Aug
2nd
2017
Points of Canon: S1x25 - Party of One · 5:37pm Aug 2nd, 2017
Oh boy. I mean, oh Pinkie.
- In early series, Twilight generally reads standing. Later seasons see her sitting a lot more often.
- “Gummy’s turning one year old.” This means that it is impossible for this episode to occur more than one year after Feeling Pinkie Keen, which is a consideration important for chronology.
- Rarity is not amused by Pinkie’s tuxedo outfit… Well, actually none of the Mane 5 show the signs of being the least bit amused.
- This time, to get at Rainbow’s house, Pinkie had to secure the use of the infamous purple balloon.
- Pinkie has a fireplace with an actual log in it.
- Rarity refers to the “Spring has sprung” party, which is detailed in Pinkie’s chapter book which I recommend you don’t read, it’s that bad.
- Surprisingly, this is the one time when Twilight doesn’t dance worse than anyone else.
- …Where did the wasp hive on the library go? I stopped marking it up because it has been consistently there for the past ten episodes, but here it’s conspicuously missing.
- Twilight’s excuse is that she’s gotten a bit behind in her studies, but she just manipulated over a hundred books within the space of a second without looking at them.
- Applejack is hauling three carts of apples at once, which she does not usually do. Probably, cramming work in to free the evening.
- “’Cause that’s what we do! With the… apples. We, uh… pick ’em!” Actually, usually you buck them…
- Rarity makes Spike take out the trash. The background of the shot contains Pinkie’s and Fluttershy’s Gala dresses on a rack inside the Boutique.
- “You smell like a rotten apple core that’s been wrapped in moldy hay and dipped in dragon perspiration.” Dragon perspiration has a smell.
- It’s interesting that Pinkie caught Rainbow and Fluttershy together at Fluttershy’s – everyone else was at home. Whatever preparations for Pinkie’s birthday these two had in mind, they were going about them jointly.
- When Rainbow draws a wristwatch on her foreleg, she does this with her mouth and draws it on her left foreleg. Rainbow is right-hoofed. I do wonder how exactly did she manage to use what has to be a pencil to produce anything visible, though. Or why did she expect Pinkie would accept this. Actually, I’m not sure if the entire story about Harry the bear is meant to be believable in the first place. Either they wanted Pinkie to disbelieve them, or were too far out of their minds to notice.
1. Later episodes show examples of other advanced preservation methods, and more tin cans, but I think this is the earliest one.
Pinkie uses a rope telephone made of two tin cans and Twilight catches her. She also refers to these containers explicitly as “tin cans.” Ponies have tin cans.1
- Twilight uses a doorbell on the Boutique, like in Griffon the Brush-Off, though this time, we don’t actually see the button. Notably, in lieu of hoof or magic, she presses it with her nose.
- Rarity uses her tail to grip and carry the cake box, which is one of the uncommon on-screen examples of non-Earth-ponies using their hair as an extra appendage.
- Pinkie accumulates disguises, eventually progressing to a hay bale, plus fake nose with glasses plus baseball cap plus a trenchcoat. The interesting part about that latter is… I’m not sure it would fit well on a pony.
- The logic why the cake had to pass through Twilight and Rarity and Fluttershy to end up at Sweet Apple Acres is never explained.
- Pinkie is capable of outrunning Rainbow through her mysterious means.
- It’s interesting that Rainbow has bags customized with a lightning bolt which does not match her cutie mark. Where did those come from?
- Applejack says, “Oh, well, she was just bringin’ in some… supplies! Yup, supplies for the… renovation! Fixin’ up the whole thing, top to bottom… uh, lots of construction goin’ on in there right now.” I spent a while trying to figure out if this constitutes an explicit lie on Applejack’s part or not. I’m still not entirely sure. On the other hand, her previous statement about picking apples probably does.
- That’s the first time I see a proper lamppost on Ponyville streets, or at least the first time I notice one. And it’s bent for some reason.
- That interrogation technique with a light shining in your face is interesting. I’ve been able to track down a discussion on Straight Dope which suggests that the variation Pinkie employs is just a movie thing, but it has roots in actual police torture. So where did it appear from in whatever movies Pinkie watched?…
- That lamp is very obviously electrical.
- “Okay… uh, beautiful weather we’re having, eh? I love a sunny spring day, don’t you? The birds chirpin’ and the flowers bloomin’.” I.e. according to Spike, this episode has to occur in spring.
- “Magical Mysteries and Practical Potions” is the title of a book.
- “I’m the one who used up all the hot water in Ponyville yesterday when I took a seven-hour bubble bath!” Ponyville has a central hot water supply, and it’s not particularly big.
- Isn’t Mr. Turnip actually a bucket of turnips, not a singular turnip? Even Rainbow comments on that later on. Same about Rocky. At the same time, Sir Lintsalot and Madame le Flour are singular objects. No method to Pinkie’s madness, it appears.
- We can’t rely on these names to mean much, since Pinkie obviously cooked them up when she was feeling much less sane than usual, but “Sir” in this context would imply knighthood. And “Madame le Flour” uses scattered French words and a french accent. Hmmm…
- Rainbow uses “Pinkie Pie” to address Pinkie for the entire episode, rather than the more common “Pinkie,” for some reason.
- Pinkie stretches her foreleg to about three meters at one point. Being in her depressed state does not seem to reduce her party pony powers at all.
- Rainbow Dash is capable of dragging a resisting Pinkie all the way to Sweet Apple Acres from Sugarcube Corner. Remembering how strong earth ponies can be just because they are earth ponies, that’s actually a rather surprising feat.
- If Gummy’s birthday is immediately before Pinkie’s, it follows that she probably got him as a birthday present last year – right after he hatched.
Chronologically, I’m still pretty confident this has to be an early post-Discord episode, because not only Pinkie is giving in to exactly the kind of self-delusion that Discord imposed on her (“My friends laugh with me, not at me!”) but the rest of the Mane 6 are being, at times, far more stupid than they normally are. Likewise, Gummy is more of an excuse for a party than an actual participant, and is not seen as an entity worthy of much consideration by anyone in the room when the party is going on.
"“I’m the one who used up all the hot water in Ponyville yesterday when I took a seven-hour bubble bath!” Ponyville has a central hot water supply, and it’s not particularly big."
I remember I noticed that one (unlike most of the things you point out) and eventually decided that it was likely Ponyville had a wood-gas-fired district heating plant. Trying to remember/reconstruct my reasons...
From the limited capacity, it obviously can't indefinitely heat water as quickly as the water passes through it, implying that it can't add heat quickly enough and/or that it has a limited energy supply. We also haven't really seen anything, as far as I recall and recall recalling, that looks like a heating plant, implying that the machinery doesn't impose strong requirements on the building design (or possibly that the plant's mostly underground, but that seemed a bit much for a town Ponyville's size). Likely something pretty clean burning, or clean through other means, then, and without a need for large visible fuel stockpiles. Ponyville is adjacent to forested areas, so wood would be a ready fuel.
...Not quite remembering at the moment how I made the jump from there to wood gas, though.
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Actually, let’s calculate.
Spike says he was taking his bubble bath for 7 hours, and eventually used up all the hot water the central system could supply.
For this to happen at all, he would need to continue consuming hot water through those seven hours. This can be done in one of two ways:
Let us assume for simplicity that he uses pure hot water (about 50°C usually) and will refill it the moment it cools down to 20°C (room temperature) and that his tub contains 400L. The actual time it will take for water to cool down depends on surface area, but taking something reasonable, I get that it will take more than seven hours for it to cool down that far even if the bath itself is perfectly transparent to heat.
Therefore he is running the water continuously.
We don’t really know the flow rate, but looking at the data presented by energy preservation societies, I get that it was common to have a showerhead with a flow rate of 10 liters per minute in the 50s, and this sounds like a good number.
This gives us that Spike should have consumed something like 4200 liters of water during that time.
Which isn’t a whole lot to be honest. An 2m diameter cylinder would need to be 1.33 meters tall to contain that much. This kind of tank can be hidden anywhere, and if the heater continues working, the tank can be smaller – depending on the rate it heats water at.
Didn't realize there was a season 1 episode already referencing the chapter books.
Minotaur/Feline nations may have both more advanced technology, and more brutal policing. Or as foreign nations, ponies like to make movies about them so they can have evil guards and rulers for villains.
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4621617 Another question might be: Giving the hassle of running a bubble bath continuously, why didn't Spike just re-warm the water with his breath? Does this suggest that fire-breath consumes a certain amount of energy?
Actually, we've never seen Spike use his fire-breath on his own for anything. He has to be told to "send a message to Celestia," "light those cooking fires," "light the torch for the Equestria Games," with the single exception of melting that cloud glacier to save lives. I wonder why that is?
Part of the stupidity of the party preparations might be the rest of the Mane 6 trying to surprise Pinkie, a pre-cognitive psychic, by using complicated and arbitrary methods in the hopes that it will throw her off.
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Hm. Interesting; thanks for doing that.
Depending on the distribution system used (say, direct hot water delivery vs. steam delivery to an in-building heat exchanger), he, being a dragon, might have been able to take a bath that would be dangerously hot for a human (or, presumably, pony) and thus use more energy. Probably not that much more, though, since there's only so hot the water can get before it boils as soon as it's out of the pipe.
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"I wonder why that is?"
Well, it's a bit dark, perhaps too much so for show canon, but maybe he was conditioned not to? Dragonfire could be pretty dangerous, after all.
"Part of the stupidity of the party preparations might be the rest of the Mane 6 trying to surprise Pinkie, a pre-cognitive psychic, by using complicated and arbitrary methods in the hopes that it will throw her off."
Hah, good idea! Wow, that must have been some planning meeting. How do we throw a surprise party for the precognitive psychic with a specific focus on parties?
Forgot earlier, but the reason Spike sleeps so much is probably because infants are supposed to sleep for like 16 hours a day.
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The thought had crossed my mind, though it does seem dark. But the more I think about it, the more I have to agree with you. I mean, as a newborn, Twilight would kind of watch him with one eye while reading a book with another, and what is the one thing that probably got her to raise her voice at Spike? When he burned a book. That's going to stay with him, even when he's being chased by flammable Timberwolves in Spike at your Service.
Exactly. Probably no guaranteed way, just hope if you add enough random actions to break up the party planning activities, her senses are befuddled. Of course, befuddling Pinkie's senses may have contributed to her depression.
Also, Rocky: Flour, Lint and Turnips are normal to have in the house (the Cakes probably put turnips in dishes they make for themselves, even if they wouldn't sell them). Large rocks however, are not, Pinkie had to go outside and gather some. Given what we know now, I suspect Rocky was a stand-in for Maud, who Pinkie must have been missing something fierce in this episode.
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I think it’s actually the other way round. Episodes don’t reference chapter books. Chapter book authors are religiously referencing episodes, and if the episode mentions a “spring has sprung” party, they get a chance to turn it into a party dedicated to all things bouncy and helical… Ponypalooza was a coincidence.
Well, not sure about feline, but minotaur nation exporting movies would do it, minotaurs observed so far are indeed more brutal.
Yes. See Over The Barrel where he complains about frying food and A Bird In The Hoof where he is shown using his breath to fry food. Re-warming water with breath would take energy.
Except when he tries to scare off the dragon in Owl’s Well That Ends Well… He doesn’t see it as much of a tool, but yes, he uses it on his own initiative on occasion. And the whole idea with him being yelled at or punished every time he burned something valuable is a good explanation for why he does it so rarely.
This is a very good explanation for the cake charade, but it does not explain the anti-excuse produced by Rainbow and Fluttershy.
The real “hmmm” here is not that he sleeps a lot – we only see twenty minutes out of his day at most, anyway and know little about his sleeping patterns – it’s that he falls asleep abruptly, without realizing he’s falling asleep – in the middle of something else he was doing.
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Of course, for full absurdity, in the very next scene Pinkie reacts like Rainbow and Fluttershy’s excuse makes much more sense than anypony else’s:
Theory: Since Rainbow Dash is Pinkie’s prank buddy, she has a better grasp on how Pinkie thinks than anyone else. It was her idea to make the surprise party plan needlessly convoluted to confuse Pinkie. So Rainbow also knows Pinkie would more easily believe an implausible excuse than a plausible one. So when Pinkie invites her and Flutters to Gummy’s party, Rainbow is the one throwing random random details into the alibi in hopes that something sticks, while Flutters is the one pulling Dash’s story closer to reality by adding details that later episodes would confirm to be true.
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Although sometimes the chapter book authors get early access to episode scripts or some other canon source. I remember it was one of the chapter books that first revealed Limestone and Marble’s canon names, and that Pinkie had a third sister.
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…Ok, that does sound plausible, sort of.
But not her name. See my writeup of said book. Whatever leak was involved was incomplete.
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4622824 Good theory. Rainbow could probably plan the party like an elaborate prank on Pinkie. And Rainbow probably wouldn't be able to tell until it was too late that such a prank might be detrimental to Pinkie's psyche.
…has equal treatment of front and back hooves, and a high flank cut to show off a mark. Not quite high enough to show off all of hers.
that's all three tribes, then, between this, the obvious AJ, and Flutters in Buckball. Were I a toy fanatic, I'd no doubt produce some commercial where the hair was claimed to be magical…
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~~Objection! He's been bathing in lava. Why would he restrict himself so?~~ I see someone else hit that already.
:applebuckseason:
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50°C is the typical hottest temperature you can get out of your tap, I didn’t just pull a number out of the thin air.