So, I got this friend, who found a site, who made some flags from this site. Wanna see? It's... something.

Hey, I stumbled across this flag creator yesterday and decided to try my hand at creating flags for the big Conversion Bureau factions. What do you think?
HLF:

PER:

PHL (yes, that's just in the Spectrumverse, but it's one of the most popular and long-running ACB fics):

Feel free to spread these around, and tell me what other people think, too!

PS: if you guys hate the acb don't throw it to me, i just like these flags

Kind of busy. And I'd expect a decapitated pony head somewhere on the HLF one, really.

5776823 I read one fic where the HLF symbol was Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man

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Starswirl, I mean Leonardo, would not approve! (Although it makes more sense than the HLF flag mysteriously featuring a radiant sun, the symbol of Princess Celestia! I would have figured a hand as an obvious sigil for the HLF.)

PHL and PER are quite nice. HLF... not so much. I'm not even sure how anything on this flag could symbolize any of the values of HLF.
In my headcanon HLF always uses this flag - https://robertgraham.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/anarchy-flag-resist.png?w=700 .

5779563 Neat. Thought I recognized that HLF flag from real life. How much do you know about flags? Was curious why red, white and blue is used for many national flags.

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Color psychology. Different colors tend to inspire specific emotions in people.

Red brings to mind images of blood. When used on a nation's flag, this is intended to be the blood of the soldiers who died fighting for it, and it's meant to convey ideas of courage and self-sacrifice.

White represents purity, due to the extreme difficulty of keeping things white in the ancient world. It also came to be associated with innocence, faith, and godliness. Essentially, its use on flags is meant to convey that the country's people have strong morals.

Blue is a soothing color, and it inspires feelings of calm and peace. On flags, it represents stability, justice, and good governance.

Of course, those are just generalities, and different nations have slightly different interpretations of their meanings. For example, in France, the three colors of their flag and the three words of their motto - Liberté, égalité, fraternité - have become conflated, so that red represents liberty, white represents equality, and blue represents brotherhood. However, the ideas of courage, morality, and justice seem to be the most prevalent ones, and are the ones represented on the Great Seal of the United States (technically, the colors on the flag don't mean anything, and are just hold-overs from the Red Ensign of Great Britain that was in use at the time, but the meanings are often attributed to the flag anyways).

5777616 How do you know Da Vinci wouldn't approve? Even if he was more accepting of people different from him than the average person during his time period, that doesn't mean he would be onboard for ponification. He might frown upon the end of humanity even if the individuals survive, albeit in a different form. We have to be careful and not impose our ideals on historical figures.

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You have very neatly summarized the main internal conflict Leonardo experiences over the span of my story Renaissance Pony! (What makes a human being human and the impact of physical form on the mind?) These questions dog him throughout his second life at Starswirl. Also, as one on mankind's greatest artists, he is further faced with the question of the survival of humanity's cultural legacy in This Quiet Earth.

As to those "imposing my ideals on historical figures", I have tried to be as true to the man Leonardo daVinci as possible. Although I would love to know what he would have actually thought of all of this, it's impossible for us to know as he's been dead for over four centuries. That's why I did a lot of research on daVinci and what he's published about his ideas - and I've been a major fan of Leonardo's since I was a teenager. I've read pretty much everything of his that has been translated into English or French, and I'm no slouch as a daVinci scholar. He was no doubt one of the great humanists of history, and loved mankind - as do I. He was also a dedicated vegetarian, who saw a much greater kinship between animals and humans than most people of his era. In addition, daVinci was one of the Renaissance's main proponents of "natural philosophy" and in good part one of the fathers of the scientific method. I would imagine he would be thrilled to be able to do what no person had ever been able to do before: view humanity from both internal and external perspectives, and not just to recognize the other, but to actually become "other".

Again, I only ask that you read my stories and judge them on their merits.

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Says the guy who introduced himself with "You know what, screw it. Flag creator, here."

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On a thread about the flags I created, as a preface to explaining them in order to let people know that I knew what I was talking about. I wasn't writing a three hundred word long plug for my fics on a thread with only a tangential relation to them.

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And I was responding to a comment directed to me, personally, in a discussion thread in a group dedicated to TCB stories.

By the way, I'm one of the admins of this site. I do know what the policies are.

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I'm one of the admins of this site.

Admin for a forum on group on a bigger site. Remember Knightly and pals are god here. Not you or you or me. Not any of us. If you you two want to wave your dicks around in an off topic manner, watch where you swing 'em and wear protection please.

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Admin of this forum, not the FIMfiction site. I misspoke and stand corrected.

Pre freindship pony faction pretty flags. Did the cartoon ever show what the flags the three tribes used? I remember them having banners but is that the same thing as a flag?
Shown here.
Just curious if it's consider the same thing as a flag.

5783968 At least you can stand straight. Most likely think straight. Just having Deja vu about flags. Swear to god there was posts about this topic on this group before.

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Well, they are flags. Almost certainly not the primary flags, though. Every national flag I know of is flown horizontally. Plus, as terrycloth pointed out, flags like those and the ones I made are a bit too "busy" to be the primary flags - making all those symbols on every flag is a painfully time-consuming process, especially if you don't have modern mass production methods. However, they are still probably official flags, just ones used for more ceremonial purposes and not flown from every flagpole. Many countries have state flags that are more ornate than their civil flags, and other, even more ornate variants used as things like the personal standards of high-ranking government and military officials (which is almost certainly what the flags we see in the show are - the "Equestrian flag" is most likely the flag of the diarchy, not the nation). Some even have official variants of their flags for vertical hanging.
For example, Germany has this hanging variant of the Federal Service Flag and Service Flag of the Land Forces of the Federal Defense:

And Queen Elizabeth has her own personal flag, the Royal Standard of the United Kingdom:

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There were three flags, one for each of the pony tribes:
Earth Pony:

Pegasus:

Unicorn:

As well as the flag of the two sisters:

And a recent addition was the flag of the ship Pinkie, Rarity and Applejack sailed in the episode "P.P.O.V.";

Specifically the flag...

IT' s the flag of the Canadian Province of British Colombia! Where DHX is based!

The PHL flag looks like the Ulster Loyalists, Sinn Fein and Equestria got together to make it.

The post between this post and this post by Tathem_Relag was deleted for the inclusion of a nazi flag. If I had the power to remove the image of the flag and keep his/her message, I would have done so, however I could not, so I shall include the meaningful part of his/her message as the creator of the three flags in the original post:

The HLF flag's general design is based around the Nazi war ensign from 1935 to 1938:
The background is yellow because it's the opposite color to purple on the color wheel, showing their opposition to the PER. The black sun symbol in the place of the swastika indicates their commitment to "making Celestia's sun go dark," a.k.a. killing her. The coat of arms in the place of the Iron Cross hearkens back to the mighty empires of Europe's past and indicates their devotion to preserving Earth's history and ancient cultures.

From now on, please do not post images to any real world flag or fan made flags based on real world flags. You may, however, use text links to such images if it is relevant to your post.

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Was the post deleted because of the Nazi flag specifically, or the real-world flag in general? Because if the latter, not one post containing images so far passes muster.

The first flag here is based on the Imperial German war ensign, which was also used as the basis for Nazi military flags, including the one you deleted. It's a yellow-for-red color swap, with the icons changed.

This post is full of IRL flags.

Another IRL flag.

If, on the other hand, it's because "nobody should ever see a picture of a Nazi flag", we have all sorts of problems.

5922071 Originally, it was my intention to delete this entire thread, because it is what I call a “powderkeg topic”; It has a high risk of inviting argument. However, as I read over all of the posts, it became clear that this thread carries genuine interest to the design and meaning of flags, but flags are powerful symbols to what is supposed to be living ideals and always evoke strong opinions.

Let me give you a little example here. Some years ago, I went to my first big MLP meet. As I entered the main room, I gasped as there standing on either side of the podium were three feet wide seven feet long banners of the two sisters. At that moment, I was no longer at a convention, I was at an embassy of Equestria, and it changed my attitude throughout my entire time there.

Flags that are posted here because they have been made to represent peoples within TCB, are an expression of creativity. These flags do not have a prior meaning, they do not have serious followers, because they have just been created. However, the phenomenon regarding flags is very real. If you go to a general SF convention and hang up the flag of the United Federation of Planets over some back corner broom closet where no one can see it and you’d have to go looking for it just to see it, if you come back in twenty minutes, you’ll find the fan of every series and movie of Star Trek in the convention in uniform crammed in that corner so tight you can hear the science officers in the back making observations on the coal they brought with them being compressed into diamond.

It’s all fun and games when it’s good natured silliness like this, but people take things seriously. There are probably people who hate Canada enough to be disgusted at the flag of British Colombia, but they probably don’t watch MLP for that reason, there are people who hate Queen Elizabeth, and there are people who hate every military organization ever, but thankfully nothing has come up about this, and if it does, I will delete those posts as well as the posts that contained the flags that started them, but the nazi flag and its key symbol, the hakenkreuz, regardless of what they represented between the years 1925 and 1945, represent today, in 2017, both an inward and outward hatred that is ultimately self-destructive. Some years ago, at my favorite conventions, I met a group of people standing with perfect posture, exhibiting all the features typical of old world gentry, their SS uniforms had not a speck of lint on them, and we got along great. I did notice over the year, that they were high strung toward any and all opinions on everything. A year or two later, I learned that their feelings toward nazism were genuine and not just an expensive cosplay. This didn’t bother me, because I have also met people who are Asatru, which is the viking religion that states they can only go to a good afterlife if they die well in battle. Such things might be upsetting, except they also hold the belief that life is a battle, so that which is normally considered sinister does not have to be if it is directed respectfully inward. At one con, these nazis and I went out to eat, not a single identifying emblem on them mind you, and there was a small completely unrelated incident in the first five minutes that we were there, so we left, which is upsetting because we were not actually kicked out, and I wanted to stay. Outside the restaurant, they worked themselves up into a frenzy, pulled out a lighter, burned my coupons for this restaurant, and hailed in a circle over the tiny fire making curses at the restaurant. I was shocked to witness such a display of hatred over such a minor problem. They never forgave the incident, and I had to listen to them cussing the place out all the way back to the hotel. At this point, it occurred to me that I had been letting all of their angry remarks slide as harmless, when the hatred behind these remarks were real. Last year, at the end of this convention, I was helping a staff member take down some wall art and asked why certain areas seemed to be covered up, she told me those were areas where hakenkreuz had been drawn next to her art specifically as intimidation because she was jewish, and at least one of these people felt that this alone was enough to have her not be welcomed at this convention.

So you see Zontargs, for every widely known flag in the world, there is the potential to band together under brotherhood, but also the potential to band together under tribal hatred of others. Some people, may have had similar situations where a flag or a symbol was used as a threat against them. Because I know that some of these flags have been used this way, I must limit the way all of them can be displayed. Linking to the flag in a relevant post allows the reader to choose whether they want to see it or not, and shows respect to anyone who many be offended, that offense is not intended. As for the flags already posted, I do not want to delete everything, but the one I deleted was used, in my presence, as a clear symbol of hatred against others, so I can neither ignore that fact nor pretend that displaying it here will remain strictly a historical reference.