Jul
31st
2017
Points of Canon: S1x23 - The Cutie Mark Chronicles · 1:57pm Jul 31st, 2017
This one is very important. And I’ll be done with Season 1 soon.
- According to Sweetie Belle, ponies do not zip-line often, if at all. So who does, then, and where did Spike have an opportunity to engage in this activity?
- Ignoring the fact that carabiners shouldn’t really get so hot over such a short distance, the rope shouldn’t burn through so easily either – at least, not rope capable of supporting three pretty heavy fillies. Unless it’s paper rope. Which was occasionally used for packaging, until completely displaced by plastic tape.
- It’s annoying, but even our pines produce sap all year round, so we can’t date this episode based on that. It’s somewhat strange that the CMC managed to get covered in it completely, though.
- “You know where we can find a cannon at this hour?” This is the earliest indication ponies have cannons at all, because I don’t think Pinkie’s party cannon appears until Season 2. Notably, even Scootaloo knows what they are.
- Apple Bloom’s and Sweetie Belle’s immediate reaction to naming the “coolest pony in Ponyville” is to name their sisters. The second coolest is still Pinkie, not Rainbow. Notably, they don’t associate Rainbow with Cloudsdale, but they do associate Fluttershy with Cloudsdale. It seems that Rainbow remained extremely tight-lipped about her origins until then.
- While Scootaloo doesn’t fly high, she is, apparently, quite capable of supporting her own weight on her wings. Otherwise, she would get stuck to the ground, instead of Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle.
- Remember the cart from A Dog And Pony Show? Spike’s cart is probably a slightly modified version of the cart Scootaloo tows with her scooter. Could, in theory, even be the same one, though I’m pretty sure the Flash assets are different, Spike’s cart did not have wood texture on the side.
- For all its simplicity, the scooter has to include some kind of brakes with controls on the handle.
- The bunnies take their time to taunt Applejack. I’m pretty sure their motivation to steal apples is not food.
Applejack Story
- The carrot building turns up consistently behind the Apple barn in just about every picture or flashback of the Apple barn. I still want to know if it counts as part of Sweet Apple Acres or not.
- Knowing what we do know from The Perfect Pear and Where The Apple Lies, the order of events is that first Applejack leaves for Manehattan, then returns after the Sonic Rainboom, then the incident that causes her to stop lying and Big Mac to shut up forever happens. If the parents were still alive at the time she left, this scene could not have possibly avoided them. So is Apple Bloom still being wet nursed by Braeburn’s family, as we speculated when discussing Where The Apple Lies? This whole period of Applejack’s life is confusing. Notably, Applejack doesn’t even mention Apple Bloom throughout the flashback, though she does mention Granny Smith and Big Mac.
- Carrying a framed portrait of Aunt and Uncle Orange is weird. She’s going to live with them, this is a particular thing she could do without.
- Instead of saddlebags, Applejack is using some manner of sack worn over a shoulder on a stick. We never see how the hell the stick stays attached to Applejack, because she is not holding it with a leg. And when running back home, she has apparently abandoned the thing entirely.
- This is one of the very rare depictions of crescent moon. Notably, no sign of Mare in the Moon appears, even though it probably should be visible behind the crescent.
- Manehattan in the flashback is populated by present-day Canterlot ponies like Royal Ribbon and Lyrica Lilac.
- To be a direct “aunt and uncle,” the Oranges have to be brother and sister, and children of Granny Smith and her missing husband, i.e. siblings to Bright Mac, or children of Grand Pear and whoever his wife was, and siblings to Pear Butter. The latter is quite unlikely, because Applejack was not aware of her Pear ancestry at all. So either the Oranges are more distant kinds of aunt and uncle, or they had to have split off the family right when the flashbacks seen in The Perfect Pear were going on…
- The entire party uses drinking straws.
- The Oranges employ unicorn servants.
- The Rainboom had to have happened very shortly, nearly immediately after dawn – Applejack barely had the time to close her eyes and say “cookadoodledoo.”
Fluttershy Story
- Fluttershy says “Oh, that would be interesting” when Rainbow’s cutie mark story comes up – which would mean that she is not aware that Rainbow got her mark simultaneously. She further on confirms that she never knew how the race ended. I wonder how that could happen. Did she really never ever come back to the flight camp afterwards?…
- While most of the audience watching the race is flight camp children, there’s a group which includes Twinkleshine on the cloud opposite them. Yes, you can see the horn and nope, no wings. Notably, it’s way past dawn when the race starts, and as we know from The Cutie Re-Mark, dawn has occurred at least half an hour ago, and more likely, multiple hours, because all of the events that lead to the race happening happen immediately prior.
- Dark matter butterflies. Oh well.
- Notably, Fluttershy mentions she had no knowledge whatsoever of butterflies, but her song immediately mentions squirrels and bunnies, not to mention bees. Those, she knew about, even though none of them “fly as high” as her cloud home.
- The Rainboom explosion in Fluttershy’s flashback occurs at a vector at least 40 degrees away from the direction towards the racing Rainbow.
- Animals are massively scared of the Rainboom.
- The story included the full song, or at least, Scootaloo complains about having had to listen to it.
Rarity Story
- Rarity uses safety pins to hold the unfinished clothes on the CMC.
- Rarity also claims to have been late in getting her own mark.
- Rarity wanted to be a fashionista and was quite skilled in sewing long before she got her mark.
- Rarity’s horn is very literally dragging her, moving on its own accord, with no conscious action on her part. “I had no idea where my horn was taking me. But unicorn magic doesn’t happen without a reason. I knew this had to do with my love of fashion and maybe even my cutie mark! I knew that this was… MY DESTINY!”
- At the time Rarity’s horn triggers, the sun is directly on the horizon, but we don’t really know if it’s sunrise or sunset. Rarity’s statement that “the play opened that night” leaves room for both. The play, at least, does start after sunset.
- While she is being dragged, suddenly, it’s night, indicating that it was probably sunset rather than sunrise when the spell triggered. What’s more interesting, the moon is full, rather than crescent. Notably, the Mare in the Moon is NOT visible. So if Applejack’s story is rendered correctly, it had to have taken much longer than whatever time it takes for the moon to go from crescent to full.
- The location where Rarity’s trip stops matches the terrain shown in A Dog And Pony Show and pretty much no other place. At the time Rarity arrives and the Rainboom fires, the sun is at least 30 degrees above the horizon, probably quite a bit higher, since Rarity is pretty small.
- The audience of the play includes the Canterlot Friends, who patently can’t be there since they’re about Rarity’s age at the time.
Twilight Story
- The Summer Sun Celebration that Twilight attended includes a whole amusement park worth of stalls, down to the ferris wheel. One of the stalls sells corn on the cob. The architecture of the event grounds implies it happens in Canterlot.
- There’s no way Canterlot Friends can be in this crowd, but there they are. And so is the adult Derpy.
- The horns the royal guards play are supported by tripods.
- That’s a bloody interesting orrery. In addition to the sun and moon, it would have us believe the pony Earth has two more satellites of some description, possibly three.
- I have already mentioned the oddities of Twilight’s house in RTAC #1, see that.
- Enough has been said about the egg test over time, so there’s no need to dwell on that. It has to be some form of Kobayashi Maru scenario, because as far as we know, Spike’s situation is completely unique.
- …and here’s another globe in the corner of the room. Damn, these are far more common than anyone believed.
- One of the examiners is wearing a wristwatch. On the right foreleg. The time shown appears to be 09:00, so at least an hour after sunrise, possibly two.
- The Canterlot Castle is visible from the window of the examination room, and the Rainboom is on a direct line between the examination room and the castle.
- Twilight Velvet and Night Light remember being turned into plants.
Pinkie Story
- “My sisters and I were raised on a rock farm outside of Ponyville.” At least one train stop out of Ponyville according to Hearthbreakers, probably quite a few train stops. The entire turn of phrase is odd.
- Neither Limestone nor Marble have their marks at the time they first show up.
- The Rainboom blows away the clouds, but we can’t really tell where the sun is even then. The flashback does, however, insist that Pinkie’s first party only happened the next day. While the moon is shown moving across the sky, the Mare in the Moon is NOT visible.
- “Surprise! You like it? It’s called… a party!” How did Pinkie know that? Did her metaknowledge manifest immediately?
- The moment the mark emerges is explicitly the moment the other Pies break and join the party.
Rainbow Dash Story
- At the moment the race starts, Hoops already has his cutie mark, but Dumb-Bell does not. Something to compare to The Cutie Re-Mark.
- Dumb-Bell collides with a cloud column, pierces it and remains stuck inside. See the discussions on cloud physics in other pegasi-related episodes.
- The original Rainboom explosion happens nearly at the ground level, spreading upwards from there. The final one in The Cutie Re-Mark. behaves the same, but definitely starts a lot higher, and the final rainbow curve that everypony sees is also a great deal higher.
One thing to notice is that Rarity, Pinkie and Applejack get their marks long after the Rainboom hits – hours in case of Rarity, the next day in Pinkie’s case, and possibly days later in case of Applejack – while Twilight, Fluttershy and Rainbow herself get theirs within minutes after the event.
Rainbow and Fluttershy flashbacks are corroborated by later episodes. They have strange elements, but there is no doubt they happened, and at least some of them were observed without “flashback distortion” later on. Pinkie and Twilight flashbacks are isolated and neither produce significant doubts nor affect any other character’s known history. Rarity’s flashback is slightly more strange, because it has her horn do something horns never do for anypony else, but it’s still reasonable. But Applejack’s flashback is quite dubious – especially the way the Rainboom happens immediately after dawn for her, when it happens hours later for everyone else. This would require the sun to rise in the west at least this particular time, and maintain a constant speed along the sky, which I’m pretty sure it does not normally do.
Theory: the first Rainboom is not entirely a physical or environmental phenomenon, but rather is an existential one, not especially moored in space-time, or at least, what passes for space-time in ponyland. As such, it is literally a miracle shock-wave, and only arrives as each individual's destiny is ready for it to arrive. That is to say that it propagates through the substance of destiny, rather than the experiential world.
The sun already had to rise in the west for Applejack's flashback, given how she was looking towards Ponyville from Manehattan.
The party cannon does indeed become canon in Season 2. Specifically "Sweet &Elite."
This actually isn't the only time Applejack prepares a bindle when going to Manehattan. She also makes one in "Brotherhooves Social."
This has always been one of this episode's more interesting details to me. Manehattan's typical socioeconomic-tribal correlations seem to be the inverse of Canterlot's.
As for Pinkie's metaknowledge, she wouldn't be the only one whose mark came with a vocabulary supplement. Just look at Fluttershy.
4618957
Clever, but counterarguments:
4618975
Twilight thinks they're all simultaneous, since they all happened in conjunction with the experience of the rainboom. She may be overgeneralizing from Fluttershy's and Rainbow's stories, to therefore presume that because each member of the six experienced the rainboom at the time of their cutification, they all happened simultaneously.
And I would observe that Rainbow's Rainboom was the necessary precursor to the event. Without that, it would have never have happened, thus the multiple alternate histories where Harmony was frustrated in its attempt to bootstrap itself. Destiny isn't Fate: it can be frustrated.
Or, to put it another way, the Rainboom is the flung rock in motion through the dimensions of fate-time, to be perturbed by the gravity of other objects in motion, and to perturb others in turn by its own gravity and motion, but not stopped of its own accord. However - it was possible to keep the rock from being thrown, and Starlight Glimmer did this in the alternate timelines, where events and objects fell into differing orbits by the absence of the Rainboom miracle-impetus.
4618971
Good point.
Mind you, I think most of those flashbacks are bogus in the same way the ones in Parental Glideance (We even have Scootaloo as the recipient of the flashback again!) and Celestial Advice are.
Scootaloo is the narrator and she’s just imagining it wrong. Forgetting the Mare in the Moon, etc. The spoken text provides enough wiggle room to sort the inconsistencies out.
4618990
Well, it works, I suppose, if you employ a certain level of poetic interpretation of the whole thing… :)
4619000
In a universe where friendship is a physical force and love is a nuke, there reaches a point where one assumes the whole place is built of Narrativium.
4618975
The CMC are on the projector screen when she says this - she's talking about them, not the main cast, and the CMC's cutie marks were indeed simultaneous.
It's a bindle,[1] which is a big handkerchief, neckerchief, or similar cloth tied around one's belongings and placed on the end of a stick for ease of carrying.[2] It was used by, and a stereotypical symbol of, depression era hobos and runaway children. I too, have no idea how AJ is keeping it on her shoulder without a hoof on it. Prehensile mane, maybe?
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[1] Sometimes called a bindlestiff. (Corruption of bundle-stick?)
[2] It works pretty well, too! I've used the technique on occasion.
4618971 The difference between Manehatten and Canterlot is that in this fancy dinner party for the elite of Manehatten, unicorns were servants, but every single guest was an earth pony. However, in Sweet and Elite we see that half the Canterlot elite are earth ponies.
Good point about Applejack's story being most unreliable (though I think Rarity being dragged by her horn was also hyperbole). My guess is that Applejack was carefully stepping around the fact that the loss of her parents was the primary reason she moved to Manehatten. This resulted in her story feeling less "real" than the other ones.
Now that we've met the Senior-Shys, my guess would be that when Fluttershy didn't come home from Flight Camp, the parents were worried but too non-confrontational to yell at the flight camp staff for another day or two, and then it would take a while for some other Pegasus (probably a stronger flier) to find Fluttershy frolicking in the woods below. When they get her back after 3 or 4 days, Fluttershy is pulled out of the camp for safety reasons, she never learns to be a better flier, Rainbow Dash starts hanging out with a young Griffon instead, and they do not reconnect until later. Also the Senior Shys are afraid of losing their foals, so they encourage the younger one to stay at home and never to take risks.
Uncle and Aunt Orange are in the same boat as Cousin Braeburn who refers to Granny Smith as "Granny." Perhaps Bright Mac was much younger than his older siblings, who moved out when he was like 5?
4619508
Compare to A Dog And Pony Show, the scene wherein Rarity sees the diamond dog for the first time. I think this really does happen to her, though I have no clue why, since magic doesn’t work this way for anyone else ever.
Possible. Requires Scootaloo as the unreliable listener to work, though, but that’s my preferred explanation as it is.
That would explain things. :)
Possible. There are still wormholes in them apples though…
Which would mean that one of the following is true:
So which is it?
4619542 My guess is that Apple Bloom, like the rest of the CMC, is more like 12 at the start of the show. Applejack is still a teenager in Where the Apple Lies.
4619613
She’s have to be like 14 for this series of events to fit.
No comment on Maud’s complete absence from Pinkie’s flashback? The Doylist explanation is obvious, but the show made it harder to come up with a plausible Watsonian explanation because:
Funny thing: there’s an animation error where Pinkie’s CM shows up before her family’s reaction, as she’s saying, “You like it? It’s called a party!”
I know at least one author interpreted that animation goof very literally. That Pinkie actually got her mark while she was preparing the party, without realizing—but her family’s reaction made her doubt herself so much that she lost her mark, before regaining it shortly after. I don’t know if that’s something that could happen to any colt or filly, or if it’s just another way Pinkie is weird.
4619919
Mostly because I’m pretty sure someone will accuse me of splitting hairs if I do. As long as Maud can be imagined being otherwise detained elsewhere and only returning in time to join the party in the middle, that’s all the Watsonian explanation you need.
There is a snag that complicates it: If, as the word of god seems to insist, Limestone is the eldest Pie sister – we know that Pinkie and Marble are twins with seconds between them from Hearthbreakers – and Limestone does not have a cutie mark and looks just as tiny as Marble, there’s no way Maud would be out on her own alone unless sent to visit another family member, for example.
Lucky for us, there are also the invisible “Nana Pinkie” that Pinkie mentions in Too Many Pinkie Pies and “Granny Pie” mentioned in Pinkie’s song in Friendship is Magic and Maud could be out on an errand to visit either. In a red hood and with a basket of rock cakes.
…Just what kind of dramatic benefit could they expect to pull out of that?…
4619932
I don’t recall if he ever tried to pull anything out of that. That’s just how he interprets everything about the show. He treats every detail as if it were completely deliberate on the part of the writers, and doesn’t believe in dismissing anything from primary canon for any reason. But he also somehow thinks the show has never contradicted itself and doesn’t have any plot holes. Mainly because he has an idiosyncratic definition of “plot hole” that basically boils down to, “If I can make up an explanation after the fact to reconcile those details, then it’s not a plot hole.”
4619939
Oh my.
4619619
I don't think Applejack is 25 at the start of the series, more like 21. That would make her 9 years older than Apple Bloom. The parents died when Apple Bloom was 1 and Applejack was 10, Applejack is like 14 and Apple Bloom is 5 in Where the Apple Lies. I suspect Apple Bloom didn't actually move back to Sweet Apple Acres until a few years before the start of the show, it helps explain how she never knew Sweetie Bell and Scootaloo.
4619343
No, a bindlestiff is someone who stiffs bindles- that is, steals them. At least, how I learned it:
I begin to think they have a "be there, too" power.
It explains all of these presences.
4619013
we are here to stave off that moment as long as possible, for it is the Death of Verisimilitude…