The ages of the Mane 6 confirmed...with SCIENCE! · 5:21pm Aug 10th, 2018
Note: I got called out on an un-cited claim, so I made edits where appropriate. Affected text is in green.
Dear Bronies and Pegasisters,
Hi, it's me; Princess Columbia!
30 moons.
You may be surprised to know, but a "moon" does not equal a month. Sure, the two approximate to each other nicely, but they are not the same.
Earth's moon, for example, orbits the planet once every 27 days. (27.32, to be exact). 27.32 times 30 = 819.6, divide that by the length of a year (we'll use a strict sidereal year of 365.256 days, since we're going with the precise orbital period for the moon) and we get 2.2439... years.
I'm getting there, just bear with me.
When we first meet her, Sunset Shimmer displays an uncanny amount of knowledge for someone who just bounced back into Equestria at the beginning of the first EQG movie, far more than can be explained simply by saying she used to be Celestia's student. She knew there was an Element of Magic and she knew which pony had the Element of Magic. Rolling back even further, she somehow managed to get into a high school (we'll call it an American high school, or whatever mirror/human universe's equivalent to America is, for simplicity of reference's sake) in spite of having no documentation to prove who she is, no experience being a human, no resources, a complete and utter lack of historical knowledge, no exposure to tech anywhere near the level available to your average modern high school student, yadda, yadda, yadda.
What Sunset Shimmer would need is two things:
- A chance to step into Equestria for a bit to gather intel before her expedition to steal the Element of Magic
- Enough time prior to the start of the high school year at least 2.5 years before she goes back to Equestria to steal Twilight's crown
And as a corollary to that second point:
- Sufficient time to gather the necessary falsified documentation to get into an American high school
I'm emphasizing time here because regardless of any other resources, with enough time and initiative you can gather the money and make the connections necessary to do just about anything (whether legally or not). In this case, Sunset would have needed to collect or convert currency to have sufficient money to get a birth certificate, the EQG equivalent to a social security card, sufficient burner phone numbers to create a convincing micro-network of relationships so the school could "contact the parents" as necessary...if Sunset didn't just pay or blackmail an office worker at the school to slip her records in, which would still have required time and resources to pull off. This isn't a 36-hour stealth operation like Twilight's where she had to get in, get the crown, and get out and so no paper trail would be necessary (or even desirable), this is a long term espionage operation where failure to blend in will result in capture or death. Sunset is smart, she's going to do it right.
So we have three benchmarks:
- Steal Twilight's crown
- Gather intel in Equestria (where it's determined that Twilight's crown is the item that needs stealing)
- Infiltrate the high school
OK, so a quick sidebar: Why infiltrate the high school, and furthermore, why as a student?
Simple: she looks like a student. Any Equestrian who goes through the mirror takes on the physical form of their alternate counterpart at the time they first crossed over, and then is locked in that form. My evidence? The Sirens. Even presuming their physical aging would have been arrested by their Siren nature, the feast-or-famine eating habits (mostly famine) would mean that the magic that makes them apparently immortal wouldn't have been constant, which means they should be aging, even a little...but they're not. Even one to two thousand years after they've been banished to a world that won't sustain their immortality magics consistently, they still physically pass for teenagers enough to simply walk into a high school and pass as students. Sunset Shimmer needs to blend in as a student because she'd stand out too much if she tried to pass herself off as a staff member. Being a student has the added benefit of allowing any flubs or slip-ups that inevitably pop up from not being a native be excusable as simply being young and naïve.
As for why she should infiltrate the school? It's simple: She just wants to stay near the portal back to Equestria, and the portal is literally on school property.
Even using our absolutely literal, Earth-based metrics for determining enough "moons" back in time from benchmark #1 to accomplish all this, assuming Sunset left, managed to gather everything she needed to infiltrate the school in less than 6 months, then return once to cram as much intel gathering in 3 days as she could, that's at least 60 moons prior to her visit to Equestria/The Crystal Empire. Let's be more realistic and say it's 90, and you're now looking at 6 years and 8-9 months earlier.
So what does that have to do with the age of the Mane 6? It all comes down to Princess Celestia.
Princess Celestia is a head of state. She's not just an educator like her human doppelganger, she's Equestria's Chief Executive, Chief Law Enforcement Officer, and head of all governmental affairs foreign and domestic. And given that she operates a regular and traditional royal court, complete with audience chamber and throne, we can also assume she operates as the country's chief judge. Celestia is a busy mare, no matter how you look at it. As a result, it's probably unlikely, in fact downright rare, that she'd take on the education of any one student. In fact, "Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns" is likely a hobby, one she's been dabbling in for centuries by the time Sunbutt Jr. and later Purple-smart pop in. Think about it; at any point does anyone in the entirety of the fourth generation of My Little Pony and any of it's spinoffs refer to any other "personal students" to Celestia other than Twilight and Sunset? The answer is, "Never."
What caught Celestia's eye about Sunset, we don't know for sure. Some fans have theorized that she's actually Celestia's daughter, which actually holds quite a bit of weight. Consider for a moment that Blueblood is Celestia's nephew, no matter how many times removed, and you begin to understand that Sunbutt the Ancient aint no Virginal Goddess, she's been getting busy at some point in the past. It would make a lot of sense that Celestia has taken a personal interest in Sunset's education, enough to bring her in as her personal student, because, hello, Sunset's her daughter.
"Ah," you say, "But what about Twilight Sparkle? Doesn't her being completely unrelated to Celestia yet still picked as the princess' personal protégé prove that your theory doesn't hold water, you sexy beast of a mare, you?"
To that I say, "At least buy me dinner before you continue that line of questioning, but also, no." And the reason is in the Tree of Harmony.
Waaaaay back when Discord was using Equestria as his own personal toybox, but well after Barstool the Weirded and his merry band got trapped in Limbo, Celestia and Luna found the Tree of Harmony, complete with their cutiemarks and one other really, big, stonking symbol that didn't match any other cutiemark they had ever seen. I'm sure that, at the time, it didn't seem like a big deal, maybe just a symbol of the tree or harmony or whatever, but imagine you're Princess Celestia: A little over a millennium later you're walking back from a particularly stressful meeting with Parliament, probably trying to figure out how to get Cadence and Sunset to stop arguing again, and the school with your name on it practically blows up, massive rainbow phenomenon are seen in the sky, ponies are turning into potted plants, there's a dragon poking out of one of the buildings, cats and dogs are living together...and there, on a little filly's flank, is the mark you remember very clearly, because it's the only other mark that existed on the Tree of Harmony when you and your sister picked it's magical fruit and you were able to defeat the tyrant that held a nation captive.
Celestia knows at this point that Twilight Sparkle is the one that she needs to be focusing her time and attention on. For reasons that she cannot tell a single other soul, this little filly who's trying to get into her school is the key to the future, whatever that future may be, and it'll include other ponies that she's already made sure to arrange to be near where they'll be needed most. No, not near her old castle, near the Tree.
Celestia must now make a choice; find a way to cut back time with her daughter, or entrust the future of her nation, and very likely her sister, to ponies that don't even qualify to know that the Tree of Harmony even exists. Fortunately for Celestia, Sunset makes that decision for her.
So how old is Twilight Sparkle when she enters Celestia's school? Well, we can reasonably assume that she's about the age of the CMC when they get their cutiemarks. This is coming down to simple biology; something I've had a refresher course of late as I battle with my ex-wife over the best way to handle our daughter's impending puberty. (...yaaaaaaaay...) If a cutiemark simply can't manifest before the pony's body is damn good and ready, which seems to be the case, what with it corresponding nicely with the biological process of getting ready to make babies, that means that only after the filly or colt is old enough will the cutiemark appear; and based on the general population of ponies in the show and allowing for statistical anomalies that experience Early Onset Cutiemark (like Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon, maybe?), this remains the case. Don't know what I'm talking about? Well wait a few paragraphs, 'cause I'm going to blow your freakin' mind! And keep in mind, this isn't their age when they ask Twilight about her cutiemark story back in season one. Certain reviewers have postulated that several seasons of the show are packed into a single year, and somehow all the events of seasons one, two, and three, the first Equestria Girls movie, and the first couple episodes of season four all happened in under 365 days. This is demonstrably false, and we can break that down in another post; suffice to say that if we can take a single season of the show as being a single year in ponyland, then between the time when the CMC first start their journey to find their butt-stamp to the time they actually get it is five years. After that time gets royally f**ked thanks to Starlight Glimmer and Sci-Twi.
So what do we mean when we say Starlight Glimmer and the human world's Twilight Sparkle completely boned time? It has to do with space-time, as in the Einsteinian concept that space and time are not two separate concepts and are, in fact, a single construct in the universe. If that doesn't make your brain hurt just a little, you're not thinking hard enough about it. What this means is you can't have space without time and you can't have time without space. Time is, essentially, the fourth dimension.
Oh, and before we go on, a bit of vocabulary clarification. Regardless of the words they use in the show, the human world and the pony world are not different dimensions, they're parallel universes.
So up until the end of Season 5, the timelines between humanland and horseland were on a pretty even keel; time passing roughly the same in both universes, enough so that we can reasonably assume that a year spent at Canterlot High is roughly the same as a year spent in Ponyville, although there's some evidence that time may have passed at a faster rate for Equestria while the portal is closed, since it's less than a full year between when Sunny got her demonic butt handed to her and when the Sirens tried to make like The Heathers on Canterlot High. Of course, unlike the beginning of Equestria Girls and the end of Friendship Games, we don't have and clear time-stamp on when Twilight makes her second trip through the mirror, so it's possible to simply insert Rainbow Rocks pretty much anywhere in the Equestria timeline that it would best fit. (Although it'd have to be after the events of the episode "Maud Pie," because Twilight knows who Maud is during the sleepover at Pinkie's)
But then at the end of FiM season 6 and during the climax of "Friendship Games" we have two incidents that, for all intents and purposes, happen simultaneously, Starlight Glimmer and Sci-Twi break the multiverse.
Glim-glam is a very, very smart mare. The problem is she's impulsive, and so when she put two and two together with Starswirl's time spell (which we never really learned what that particular spell's purpose was, though we can guess it was the same spell Twilight Sparkle used in "It's About Time"), she got 35 and went with it. The problem was that she didn't simply create a wormhole to another point in space-time like Twilight's use of Starswirl's spell did (which created a closed-time-loop where causality took over and Twilight was railroaded into the specific sequence of events), she created a causality locked loop for herself that directly interacted with a non-causality time-artifact in the form of Twilight Sparkle being able to directly (and linearly) alter the flow of a single time stream repeatedly, using the cutie-map as an anchor. This didn't just move Twilight into other timelines, it actively created new timelines that didn't exist before. (Don't worry, it's a quantum impossibility for those new timelines to overwrite any already existing timelines, so no genocide occurring on a Thanos-scale occured) Then, once Twilight figured out a way to break out of Starlight's trap, she did it by breaking the causality loop that Glimmer was locked in, thereby breaking causality itself.
And lest you think I'm laying the blame for this just at Starlight's feet, let's revisit our dear Sci-Twi. While being corrupted by far more magic than she should ever have been exposed to in the first place, Midnight Sparkle started tearing holes in the fabric of reality. Through these holes we can see Equestria. Here's the question, though, which Equestria? After all, throughout all the events of The Friendship Games we see Sunset trying (and failing) to contact Princess Twilight Sparkle, and the Princess of Friendship is unable to receive any of the messages until after she's finished dealing with Starlight Glimmer. This means that Twilight was stuck in the time trap for literal days while Sunset and company were trying to wrangle the fallout from Sci-Twi's cyberpunk Element of Magic.
Oh, you didn't realize that's what Sci-Twi had actually made? Think about it: You have a single artifact that uses the magic of the other five elements to create Orbital Friendship Lasers, allow someone to ascend to a higher magical form, and who's improper use turns the wielder into a demonic force. Not saying that Princess Twilight isn't smart, but I don't see her putting together an Element of Magic from a smoke detector and parts from cell phones. Just sayin'!
So while Equestria is in temporal flux, with multiple versions of Equestria existing simultaneously and in parallel, Midnight is tearing holes between universes, while we don't see enough through the tears in reality to confirm this, it's not just possible but likely that each hold in space-time is a portal to a different Equestria.
Princess Twilight and Sunset managed to fix the multiverse, but only just.
By the time the CMC manage their cutiemarks, they're not impressionable little fillies anymore. Even assuming they start the series as the show's target demographic of 4-7 years old, by the time they get their flank-stamp they're at the youngest, tweens. More likely, though, they're at least 13 to 14 years old, which would make them High School Freshmen; and look at that, their EQG counterparts are high school freshmen.
"BUT WAIT!" you shout, "Everyone knows that the CMCs and their classmates were aged up for the EQG universe!"
To which I reply, "Don't shout at me, and says who?"
Ah, the cute-ceanera; an adorable ponification of the quinceanera, a tradition in Latin-American cultures that celebrates a girl's transition from childhood to womanhood. After this celebration she's considered to be a contributing adult in her household, and the quinceneara doubles as a "coming out" party where the young woman announces to the world that she's now looking for a husband. This passage to adulthood happens on the birthday when she's considered old enough to be a mature, responsible adult who...wait, it happens when they're 15?!!!
Mother of Me, this lines up even more perfectly for this theory than I thought!
Also, season 1 through 5 Diamond Tiara is even more of a little bitch for picking on kids who haven't even started puberty yet, but then again, my 10 year old daughter is at the age when girls older than her are starting to treat her poorly because she hasn't had her period yet, which proves the constant that children are mean, nasty creatures no matter the species.
So apparently the fillies and colts of Equestria are a lot more physically mature than we originally gave them credit for. In other words, it's not the younger members of the cast that have been aged up, it's that the older members have been aged down.
This means that developing a cutiemark really is the pony equivalent of puberty. Not the start of puberty, but getting far enough through puberty that in centuries past you'd be considered an adult and expected to contribute to the household, your village, and society as a whole. The cute-ceanera the public celebration of the filly becoming a woman.
So now we know how old, approximately, Twilight Sparkle was (within a reasonable margin) when she got her cutiemark; between 14-16 years old. In other words, Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns isn't the Hogwart's-style old-world institution that our friends from across the pond are more familiar with, CSGU is a high school.
This is when we get back to the amount of time Sunset Shimmer spent in the human universe after running away from home. If you recall, the extremely conservative estimate was that she was on the side of the mirror where she has hands for 6-7 years. Basic grade-school math means that by the time Book-horse is crowned Princess, she's between 20-23 years old. And given that Sunset Shimmer bolted through the mirror when she was around Twilight's coronation age, that'd make present day Sunny-bun 26-30 years old.
"But hold on, Princess, you said you could prove the ages of all the Mane 6?"
Why yes, yes I did.
We have two data points for this: Let's take a look at their humanland counterparts for a moment. At the time of Friendship Games (remember, this is the last time the two universe's timelines will sync up), they were all in the same grade, and probably seniors. In fact, unless another movie or miniseries comes out that shows us otherwise, we can probably assume that the HuMane 7 are graduated as of Roller-coaster of Friendship. This means that they're all within 1-2 years of age with each other.
Returning to ponyworld and rolling back the clock again, we can see in the flashbacks in "The Cutiemark Chronicles" that all six of Equestria's future Most Valuable Ponies get their cutiemarks at the same time. Season 1 also provides us with a few other hints on the Mane 6's ages. Fluttershy, for example, says that she's a year older than Pinkie in "Griffon the Brush Off." Rarity is making costumes for a school play featuring vegetables. I don't know about you, but the last time I saw a school play about produce was for elementary school. This doesn't mean that Rarity was in elementary school, but it does mean that she was close enough in age to have her participation as a costume designer not be an issue. Amusingly enough, even though Rarity spends the most time on age treatments and beauty creams and the like, she's probably the youngest of the Mane 6. We know that Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy grew up together, which likely means that they were in the same class until Dash dropped out, and though Dash is probably younger than Buttershush, the age difference is probably negligible. Applejack says that she was the last person in her class to get a cutiemark, and while that doesn't necessarily mean she's automatically younger (delayed puberty does happen and runs in families), it does suggest as much. I personally suspect she was born late enough in the year that she was one of the youngest people in class. (This happened to me, I was the youngest kid in my kindergarten class because my birthday is in September)
So let's put this in order:
- Fluttershy
- Rainbow Dash
- Pinkie Pie
- Twilight Sparkle
- Applejack
- Rarity
But how old are they? Well, let's go back to Twilight Sparkle's age: Sparkle-butt is 25-28 years old when she opens the School of Friendship. Remembering that they're all about 1-2 years close in age, and we have a comfortable range to work with:
- Fluttershy - 26-30
- Rainbow Dash - 26-30
- Pinkie Pie - 25-29
- Twilight Sparkle - 25-28
- Applejack - 23-27
- Rarity - 22-26
So we have a pretty big range there, 22-30, so let's aim for the mean since we've already determined their pretty close to the same age. If our statistical mid-range is 26, we can pin that to Twilight and work from there:
- Fluttershy - 27
- Rainbow Dash - 27
- Pinkie Pie - 26
- Twilight Sparkle - 26
- Applejack - 25
- Rarity - 25
You all know what this mean, right? That's right, all you Flash-Light shippers had better alter that course to pair the purple pony princess up with the protector paragon pegasus and NOT the pubescent pupil, or you're getting into some mighty disturbing territory there!
Speaking of...what about Shimmy-sham getting back together with Flash Sentry in the more recent EQG entries? Well, as stated earlier, the Class of Magical Banhammers and students that have a Final Form are pretty close to graduating, if they're not already after the events of Forgotten Friendship. It's not unusual for older students in that age bracket to actually be 18 years old or older at the time of graduation, even if they were never held back a grade or required extra credits on their transcript. I can easily see a reformed Sunset, no longer looking to get into a relationship just for social status or ambition but knowing from past experience what a nice guy Flash can be taking a look at this young adult and deciding that maybe she can make it work now that he's old enough to not need help with his high school math homework.
Oh, and remember that thing I mentioned about the time-lines being completely f**ked? All I have to say on that topic is Princess Twilight better not move that journal off the mirror for very long, 'cause that's the only piece of duct tape that's keeping both universes, and probably several alternate time-line universes, pinned together. The EQG universe is already showing signs that time is moving slower than it is in Equestria. If contact is ever cut off for any reason, it's entirely possible that the two universes would completely de-sync, possibly even spinning off and away from each other to never make contact again! Better hope the Princesses have a copy of your Last Will and Testament updated, 'cause the next time you see them could be the last time.
Sincerely,
Princess Columbia
Thanks for reading my mindless drivel, and for putting up with my attempt to emulate Austin's 'The SCIENCE!' videos on The Game Theorist's YouTube channel. Don't forget to like and subscribe watch to get even more ramblings from your American Princess.
Well constructed indeed. Interesting thoughts about the M6's ages as well, I've never seen anyone pin them down so precisely before - at last, not with so much evidence to back it up.
I look forward to this post. It's been a constant bugbear of mine that people insist the first three seasons are one year long despite all the contradictory evidence.
Applying intense math to things it was never meant to be applied to is always a worthy endeavor. My compliments!
Your insane!!!...... I love it
Read the whole thing in Austin's voice, and it was glorious. I iust have one or two teensy weensy issues, and I'm going to try to express them SCIEN-tifically myself. Ahem:
Citation. Freaking. Needed. We know the Crusaders are in the same class as Diamond Tiara from mountains of firsthand evidence, and are thus at least roughly the same age as her. And remember whose cuteceañera introduced us to the concept way back in Season 1? That's right, Diamond Tiara's. This means that the possible age range for cutiesynthesis spans at least five years by your argument before taking any other possible forms of error into account.
Granted, that's roughly the range of uncertainty you present, but there's one other issue: Rainbow Dash. In "Call of the Cutie," while Applejack says she was the last foal in her class to get her mark, Dash quite proudly states that she was the first. We see that this is blatantly false in "Cutie Mark Chronicles," but she was still one of the first, and that early/late split would imply their relative ages are the polar opposites of what you present.
As an alternative, it's possible that Fluttershy was kept back a year or more in Flight Camp, thus explaining her gangly, pubescent limbs as opposed to Dash the tiny, angry fluffball.
As for Sunset, your assumptions about the sirens' immortality are just that, assumptions. We don't know how their magic or unaging bodies worked prior to getting bitchslapped by the power of an enemy Stand, and your hypothesis states that Sunset hasn't physically aged in over six years. Now, she's been going to CHS for roughly four of those, and someone at some point—likely a school nurse—probably would have said something about the freaky unaging entity who showed no sign of needing to decapitate her fellow immortals with a broadsword to claim their power.
Now I admit that I don't have a better explanation for how she got all of the necessary documentation or her sweet apartment, but I personally suspect that she knew about the Element of Magic from her studies with Celestia. After all, before Twiggles came along, Sunbutt the Younger was likely Tia's best bet for decrazifying Moonbutt, and she might have tried giving what she felt was valuable, need-to-know information ahead of time. (She saw how well that worked, so the second time around, she went for the Obi-Wan approach.)
Still, overall, some good stuff, especially how the quantum entanglement journal is the one piece of masking tape holding together the local multiverse. (Well, two pieces as of "Mirror Magic.")
Quite interesting blog post.
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Comments added appropriately, see the added text in green.
Actually, they're in the same classroom, not necessarily the same class. Ponyville, for all it's a (very, very distant) suburb of Canterlot and the largest concentration of ponies between the Canterhorn and Los Pegasus, it's still a tiny little farm town. I'm betting the vast majority of it's pre-Princess Twilight economy came from the Apple and Pear family farms (and eventually just the Apple farm) for the better part of it's existence. Even by the end of the first season the town didn't even rate a train station. (Not the train wasn't in the S01 intro but appeared in the S02 intro) Tiny little frontier-style towns of that size don't have a large enough population to support a school any larger than a single room, so all kids going through school would meet in the same room.
...??? I'm not following.
That's a remarkably specific example, and you may have inspired a fanfic where Nurse Redheart is a Highlander and mistakes an age-locked Sunset Shimmer for another Highlander and hijinks ensue.
That said, why would the school nurse have noticed? The average high school has 1-2 thousand students, and even if the odds were good that Sunset would simply blend in with the crowd, Shimmer would probably do her damndest to never see the school nurse (or any other staff person who might notice her lack of aging) specifically for the reasons you cited.
True! But remember that when she made like Ferris Beuller Through the Looking Glass, the whereabouts of the Element of Magic were unknown, and likely everything she knew about it would have been taught to her by Sunbutt the Ancient, and she didn't know much about it before it disappeared after banishing Nightmare Moon. Sunset would still have had to do LOTS of recon and fast in order to be able to formulate a plan when she finally came through to act on it.
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Regarding the documentation, there is another option. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the magic of the mirror is able to automatically localize users. It makes you the local most common sapient species, and more importantly gives you clothes appropriate to the local culture. Maybe this is through something similar to Connection (Wax and Wayne by Brandon Sanderson) but the details don't matter. What does matter is that Equestrian bits would become Pedestrian bits, birth certificates would change to match the local forms, and so on. That the sirens wound up human suggests this effect is something intrinsic to Starswirl's method of dimensional travel, since he had no reason to make things easy for them.
I'm also going to suggest the Siren's immorality doesn't mean they never age. Instead, they gain youth from their feasts and age again during their famines. It would be very traditional. And finding strife to feed on wouldn't be very hard for most of history, even if more magic radically increases their power and ability to digest it.
Now that brings us to Sunset. It's possible that she's similarly aging...but every time she uses the mirror her age resets. As to why it's always high school, presumably it's again something to do with the destiny entanglement between the dimensions. Finding you an equivalent place in the weave, even if the details are different (authority figures are often teachers etc).
Speaking of the Destiny Entanglement, that makes keeping the two dimensions stitched together even more vital. After all, there's no guarantee Pedestria mirrors Equestria. It could very well be the other way around, and if the dimensions break apart everything from the Map Table to Cutie Marks themselves may be screwed up.
Eh, I don't know... While a lot of this sounds reasonable, much of it is predicated on the assumption that Cutie Marks are an entirely biological thing. This is NOT the impression I've gotten, what with the marks consistently appearing at moments of self discovery AND with said marks being relevant TO said self discovery. Rather, I suspect Cutie Marks could theoretically happen at ANY age (assuming the subject is cognizant enough to formulate the required metaphysical thoughts). If this were the case, we couldn't make any reasonable assumptions about age based on those butt stamps, and thus most of the deductions here lose their foundations entirely.
Still, the part about multi-dimensional (NOT multiversal, that term would also encompass every MLP fanfic universe and then some) destabilization seems to hold water... which is honestly pretty terrifying.