Points of Canon: S8x07 - Horse Play · 8:50pm Apr 28th, 2018
In which secondary sources are treated with epic ambivalence.
- Chronology markers: School of Friendship occurs on screen, is used in a few scenes, and the Student Crew are playing extras. The Canterlot Castle throne room has the post-movie look. However, no obvious information permits us to set this before or after any of the Season 8 episodes beside School Daze – for example, Mudbriar, the only in-season watershed event so far, does not appear.
The play is scheduled to correspond to the ones-versary: “The one-thousand, one-hundred, eleventh year anniversary of when you first raised the sun.”
- Remember RTAC #8, where I calculated that ponies have arrived to Equestria no earlier than 1200 years ago? Nobody seems to have taken it seriously at the time, just about everyone thought it had to have been a lot longer. Well, canon thinks I was very close, now. Mind you, I’m not sure if I’m happy about that.
- “My… ‘ones-versary?’” Prior examples of ‘versaries’ would have ponies prefer decimally round numbers. Notice also that it’s base 10 round numbers: 111110 is 21278 and not very notable. 11118 is 58510 and also not very notable. See RTAC #13.
- “Good thing Pinkie Pie reminded us, or we would have forgot to celebrate.” “You’re not the only ones.” Celestia herself has forgotten – which does not surprise me one bit – but Pinkie Pie knew. At no point Celestia gives any indication Pinkie could be incorrect, but that itself is not corroboration, so room for Pinkie to be mistaken does exist. That said, do we want to argue with Pinkie?…
- “Did she just… prance?” Spike has not previously observed Celestia in such an excited state. Apparently, neither did Twilight.
“Oh, uh, forgive me for getting so excited. It’s just, when I was a filly, my friends often put on plays. It was so wonderful. Everypony coming together to create a magical experience to share with others. I’ve always believed theater brings out the best in us and forges a special bond of friendship.”
- Celestia had friends who would perform plays when she was a filly. Not a given, and not something any prior source has so far stipulated.
- Celestia uses a moving illusion with sound to illustrate this phrase on one of the windows. The illusion does not depict any even remotely recognizable ponies though.
- “Oh, not me. I was always too busy with my magic lessons to be part of any plays myself. But still, it’s something I always wished I could experience.” Celestia had magic lessons. Not a given either.
- “We would?!” Spike’s reaction implies that Twilight had this idea on the spot, but I wonder, who would have been the star before Celestia was drafted?
- “I guess, but how are we supposed to give her directions? She’s the ruler of Equestria!” Celestia’s status as a ruler is not often acknowledged, by the way.
- “Your invitation is very kind, but are you certain it’s wise? I have no acting experience at all.” So riddle me this: Just how exactly, over a thousand years of running diplomacy, does one avoid acting experience? Celestia is quite ambivalent about it, as in the end of the episode, she tricks Twilight easily and is quite convincing.
- Pinkie is parachuting down on an umbrella which is far smaller than you would need to descend safely. In other words, nothing special is happening at all. That said, it is apparent that she launched herself with a load of confetti out of her party cannon, which is a trick I don’t think we have seen her do before.
- “Wormy apple cores, Pinkie! How many times have I told you to keep your special effects away from my sets?!” “Three hundred twenty-seven.” Assuming an entirely unreasonable repetition rate of once per minute, that would require them to have been at it for over five hours. Either Pinkie is exaggerating, or the preparations have taken multiple weeks by this point – and if they have, Twilight, who returns during this very scene, went to secure Celestia’s permission very late. In fact, since multiple costumes are complete by this point, she was late anyway. In either case, Applejack has angelic patience.
- It’s interesting that the play script Starlight is holding in her magic is a pack of sheets held together with a ring threaded through the corners. Not a staple. Not a paper clip. A ring. I’ve never seen people actually do that.
- “Silk! I must find the silk! If Celestia’s going to be in our play, we have to take everything up to the next level!” Notice that this is, incidentally, the one case where Rarity would be designing a dress for Celestia in primary canon. Shame that no such dress, or in fact, any costume on Celestia at all, ever materializes. She still has all her regalia glued on. (Remember, she sleeps in her crown and peytral.)
“Forget my regular party cannon! For princess-sized effects, we’re gonna need Big Bertha!”
- We know what a “Big Bertha” is, but I wonder how does Pinkie know.
- It’s difficult to measure the caliber of this thing reliably, but eyeballing it, it’s bigger than the actual Big Bertha. Twice as big, in fact.
- “I gotta tell everypony I know! And even the ones I don’t!” Rainbow Dash produces a Sonic Rainboom without, apparently, even recognizing that she did it.
- “That’s different. You’re not a ‘princess’ princess.” I do wonder what exactly Starlight was referring to in this phrase, as different variations produce wildly different implications.
“Directed, written, and produced by Twilight Sparkle.”
- That happened.
- Twilight is quite sensitive about being credited here.
- …and for once, Spike is wearing shoes. Not to mention pants.
“Page one, act one, scene one. Action!”
- Does this imply there is more than one act?
- People usually don’t say “Action!” in theater, do they?
“Once upon a time, before Celestia, Equestria was suffering terrible hardship. Raising the sun every morning was so hard, it took five great sorcerers plus Star Swirl the Bearded to do it. And every day, the unicorns helping Star Swirl would use so much magic, they lost their powers forever.”
- Notice that every example of a play seen on screen so far included a narrator, starting with the very first one in Hearth’s Warming Eve. Our theater employs one quite rarely, and the view generally is that a stage drama is mimetic, rather than diegetic – i.e. it is acted out rather than told, in all cases. Pony theater, however, seems to necessarily include narrator at least to glue the scenes together and set the stage, no exceptions.
- Compare this statement to the Journal of the Two Sisters, which describes exactly that procedure of the sun-moon swap before Celestia taking it over, with exactly the same dire results. As a result, the Journal is confirmed where previously, Shadow Play jossed it pretty hard. Notice though, that while the Journal does not stipulate the auxiliary casters require any particular aptitude or skill, Twilight’s text does call them “great sorcerers”. So how many great sorcerers did early Equestria even have?
- Ocellus did not transform for her part for some reason.
- All the unicorn costumes have cutie marks stitched on their robes over where their actual ones would be – except Star Swirl’s.
The stage backdrop is decorated with a crescent moon, which is pretty rare. Also, something DannyJ pointed out: At no point throughout the play, neither the Moon nor Luna are mentioned, despite the backdrop. Meanwhile, the Journal insists they got their marks and their celestial bodies simultaneously. If the Journal is in any way correct, it would be difficult to separate their stories. If I were Luna, I would be offended, this is her holiday too. That she isn’t, can imply one of a number of things:
- The Moon simply didn’t exist at the time. Unlikely, since it is depicted on the stage backdrop.
- The Moon didn’t require manual moving at the time.
- Luna has truly angelic patience and/or is a masochist.
The most rest-of-canon compatible option is #3.
- “But then, a student named Celestia discovered she had the power to raise the sun herself without draining her magic!” Twilight glosses over entirely over the circumstances of just how did Celestia discover this, whether anyone else was “a student” – the text doesn’t even say whose student Celestia was – and more importantly, over whether Celestia was an alicorn at the time or not. The Journal says she was.
- “My Royal Canterlot Voice. Thank you for the reminder, Twilight.” First ever case of Celestia using Royal Canterlot Voice on screen, as well as the first indication that she is capable of doing so at all, and it’s not just Luna’s thing.
- Twilight does something interesting: She entirely changes her posture during teleportation, to clamp around Applejack and shut her mouth.
- “Come on, Star Swirl. Throw off that musty hat and let’s have a dance!” Notice that since Celestia is mangling this line so horribly, it had to have been one of her lines in the actual play. No comments.
- “Everypony in Equestria’s gonna see this thing!” Now, Rainbow is obviously exaggerating. Importantly, she keeps exaggerating the success of her advertising for the entire episode.
“Princess Celestia, meet Method Mare performers On Stage and Raspberry Beret!”
- Those two get official names this time.
- Notice that Twilight chose to flag down two actors she was personally acquainted with, and had to import them from Manehattan to do it.
- “If there’s anything I can do to become a better Equestrian thespian, I will!” Celestia knows the word “thespian.” I wonder if any intended viewers of this episode do.
- “What box?” Wait, so how has Celestia avoided ever seeing a mime, when, during Princess Spike, one is visible out in her own castle’s courtyard?
- “It’s the perfect substitute!” The stage, notably, is built inside a natural cave – and the cave ceiling was not evened out to do it for some reason…
- “Oh, it’s so snowy today! Brrr! I’m getting chilly!” Raspberry Beret would have us believe that ponies typically ski in a bipedal fashion – she would have to portray the most recognizable variant, wouldn’t she. That’s very much not how Double Diamond does it in The Cutie Map, though.
- “Whaaaat? It’s realistic! The sun is just like a burning marshmallow!” Incidentally, Pinkie might just be correct. See RTAC #7.
- “A duck-billed platypus! Antidisestablishmentarianism!” Platypuses exist. So does establishment.
The spectators of the play include:
- Twinkleshine, but none of the other Canterlot Friends. Something more interesting must be happening somewhere else!
- Luna, who appears to be, for some reason, in close acquaintance with Fleur and Fancy Pants, who obviously came together.
The rest of the audience is mix of primarily Ponyville ponies.
“Why would untested magic fireworks that I bought in a back alley from Trixie at midnight be unsafe?”
- As howard035 pointed out, Trixie steals the show without even being in it. You go girl.
- Trixie sells magical fireworks – rather than, say, mundane fireworks – and keeps irregular hours.
- Trixie uses her cutie mark in branding.
- “Standing room only!” Strange way of standing, that: everyone in the audience is sitting. While the seats are full, they are far from overflowing.
- “Uh, who likes juggling?” Presumably, Spike can juggle, otherwise, he wouldn’t offer – but we never actually see him do it. This doesn’t save him from getting tomatoes thrown at him, which prompts the question… Who brought tomatoes, and did they really expect to throw them at Celestia?!
- “You really mean that?” This is a rare shot of a crescent moon in Ponyville area.
- “Visualize with me. You’re a princess. Regal. Commanding. Confident. Feel the rising sun’s warmth. Equestria needs you.” Notice that just a few hours ago, Celestia was incapable of doing this herself and definitely had no understanding at all what was required of her.
“We play charades.” One of the three must be true:
- Celestia just raised the sun out of turn, possibly, causing mass panic elsewhere.
- The audience just spent the entire night waiting for their play. Which would explain the hecklers, but wouldn’t explain why they’re still here and nobody is even asleep.
- Celestia pulled some manner of illusion or substitute. Which is suggested by the fact that the sky does not change to daylight as the “Sun” is rising, but at the same time, could be the result of the Moon not being lowered – compare to very similar sky during Princess Twilight Sparkle.
So which is it?…
Some analysis.
Celestia’s behavior during this episode is quite inconsistent – first, she appears to be genuinely incapable of acting or even understanding the basic ideas behind acting. Then, suddenly, not only she is able to direct others to act with full understanding of the methods employed, but pulls a very convincing prank on Twilight herself. What exactly was that about? Something’s fishy here. Could this be connected to the fact Luna is not mentioned in the play at all, by the way?
Oh, and one last thing.
The episode was written by Kaita Mpambara, who is a new addition to the show crew. Essentially, we have a new guy, and what does he do? Like any diligent, proper writer should do, he does research. And what does he use as his primary source on pre-Nightmare Equestria?
The book that primary canon has already made irreconcilable back in Shadow Play, of course, because where would he get a current source? 
Comics sometimes show that she deals with insane amount of papers. So maybe she really good on processing and understanding information? She find books about acting and get really good at this in very short time?
4849448
Possible, but the episode would have us believe Celestia had very little free time before the play that was not occupied by interacting with actual actors.
Pretty fun episode for a first timer!
So burning through a half-dozen unicorns every day is obviously not sustainable in the long term. This raises two questions:
Starlight is essentially acting as Stage Manager, and her script should be in a binder. At least that is universally true for all of the hundreds of stage productions I've been involved in. As for the actors, I've seen many different personal methods used... but never a single ring like that, that I can recall.
As for narration (or voice-over for a movie), it's a shortcut and almost universally considered to be poor, lazy craftsmanship. But MLP has only 22 minutes to get its story across, and shortcuts are almost unavoidable.
Oddly, lying convincingly is actually a very different skill from acting. Improvisation tends to edge closer to the more universal skill, but they never really overlap.
Kudos are due for actually doing some research... but as a virulent hater of "cringe comedy," I hope Mpambara hasn't done any other scripts for this season.
4849455
I noticed this all the way back then.
My current best guess is that an artifact existed which permitted one pony to control the stellar object, and it was the loss of that artifact which caused the ice age observed in the Hearth’s Warming Eve and resulted in the exodus, as manual stellar object control was neither precise enough nor reliable enough. This state has only lasted for a few years.
We know nothing at all about this hypothetical thing, but The Alicorn Amulet sounds like a good candidate: According to the Journal, books about it existed all the way back then. It could have been used to seal something very evil, and thereby damaged.
Possible, and very likely – but the specific reason escapes me. It’s almost like she wanted the play to fail because there’s no Luna in it, which, to be honest, doesn’t work.
…In addition to all the ones she owes him already?
4849459
Thank you so much for getting this. Have a thumbs-up.
Emphasis on the word the. As in singular. Ponies may pay lip service to the idea that all three (non-foreign) princesses are equal, but when it comes down to it, Celestia is still the one.
Yeah. Like that.
The obvious solution is that this isn't the first play they've put on, so the numerous reminders are spread over multiple whole production schedules.
Well, you can either have a changeling acting, or you can see that you have a changeling acting. Not both.
4849480
An option, but then it’s a conclusion that they put on more than one play previously, which is in itself useful.
You can have both if a changeling is playing the part of another changeling by transforming into them.
4849475
Thanks! I learned it through hard experience; it is neither intuitive nor obvious!
Yeah, I though Ocellus was gonna take Celestia's part. Which could've been funny in and of itself, I could imagine that last-ditch effort as a scene right before Celestia's return.
Eyupp. I guess she'll have to deal with the aftermath of that little stunt for the better part of next week.
"Celestia is a bad actress"
> FATAL ERROR, 1st DEGREE CONFLICT IN PRIMARY FANON/CANON DETECTED
I am having a hard time reconciling that with years of fandom-interpretation. Let alone Celestia being so hilariously bad at acting it has to be intentional. (Either that or she is secretly Tommy Wiseau.)
The end of the episode seems to hint at everything being a trick, or at least that's the only way my brain can resolve the conflict as to not cause a crash.
Though then I am confused as to Celestia's motives, and why she then got upset at Twilight for "playing pretend" while Celestia herself had been playing pretend all along.
Is she perhaps suffering from some cognitive dissonance when faced with a theater-setting, rendering her 1000+ years of experience in diplomacy and court-proceedings inapplicable?
Somepony really needs to write a fic or two explaining what exactly happened here.
Wait a minute. Assuming Celestia got her cutie mark from raising the sun, it can be further be assumed she was still a filly at the time, a mid-teen late bloomer at the most. Which means 1111 years would be pretty close to her actual age, as well as Luna's.
Which means Luna spent 90% of her life so far on the moon. If she even was consciously aware of it. If she was, then ... I'd expect her to be a lot less mentally stable than she is portrayed in the show. Tantabus? Pffft. I'd be surprised if she could hold a coherent conversation. It'd be like locking a toddler up in complete isolation for 30 years and expecting them to grow up normally.
If she wasn't consciously aware of her time on the moon...
Well. "Little sister", indeed.
Actually, Granny Smith would probably be older than her, mentally.
So yeah, the idea of Celestia and Luna being any less than 2000 years old bothers me.
Could also be hyperbole, or exageration for the sake of the play. For all we know, they just couldn't cast spells for the next two to six months and then recovered. Or some other arbitrary number of months, at some point the logistics of burning through so many high-level unicorns probably becomes unsustainable.
Or they did indeed lose all their magic forever, or perhaps only a certain percentage of them did which meant there was a constant risk involved --- one can headcanoe with this any way they want.
EDIT: Oh, you already said that. Woops. Oughta done depth-search instead of breadth-search.
Ooooh, that's a good interpretation. Headcanon saved.
It isn't just that, it looked to me like they were close enough for their wings to brush up against each other and get stuck. And then two princesses fell out of the sky because Twilight never learned flight safety 101 in Flight Camp as a filly.
Okay, let's do some maths.
Assumption 1: pony years are roughly the same length as our own: ~360 days. Not a safe assumption, but it's the best we've got since the show staff liberally borrow from Earth (and American) cultures when they need something like this.
Assumption 2: raising the sun permanently burned through a number of unicorns each day. This may not have been five great mages a day - it may not even have been one mediocre unicorn a week. But there's a number, and it's not zero.
Assumption 3: Legends of Magic showed the royal sisters when they were young. Both were alicorns, and both had their cutie marks. There's a visible age difference, but not a great one - it looks like 5 to 10 years difference between them.
Assumption 4: The three pony tribes had roughly equal numbers in the pre-harmony era. There would be some inter-breeding, but not a great quantity. In order for a species to avoid inbreeding, a safe breeding population requires is about 50,000 individuals (*); under dire circumstances, a species (**) can recover from dropping as low as 10,000 - 30,000 individuals, with genetic side effects. This refers to individuals who are part of the breeding population; celibate or infertile individuals don't count, geneticlaly.
Assumption 5: Ponies live, age and reproduce at roughly the same rate humans do. For the sake of propriety let's assume an average generation length of 20 years at the era. Birth rate in medieval societies was high, in the region of 5 children per woman, but death rates were also high. I'd expect malnutrition to be a large factor, given what we know about that era of pony history. Evidence shows that the population expanded significantly after Hearths Warning, so the aggregate reproduction rate must be well above 2. Let's use a value of 3.
Assumption 6: Pony gender ratios are close to 1:1. This probably isn't true, but it makes the maths simpler.
Assumption 7: Unicorns lack the earth pony talent for growing food or the pegasus ability to control the weather. A burned out unicorn has their mind and their hooves, but little else. A medieval population cannot sustain more than a small percentage of non-producing individuals.
Okay, so let's imagine a migration-era population of at least 30,000 breeding individuals. Of these a third are unicorns. The aggregate reproduction rate per year is therefore about 10,000 x 1/2 x (3 / 20) = 750 unicorn births per year.
A number of unicorns u are permanently drained each day; or 360u each year. If u was anything close to 5 as suggested in this episode, that would be 1800 individuals per year, or 2.4 times the number being born. That sort of attrition rate is only sustainable for about 10 years before you run out of unicorns. If the value of u was 1, approximately half of unicorns would suffer magic burn out at some point in their life, which would still be enough to lead to a collapse of unicorn society.
Conclusion: u must be substantially less than 1, and the repeated stories - in both the journal and this episode - are gross exaggerations.
( * Which is why, when I see headlines saying eg "The pink spotted wild snipe is down to just 40 breeding pairs. Can conservationists bring it back from the brink of extinction?" the answer is "No, they can't. It's a lost cause. Spend you efforts where you have a hope of making a difference." )
( ** Such as our own. The details of human evolution change daily, but it's believed that human population has dropped very low at least once in the last few hundred thousand years, which is why humans are so genetically uniform. )
4849487
For some reason changeling theatre is not popular among ponies.
Celebrating the 1111th anniversary of something seems like a distinctly Pinkie decision, rather than something that ponies in general would do. And then when Pinkie pointed out this anniversary to Twilight, Twi jumped on it. Because she wants to do something special for Celly, and doesn’t want to wait until the next round number year to do it.
I suspect Celly’s vaguely aware that the anniversary of when she first raised the Sun is coming up, but doesn’t keep track of the exact date because she doesn’t normally celebrate it.
Further evidence that Fancy Pants holds some position of authority in Canterlot?
Further evidence against the crazy theory that the Elements of Harmony got switched somehow, and Rainbow Dash ought to be the Element of Honesty.
I’m sure the average pony wouldn’t even consider the possibility that Princess Celestia could be a bad actor. If the play had gone forward with Celly in the lead role, I’m sure the audience would have just sat there in stunned silence, unable to process what they’re seeing.
They brought the tomatoes to throw at anypony else who was terrible and unentertaining.
4849455
I wonder how badly Twilight and/or the Princesses chewed out Starlight immediately after “A Royal Problem” ended, to make Starlight pull a complete 180 like that.
4849459
4849475
Interesting. I thought perhaps there was a bit of the Centipede’s Dilemma going on here (i.e. that you can normally be really good at doing something, but mess up completely if you think too hard about it while you’re doing it). But this explanation does make a bit more sense.
I’m reminded of the TV show Leverage. Sophie, the grifter for a team of con-men, was an expert at creating and embodying fake personae for the con games—but she had dreams of being a stage actress, and she was terrible at that.
4849549
That is definitely a part of it. But also, acting is a craft, with a lot of specific skills attached, and they all need a great deal of practice to become good at them. A great deal of image-projection and inhabiting demonstrably false environments is involved. The exercises the actor ponies went through are actual things taught to actors, and they are very useful despite how they were presented as ridiculous in this episode.
Lying (or diplomacy) on the other hand, seems to be an innate ability in humans and the higher primates. Possibly dolphins, corvids, and elephants, too. Being a lying sack of shit seems to have an evolutionary advantage.
The Sun is a puff of incandescent fluff,
a huge marshmallow on fire,
where sucrose, starch, and collagen are oxidized
at temperatures of thousands of degrees.
4849487
It's exactly what Lauren said back then. Or, more precisely, she said that Luna turns into NMM at very young age.
4849487
Do check out RTAC #8. That’s what the numbers came out to even before this episode.
4849498
If instead of u being a stable number, it’s a probability, what’s the highest it can be?
4849549
But of course.
The dissonance here arises less so from Celestia’s acting per se – that’s only going on for under five seconds – but from the fact that she is employing every method that had been tried with her just hours ago correctly on the spot, even though it’s pretty clear nobody tried to actually give her a lecture on the theory.
Which is why I’m leaning more towards Celestia’s behavior being deliberate than anything else.
4849738
Which, as 4849487 mentioned, would make Celestia a huge hypocrite for the lecture she gave Twilight.
Luna, obviously.
Oliver, will you be editing RTAC #8 to fit this new detail in?
4849924
Eventually.
A great episode that is juicy in canon.
You should always be happy to have been proven right, even if its bad. That's the half the payoff of being pessimistic!
Which also implies some important stuff about the general state of the historical record. The fact that no one questions how or why Pinkie knows this fact suggests that there's an intact historical record going back to Celestia first raising the sun. That's a really big deal, because she probably got her cutie mark for raising the sun, and she had her cutie mark defeating Discord (and everything else). Ergo, this seems to strongly suggest there was no lost period of civilization or record keeping during the time of Discord, something that has appeared in a bunch of fanons.
So you're saying Celestia cast Toon Boom Harmony on the window instead of Flash 8?
Well, we knew she did from the S7 Finale. But given the fact that the show only calls unicorn or alicorn magic "magic," and this seems to suggest Celestia was either born an alicorn or unicorn.
Also called "the" ruler. They've really pulled back from pretending Luna co-runs the country.
Right, diplomacy and public speaking are just acting plus extra stuff. Least-implausible theory: Celestia got in the mindset of that little filly who never got to be onstage when she acts, and has difficulty getting out that mindset, even when it's detrimental (see Fluttershy syndrome).
Pinkie is family, and Applejack will tolerate anything from family.
Hasn't Twilight spent the last 4 seasons telling everyone to treat her like an ordinary pony? I love the idea that she's getting that and not entirely liking it.
Which Rarity probably didn't make for him until Celestia joined the play.
Well five a day every day is a lot. I think any unicorn who is willing to sacrifice their magic so the sun can go up is given the title of "Great Sorcerer" to honor their sacrifice. I don't think there were 1,825 great sorcerers around in any given year.
If we had a firm grasp on either the date the unicorns started raising the sun or their population numbers, we could use this to calculate the other. Quite frustrating. What I wouldn't give for a decently show-supported demographic profile!
So some kind of population crash (mass famine from the Windigos?) meant that there weren't enough unicorns to continue the daily sacrifice.
A line written by Twilight Sparkle. Was she at all concerned that Starswirl might actually attend this play? I was kind of sure he would show up for a while.
She also seems to be rapidly teleporting from the stage to a classroom in Canterlot, with no visible effort.
She may not actually be that great an actress herself.
Of course the establishment exists. It's 5 feet from the Raspberry Beret!
Oliver, I know you like to list fairly obvious things in canon and say they are not necessarily a given.... I think this was a given.
Here's another question: Why isn't the audience mad that Celestia isn't in the show? They all came to see her on stage. Nice callback to season 1 and the idea that Spike can eat anything though.
I think the plan was for Fluttershy to play Celestia originally. After all, she has recently proven she's a great actress. Also, that Fluttershy is basically Celestia if you replaced the 3 pony tribes with small woodland critters.
[quote
] The mass panic is why I'm going to stick with 3. That I'm pretty sure in charades you don't use the actual object you are referencing.
Was this some kind of friendship test? Celestia makes repeatedly clear to Twilight from the beginning what she really wants is for Twilight to treat her like a friend. Was she trying to fake-act to push Twilight into criticizing her and developing their bond more as equal friends?
Two other things:
Luna looks pissed when everyone else cheering, for some reason.
Celestia tells everyone at the end that they can just call her "Celestia" from now on, but behind her back they were doing that the entire time this episode.
Celestia's age is something like 1120-1135. That's a pretty small range.
They'll train that kind of effort right out of him soon enough.
4849455 I was running the math. You could burn through 182,500 unicorns to raise the sun every day for a century. (Not sure about setting the sun, raising the moon, etc.) That's actually somewhat sustainable, especially since the drained unicorns could still reproduce. Of course, that's if you start with a population of over a million unicorns or something. We don't really have upper limits on their population size.
That said, I like the idea from the comics, that Anubis used to raise the sun. His closest royal guards were unicorns, so when he was overthrown they could have taken over for him.
4849549 Well he's explicitly the Canterlot representative to the Grand Pony Summit, for one thing.
4850311
Not necessarily. Nobody questions Pinkie. Ever.
The televised canon never really paid it much attention anyway.
Should be ten, since it has to be repeated every morning and every evening, but it wasn’t particularly clear even in the Journal.
That’s a nice save.
I bet she was banking on it. She has to ship Celestia with somepony, right?
The classroom is within the School of Friendship, that’s Twilight’s own auditorium. So nowhere near as far.
Good question, no answers so far.
4851366
Or even 20, if the moon needed a separate ritual.
I mean, you can't have teenagers poking fun at the brave volunteer who gave up their magic to raise the sun because now he's eating with his hooves, or you'd lose volunteers.
That and they probably got the 5 oldest unicorns around to do it every day.
Oliver, have you been getting into the secret shipfic folder again?
Ah.
I think I have an answer, on reflection: We do see Celestia on stage picking up roses at the end of the play. So maybe the audience held their fire in hopes that Celestia would eventually show up, and she did-when it was time for the whole crew to come on stage and take a bow.
Unless you count launching herself and the rest of the Mane 6 sans Twilight out of the giant cannon at the end of the movie.
How many plays have we seen that weren't either based on historical events (which would make them generally more likely to include a narrator) or put on by children? The only ones I can think of were the musical in Rarity Takes Manehattan and whatever the Method Mares did (I don't remember exactly what it was, but I'm fairly certain at least part of their performance was shown) in Made in Manehattan, and I don't think narrators were shown in either of those.
It wasn't explicitly stated to be the RCV, but Flurry Heart's Crystal Heart-shattering crying in The Crystalling and Twilight silencing the crowd to begin the song in Fame and Misfortune both used all the same visual and audio effects as the RCV, so I think it's fairly safe to say that's what they were doing.
A bit of an odd thing to say, seeing as antidisestablishmentarianism is opposition to the separation of church and state, and Celestia is both the head of state and the closest thing to a god the ponies have. Does this mean there's significant enough opposition to Celestia's rule on the basis of her being essentially a deity that there's enough counter-opposition to have a word for it?
4853547
The play in Made in Manehattan does not present a narrator on stage, but there is still a narrative voice opening the performance. The musical in Rarity Takes Manehattan only turns up for exactly one closing line, so it’s unclear whether it has a narrator or not.
I doubt it.
It is much more likely that the term is exactly as archaic and meaningless to ponies as it is to us, and then, its original meaning might have been something else.
Compare Applejack's fashion consultancy in "Honest Apple". Suggests that Celestia is really no longer in the loop
She has enough acting to do that.]
You'd thnk being Princess would include experience hitting cues, voice modulation, and expressing an emotion she did not feel. [And then she does that lie.
Yeah.
Which are properly dealing with a tail for modesty's sake. Mind, he wore pantaloons back for the other play, too. Why does he not wear them for the stalling? Was he anticipating the tomatoes?
Posture-change teleportation is not a new thing, iirc.
Strange it's Twilight going, but they're only two removes--they're from the "Made in Manehattan" Midsummer play, so would know Rarity and AJ and have favorable reasons, and thanks to "Fame and Misfortune" likely know that Twilight is associated with them.
For that matter, thespian is named for a specific Greek actor on Earth. For them…who?
The quadrupedal default state of ponies is being eroded very strongly in S8.
4849455
It is also, unusually, an in-flight talk. We've only seen that in…"Testing, Testing"?
Swapped out her extensions.
Yeah.
4849480
4849484
Second, minimum, obviously, "Hearth's Warming Eve".
4849485
I have difficulty understanding this. Is not presenting a believable false front, that is different to the reality, shared between the sets 'lying' and 'acting'? Wearing a mask?
4849581
Ah.
4849498
I thought the rule of thumb was 50/500/5,000 individuals for short, medium, and long-term genetic viability?
4850311
A series of mostly-unwatchable online shorts (allegedly) explaining magic do point to pegasus weather manipulation (and possibly flight) and earth ponies' ability to grow "delicious crops of fresh food", as magic. Not precisely "the show", though.
Good question.
She might otherwise be very pleased to enjoy this bit of nightlife. An event during Her Night? With full audience? That Celestia, normally sleeping, is happily performing in, with no [visible] input from her sister? And Fanon gives Luna the Arts as part of her domain fairly often…
- MLP: FiM
- Comedy
- Drama
Theater has changed. Princess Luna has not.but Celestia's (apparently) raising the sun in her night. For the enjoyment of ponies. In a play eliding her existence. And the importance of raising the moon. While not even being willing to show her face during a Nighttime Entertainment.
It's very effective salt in the wound that led to Nightmare Moon, such a contrast.
The entire episode is a dream Luna is having...
4854794
Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy also had a brief talk while flying to Sweet Apple Acres in that cider episode. Flying sideways, so they could look at each other as they spoke, oddly enough.
I'll leave it here for the future generations of viewers: my reading on the episode was that Celestia did not expect to be in the limelight of the play, and did everything she could to weasel her way out of it and let her ponies manage the task on their own, while having some innocent fun at their expense. And that is completely in character.
Compare and contrast first two minutes of the episode when Celestia is extremely happy for the play and acts as genuinely as she can which is met by misunderstanding from Twilight and Spike. Then Twilight offers her to be a star in the play. Celestia looks concerned: that came at her from a left field, but she couldn't deny the request and disappoint her student.
Thus, shenanigans begin. If anything, this episode solidified Celestia as a good-natured trickster character in my eyes, though there are ample of other evidence for that already