Aug
11th
2017
Points of Canon: S2x17 - Hearts and Hooves Day · 6:32pm Aug 11th, 2017
A-and, that’s the last one for a while, I expect.
- In the establishing shot of the town square, the spa and the beauty salon have changed places – previously, the salon was to the left of the spa when seen from this direction. In the next establishing shot, once the CMC set out on their mission, they’re back to their regular position. But then they swap again. Sigh. Guess they can’t serve as a chronology marker after all.
- The CMC clubhouse is missing the annex with the telescope seen in Family Appreciation Day, so yeah, we’re never seeing it again.
- I’m pretty sure that’s polyvinyl acetate glue the CMC are working with.
- “Hearts and Hooves Day only comes once a year, after all.” I.e. it is explicitly a yearly event. And I am definite it’s not February, for the record – even Princess Cadance and the Spring Hearts Garden insists on spring.
- Nothing much changed about the schoolhouse since the last time in airing order, we still see the telescope, the globe and the microscope.
- Frankly, the CMC have never been quite that enthusiastic about Cherilee before. Did something change?
- Looking at the face she makes when the children can’t see it, Cherilee would like a special somepony very much, but definitely does not have one.
- It is socially appropriate to express all forms of love, not just the romantic, on Hearts and Hooves day – otherwise that huge heart is not TV-Y. It’s not the only heart Cherilee receives from her students either.
- “Pin the heart on the pony” is a traditional variation of “pin the tail on the pony,” since the CMC also have a copy of the requisite poster in their clubhouse.
- Twist pins the heart on Cherilee. I hope needles weren’t involved.
- “Hearts and Hooves Day is almost over!” The clock is showing something like 15:50, though…
- Actually, if they could only get their heart to Cherilee that late, did they make it this day or yesterday? I want to know if it’s a holiday or not.
- Canterlot Friends are spending their Hearts and Hooves day in Ponyville. Well, we know that Lemon Hearts kisses a new stallion every Hearth’s Warming…
- Here we see Button Mash and the arcade games. Notably, these games can be electromechanical and do not require computers to produce. I do wonder what the arcade is doing in the open air, though. One interesting game I missed the last few times is a crane game.
- The other scene with the far reaching consequences is a funeral service, complete with a coffin, an elderly stallion reading from a book while wearing a clerical collar, and a strange asymmetrical three-candle candelabrum.
- Also an ambulance.
- The clown has a gas canister with an obvious manometer – presumably helium for the balloons.
- The stallion who is too flashy has the earliest example of chest hair in the series.
- The exit of the barn in which the CMC are scheming has four horseshoes nailed to it, ends up.
- Wait, here’s this gazebo from Friendship is Magic, the one I thought they lost forever! I’m not sure if the rest of the surroundings match, though, even though Cherilee refers to it as “the gazebo,” so it has to be a known landmark.
- Twilight reads while walking. We see her doing this occasionally, but less often than you would expect.
- “Did you know that this holiday got its start because of a love potion?” A, presumably, historical work about the Hearts and Hooves day includes a recipe of a love potion.
- Ha. When first seen, the illustration in Twilight’s book depicts the prince and princess without clear tribe identifying markers. Neither horn nor visible wings on either. But when Sweetie Belle is looking at the book in the CMC clubhouse, the princess has both wings and a horn, while the prince does not change.
Potion recipe includes: A tuft of cloud, a bright rainbow’s glow, and a pegasus feather to stir it.
- Notice that all three are connected to pegasus magic. Only a pegasus can readily collect or produce a tuft of cloud, only a pegasus would have a feather, and only pegasi factories are known to manufacture rainbows at the present time.
- Collecting rainbow’s glow involves a vacuum cleaner and sucks the chroma out, leaving the luma intact. This is the only time rainbows behave quite like that on screen, in all other cases the components are treated as inseparable. I wonder how this was supposed to be done.
- Notice that the potion requires both victims to not be aware of it. So it has to be made by a third party in all cases.
- So why do they buy the second excuse the CMC make to get them to the gazebo? Cherilee, I can understand, she appears to have bought the “sleeping” Granny Smith in Family Appreciation Day. But Big Mac?
- Sweetie’s triumphant “YES!” suggests she is far more like Rarity than she realizes.
- “He’s my shmoopy-doopy sweetie-weetie pony pie.” …“pony pie?”
- There’s a stack of what looks like newspapers on a box in the corner of the CMC clubhouse. Where did that come from?
- “Apparently, some prince a long time ago whipped up this recipe and gave it to this princess he liked.” Which is obviously bogus, since there’s also the requirement to “Serve to two ponies who aren’t in the know.” Sweetie Belle has to be misunderstanding something.
- “Well, there’s something here about a dragon, the kingdom falling, chaos reigning… Okay, apparently it was all because the prince and princess were so lost in each other’s eyes that they couldn’t perform their royal duties.” Unfortunately, because we’re now sure Sweetie Belle is misunderstanding something crucial, this is interesting, but too unreliable to base anything on.
- “Ponyville will be overrun with uneducated little ponies starvin’ for apples.” So why is Apple Bloom calling adult ponies “little” in this phrase?…
- According to Cup Cake, the public display of affection in Sugarcube “has been going on for hours.” But at the same time, once the CMC announce the wedding preparations, and look at the clock, it’s 17:00 exactly. Which means that the preparatory steps and the first failed attempt took the CMC all of fifteen minutes. Somebody lied. Probably the clock at school…
- Big Mac has a framed portrait of Cherilee while at Sugarcube corner. Where did that come from?
- Rarity is not in attendance at the Boutique when Cherilee comes to pick out her dress. If she were, she would be annoyed at the misuse of her fainting couch. …Is she on a date herself?
- Ponyville has a jewelry store. Which is in itself notable, see the commentary on All Bottled Up.
- I really want to know where did ponies get the association between weddings and diamonds. Especially rings.
- Apple Bloom managed to waste 35 minutes just on rejecting diamonds. As a side note, this episode makes it very definite that ponies have a 60-minute hour, with all the references to the clock and exact numbers of minutes.
- So did Big Mac have enough cash on him or was credit involved?
1. Yes, people did suggest that.
We see two bovines, with very obviously masculine faces and no udders, pulling a cart full of anvils – about 8 of them. Setting aside the question of who needed so many anvils, we can at least say for sure that minotaurs aren’t the male counterpart of cows.1 Also, unlike ponies, who typically pull carts using belts tied around the barrel, these bulls have the cart attached to the yokes they are wearing.
- I’m not sure a cart should be able to survive so many anvils.
- Big Mac is capable of out-pulling two bulls, and pulling an entire small house off the foundation. That’s pushing the top earth pony performance into the range of a hundred horsepower.
- Carousel Boutique’s door has a catflap. I thought Opal wasn’t an outdoor cat, but looks like she is allowed to come and go as she pleases.
- Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo managed to dig a ~5x5x5 meters pit in no more than 15 minutes. And put a mattress on the bottom. And neither of them are earth ponies.
- The limit of punishment for this entire debacle, that both Cherilee and Big Mac consider fair, is doing all of Big Mac’s chores. And that’s more than what Twilight got for the Smartypants Incident. As I have observed before, intent is the primary criterion ponies use when judging mind control incidents.
Questions
- So how did the incident with the potion – which, according to the book, ended quite badly, even though the details are very murky – lead to the tradition of Hearts and Hooves day?!…
- Twilight seems to believe the book is historical, and, well, the potion is known to work. Was the princess depicted actually an alicorn or not? And more importantly, who was the third party that actually fed them the potion?
- Why is the potion recipe so strongly pegasus-centric?
If we’re going to invoke unreliable narrator regarding the CMC reading the book’s contents, then it bears noting that “Serve to two ponies who aren't in the know,” is what Apple Bloom reads, and is in fact her only contribution. Sweetie Belle reads aloud the rest of the recipe (which is shown to be accurate), and the antidote for the potion (which is shown to be accurate), and the backstory about the prince, the princess, and the fallen kingdom. If we have to say that one of the two fillies is wrong, it’s simpler and more consistent to say that Apple Bloom is mistaken about the potion’s target needing to be unaware.
Or, we could reconcile the apparent contradiction. The potion really does require both targets to be unaware, but the prince found a loophole.
When the princess visited his castle for a week, the prince mixed up the love potion himself. He instructed his servants to sneak the potion into his and the princess’s dinner drinks, specifying that they must do it “On some night I won’t expect it.” Only after giving his order did the prince realize his mistake. By his own orders, the servants couldn’t sneak the potion into the drinks on the princess’s last night—because if they hadn’t acted before the last night remaining, then he’d certainly expect them to act then. And with the last night removed from consideration, the servants now couldn’t sneak the potion in on the second-to-last night, for precisely the same reason. Iterating that logic a few more times, the prince came to the inescapable conclusion that there was no possible night that his servants could surprise him with the potion, therefore they would never act.
The servants, unaware of their prince’s vexing conundrum, snuck the potion into his drink on Wednesday night, taking him and the princess completely by surprise.
4630814
This is a sensible point of view, and yet I don’t agree.
The list of ingredients and the “Serve to two ponies who aren’t in the know” are lines which are implied to be direct quotes, and are in matching style.
Sweetie Belle recounting the details of the story is definitely a retelling, however, not a direct quote.
If you can offer a clear way in which one could misread a hypothetical original phrase, and yet maintain the observed mechanic of the potion working, though, that would be a much better option.
Clever. :)
But isn’t it a bit too clever for a legend that has to date to, what, pre-NMM?
Good to put horsepower numbers on the limits of earth pony strength.
Not sure about the Princess being an alicorn. Would the CMC have drawn wings and a horn if they thought they needed to "correct the record?"
However, I think Sweetie Bell saying the part about "kingdom fell, a dragon appeared, chaos reigned" can be taken as accurate (to what the book is claiming). Which presumably means Discord was mixed up with this in ancient times.
How is the "love poison" different than a "love potion" anyway? It seems like the poison works exactly the way you would expect a working love potion to work. How does Cloudsdale avoid constantly generating accidental mixtures of love poison?
4630830
Depends on how mad Twilight would be if you draw in her books.
Inconclusive, probably not:
Notice, no Discord whatsoever. Discord is not the only source of chaos, the CMC are a close second. :)
“poison” is merely the epithet Sweetie Belle applies to it. I honestly have no idea where she got it from, but just like it could be given in the book, she could have invented it in place.
Now that is a very good question. No idea! All of the components of the potion should be available accidentally, and in fact, will mix accidentally – spill a rainbow on a cloud, send a spinning pegasus through, boom.
And yet we know it works, don’t we?
4630845
Well forget that then, the CMC aren't that dumb.
Yeah, there are other sources of chaos. But "Sweetie Belle: Well, there's something here about a dragon, the kingdom falling, chaos reigning" sounds like Sweetie Belle is quoting from the book. And "chaos reigning" sure sounds like an old-timey term of art referring to Discord, just like "reign of the sun" probably refers to Celestia. It's possible the book just means there was general anarchy in the kingdom, but chaos reigned sounds more specific. Discord could also be mistaken for a young dragon by ignorant ponies.
Perhaps something special has to be done to Rainbow Juice to release the glow, and before vacuum cleaners this was difficult process. On the other hand, perhaps we can explain how terminally shy Pegasi like the Shy Parents nevertheless ended up together...
4630856
Yeah, and Discord likes Fluttershy because of the butterflies on her cutie mark, since he expects them to cook up a hurricane on the other side of the planet any moment now. :)
I think this is mostly baseless, honestly. And more importantly, largely useless, because we’re theorizing about a phrase that is known to be a retelling, (“Apparently…”) of a book containing legends of unknown veracity – if the potion works and the antidote does, it does not necessarily mean that the legend is correct, and the legend doesn’t even match the potion recipe – or provenance, and isn’t cross-referenced with anything else that I remember.
That’s all we got:
Tuft of cloud is immediately obvious, and so is the feather, why wouldn’t rainbow be likewise obvious?
Tempting.
Sure, that sort of thing must have been mixed by accident dozens of times—but how often would anypony actually drink the result? As far as they know, it’s industrial spillage with feather oil mixed in.
4630867
Now Oliver, I think Fluttershy's ability to cause chaos can no longer be in dispute.
[citation request]
Psychic paper!
The Foal Free Press?
4630814
Well-played hanging problem reference.
4630845
Here is where the separation of the rainbow's glow becomes important. Separation of rainbow into its ingredients is, after all, seen here and only here, and may be difficult to accidentally do.
I also suspect some bit of (fanon?) Harry Potter potions theory applies, in that the act of stirring is channeling magic through the stirrer into the brew, which is a necessary component of creating many potions. This doesn't get us out, though, because pterippus feathers are naturally going to be channeling some magic. (Perhaps not channeling magic, but being conductive still, may be necessary, but that then … (
Did they stir by mouth?Can't tell, out of frame. That's the only real hold they use that doesn't overtly require magic to function. Then again, heartsongs and verbal components mean vocal, oral magic.)Also, intent while stirring, perhaps, to shape the magic.
4630867
Or if it's being annoyingly monogamous and the magic doesn't function with 1, 3, 4+ drinkers, or the "in the know" requires that someone else have a "know" for them not to be in (see above re: intent).
Bitterness over Canterlot.
Alternately, oropygeal gland getting mystically associated with sex, combined with a necessity to use an organic, pony-derived stirrer. Pegasus feather neatly cuts out a step by coming pre-coated with a properly-associated substance, being non-gory and unlikely that you'll drink/get some on yourself when stirring. It's the 6cc of mouse blood version, or nearly so.
wait a ponyfeathered minute, the luma is arguably more the glow than the chroma…but they used the chroma.
4631317
I’ve been mentioning it often, both Hearthbreakers and A Hearth’s Warming Tail present Lemon Hearts with a stallion – and it’s a different stallion either time. Other appearances of Lemon Hearts in later seasons also pair her with different stallions, though few of them are quite so obviously romantic.
Maybe. Which is why I’ll be keeping an eye on this corner of the clubhouse. However, it might turn out to be entirely random, like the Floating Spa Building.
Notice, however, that three fillies figured out how to do it even with very limited access to pegasus magic, and it took them very limited time – even if we assume that the school clock lies, all of the events related to the first failed shipping attempt and the preparation of the potion have to fit within at most ten hours. It might not be something that happens accidentally, but it is something easy.
Well, we don’t have anything resembling solid indications that ponies are ever not monogamous, (…guardianship of children shared by the community, though…) and we have a huge number of very monogamous cultural attributes, like wedding ceremonies… Imagining pony herds requires deliberately wanting to do so.
That does sound plausible, if that oropygeal gland exists in pegasi. They still could have powder down, but then, that powder could itself be the active component… It would certainly permeate the potion better than the oils from the gland.
…Ha. Incidentally, the love potion is the only clear example of an other-affective magical effect that is not associated with unicorns or naturally magical objects, like plant life or gems.
I think it really is the only example of pegasus magic that affects someone else.
…and I wonder now if Cadance originally being a pegasus could possibly be related to this.
Precisely why I went ‘huh’ at that.
Rainbow contrails don't count, those aren't permanent.
It likewise makes me realize, for all the ubiquity of liquid rainbow on-screen decoratively and the explosive Rainboom…I don't think we ever see a "normal", arch-style rainbow like they have here being deployed?
4631329
I’m not sure there’s a normal arch-style rainbow in primary canon period. At least, the only one I remember well is the Sonic Rainboom arch, which is explicitly a contrail that hangs around for longer than normal.
Secondary canon does have one or two.
4631330
Well, here we do have an arch-style rainbow, mythic-style in that it touches down, out of which they suck said "glow", which is normal enough for my purposes.