Holy shit. · 1:17pm Sep 18th, 2019
I think I figured out an actual way time can flow in the same rate in Equestria and EQG world and still account for discrepancies between the two series.
It's not a matter of time. It a matter of how it's measured.
Since day, night, the weather, and most other natural phenomena are controlled by ponies, there's no reason to assume that they'd use the same "24 hrs= 1 day, 365 days = 1 year" calendar we would.
What if the Equestrian day is 20 hrs long, with Celestia and Luna adjusting the length of day and night based on the weather needs, crop cycles, etc.?
And following on that, what if the Equestrian year is 200 days long?
So 200 days in a year times 20 hours in a day= 4000 hours.
4000 divided by 24 hours in an Earth day is 166.666 repeating. We'll round that up to 167 for ease.
Now, assuming Sunset was roughly 22 Equestrian years old when she first came through, that gives us 4400 days. Divide 4400 by 365, that makes 22 year old Sunset just over 12 years old on "Earth." And if you subscribe to the idea, as I do, that Sunset was in the human world for two cycles of the portal to open before the events of the first EQG movie1, that would put Sunset roughly at human age 17 or 18 at the current point in the series. Which, again, seems to jibe with what we see in the show, assuming the current episodes take place during the girls Senior Year.
So, 1 Equestrian year = just under 6 EQG months. No time dilation, multiple Hearth's Warmings are accounted for, and we have a rationale for why Twilight and Sunset appear as teenagers in EQG but as adults in Equestria.
Is it perfect? No, but we're talking about a cartoon where weather, seasons, and time are largely based on plot convenience.
It solves the "How long is a moon?" problem too.
365 days* 2.5 "earth" years= 912.5 days. 912.5 days/200= 4.5625 Equestrian years. 1 moon= 4.5625 Equestrian years.
Which is, of course where the whole thing falls down, because that would mean the Apple Family Reunion is only held every 456 Equestrian years.
But fuck it, it's good enough for me. Your mileage may vary.
UPDATE: FanOfMostEverything pointed out in the comments that I dropped a conversion when figuring out the length of a Moon, and he was right.
912.5 days would equal thirty moons, not one.
So, 912.5/30 gives us 1 Moon= 30.14666 repeating days.
Holy shit again. I think I just proved the 2.5 year assumption has been accurate this whole time!
1 First cycle, she came through. Second cycle, she went back, found out about Twilight and the Elements, got pissed and began plotting.
Damn, that's solid. :O
I try not to put a lot of stock in the "every hundred moons" thing, mostly because it was season one and not everything had been planned out. And it really just does not make sense vis-a-vis every other time they've used 'moon' as a measure of time. :B
I think you forgot a conversion factor when calculating days per moon. The mirror opens every thirty moons, so this may actually be more airtight than you think.
And maybe Applejack said 100 moons in a figurative way, like saying a long time, just like if I say "DUDE I haven't seen you in a million years" or, "we can only get together every hundred years" it doesn't mean exactly the amount of time, just that is a long period... or maybe bad writing.
When/where has it been mentioned that Sunset came back to learn about Twilight?
And knowing that is has been exactly two cycles before EQG?
I like it. Not time warp but fast years. It’s not even necessarily easy to notice unless you’ve got a good internal clock. You just have more time for plot to happen in a day on one side of the mirror.
5122939
It hasn't.But, the only way Sunset could logically know about Twilight and the Elements is if she came back to Equestria some time between her initial departure and the events of the first movie. Otherwise, the movie's entire premise doesn't work.
Easiest thing to assume is the portal opened once between Sunset's departure and the beginning of the movie.
5122926
Shit, you're right. I did.
5122926
912.5 days would equal thirty moons, not one.
So, 912.5/30 gives us 1 Moon= 30.14666 repeating days.
Holy shit again. I think I just proved the 2.5 year assumption has been accurate this whole time!
How on Earth did you come up with all this?
5122978
I've been mulling it over for a while for a fic idea. This morning I surprised myself by finding a way that actually works.
One problem with the 2.5 year theory. "Friendship Games" established said games only happen every 4 years and Sunset didn't know that, or how seriously it was taken, meaning she couldn't have been in the human world longer than 4 years. But if we tweak the numbers (the staff said the EG world isn't earth so no need to hold them to our time) we can still use the formulas here. If we assume Equestrian moons are far shorter than Earth months, hence the 100 between Apple family reunions, that gives a lot of leeway.
(Sunset being there for a smaller amount of timemakes sense given how many more years of school she goes through.)
But I was thinking that years in Equestria are shorter than human years. That explains why nopony visibly aged (most notably Pound and Pumpkin who remain babies as we've seen 5-year olds have distinct designs) despite everything that happened in the series.
5122941
Thanks!
5123014
I always figured she just didn't care about them during her queen bitch days.
5122941
Not necessarily. All Sunset was "up to date" on was Twilight being a princess (too recent to have learned in prior visits) and the workings of the Elements (her redemption was triggered by how horribly wrong her knowledge of them proved). That also raises the question of how Sunset wasn't caught as Celestia would have had the mirror observed when open in case she returned (as for it being unobserved in the movie maybe she'd given up on Sunset returning).
The Element went through the mirror Wednesday morning (per human Fluttershy). If the mirror open midnight that day and Sunset went through then (makes sense if she wanted to sneak in), that's an roughly 8-hour window to have heard learned of Twilight's coronation and Element (which would be quick as it's recent front-page news), go back through the mirror to get/make the fake Element (more more contrived than anything else in the series). Her knowledge of the Elements working could be what she learned of in theory of magic artifacts during her time as Celestia's student.
5123025
Cared about what?
If you mean Sunset being too arrogant to care about the possibility of it being that makes sense. But that doesn't explain the the other stuff.
Did you delete my comments on your story related to this?
You came up with some maths that looked interesting, but it turned out to be wrong. There's no need to get defensive about it.
It's even easily fixed. Sunset's 18 Earth years are 39 Equestrian years. If you want her to be 22 Equestrian years when she arrived, then she was 10 Earth years at the time. Nothing wrong with that.
Or if you want to keep her Earth arrival age at 12, she would have been 26 in Equestria. Also reasonable.
5134291
You're right. I apologize.