking a nightmare at first, nor any trouble picking out Luna's dream, so I suspect a lot of query-selector power in dream-reign.
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Thus giving a strong implication that this spell is arcane (esoteric) and unknown, in-credible, even, to most.
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Huh, didn't know there was a pony established to do that.
Less surprised there's a comic pony who did it.
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Huh. Doylist option, of course, is that white moon doesn't show on white Celestia rump.
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I'm really surprised they didn't call her Daybreaker Sun. But yeah, I agree that it's probably from Celestia's being there, not Starlight's.
…Starlight doesn't conceive of herself as NMM/DB's equal, despite fighting Twi to a standstill. Hm.
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Alternate hypothesis: cutie mark manifestation and the cutie mark manipulation spells (even Twi knew one in S1, to try to make one appear) do not have a singular, unified referent to say "this is a cutie mark".
Starlight's spell might just go "unusual pigmentation here? Transfer it all. Oh, and that destiny magic that's pointing at it" like a quirky future CSS selector going flank>has(new color):parent(magic) rather than going at it from the destiny side like Starswirl's unfinished one seems to.
(Perhaps Luna magic-dyes her coat so as to make her mark pop more, and tied it into her body and/or soul in some fashion that Tirek could not unroot…or it's just part of the NMM…no, interestingly, NMM has a blue splotch there, so this suggests I'm wrongish.)
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It works, I guess.
Just had a new thought: I'm as hostile to the idea of an overly-powerful Celestia as anyone, but doesn't Daybreaker seem like the leading candidate for the burned-out wasteland future we saw in the S5 finale?
And isn't anyone curious what a Daybreaker takeover would even look like? I mean, she never said she wanted the day to last forever, so would it be business as usual, but with Celestia being more fire-colored and short-tempered?
Based on the purple gems on the music box, I wonder if that is a specically prepared replica designed by Twilight for this spell, that she made Starlight take with her. Would explain some of the magic if she had a dedicated conduit to let her easily keep the spell up, and also a scry focus to listen in on things.
That's the best explanation I can think of.
So then a certain percentage of the population has been randomly waking up with cat's eyes, dark coats, powerful magic and turned evil for the last thousand years and Celestia just never figured out why that was happening? Is there a wing in Tartarus where she has been stashing these ponies?
Hmmmm. At this point I'm starting to think that the CSfGU and Magic Kindergarten are in the same building. Maybe there's one big educational campus and getting in to the CSfGU just means you go to the gifted classes in middle and high school. But why was the entrance exam for the CSfGU in a tower in Canterlot Castle then?
4567126 The fact that the music box looks like it has been pre-built for the purpose of this spell suggests a variant of the Enter Image spell you are referencing, to me.
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I’ve seen people complain that it doesn’t make much sense for Luna to have so many fewer duties, considering that the show elsewhere emphasizes how much Equestria needs both princesses. “We were meant to rule together, little sister,” Celestia said, all the way back in the very second episode of the show.
And then I’ve also seen people complain that it doesn’t make much sense for Princess Luna to be accepted so easily. It’s one thing to forgive a pony who overthrew the monarch and tried to cast the world into eternal night, but it’s bordering on crazy to give that same pony a position of authority right next to the monarch she tried to overthrow.
But... what if those two seeming plot holes are actually the answer to each other? What if Princess Luna has so few official duties because she’s on probation because of the whole Nightmare Moon incident? After a few years of limited responsibility to prove her trustworthiness to Equestria, she and Celestia will divide up their Princess duties more evenly.
And that would feed into Luna’s resentment in this episode. Luna fears that, if her own sister doesn’t appreciate the work she’s doing now—doesn’t recognize that she’s going above and beyond her duties, with gestures like the lavender in the halls—then she’ll never be let off probation and never get her full job back.
4797668 It's possible. Certainly Luna's education is 1,000 years out of date, and I could see her being given a few decades to catch up before she handles duties that require a modern understanding of economics and the law, etc.
My problem with that idea is: This episode really makes it seem like, outside of Celestia's catty comments when she feels underappreciated herself, Luna's job as it is now is equally important with Celestia's role. I know to our eyes there's a massive disparity in the importance and prestige of "make sure everyone has good dreams" versus "run the government," but it seems like ponies really see these as equally important. There's also Luna's lines in the song in S4E25, which really seem to imply Luna is content with her role as it is now.
I mean, Cadance is basically a mayor at this point, but because her town has a magical artifact, this is treated as a role of vast importance.