Jul
25th
2017
Points of Canon: S7x13 - The Perfect Pear · 3:37pm Jul 25th, 2017
Spoilers.
If you still haven’t seen it, or any reviews or summaries, you have enough patience to read my blog at a later date.
Go fly a kite, I hear Starlight got a new one.
- This is one of the few cases where we see multiple ponies out with saddlebags on them.
- In the background of the opening shot, we see Cherilee talking to what has to be two teenage ponies. At least, they are about half a head shorter than she is, and taller than Apple Bloom, while otherwise maintaining the same kind of body proportions as the adults.
- So there’s a famous pear jam store in Vanhoover. This, actually is the first time ponies refer to Vanhoover on screen, if my memory serves me right. Previously, the name was only featured on maps.
- You can grow pears in Vanhoover. Then again, pears do grow in Oregon, so I suppose there’s nothing unusual about that.
- Big Mac uses his teeth to manipulate the frying pan handle, rather than hooves. Likewise, Applejack holds the plate in her teeth to catch the flapjack.
- Since Applejack says, “just in time for breakfast for dinner,” they are about to sit down for dinner – but I wonder, is it normal for Apple Bloom to go shopping before dinner? Why exactly did she end up in the market?
- How exactly does Applejack recognize the pear jam by sight? She can’t have a lot of opportunities to see it, with panicked reaction like that. Or is it by smell?…
- So the floor of the kitchen is laid directly over the soil? I don’t think this can be right…
- It’s interesting that Granny Smith says “I’m gonna wash up for supper,” when Applejack just referred to the meal as “dinner.”
- I think that’s the first time I’ve seen that the Apples use an outhouse rather than an indoors toilet, but that’s the only thing this can be.
- Goldie Delicious cites the volume containing the story of the feud as “Apple Family History volume 137.” I wonder how many volumes there are, because the pile of books she’s sitting on has to contain well in excess of 300 books.
- She says, “A long time ago, Sweet Apple Acres wasn’t the only farm in Ponyville.” It’s interesting that the picture she is pointing at when saying that contains the carrot farm behind the Apple barn, in addition to the Pear estate on the opposite side. So Carrot Top / Golden Harvest doesn’t count?… Or does she count as part of Sweet Apple Acres? What?…
- The one remaining Apple parentage mystery after this episode is, wherever did Granny Smith’s husband, if any, evaporate to. Throughout the various flashbacks, she features prominently at an age she would have to be a mother so that she could become a grandmother to the Apple Trio. Bright Mac addresses her as “mom” during the wedding. And yet, she’s always alone. We have another conspicuously missing Apple.
- Judging by the apparent age of Granny Smith, the start of the feud dates to between 60 and 70 years ago – she doesn’t look a day older than in the Family Appreciation Day flashbacks – which makes for a bloody long feud.
- A stallion buying pears sports a cutie mark depicting what has to be three smoking pipes, and he turns up several times across the episode. Ponies smoke tobacco, or at least did in the last hundred years.
- In a sudden fit of continuity, they got the Mare in the Moon right for the time period.
- So Granny Smith reads bedtime stories to the trees, like Applejack did to Bloomberg…
- Apparently, ponies have two radically different modes of infancy, with regular eyes and with button eyes. And while Applejack has regular eyes on her birth certificate in The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows, her parents have button eyes in this flashback, so it’s not immediately hereditary. What’s up with that?
- The names of the missing Apple parents are Bright Mac and Pear Butter. However, Applejack has never heard the full name of Pear Butter until this point and knows her only under the nickname “Buttercup.” Wouldn’t some paperwork be involved at least at some point?…
- Burnt Oak sells firewood. So there’s a market for firewood in Ponyville, enough to make a living for exactly one firewood salesman, since Applejack says “the.”
- Burnt Oak has been expecting this conversation, which makes me really wonder how exactly did the Apple Trio avoid triggering it years earlier.
- Burnt Oak uses his teeth to hold the axe. Now that’s some teeth.
- So Mrs. Cake admits her original name was “Chiffon Swirl.” This breaks every naming and name changing pattern established so far, since she changed both name components for an unknown reason. It also has nothing whatsoever to do with her cutie mark, which depicts cupcakes. See also The Cake Is A Pie hypothesis. This could be seen as evidence for ponies changing their name upon receiving a cutie mark being a thing, and then it just as well could be related to her marriage instead – with Chiffon Swirl choosing to change both components of her name to match both her husband and her cutie mark. Thanks for muddling the issue further, Mrs. Cake, as if we didn’t have enough problems with that.
- It’s interesting that the scenes with Buttercup hanging out with Chiffon Swirl appear to occur in the same Sugarcube Corner kitchen we already know. The pump water faucet, unique to the location, is identical, at least. Which means that Sugarcube Corner is actually quite an old establishment that predates both Cakes, and that the nominal owner of the place is probably not Mr. Cake.
- Buttercup is using an interesting device to cut pears, obviously adapted to pony hooves.
- “Happy 131456 hour anniversary, darling.” That should be ~5477 days, or, assuming a sensible pony year of 360 days, a whopping 15 years. According to Bright Mac, this is the anniversary of him calling Pear Butter “Buttercup,” and is longer than their relationship has been a steady one. That puts the ages of both Apple parents at the time this is said at about ~20 years, assuming they were ~5 at the time of the earlier scene when Bright Mac calls her “Buttercup.” Notably, it’s not very practical to compute the number of hours unless they are using 1000-hour moons as a measure of time.
- Buttercup and Bright Mac employ birds as messengers. I wonder what sort of negotiation this involved.
- Ponies had plastic drinking straws ~25-30 years ago.
- Ponies have a practice equivalent to writing X+Y= and use cutie marks in place of the X and Y instead of names.
- Vanhoover, at the time, had “acres of untouched land,” according to Grand Pear.
- So once the Grand Pear moved away, did he pack up all the trees? Because we never see any pear trees in Ponyville…
- Apple Bloom addresses the mayor as “Mayor Mare.” So does Buttercup in the wedding flashback. She really doesn’t have a proper name, does she? :)
- Since Bright Mac and Buttercup were able to get their marriage registered at all, the pony age of majority does not exceed 20 years.
- Mayor Mare wore her mane in its original magenta color at the time.
- Notably the wedding uses candles. As I mentioned before, ponies rarely seem to use candles.
- So how exactly did Granny Smith miss the entwined trees?
Chronologically, the only bound on this episode is Apple Bloom’s cutie mark, and no other markers appear. In fact, this episode makes the more sense the earlier it happens.
It’s a very sweet episode, the best so far in the season, even. But it still leaves a lot of questions unanswered and creates new ones when it really didn’t have to.
In some ways, I really appreciate the Chiffon Swirl point. It kind of lets us immediately do away with any names that seem really lucky and based on cutie mark with the statement "they changed their name". To be honest, not sure why the fandom's assumption wasn't this instead of 'parents can magically tell what name will best suit their child but somehow can't predict their talents'.
4612307
Both assumptions turn up often, actually. Both have huge problems, since we see multiple ponies gain their mark directly on screen without any name changes whatsoever.
She did, but then she won the election, and her first act as notary was to change her own name. It will be very awkward when she's voted out of office after that birth-certificate back-dating scandal comes to light.
4612319
The real question is, how much overlap is there between characters whose cutie mark-to-name correlation seems really hard to predict and characters whose marks we've seen ignite?
4612320
She was voted out of office once. Nobody was sure what to call her after that, and she quietly ignored everyone fidgeting until they called her back.
4612324
All the CMC marks have little, if anything, to do with their names. Their names did not change. Two other characters who got their marks on screen or very nearby that we know are Twist and Diamond Tiara. Twist’s name may or may not have anything to do with her mark, I’m not an expert in confection words. Diamond Tiara’s name is not mentioned up until she already has her mark – of a diamond tiara – but at the same time, nobody making a mistake with her name so soon after it she would have to have changed it would be really ridiculous.
My general observation is that the more plot-important a given character is, the less likely they are to have a name that describes their cutie mark.
4612328
It's interesting that the characters most obsessed with the concept of cutie marks had actually emotionally matured enough by the time they got said marks that they didn't need to redefine their literal identity around them. One could call that character growth if we had even known for sure that changing names was a thing before this episode.
4612328
Best electoral strategy ever!
(And now if you'll excuse me, I have to go change my name to "Mister President"...)
This barn/farmhouse thing has been demolished and rebuilt multiple times over the couse of the series... I mean, I'm sure there must've been an actual foundation originally, but do we know that it survived the parasprites?
Son, daughter-in-law, and husband, and all three before their time. Granny Smith seems to have led a much harder life than she lets on.
Biggest surprise of the episode.
From now on, I'm just ignoring the eye thing as a design choice. They can't keep it straight, and it doesn't make much sense when you get down to it, so I'm not going to bother.
Amen to that.
Pinkie Pie and Twilight used a bubble pipe that looked just like one of those in that cutie mark, so it needn't be indicative of tobacco use.
4612328 "She was voted out of office once. Nobody was sure what to call her after that, and she quietly ignored everyone fidgeting until they called her back."
Just an unpronounceable symbol when she became known as "The mare formerly known as Mayor Mare."
4612307 Mostly handwaving. After all, Pear Butter was named that before she got her pear butter cutie mark. I would say it is more like a few centuries ago in Europe where your name was more conditional and less set in stone. Norway/Sweden are good indicators of this where a name like "Sven Svenson" is not uncommon. (Sven, son of Sven, son of Sven) Heck, it dates back to biblical times when Thomas was called "Didymus" or "The Twin" while James and Jon got the odd name of Boanerges "Sons of Thunder" from the way they argued. Even Mi Amore Cadenza was not immune to this, due to Twilight's baffled response to her real name when everybody and their dog just called her "Cadence"
4612480
Pear Butter has the excuse of her father is William Shatner going through a pear phase. It's plausible for him to name a child like that.
4612485 Since Gran'pere has a daughter, we can add this to one more alien life form that Cap. Kirk has slept with, too.
4612490
Oh god, imagine if all of Equestria is just a holodeck Kirk set up to have sex with a horse, and Spock went way too overboard on the world-building?
4612497 "Captain's personal log, Stardate 47457.2. Planet: Equis. It has now been forty-seven T-years since I was stranded on this planet due to a transporter accident, which I'm starting to think might have something to do with when I slept with Transporter Officer Quinn's wife...."
4612506
But then the question becomes, why pears? Why didn't he just spend his entire time there trying to seduce world leaders into magicking him back home?
4612511
Because things went pear-shaped.
Is the dinner/supper thing so surprising? It seems at least in the Midwest, the words are used interchangeably.
4612533
It is somewhat surprising that both are used by the same family to refer to the same meal within less than two minutes.
Then again, I’m way too far from Midwest to know if people actually do that.
4612537 Yes, we do. (I'm about as much in the Midwest as you can get, and we get both breakfast/lunch/dinner and breakfast/dinner/supper intermixed all the time.)
4612537
Yeah, based on my anecdotal evidence, the distinction between dinner and supper seems to be diminishing here in the US, these last few generations. I rarely say “supper”, and when I do, I use as a synonym for “dinner” (and I use both exclusively to mean “the main meal of the evening”). As for my region, I moved around a bunch while growing up; my dad’s from Indiana; and my mom’s from California.
It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I realized other people distinguish between “dinner” and “supper”.
4612537
Perhaps I shouldn't speak for the whole region, but I know at the very least my own family and people I knew growing up made no difference between the words. Both simply meant the big, final meal of the day.
4612579
Big ol' Hoosier here, and I pretty much had the same experience. It was high school when I found out supper and dinner weren't supposed to be synonyms.
Probably her afternoon class.
You know in Equestria there must be a grunge rock band named Pear Jam, right?
A lot of issues of this episode come down to the fact that Granny Smith was so traumatized by the tragic death of her son and daughter in law that she does not discuss them under any circumstances and reacts strongly when they or just pears in general are brought up. It's presumably why Applejack and Big Mac know almost nothing about their parents, and is a fairly big black mark on Granny's parenting.
Perhaps the Apples sold that land to Carrot Top or an ancestor of hers a while back.
Consider the amount of Apple incest jokes I've seen on this site, I expect fan theories to point to Gran Pear as the missing Apple.
And one that is basically started by the two of them competitively hawking their wares in the market. Man that is dumb.
Anyone else annoyed they created a new character for this instead of giving this role to Filthy Rich?
Everyone else in town figures Granny will tell the kids what they need to know, and Granny failed at this.
*Dancing elaborately in front of computer* Some ponies choose to take a new name, but not all ponies do. Notice that Chiffon needed an outsider to even suggest baking to her, so she didn't start with a family pre-determined name to work off of.
Agreed.
Those dumb birds are working by the moon, but getting paid every DeciMoon!
It makes sense for them to discover that weird little grove earlier, but on the other hand Gran Pear is now moving to Ponyville full time. If we see him appearing in the background in later episodes when he didn't before, that should suggest this episode is pretty much in chronological order.
4612307 Yup. Seems fairly straightforward to me. In many cultures on earth people will change their names when they become an adult.
4612328
Or at least, the more insecure a person is about their old identity, the more likely they are to choose to change their name. I wonder if Rarity changed her name, as a pony going into a heavily image-concious field, looking to climb socially as an adult?
4612490 You have to wonder how long before Discord feels an inexplicable urge to go harass Gran Pear until the pony gives an eloquent righteous speech that shames Discord into leaving him alone (for a while).
4612776
So what did Cookie Crumbles and Hondo Flanks originally name their oldest daughter before she grew a Middle Atlantic accent and renamed herself? They named their youngest Sweetie Belle, so... hrm.
Blueberry Flour? Spring Snows? Vanilla Extract? Marshmallow Drifts?
4612973
Definitely the last one!
4612776
Sure. Considering the carrot-topped building existed back then, how exactly does it not count as a separate farm, is what I’m asking.
I’m not convinced the name change upon getting a mark actually happens, mind you. Mrs. Cake speaks as if all of the period she knew Buttercup is covered by the name “Chiffon Swirl.”
So I say it’s inconclusive.
I’m pretty sure we won’t see him until Season 9. :)
Name one that is not a preindustrial tribal society. You will find it rather difficult. In fact, name one that is, you won’t find it very easy either.
You see, there’s a reason the practice is abandoned: it greatly complicates taxation, representation, and in general any relationship with the government. Which we know ponies do have.
4612973
White Silence.
4613079
Perhaps it is here that we begin to find the roots of the practice of signing with one's cutie mark instead of one's name. A cutie mark can be reasonably counted upon to be both constant and imminently recognizable, as well as having far smaller odds of being the same as someone else's, thus making things like mailroom blunders and misfiled paperwork much less common.
I can't even begin to calculate how this would impact the process of changing one's name for better or worse, but it probably has some impact.
4613098
You’d think that. However, cutie marks do repeat. Certain cutie marks, particularly the hourglass, repeat often – two named characters with speaking lines have this one, (Minuette and Doctor/Time Turner) not counting four or five more ponies who also have the same one.
We have yet to see a signature on a formal document. However, we know that invitations in formal settings are signed with names. (See Sweet and Elite.)
4613126
Damn those Time Lords, screwing with our tax documents!
4613079
I'm not sure about that.
"Apple Bloom: But isn't your name Mrs. Cake?
Mrs. Cake: Not always. Back when I was Chiffon Swirl, heh, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. But one day, your mom brought me some candied pears, eggs, flour, sugar, and vanilla, and told me to just be creative! Next thing I knew, I was whipping up pear upside-down cake, and I got my cutie mark! It was like she knew what I was supposed to do long before I did."
In fact, the conversation seems to tie her lack of knowledge of baking to her name.
Does this make this a forwards-chronology episode, that we will one day slot in among other S9 episodes? That would be interesting.
Chinese People Giving Themselves English Names
More about the Courtesy Name, which seems at least somewhat similar to ponies giving themselves names that match their cutie mark if it will also help them in business/society in the future.
4613098
4613126 Cutie Marks do repeat, and not just with similar version, we've seen identical copies before. The flip side of this is; the pony naming convention (common word pairs that fit together like "Silver Spanner" or "Cup Cake" rather than matching a large list of first names and last names together randomly) should probably throw up even more duplicates than repeat cutie marks. I suspect your name is your name, your first name, family name?, and cutie mark together are basically your national ID number.
4612425
In my area, it's not unusual for 19th century buildings (especially in rural areas) to have been laid down right on the earth without a foundation. Hell, I work in one. So the Apple's farmhouse could have dirt right under the floorboards- I've seen it before.
4613717
No, it just makes Grand Pear invisible like a lot of other background ponies.
This is primarily motivated by the huge divergence between Chinese and most other languages, and I’m pretty sure it does not as such apply to ponies. Ponies don’t have a lingua franca to contend with, they are the dominant culture as far as we can see. Contrast “Nguyen” and what the Chinese did to the Vietnamese.
Any others? :)
That is one big motivator for the specific adoption of western names by people of Chinese descent, yes. However, it's not the only one, nor are western names the only names young adults choose. Did you read the link about courtesy names? Or Milk names? China has long tradition of people changing their names as they approach adulthood with the goal of said name helping the individual succeed. It's actually decreased over the last 100 years as China has had more exposure to western naming traditions, but it still goes on.
4615192
Yes, I did. Once again, any others? :) In fact, any culture that uses an alphabet?
This really isn’t a “common” practice, is what I want to say. It creates a lot of problems once the mean size of a village crosses the Dunbar number, and any sufficiently big nation will want something more stable, where the changes in people’s names are limited as much as possible. If the primary motivator of the name locking is taxation, and per-household taxes are the primary means of tax accounting, names will tend to be locked per-household, with name changes happening only upon marriage. This is also the motivator for family names.
Speaking of duplicates in pony names… Applejack was convinced that a duplicate “Coloratura” is possible, when this is a really uncommon word.
There’s something fishy about the whole thing. Let’s re-collate. Known name inheritance and change patterns look like this:
Anything I missed?
My biggest argument against ponies changing names upon acquiring cutie marks are Filthy Rich (“I prefer Rich.”) and Spoiled Milk. Both of them dislike their names severely, and if there was an option to change them other than through marriage, they would do so. In the latter’s case, the name she ended up with after the marriage is arguably worse! :) Also, coupled with the shared-component practice, Cup Cake marrying Carrot Cake would draw stares. My opinion is that the easiest way to make this make sense is to assume this set of rules:
…And apparently, nobody knows Mayor Mare’s real name. :)
4615655
No, just the one covering a 6th of the planet's population.
Well, they use an alphabet now, but to be fair they have traditionally use a pictographic representation of their names.... almost like a cutie mark.
You make a strong logical case for why people only change their names when they get married as part of a modern society, I must admit. However, the cutie mark is a complex sociological phenomenon that has no true parallel on earth. We've got things Bar Mitzvah and Confirmations, and even Quincineras, but without a magical stamp appearing on the ass of the guest of honor, it's not nearly as important to the individual. I feel like that is a big enough change across all of history to push governments to allow for an additional opportunity to change one's name, i.e. on your Cutecenera. You're right that governments have a strong incentive to discourage citizens from changing their names randomly, or casually. But that also means that if ponies really, really want to change their names, governments would prefer if they all did it once, at the same time, before they are adults and have jobs and own property. That means from the point of view of Celestia and the Equestrian government, it's much less hassle if there is an official Cutecenera name change form that Chiffon Swirl can fill out, than if she just decides to change her name to Cup Cake at 20 because she was able to buy out the Ponyville bakery from their owners and now feels like an auspicious time to change names. BTW, as the world's oldest continuous civilization, I suspect China had quite a lot of historical experience dealing with the paperwork of name changes.
Historically, pony society, before they had lots of paper and clothes, still had effectively a name tag on the flank of every adult that could reasonably distinguish them from everyone else in their village. I bet when you wanted to get the attention of someone you hadn't met before, you just shouted out the name of their cutie mark and expected them to respond to that (embarrassing if you guess wrong, of course). I suspect the cutie mark pictograph has been an identifier of names longer than the written word. Ain't no "Celestia" or "Luna" carved into the side of the Crystal Tree.
I'll agree that if name changes upon one's cutecenera happen at all, they happen pretty rarely these days, like 1-5% of the population at most. As modern society has people feel like their identity is less tied up in their job, it follows that there would be less pressure to change one's name based on future career.
I don't recall any evidence of Spoiled disliking her name. I admit, Filthy Rich is the single biggest argument against the theory, since he could have changed his name but didn't. But we do know that his family has a tradition of naming their family in a specific way, at least based on his grandfather. And we know from S6 that Filthy was hugely focused on carrying on his family's legacy with the store. Just went back to review our canon notes and discussion for "Where the Apple Lies," and I believe we left it at the idea that Filthy is the designated heir for the Rich Empire, eager to please whoever the matriarch/patriarch is. I think it's not an unreasonable supposition that Filthy Rich would keep a name he hates because even teenage Filthy was a shrewd business-stallion, and if he pissed of Grandpa Stinkin' or Aunt Impossibly by changing it he might not be the next heir. Instead, he sucks it up and vows to choose a non-embarrassing name for his future children once he is old and established and beyond retaliation from his family.
You know what's actually much stronger evidence than Filthy: Flim Flimflam and Flam Flimflam, professional inventors/con-ponies whose names announce they are con-ponies, and who have perfectly innocuous Apple cutie marks!
Certainly not legally mandated, and may only be a tradition among earth ponies.
I would think that the cutie mark is part of the formal identifier, once it exists. Heck, ponies can have actual National ID numbers as well. Their technology level is past the point where many western nations started handing those out, and it's vital in the hospitals, which we can see are very advanced in Equestria.
Do you mean more than humans do in real life? I'd love to get into a discussion about Rarity Belle, but I'm not sure if that's where you're taking this.
The issue with that is once again Filthy Rich. My theory of why he didn't get rid of Filthy was that when he as 13, he had yet to join the Rich empire, and wanted to get started on the right foot. But your theory means he would have had another chance to change his first name when he was older, and he still chose not to.
I don't think this can be true though. Are you saying that nowhere on official records is any part of Big Macintosh's name "Apple?" Or that none of the Hoofield or McCoy clan actually have that in their names? There is frequent, (but also contradictory) use of family names. Do family names in Equestria just have zero legal weight?
Ok, but then how is that different from my theory, but with a few more years added on?
This guy knows the dark secrets of Mayor Mare more than anyone alive.
4616673
And not sharing the linguistic family with anyone in the other 5/6ths.
Pinyin is not an alphabet, but a phonetic syllabary, and is not meant to replace hanzi. In fact, it can’t be used for Japanese, which also uses hanzi, but shares no phonetics.
There are reasons the Chinese culture is so different even from their closest neighbors who spent centuries trying to imitate them, and the language barrier is one of the big ones. Building artificial barriers because everyone else is a dirty barbarian is another.
So why is Chiffon Swirl the only potential example observed out of all ponies who received their cutie mark when we could see that?
Ok, I suppose there isn’t.
He could become Fabulously Rich, or any of the numerous other possible combinations that carry on the meaning and the shared component, but don’t have the connotation with filth.
As a side note… So why doesn’t Diamond Tiara share a “Rich” name component then? As far as we at all know, she’s an only child. Wouldn’t he get in big trouble with his parents by picking a non-Rich name for his little princess?
I’m pretty sure “Rarity Belle” is the purest fanon, because she is never ever addressed as such in any canon media.
But I do mean ponies seem to apply nicknames socially more often than humans. I have used close to ten different names, not covering the standard permutations, and I only ever got called three to my face.
Because Spoiled Milk wanted to be a Rich and he was head over heels with the pink gold digger.
Yes. Why:
aud Pie” is a pun…) and even other traditionalist earth ponies (the Apples) think they’re weird.And that’s actually all we have. We know that Shining Armor is not “Shining Armor Sparkle” or anything of that ilk, because during the wedding, when Cadance is addressed with her full name of “Mi Amore Cadenza,” Shining Armor is still “Shining Armor.” I.e. sharing a name component within the family is not a universal tradition and not universal even among earth ponies. That does not preclude the family as a whole from being designated by a word.
Yes, that is what I think.
Mostly, it is different in that it happens when they’re adults. A well-meaning government would wish to avoid letting children change their name at the age when they get a cutie mark: The chance of ending up with a whole country suffering from picking cool sounding names that won’t be cool a generation later is too high.
That's certainly true. There's a prominent world-builder on the site who likes to say Equestria resembles Chinese and other Asian cultures more than Occidental cultures, but I don't think he's ever focused on the language.
Like I said, I think it's fairly rare these days. We can assume Chiffon's parents were not bakers since the idea never came up. The number of ponies we have seen from pre-cutie mark to post-cutie mark is like 15, counting the CMC and the Mane 6. I would put Trouble Shoes as a strong second contender though.
The connotation of filth is part of the tradition though. If he changed it to Fabulously, he might still have offended his family.
Since you bounced Tarnished Riches as a pure fanon invention, my other suggestion would be that by the time DT is born, Filthy is an adult with an established place in the business, and thus less worried about offending his family than before. Perhaps Grandad Stinkin died off when he was 20, right before he was given that key position in Barnyard Bargains that marked him as the heir.
That might be down to individual experience. I would probably call you Ollie in real life (or Smoozie if my suspicions are correct). But that might just make me the Pinkie of the bunch. I don't know if we have a handle on how common human nicknames are, to compare to ponies.
I wonder if its like Scottish Clan names today. I may be wrong, but I think the Clan name is no longer part of people's middle or last name in Scotland, even if they have a pretty good idea of what clan it is. So Big Macintosh of Clan Apple.
The naming reforms of Chancellor Awesome-Sauce were far-reaching indeed.
BTW, surprised you didn't seize on the names of the FlimFlam Brothers.
Not the first US airdate, but they handily gave me the last three episodes along with the new one, so here.
And yet, this is also very puzzling if "no Apple nor Pear liked each other but Bright Mac and Pear Butter", unless Granny is the prime ancestor of the Apple Family…
and she isn't, she's a Smith.♪"Cinnamon Sugar on Toast" is an odd ejaculation.
Who is ♪"Gosh" and why would he "Darn" somethng? Would it be to Tartarsauce?
♪"They had that magical, star-kissed, other-side-of-a-rainbow kind of love."
∃Guitar called a guitar.
Pear Butter[cup] can sing and play guitar very well.
Messenger birds.Noted.This should be unpacked a bit.
Elopement is legal, and binding:
Individuals are permitted to marry of their own volition
Parental consent is unnecessary therefor
What I find interesting is that neither AJ nor BM have heard any of these before. I suspect Mayor Mare, having complained elsewhen of not being in on schemes, concocted this, as the repeated narrator-change thing is a little too convenient, with hardly any story overlap but strong narrative flow.
Break for comments!
4612328
Some merch calls her Peppermint Twist, which is precisely her cutie mark. "Twist-a-loo"…I got nothin'.
4612490
i've learned French and I'm ashamed to have missed that pun.
4612579
the difficulty, of course, arises from it meaning "the main meal" and hte evening part being something that isn't as consistent.
4616673
That they had bureaucracy and spread it was rather famous.
He's got a few reasons.