Timeline: diagram and notes (updated 17 April 2020) · 6:01pm May 7th, 2018
Key
- Sunset Shimmer flees through the portal
- Fall Formal (“Through the Mirror”)
- Battle of the Bands (“Rainbow Rocks”)
- Friendship Games (“Friendship Games”)
- Chance to Prance (“Dance Magic”)
- Camp Everfree (“Legend of Everfree”)
- Studio tour (“Movie Magic”)
- Enchanted mirror (“Mirror Magic”)
- Memory stone (“Forgotten Friendship”)
- Graduation from Canterlot High School
- Storm King invasion (My Little Pony the Movie)
- Princess Twilight Sparkle’s accession to the throne
The Timeline
The chart above and the notes following are intended to provide only a general approximation of the temporal relationships among My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic (MLPFIM), My Little Pony the Movie (MLPTM), and My Little Pony Equestria Girls (MLPEG). It also is the basis for my Twin Canterlots fan-fiction series.
“Through the Mirror”
- Time of year: No snow or heavy outerwear are shown. Mid-October is about the latest that is appropriate for a temperate climate in the northern hemisphere.
- MLPFIM: Twilight is a new-minted princess, placing the Fall Formal early in season four.
- Sunset’s arrival: Despite Jayson Thiessen’s obvious dodge that a moon is “a unit of time with no human equivalent”, almost certainly the script was based on the idea of thirty lunar cycles, a period of just over twenty-nine months. That puts Sunset’s arrival in May, four months before starting at CHS as a freshman.
“Rainbow Rocks”
- Time of year: DVD audio commentary puts the Battle of the Bands six months after the Fall Formal. No snow or outerwear are shown. Those facts point to mid-April.
- MLPFIM: Twilight is newly titled princess of friendship, placing the Battle of the Bands early in season five.
“Friendship Games”
- Time of year: In the absence of an explicit statement, best guess is two to six weeks after “Rainbow Rocks”.
- MLPFIM: Princess Twilight’s reference to the end of season five does not fit. I suspect it was inserted hastily in the rewrite deleting Sunset’s homesickness thread.
Magical Movie Night
- Time of year: A swap in production schedule changed “Dance Magic” from a prequel to a sequel for “Legend of Everfree”. The result makes no sense, so the Chance to Prance contest is restored to its original position. (Otherwise it would be late in summer break, but before the studio tour—entry G on the graphic above.)
- MLPFIM: For a reformed Starlight Glimmer to show up, “Mirror Magic” must be very early in season six.
- Time span: Post-production requires months after filming, yet “Mirror Magic” seems to be only a few weeks after “Movie Magic”. The best, if still weak, explanation is to assume the delays telescoped production, driving up costs and workload. That movie had better be a hit.
Digital Series
- Time of year: Summertime Shorts appears to run throughout the girls’ junior year and the following summer; Better Together and Choose Your Own Ending seem to start that summer and run through the girls’ senior year.
- MLPFIM: Summertime Shorts is concurrent with seasons four and five; the others, seasons six and seven.
“Forgotten Friendship”
- Time of year: Printer deadlines for yearbook interiors are about six weeks before delivery of printed books, which usually happens at the end of the school year. If this is during junior year, it would have to happen right after “Friendship Games”; otherwise it would be about a year after. Either way, the epilogue would be a month and a half later.
- MLPFIM: If this is supposed to be junior year, that would be contemporaneous with season five. If it is senior year, that would put it during season seven.
“Spring Breakdown”
- Time of year: This is explicitly during spring break, though whether junior year or senior year is unclear.
- MLPFIM and MLPTM: Placing this after the movie (and season seven) swerves wildly into “eternal high school” territory and cannot fit any rational timeline. The simplest solution is to ignore it. My guess is corporate involvement forced a hasty rewriting and ensuing mayhem in storytelling and production.
“Sunset’s Backstage Pass”
- Time of year: The music festival is described as two days; Sci-Twi says the day before was a school day. The festival probably is a weekend affair in the autumn or spring, almost any time during the girls’ senior year.
- MLPFIM: Most likely this is early in season six or early in season seven, but cannot be pinned down any closer.
“Holidays Unwrapped”
- Time of year: Almost certainly this is during the winter break of senior year. No other placement makes sense.
- MLPFIM: Sometime in mid- to late season six.
Human and Pony Age
Students start high school at fourteen to fifteen, so the human Mane Six would be fifteen to sixteen at the start of MLPFIM. I’d bet their counterparts, in a late–nineteenth-century sort of setting, are the same ages—think Mark Twain, apprenticeships, and one-room schoolhouses.
Sunset Shimmer’s Age
According to a tweet from Ishi Rudell, “Sunset would be older . . . age-wise she’s like a senior who was held back a couple years!” My guess is she was age sixteen when she absconded through the portal and started at Canterlot High School.
- On page 28 of the Through the Mirror chapter book, Celestia states, “[Sunset] began her studies not long before Twilight.” Twilight adds, “I don’t really know her. But now I think I remember seeing her in Canterlot. . . .” Apparently “not long” can be a couple of years!
The Sirens’ Ages
I assume the Dazzlings also are as young as they appear: late teens, roughly contemporary with the main cast or possibly with Sunset. To make that possible, they would have to fall into the human world no earlier than three to five years before the Battle of the Bands, depending on their exact ages. In turn that requires them to have been flung forward in time as well as across dimensions. Why not? It isn’t any less believable.
- Given this is a toy company’s franchise aimed at teen girls, I think it unlikely the scriptwriters would resort to weird or borderline creepy shenanigans regarding age.
My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic
“Lesson Zero” and the six-month span between “Through the Mirror” and “Rainbow Rocks” suggest each season of MLPFIM (except third season) represents some six months in the characters’ lives.
- A full season of twenty-six episodes, broadcast one per week, lasts half a year—which is how the television industry in the United States arrived at that number.
- Twilight’s panicked comment in “Lesson Zero” about sending a letter every week almost certainly is a sly reference to this temporal correspondence.
My Little Pony the Movie
To my knowledge no time span has been given for the movie. Estimates of a few days are absurdly short, though, unless Equestria is about the size of Liechtenstein and the world is about the size of the asteroid Ceres. More likely it takes place over weeks if not months, considering typical travel times on foot or via early-generation airship, which would displace seasons eight and nine by a noticeable amount. A span of two months is shown on the chart above, as a rough estimate and to keep the information within the limits of the page.
- Infantry throughout history has marched much the same twenty to twenty-five miles (32–40 km) a day. A party of seasoned hikers might get farther; city folk with no outdoor experience might not get as far.
- This timing may be why “The Hearth’s-Warming Club” is so soon after the School of Friendship’s opening.
Looks reasonable to me, even if I do still love the idea of immortal sirens getting into centuries of misadventures and provoking the occassional atrocity.
OBJECTION! Season 4 begins with preparations for the Summer Sun Celebration.
Looks pretty solid. I appreciate this sort of thorough research.
Question, though. If you're accepting prima facie that the sirens were thrown forward in time, why not accept the same of Sunset Shimmer? While it isn't an airtight case that the two of them clearly don't recognize each other, it would be VERY strange if she and Twilight were A) the same age, B) both Princess Celestia's personal student; C) both in the School for Gifted Unicorns; D) coterminous; and E) total strangers.
4855522
(Sigh.) So does season one. There’s only so much I can do to reconcile all the contradictions, and this is the best available way of doing it, as far as I can determine.
I am reminded of a Steven King story—I don’t read his stuff, so I don’t recall which one—in which all the major holidays in a year fall on full moons, which is flatly impossible, but he did it anyway.
4855520
And, truth to tell, changing that single aspect doesn’t affect the rest of the timeline, so it probably is the easiest tweak to make without rippling consequences. Still, I try to stick as closely as I can to what I’m able to divine about the canon writing, both as presented and the likeliest assumptions behind it.
There is a certain charm to that, and I’ve read and enjoyed a fair number of stories founded on that premise!
4855527
The quoted discussion in the chapter book continues with:
To my mind that implies Celestia kept them compartmentalized, meeting with each separately—which would make sense, by definition, if she was mentoring them one-on-one. Moreover, the school’s student body seems large enough they could go to more ordinary classes without crossing paths more than in passing, as Twilight’s vague memory suggests, and that assumes Sunset also attended ordinary classes. She probably did, but there’s no definitive statement one way or the other.
For me, though, the clincher is how unlikely I think it that writers for a toy company’s squeaky-clean franchise aimed at teenage girls would resort to such a borderline creepy measure as aging down a character from adult to teen. I’m not sure such an idea even would occur to them.
4855553
Hadn't seen the chapter book; that's at least something, though it sounds to me like a retcon lampshade so for my own personal headcanon I'm not sure how well it'll stick.
And to be clear, I'm not talking about "Sunset was born earlier, rebelled as an adult and was aged down" with what I mentioned above. More so the exact same thing you specified for the sirens: they fell into a portal as teenagers, and emerged teenagers, just flung forward in time.
ETA: I think this still is worth considering even if it's a gap of just a few years (thirty moons?). It might make sense for Sunset to have started her studies "not long" before Twilight (i.e., a few years ahead, if she was Celestia's Plan A), and then be a few years ahead of her in school (limiting their mutual exposure even further), and then Twilight catches up to her while Sunset doesn't exist during the time skip.
Though part of what was gnawing at me with the chapter book just crystallized. Sunset vanishing would have been a pretty big deal. If it was even slightly open knowledge that Sunset was Princess Celestia's student, and that she vanished under mysterious circumstances, I'd think Twilight would have had more than vague memories. "Oh, yeah! You're that missing filly from freshman year!" That's why it's always made more sense to me to have Sunset's disappearance be from before Twilight's entry into school: Celestia didn't even need a Plan B until Sunset flipped out.
4855584
Fair enough, and I apologize for missing your genuinely intriguing point about sliding Sunset as well as the sirens forward in time! I’ve amended the post to mention it as an alternate possibility.
Absolutely the whole explanation is a big, glaring lampshade—but I suspect anything they cobbled together would have to be, given how Equestria Girls as a whole initially was shoehorned in unceremoniously. As I understand it from comments by Meghan McCarthy, originally Through the Mirror was to be a one-shot, with no thought of extending it into a new franchise, so they may not have spent much effort initially on considering the ramifications.
I generally interpret “not long” to mean days or weeks rather than months or years; I always have considered the latter to be definitionally “long”—though I grant that may be subjective—and I do think that was the intended meaning. As for Sunset vanishing: if it was widely known, I’m not sure even a couple of years would be long enough for the rumors and stories to die away. If it was hushed up, which I wouldn’t put past Celestia for a moment and is hinted at here and there, the rumors and stories wouldn’t get around, and the time factor wouldn’t matter.
In any event, while I don’t buy the line of logic myself, I’ll concede it is completely arguable and supportable in the absence of clear, unequivocal canon statements. After all, on a few important points I too am arguing from interpretation, particularly of real-world corporate motivations and tendencies, rather than certain knowledge. At this point I just am chewing because I find the debate meaty and delicious, as well as thought-provoking.
4855626
Fair enough in return! While I agree with you that it's a matter of interpretation at this point — and I'm also picking at the question just because it's meaty — I think I'll stand on my interpretation that "not long" from Princess Celestia has some severe wiggle room. (E.g., "I was born not long before Reagan's presidency", meaning I was too young to remember his first election but not his second. And remember that this is a functionally immortal pony talking about timespans that, regardless of our interpretation, are dwarfed by her millennium of rule.)
Especially since if they started school in the same year, I think she would just say "they were in the same class", not "Sunset started not long before Twilight". How would Sunset start slightly earlier than Twilight in the same year, if students had to all undergo magical testing to be admitted as part of the same class?
(And for that matter, how would Sunset not remember Twilight if they were coterminous? Making a dragon explode from the roof of the testing building, amid magical surges that required Celestia's direct intervention, is neither unmemorable, nor particularly cover-up-able given that Sunset would have been on the premises.)
That's reasonable. My own headcanon timeline places Sunset something like a decade back, though I can't justify that against "not long", and even at that distance I think you've got a point about a hush-up being more likely than forgetting.
4855666
…Alternatively, Celestia never covered up Sunset's disappearance because Sunset never disappeared! Or at least the changeling who replaced her wasn't exposed until the Canterlot Wedding invasion.
That explanation, of course, goes way down the conspiracy rabbit hole. I'd make some joke about "that's not a bug, that's a feature," except the whole point is that it's a bug.
4855674
That made me laugh out loud far more than it should have.
4855666
If nothing else, all this is forcing me to think more closely about my logic chains. I think they’re as solid as the available evidence allows, but as you point out, even including chapter books, extrapolation of real-world corporate behavior, and published interviews, there still is wiggle room, and it never hurts to nail down everything as much as possible.
Your comment about Celestia’s phrasing is well-taken, and in retrospect does seem ambiguous, but I don’t think it invalidates the “same year” concept. Bullet list because BBCode makes it easy . . .
I could see the results of Twilight’s test being acknowledged without identifying the student for reasons of privacy. The only witnesses were Twilight and her parents, Celestia, and the testing board; all of them have good personal or professional motivations to keep it confidential. According to a Q&A session with Ms. Faust, she had in mind that Celestia reared Spike until he was old enough to place with Twilight, and it occurs to me this could be a good reason why.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if Sunset did know about Twilight in school—and that was why she was jealous of Twilight’s achievements. It’s easy to imagine our earnest little purple bookworm being too preoccupied to notice Sunset and equally easy to imagine the temperamental Sunset being entirely too aware of potential competitors. Though I have to say one question that always bothered me was, if Sunset couldn’t keep tabs on what was going on in Equestria because the portal was closed, how did she know of Princess Twilight, the Elements of Harmony, and suchlike?
I realized after I posted my initial reply your idea of sliding Sunset forward in time isn’t disallowed by my timeline and doesn’t affect it, since it (more or less deliberately) doesn’t address anything before she pops into the human world. That’s one reason I added the idea to my notes in the posting—I’d like to see someone pick it up and run with it, even if I don’t. Consider that, under this interpretation, she’s lost years of time in the lives of ponies she knew and might miss!
Did I miss anything? . . .
4855757
Little more to add here. Good point on the witnesses to the Spiking.
I would think that if Sunset directly was aware of Twilight's status, her reaction to Twilight coming through the portal (especially after she learns the new student's name!) would be very different. Though, frankly, given her theft at the beginning of the movie, she might have put two and two together regardless of the circumstances. (And that gets to the question bothering you, to which I also don't have a good answer. Though she HAD to know of the Elements of Harmony before returning to Equestria — since she was trying to pull a swap job with the Fall Formal crown — so that implies she was told of the EOH while pony!Celestia's student, regardless of her knowledge of Twilight or lack thereof.)
4855771
Thanks very much for the fascinating and illuminating discussion!