The Moon Has Two Faces - Delayed Chapter + What Even Is Time? · 7:03pm Jan 2nd, 2021
Hello everyone!
For those of you who are keeping up with The Moon Has Two Faces, I wanted to let you know that the next chapter is still coming. We're delayed this time thanks to the holidays.
Your next chapter will be written by Solana and edited by me. Some of you may recall that she wrote the Frank segment of an earlier chapter, and she's been the mare perched over my shoulder for the whole story. She wanted to take this next one, but we've had to deal with A Lot the past couple weeks ago it will take just a bit longer.
Since it's been a while and people requested it, I thought I'd give my thoughts briefly on a few aspects of the setting! In particular, the time variance between the human Earth and Gaia. As I mentioned in my author's notes, explaining the nature of how time works between the two worlds of the story proved entirely too tedious. Since this is my blog post and no one has stopped me yet, I can ramble to my heart's content.
The following contains minor spoilers for the story as it has been currently written, but none after the halfway point. You have been warned!
In the story, every time Light Breeze goes to sleep, she awakens as Owen, and every time Owen goes to sleep they awaken as Light Breeze. Even if Owen only spends ten minutes awake, a full night will pass for Light Breeze, and if Light Breeze spends three days awake only a single day will pass. Princess Luna is able to, in dreams, shuttle back and forth between the two of them. When does Luna arrive and how?
The first thing to understand is that, while the laws of physics can vary between universes and the laws of magic supercede them and are truly universal, certain consequences remain common between different universes, or at least between Earth and Gaia, and in this case that includes the laws of relativity. All universes in the canon of Two Faces are connected in a vast soup of potential - the sea of formless chaos - that is accessed through dreams - and Earth and Gaia are two faces of the same coin in many senses. There are substantial differences - Gaia is flat, Earth isn't - but many things are the same. It is implied rather than stated that many (albeit not all) of the gods from our mythology were actually figures from Gaia, such as Luna/Selene and her apprentice Artemis or her lover Endymion, their stories tangled and twisted by the game of interuniversal telephone.
For most of the history between Earth and Gaia, these links were tenuous and faint. Time marched differently based on the relative connection and was stochastic and random. A hundred years could pass for every day or vice versa, and this is where you see some myths of people who visit a strange world for a few hours only to return in another century. Once, the human Earth had the magic to support such linkages, but they were infrequent.
In the present day, these random linkages have been all but broken. Now, only a rare dreamer slips safely through the void by pure chance, all but for Light Breeze. I won't spoil why, but this simple act of her soul shuttling back and forth on a schedule lends a kind of reference point between the two worlds and synchronizes them in a way that they haven't really had before. It keeps things regular, and the laws of magic pay attention to things like this. Generally speaking, so long as they maintain healthy sleep cycles, this means a roughly contestant variance between the two worlds. Every 8 hours of sleep on one world is roughly 16 awake on the other and so on, back and forth. If it gets compressed, then that time stretches out - the universes "know" deep down about how long that'll be in the same way Celestia and Luna are able to divine inklings about probable futures, and so time will stretch or contract accordingly.
So, therefore, working out when Luna arrives in one universe is fairly simple. Let's say that Light Breeze is destined to remain awake for 20 hours, and Luna leaves on hour 10. This means she will arrive about halfway through Owen's destined sleep cycle (say, 5 minutes if they are "intended" to sleep for 10.) Knowing this, can Luna try to manipulate things? Arguably yes, but it would profit her little - her reactions can influence the flow of likely events, but the universe would compensate and likely already have an adjustment baked in.
Also, Luna's passage itself is influencing that passage of time in more random ways, so it can fluctuate somewhat, making it rather unpredictable. The "pure" example above is never correct in practice - really, she could arrive two minutes early or late, or even longer.
Eventually, Luna would like to build a portal between the worlds so that she can send help, come in the flesh with all her power, and rescue people who need it. At that point, with a stable entry back and forth, the universes will come more fully into alignment and the passage of time will be locked into something closer to 1:1 with minute fluctuations. The real interesting question is what that would do to someone like Light Breeze and Owen - in my opinion, it would actually allow them the opportunity to dream normally for a time if they arrive while asleep, but it would leave them in a comatose state if they woke without their shared soul until it returned.
What happens in the actual story, though, will be for you to see.
Ooh, multiversal temporal mechanics!
I know, I know, "mechanic" is entirely the wrong word to approach magic in this story, but I still appreciate the breakdown of how this all works.
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Hehe yeah. Glad you liked it!
Gaia isn't actually flat, there is no edge. I know we've talked about this and that you understand that, but it's not really going to be clear to the audience because that discussion isn't included here.
I still disagree with all of this because it makes zero sense in light of all the previous interactions between Earth and Gaia - which have happened and are a big part of the justification for overlap in language/terms. Making relatively literally bend over backwards because one soul got caught by a demon-spider makes no sense in the context of everything else going on in this setting.
There are, also, portals that existed in the past which could potentially be revived, because again, it makes no sense for the worlds to have zero historical interaction.
Also I'm working on the chapter, let me unwind and waste my life in Shadowlands for a bit. :c
Next week my hours are less insane, anyway.
No problem on the delay on my end; while I'm looking forward to the next chapter, I also right now already have so many other new horsewords in queue and am just fine waiting a bit to pile the heap high, as nice as said words may be. :D
Oh, I'm sorry you've had that A Lot to deal with, though. Good luck.
"a roughly contestant variance"
"a roughly consistent variance"?
And thank you for the worldbuilding and explanations thereof! :D
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Ooh, and thank you. I mean, in general for your work on the story, but particularly here for your additional information here about the worldbuilding. :)
...Though it does look like there's some disagreement about the time relations? Hm.
(And, er. Actually, maybe don't tell me, to reduce the effect if it's the latter, but was that first spoiler a spoiler for something past the already posted content?)
Anyway, regarding the world shape, is there no edge because it extends out infinite, or because it wraps? Or I suppose it could be both, depending on the direction one goes, but that seems less likely here. And, of course, I wonder what happens if one keeps going up or down...
...Er, you don't have to answer, in whole or in part, of course, but I'm curious. :D
And regarding the time relations... hm. Well, I don't know just what your full disagreements are, but from just what's in the blog post and comments here, I'm not sure the two are incompatible?
So, we've got two different things here, it seems to me, for each given link: which point on each end that link connects with, and what the relative rate of time passage is for that link. Ether Echoes also stated that magic here takes, as I understand it, an eternal perspective; from the point of view of magic, then, the tapestry to time and web of links can all be set up at once.
Consider two points ("points" somewhat awkward phrasing here, since they're not 0D if time is considered (which it is), but I'm not sure what better to call them) a_e and b_e, on Earth, adjacent to each other in space and appearing at the same time on Earth. a_e links with a portal to a_g and b_e with a portal to b_g. Thus, all four of these points will be experiencing time at the same rate... however, a_g and b_g do _not_ have to be starting at the same time, and could in fact be a thousand years apart.
Let's add a point c_e, connected to c_g not by a portal but by a variable-time-rate link such as Light Breeze's dreaming. We'll put c_e next to a_e and b_e and start it at the same time, so all three of those points are locked together, and thus c_e is also locked with a_g and b_g. However, we can put c_g at a _different_ time on Gaia, and the active life of c_g, due to the variable rate link, can still be a different length of time than the active lives of c_e as observed through the portals at a_g and b_g.
...Hm. Is that making sense? I'm throwing this together on the fly with admittedly fairly incomplete information.
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I hope the unwinding goes well, and good luck next week. :)
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Everything that was in a spoiler box pertains to things that haven't come up in the story yet, hence the use of a spoiler tag, as absolutely no one would have had any chance to gleam it themselves from the content so far.
It is unlikely to be stated directly in the story, so I may as well explain, my personal take on Equestria is that it mirrors a world like 'Creation', ala the roleplaying setting Exalted, much more than it reflects a traditional flat earth. So there is no edge, the closer you get to a relativistic 'Edge' the more chaotic things get (hence beings like Discord who sought to harass Equestria and subsume it into a more chaotic state). It also felt appropriate because places like the Everfree Forest would similarly be little pockets where the world behaves as though you are at its edges, even if presently you are not.
I know that most people just have Equestria/Gaia as a whole occupy a universe identical to ours, but that just doesn't hold true in the comics or shows. Luna and Celestia are the ones raising the sun and moon, and they are not constantly occupied with the task to account for relative time zones. Before this, unicorns had to raise the sun and moon themselves, and the exertion of such was that eventually they always burned out. It just doesn't fit with all of the stories and their hot takes about how the Royal Sisters must be lying to preserve their power like human monarchs, just so they can have a space program and do spaceship things.
But by that same measure, it doesn't seem very realistic to me that it would just be a flat plane occupying space that is, otherwise, functionally identical to our own.
I have explained my take on things to her and we've come to a consensus on it, but I don't want to explain it right now because it might come up in the actual story.
I'm glad you're putting as much thought into this as you are! I've always loved how engaged you can be with the reading material. If I had one thing to point out without explaining the truth entirely, I would draw attention to how your example seems to follow the belief that time is an objective constant, rather than a rough concept cobbled together from human experience, something that works just fine when you occupy one timezone, on one planet, in one universe, and so on.
In a place like Equestria, it's likely that time only exists much like the sun and moon: that is, insofar as a pony deliberately manifests it from, or in opposition to, chaos.
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Ah, oh well; thanks!
(And thanks for using the tags, even if I didn't understand at first what exactly they were for.)
Ah! Interesting; thanks! I'm only vaguely familiar with Exalted, but your explanation here makes sense to me, I think.
I don't know about most people, though I suppose there can be an assumption made that if a particular work doesn't touch on that at all, that's it.
(The author Forthwith on this website, by the way, came up with a very interesting, or at least I think so, geometric explanation and universe-shape allowing simultaneous sunrise and such at all points on a spherical Equus; I don't know how much you'd like it, but you might want to at least glance at that if you didn't already know about it.
Unfortunately, last I checked the diagrams in the explanatory blog posts had broken, and I think I recall Forthwith saying they'd lost the original images.)
(edit after seeing the comment posted: Okay, wow the reply to the next line turned into an even bigger wall of text than it looked in composition. Feel free to skip from when I start talking about worldbuilding in and inspired by a Victoria II mod down to the next blank line, and sorry about the comment length! Still, leaving it in in case it is of some interest...)
"all of the stories and their hot takes about how the Royal Sisters must be lying to preserve their power like human monarchs, just so they can have a space program and do spaceship things."
Huh. Is that actually that common? Only one story that does that is coming to my mind (nd that one's a Fallout Equestria AU, so, while I think it's a good story, that's far from the only issue in Equestria's government in it), but I could easily see that just being a result of sampling not representative of the entire population.
(There's also the Victoria II pony mod family, which doesn't get into space travel (or at least the ones I've played/made don't) but does (see previous parenthetical) leave it ambiguous, up to the player, whether the Princesses are lying or not. There's a nice line, I think, in the intro about how, during Equestria's crash-modernization/Westernization in the early 19th century, the sciences were greatly advanced with the explicit exception of astronomy. This could be taken either to mean that the Princesses are lying are suppressing astronomy to keep the con going, or that Equestria, similar to some other "primitive" civilizations, actually already had quite good astronomy of its own.
(One of the many things I haven't written and published, by the way, is the creation myth I came up with for at least my own modmod there. To briefly summarize, from the primordial chaos randomly appeared Discord, who then created the base universe. Eventually, four of his creations rebelled against him, the first gryphon and buffalo (I forget which order I had them in, as it was a while ago, but the second learned from the first's failure) unsuccessfully, and then Celestia and Luna successfully, by learning from both the previous failures and working together. The gryphon and buffalo in their defeats were shattered, become their respective species, but the Sisters in their victory, though ponies were still formed from them (In the battle? I don't recall the details there, either.), survived and bound themselves into the new world, which was harmony imposed on a semi-frozen version of what Discord's world happened to be at the time of his defeat, including a history stretching back in linear time before the defeat (and many aspects of the world can be explained by this combination of chaos and harmony). The three magical peoples spread out around the Everfree Forest, the site of the battle, and thus the creation of the world, and the most magical (and wild-magical) place in it, the gryphons to the north and northeast (settling in an area in our world roughly corresponding to Washington, Oregon, and Idaho), the buffalo to the southeast (Nevada, Utah, and Arizona), and the ponies to the south (California). Humans, once they arrived on the continent and made contact, didn't really have a place in the existing story, but since they came from far away and had much more subtle magic, it was fairly easy to explain them as just one of the random things in the world, another thinking people that happened to be farther away when the battle was won and solidification happened. Since the magical peoples hadn't spread all that far away from the Everfree, there was still plenty of space on the continent for the humans to settle, and for the most part things went well and stably for the next fifteen thousand years or so.
(Not that there weren't incidents here and there, of various sorts, of course; fifteen thousand years is a long time. Nightmare Moon, by the way, in this universe sought to trap ponies in dreams, not a literal the-sun-never-rises night. Equestria also wasn't founded right away, nor did the Princesses immediately assume positions of rulership.)
And then it turns out there were more humans across the sea (I've speculated on an AU where Chinese explorers contact Equestria and/or one of Equestria's period of exploration, rather than just covering the Americas, reached Asia, but that doesn't fit as much with the game setup. I had done so much thinking on this set of universes outside the scope of the game, though. One of the multiple times I've found that an active imagination can greatly extend the enjoyment from something. :D), and some of them from a place called "Europe" have some ideas regarding the "New World" (in which one country has a capital city that was built partway up a mountain because the still-in-power-now government was concerned about sea level rise at the end of the most recent ice age, but it's new to the Europeans and that's what counts, obviously).
Since the magical peoples aren't vulnerable to the same plagues that cripple the native humans ahead of the advancing Europeans, though, and Equestria in particular is prosperous, populous, and unified, this does not go quite the same way it did in OTL.
(Of course, that doesn't mean Equestria's free from problems. The thousand years of the Nightmare Moon incident, I think here a result of one of Luna's experiments gone wrong, are still pretty recent, with the ripples from it not fully dissipated, and that's before the perturbations from European contact. The crash-Westernization Celestia wrought soon after open contact was established put Equestria in a position to stand up against the great powers and on track to become one itself and push back against colonization of other parts of Turtle Island (and/or form its own empire), but it was a rush and kludge job that damaged the social structures that had been key to Equestria's long-term stability and set up new internal tensions. There are a lot of ways a game can go (though I tended to follow pretty much the same path each time, and deepened the content there with much of my own modding).)))
...Er. Well, that was... a bit of a digression. I appear to have gotten going a bit there! Sorry? :D
Well, feel free to skip it if you're not interested.
(I'm guessing it's not a problem to have it in the comments, at least.)
"But by that same measure, it doesn't seem very realistic to me that it would just be a flat plane occupying space that is, otherwise, functionally identical to our own."
You mean just floating in space, a flatworld in a universe otherwise like ours? I mean, one could do that with the right magic structure and history, so I'm not sure about realistic... but it does seem rather unsatisfying, yes.
(Though another possibility is a flatworld in a universe of flatworlds. I've also at a few points idly thought about implementing an Equus in a universe I came up with/extended for some technically-Golden-Sun-fanfiction I wrote back in highschool, in which most worlds are flatworlds at about the surface of an endless sea of clouds. The worldplates each have their own envelopes of gravity and possibly particular physics, but these fade out at the edges to the microgravity yet air-filled environment of the cloud sea, continuing up endlessly, as far as anyone's been able to find out, and down the same, though down can't be seen due to the clouds. Usefully, different layers of clouds have different charges of (as I recall, unspecified) energy, so an interplate ship can trail two cables of different lengths for power (and suck up the clouds and condense them for water).)
...And I'm digressing again, though at least I've done much less thinking on that universe/set of universes and so probably couldn't go on as long. Still, uh, sorry. :D
"I have explained my take on things to her and we've come to a consensus on it, but I don't want to explain it right now because it might come up in the actual story."
Ah, righto! No problem. :)
(Though I do hope that, if it doesn't come up, there'll be a blog post or something. I will, admittedly, quite possibly have forgotten about this by then (though, also admittedly, this conversation about it probably makes it less likely I will), but right now I'm curious. :D)
"I'm glad you're putting as much thought into this as you are! I've always loved how engaged you can be with the reading material."
Oh, thanks. :)
Though I am curious about "always"; is that just referring to the comments I've been leaving on this story, or is there something else you're also referring to?
"If I had one thing to point out without explaining the truth entirely, I would draw attention to how your example seems to follow the belief that time is an objective constant, rather than a rough concept cobbled together from human experience, something that works just fine when you occupy one timezone, on one planet, in one universe, and so on."
That's true and a good point, though with the information I had I do think that was a reasonable assumption to make. Without the constraint of both worlds having at least mostly shared at least mostly linear timelines, the number of possibilities would seem to greatly expand; that, in turn, without further evidence providing an alternative way to narrow things down makes speculation more difficult, at least if one wants said speculation to home in on something like what's actually there.
"In a place like Equestria, it's likely that time only exists much like the sun and moon: that is, insofar as a pony deliberately manifests it from, or in opposition to, chaos."
Oh, interesting. :)
Well, I look forward to learning more about that. :D
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I'm not sure what you're addressing here, it can be difficult to tell sometimes if you don't use [quote\] [/quote\] boxes, and just copy the text you're addressing over.
I can't really say as I've never seen it. Do you have a link?
Well that's unfortunate, but if they typed out their explanation I shouldn't really need the images to assist me in understanding it. My personal grievance with spherical Gaia (I don't like Equus for the same reason I don't just refer to the entire world as Equestria - other people live there, we live on Earth, not Humania. Germany is a country, not the planet.) isn't that there's no reasonable way it could exist, it's just that there's no reason why it should, except that it's what we know and are familiar with. In a universe where so much already doesn't work the way ours does, my natural instinct is to run with it, and imagine something else, rather than a solar system that is precisely configured to allow a quirk of the show while leaving as much unchanged as possible.
Does the author also explain why the sun and moon orbit the world according to magical whim, rather than fixed universal properties? Because there's a lot more at work than just "The sun shines equally across the entire planet despite it being a sphere."
This is the only one that calls direct attention to it that I am aware of, but it should be noted that any of the stories that set up a normative solar system are at least passively arguing it. Reading StarScribe's book where an alicorn Shining Armor is forming a colony on not-Mars? The royal sisters are liars, and so are all the unicorns who did the job before them.
Of course this is far more commonplace the moment it becomes a Human in Equestria story, which Pirene and Selene technically are.
An interesting take, but not one I think is very consistent with Discord's character, and which essentially abandons anything from the canon for the sake of doing its own thing - not necessarily bad on its own, but when you lift all of these characters from their existing context—rather than making alterations to something that exists in an attempt at greater fidelity—what you end up with is characters who are themselves in name only, they are no longer Luna, Celestia, or Discord.
Well, unless they behave contrary to their new context, which is its own problem.
This is not to say that you're wrong for enjoying your idea, just that you seem to put as much thought into worldbuilding as I do, and if you're going to put yourself out there like this, it would feel untoward to just quietly ignore you, rather than offering my own honest thoughts.
If you want, you can PM me and I can just tell me, or add me on Discord or whatever: Solana#6482
The former.
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"I'm not sure what you're addressing here, it can be difficult to tell sometimes if you don't use [quote\] [/quote\] boxes, and just copy the text you're addressing over."
Ah, sorry! I do usually use quotes, but sometimes if I'm in a hurry or the like I might omit those to save time if I think the reference is clear enough from, generally, positioning. I'm guessing that that's what happened there, and it looks like, if so, I guessed wrong about the clarity; sorry about that.
As for what I was addressing...
I believe that would be approximately:
"I know that most people just have Equestria/Gaia as a whole occupy a universe identical to ours, but that just doesn't hold true in the comics or shows. Luna and Celestia are the ones raising the sun and moon, and they are not constantly occupied with the task to account for relative time zones. Before this, unicorns had to raise the sun and moon themselves, and the exertion of such was that eventually they always burned out."
The start of that I'm confident about, but the end is a bit fuzzy between that and the next thing I said in the comment.
"I can't really say as I've never seen it. Do you have a link?"
Bits of information about it, of various sizes and levels of detail, appear in various places in some of their stories, but I should be able to finds links to those explanatory blog posts for you...
Here they are, I believe.
"Well that's unfortunate, but if they typed out their explanation I shouldn't really need the images to assist me in understanding it."
Weeeell hopefully, but I remember the diagrams being very useful... and the explanations were originally composed, I assume, in the belief that the reader would have access to them. So I don't know, but it'd be nice, aye.
"I don't like Equus for the same reason I don't just refer to the entire world as Equestria - other people live there, we live on Earth, not Humania."
Aye, that's fair, though I could see "Equus" just being the name for the world in one or some of its languages, too.
(And it, or variants, seems to be, or at least have been in my experience, fairly common in the fandom, so by now it seems to have become my default. It's also the name Forthwith used for the planet in the set of worlds I was talking about there.
But I see no problem with it being "Gaia" in some universes.)
"Germany is a country, not the planet."
...Yes? I'm not sure why you bring up Germany, though, sorry, or what the bolding means.
(Though that got me looking into the etymology of the name, and apparently there are a lot of different names for Germany in various languages, with at least about six different origins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany
I wonder how many other countries have so many names, that I've not been aware of?
(I mean, with Germany I at least knew that the German name was "Deutschland", rather than something the sound of which "Germany" is the closest English approximation of...))
"My personal grievance with spherical Gaia" "isn't that there's no reasonable way it could exist, it's just that there's no reason why it should, except that it's what we know and are familiar with."
Well, the show appears to have globes; that's been taken by some people as a sign that... Gaia (Do you prefer that it be used here (that is, in conversation with you and/or in comments on a blog that is not technically yours but close) even for general cases? I can do that (provided I remember; sorry if I forget), and just in case will try to do that, if it comes up again, for the rest of this reply at least even without specific word.) is approximately spherical. Of course, that's also not a requirement; even among people wanting to follow the show, there are varying borders that can be drawn between "That's canon" and "That's just an incidental thing and artifact of the show's production", and naturally one can simply decide to not try to follow show canon, whatever it may be, in one or more areas.
(Oh, and there are stories like Changeling Space Program and its sequel, in which the planet being approximately spherical and space travel being possible are important parts of the premise. Though if you haven't read any of that particular series, that's emphatically not a universe where the Princesses are lying. For example, at one point Luna moves the moon away from the path of a mission she didn't want getting near it.)
"In a universe where so much already doesn't work the way ours does, my natural instinct is to run with it, and imagine something else, rather than a solar system that is precisely configured to allow a quirk of the show while leaving as much unchanged as possible."
Nothing wrong with that either, though, and it too can produce/contribute to good stories! :D
"Does the author also explain why the sun and moon orbit the world according to magical whim, rather than fixed universal properties? Because there's a lot more at work than just "The sun shines equally across the entire planet despite it being a sphere.""
Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, and in fact in the model they came up with the sun and moon don't orbit the world at all, just look like they do. And as I recall (it's been a while since I went through that explanation, so the memory and understanding have faded a bit), the sun and moon follow their courses by themselves for most of their path but require active intervention at sunrise and sunset, due to their interaction with the shape of the universe.
I'm not sure how much magical whim comes in to it, though that model was developed back in 2014 at the latest and so didn't have as much data regarding the sun and moon's movements in the show as we have access to now; I don't recall what the particular state of it was then.
(Though some of it may just have been Forthwith thinking that this was a neat model and fun to work with/on, anyway, and picking canon/noncanon/canon special circumstances/etc. appropriately to provide a challenge without ruining the fun. I don't know, particularly given other relevant things I don't know, but that seems plausible.)
"This is the only one that calls direct attention to it that I am aware of,"
Ah, right, those! I feel particularly foolish for not thinking of those, given that the FoE story I was thinking of in fact uses, with permission as I recall, versions of the very same characters involved there are builds from/has similarities to some of the plot points.
Maybe I was just very focused on pure-or-mostly-pure-text stories, or... something? Eh. Anyway, thanks for the reminder that shouldn't have been necessary but apparently was. :)
(Though I do hope I'd have remembered anyway if/when it came up somewhere else.)
(Oh, yes, though you might want to use this link, if this comes up again; the one you provided sent me to a Tumblr login page, and I only figured out what you meant by examining the url. Though perhaps your link provides something the one I suggested doesn't, in which case, I am curious about whatever it was, and sorry for missing it.)
"but it should be noted that any of the stories that set up a normative solar system are at least passively arguing it."
Ehhhhh, I can see where you're coming from there, but I'm not sure. Though, thinking more on it, I suppose it depends on how "normative" and how firmly established as "normative" a given story in question is.
Still, I can imagine ways to get an apparently normative solar system that's very much not that.
In the Victoria II modmod headcanon-ish worldbuilding I mentioned, for instance, the Princesses are (or claim to be, depending on interpretation) just tied into the fabric of reality. Yes, the sun "moves" around the Earth and the moon moves around the Earth according to the laws of physics, but the Princesses are tied into keeping those working, and to the sun and more in magical ways outside of Western pre-contact physics anyway.
One could have a system where the planets and such move similarly to ours, but there actually aren't laws of physics behind it; the celestial bodies really are moved by equivalents of invisible angels pushing them along, and if Celestia might actually be responsible for the rotation and orbit of the planet rather than the movement of the sun around it, well, that's still a pretty significant thing and perhaps an easy mistake to make when she was first figuring things out herself.
Perhaps it's conceptual: the particles are all doing their thing according to the laws of physics, matter and energy interacting with each other, yes, but Princess Celestia is what stands between the sun rising and giving light to the people and a large cluster of gravitationally-bound fusing hydrogen plasma casting electromagnetic radiation onto a different section of the surface of a much smaller gravitationally bound cluster of denser matter as said cluster rotates and thus varies the level of shielding different parts of its surface receive, and this may trigger chemical reactions in certain small but complicated arrangements of chemicals distributed on the newly irradiated surface. The Princesses tied not directly into the movements of matter and energy but into the collective souls of the peoples of the planet, or something like that.
Of course, I'm also not arguing that it's not in some cases passively arguing the Princesses are lying, possibly even without the author being aware of it, but the above are some ideas that came to me while thinking about the matter.
"Reading StarScribe's book where an alicorn Shining Armor is forming a colony on not-Mars? The royal sisters are liars, and so are all the unicorns who did the job before them."
I think I may remember that...
This one?
Though looking back at that last chapter, I'm not seeing anything indicating the Royal Sisters were lying, or the unicorns before them. Or even an indication of what the planet being colonized was orbiting.
(Oh, though I did find something against "not-Mars"... "reprocessed Martian soil"
So just actually a planet called Mars, though presumably still not ours, apparently.)
Am I missing something in my admittedly quick searching now and/or forgetting something from when I went through the story months ago, or is this in fact not the story you were referring to (if that latter, sorry for potential spoilers)?
(I have had some mixed enjoyment of Starscribe's work I've read, though. Quite liked some parts, others not so much, others just eh.)
"Of course this is far more commonplace the moment it becomes a Human in Equestria story, which Pirene and Selene technically are."
Oh? Interesting. I'm not sure that matches my sample (and the specific cases I'm thinking of are mostly counter to that, at the very least in the sense of the Princesses not being liars about being able to move the sun and moon), but as I don't read that much HiE, I do suspect my sample's not all that representative.
"An interesting take, but not one I think is very consistent with Discord's character, and which essentially abandons anything from the canon for the sake of doing its own thing - not necessarily bad on its own, but when you lift all of these characters from their existing context—rather than making alterations to something that exists in an attempt at greater fidelity—what you end up with is characters who are themselves in name only, they are no longer Luna, Celestia, or Discord."
Right, and I've actually deliberately done some of that with other characters elsewhere in thoughts about potential states of that world, using various pieces from the show and such fitted together in different ways.
(Though it occurs to me that you may not have been aware that I was already starting with something divergent: the original Victoria II pony mod and/or another other versions of it I drew on, either in inspiration or code, for mine. So "Equestria is in California" was a question asked, not something I came up with out of the blue. Why is it in California? What does it mean that it's there? What implications for other things does that have? I've had quite a bit of fun pursuing those questions over the years, quite a bit of it without even playing the game or writing anything down, but from the starting point I already had some avenues of worldbuilding closed off.)
"Well, unless they behave contrary to their new context, which is its own problem."
Right, if I'm understanding you correctly.
(...Hmmmm. Though, now I'm wondering what would happen if a Luna, Celestia, and Discord from a more directly show-like Equestria showed up there... Still so many versions/interpretations of them it could be, though...)
"This is not to say that you're wrong for enjoying your idea, just that you seem to put as much thought into worldbuilding as I do, and if you're going to put yourself out there like this, it would feel untoward to just quietly ignore you, rather than offering my own honest thoughts."
No problem, though thank you for the clarification just in case. :)
And thank you for your honest thoughts! ...Though sorry if you still felt you had to read through all of that whether you wanted to or not, to offer said thoughts, just because I'd put it out there.
"If you want, you can PM me and I can just tell me, or add me on Discord or whatever: Solana#6482"
You can just tell me, I assume you meant? I assume you don't need a PM to tell yourself. :D
But more seriously, thanks. :) I'm not on Discord and am not sure what "whatever" would be here, but a PM... hm...
I mean, I do want to know, but if you, with your much better information about what's coming in the story, think that it much come up in the story in such a way that enjoyment of the story might be reduced by getting an explanation earlier outside the story, it seems like it might be a good idea to follow your judgement there? Or am I misunderstanding?
But thanks for the offer, at least. :)
"The former."
Oh, well, I'm surprised I really have made that much of an impact, but thanks again. :)
(And thanks for the answer here, of course.)
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"Earth" literally just means "ground" etymologically.
Variations on that would make more sense. "Home", "Dwelling," "Center" and the like would also make better roots for homeworlds than what most sci-fi does, which is make it the name of the dominant race.
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Aye, that would make sense.
I'm guessing the "most sci-fi" practice is quite possibly part of why "Equus" became so apparently prominent. (Of course, so many of those planets also seem to have one language, one government, at most one religion, occasionally one climate...)
(Though, of course, a dominant race also could use that dominant position to name the place after themselves. Perhaps especially if they wanted to make a statement to other races.
But that's not something most versions of ponies would do, I think (though "Equus" might still be a name for the planet used in one or more languages from peoples related to the our-Earth genus, depending on how the worldbuilding was done and how insular or imperialistic those peoples were).)
(Incidentally, did you know there's a hypothesis, not generally accepted currently but not entirely without evidence either, that the horse never actually went extinct in North America, and in fact had been domesticated by a number of native cultures long before the arrival of European horses?)
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In that case, the issue, I think, is that most people don't put much thought into it at all, and similar to the show just aren't too preoccupied with consistent world-building. Sometimes they are, but often they're not. It's the same situation as people saying "Ponies in Equestria has fur, because the show calls it fur." Rather than the far more realistic "The show says they have fur because the show is made by people who don't know much about horses/ponies."
I understand that you do use Quotation marks, but especially in dark mode FIMfiction, they can be hard to see, and are used for purposes other than quoting the other person - as you can see in my paragraph above. Quoting what another person posted is much more readily visible if you use the quote function, and creating the tags for that is as simple as Ctrl+Q.
This is not an explanation that bothers to explain how the show works and why it makes sense, it is an explanation that asserts the laws of physics must function differently than they do here, because the show did that, and the show must work, which again, brings me to the point that if their universe is so different from ours already, there is no reason that there should be space the same way we have space, that there should be a globe, the way we have a globe. In some ways the world of MLP is positively hermetic, with earthly, lunar, and solar spheres, and different metaphysical laws depending on which sphere you occupy.
You won't hear us describe ponies as 'furry', and you won't see Equestria situated on a globe as a result, either. Ponies are torn between being a cutesy modern day cartoon with modern day knowledge, and the trappings and esoterica of mythology, it's the latter that drew me to the alicorns (and by extension the show as a whole), so it's the latter I seek to express in my own work. Thus the sun becomes an act of powerful magic—rather than a massive ball of gas—and the moon is a metaphysical warden against the chaos of primordial darkness, as a result. The world, while not flat, is not an oblate spheroid, and does not occupy a vacuous space as a result. Rather it is surrounded on all sides by the undulating darkness (what ponies call 'night') that creation was born out of.
It is not very scientific, or in keeping with what we know about our own universe, but it is also a fantasy setting. And fantasy used to be about worlds not our own, not just a borrowed aesthetic you could slap on or replace interchangeably. Would have been great if the show could have remembered that.
From the Mannaz rune, which translates as 'Mankind', Germany as a name essentially translates to "The People" or put the way I intended by bolding one part of the word: the homeland of the folk, people, humanity. In the sense that Asgard is the land of the Aesir, Alfheim is 'Elf Home', Vanaheim is 'Vanir Home' and Jotunheim is 'Jotun Home'. Germany is essentially 'The Land of Man', it is, as far as nation names go, the closest thing to an 'Equestria' Earth has. The point was to illustrate we do not call our planet 'Equus' or 'Equestria' equivalents, even when we have nation names that inspire things like Equestria to begin with.
It's worth mentioning as an aside that 'man' did not originally refer to genders, it just meant 'person', with 'wer' and 'wif' being what we'd call man and woman. The reason why woman came to mean 'A wife/man's property', and wer got replaced by the word for 'person', is uh, well - something to take a gender studies course for.
Yes, but again, the show says ponies have furry coats, and I know that they don't. The show's desire to pillage the aesthetic of mythology with none of its qualia hasn't gone unnoticed either, We simply refuse to follow its lead in that regard.
Canon is something I try to follow, it's why Celestia and Luna came from a tribe of alicorns, and were born that way, and came to Equestria at StarSwirl's behest. It's why Cadance, to me, was born a pegasus, and became an alicorn after manifesting her archetypal love in a powerfully divine way. The story of Luna and Celestia in the season one openers is what captured my interest about the show to begin with.
But sometimes things are inconsistent, some things stretch credulity. The show has globes because we have globes, and like us, it has modern day classrooms, modern day trappings, etc etc. Things that should not be there but are, because at the end of the day its intended purpose was to be an insignificant cartoon to sell toys to small children, under Capitalism, the meaning behind things is irrelevant, and what you're left with is an aesthetic which has the ultimate purpose of trying to sell you stuff. Half the fun of being a fanfiction writer, is to take the shallow scraps of content left to us by capitalism - which frequently pillages from the toy chest of our own ancestral beliefs - and breathe new life into it, to claim ownership of it, to make it belong to the community again.
And while it might technically be possible to grandfather the globe in, while you could just hoofwave the occasional mention of ponies having fur as being a quality unique to Equestrian ponies, all of these feel to me like apologia for the sake excusing the shallowness that lies at the heart of a show like MLP. If I'm going to do it, I would rather see the trappings of mythology, and ancient stories, and dive deeper into that pool, not rejigger how the physics of light works to allow Celestia and Luna to be the goddess of the sun and moon, and still keep the planet sphere shaped, in space, surrounded by vast multitudes, with all of the same laws of physics we do except for when it doesn't.
TL;DR: I have made an executive decision regarding which parts of the canon enrich the story and setting, and which parts detract from it.
I wouldn't read a series titled 'Changeling Space Program' to begin with, for the reasons stated above.
A normative solar system is heliocentric, and does not involve the sun orbiting the earth. The moon's phase is determined by its placement with regards to the sun and the Earth. In the show, Celestia and the unicorns before her *move the sun*, therefor the sun moves around their planet. The moons phase is not determined by where it is respective to the sun. If a setting doesn't take lengths to explain this, it is effectively calling for cognitive dissonance, or else is tacitly implying the princesses are not actually necessary for their jobs.
(But canonically, they are.)
I'm sure you could imagine plenty of ways that you could have a normative solar system and still have Luna and Celestia the goddesses responsible for the movements of the sun and moon, but I doubt very much that many of them would be all that consistent. I've read Forthwith's detail-rich explanations, and I did not even find that much all that compelling, and to wit, it still falls back on "Well magic exists, so we can't take physics for granted." By paragraph two. It doesn't spend an awful lot of time explaining why the world works this way, how it plays into the history of Equestria, Celestia, Luna, or the unicorns that did the work before them, it just attempts to address a failing of the show and keep all the objects in the air without dropping any.
Of course, all of this is easily explained if the world doesn't occupy space at all, if the sun and moon aren't celestial bodies, but rather are metaphysical concepts controlled by godlike beings, and before them, powerful sorcerers working in conjunction.
Then you must apply that model in addition to Forthwith's model, because it does not explain any other aspect of the phenomenon. It's creating a Frankenstein's monster just to say "But I mean you could create a setting like that, which does not cast aspersions on what the princesses are doing!" But so far no one I've read has, and saying "I'm not saying that at all," doesn't count, the story, setting, and narrative, have to reveal that. Doing the "Well, maybe they're just 'tied' to those bodies," approach just doesn't address everything established, doesn't account for the unicorns who had the job originally, and so on. Making the assertion doesn't make it true. For that you need consistency.
Wouldn't be what I described with the normative solar system, now would it? If Celestia's magic moved the earth, she should have an earth cutiemark, and could be called Gaia or Demeter instead, and simply refuses to stop turning the earth when she gets sad.
And again, you'd have to also incorporate Forthwith's canon about how light works to justify the sun shining everywhere, and the absence of timezones.
What your missing is the part up above where I said that this is the only example that goes out of its way to call the princesses liars, the others just imply it. Thus, you're hitting every example I gave in response to you saying "What stories? I don't know what you're talking about, aside from one of the most popular genres on the site.", and then saying "Yeah but the story never calls them liars directly."
Which is not what I said they did.
If I didn't want to read what you wrote I wouldn't have, you have no super powers compelling me to unwanted actions, and you're not bribing me as a means of coercion. You have no power over me, Reese.
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(Just so you know, I'm pretty tired by this point and perhaps should have gone to bed hours ago, so sorry if the reply quality on this or the other one suffers at all from that.)
That seems plausible.
Oh! I don't think I ever thought of that; sorry. I don't use dark mode on here much, and I don't recall quotations marks being problematic for me in the instances when I did -- but I know that people have different color contrast text processing difficulties.
I'll try to remember to use quote tags with you.
Yes, but isn't that clear from positioning?
It is that, yes.
[tries that in the text entry box]
Oh, neat! Didn't know that. It unfortunately doesn't help me much, though, as I pretty much always compose my comments and replies, unless they're very short and self-contained sometimes not even then, and such in a separate plain text document, then paste them in. Format tags I usually do manually, though sometimes when quoting text and worried about getting the tags just right I'll copy it, paste it into a FIMFiction text entry field somewhere, and then copy that with the generate tags to place into my plain text composition. (Or if I want a tag I don't use as frequently and don't recall, I might generate it in a text entry box and paste it into my composition.)
(Though I think that that may have stopped working with strikethrough tags at some point...)
Since it takes longer, and adds complexity, to type the quote tags, and so much of my quoting involves pausing reading or listening stories to note a typo or the like, I've used quotation marks as a standard; I also don't recall it being pointed out as an issue before, which I hope means it hasn't been.
Though I have sometimes used quote tags for quoting external text, if I'm transcribing a passage from a book or the like.
(Also, the quote-tag-generated box takes up more space, but that's fairly minor and would usually likely be outweighed by its greater clarity.)
Well, not the whole thing, sure?
But the whole thing has a lot of difficult-to-resolve inconsistencies; Oliver and some others, as I recall, were actually having a surprising amount of success putting things together up until the last couple of seasons or so, but then still ran into problems.
...I don't think I'm following you here, though, sorry. Especially combined with the previous sentence?
I mean, yes, it does assert that the laws of physics must function differently in order for a particular set of effects to be observed, but how is that not seeking to explain part of how the show works and makes sense?
Sure.
Some universes, sure, but unless I'm forgetting something, I don't think show canon has evidence for all of those.
Yeah, I'd gotten that impression. :D
And thank you for developing and expressing that for us to admire, enjoy, and think on. :)
(And I am, naturally curious to learn more about this world/these worlds... but, as mentioned at the top, tired and really needing to get to bed as soon as possible. So another time (beyond what's in this and the other comment in queue to reply to, that is), hopefully. :))
Oh, I disagree with that first point, or at least think it may not apply one way or another. The definition of "scientific" for which that would be true (the body of information that is classified as the scientifically verified truths and beliefs about our world, as held by our current civilization... though I'm not sure how well I've expressed that) seems to me to be ruled out by the second part of the quote there, since those would be redundant with each other.
But there's no reason the scientific method could not be applied to such a world; it would just, when used properly, come to some very different conclusions about that very differently-structured world.
Though I do remember reading... relatively recently, I think? Something commenting on some work being a breakthrough in being fantasy completely shorn of connection to our world. I don't recall where that was, though, unfortunately, or much in the way of other details.
Aye, sorry.
Oh, neat! Thanks!
I think I'd gotten that from previous text, but thanks.
Ah, also neat! Thanks again.
I do hope these things stick in my memory well enough...
Yeah, it seems like there might have been some slight bias there. I'm unfortunately not clear on the exact history (I mean, didn't even know those linguistic details about, as far as I'm recalling), but probably indeed a bit much to get into here right now and I really want to get to bed.
Well, Earth ponies, that is ponies on our planet Earth, don't (as far as I know, and this is something I know something about even if I don't have exhaustive knowledge of all pony breeds out there), but I don't see why a particular Equestria's couldn't. Still, yeah, that's not my standard either.
Aye, and that's fine too.
I tend to think of how many different worlds can be built from the selection of basic parts as one of the great things about this fandom, really. Naturally not all of those worlds will be interesting, or interesting to the same degrees or for the same purposes, to all potential readers, but there's a lot out there that I like and a lot that other people seem to like, so that seems good.
Yeaaaah, something I'm kind of uncomfortable with too.
We have this great fandom that's done so much good for so many people, that's led to so much creativity!
And also it all started with a half-hour-minus-other-commercials-long-commercial to convince children to convince their parents to give money to a large corporation in exchange for a large number of lumps of color plastic that are kind of not the best use we could be putting our increasingly limited hydrocarbon resources to.
And thank you for doing that. :)
(And aye, I think most of my involvement with the fandom has been for the whole time I've been in the fandom with fanfiction and related things more than with the official content directly. Their are other franchises out there where the proportion is even higher, there are video games I've never played nor expect to play that I've read many hundreds of thousands of words of fanfiction of...)
Ehhh. I mean, I don't think it's somehow wrong for you to feel that way, personally I think that focusing on and expanding from different parts of the base material, when done well, is just, well, using it differently, not just excusing the shallowness of the base material.
And aye, thank you for doing that, again; I'm glad we have you doing that just as we have people doing interesting things with physics to try and answer the challenge of "But if we say that X does have to work, how would it?".
(And, of course, both approaches can be done poorly, but I don't think we're talking about those here.)
Aye, and I think that's quite a good approach for a fanfiction creator to take.
(One thing I personally don't like is when an author's writing a story, something comes up in the show (well, not that much of a problem here anymore, or at least for now, I suppose?) that contradicts it -- and the author decides the story must be rewritten to accommodate the new thing. Just, no, please, I mean, I can respect that as your choice, it's your story, etc., and if you have a good idea for incorporating the new thing, go ahead. But please don't feel you have to massively rework what was already a good story to take into account something the show did!
So I tend to consider that willingness to make those executive decisions a pretty good thing to have.)
Aye, I'd recommend it if you liked that sort of thing, but it sounds like you don't and likely wouldn't enjoy it much.
Hm.
While we're on the subject, just checking, but as it's the first thing that came to my mind when trying to think of something more likely to your liking, have you read Riverdream at Sunset?
Thank you for the clarification; I think I understand what you meant there, though the tiredness is being a bit of a problem.
Is consistency necessarily necessary in all contexts?
Aye, having learnt more of your preferences, it does seem like it might not be of much interesting to you; sorry about that.
(Though arguments can and have been made about where the border lies between magic and physics and if there in fact is one, I really don't want to get into that right now and suspect that's also something you wouldn't be interested in anyway.)
Right, I don't recall it doing that, though I don't think it was trying to, either, more just work out the interesting (at least to some) geometry/physics problem.
Indeed. :)
(Well, for given values of "easily", of course, as levels of detail increase. :D)
...I don't think I'm following you here, sorry.
Well, taking that as referring just to the modmod worldbuilding I did, since I don't currently understand the rest, I did have another clear purpose there: wanting a deeper sense of what the world I was playing/working on was like.
I'm not parsing what this refers to either, sorry. Possibly it refers to the most recent other quote I expressed something like that about, and that's why?
Consistency with the part's one's including in the particular "everything" of concern, at least. Er, if I'm understanding and processing that part correctly...
This is likely a result of me misunderstanding what you meant by that.
Not necessarily depending on how that particular universe worked, I think, but more plausibly, yes, probably.
If the sun still shone everywhere and timezones were absent, yes.
I don't recall anything even implying it, though? Unless another planet even existing counts? But didn't they also access it by mirror portal in that story?
[checks again]
Right, it looks like they did, with no mention of other access in that chapter. So I'm... still not sure what you're seeing implying it there, sorry.
...And I'm not sure what you mean here.
Ah, good; thanks.
I'm dyslexic, it helps, and Ether Echoes is not dyslexic, but she also has issues reading your comments a lot of the time, as a result of how they are formatted, especially the longer ones like what we've been exchanging today.
I am explaining myself sloppily because it actually very exhausting to go point by point responding to someone in the format of blog/story comments, compared to just in IMs or via back and forth PMs that are separated by their individual points.
The distinction I am making is one where, on the one hand, someone is explaining why actually an aspect of a story is very enriching, and makes sense, and on the other hand you have an example of something that attempts to make excuses for something. As with the Forthwith example that you gave, it starts off with "So this isn't something that could work in real life, but -" In an effort to offer penance for the fact that we've got mythological beings and metaphysics running around but also it needs to be relatable to a modern day audience, so let's just throw some doodads in there.
Do horses have fur? Ask pretty much anyone who has lived with/near ranches, or in a rodeo town (like I did) and they'll say: "No, horses have coats of hair, and manes of it as well." but then you'll have other people who say that Andrea Libman says "Furry Coats" in the show, so maybe they just have fur because they're not actual horses/ponies.
As opposed to any of the examples of the opposite mindset I've been giving this entire back and forth conversation. I can't make my point any clearer than I have right here.
I wasn't referring to fan-settings. (I don't know why you use the term 'universes' in this context, it doesn't mesh well, especially considering that some of these settings involve multiple universes). I'm referring to the fact that illustrations in the show, of in-universe books describing Celestia and Luna's control of celestial objects, is similar to the drawings you would see from medieval Europe - because that's where they lifted the aesthetic. You may recall that I spent A LOT OF TIME explaining how capitalism loves to lift the aesthetic of things absent its actual meaning (this is where appropriation comes from). So when I say that the show can be downright hermetic at times, it's because the styling of its aesthetic choices is evocative of the things I was talking about.
A fan fiction perspective on it is irrelevant. I'm not here to link you to other authors and say "Well you're wrong, and to prove it I will quote from the book of PJABrony." When I say something, I'm referring to a canonical source. Star Swirl is styled after a hermetical wizard, the early drawings of Luna and Celestia included stylizations that glamourize lunar spheres and celestial spheres. The show is not going off on this, if it did I wouldn't be talking about how it frequently lifts the aesthetic, and how it's up to us to put the meaning behind the aesthetic, back into it.
You're being obtuse. It does not mesh with our understanding of the solar system as born out by scientific examination. I never said that the scientific method poofs out of existence. (But in many of our settings, it certainly becomes a lot less definitive, when the power of qualia can have a direct impact in ways a material universe can't, even that, arguably, could be understood within a scientific context).
I am being long-winded here because it feels like whenever I'm vague, you misunderstand the point I'm trying to make, I apologize if I wasn't specific enough here.
We're running into situations now where, when I'm too vague, you misunderstand what I say, and when I am deliberately thorough, you representing as me belaboring the point, because you are in some cases, going sentence by sentence over what I am saying, instead of just quoting enough to reflect the actual point you are responding to.
I explained this earlier, and don't want to belabor the point.
I can appreciate that people enjoy different things, but I also don't believe that art is purely subjective. I believe firmly that mindset has led to the humanities largely being dismissed, with little regard paid to how the appropriation of culture - even your own culture (especially your own culture) - for for the sake of its aesthetic but not its meaning, leads to bad habits, alienation, and just in general, difficulty understanding the meaning of events as they unfold around you in the real world.
That doesn't mean I think our stories are perfect, or that anyone's is, perfection is something to strive for, not a realistic destination. It does mean that I work very hard on presenting things in as 'true' a sense as possible, Platonically speaking. I want to touch something that feels real, not just something that sparks joy in a brief transitory moment.
I haven't, I might later.
Get thee hence, Discord.
(Yes, it does, unless it is deliberately trying to be like, Terry Pratchett or whatever, and I can't stand Terry Pratchett.)
I'm aware, and I have arguments, but the comments of a blog post isn't the place for it. And I'm tired.
And to reiterate, it's not an interesting answer to me because it's functionally no different than explaining the situation I have. If the person was explaining things using real world physics, that would be impressive, because it would limit them to a set number of pieces, and it might be interesting for me to see someone do that, with that sort of handicap.
Instead it just makes pieces up to solve the problem, and misunderstands - in my opinion - the heart of the problem to begin with. The problem is not just that the material universe presented (at times) in the show is incompatible with its immaterial mythology, it's that the original creators, and the corporation responsible for it, never cared enough to consider that it might be a problem to begin with. Basing your own personal take on the setting around a 'solution' like Forth's effectively covers up the man-hole opening with a sheet.
I feel like if it weren't so late, it would be clearer, but I'll attempt to clarify: Many of the examples presented are of people who simply choose not to address the problem at all, and ignore it. You gave some examples, but none of those examples are internally consistent, unless you start assuming your audience has already read and now believes the "canon" of other authors and their sources. This is a natural thing for any group to do - religions do it all the time - but it's also the sort of thing that makes a phenomenon impenetrable and obtuse, like many religions aged into the modern era, with their denominations, apocrypha, and so on. Basically, any situation in which you have been using the phrase "in this person's universe..." You have essentially been citing not-Apocrypha.
If you didn't, you would instead have to alter a fundamental aspect of Celestia and Luna's being. And I'm the kind of purist who would argue they're no longer themselves at that point. So much of who they are is predicated on that, going so far as for it to be the cause for Luna's fall from grace, something that confuses and bewilders many authors and readers, because it just doesn't seem like a big deal to get mad about, to them.
See my point above about how media that sparks joy can still lead to bad habits, and trouble relating to qualia. When Celestia is allowed to be anything, up to and including a 'Molestia' figure, and when Luna is allowed to be everything a dorky gamer to a grumpy night owl, they are essentially reduced to their aesthetic, with none of their qualia - their "personhood", and actions they take begin to make less and less sense, because they exist only for the person to insert themselves under cover of that aesthetic.
I really think you need to revisit what I'm saying here later, because you literally just looked at my response to your comment that the story never directly contradicts Luna and Celestia's responsibilities, and then said "I don't understand, the story never implies it, never states it."
For the fourth time tonight, by having Mars be a planet, by having it occupy a vacuous space, and by not taking the time to world build a solar system that is meaningfully different than ours, while including things LIKE Mars, the only recourse is to assume that it functions identically, because in every instance where it is brought up, it functions the same, they just used teleportation to reach it instead of a rocket ship.
When presented with 2 + Y = 5, the simplest solution is that Y is 3, especially if no information is given that contradicts that.
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Ah, sorry about that again, then.
Ah! I shall try to also remember to do this for her, then.
Regarding the rest of your comment, I've read through it, and if you like I'll reply point by point, or to any particular points you'd like me to. However, I'm now thinking that we may actually have been having two different conversations that interacted enough to cause confusion and frustration but were actually going past each other. I certain was at no point being deliberately obtuse, and I'm sorry that, I gather, it felt that way.
I'm getting the impression that we may just approach fanfiction(/fiction?) in ways that, while having some areas of overlap (and fortunately enough for me to enjoy your work; if anything I find myself more impressed by that work based on what I think I've gleaned of your artistic stance from this conversation), also have substantial difference, some on fairly deep levels. (As a sample of one of the results outside this conversation, I'm rather fond of Terry Pratchett's work, for instance. It's not without flaws, but I can still enjoy it.)
While I'm still curious to explore those... unfortunately, that doesn't seem to have been going very well, as I get the impression you've not been fully understanding what I've been trying to say here and I know I haven't been fully understanding you.
(Though, one thing I hope won't be a problem to ask now, as I'm quite curious: am I now correctly understanding that you think of different portrayals of Celestia and Luna in different fan-settings/universes (though I think we may not actually mean quite the same thing by those terms) as different portrayals of the same characters, such that they may be considered in how well they portray those characters, rather than portrayals of different characters who have similarities to each other?
Apologies if I'm still misunderstanding, and please feel free not to answer if it's too frustrating or the like and/or seems too likely fruitless.)
Sorry this hasn't been working out better, but thank you for making the attempt even when it began to wear on you. And even if we aren't fully understanding each other, I still look forward to your future writing; good luck indeed in your noble quest for true ideals behind these images.
(Though, before I post this, a couple clarifications I hope you won't mind:
I believe this:
Was partly me trying to make sure that I didn't have an unclear reference as I did earlier in the conversation; sorry that I apparently went too far in the other direction.
As I'm not sure it was clear (or whether you were referring to me or them), I haven't based my own personal take on the setting on a solution like that, in large part because I don't really have any single such take.)
(Oh, and also, relevant to Riverdream at Sunset but also out of general interest, and if you don't mind me asking, what do you think of Lord Dunsany?)
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I haven't read anything he has written.
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Ah. Well, I'm a little nervous recommending him given the misunderstandings earlier (and hearing that you'd not read anything he'd written, when I'd been thinking from the way the conversation was going that he might well be well known to you), but even with my lowered confidence in predicting what you might like, I still think you might like his work; from my perspective and to my recollection, at least, it's much on the mythic side of fantasy.
My apologies in advance if this is another error, but I do still hope that, if you decide to try his work at some point, you find it enjoyable.