Aug
11th
2017
Points of Canon: S2x16 - Read It and Weep · 3:12pm Aug 11th, 2017
I won’t be able to do this quite as fast in the next few weeks, if at all, which is why I’m chewing through as many as I can.
And this one’s meta. You know, me and meta, right?
- “Isn’t she the most daring devil? I mean, the most devilish darer?” Nopony wonders what did Pinkie mean. Except, you know, us, because she said “devil.”
- Pinkie is capable of doing a full 360° with her head, though, only once. She needs to unwind after that.
- We don’t see what exactly was Rainbow doing, but the trajectory can be estimated from the motion of the heads of the onlookers, which is synchronous. That Rainbow fell at all the way she did fall implies that pegasi can stall. Not a given, and itself rather surprising – it appears that at least in some modes, pegasi do fly like a fixed wing aircraft.
- This is the unmistakable sound of a heart monitor. While it remains audible, Rainbow’s heart makes 11 beats in 17 seconds. Assuming Rainbow is now stable, this comes out to a pulse of 38 at rest. The range for well-trained human adult athletes is 40-60, and most humans have much higher pulse at rest, but for an adult horse, the norm is 36-44. Guess she’s fit as a horse, either way.
- Ponies have heart monitors, and I’m inclined to say this one is electronic rather than any other kind.
- This band-aid on her forehead will be a bitch to take off.
- The hospital bed includes wiring set up above it – presumably, a nurse call button, at least one of these objects looks like a microphone. I couldn’t track down just when these were introduced, but, I don’t think they became common around here until the 1950s.
- The doctor is studying an X-ray of a wing, which cleanly shows a broken bone. I don’t know if the detail is sufficient for us to assume that pegasi have bones in the feathers, but the structure of the wing does look more complex than that of a bird, to be sure – possibly, more similar to a bat.
- “Luckily she has friends like you who got her over here in a jiffy.” So time was a factor, then? Why, exactly, would time be a factor with a broken wing? Or did Rainbow sustain more injury that is not outwardly visible?
- “Well, that all depends on your recovery, but I’d say a few days minimum.” Pegasi bones can heal in a matter of days. According to the doctor, this is not amazing at all. The doctor’s recommendation is to “stay off that wing for a week” afterwards, though how exactly is Rainbow supposed to accomplish this is a mystery. We don’t really see her fly after being discharged, but if she can’t fly, she can’t get home, can she? And she did get home in the end.
- “Did the crash somehow give her super-duper spider powers?” Do ponies have a Spidermane somewhere, or is Pinkie knocking on the fourth wall here?
- “I bet the chow in here is hoof-lickin’ good.” Really, AJ? How would you know?
- The patient on the next bed over has cute stickers all over his cast. Signing casts and otherwise decorating them is a thing. Notably, the cast appears to include a metallic restraining element. What happened to the guy?…
- The nurse chooses to push the shelf with the books with her nose, rather than hold on it with her hooves.
- “Daring Do and the Quest for the Sapphire Stone” is the first book in the Daring Do series.
- The bed table contains a box of tissues, and an apparently electrical lamp, which is turned on and off by a push button. Ponies have tissues.
- “No thanks. I so don’t read. … It’s undeniably, unquestionably, uncool.” This is so a chronology marker.
- “I’m a world-class athlete.” It’s interesting that the term itself exists, when there isn’t much of a world.
- “Why, a good book is almost as magnificent as silk pajamas on a Sunday morning, heh!” Funny how we saw Pinkie wear pajamas, but never saw Rarity do the same.
- Pinkie mentions grapefruits. Those exist.
- Rainbow’s room number is 12. Presumably, at least 11 other rooms exist. Notice the perfectly readable numbers.
- Hospital food includes a block of jelly. Or at least, something square and transparent. See much earlier comments about plant-derived gelatin.
- Between the time Rainbow starts horsing around and the time she actually picks up the book, the clock only changes by one minute.
- “The mosquitoes buzzed loudly.” Must be a jungle thing – but, it’s interesting that small biting insects are not mentioned more often.
- Macaws are a New World parrot species, appearing primarily in Central America, which makes that jungle temple on the map squarely the place where most of Daring Do’s adventures happen.
- The passage Rainbow is reading starts within view of the shoreline, so, not as far inland as it could be.
- That jungle is home to just about every large cat-like predator, at that, unless Ahuizotl brought them over from somewhere else and they’re not native.
- While swinging on a rope, Daring Do bumps into a cloud and pushes it out of the way. See cloud mechanics.
- Honestly, I wonder how could one search for something that big “tirelessly over sixty days and nights” when the region appears to be so small on the map. Either the geography is downright sadistic, or magic was involved.
- When Rainbow drops onto the pillow, feathers come out. Presumably, chicken. See Scootaloo.
- The structure that Daring Do is investigating is explicitly called a “temple.” More religious vocabulary.
- This is not a pony skull, is it? Neither, for that matter, is this face. Actually, they look kinda like cartoon apes. They turn up a lot in the imagery.
- The issue of why is the temple lit, or why the traps still work, can probably be magicked away. But what about the alligators?…
- Daring Do’s pith helmet has five arrows in it. So how exactly is the correct number of arrows twenty in Stranger than Fan Fiction? We’re definitely getting Rainbow’s secondary narration here.
- The particular sapphire statuette appears to be some manner of a two-headed jackal. Which, as far as we know, were native to Anugipt. Was Anugipt also on this continent, then?…
- Rainbow’s favorite boardgame is pegasus-styled Battleship.
- “We know how much you like to win!” Depending on which variation of the game this is most similar to, though, it’s mostly a random guess game. How often does Rainbow normally win?…
- In the coordinates, one of the axes is “cloud, sky” – instead of letters of the alphabet. Which makes me think this is the Y axis and it is meant to represent altitude. The verbs Rainbow uses when her “ships” are “hit” are interesting - “you rained on my cumulus,” “you zapped my weather pony…” Is it about ranged anti-air defense?! As a matter of fact, is it even symmetrical, or is the other opponent meant to be bombing stuff?
- “But you don’t lose some. I don’t think you’ve ever lost a game of…” Nice save with withholding the name of the game from us, however, how is it that Rainbow has never lost a game, when so much of it depends on random guessing?!
- Daring Do wouldn’t have much of an adventure if her wing was ok – all the traps are pressure sensitive.
- That’s a very prominent solar symbol, it is.
- Daring Do grabs the ledge with her teeth.
- I wonder where the water that caused this steam explosion came from.
- Rainbow neither receives nor uses any utensils while eating her hospital food.
- Ahuizotl uses a whistle – shaped like a cat – to command his feline minions.
- Notice that Rainbow wonders who Ahuizotl is, and yet, Daring Do acts like she already knows who that is, and this is the first book in the series. Whut?
- The feline minions are smart enough to use a flail, a spiked club, and rope.
- The lever Ahuizotl uses to trigger the deathtrap is suspiciously modern and doesn’t match the the temple stylistically. This is some other building, isn’t it? But most of the imagery matches the temple.
- Daring Do does not appear to be afraid of spiders at all. Notice that Friends Forever #32 insists otherwise. Which is quite a dilemma, really – on one hand, we’re dealing with a second hand account here, it’s Rainbow imagining a scene that Daring Do wrote. On another, the comic is secondary canon.
- Rainbow is using a firefly lamp to read under the covers. To put it out, she releases the fireflies by blowing on the lamp – which opens up a door in the glass. At the same time, the lamp has a push button switch. Why?…
- Doctor’s cutie mark is a heart monitor. This kind of heart monitor requires at least an oscilloscope-level CRT to exist. For the doctor to get this mark, the technology has to have existed for at least a decade, probably quite a bit more.
- It’s interesting that the doctor doesn’t examine Rainbow, he just announces she’s getting checked out immediately. What’s up with that?…
- It’s hospital policy to move patients out in wheelchairs anyway. Once Rainbow is out, though, she is left entirely unattended. Huh.
- “I think I know what the trouble is. A severe case of lazy-itis.” If any one line convinces me medical care in Equestria is free, or effectively free, for the patient, it’s this.
- The hospital guard is using a flashlight, and so do most of the hospital staff members later on. He also has what looks suspiciously like it’s meant to be a PTT microphone for a personal radio or equivalent. Whether that works, and how, we don’t know.
- Notice that instead of simply stealing the book, Rainbow prefers to read it right here. In the dark.
- “Burglar, burglar! Someone’s trying to steal my slippers!” I dunno about slippers – ponies have slippers, which has to be terribly inconvenient – but burglary is at least occasionally a concern in Equestria.
- Rainbow’s wing does seize once she tries flight, though I expect, this is more about the speed she was trying to achieve rather than flight as such.
- Why exactly does a hospital have this alarm?…
- Pinkie opens up a window. Only, that’s not her usual room on top of Sugarcube Corner, but a completely random house in town. <insert clopfic>
- Hospital staff is chasing a supposed thief without, apparently, alerting any kind of authorities.
- I don’t think we saw those trees growing next to Ponyville streams have those vines on them before.
- Rarity wore a kimono to bed this time. I hardly think this is properly called “silk pajamas,” but ah well.
- The wasp/bee hive on the library is present, but the insects themselves are apparently asleep.
- The story of why Screwy is barking all the time remains entirely outside our knowledge.
- How exactly did Fluttershy get here, and why was she sleeping in a bathrobe?…
- The Daring Do bookshelf – yes, these are all Daring Do books, edges of the distinctive covers are visible – contains 16 volumes as of this time.
- Immediately upon acquiring the book from the library, Rainbow directs Spike to write a Lesson Zero-pattern letter to Celestia, making this a hard bound – since I can’t imagine she would allow any delay in getting the book.
- That’s the first time we see Rainbow’s bedroom.
- The ending of the book equates recovering the statuette with saving the world, but never elaborates how one leads to the other.
- Upon completing the book we started with, Rainbow picks up the next one, and that’s “Daring Do and the Griffon’s Goblet” – and it has to be the second one in the series.
Some questions
- We still have no clue where Ahuizotl came from. His physiology is highly distinctive, and is not similar to anything at all. Any ideas? (I know the Doylist explanation, thank you.)
- What was a jackal statuette doing in an ape temple, anyway?
- Why did Daring Do know who Ahuizotl is, but Rainbow Dash didn’t, when this is the first book in the series?
- Why was Pinkie sleeping in that house? For that matter, Sweet Apple Acres is outside of town, and so is Fluttershy’s house. How did it happen that they woke up to attend the fracas, when, say, Canterlot Friends didn’t?
Daring Do knew Azhuizotl because the books were written out of order, because AK Yearling's career began years after that of Daring Do's, and she started with the then-most-recent adventure.
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I’m not sure this works, because:
Good idea, though.
Clearly, Rainbow Dash is the King of Games. (Yu-Gi-Oh reference.)
The jackal statuette in an ape temple is probably spoils of war that the apes enshrined in their temple as a sort of bragging rights thing.
Only a few points: Applejack thinks the hospital food must be good, because guess where the hospital buys apple products from to put in their food?
Agree on free healthcare. There are a bunch of reasons why Applejack wants to raise money to buy Granny a new hip is problematic. Any good theories on an alternative explanation?
Theory: After giving that comment about silk pajamas, Rarity invites the girls to a silk pajama sleepover (she knows Rainbow would never be interested in that anyway) and makes them all pajamas. They were all sleeping over at Rarity's house that night.
Another theory: Ahuizotl's race died out, but he was trapped in a stasis spell as part of a temple death trap, just like the Cipactli. After a young Daring Do accidentally released him by triggering his "trap," he wanders around trying to collect other artifacts and fighting Daring Do.
4630749
Actually, upon meditating a bit on the issue, I think I can offer a good guess:
Rainbow is cheating. And yet she doesn’t know she is cheating.
The variation of Battleship presented depends on pieces in a plugboard, though we can’t see the details. It also has a vertical partition between the players so you don’t see the opponent’s board.
However, from Testing-Testing, 1-2-3 we know that Rainbow is, at least in certain situations, subconsciously hyper-observant.
So she is watching the motions of her opponent as they place their pieces and has guesses for their locations that are superior to purely random. Then she interprets it as a sixth sense of some kind, or, well, just doesn’t bother interpreting it and simply wins without understanding how.
4630823
Only, I don’t think the food shown contains any apple products. :)
Had one for a while. The surgery to install the hip would be free. However, the prosthetic itself is an experimental technology, currently only available from private companies – who expect to sell it to the government eventually, but for whatever reason cannot do so yet.
Good theory, but:
That’s actually a very interesting idea. Especially considering that the mythological ahuizotl is a “spiny aquatic thing” and is supposed to use the hand on the tail to drown people.
4630840 If Pegasi can sense air currents really well, then Rainbow Dash could basically have Blindsight. That would certainly help her cheat, and it might be subconscious.
Applejack assumes anyone smart enough to buy lots of apples from her probably makes all their food pretty delicious.
Perhaps The Equestrian Health Services will give out a regular prosthetic that works for walking around, but not a fancy aluminum one that would let Granny go back to her occasional high-dives.
Ok, a non-pajama sleepover that only Applejack and Fluttershy agreed to.
Pinkie is planning a small surprise party for someone returning home on the midnight train to Ponyville.
I'd love it if we ever see Ahuizotl again, and he's allied with the Cipactli.
4630846
That is an option too.
That works.
You really want to avoid that clopfic, don’t you? :)
4630849
Depends on your activities list for a small midnight surprise party, doesn't it?
4630864
Point.
A criminal mastermind, she is not.
Also, she didn’t even think to hide her identity: her stealth outfit leaves her face and distinctive rainbow tail uncovered. She probably would have showed off her cutie mark as well, if she just had enough time to cut holes in her pants.
4630895
That's the most Equestrian thing ever, a stealthsuit with a hole cut in the flanks to show one's cutie mark.
skindeepcomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/kickstarterpinssmall.png Let's see… looks like "Did not do the research" intersects "cartoon resolution"…but closer to bat.
She's close friends with Pinkie and Fluttershy….and Twilight. Between those, she can get home fine.
see "Where the Apple Lies" for a time when she was sneaking through the hospital.
the lowest being if they got it for inventing it.
4630923
They're all notable in cutie-mark-hiding outfits, which are relatively uncommon.
Pinkie knows¹ everypony in Ponyville.
¹Carnally.
Also, there are either two Daring Do and the Sapphire Stone covers, or two books of DD and the Sapph*
…ic Sacrilege Surprise?
For Pinkie, naughty possibilities aside, she probably just likes having sleepovers.
Also, it’s interesting to note that Daring Do is clearly a recolor of Rainbow Dash on the cover of the book, even before Rainbow starts reading it. Quite a few viewers missed that detail and assumed that Daring’s similarity to Dash was purely a product of Dash’s imagination. It was a pretty common complaint about “Daring Don’t”, as I recall.
(Though, on a Doylist note, I believe the animators have said that they wouldn’t have made Daring a recolor of Dash if they’d known that Daring was a real pony.)
4631126
At the beginning of the episode, Rainbow reads the book title as Daring Do and the Quest for the Sapphire Stone. But at the end of the episode, Twilight identifies the book as Daring Do and the Quest for the Sapphire Statue.
So I bet the book was originally released as Sapphire Statue. Then when its first printing sold out, it was reprinted as Sapphire Stone and given a new cover—and that became the much better-known edition. Twilight, being an über-fan, has copies of both editions, but still insists Sapphire Statue is the “real” title.
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Possible further evidence that Daring’s adventures were not published in chronological order: the first book in the series is the THIRD book in Twilight’s shelf of Daring Do books. (Or, second book, if you buy the above theory that Twi has two copies of the same book.) There were one or two prequels, so Twi arranged her own bookshelf by in-series chronology rather than publishing order. (So if Twi had the complete Chronicles of Narnia, she’d shelve The Magician’s Nephew before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.)
I don’t see how that quote from Quibble Pants is really relevant. Mentions of the “first trilogy”, “first three books”, and “original trilogy” are clearly references to publishing order, which doesn’t necessarily correspond to Daringverse chronology. (Heck, the most famous “original trilogy” out there is the Star Wars franchise—episodes four, five, and six within the series.) The huge change in tone between the first three books and the later books could be explained just as easily by Daringist or Yearlingist logic:
4631331
Considering Friendship is Magic #16-17, which extracts a Daring Do character out of a book, along with numerous other entities ponies label fictional, nobody knew, and the very idea that she might be real didn’t turn up until much later.
Want a meta plot for a story – have Yearling encounter Daring Do as she wrote her. :)
Huh. I missed that!
…It could just as well be alphabetical, because it was under “D.” :) Depends on whether Read It And Weep occurs before or after Secret Of My Excess, though, where Twilight rearranges books by category. Which we can’t establish conclusively so far.
Plausible. How does this fit with the common fanon that Twilight Velvet is the said editor, and that Twilight found out where Yearling lives so easily because she could just ask her mother, and does it fit at all, though?
4631331
Don't get me started. Especially as there are printings that put on the cover/spine one numbering and printings that put the other.
4631347
I can think of one major author - Los McMaster Bujold - who has argued out the cases for both sides for her own out-of-order books in prefaces in her later editions.