Ursas have always been my favorite creatures in the show; I feel that they have a lot of interesting narrative potential, and I find myself very drawn to explorations of their origins and nature.

Given that, I wanted to try to stir up a little conversation on this topic. Do you have any particular headcanons on this topic? What do you figure their place in the world to be? Are there any stories you know of that do anything interesting with them?

(On my end, I'm currently on a readthrough of Sharing the Night/Sharing the Nation, so the main concept currently on my mind is its version of the star beasts as literally chunks of night and stars fallen to earth that collected together and shaped themselves around legends and stories.)

For that matter, what about the topic of different "star beasts" -- the Scorpios and Dracos and Aquilas and so forth that show up in stories from time to time? Any interesting ideas on those, or do you feel that Ursas are better off as their own type of oddity than as part of a larger "set"?

My take is that the stars are alive, that they are remnants of ponies who have died. I derive this from the four stars that aided Princess Luna, as Nightmare Moon, to escape imprisonment, and from the two shooting stars that represented Applejack's parents. I then build on this to claim that the constellations, of which the Ursa Major and Ursa Minor are definitely sentient and possibly sapient, are collections of stars with a shared motivation or a shared gestalt. Together, the stars in a constellation form something greater than just a discrete pattern. I've integrated this interpretation into my one and only story here on FiMFiction, which is a cross between a trans-universe visitors guide to Equestria and a gap-filling exercise. (There's no tags for 'fills gaps in canon continuity' or any groups either. Just "slice of life" and "world building", both of which apply but neither properly expresses 'canon pony civilization thought experiment' or even 'pony diary'.)

7864224
I like the idea that the cosmos of Equestria are their own incredibly magical ecosystem, guided less by evolution than the stories creatures tell of the various creatures they see in the stars. Luna especially, who turned to the heavens more and more in her isolation before going mad. The night sky is where stories very literally come to life.

The problem is that Celestia didn't really understand that aspect of the job while she was moving the moon, and things got a little... odd up there. She only really appreciated all the things she wasn't doing when the Ursae crashed into the Everfree a few centuries ago, and even then she wasn't sure how to keep it from happening again. Her personal students at the time did most of the legwork to figure that out, if not the hornwork.

Suffice to say, it's a good thing most starbeasts are still in their natural habitat. Equestria is ill-prepared for more living-dream kaiju. And Luna gave her sister quite the earful when she saw the sorry state of her night after getting purified.