Aug
4th
2018
Points of Canon: S8x15 - The Hearth’s Warming Club · 7:33pm Aug 4th, 2018
Oh boy… Oh, and I won’t mark this with a spoiler tag because I’m confused just when the hell is it supposed to air in the US, and I can’t be bothered anymore.
Chronological markers: It’s a Hearth’s Warming episode, and thus is strictly seasonally locked and has integer year boundaries, but that was obvious. Otherwise, this episode is a chronology problem, because it establishes the following:
- This is the first winter the Student Six spend in Ponyville.
- School year runs through the winter with two weeks off for the holidays. It does not start in winter.
- Indirectly, this also has to be the first winter Spike had his wings, i.e Molt Down has happened.
See where this is going?
- Sandbar blatantly holds a Christmas tree ball with his hoof by the side. Ponies do this sort of thing often, but it’s rarely seen clearly like here.
- “Come on, everycreature!” Yep, new, politically correct form of address. Pretty consistent this season.
- Now, I understand why the foreigners aren’t joining in the song. But why aren’t the ponies? Doesn’t any of them like Sandbar either?
- “Dragons don’t do pony holidays.” That one was obvious, but the obvious occasionally needs to be remembered: Hearth’s Warming is explicitly a pony holiday.
- “Oh! Is that why you put their Fire of Friendship on top of the tree? To help us remember their unity?” Compare to A Hearths’ Warming Tail, where, instead of a Fire of Friendship, the top of the tree is decorated with a Derpy in a star-topped hat, and there’s no sign of that heart. Presumably, this is Twilight’s own invention – and own magic animating it for that matter, because that’s the first time we see it on top of the tree. We still don’t know just how diegetic was the Fire of Friendship in the very end of Hearth’s Warming Eve and what it actually was, by the way.
- “Yona like any day that is start of winter break.” “Two whole weeks without classes.” Now this is important! School year runs through the winter with two weeks off for the holidays. It does not start in winter. This is a very solid argument for the school year roughly matching the American school year, and it is important for the chronology of the entire series.
- “That’s the students’ quarters!” Students live on the grounds, i.e. it’s a boarding school. Took them long enough to say that out loud.
- “One of you must have done this!” Or it could just as well be Starlight, or any other teleporting unicorn, but nooo…
- Ocellus is mysteriously able to tell that Yona hasn’t closed her eyes. How?
- “The guilty party won’t be going home over Hearth’s Warming break. She or he will stay here for some one-on-one friendship lessons.” Twilight is empowered to do this, which is not a given.
“Oh, yes! It’s our favorite holiday! Well, since Headmare Twilight shared it with us last year. She gave our hive very clear instructions.”
- Changelings have never celebrated Hearth’s Warming, or any variation thereof, before this. There’s a good chance they didn’t have holidays at all.
- The literal manner in which the said instructions were interpreted makes it very unlikely that changelings did any long-term infiltration of pony society as a species, because otherwise they would have a very good idea what the instructions actually meant.
- Initially, I thought this whole sequence implies that To Where and Back Again happened between exactly one and two years away from this episode, but then realized how shaky that gets: we don’t know when the calendar year starts of ends. It still seems quite likely, though.
- Changelings receive and begin interpreting the instructions during a warm period of the year, which is strange, but since the rest of it is floating so much, we can’t tell if it means anything or not, or what exactly does it mean.
- During Ocellus’ flashback two baby changelings appear. How the hay exactly were they birthed remains unexplained.
- Changelings use firefly lamps. Previously, the only species caught using this biotech were the ponies.
- “You might have misunderstood things just a little.” This line strongly implies that Ocellus’ flashback was presented as a much more detailed spoken story than what we have heard. Which makes interpreting it bloody difficult.
- “Yaks do not. Our holiday much better. Is called Snilldar Fest. Night before, yaks gather things to smash and put them in big pile. Then in morning, we smash them! In afternoon, we smash them again!” Good to know.
“Whole family – grandpa, grandma yak, Yona’s brother, sister, mother, father yak – all go to woods singing yak song.”
- Yakyakistan has woods. Not really a given, after we saw that tiny village.
- Yona has a brother and a sister.
- “Then yak family build perfect snow fort… and smash it!” It’s interesting that what the flashback shows is very much not a fort.
- “Moss pile is for special family rituals. Last year, ritual for Yona. All yak family gather around Yona and braid Yona hair for first time.” Good to know, and notably, a very rare case of using the word “ritual.”
- “Well, we do have the Feast of Fire. Everydragon gets together and tells stories. The best one wins a pile of gemstones.” Also good to know, but I wonder who supplies the gemstones and how exactly.
Smolder’s story deserves to be quoted in full:
Once upon a time, there was this sad little dragon. Her name was Scales. She lived alone in the wilderness with nothing to eat. But one night, as she sat alone in a storm, she heard something. It was the Dragon Lord! Scales was scared, but the Dragon Lord told her not to be afraid, that he was taking her to the Dragon Lands for a great feast. Scales sat with the Dragon Lord’s family and friends and had the biggest, best dinner of gemstones she’d ever eaten! Then, while the dragons were telling stories, Scales thought it would be so easy to seize power from this feeble and sensitive Dragon Lord. She saw her chance… and took it! She claimed the Bloodstone Scepter and took over the Dragon Lands! And forced the Dragon Lord to live out in the cold, just as she used to!
- Notably, neither of the two characters are Torch, which suggests that his term in office was not all that long: If it was, a story about successfully seizing power would be difficult to imagine in the first place.
- The current Dragon Lord in the story is sufficiently small to party right where we saw the Bloodstone Scepter during Gauntlet of Fire, which suggests Torch is actually an anomaly as far as dragon lords go.
- Seizing the Scepter by force and becoming a legit user is possible, though conditions in which it is possible remain unclear.
- “But dragons like hearing about weak, kind creatures getting defeated.” Which is actually bloody strange – is the victory over a strong unkind creature less valuable?
- Sandbar has a little sister, and we get to see his parents, though I doubt anyone was seriously excited about seeing those.
- “Yeah. It was a Hearth’s Warming miracle.” Miracles on Hearth’s Warming are a thing, whether imagined or not.
- …Wait, why did everyone get interrogated by Twilight alone, but Rainbow suddenly gets Smolder all to herself?
- “But I can’t miss the Three Days of Freedom Celebration! … It used to be only one day, but now to commemorate our escape from the Storm King, we’re adding two more days of awesome!” The hippogriff holiday celebrates first the escape and then the final liberation from the Storm King, and thus, can only be as old as the fact itself – which, by our best estimates, is at most two decades.
- “Queen Novo had these made for the Mount Aris board of tourism to explain it all to guests!” Mount Aris has a Board of Tourism. Mount Aris has tourism. And that shiny new railway station. Things move really quickly when ponies are involved…
- The list of activities for the Three Days of Freedom includes sea-dancing, whale-singing, shell-stringing, sky-dancing, a wind song in the Harmonizing Heights, and ends with receiving presents from the Queen. I’m sure there’s a reason for that last one.
- “Wait. Hold on. ‘Cousins?’ What are those?” So does Gallus really have no idea what cousins are or not? He really looks like he does not. How exactly?
- “Blue Moon Festival. The one time of year when griffons are nice to each other. Well, as nice as we can be. Families get together to eat and then complain about the food and give each other presents they don’t like and mostly just try not to yell at each other.” I do wonder if that’s just Gallus’ own impression, or the festival really is mandated to be this way. I’m betting on the former: If Gallus is an orphan like he claims, Grampa Gruff is inexplicably strongly upset about him missing during School Daze.
- “What about Grampa Gruff? … That’s just his name. He’s not anygriff’s actual grandpa.” What, not even Gilda’s? And the flashback which shows him, Gilda and Gabby right as this is being said was just to confuse us? Really now, Gallus…
- “I felt like I never had a place in Griffonstone.” And once again we’re reminded that Gallus has coloration extremely unusual for a Griffonstone griffon, and much more in tune with the colors of the griffons who came to the Equestria Games.
- “We kinda guessed it was you. But we wanted to give you the chance to tell the truth.” It’s strange that they continued to interrogate students after that – because Gallus got called out first.
This is far less important in terms of pony history than a Hearth’s Warming episode usually is. At the same time, the implications it casts on changelings as a species are really significant, and dragons become simply strange.
I'm probably way overthinking it, but I figured that if Twilight interrogated them all one-at-a-time, then the last creature to go would feel compelled to confess even if they didn't do it, just to get their friends off the hook. Therefore, doing the last two at once prevents that from happening.
Or it might be because the episode was nearly over
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Probably the latter, but your explanation is superior.
Actually, do you know what the most interesting thing is about that Dragon Lord story? Smolder says that it was the favourite story of last year. So whoever made it up was totally taking a shot at Ember's policies. This is dragon political satire.
"Ocellus is mysteriously able to tell that Yona hasn’t closed her eyes. How?"
I noticed that. Extra changeling senses of some sort?
Don't exactly get a problem here? As far as I remember it's never ever stated that Chrysalis actually a mother of all changeling or that all changelings sans her are drones who unable to lay eggs.
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So it's Astrophanes the Dragon. And would make the Dragonlands Athens. Would the storytellers threaten to eat the audience at the end of their story if they didn't vote for their compositions?
That's Digestes. He's been the winner of the Feast of Fire Story-hoard eight years running.
He must be a very good story-teller!
Are you kidding? He's the biggest drake that bothers to keep coming to these things. He could eat half the audience without getting heartburn, and they know it. His stories are mostly tedious rants about how degenerate the modern younglings are, and why everydragon ought to rise up and throw the current Dragon Lord into the Flame-cano.
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Further, even if that were the case, there's nothing prohibiting the changedling babies from having been born as regular changelings and then transformed just like the adults were.
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Well, it sort of has been stated… in the comics… which everyone’s ignoring…
1. Imagine a family-based hive under Chrysalis’ hive mind. Remember that without a certain level of hive mind, To Where And Back Again becomes the stupidest episode short of the movie.
But my point is that changelings behave and look, to a large extent, like hive insects, and even refer to their group dwelling as a “hive” – making it very reasonable to expect them to also procreate in the same manner. I am not inclined to interpret the ambiguity here in favor of some other model,1 but whatever floats your story, I guess.
A rather sweet episode with lots of juicy worldbuilding and troublesome chronology.
Clearly they have good taste.
I'm actually wondering about that here. As of the last episode, we've established that Twilight will wildly misuse precious historical relics/artifacts, and Celestia will let her do so. And Ocellus calls it "their Fires of Friendship." That's not actually like the original fires of friendship, as some kind of eternal flame thing, lasting for millennia until now because no one poured goo powder on it, is it?
Also that despite the fact that these students almost started a world war to go to school together, and Twilight destroyed her school's accreditation so classes would be less boring, teenagers still hate class.
Right? Wasn't the last Hearth's Warming Episode about how Starlight hates the holiday?
She can sense Yona's emotions, maybe Yona was feeling sneaky by leaving her eyes open.
This actually got me thinking about the previous episode. Under Princess Twilight's rule, there's an incentives problem: Her answer to everything is more friendship. This episode has the guilty party "punished" with more friendship lessons, but then forgiven and instead given the "reward" of spending the holidays with the teachers and their families, which we all know is almost identical to how the "punishment" would have played out.
The reason I bring up last episode here is because this scene made me realize Starlight was probably making Discord "Vice Headmare" not just to, as Johnson said of J Edgar Hoover, "have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in." It was also put Discord in a position where he might actually absorb some friendship lessons himself, without actually suggesting Discord become a full time friendship student (which would probably be a good idea, but suggesting it to Discord would end with the school destroyed).
A lot of changling society makes more sense if you go with the comics idea that until a few years ago, they were sleeping inside a volcano.
Well we've established their on the opposite side of the planet, right? Does Equestria not have different seasons for different halves of the planet?
I think this suggests changlings may in fact live in nuclear families. It may also suggest non-Queens can even lay eggs.
Here's a question: How did tiny changling children learn how to give love, if no child ever did this from birth before Chrysalis was overthrown?
Basically Yona's Bat Mitzvah.
My guess is every dragon has to chip a gemstone in as an ante.
I feel like these kind of contradict each other. If Torch has not been ruling for very long, he shouldn't be that old. But if he's so much bigger than all the other dragons, then it seems much more likely that he would have been ruling all this time.
Perhaps it's just that Torch hasn't been ruling that long by dragon lifespans. The winner who suggested the story could be almost as old as Torch, after all.
Perhaps just seizing the staff out of someone's hands before they can order you to stop, then ordering them not to try and take it back from you.
Very weird. Maybe it's a kind of moral lesson about not being kind?
I had the exact same reaction. Thinking about it though, I guess the idea is that Gilda and Gabby are the only two ponies in Griffonstone who've embraced friendship at the time of Gallus's memory, so they are the only ones willing to let an old Griffon who's not their actual family spend the holidays with them.
This opens up so many more questions about Gruff though. Is he the informal ruler of Griffonstone, even without any kind of noble family to back him up? He's certainly recognized by Equestria. And if Gallus isn't Grandpa Gruff's grandson, why was he picked to attend Friendship School instead of say, Gabby?
Different from most griffons, but what about Gabby and Greta?
That's actually a standard interrogation technique. Hang a collective punishment over everyone's heads, then let them work each other over until someone breaks down and confesses. Fairly devious for Twilight though. This feels like it had the possibility of destroying their friendship, the friendship that kept the school going, and Twilight jeopardized it so she could figure out who sabotaged a Xmas Ornament and made a mess in the living room.
And Griffons! Yaks and Hippogrypths it was just interesting and cute.
4914329 I agreed until this episode on the queen laying the eggs, though I do feel this kind of tips the balance towards family laying their own eggs. Or, queens lay all the eggs, and then drones pair off to raise a couple each?
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As far as I remember in comics they all born from a tree, not from Chrysalis. It's also stated that holes on their body remained from Celestia combat spell, which is bull because even baby changelings are born with such holes. Oh, and according to comics Celestia supposed to know about changelings (she kicked their collective plot) so her surprise in "Canterlot Wedding" looks strange (unless she, for some bizarre reasons, pretending to be surprised).
And Celestia defeat also looks strange. Before she singlehandedly defeat Chrysalis and her entire army with an single spell and in "Canterlot Wedding" she unable to handle Chrysalis, even if she power-up herself with Shinning love?
IMO hive mind implied that Chrysalis massive idiot because of even with hive mind she unable to feel the difference between real Straight and disguised Thorax.
I am mostly too confused (having just watched this episode and Friendship University) to properly comment this time.
I agree that it's weird that -- given that Twilight has faced Sunset and Starlight before -- she assumes that one of the students must have done it.
I am further surprised that she takes the 'If none of you fess up, all of you are punished' route. Twilight, surely that happened to you in school and you noticed how unfair it was then? All it does is make people mad at each other AND you... hardly friendship-inspiring at all! For shame.
I presume the Student Six all know eachother pretty well by this point -- they probably knew that Yona would open her eyes, and Ocellus was the only one goody-two-shoes enough to care about ensuring anyone else followed the rules.
I'm not sure this means that such victories are more valuable, only that dragons like hearing about them. It reaffirms their society's virtues of having enough personal strength to bully everyone else, after all. It's a bit odd that Smolder isn't more self-conscious about this after at least a semester of friendship lessons. It seems unlikely that she A. is still that clueless about pony culture, or B. has flunked all her lessons so badly she sees no problem with the story.
This is a fantasy world... this story makes me wonder if the alignment entry on Dragons reads "Usually Chaotic Evil."
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Well, you know how the Olympic flame works, right?
It’s traditional for teenagers to hate class.
Probable!
Me, I am thinking that none of the changelings that went into the volcano survived except Chrysalis herself, and the ones we observe were mostly born ten years ago, tops. Probably less.
This is why they seem so stupid: They’re literally children, whose only example to build themselves was the constant presence of Chrysalis over an emphatic link, with no education save for what Chrysalis deemed absolutely necessary to perform the duties she assigned. Whatever they know of the pony society is not the result of experience living in it undercover, but the result of passively observing it while transformed into furniture, without having any idea of what’s actually going on.
And now? Now they’re playing house.
We don’t know. The presence of the desert in a band across the continent suggests that something happens, but we can’t say for sure what.
…or imitate nuclear families.
Of course, some of the changelings would have to imitate children for this while actually being adults, but I expect they switch roles from time to time.
Or, he could have taken the scepter by force from the previous Dragon Lord, who could fit into the cave. You know, “Young idiot, you’re going to be the death of all the dragonkind! I must relieve you of the burden of rule!” Etc.
Probably, because he was an orphan.
Still different. Seriously, compare the colors.
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I actually have a theory on how that thing in particular works, but I’ll save it for a proper post one day.
She isn’t surprised they exist. She is surprised they are out.
Amen to that one…
Because Thorax is disconnected from the hive mind at least partially, that’s his shtick.
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I'd go 20-30 years, but other than that I totally agree, it's a great theory. It definitely explains a lot more about changling behavior.
Sure he could have, but why wouldn't Torch have done that before the young idiot even became the Dragon Lord? Why would he not have beaten out whoever the challenge was in the first place.
That's why Gallus was selected, not why he or anyone else listens to Grandpa Gruff. It kind of seems like Grandpa Gruff just appointed himself the leader of anarchist Griffonstone by virtue of the fact that he sleeps in the old/palace library, and the other Griffons let him get away with this to the extent its more convenient for them to put up with him than to try and choose another leader. Like, whenever ponies or outsiders show up and ask the nearest Griffon "where is your leader?" they just kind of shrug and say "I guess go talk to Grandpa Gruff, he lives in the palace."
And Gruff just grabbed the nearest kid no one would miss to drag to Equestria.
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Because Torch is wise enough to not want to be the Dragon Lord in the first place. Evidenced by his attempt at setting up a fair competition to give the title and the Scepter away later on.
Not impossible, but I suspect, rather unlikely. Unfortunately, to expect any sensible statements clarifying the situation from the show writers would be silly.
Given the 9-month win-streak of Fluttershy that predates Spike's wings by at least a day or two, this implies that the movie and Season 8's premiere both happen in March shortly after Winter Wrap-Up. It also implies that an oddly large number of this season's episodes so far happen in November and December (centered mostly around when Spike grows wings).
Assuming 1 year of Season 1-3 (something I personally find to be an impossibility, but will concede since the two-year model creates a few problems of its own)... This means Seasons 4-7 happen over the course of around 3.5 years. Season 4 during summer, Season 5 going from summer through winter (Tanks For the Memories), through summer again (Brotherhooves Social, which is dated in-universe as happening either just before or just after the start of summer), back through fall and winter again (Crusaders of the Lost Mark and Hearthbreakers), an entire year followed by another winter in Season 6 (A Hearth's Warming Tail), and if you really squint you can squeeze all of Seasons 6 and 7 before A Hearth's Warming Tail, making the Movie happen the following March.
Then we go through another year to the current episode (The Hearth's Warming Club), and presumably through yet another year to the upcoming Holiday Special (Best Gift Ever). So that's 5.5 years from start to this episode, 6.5 to the upcoming Holiday Special. Of course, it's entirely possible that you could squeeze this episode into the Holiday Special, but we'd have to wait and see to find out.
God, I hate that I keep having to revise my mental map of this series recently. I didn't have to revise ANYTHING this massive for Seasons 6 and 7...
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This was an issue? How?
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Check out the relevant PoC entry and particularly the discussion that followed. It is an issue.