The mighty earth pony · 8:57pm Sep 1st, 2018
Unicorn magic is versatile. Pegasus magic is flashy. But earth magic feeds the nation.
I submit that Ms. Faust did a far better job of balancing the tribes than adherents of the tiresome “unicorn master race” trope seem to accept. It’s critical to understand Equestria was presented as possessing a level of technology roughly equivalent to the 1860s–1880s, before industrial-scale agriculture and massive worldwide logistical pipelines existed. In that context, the ability to assure steady, reliable harvests (and to deliver them to market) is enormously powerful—to a degree that’s almost impossible to overstate. Living in today’s world of fresh fruit flown by jet from the other hemisphere, it’s easy to forget that throughout all but a tiny sliver of human history, just getting enough food to eat all too often was a daily struggle. Equestria simply does not have that worry.
The overt, showy magic of spells, weatherworking, or flight indeed are beguiling, and to be fair they seem to be mightier on an individual basis. By comparison humble earth magic is subtle and slow-moving, generating results in seasons rather than seconds, but it absolutely is every bit as powerful when regarded on a society-wide level. Give those earth ponies some love.
Bless.
I’d say that a complete control of weather patterns is a pretty big factor as well. Really, it’s just the unicorns left out in the cold after the Sisters showed up and took away their primary job/threat held over the other tribes.
4929745
True, and an earlier draft alluded to the “force multiplier” effect of the pegasus tribe—but it dropped out during revision and I forgot to add it back in. Doh.
Agreed on all counts.
They also, IMO, have some other abilities which have fallen by the wayside over recent centuries (due to disuse) in all but the most unusual cases, as evidenced by the Pie family.
Hard to be a master race if you can't eat.
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On the other hand, they're free to push the bleeding edge of possibility. That's not always a good thing, Starlight, but it does give them the opportunity to advance civilization.
4929787
Yeah I was going to talk about that too, but I got lazy.
So yes, that’s the flip side of the argument. In how many agricultural civilizations is political power vested in the people growing the food that makes having a civilization possible? That’s right, roughly zero of them. That position usually goes to folks with enough spare time to get really good at using various pointy objects in any number of unpleasant ways. And look at that, unicorns are born with their own personal pointy objects from the get go.
On the other hand, let's say you can pick one of the three tribes to play as in an rpg. How well does +STR/CON stack up against straight up flying and magical shenanigans?
Unless it's at casual superstrength levels (Maud, Big Mac), it's kind of lame for the DM to tell you "Well, yeah, but like, you'd be awesome if there were 99 more of you, maaan".
I'm leaving Pinkie the hell out of this because she's an eldritch horror with positive goals, or at least a cultist of same.
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I dealt with this when writing my pony RPG. An earth-pony player character gets a laundry list of small, subtle benefits, among them a slightly higher average value for characteristics, the option to use Power (a magical characteristic) in place of the characteristic normally used for certain skills and most physical feats, and game-master discretion to make additional tweaks or adjustments to taste.
That said, I wasn’t discussing them in the context of RPGs. I was discussing them in the context of world-building and writing.