Mar
5th
2018
Points of Canon: S5x14 - Canterlot Boutique · 1:20pm Mar 5th, 2018
Ah, the joys of capitalism.
- Chronology markers: Twilight has wings. Friendship Castle does not appear in any shots, and neither do the CMC cutie marks. No whiff of Starlight either. It is however, quite certain that Twilight’s coronation has happened already, but I’m inclined to place this episode as early in the timeline as feasible, because of the emphasis on Twilight’s star power – which is clearly faddish.
- “Was that the Pony Post?!” Notice that this is the only case where the (potentially one of multiple) postal service is referred to by a name. Also, the usual mailpony Rarity gets is male, and therefore is not Derpy.
- For that matter, if the clock is to be believed, mail is supposed to be delivered at 9:00 sharp.
- “Well, that welcome is warranted by a pony that whisked up a warm batch of strawberry cinnamon cilantro cupcakes!” Fun fact: between 4% and 14% of humans tested perceive the taste of cilantro (coriander) as that of soap. This is probably higher among ponies, because otherwise I don’t see why these cupcakes would cause the reaction that everypony has to them – they sound not particularly enticing, but hardly sickening.
- Close examination of the envelope Pinkie delivered after taking out the post pony with a cupcake reveals a postage stamp. That round circle on the back is likewise not a wax seal, but rather, some manner of a sticker, seeing its pieces once Rarity takes the envelope apart.
- “Oh, I have been holding out for the perfect location, and it finally became available!” I wonder what exactly happened to make it available, by the way. Could it be Sassy too?
- “Rarity’s such a savvy businesspony. I’m so impressed she used the huge bonus she earned making the costumes for Sapphire Shores’ Equestria-wide tour to open this second boutique!” Rarity made costumes for said tour and earned a bonus. We don’t really know if this is the same job as presented in A Dog And Pony Show or a subsequent one, however, but if it is the same one, Rarity has been holding out on this bonus for almost an entire year. As such, a subsequent one is much more likely, unless this episode falls through backwards to before the end of Season 4, which it can.
- “I take it from your reaction that you like the boutique?” Notice that the boutique is already completely set up – its fully decorated in Rarity’s diamond patterns, has a banner with Rarity’s face on it, and there are even cakes on the counter. Not to mention some stock is already in. A substantial time has to have passed between the cold open and the body of the episode.
- “Well, despite my ’nubby scrubby buffy pony pedi, I actually have been working very hard!” Another uncommon occurrence of the term “pony pedi” in lieu of “hooficure.” Pinkie probably picked pony pedi, if only for the alliteration.
“I knew I needed a manager for Canterlot Carousel, so when Sassy showed me her resume and I saw that she worked in all of the finest boutiques in Canterlot, I hired her right on the spot!”
- Ponies use resumes as a method of hiring. Not a given.
- Sassy Saddles is one character that persists in wearing a saddle when it’s out of fashion. In fact, this episode is one of the latest episodes in which saddles appear on random ponies, further suggesting it’s actually earlier in the timeline than shown.
- Wouldn’t working in all of the finest boutiques in Canterlot imply being fired out of each one, or having all of them fail?… Later, Sassy even says, “I can’t be a part of another failed boutique!”
“But next was the very crucial pattern piece… Marketing to the Mares! Turns out that everypony here loves royalty!”
- Ponies have marketing. Now, I haven’t been able to identify just when the word came to mean what Sassy says it does exactly, but the practices Sassy employs – notably, polls – are a XX century invention for us, specifically, 1930s, primarily, post-Great Depression. Notice also that this implies ponies have sociology somewhere, even if it is in its infancy.
- Now, to love royalty, just three princesses wouldn’t be enough, don’t you think? See limited nobility interpretation as detailed in RTAC #2. That said, both of the dresses in Rarity’s collection not directly referencing an alicorn princess are described as referencing local architecture instead, they’re not so much royalty-centric as they are Canterlot-centric.
- “In every poll Sassy Saddles took, you were the most popular princess! Coincidentally, one of my gowns is inspired by the window in Canterlot Castle commemorating your coronation!” I doubt Sassy has the resources to conduct a nation-wide poll, (sociology can be very expensive to do in a pre-Internet society) so I expect it is limited to Canterlot City. I also suspect this result actually dates this episode to soon after Twilight’s coronation, when she’s still the “hot new princess” and not a piece of half-year-ago news.
- “My marketing research also confirmed that customers that viewed somepony famous wearing a gown wish to own that gown for themselves. I call this piece of the pattern Celebrity Status!” Like I said above, either sociology in Equestria is in its infancy, or Sassy Saddles doesn’t know that much about it, because that would be a textbook conclusion, rather than new knowledge that required a poll to obtain.
- “Ever since I was a little filly, all I’ve ever wanted was to own a boutique here in Canterlot.” And not Manehattan. Just saying.
- Among the notable ponies present at the grand opening are Jet Set, Upper Crust, and Fleur.
- “Fashion Plate of Cosmare magazine! I’m so honored that Cosmare was able to do a piece on the grand opening of my boutique!” “Cosmare” is a fashion magazine. I wonder what happened to “Clothes Horse” though. Those glossy magazines come and go, I suppose.
- “Well, when Sassy Saddles calls, saying she’s found the latest and greatest in fashion, we hightail without fail!” Sassy Saddles does have connections, doesn’t she.
- “Because the dress is inspired by the stained glass window of a reigning princess!” Doesn’t that emphasis on “reigning” mean that a non-reigning princess is possible?
- Side observation: The dress is pretty, but – it’s just about as disharmonious with Twilight’s colors as they get. This works best on somepony with a much lighter coat, or at least a warmer color.
- “Rarity now has one hundred orders for her signature gown!” There hasn’t been anywhere as many ponies actually shown. In any case, that’s quite a considerable number of clients for what is obviously an upscale expense, and gives us an indirect gauge on the population of Canterlot: It should be in the hundred thousands.
- Canterlot Friends turn up, attracted by the song montage.
- One of the tools Rarity employs is a bottle of PVA glue.
- So Rarity gets an inspiration to spice up the Princess Dress, which is all well and good, but here’s a question: Just what are those bowls of gems doing in her workplace, otherwise optimized for mass production in this particular instance?
- “Is that the customer who ordered this Princess Dress?” The particular customer also appears to be wielding a pocket watch without any sign of pockets. See cartoon resolution.
- “Paisley and poplin, Rarity!” Ponies have paisley and poplin. Poplin is obvious, but I wonder where paisley came from.
- “Princess Dress! Finally! I’ve been simply desperate to get this ever since I saw Princess Twilight wearing it on your… …Wait a minute. There’s something different.” You’d think the chance of coming to a party in the same dress as somepony else would be more of a consideration. It’s interesting, however, that Sassy Saddles correctly predicted this reaction.
- Lyra owns a copy of the Princess Dress come this episode. So do Fleur and Upper Crust.
- “You made two hundred Princess Dresses!” … “And in the hour since the magazine’s come out, we’ve gotten another hundred new orders for the Princess Dress!” I.e. the market for the princess dresses easily extends to 300, and would probably peter out no earlier than 500, if one fashion magazine publication caused it to bump a 30% in just an hour, bringing potential population of Canterlot to somewhere closer to half a million. This also gives us a timespan for the episode: Less than a month, more likely, about three weeks.
- Notice that the title “Cosmare” is in fairly readable English. Also notice a bar code in bottom right, which is actually the only evidence of digital technology so far observed – that’s why bar codes exist in the first place. This bar code is not an accident, as it is repeated both on the cover of the actual magazine and on Sassy’s picture plan. This is actually a lot bigger than it sounds – bar codes require either image recognition or scanning lasers, and they require them to be cheap enough to be ubiquitous. Let’s just hope it isn’t actually a bar code, but barely readable vertical lines, printed like this traditionally for whatever reason. The rest of the lines on the cover are unreadable just like that anyway. Introduction of cheap ubiquitous digital electronics would leave no stone unturned in Equestria.
- “I have a piece for that! Assemble the Assembly Line! You’ll never have to sew again!” Which is actually quite a sensible proposition which would leave Rarity free to create something new, and Rarity not accepting it implies she doesn’t accept that two entirely different segments of the market exist, one more fit for mass production. She still succeeds, but this is more likely to be an indication that Rarity is more prolific than any other designer Sassy worked for before: If all of them abandoned the idea of mass production like Rarity did and that got their business to fail, it simply means they couldn’t make enough new and unique designs to satisfy the general demand where mass production would.
- Canterlot Friends came for the going-out-of-business sale, but Lyra didn’t, she already had her dress.
- “Well, yes, I’ll come to Canterlot with new designs and to see the customers of course, but Ponyville was always going to be my home base.” So who’s going to be sewing the actual dresses if Rarity is going to be supplying the designs? I doubt it’s Sassy alone, so, story opportunity for someone.
- “Oh, my gosh, a sale! Do you have the Princess Dress?!” Recursion: See pony with recursive cutie mark, and also, probably the most extreme example of female body type in ponies to date.
Hardly much of a haul in terms of points of canon, except for vague conclusions about the potential market scales for dresses in Canterlot and designer attitudes that systematically got boutiques to fail… and that bar code.
Unicorn magic opens up all sorts of image-recognition technology which isn't strictly speaking 'digital'. And given the lack of pony family names and the apparent usage of cutie marks as unique identifiers, I'd think that cutie-mark-recognition magic would lead to a fractal development in pattern recognition magic, however analog that library of dedicated spells and matrixes might be in practice.
Uh... Considering that Canterlot don't have "ground" parts I really at loss where they cram them. Unless, beside hanging platforms they also hollowed out mountain and city have a large "undermountine" part.
4810493
Yes, but. A bar code, just like the earlier specialized fonts for writing digits, is an attempt to adapt images to be easier recognized by digital technology. If the recognition is not digital, such an adaptation is pointless, and actually counterproductive, since it makes manual recognition harder.
For one, if it were easier to recognize bar codes magically, and the technology evolved from sorting cutie marks as you suggest, they would never be linear, jumping straight into QR-code and DataMatrix territory.
4810495
Check out A Hearth’s Warming Tail – particularly, an entire city of brown-stone that is described as “Canterlot,” which appears to be positioned on a plain, rather than on the mountain itself. I always wondered where it went off to, but apparently, there’s a good chance that it still exists somewhere at the foot of the mountain and houses the aforementioned population.
4810499
Maybe the bar code is actually the publisher's mark? Bar Code, the most ruthless and nightmarish lifestyles-entertainment-fashion magnate in Canterlot, known informally in the industry as 'Discord in Sweetmint's Saddles', terrorized the publishing industry in both Manehattan and Canterlot throughout the first two decades of the Second Harmonic Era; even the princesses did their best to avoid invoking her wrath.
4810499
Huh... About digital... I remembered that in one comics pony police bugged a diamond with really tiny bug. As big as sand particle if I remember correctly and they used something that looks like a dragonball radar to track this bug.
Oh, and SMILE agency have a long range comm devices installed into wristwatches. Although it possible that in both cases we deal with magical device.
It's part of pony analog of Christmas Story so I not sure how real this "Canterlot" is. In same time we never ever know that city have other platform beside main one before movie shows them to us. So it's possible that this part of the city do exist.
4810503
Well, we have something that looks like a bar code and no evidence whatsoever of anything that looks like a bar code reader, so it could conceivably be anything.
4810504
Does not actually require the technology to be digital in any way.
I’m not either, but both Twilight and Starlight and Spike are familiar with Canterlot, so they wouldn’t tell a story in such a way that Canterlot wouldn’t be recognizable.
It might exist, it might not. If it does, that’s where a large proportion of population ran off to.
4810507
But it's imply miniaturization on level with early processors IMO.
4810510
Not really, operational amplifiers have been around a lot longer than the early processors.
4810518
Huh... I'm wrong. While they do put a extremely small "tracker chip" (quote from comics) on stolen diamond they track it with magic, not with tracker device.
[citation needed]
4810623
Here:
Well, she probably wanted both. Or maybe she's selectively remembering things.
Well, Princess Platinum isn't reigning anymore. And Cadance doesn't sound like she had much reigning to do before the Crystal Empire came back.
Or maybe we heard it wrong, and it's actually "reining" - i.e., one who pulls the metaphorical reins of society.
4810635
Sorry, I was joking ^^ It's a joke on xkcd to put [citation needed] on things that obviously need no citation.
4810714
Well, too late!
Ah, what a great episode. We get to meet Sassy Saddles, the first pony I'm 100% sure has an MBA.
I'd be inclined to put this episode right after the S4 Finale, when Twilight's popularity should be at its peak, since she is the most popular princess.
Soap would be better than cilantro tastes.
It has to be the subsequent one, as the S4 episode is where Rarity says "This is without a doubt my most prestigious order ever. After all, Sapphire Shores isthepony of pop, and her Equestria-wide tour launches in Canterlot next week!"
This whole episode needed to take place over a few months, though other episodes where Rarity wasn't present could certainly take place. Just like Rarity's punk mane episode.... anyone else suspecting Rarity of using the mirror pool?
Some of them probably failed, especially given her statement. But some of them she could have just switched jobs or gotten hired away from. We've seen how insular the world of Equestrian fashion is, I feel like it's really unlikely she could have developed a bad reputation with all of those other fashion figures and Rarity wouldn't have heard of it.
These are really good points. Ponies must have statistics to have polls. And this kind of stuff doesn't really filter down to marketing until it has grown up in other academic disciplines first.
I kind of would. Royalty as opposed to nobility seems somewhat specific. Heck, Canterlot, with its long pillars of marble topped by gold, seems specifically inspired so the architecture matches Princess Celestia.
That said, if you're suggesting ponies buy collectible china sets with Blueblood's face on them, I could see that. Someone has to be the Prince Harry.
Makes sense.
Or Twilight's Kingdom, where Twilight defeated Tirek and was seen in Canterlot in astral form restoring everyone's magic. She'd totally be my favorite princess then.
Yup, I could see Sassy as one of the first ponies who studied sociology/statistics.... somewhere to go into marketing. Keep in mind though, she does say confirms, not discovers, so at least there's that. Also that seems like the kind of result that would be gathered from a focus group, not a poll. This reminds me a lot of really early Mad Men episodes.
Yup, the place she stared up the side of a mountain at almost from birth.
He was rapidly replaced by the reporter Fast Fashion, whose tenure was brief.
If you're a fashion reporter and there is exactly one pony generating new polls, studies and reports that you can use in your articles.... that pony would have a lot of leverage.
Of course. The weird thing is, I would think that Twilight is the only non-reigning princess around. That, or the emphasis was to fit a strained metaphor.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Plus the time from the opener to the main sequence, so probably 5-6 weeks.
Yup. I mean, landline telephones in Manehatten alone are not that big a stretch, but functional bar codes magnify the schizotech problem by several fold.
I thought it was that Rarity is violently ideologically opposed to mass producing dresses, and would rather go out of business than operate in this manner.
Absolutely. Sassy is basically trying to turn the boutique into a Zara's. Market the heck out of a few simple designs, sell a large number of them, watch the fad fade and replace them with a new fad. This is very profitable and has worked in real life, but of course Zara's can hire hundreds of designers. If Sassy's boss is unable to think of a great new design every month, the business falls apart, which is likely what happened to her previous bosses.
Since Sassy didn't help sew the Princess dress herself, I suspect she can't sew well enough to make dresses. Either Rarity is sewing enough for 2 boutiques, or as you said, there's a good story idea there for where Rarity is getting the labor. Ah geez 4810493 , any ideas where a desperate Ponyvillian looking for skilled labor could go?
I'd disagree. Sassy's plans, polls and marketing techniques tell us a lot about how modern business is conducted.
This review made me realize: It's weird that Sassy stays in Canterlot and Coco Pommel stays in Manehatten, when each would probably do better if they switched locations.
4810493 So bar-runes? I like your idea of it as a publisher's mark more than anything. I bet Bar Code is a Zebra!
4810794
Rarity, step away from Tom, and nopony needs to get hurt. This property has been sealed by order of the Princess! Nopony wants to have to arrest an Element Bearer.
For this spring's strictly pret a porter line,
We predict shawls detail-stitched in superfine
And one must once again emphasize for those sadly wit-addled
Nopony of stature or sense should go about in public saddled!
4810794
You’d be surprised what can a proper lady do given just a mirror.
Good point.
They probably would, though, Coco’s particular passion, as stated multiple times, is making costumes for the stage. She even managed to sell what is obviously a stage costume (a disco ball) as high fashion. Canterlot doesn’t have quite as much of a theater scene for her to indulge in this.
I used to be in the US Army’s Medical Service Corps. Owing to the crappy, over-automated way the Army handles officer promotions, and the very specific information included (and excluded) on Officer Record Briefs (basically Army-specific resumes), it’s much too easy for a incompetent officer to have a more impressive record than a competent one. Basically, if you do just badly enough that your CO’s keep transferring you to different units, to make you someone else’s problem—but not badly enough to get discharged outright—then the promotion board looks at your ORB and says “Oh, he’s worked twice as many positions as his peers. That’s promotion material right there!”
So it strikes me as entirely too plausible that Sassy could have crashed and burned at every prior boutique she worked for, and still spun that into an impressive resume. And that goes double if Rarity neglected to contact any of Sassy’s prior employers—we saw from the Suri Polomare incident that Rarity can be much too trusting for her own good. Or maybe those former employers were all too nice to say “Oh, Sassy drove my business into the ground”—or didn’t even realize it was Sassy’s fault at all. 4810794 raises a good point about the insularity of the industry, but that insularity can just as easily lead to insiders protecting their own.
Or maybe Sassy has dirt on all her prior employers, and blackmailed them into giving her positive recommendations.
Most likely, a reference to Cosmopolitan magazine (often abbreviate to just Cosmo).
What’s great is that this pony—nicknamed Whoa Nelly by the fandom—is definitely some kind of celebrity. In “Tanks for the Memories”, one of the Cloudsdale weather ponies keeps a photo of her inside their locker. In “Made in Manehattan”, she’s on the front page of the news, apparently hounded by paparazzi. And in “The Gift of the Maud Pie”, she’s on a Manehattan postcard. It’s possible Whoa Nelly is some kind of model, which would explain her recursive cutie mark: it’s a headshot.