Oct
21st
2017
Points of Canon: Legends of Magic #6 · 1:22pm Oct 21st, 2017
Onto the next.
Framing story
So Starlight is seeing Sunburst off to the Crystal Empire from Canterlot Station. Which enforces the following sequence of events, which might be chronologically important:
- Sunburst arrives from the Crystal Empire in Legends of Magic #1 and starts studying Star Swirl’s archive.
- He keeps at it for a substantial time, until Starlight intercepts him in Legends of Magic #4 – having arrived with Twilight for whatever undisclosed reason.
- Tiberius’ birthday happens in Legends of Magic #5.
- Sunburst leaves for the Crystal Empire.
- Sunburst arrives to Ponyville and the events of Uncommon Bond occur.
- He immediately goes to Canterlot and the events of Shadow Play occur.
That’s a lot of train rides. Notice also that at any point in this sequence before #5, the events of From the Shadows (My Little Pony #51-53) have to happen.
Also notice that a substantial time has to pass between #4 and #5 for Starlight to miss him so badly as we see in Uncommon Bond. See the end of this writeup, though…
- “I just.. She always figures out everything. It’s nice to actually know something before she does. Is that wrong?” This suggests a deeper familiarity between Sunburst and Twilight than Uncommon Bond would imply.
- Sunburst occupied the entire passenger car with his luggage and got away with it.
- “Mage Meadowbrook… I always love quests with healer ponies. They know some of the neatest spells. There’s nothing like a good healing spell, or a zone of truth.” Healing spells exist. This is quite a blank spot in the canon, actually. I can’t even begin to theorize what a “zone of truth” is.
Meadowbrook’s legend
- “Meadowbrook polished off ponypox in Puerto Caballo. She fought the phoenix fever in Fillydelphia. Finally, she had just cured the blue flu in Salt Lick City.” New infectious diseases, just what the canon needed. All those places have been mentioned before, but it’s nice to see them again. Notably, “blue flu” appears to actually color ponies blue.
- Mareidian was (and possibly is) a town which is a two days travel distance from Salt Lick City. Notice the architecture that fits much better with “Old West” style places like the ones previously shown in the comics as well as Appleloosa. This is supposed to happen pre-Nightmare, remember? Remember? When they had straw roof huts?
- A candle in a glass lantern is used for lighting in this town, multiple times. The very next page has a piano in it, not to mention a musical score (with no notes) labeled “Thriller,” as well as a huge number of pictures on the wall, in frames with glass. Which would, in most cases, imply photography. And there’s a pony in a top hat…
- The narrators’ text refers to the sick ponies explicitly as “zombies.” Meadowbrook immediately assumes that the illness is touch-transmission, but to be honest, it could just as well be airborne, in which case she would have been screwed by this point anyway. To infect an entire town with nopony escaping, it would have to be.
- Notice that this means Meadowbrook does not subscribe to, say, miasma theory of disease.
- “Meadowbrook may not have been the traditional swashbuckling hero, but she had skills that helped when she was backed into a corner.” That’s narration. At the time of writing, the archetype of a swashbuckling hero existed already.
- It’s interesting that Meadowbrook is using a messenger bag, rather than a saddlebag or a pair.
- “This must be the oat stores for the whole town.” Communal oat stores?
- “And you’re a Nilson swamp frog! You’re brightly colored so you can warn predators the excretion on your skin is poisonous.” Cursory googling produces no mentions of such a frog in our world. Which is why the “Nilson” is so puzzling.
- “Which wouldn’t normally be a problem, because a pony wouldn’t eat you.” Ponies do not eat frogs.
- Whatever the mechanism of action of the cure Meadowbrook uses, it involved squeezing a live frog into the potion. It also works without having to ingest it, which suggests alchemy rather than mundane chemistry.
- Narration specifies “funky ninja action music.” Ninjas were a thing at the time of writing.
Framing story
- “I don’t think that Star Swirl really knows what a healer–” Actually, I’m with you on that, Sunburst.
- “I don’t remember seeing this book before.” Boom, discrepancy: According to Uncommon Bond, Sunburst found this book in the blind buy barrel in Ponyville antique store. This is the book referred to in Shadow Play, since the opening text matches verbatim: “The best elements within us can spread light and virtue…” Only, in this comic, he departs from Canterlot Station.
Some analysis
- They can’t get anything consistent, can they?
- I think we did bring this up before, that it’s as if Meadowbrook came from a radically different era from all the other Pillar heroes? Yet she’s supposed to be contemporary with Star Swirl, Somnambula, Rockhoof, and it all is supposed to have happened pre-Nightmare. This is quite evident even in primary canon, but this issue makes it pretty explicit.
No. But we knew this already.
Given all the weird discrepancies specific to Meadowbrook, plus that comment in the last comic that only unicorns are potion masters, what if Meadowbrook was the time traveler? Like, she originally came from 100 years ago, and did most of her good deeds, then stumbled into a.... random time portal? Came out in the time of Starswirl, and told him a bunch of legends about herself after Stygian recruited her?
Ehh, that will probably be ruled impossible in a month when #8 comes out. This is starting to feel like if JRR Tolkein had asked a casual fan to write the Simarillion for him while he concentrated on other projects.
Also, in your sequence of events at the top, when does Legends of Magic #6 Occur?
4704470
It’s item 4 of course.
It sounds like a reference to poison dart frogs. No idea why the comic renamed them to that, though.
4704471 Thanks. This issue of where Sunburst was between all the comics and the 3 episodes was really confusing. Logically they should just have shipped him all the books to the Crystal Empire and let that manny read in peace.
4704525
Logically, either Uncommon Bond shouldn’t have existed, or the scenes between Sunburst and Starlight (and others) in Legends should have happened in Ponyville at various points during Uncommon Bond, and it would make sense. Unfortunately, since nobody seems to check the scripts beyond a rough outline for consistency, they wove this mess, which requires Sunburst to shuttle between the Crystal Empire, Canterlot and Ponyville all the frigging time to satisfy the constraints imposed on him by the plot.
4704883 Real truth: Sunburst's frequent rider miles are about to expire and he wants to use them all up. He even upgraded to a private car once!
⛧ Low-level D&D (also a Hasbro property, natch) AoE truth-forcing spell. ⛧
Discord was actually referencing something
realthat existed prior to his demand of Cadence and Twilight? [⛧…it maybe wasn't when that episode was written]I mean, infectious diseases hardly come in a limited selection in real life. Chickenpox, smallpox, cowpox, the measles, anthrax, herpes, the plague, the pox, the clap, flu, the common cold, scarlet fever, yellow fever, malaria, sleeping sickness, whooping cough, hepatitis A, B, C, D and E, cholera, polio, Lyme disease, tuberculosis, rubella, typhus... to be honest, I tend to be suspicious of fictional worlds having only a small and tidy list of diseases.
4998131
They already had “pony sniffles,” feather flu, pony pox, and a number of others,
but this one is its own particular shade of fridge horror. It should, in theory, result in an extermination campaign, but bizarrely does not do so on screen.sorry, got wires crossed here, as I remembered the other infectious “disease” that Meadowbrook was involved with.