Nov
1st
2017
Points of Canon: S4x08 - Rarity Takes Manehattan · 8:59pm Nov 1st, 2017
This is an episode I don’t remember well, so I expect some discoveries.
- That’s an interesting cart Spike is using to haul Rarity’s luggage: It has no handles or harnesses of any kind. Presumably, the pony is meant to push it with their head.
- One of Rarity’s bags is a paper bag with a Chanel logo. The earliest time I saw it was in Sweet and Elite and the frequency increases in later seasons. Actually, all the Mane 6 acquire such bags over the course of this episode.
- “Of course we’d all come along to support you during Fashion Week, Rarity!” Fashion Week is a recurrent yearly event, which repeats in The Saddle Row Review. Notably, at the time Rarity states that “tonight is the last night of the Fall season.” Fashion’s “fall season” need not explicitly fall on calendar season boundaries, but it pretty definitely has to be in autumn, so both of these episodes are in autumn, and there’s a positive integer number of years between them. This, incidentally, is one of the things that prevents this episode from falling into the hypothetical hole between Twilight’s ascension and her coronation.
“These are tickets to the hottest musical on Bridleway!”
- Musicals are a thing. Which is frankly somewhat unusual in a universe with diegetic singing, which this episode plays with later on.
- Bridleway is a place, presumably equivalent to Broadway.
- “You couldn’t mean Hinny of the Hills… because that show’s been sold out for months!” I am not sure if “Hinny of the Hills” is a specific reference or not. Can anyone confirm?
- Entry into Manehattan is accomplished via an advanced suspension bridge. There’s an interesting, rather crudely drawn building on the shore opposite Manehattan itself. It is either a large telescope or a large cannon in a turret. I must say that right next to a city with a bright night illumination is the very worst possible place for a large telescope, so take your pick.
- Sail-boats and sail-less boats are visible beneath the bridge. I missed that. Actually, I missed all the boats in this episode previously.
- That huge horse head on top of one of the skyscrapers has to be someone’s corporate logo, but then I wonder what the hell would it be doing decorating Twilight’s library.
- The clock on the Grand Central Station shows 10:00 sharp at the time the Mane 6 arrive. This would imply an overnight trip, but clocks aren’t very reliable around here.
- Times Square has huge billboards, advertising, respectively, Wonderbolt shows, an apple drink, burgers, and the Equestrian version of “Cats” musical, unless someone is just messing with us.
- “Oh, I gave some designs to the costume designer, so he pulled a few strings.” At this point in her career, Rarity already has contacts with a Bridleway costume designer. I wonder just how she got them and whether Fancy Pants was involved or not.
- There’s an alicorn cosplayer flying between buildings.
- According to Applejack, Rainbow Dash does not normally like musicals, and Rainbow concurs.
- “Ponies just bursting into song in random places at the drop of a hat? Who does that?” Rarity does, right there and then, and both Applejack and Rainbow go wide-eyed at the obviously diegetic singing.
- As a side note, Manehattan is nearly devoid of undressed ponies, save the Mane 6 and a few stragglers. See who are the country hicks here?
- “Mane Fair Hotel” is a major Manehattan hotel.
- Rarity tips the hotel porter with a gem, and he actually offers to give her change. Evidently, gems are at least as good as money, and yet, not particularly expensive, at least, not this particular stone. Later, she uses a gem to pay for a single flower, and it is also accepted without question or complaint.
- The Mane 6 take a short cruise on a boat – and since we don’t see neither sails nor wheels, it has to be using a screw or a hydrojet. The speed would suggest a screw. Ponies have fairly advanced shipping, at least around here.
- What the hell is Fancy Pants doing there in his cap with an anchor, however, I’m not sure, but that’s definitely him – Fleur is standing next to him. They never interact with the Mane 6 on screen, so we’ll never know. So I guess Fancy Pants was in fact involved in getting Rarity acquainted with this costume designer…
- The Statue of
LibertyFriendshipWhatever – it’s never named anywhere that I remember – has an almost-saddle as part of her toga. It’s interesting that it seems to be an earth pony. I wonder what’s the story behind it in Equestria. - There’s a tourist wearing a very interesting backpack, with two straps. One goes under the belly, the other across the chest.
- As the Mane 6 are passing by, we see the window of an office, wherein a mid-XX-century desktop phone can be observed. Manehattan, at least, has a phone network. For some reason, the dialing disk only has six holes. Unless this is due to the cartoon resolution, that would be quite limiting.
- “What if you find a Gloomy Gus?” …what’s a Gus? No, I mean, how did the ponies come by this word?
- Rarity knows a spell that can at least temporarily restore a completely shattered wooden object, in this case, a wheel. She hasn’t been using it much, but she does something similar all the way back in Look Before You Sleep
- The particular taxi that Rarity repairs is interesting: It is painted with a rainbow stripe, not the expected checkerboard pattern, while otherwise being identical to the others. Huh?
- For an extra pun, notice that Applejack serves as a car jack in this scene.
- Manehattan has very obvious streetlights, though apparently, not on every street. Rarity pole-dances on one.
- “The dresses are all completely finished, all made from a fabulous new fabric I’ve been developing for months. Stretchy, but not clingy. Shimmery, but not showy.” Rarity manufactures her own fabrics at least on occasion, and this has to involve magic, since she has never been seen anywhere in the vicinity of the requisite technology until later in this episode, where she saddles Pinkie with operating a loom. Pretty darn exclusive if you ask me.
- “Oh, that’s funny. Because that clock over there makes it seem like that’s only ten minutes from now!” And the most surprising part, that is in fact what the clock shows - 13:50. Looks like the Mane 6 have been hanging out for over three hours.
- “Oh, my ribbons and threads.” Rarity never seems to use this exclamation again, which is a crying shame.
- “Please won’t you let her have this taxi? She has somewhere very important to be right away!” Nopony notices Twilight is a princess and she gets no respect whatsoever. The Doylist reason for this is obvious, Rarity needs to get payback for being helpful to the taxi driver, the hotel porter, etc – but that doesn’t prevent this from being a stumbling block for interpretation.
- “Fashion runway plaza in seven minutes. Can you make it?” Actually, I’m pretty sure Twilight could teleport Rarity there in one hop and make a detour for the dresses.
- “Don’t you remember me? Suri Polomare from the Ponyville Knitters League?” Ponyville has, or had at some point, a Knitters League. And knowing that Rarity’s bedroom workshop has knitting needles in it, Rarity probably was or is also a member. There has to be a story in it for someone.
- “You haven’t been back in years!” Suri is originally also a Ponyvillain and could conceivably turn up in stories set in a pre-Twilight period in Ponyville, something to keep in mind.
- “Take my culottes, for example… they are simply crying out for just the right accent, but I haven’t the slightest notion where I…” I wonder just which kind of culottes does Suri mean. Because some of them are panties. I don’t see any panties on the rack she eventually rolls out, but that rack is entirely new anyway.
- “Far-Afield Tavern” is a fancy restaurant in Manehattan.
- Among the souvenirs the Mane 6 brought from running around the city is a snowglobe. I presume they eventually lost the thing, cause it never turns up with anyone.
- Now, we knew that Fluttershy has “freaky knowledge of sewing,” as Rarity herself put it in Suited for Success, but Twilight is operating the other sewing machine – for some reason, by hoof.
- Rainbow is operating a spinning wheel. The practicality of spinning new thread in such a short time escapes me. Pinkie is operating a goddamn loom. Both of these are remarkably low tech, and I’m wondering if Twilight cobbled them together from destroyed furniture or something.
- “Congratu-pony-lations, fillies!” What an odd phrase.
- Rarity’s brand new line involves at least 14 hotel keys, not to mention the lampshade. I don’t envy anypony who gets to sort out the aftermess. This would involve throwing considerable amounts of money or authority at the problem.
- We see the rainbow gleam of the Chest of Harmony Key, first one so far. The choice involved is explicitly between fashion, the ambition of her life, and friendship. The pony motivated by this choice to accept friendship is Coco Pommel. See Doylist Intrusion #1 for an explanation of why this is interesting. Yeah, I know Larson made statements that invalidate the conclusions of that post, the logic is still useful and sound, you can make a nice AU with it.
- As Rarity ventures out to sing in the rain, the clock shows 17:10.
- “Hope you’re all available for an exclusive performance of Hinny of the Hills!” The amount of strings one would have to pull to get that to happen is pretty staggering, as a typical musical involves the realtime efforts of an entire orchestra, never mind the singers. Rarity later says “Remember my costume designer friend who got me the tickets? Well, I offered to make all the costumes for his next show!” but I am not sure even that would be sufficient, since Rarity did not offer to make them for free – she offers the task to Coco as a job. I guess the only reason Rarity wanted to participate in the Fashion Week is that running a mafia is not fabulous enough.
- “Wouldn’t have wanted her to find out the truth now, would we?” Notice that eventually, Rarity would have found out: the first prize winner forfeiting the win would be prime gossip and would get written up in every topical publication. And what Suri should be worried about is that eventually Twilight would have found out.
- “How would you like to work for my friend making all the costumes for his next show?” I don’t think we ever find out who he is, that costume designer guy, which is also a shame. Notice that this gets Rarity out of the necessity to stay in Manehattan to make them herself.
- Rarity ends the episode narrating a Journal record and is shown writing it down herself in her bedroom workshop. Since this is also the moment she chooses to unpack Coco’s gift and receives her Chest of Harmony Key, a spool of rainbow thread, this had to have taken place more or less immediately upon her return to Ponyville.
Some analysis
The really weird thing about this episode is Twilight’s wings. It would make perfect sense if she did not have them, but this is outright impossible: a Chest of Harmony Key is the entire plot of the episode, it concludes with a Friendship Journal record, and it is forced to happen in autumn, long after all the wing-related events have happened already.
It would likewise work if Twilight simply didn’t participate in it, as her involvement is fairly peripheral, but she’s on screen far too much.
Now we have to invent reasons why everyone ignores a princess and why Twilight doesn’t solve half the plot in one fell swoop. It’s notable that Twilight never uses her wings as part of her expressive system either, which she only starts doing to any serious degree in Season 5, so there is a chance someone would just think they’re a fashion accessory – there is a stray alicorn animation error in the episode, remember? – but Manehattan specifically is a place where ponies read their newspapers, and a coronation would be national front page news, so someone would have recognized her face.
There is of course a chance that they thought that since it’s impossible that a princess with no guard and regalia would be gawking around like a tourist, and standing in line for a taxi, this can’t be her, and that’s that. But that doesn’t explain Suri Polomare, who should have been very wary of the possibility of this being the recently crowned princess, since she would know that she lives in Ponyville.
I’m afraid the only reasonable explanation we have left is Twilight employing some manner of ignore-me-please magic just to avoid getting mobbed on the street. Which does seem like something she might do.
Doesn’t mean I have to like it.
People talking about this.
Didn't you hear of the Manehattan Declaration of Independence? It's now once more just a part of the old Federation of Equestria, not the modern United Kingdoms of Equestria! It doesn't need to bow and scrape to alicorn princesses anymore!
Or, at least, the cabbies like to feel that way. Maybe they just joined the United Kingdoms a little while ago, and they still haven't adjusted. Or, more likely, they're having a resurgence of nostalgia for their old independence. Or, maybe Cadance or Luna made some big mess there a little while ago, so Princesses other than Celestia are unpopular at the moment.
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Unfortunately that wouldn’t explain Suri Polomare in particular, who should be very wary of making powerful enemies, no matter how she feels about bowing down to them.
4714795 Grumble. You're right. And that would be true even before Twilight's ascension, given how she was the Princess's personal student and how she and Rarity were both Elements of Harmony. The only possible way around that would be to say the Element-Bearers' identities were kept secret... which doesn't work at all this late in the series.
Um, maybe she didn't care about snubbing Twilight since she thought the Princesses were so unpopular in Manehattan? But even that doesn't work unless she was perfectly fine with limiting herself to the Manehattan political scene.
Uh, maybe she had a touch of the Nightmare Forces accentuating the evil aspects of her personality?
Publishing houses have a lot more power and revenue in a world with little to no electronic media.
Given the initial, it seems like a perfectly valid griffon name.
The expression later developed self-awareness, composed variants of itself, and became Sassy Saddles.
Can cartoon resolution apply to sound?
I've taken the inability to register an alicorn as a sign that Manehattan is a fiercely egalitarian city, likely the most aggressively tribe-blind one in Equestria. Celestia herself can't get a cab there without waiting for ten minutes. Twily-Come-Lately doesn't even get the time of day. Coco, a born and raised Manehattanite, internalized this attitude at a young age regardless of her timidity. It's not what you are in the big city, it's what you've done for them lately. (Same reason the multi-time saviors of the world don't get a second glance. Their latest act of salvation never reached the East Coast.)
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It can, in theory, I suppose… But what was the expletive she actually used, then?
Actually, here’s an interesting new question:
If Coco is natively from Manehattan, why did she have to go work for a provincial upstart?
This episode is what made me realize that Manehatten is really the center of economic and technological progress in Equestria. It seems to be to Canterlot what Canterlot is to Ponyville.
Is there any reason the coronation couldn't have been in the winter, months after the rest of the episode? Then we can assume Manehattenites think Twilight is another alicorn cosplayer. I mean, it's a cloudless sky, but Pegasi weather control could do that any day of the year.
When did Applejack learn this? I mean, are musicals occasionally shown in Ponyville?
Which requires so many associated technologies it's not even funny, but suffice it to say pretty much anything 1950 New York had, Manehatten probably has (except maybe TVs).
A depressed Griffon criminal locked up in San Franciscolt. Everyone knows the Birdcat of Alcatraz.
Theory: This is the sort of thing Sassy Saddles says. What if Rarity has already met with Sassy and begun planning her Canterlot Boutique at this point?
Something that nobody but Alex Warlorn has ever tried to use, for some reason.
Probably a reference to Tavern on the Green.
Doylistically, feels like a writer was told to put a generic pony pun here and panicked at the last minute.
This is ridiculous. Maybe it's just a dress rehearsal Rarity got them access to?
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This would be a lovely place to stick it, winter downtime is murder on the chronology, but no. Green hills can be seen.
Good question! We don’t know, but that is unlikely: Ponyville is known to have a movie theater, but is not known to have a sufficiently large theater venue. Musicals are typically expensive performances. Sweetie Belle likes black box experimental theater – for which she would have to have an opportunity to watch some locally – but this type of performance is specifically notable for not requiring resources to produce and will occupy whatever space is available.
I expect that’s one of the things they did in winter – they went to Canterlot Opera Theater. :)
Not a whole lot. Mechanical automated telephone network is comparatively simple and doesn’t even really require transistors, although it works much better with them than without.
I have fond memories of plugging directly into telephone lines with a “phone” that was nothing but a handset ripped off one – microphone, speaker, nothing else – and dialing by crossing wires. :) I'm sure I could still do it, too, after some practice, and it would still work, most of the city still has pulse dialing.
I’ll try to see if this is possible once I get to Canterlot Boutique.
She’s not that good of a character, really. Pretty forgettable.
Maybe, it would certainly explain things. But for a currently running musical, I’m not sure those would still happen. Dress rehearsal by the second list cast that is just starting up in a week, due to high demand? Possible.
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Shoot. I mean, green hills are possible if you accept the idea that the Equestrian government is willing to basically temporarily "de-winter" the area surrounding Canterlot for an alicorn coronation, which is a big enough event that it might be considered... but then you would need earth ponies out there clearing snow and growing grass, and it just sounds more and more logistically difficult the more I think about it.
But she also loves showtunes, which suggests she's been to at least a few musicals.
True, but the idea that Rarity had a fellow seamstress friend growing up in Ponyville, who might well have a family that accosted her on her first day back from Manehatten to ask Rarity how their darling daughter Suri was doing? There's some story potential there.
Yeah, it's kind of a stretch.
This episode destroys timelines. For this episode to take place in fall, it has to be at least three months after Princess Twilight Sparkle, which is explicitly at the beginning of summer. This pretty much has to be one of the last Magical Mystery BoxTM episodes, with Twilight's Kingdom occurring very shortly afterward. Making things more complicated is Equestria Girls. Based on the statements about how long the portal is open and how much time Twilight spends with the humans, time can be determined to pass at the same rate in both worlds. The first movie also states that Sunset Shimmer and Company are high school seniors, which only allows one school year for all media portraying them as high school students. The third movie ends with human Twilight transferring schools to attend the same school as Sunset and Co., which only makes sense if there's a significant portion of the school year left- I'd say it at least has to be before winter break- and it also takes place concurrently with The Cutie Re-Mark, which means at most maybe one and a half months or so can pass between the end of season four and the end of season five.
Every episode that has to take place between Tirek's defeat and Starlight's redemption, including all Cutie Map episodes and the CMC getting their marks (and by extension, every episode showing both them without marks and the Castle of Friendship), has to fall in that space, which causes some issues when you look at Made in Manehattan and Brotherhooves Social, since these episodes include the Castle of Friendship, unmarked CMC, and an event called "The Midsummer Theater Revival." Since these episodes have to take place in the fall (which also has implications for the timing of Lesson Zero and Sisterhooves Social due to the latter concerning an annual event shown in the S5 episodes), the theater event's name doesn't make any sense. The only explanation I can come up with is that "Midsummer" is a pony's name, and the event is named for them rather than the time of year when it takes place. That also suggests a very short amount of time between Rarity Takes Manehattan and the two S5 episodes, much less than is implied by the latter.
TL;DR Equestria has had one hell of a year.
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Actually, no, it is not: Summer Sun Celebration is “the longest day of the year,” which in a reasonable calendar is not the beginning of summer but is ~20 days in. In an unreasonable calendar, it can be anywhere. See Friendship is Magic.
Your life will be much easier if you do not assume that the time gradient is stable and linear, and there are good reasons to think that, but I’ll post about them when I get to figuring out the Equestria Girls problems in detail.
That is a cute idea.
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I'll concede that in this context, the seasons might not necessarily line up with the scientific definitions, though it should be noted that the ones on calendars are the astronomical seasons that begin and end at the solstices and equinoxes, not the cultural ones where they start roughly at the beginning of whatever month they actually start in aside from spring. You'd think in a civilization where weather and the length of day are artificially controlled, the cultural seasons would actually match the astronomical ones more closely, but there actually is evidence against this. In One Bad Apple, an event called the "Summer Harvest Parade" takes place. Based on its handling of the CMC (they know each other well and aren't all that intimidated by Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon without Babs joining in), it can pretty much only take place in the show's second summer, but it can't be after the solstice because it has a shot of unicorn Twilight in the parade's audience. Therefore, it has to be in late May or early June (by our calendar, at least). I realize that I'm saying this after my last comment wriggled out of a timing issue with a similarly named event by suggesting it could have been named for a pony, but that explanation doesn't work nearly as well here and I'd rather not use it more than once anyway.
As for Equestria Girls, I've found that trying to figure out a way for interuniversal travel and communications to work with non-linear and unstable passage of time is actually more of a headache than trying to fit events that seem like they should have taken years into the space of a couple months. If time flowed at different rates on different sides of the mirror, expecting any sort of response to a request for help like in Rainbow Rocks would be unreasonable and anyone actually responding would be pretty much impossible. Figuring out how Sunset can still pass herself off as a teenager despite the fact that she'd have to have been living as a human for several years is... interesting, to say the least, but there's any number of explanations to that, and until and unless we see actual human Sunset, they'll hold, and it makes for an interesting fanfic topic that shockingly few writers have touched.
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Errr… Check out my PoC about Call of the Cutie – I am not convinced One Bad Apple can or needs to be in the second summer.
In fact, check out my timeline tool.
In general, I have a huge blog index so that I wouldn’t have to repeat my arguments. :)
Here’s another one for you nobody seems to have touched:
let alone whether it was moved at allEDIT: Correction. Luna says that it was kept in the Canterlot Castle and was moved after Cadance took over the Crystal Empire. Which doesn't explain why was it moved and makes no clear statement regarding its location at the time Sunset left. And exposition from the mouth of either princess has always been to a certain degree dodgy.It is, therefore, possible for Sunset Shimmer to have left Equestria a thousand years ago, with the time being skipped over entirely, which introduces plausible explanations for a large number of silly questions. This would also explain why the Sirens still talk and behave like they’re teenagers even though they were exiled a thousand years ago: From their perspective, they’ve only been there a couple of years.
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There are ways it could happen during the first summer, but it makes more sense for it to be in the second. Even going with the assumption that Call of the Cutie was a remedial summer course (which I really don't like, and there are ways to get around that- we didn't see the whole lesson, so it probably got more detailed off-screen, and Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo could have switched into Apple Bloom's class at the end of the term- unusual for elementary school, but not unheard of, and considering how ponies deal with friendship, allowing elementary schoolers to switch classes to be in the same group as their friends isn't all that unreasonable), it still makes more sense for this episode to happen after they've had more time to get to know each other and do CMC stuff (they had to learn how to build booby-trapped parade floats somewhere, after all, and seeing as they did it in one night without help, they clearly got pretty good at it).
Then again, maybe we're just thinking way too hard about cartoon horses.