• Member Since 13th Oct, 2013
  • offline last seen Apr 20th, 2021

Jordan179


I'm a long time science fiction and animation fan who stumbled into My Little Pony fandom and got caught -- I guess I'm a Brony Forever now.

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Jun
22nd
2017

S7 E13 "The Perfect Pear" - A Major Problem · 3:27pm Jun 22nd, 2017

So, despite the fact that it AU's my story At the Gorge (by giving that Sweet Apple Acre Siblings other parents) and peripherally affects Hitting Rock Bottom (by implying Cup Cake is older than I thought, and that Mayor Mare is of an older generation than Cup Cake and Cheerilee), I actually liked the personalities they gave Bright Mac and Buttercup. But there is a major logical problem in the story.

Obviously, AJ's parents were alive when Apple Bloom was conceived, and Buttercup must have been alive when she was being born (though she might have died in childbirth). But Applejack is at least 8-10 years older than Apple Bloom, and Big Mac at least 2-4 years older than Applejack, hence at least 10-14 years older than Apple Bloom.

In other words, Big Mac was at least 10-14 and Applejack at least 8-10 years old when their parents were still alive.

Given this, they should have strong memories of their parents, and probably know at least some of their life story. But it gets worse.

Story asks us to believe that the whole town of Ponyville has previously never told any of this story to any of the Sweet Apple Acre Siblings.

This is not impossible, but it is highly-improbable. Cup Cake, in particular, is very well known to the Sweet Apple Acre Siblings: they have spent many hours at her shop, and are friends with Pinkie Pie, who lives and works there. Has the subject never come up?

Furthermore, there was a Pear farm adjacent to Sweet Apple Acres (where? Sweet Apple Acres is bounded by a river. Did the Apples buy out the Pears?). This farm existed until at most 30-35 years ago (in the SWSV, Applejack is now 29 and Big Mac 33, probably a bit less in the canon chronology). Everypony would remember this farm. ("Oh, that's the old Pear place.")

What's more, if AJ and Big Mac are like any real farm kids, they grew up playing on and all around their farm, both with each other and with other friends. Did they not notice the remnants of the abandoned Pear farm?

What, did Granny Smith chop down all the pear trees and sow salt in the ground? ("Pearia delendum est!") Did she hunt down and erase all their Cutie Marks? How insanely hostile was Green Apple Smith (Granny's full name in the SWSV) to the Pears? And why? The mutual rivalry shown on the episode seems utterly inadequate motivation.

It simply doesn't make sense.

What do you all (oh, I like the vanished "ye," having used it so often in the dialogue of Luna and the Sunney Towne Wraiths, it's a useful word!) think about it?

And read At the Gorge. It's a good story. And even has a very unexpected character!

Comments ( 37 )

Not really, if you think about it.

They probably knew a bunch about there parents as there parents. They probably don't know much about them before that because they wanted to know them as Mom and Dad over anything else. Couple that with the harsh fued and likewise painful
disownment, they probably didn't talk about that.

The real thing is, how did they not see the Apple Pear tree before on what we can assume was there own property?

Well, what do I think?

I think the breakup from her birth family was so painful for Pear Butter, she changed her name and never mentioned she used to be a Pear. Maybe she wanted to tell her children about it when they were all adults, but didn't live to see that day and Granny Smith was too upset at the Pears in general to make that step after Pear Butter was gone. Instead, her older grandchildren inherited the family grudge and any questions they had about it were stonewalled.

Applejack didn't really know who else to ask, at least until Granny Smith mentioned Goldie Delicious when they wanted to know about the Apples and the Pies. Granny inadvertently gave them the method to find out more without going through her first. Pear Butter never talked about her past since she was just an Apple now and the family friends probably thought it wasn't their place to reveal it for her.

Also, I don't remember anything about the Pear Farm having been abandoned. Grand Pear moved to Vanhoover, that doesn't have to mean all the Pears moved with him. There are still pear trees in Ponyville, but the Apples don't go there because of the feud.

What, did Granny Smith chop down all the pear trees and sow salt in the ground? ("Pearia delendum est!") Did she hunt down and erase all their Cutie Marks? How insanely hostile was Green Apple Smith (Granny's full name in the SWSV) to the Pears? And why? The mutual rivalry shown on the episode seems utterly inadequate motivation.

You mean something like watching that old fool Grand Pear disown his daughter, right after her wedding, because she dared wanting to be family with the Apples? To a family-oriented pony like Granny Smith, that must've be doubly-horrible.

4579845
It was between Apple and Pear territory; it was fairly hidden (they had to clear away the bushes to see it); and it's loaded with desperately painful memories. Granny Smith would only know it as the spot where Pear Butter lost her birth family. She wasn't there when the tree was planted. She had little reason to go back and plenty to stay away, while AJ and Mac were taught to stay away from anything pear-related.

The thing is, as you note, the older Apple siblings did have some time to know their parents. And in all that time, they only ever knew their mother as Buttercup. Sad to say, she seemed to reject her past as Pear Butter and all that went with it after Grand Pear forced her into that impossible choice. When she chose the Apples, she didn't go halfway. Since we don't know precisely how Granny reacts to pears in the modern day (Rage? Grief? Both?) it's possible that she feels she's honoring her daughter-in-law's memory by glossing over the details of her family.

The matter of the townsfolk? I suspect a lot of it was a combination of assuming the siblings already knew, likely from Granny Smith, and not knowing how to broach the subject. Close enough to the tragic event, and you may want to let the bereaved mourn. Further out, it just becomes awkward. Who's going to say, "You know, your dead parents and I used to be friends"? I'll grant that there are more tactful approaches there, but I could see it become one of those things people just don't discuss, like how the town's gone crazy since the new librarian moved in.

The pear orchard, though, that I can't explain, because it's still there. In that beautiful closing shot of the helical hybrid app-pear tree, half of the other trees are clearly still bearing pears. Unless Grand Pear brought his entire orchard with him when he moved back, some hint of a connection between pears and the Apples couldn't have escaped the former.

This is the problem with letting this sort of question linger for so long; as with "Parental Glideance," the story has to work overtime to justify the lateness of its revelations. Though I suppose this one would've been problematic even in Season 1, given the siblings' ages. At least most of the issues are relatively explicable.

Pira delenda sunt?

That's about as far as I got with the help of Wiktionary.

4579858 Maybe the dreaded pear trees are part of the 'west orchard' or whatever that the apples mentioned they never farmed?

Also... what was up with 'Sweet Apple Acres wasn't always the only farm in Ponyville'? They showed another farm in that very same shot! Not to mention that there's a farmers' market with the Apples only having one booth.

'Only orchard' might make sense.

You could pull out "earth pony longevity" card and say that AJs parents had their kids pretty late. So by the time AJ and Big Mac were old enough to ask questions, the whole history of a Pears moving away was pretty old business, especially with Granny Smith pushing to never ever talk about it, and the land was either bought out or just turned wild.

I honestly think people have FORGOTTEN that Mayor Mare's mane is dyed.

4579858
4579870
Maybe I'm being stupid, but I just don't understand the problem is of there being pear trees near Sweet Apple Acres. Is there a map where its existence is impossible?

4579870
I'm willing to call that a bit of family bias on the part of Goldie Delicious. ("Oh sure, there's some ponies there who stick seeds in the dirt, but the only real farm belongs to the Apples!")

4579991
Impossible? No. Inconspicuous? Also no, especially not to a family running an apple orchard right next to it. It's similar to the road that goes directly off a cliff in "The Mysterious Mare-Do-Well," springing into existence when the plot needs it.

4580060 The road to nowhere never struck me as odd. Ponyville's in hilly territory and there's *always* a road like that.

4579940

And that she's supposed to be Cheerilee's contemporary. And that AJ is supposed to be part-Orange.

S oyoure not going to add anything to episode 12? I think it's kind of confirmed that Discord is a creature of pure chaos/magic and he doesn't age and thus also had no "birth" "parents" "childhood" "growing up" "guardians" and basically all his fanfics about him being rised along with Celestia and Luna was debunked. He was always like this.

4580108

How so? Did he say something in that episode that I missed?

4580060
They might also have meant Ponyville south of the river, as opposed to north of it. Though I think it improbable that are there are no farms south of the river but closer to Ponyville proper.

A rural town like Ponyville is almost certainly surrounded by farms on all sides. I'm guessing berry and vinyards in the hills north of the river.

4579858 There is a fair amount of suspension of disbelief needed, but I think it's doable. The older siblings knew their parents fairly well, but were presumably shut down by both parents and Granny from ever asking about their mother's past. After their parents died (between this and that episode with teenage Applejack the deaths had to happen within a fairly narrow time window) it pained Granny way too much to talk about their parents.

It's not actually that weird that the older Apples don't know about Cup and Firewood guy. People generally aren't that interested in what their parents were like as children until they are at least teenagers, as I imagine. Perhaps they both moved away and lived outside of Ponyville during the first 14 years of Big Mac's life, so he never saw those two hanging out with his parents.

I agree that Cup Cake and Firewood would have assumed Granny Smith gave out all the necessary details and not brought things up for fear of hurting them. (Granny was pretty inconsiderate in hindsight).

We constantly see that carrot farm in the background, perhaps that was built on the old pear farm after Gran Pear moved away.

I like 4579870 's explanation for the difficult question of how no one ever noticed that pear/apple hybrid. Also, it's probably only really noticeable when both pears and apples are in season, otherwise it's just a slightly odd conjoined twin.

The writers were smart to drive this episode with Apple Bloom, and have her ask a lot of the expository questions. It's possible the other siblings knew the answers but wanted to hear perspectives from different people.

4580063

It may have once led somewhere, but the structure it led to was abandoned and never replaced. Or it may have been meant to lead somewhere, and the road was never completed.

What was weird was that there was a carriage on it, out of control.

4579991

It's kind of weird that the Sweet Apple Acres Siblings never noticed it before. Or a tree as strange as the conjoined Magic Love Apple-Pear Tree. That can't be all that common, even in Equestria.

4580156

The carrot farm is the one which I assume that Golden Harvest Carrot owns, and on which Landscape Carrot (AJ's lost love) once lived.

4580108
Discord has to have some kind of biological substrate to him. Otherwise he would've ceased to exist after Tirek drained him. (Honestly, at the time, it surprised me that he didn't!)

4579913

The problem is Cup Cake. She never seemed all that old before -- in fact the episode makes her out to be almost as old as Buttercup; Cup's a pre-teen to early-adolescent filly when Buttercup is late teens to twenties. And she's only within the last few years had what seemed to have been her first children with Carrot Cake.

AJ is around 20 when the series begins. BIg Mac is older than her. Their parents must have been about 20 years older than Big Mac, and almost certainly at least that much older than Applejack. Which is to say, born 45-50 years before the start of the series. This would make Cup Cake 35-40, and I notice that they deliberately make her look older for this episode -- and this episode alone.

4580166

This also hardly precludes an originally-biological origin. Heck, in the SWSV I took his origin from the Pony POVerse -- immaculate conception by a Cosmic Concept on G1 Shady. Isn't that exotic enough for you, Conred? Or does it bother you that like Alex Warlorn, and AlaraRJones, I have him palling around with Celestia and Luna when they were young?

As for the Applejack and Big Mac not knowing the full story, I can see that cause Applejack directly stated with Big Mac backing her up that their mom called herself Buttercup. From this one line and from when Apple Bloom got her mark they knew their parents. However not knowing how their parents meet and courted is something that doesn't surprise me. I, myself didn't know how my parents met till I was starting collage due to disinterest/not really thinking about them as people. Heck my Mom and Dad know people and have friends that I never talk to or didn't meet till I was much older so yes that's not much of a stretch for me.

Now them not noticing the old pear place, that gets me a little. The best I can come up with that it was always there but off camera. After all when Apple Bloom pulled out the pear jam, both her brother and sister tried to hide it. If all the older ponies on the farm suppressed any mention of the place, it might have just been a taboo topic.

Interestingly Mayor Mare actually could be still younger then she looks, after all it doesn't say when she was elected, and with Cutie Marks and ponies starting work earlier in all.

Note Unicorns exchange rings, and Earth Ponies seeds in the old ways weddings, so what do Pegasi do?

4580162 That makes sense. In canon, I'm suggesting Carrot Top bought the land from Gran Pear before Big Mac was born, cut down the pear trees and planted carrots instead. The Apple siblings should have some vague knowledge that the Pear family lived in Ponyville at one time, otherwise how would they know the Apples and Pears have a feud? Hard to have a feud with ponies who have always lived in Vanhoover.

4580167 I dunno, Cup Cake has always seemed like she was in her 40s in the show to me. If she took Pinkie in a decade ago, then she would probably have already been an adult with a thriving business a decade ago. In fact, she looks the same age as Pear Butter in this episode, at least to my eyes. Certainly older women have more trouble conceiving, and are likely to undergo fertility treatments that can result in twins.

4580166 That's a great point I hadn't thought of. If Discord doesn't disappear when his chaos magic is taken from him, he shouldn't disappear if he gives up chaos magic. I wonder if he's like the spontaneously generated avatar of the chaos dimension he lives in. In old D&D, a powerful outsider like Discord couldn't be killed in the mortal realm, if you wanted to kill them you had to do it in their own plane.

4580185
Interesting that you brought up D&D in that context. I'd thought about that too. In much of its cosmology (and those of derivatives like Pathfinder) exists the concept of outsiders generating from mortal stock. It's possible Discord used to be mortal but isn't anymore and remembers very little/nothing of his former life.

Heck, he even looks a bit like a Protean from Pathfinder!

it's possible to uproot trees and transport them. That's what happened to Bloomberg . That or as soon as the Pears left they don't even bother take care of them. Leading to them to die and then chopping them for firewood. Then replanting Apple tree in thier place. Also anyone surprised that Grandpear was voiced by William Shanter?

4580212 Lesser outsiders came from mortals, but the greater outsiders (and Discord would definitely be at least a CR20+ Demigod-type outsider) usually sprang from the plane itself. We know Discord has been around since the time of the dinosaurs. Still, perhaps the first mortal cave-pony, upon dying and seeing the complete nonsense of the afterlife, embraced nonsense and chaos as a cause.

Heck, he even looks a bit like a Protean from Pathfinder!

You are so right. When I first saw a Kekatar Protean, I remember thinking "Ok, clearly they ripped of Discord for this."

Ooh, and this is a minor point, but I kind of felt Filthy Rich was conspicuously absent from this episode. I mean, the Rich family has been friends with the Apples the entire time, they must know Bright Mac and Pear Butter. Actually, I kind of wish they had given Firewood pony's role to Filthy Rich.

Its not so much that they didn't have memories of their parents, they just didn't know their love story, and they explicitly said that Granny didn't like to talk about anything related to pears, and i think it's perfectly acceptable that their parents didn't talk about it, given that Buttercup was outright disowned by her father right after she got married to Bright Mac. Like, in hind sight, it's sweet and romantic and only a little sad for third parties, but for them, and especially for Buttercup, it had to be devastating, she loved her family but man, that story must have been really painful to just remember.

As for the farm, we actually have no idea of how much time passed between them getting married and them having Big Mac, even in the flashback from when AJ went away to Manehattan Granny Smith already looked very old, in contrast she looked no older than Pinkie's mom when AJ's parents got married, for all we know they spent 20 years married before they had their first child and that would seem feasible.

As for the old farm, i don't think it would be too crazy to believe they probably took some trees with them, and maybe whatever was left just died out or was chopped up for wood.

But what i actually like to think is that the Apples did buy the farm, but Buttercup was sad/angry looking at the Pear farm from across the orchard, reminding her that she was now disowned by her family, that Bright Mac took it upon himself to just tear it all down (kindda like Forest Gump).

I mean, really, AJ's parents story is a tragedy, the episode just didn't get all the way to the conclusion of it. Meet as toddlers, become friends during childhood, fall in love as they become teens, eloped, disowned and abandoned by half their family, dead during or soon after childbirth. Damn.

4580060

It's similar to the road that goes directly off a cliff in "The Mysterious Mare-Do-Well," springing into existence when the plot needs it.

That's not a road, its a pegasus launching strip.

Since, as Grand PearKirk once said, everybody's human, let's see who the cast of characters are:

1) An embittered old woman who watched a business rivalry mutate into a toxic mess that forced an impossible choice on a young woman she had grown to respect.
2) Said young woman renouncing her father because the swaggering, tin-plated dictator with delusions of godhood she called a father delivered unto her said Big, Dumb Ultimatum.
3) Children who weren't curious about who Mom and Dad were because they didn't know there wasn't actually going to be time to ask when the youngest was old enough.
and
4) A sad, pathetic, stupid old man (who used to be the swaggering dictator I'd mentioned earlier) who stayed away because he too late developed a sense of shame,

this episode is very reasonable to me indeed.

(Also, as a Canadian, I sort of like the idea of that ass Shatner getting his credibility handed to him on a tray.)

4580140
Discord dissappears when he is trying to contain his chaos.
That mean he isn't a born-by-parents creature as he woudn't have awarness to act chaotic as an infant. It make sense as he never mentioned his parents. He was probably looking like his present self since he appeared. That means no actual age, aging, growing up, puberty, parents, reproduction instinct etc.

4581843

Babies are very chaotic. They're just limited in their capabilities. And my Discord didn't come into his full powers -- and tue nature -- until he was about twenty, anyway.

But he was always chaotic. Young Dissy was just chaotic good; when he Ascended to become Discord, he want mad and became for a time chaotic evil, then chaotic neutral. Under Fluttershy's influence, he's slowly drifting toward her alignment -- chaotic good.

4581997
But what do you think is canon Discord? If he reveal that he was never a kid or had parents?

4582111

I don't know. Show has never yet explained if the Royal Pony Sisters were born normally, either, though "sisters" implies they at least had a mother.

4580071
Well to be fair, the Orange side needn't be via her parents - mi working theory is a sibling of Bright Mac's (who spends this episode's flashbacks offscreen with their father) but given the strong focus on family among the Apples, a more distant relation is also plausible.

As for Mayor Mare and Cheerilee - was that in the comics? What I remember from the show was Cheerilee being a vague peer of Rarity.

(At least unlike in Family Appreciation Day, they remembered to show the Mare in the Moon.)


4580167
Perhaps she had much difficulty having said children? It's often suggested that Pinkie was a substitute foal for the Cakes, and the oddity of her offspring could point to the use of some Equestrian magic-assisted IVF equivalent.

5240071

I also assume that the Cakes are kin to the Pies, most obviously because of the similarities in names, and that when Pinkie announced her intention of learning how to throw parties somewhere bigger than the rock farm, Igneous and Cloudy arranged for her to be apprenticed to relatives. Equestria's a nicer culture than our own, but still -- would you trust your hyperactive, innocent perhaps eight-year-old daughter to strangers? Would you trust strangers to Pinkie?

5240287
I went with them being friends of her grandmother, who I had Pinkie travel with for several years between discovering her talent and settling down in Ponyville. So at least somewhat acquainted with the filly (which given her nature, is as good as friendship), but strangers to her parents - so they must have managed to rather impress them. It's one of those things I have an idea for that could make a good fic in the right hands.

(As for the names - Sorri if I sound stereotypical, but they're earth ponies. If you start thinking all the ones named after baked goods are related, next uou'll think all the ones named after fruits and vegetables are!)

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