Hypothesis #5: The Nature of Tartarus · 2:49pm Sep 13th, 2018
I did say I might cook up something to make School Raze make sense. This here is it.
This episode, and particularly the depiction of Tartarus in it, requires a large amount of aftermarket parts to fit with the rest of the series and even with itself, let alone common sense. But I think I got something which, while mostly made of the said parts, at least does not contradict anything else or itself. It opens up a huge door of further theorizing, but isn’t that the point?
Conjecture #1: Tartarus is a quasi-space
Or, to be more precise, a place that exists partially outside normal time and space, but cannot be properly called a world unto itself.
Arguments:
- According to Celestia, while living in Ponyville, one might “fall into Tartarus,” which is a concerning emergency. There is no way for this to happen if it’s just a cave. (A Celestial Advice)
- Tirek can be kept inside securely by merely stuffing him in a cage, next to cages full of creatures known to have magic, without worrying that he might consume their magic and break out. (School Raze)
- One does not need to concern themselves with feeding or cleaning up after the inmates or guarding the place beyond a single Cerberus, who sufficed for a thousand years. (It’s About Time, School Raze)
- Once Twilight is locked inside, she explicitly says that she is locked with Tirek together forever, implying that even death won’t part them. The only way it can be true is when you can’t die in Tartarus at all. (School Raze)
We know precious little about Tartarus even from this episode. However, based on the idea that Tartarus looks mostly as presented, and cartoon resolution did not eat guards, checkpoints, feeding and waste removal facilities, offices, etc, etc, and yet, somehow, the place managed to do the job required of it for a thousand years, we need to assume that it does work, by itself.
My interpretation is that, as Mitch H aptly described it, Tartarus is Limbo Lite.(1) Inmates experience the passage of time mentally, but physically they do not age, do not require food or water, cannot be hurt or substantially altered magically, cannot exercise magic, and otherwise become static.
This is probably seen as a highly equine punishment for this reason: It is an equivalent of a time out – which gives the incarcerated time to consider their sins, but puts everything else about them on hold.(2)
However, for such an application, Tartarus would require to be isolated from time, space, and magic, at least partially. Evidently it is not isolated sufficiently, as we see that even the normally magical creatures currently held in Tartarus lose most of their magic. Which leads into…
Conjecture #2: Tartarus is partially broken
At a certain point, Tartarus sprung a leak, and permits physical changes in the inmates, while still not failing completely.
Arguments:
- Tirek is depicted as healthy in Celestia’s picture book story, yet emerges elderly and decrepit. Consuming magic improves his condition, but taking it away reduces him to the same state again. (Twilight’s Kingdom)
- Tirek could escape at all – with no obvious accomplices, it was a completely random, unexpected event. Twilight’s Kingdom
We can say nothing regarding when did this leak appear, however, I suspect it has been around for a long time, and nobody is aware of its existence except Tirek. Being exposed to this leak permitted Tirek to regain enough power to break out, overpower Cerberus and escape. Presumably, it takes at least decades for Tirek to regain enough power to try again.
This by itself does not take care of the problem of Tirek communicating with Cozy Glow by mail. Which would be a problem if anyone is at all serious about keeping him imprisoned. However, at no point does Tirek describe how did the mail arrive, where did he get money for stamps, or even a pen – and the ponies don’t think to ask. Which leads into…
Conjecture #3: Magical Direct Mail exists
Many of my commenters floated the idea that Equestrian mailponies will just deliver to Tartarus, which is a lovely idea for a comedy, but I don’t think it works in a more serious interpretation of Equestria. However:
Arguments:
- While nobody is ever shown actually using dragonfire mail except Celestia, Spike and Luna,(3) dragons themselves recognize the concept instantly when shown. (Dragon Quest)
- Cadance sends Twilight an invitation to Flurry Heart’s crystalling directly with a magical snowflake. (The Crystalling)
- Twilight’s artifact collection includes an universal magical skeleton key. (School Raze)
My conclusion is that Cozy Glow has been exploiting the leak to send Tirek mail and receive replies by magical means. Which would normally require unicorn magic, but as Damaged pointed out, Cozy Glow had access to a collection of artifacts, which, if it included such a generic thing as a magical skeleton key, could also include an artifact to send any message directly to destination – and come back with a reply.
Conjecture #4: Cozy Glow is not actually a pony
I have no idea what she is, but by now I’m convinced she’s not from Equestria in the first place. I listed several arguments for this in the actual PoC post for School Raze, however, let’s do this more concisely:
- In public and with Neighsay, she always says “we ponies” but once one on one with a victim, it’s suddenly “you ponies.”
- She drains magic to “another realm,” by her own admission.
- As pegasus education stands now in Equestria, it definitely does not include knowledge of ritual magic. It doesn’t even include knowledge that it is possible, as Celestia’s description of the curriculum demonstrates in School Daze. The idea that a pegasus might be capable of doing it is quite alien to pony practice, it’s not something you stumble upon easily.
- Cozy Glow behaves markedly differently between Marks for Effort and School Raze, and yet uses the same vocabulary, far in advance of what a child her apparent age would use.
- Celestia and Luna incarcerate Cozy Glow without a second thought in a cage among monsters. Either they did this to a little filly when every adult pony who did anything of the sort(4) was forgiven on the spot, or they are aware that Cozy Glow is not what she appears to be.
- No parental figures or guardians appear to contest the above sentencing or even simply to worry.
We’ve seen manipulative adult ponies before – for example, Suri Polomare and Svengallop. They don’t behave quite like this, do they?
Conjecture #5: Cozy Glow’s plan
The shakiest part of the whole thing, but I think it makes sense, if only because I’m not the only one to have come up with it. Reese offered a quote that I think fits here very well:
Gold? It flowed as though there were an endless supply. The commander shipped enough back on the first load to make them all wealthy.
The commander didn’t go back home to spend his wealth amid the luxuries of the Imperial court, even though Emperor Carl appointed him to the nobility. That sort of thing wasn’t the commander’s meat. There, he would be a fourth-rate noble; here, he was the Imperial Viceroy, responsible only to the distant Emperor. There, he would be nothing; here, he was almost a king.
My theory is that Cozy Glow is an unwilling participant in a scheme to steal as much magic from Equestria as possible. Unwilling, but nowhere friendly enough to trust ponies to help her. Her actual masters are not interested in her fate, and are only concerned about magic, which isn’t something Cozy Glow herself desires to have. She resents them and does not want to go back.
Plan A is to exploit the situation to become a pony of status and influence, by supplanting Twilight Sparkle. An opportunity to get Twilight out of the way presents itself as part of her primary job that she can’t avoid doing – so she sends Twilight on a wild goose chase. But it fails.
Plan B, however, is… To end up in Tartarus! Damaged proposed that Cozy Glow could have had this as a desirable failure state in her plan, and I think I know how could it be desirable: Being in communication with Tirek, Cozy Glow is aware of the nature of Tartarus, as well as aware that it has a leak. She knows that this prison has acquired a revolving door – but at the same time, it does keep one alive and youthful beyond what would normally be possible, and while she will age, it will happen at a greatly reduced rate.
Eventually, Tartarus will break open, one way or another, and she will emerge with an army of monsters – but by that time, her masters will be dead or weakened, whatever hold they have over her will be released and she will be free. And as we have seen, Cozy Glow is good at the long game.
The above makes a better story than taking this episode at face value, I’m sure.
Q & A
Q: What are all these random monsters doing in Tartarus?…
A: This is not a normal state of things. As howard035 suggested, after A Royal Problem, or for any similar reason, Luna, to quell a spot of panic, started rounding up creatures which otherwise wouldn’t merit incarceration in Tartarus.
Q: Twilight fully expected the cockatrice to be able to turn them to stone. So she expects it to still have its regular powers in there. Why?
A: Reflex. She already had been turned to stone by a cockatrice once, and has a perfectly reasonable phobia of the experience.
Q: Why were pegasus powers unaffected?
Q: Who moved the sun every day?
A: Same answer to these two: Cozy Glow designed the magic-stealing ritual to leave at least some of the magic alone – the magic most essential to keeping pony civilization alive, if not particularly advanced. I.e. earth pony magic, pegasus magic, and the specific magics required to move celestial objects were explicitly left out of the equation. Pony culture would take a nosedive it wouldn’t get out of, because there’s little doubt unicorn magic is responsible for many technologies which are beyond them otherwise, but would not collapse immediately or anytime soon.
Q: Why didn’t Tirek use the same method to drain magic, instead, chasing ponies around Equestria personally?
A: I believe DannyJ’s explanation fits best: Tirek is not perfectly rational. While using this method to drain the entire Equestria was an option, it was offensive to his ideology. To quote:
That’s the thing with Tirek - he’s good at being the trickster and lurking in the shadows and lying to get his way, but he doesn’t want to do these things. You can see this in the show. As soon as he has the power to leave the shadows and make open war on Equestria, he does exactly that. He abandons subtlety altogether the moment he no longer needs it. At heart, he is a prideful being who wants to show the whole world just how dangerous he is. All the manipulation and sneaking about is so that he one day won’t have to manipulate and sneak about, and I get the feeling that he really detests doing it sometimes.
He could’ve easily opened with the hostage gambit to Twilight, but did he? No. He didn’t want to. He wanted a fight. And that’s who Tirek is.
(1) See Shadow Play.
(2) Notice that according to FIENDship is Magic #5, which still has yet to be jossed properly, Celestia imprisoned Chrysalis in a volcano, which you hardly would expect anyone to survive, when Tartarus would have to have been available already. My guess is that this is because Chrysalis’ crime against equinity is genocide – but Tirek’s only actual crime that wasn’t prevented is aggravated fratricide. See Hypothesis #4 for details.
(3) In Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep. The leaked series “bible” implies that the other endpoint of Spike’s dragonflame was supposed to be the fireplace in Celestia’s room, however, rather than Celestia or Luna themselves. Later series refuses to elaborate on the issue.
(4) Tirek notwithstanding.
A quibble: Tirek never overpowered Cerberus. He escaped during It's About Time, when Cerberus was away.
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Can’t work as such: The door locks automatically as per School Raze. The obvious solution is that Cerberus tried to give chase while Twilight just assumed he wandered off.
Good to see my interpretation of Tirek so widely accepted... Though, I continue to believe that Cozy Glow's inequinity is a stretch. As much as it might be a comfort to think that Celestia wouldn't really laugh about putting a little filly in Tartarus, I think we both know that if the writers had intended any such thing, it would've been said in the episode. And Cozy Glow is definitely going to come back, if that cliff-hanger is anything to go by. So all it'll take is for one line describing her as a foal, filly, pony, or pegasus, spoken by a character who knows what happened to her, and this will get debunked.
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The show will one day be over. Ponyfic will last a lot longer.
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When all is said and done, I really wonder how many fanfics are even going to stick with the final canon of the series, considering so many people I know in this fandom don't even watch the show anymore. It's not even over yet, and I've already started writing all my own fics as part of an AU where season seven onwards never happened.
Nice analysis (as usual). :)
Though I note you didn't address no one remarking on the magic drain skipping over some types of pony magic. Are we just saying, oh, idea, that the episode was mistranslated, as it were, and what the ponies actually said clearly specified the types of magic involved (that is, something like "unicorn magic" instead of just "magic", some particular categorization of magical abilities we don't have the vocabulary to state concisely instead of just magical abilities in general, etc.)?
For anyone who's curious, by the way, the quote I contributed was from Despoilers of the Golden Empire, a rather nicely clever story, I think.
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My general observation is that while formally, what pegasi and earth ponies do is in fact magic, and educated specialists are aware of that and occasionally use the term to describe these abilities, earth ponies and pegasi do not call their powers magic for whatever cultural reason. If they have a specialist vocabulary for describing these things, we don’t know any examples, or more likely, don’t recognize them as such.
Which is why it’s probable that nobody remarks on it because they don’t notice – and the ponies who do notice and find it weird have more immediately important things to talk about once they get to the camera.
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Ahh, thanks.
So our current working theory is basically Mitch's story, minus the hologram part? Decent theory.
I can definitely see Cozy's back up plan be "with all the time I need, I will befriend an army of monsters, and sooner or later we'll all be able to escape." Assuming Cozy can get out of her cell, she can probably use the method Twilight used.
It sounds like your theory is that Cozy is an eldritch abomination sent to steal all the magic, a bit like Jordan179's Shadows. I still like the idea that she's a human, but I think I'll wait on that until we actually learn more about the second portal in the upcoming EQG special.
4936981 I would hope they do something more. Most of those monsters locked up we've never seen hurt anyone, and the manticore even befriended the Mane 6 all the way back in the series opener. Those monsters willingly gave their power to help Twilight, turning into amalgamations of animals in the process, and their reward is to get thrown right back into the cages at the end?
Wow. It looked undoable, but this makes sense to me! I particularly like the 'Tartarus has a leak' bit, also explaining why Cozy is happy to end up there as a plan B.
Although I have to agree with DannyJ -- as much as Cozy Glow being nonpony would be way more interesting, and quite possibly originally was in an earlier draft, it seems overwhelmingly likely that if that was the direction they were doing, somepony would have mentioned it.
Actually, upon writing that, another thought comes to mind:
1. The ending is just ambiguous enough that they could change their minds later.
And that thought was followed by another:
2. What if the long explanation of Cozy Glow's origins had to be cut for time? By finishing the episode this way, the episode can stand as is (at least, as well as most other episodes...) and they can do the reveal later.
So now I'm uncertain.
Additional thoughts!
Do we see any certain proof that the 'fading magical abilities' effect is passing into Tartarus? Twilight lost her unicorn magic before entering. The creatures weren't drained into their component animals.
That does leave the cockatrice's stare, but... what if it had some kind of neutralization spell placed on it (by Luna, if the tough-on-monsters theory stands), which is still in place because of Tartarus's demiplane nature, and everypony just assumes that it lost its magic?
This also explains why the other monsters and Cerberus haven't been turned to stone. And stuff like the chimera's fire breath.
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Yeah, it doesn't exactly strike me as fair either.
4937482 What's interesting about that idea isn't just that it works Watsonially, but that it actually feels like the kind of thing that doylistically fits with the themes of the story.
I could totally see a EQG special about a human girl who started out wanting ponies, but in order to get those pony friends had to make a deal with a dark and evil power to travel to pony land, and then has to pay back those debts with magic if she wants to stay. Like a reverse-Tempest Shadow.
Oh, the whole thing with Cozy Glow is fascinating. I've arrived to similar conclusions by myself and came up with the big storyline to explain it. She definitely has masters out there...