Sep
16th
2017
Points of Canon: S7x19 - It Isn’t the Mane Thing About You · 5:59pm Sep 16th, 2017
Mane therapy!
- Global chronology markers: CMC cutie marks, Student Starlight, Friendship Castle.
- In the background of the opening scene, Apple Bloom is talking to Burnt Oak, suggesting a soft chronology lock against The Perfect Pear.
- Diamond Tiara is walking around with her dad. This is actually quite uncommon.
- “Looks like I’m not the only one who left Mare’s Day to the last minute.” So they have a Mare’s Day? What about a Stallion’s Day?… Another yearly event we’ll never see the repeat of and can’t solidly place within the year.
- Bon-Bon has problems choosing flowers. Who would have thought.
- “It makes for a captivating color story when you present them to whomever they intended,” says Rarity, booping Bon-Bon on the nose. Which would look sweet if Lyra wasn’t standing in the same line a few meters away. Now it looks strange. Really strange.
- “Vanity Mare” is a fashion magazine.
- We haven’t seen Mr. Breezy and his fan shop for a long, long time. And that’s the first time we see the inside. “But I could make you one! It’s not like I have anything else to do.” Which implies that he makes the fans he sells. Strange.
- Rarity is up to buying a sofa for the explicit purpose of a photo shoot.
- That’s actually the first time Davenport is named in primary canon, I think. While he makes no statement that he is making the sofas himself, unlike Breezy, he does take Rarity’s special order too. He also fulfills it within the same day, apparently. Does he make the sofas himself too?…
- “We are just celebrating the anniversary of the twins’ first sneezes!” This statement puts a chronology lock around this and Baby Cakes – it is at least 11 and at most 23 months away, since the Cake twins are one month old at their introduction. And if we can confirm that they sneeze in Baby Cakes, we can put it much more strictly. Do they?
- The Cake twins are out of diapers for once, which is a chronology marker.
- Pinkie uses silly string which Rarity calls “Party String” and Pinkie identifies as “Super-Sticky Celebration String.” Notice that this invention, for us, is both attributed to a specific inventor and recent – 1972. See pony chemical industry.
- Pinkie crowbars the stuck twins off the floor. Normally, that would hurt.
- “I do wish Zecora lived in town. One shouldn’t have to brave the darkest part of the forest for shampoo!” Actually, considering that it was Rarity’s idea to seek help from Zecora, I’m sure most ponies don’t go there for shampoo.
- “Even Yakyakistan?” A hard chronology lock against Party Pooped would be redundant, but we can’t really lock against any later yak-featuring episode.
- Party string stuck directly to Rarity’s horn does not prevent her from using telekinesis.
- “Yaks don’t have manes, per se.” What do they have, then?
- Zecora had her tree remodeled – this is a new background image, not seen before. I’m not sure if she can be thought to have moved to a new tree or not. The inside does not seem different… She does seem to be using more and different candles, this time.
- Zecora has never been caught using this sort of quasi-chemical apparatus setup before. What’s particularly interesting is that the super-strong remover and the super-effective shampoo are prepared simultaneously from different fractions of the same base component.
- And that is why you should always label your chemicals.
- Pinkie very explicitly grabs the bottle with her mane.
- The remover potion is mind-reactive: It removes the substances the user is consciously focusing on. I suppose that explains why Rarity’s mane is missing but the coat beneath it is not.
- I don’t think we’ve seen Rarity’s bathroom before. Somehow, I don’t see a tap valve anywhere near the tub, nor anything obvious to replace it. Notably, Rarity uses some manner of a glass scraper to clean her mirror.
- “I thought your shampoo had triggered early onset mare pattern baldness.” Mare pattern baldness is a thing. And we do see mares wearing wigs, notably, Lyrica Lilac in Sweet and Elite…
- “Mane mending magic’s the trickiest of tricks!” As the episode goes on, it becomes more and more ridiculous. I wonder, why manes are so tricky, but facial hair, as Twilight demonstrates on multiple occasions, is not?
- So wait, whose child is that with Caramel, that he feels upset by Rarity’s re-manes making the baby cry?
- Why is Bon-Bon buying flowers again?
- Nopony seems to recognize Rarity’s voice.
- “I’ll pay you twice!… Three times!…” Reminder: Never do business with Davenport.
- Despite fixing manes with magic being tricky, Twilight immediately remembers a spell to do so and that spell steals a crystal pony’s mane. From all the way across Equestria. But seconds after transplantation, it shatters. You would think that this means that crystal pony manes are actual crystal, but this is bogus, because of the entire hair care sequence in Games Ponies Play: The procedures for assembling the royal hairstyle are applicable to Cadance’s hair, which would be impossible if they were designed for use on solid crystal hair, which we know from A Canterlot Wedding that Cadance does not have. Whatever caused the shattering had to have happened to the hair in transit.
- Starlight attempts a solid wooden “hairpiece” instead, which tells us that the Friendship Castle room doors are wooden, and a whopping 15cm thick. That’s going to be tricky to replace. They also should be super heavy and difficult to move.
- So they end up with a few tons of hair and nopony thinks to make a hairpiece except Rarity, who gets dissuaded immediately. And notice that at no point the idea of a magical illusion comes up. Is that because it doesn’t show on photos?
- And apparently you can’t make manes grow faster with magic either. Any counterexamples? I’m sure there were one or two.
- Notice that Rarity is worried about her mane much more than she is worried about her tail, which is in the same sorry state.
- Granny Smith is milking a cow. That’s actually the first time we see cows being milked, I think, since Boast Busters. Evidently, that’s one thing cows can’t do to themselves.
- “It looks like we hired a new milkmaid.” Apples hire ponies!
- Notice that Applejack does think of making a hairpiece. Alas, she uses straw. They could have used all that hair that Twilight and Starlight successfully conjured…
- A cloud-based mane replacement could, in fact, work on a pegasus, come to think of it. Which is probably why Rainbow didn’t think that it wouldn’t work on Rarity.
- “I think we all know how bad Rarity has been feeling, but I never thought she’d cancel her shoot with Photo Finish.” I wonder why Twilight talks like this is a surprise.
- This is the largest quantity of icecream I have ever seen Rarity eat, at least 15 jars. I’m not sure how big these are exactly, but, it’s something like 10kg or so.
- That punk Rarity makes me pretty certain that there was a rebellious period in Rarity’s life when she learned to play guitar. This is clearly a style she had at some point in time, if she’s able to grow back into it so quickly. See Honest Apple.
- “It’s my own fault, I shouldn’t have bought flowers without asking Spoiled what she likes.” And in the nearly a decade of marriage Filthy Rich still hasn’t found that out?… Actually, how does he not know that lavender is purple?
- Breezy ended up with a big-donkey fan he probably won’t be selling anytime soon. But Davenport got Rarity’s business, when he’s the one who really didn’t deserve it.
- Notice that the shampoo did nothing to remove the silly string from Sugarcube. Would it actually clean it out of Rarity’s hair in the first place?
- Also notice that in the entire time Rarity was running about and trying various mane repair solutions, nopony must have come to Sugarcube.
- It took the Mane 4.5 (no Pinkie and nopony inquired about her. Starlight counts for 0.5) a very short time to un-cancel the photo shoot and get Photo Finish to go covert. That had to have been a story in itself.
- “It’s been months.” We don’t know for how long did Rarity have to sport the punk look, but it was surely a substantial time – at least one month, probably three – during which no episode with a long-tail Rarity can occur. This will be chronologically important.
- Even then, it takes only this long for Rarity to grow a full-length mane and a really long tail from the roots.
- Rarity has started yet another, presumably short-lived but very noticeable fad, which we will never see again.
Manes really are a big deal, and mane therapy is indeed a thing. Tail extensions might actually be a myth.
Full-body fur, far as I can tell. Their head-hair isn't particularly distinguishable from their body-hair. It's all one mop, like a dog.
I'm pretty sure that regular-issue Rarity *is* her rebellious period. I mean, consider her parents. Much of her persona is a rejection of her provincial lower-middle-class upbringing. But yes, she may have explored... variations in the exact form of her rebellion at one time. But you'd think she'd immediately flash back to the old style if she's worn this in the past, and we wouldn't have an episode. Perhaps Rebellious Teen Rarity was more of a metal-head, with hair down in her eyes and a silly stovepipe hat, like Slash?
1.bp.blogspot.com/-hrNi0jGUDe4/Wb1qam0EyvI/AAAAAAAAATE/iN_RkxBd0KMgAHXVhEnayWCuuOdisfCTQCLcBGAs/s1600/sugarbelleandbigmac.png
For timing - Big Mac is keeping company with Sugar Belle in the foreground, someone caught it in a screen capture.
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Possibly. Now you need to find someone to draw that. :)
Well, given that the Baby Cakes had silly string in their manes at the beginning of the episode, but not at the end of the episode, I would say Zecora's shampoo was a success.
EDIT: I just remembered something, and it made me reread your blogpost. What exactly do you mean by soft lock? I ask, because surely, this bit of the episode confirms the episode's chronology position in relation to Perfect Pear?
Granny's with Grand Pear at his stand, so I'd call that a hard lock.
There's also Trixie wrecking Rarity's mane in "Boast Busters," but that might have been exploiting the finicky nature of trichtomancy. If it's hard to fix manes, that may make it easy to ruin them.
For three days, no less. ("You just took the wrong potion from here yesterday." "So much to do before the shoot tomorrow.") Pinkie's apparently been scrubbing that whole time. And no one opened the front door. And the Cakes must be out of town.
Yeah, "manes are special" does seem pretty suspect. Though it's that bit about the twins that really gets me. There may not even be time for Flurry Heart to gestate depending on when they first sneezed.
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…So Rarity’s horn would remain covered in silly string even if everything went well? :)
In terms of my chronology tool, a soft lock is a lock you can turn on or off, i.e argue against. Apple Bloom talking with Burnt Oak is a soft lock – it can happen for a number of reasons, and even though we’re sure what the authors meant this time, we might want to argue against that.
Grand Pear turning up, which I missed, is a hard lock, which you can’t turn off.
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Nothing a shaver won’t fix, surely. :)
Perfect way to get Pinkie out of your hair, take note: Bubbles.
See also: Derpy.
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Ah, I gotcha. Yeah, I could understand how you missed it; I conversely missed Apple Bloom talking to Burnt Oak.
Agree that Davenport is a jerk, and a lot of the other ponies act rather rude too. Yeah Rarity is quieter and wears a cloak, but they all are aware of her, they just choose to ignore her. Kind of wish they'd had to learn a friendship lesson at the end of this as well.
I don't think the sneez-aversary provides a hard-lock, as I don't remember the Cake Twins actually sneezing in any prior episode. Though it does seem increasingly unlikely that this could be that far from the episode, since how old can you really be before you sneeze?
I sense the Cake Twins are going to become increasingly problematic for chronology over time, as the show probably has no plans to age them in any way. Already Flurry Heart seems significantly older and more mature than them, though we know this is impossible.
This episode also lends weight to the comics portrayal of Zecora as an anti-social hermit who doesn't really like a lot of company. She repeatedly kicks ponies out of her hut at the first possible opportunity.
But man, this whole episode carved out a great big swathe of time for itself, 1-3 months. I suppose we can try jamming in some episodes where we don't see Rarity any time soon, though apparently during this period all the background characters also copied her look, so that makes it tricky.
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Great, now we have to start shipping that.
The timeline implications of the Cake twins makes my head hurt, and I just know that those few months of Rarity's new style being around is going to cause more problems later. And I really, really don't understand why manes are so special, to the point that the two most OP magic-users in the series can't do anything about them. I enjoyed the episode and all, but goddamn did it not make sense.
4670605 Also apparently magic doesn't really create anything, it just transforms or summons things? That is a big deal.
Of interest: one of the mannequins in Carousel Boutique is in an outfit with a bridle, but no saddle.
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Months, at most.
Actually it’s worse. Background characters copied her look the day the issue of “Vanity Mare” came out – which happened only after her hair grew back. So the episode occupies even longer with obvious visual changes.
“Fruit shipping.”
…So where did they summon that ocean of hair from? Wig factory?
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Actually, it’s been pretty much exactly like that since day one.
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Did... did you think we hadn't started?
This may be the Equestrian White Day equivalent…but this makes for an unusually sex-segregated thing for Equestria?
going through the Frozen North, for example.
A good balance on and lubrication of hinges could make this require very little force, except to do quickly…
Especially odd, given that Rarity was shown to have this skill. Unless she only makes toupées and not wigs…but that's a bit fine.
does Hairity count? I don't think it actually grew her mane so much as the rest of her; merely turning it into dreads like all the rest. It only has to grow the coat, not the mane or tail.
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⛧Brushable mane and tail of toys.⛧
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without conjuration, if dragons are highly magic-resistant.) One interpretation of "It Ain't Easy Being Breezies" requiring a cancelling of the spell yields that it would last until cancelled. Another is that the polymorph fails in dangerous, piecemeal fashion if not…but this clashes with all the casual, careless wildlife-into-oranges, teacup poodles…
It's not so big a deal if polymorphs of indefinite duration are possible; then polymorphing stray matter is your conjuration substitute (One wonders how
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Though that could be the first time they both sneezed at the same time and Pinkie saw them.
Maybe. Speaking of wigs, Rarity's punk hair at the end has to be like 80% hair extensions, since she didn't have enough left for the volume we see. Same goes for her tail.
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Fair enough. I guess William Shatner has been sleeping with green women for like 50 years now. Just tell me he's not the reason Granny is wearing that blonde wig.
She sticks to her principles.
Had she not drummed up such business for him, he should be rather cross that she commissioned a huge fan and didn't buy it.
♪"Just about one year ago"
on the other hand, Pinkie is super-meticulous about dates and parties and party dates.
They're not on a path this time, either.
the colors seem to match what she eventually goes with, though.
I don't think it's that short-lived if ponies all have the manes yet the issue of Vanity Mare just came out
todaysuch that it's still in the stand. (Though, if it's not truly new I suspect they'd show the mag from someplace else?)They must be a well-credited myth, for "Ponyville Confidential" to make Fluttershy's alleged extensions more than tabloid fodder.