Opening sequence,

We see in the background one of the stained glass windows clearly shows a globe.

So - NOT a flat world?

As a magical land, it makes so much more sense to me making it a flatworld in my headcannon, but here we have a big giant sphere image with contients on it!

2165680
Why would there be a huge, flat, rock floating in the middle of space with magical life on it?

2165704
Wut?

2165680

2165690
The question is; why not?

2165717
Because.... I HATE FLAT ROCKS!

2165680
Good spotting.

Personally, I don't mind it as a sphere. I mean, clearly the sun and moon are. So why would the planet be different?

It does make NMM's threat to make the night last forever a bit unsatisfying, it must be admitted. Unless you get weird and metaphysical and say that the entire world shares the exact same sky. Somehow. Possibly due to wizards.

2165714
I think that this is what he was referring to:

2165680
Obviously, that window is just an incomplete account of the above picture.

What do think all those other spheres are covering up, hmm?

2165728
But flat rocks are awesome!

Could you do this with a round rock?

Didn't think so.

2165704 The old myth of the world being carried on the back of a turtle is from Chinese legend, and is the basis for the Mists of Pandaria (World Of Warcraft expansion) featuring Pandarians.

The Pandarians are panda-like beings whose homeworld is actually on the shell of a large flying turtle.

2165680
Fuck the big giant sphere image with continents on it. If you want a flat world in your story, write the world in your story as flat. Don't let - a relatively small piece of - canon cause you to scrap an idea that you want to write into your fic.

(Personal philosophy) Canon is lego, add to - or take from - it as you like. Build whatever you want to build, don't let the image on the box kill your creativity.

2165761
Huh, so apparently that's a thing...

2165763
... Nope. I've heard of turtles, I've heard of the cosmos, I've heard of backs, but not that.

2165781
I could if I tried hard enough.

2165828
You'd be extremely uncomfortable...

2165734

Because it's a MAGICAL land, dangit! You make it a REAL planet and ---

Well, I suppose I COULD just headcannon that she likes astronomy of OTHER worlds.... or ----

!!!!

It's a planet NEAR the diskworld of Equestria! Maybe?

nertz. Why would Cel have a stained class pic of ANOTHER world in her throne room?

*thinks*

It's... actually a magic portal to a world with RL physics? Maybe?

Grr! That's kinda lameish...

I'm really having a hard time picturing Cel and Lun having the power to move the earth. And it isn't implied in the series anywhere - Cel and Lun are moving SUNS and MOONS. Earth is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 heavier than you and me, and the sun is a MILLION times bigger, literally! I have a hard time picturing it if it's not a magical flatworld.

Maybe all the planets and moons and suns are smaller....

2165843
See, that's actually our world on the other side of the portal. Celestia knew about us the whole time and she never told Twilight.

2165828 Basically the turtle comes from a story that Stephen Hawking liked to tell.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell was talking about how the Earth worked. How it revolves around the Sun, how the Moon made the tides, etc. etc. etc. Then after he had finished, a lady stood up and said "You're wrong, the Earth is actually a flat plate on top of a giant turtle."

Bertrand then asked her, "Then what is the turtle standing on?"

"Another turtle! It's turtles all the way down!"

The point behind this story: replace "flat plate on top of a giant turtle" with "created by God" and replace "then what is the tortoise standing on?" with "who created God?"

Basically Hawking wanted to make the point that explaining all of Earth's wonders on God is not going to get anybody anywhere.

2165690

It's a magic world, and it's not an ASTRONOMICAL HUGE place with distances like 92 million miles to the sun and the mass of the earth being 5X10^24 kg. Such distances aren't magical. They're hideously ordinary and overwhelmingly huge. A magic place where ponies move the sun and the moon just doesn't FIT. It's like a person the size of an atom picking up a truck.

Plus, THAT isn't depicted in the series - We SEE Luna and Cel moving the sun and moon around. In the comics, the ponies WALK to the moon!

I'm having a hard time lampshading I guess.

2165908
Huh, interesting. I didn't expect something that to come from someone like Stephen Hawking.

2165945
Well, you still make some good points. I guess I shouldn't compare Equestria to the real world.

2165848 THAT makes a whole heck of a lot of sense actually!

My headcannon has Eq being intricately linked to Earth, so ... yeah.

"But... Princess Celestia! I found ancient writing about you going to Earth! You knew all along!"

"But of course." She gestures to the stained glass window. "Why would I have a portal to it right here in my throne room if I didn't know about it?"

Or something like that.

2165680

Whaaaat?!

2165680

Not to mention all those times we've seen a world globe in Ponyville's classroom!

2165680 If it was a flat world, what's on the bottom? NOT Diamond Dogs, they live IN the planet!

2165781 actually I could and I did...

2166644
Spines are not means to do that...

2166658 It's called reverse planking. Any questions?

2166560
Also worth nothing: the chalkboard is displaying some sort of orbital mechanics equation.

2165908 I have a book that referenced that.

"Onto the balcony," she ordered, and suddenly the delicate sound of a clockwork mechanism filled the room. One of the bed's wrinkled legs took a slow, smooth step forward.
Alek jumped back, and Lilit laughed from across the room. The creature crawled back up to his shoulder, echoing her giggle.
"Haven't you ever seen a turtle move?" Nene asked, smiling.
Alek took another step back, getting out of the bed's way as it lumbered toward the double doors. "Yes, but I never thought of sleeping on one."
"You sleep on one every night, boy. The world itself rests on a turtle's back!"
Alek smiled at her. "My mother used to tease me with that old wives' tale."
"Old wives' tale?" Nene cried, her voice crackling. "The notion is perfectly scientific. The world rests upon a turtle, which itself stands on the back of an elephant!"
Alek tried not to laugh. "Then what does the elephant stand on, madam?"
"Don't you be clever, young man." She narrowed her eyes, "It's elephants all the way down!"

-Behemoth, by Scott Westerfeld.

It's also possible that Equestria is spherical, but tidally locked without magic boosting its rotational speed.

I like my head cannon of Equestria being on a rogue planet called Equus, and there are two very large artificial satellites serving as the sun and moon that are controlled by Celestia and Luna. Celestia didn't give a shit about Equestria being dark when Luna went apeshit, she was pissed because the other half of the planet was turned into a continental funeral pyre.
Mmmm...toasty...

2165843
Equestria is a magical land, not a magical world. Equestria is just a part of the world. It's just one country.

2169511, 2167325, 2165680, 2169638

In order to 'square' the globe with Equestrian orbital mechanics, I've come up with my own headcanon that Equus is a Dyson sphere, and the sun and moon in the are actually relatively small and close artificial satellites that are under the direct control of the princesses. Sun and moon rises are just the princesses moving the satellites in and out of huge holes in the Dyson sphere's surface. Note: this makes the physics of the show consistent with our own!

2168476 The earth is 5X10^26 kg. I can't wrap my head around the idea, especially when I write out all the zeroes.

2169511>>2167325>>2170069

I'm going to lean toward a rogue planet with a much smaller (and movable) sun and moon, lost in the darkness of space somewhere. Dang that globe in the classroom!

Now I just have to figure out the stars... hmm...

2165734 The Princesses have a very poor understanding of the laws of physics, and any lands outside Equestria's borders.

2165815

No. Fanfiction is not a place for you to impose your personal fantasies on someone else's world. If you can't deal with the setting and the characters as they are presented, go write something else.

2170069

... Except for the obvious fact that when they look up in the sky, they don't see the other side of the Dyson sphere?

Also, there's no gravity on the inside of a Dyson sphere.

There's plenty of other incidences where we see globes. They're decorations in Canterlot (see Twilight's cutie mark flashback), there's a globe in the Ponyville schoolhouse, Pinkie Pie outright says "the world is round, there is no up or down" in HWE.

Equestria's on a planet, deal with it.

2165680

What kind of fucking idea is this? Why would the world be flat?

Also, Equestria is a country. Not a world, fuckshit.

2165945

Also, you're speaking of Equestria like you've been there, broke into the achieves, read the shit out of everything, and teleported back before anyone found out.

2165680
I'm sticking with it being flat. Raising the sun and moon are both explicitly stated in the script and very important to the setting, characters, and story, much more so than incidental background details added by animators who take for granted that they live on a planet and just want to add objects that the audience will recognize, or Pinkie's throwaway gag about maps.
The whole "raising" concept doesn't make much sense without the horizon being an actual edge, under which the sun and moon aren't already busy illuminating anything - The princess' shifts never end because on a regular planet it's never not day or night somewhere. Plus, like you said, "magical land" - It makes much more sense for it to conform to ancient, folksy notions of how the world works instead of anything discovered about nature since, oh, the invention of alphabetic writing.
Either that or there are no antipodes - No one lives on the other half of the planet. But what's stopping them from spreading there, and how is that different in practice from a flat planet, anyway? It's just a dome then instead of a plane.

Besides, there are ways to square that with apparent roundness - 19th century crackpots sure tried:

I made a little painting of Equestria in that spirit:

2171690

Ahem. Did I say the ponies were on the inside? In fact they are on the outside! However, there is another shell just outside of their own, and Luna actually does 'paint the firmament' every night by adjusting lights on the bottom of that layer. Perhaps it is a shellworld with a large number of such levels (check out Iain Banks' novel 'Matter' for examples).

For the truly ambitious world builder, physics is an infinite canvas!

2171976

Nuh-uh. Canon clearly shows planetary globes in Equestrian classrooms, and not those funny pancakes. Unless you claim that the Princesses are lying to their subjects about the shape of the world!

My shellworld theory fits both show canon, AND doesn't require hand-waving perceptual misdirection or mystical intervention. and

2171690

Fanfiction is not a place for you to impose your personal fantasies on someone else's world.

I could argue the toss about that with you, but that's not in my interests - and probably not yours either, I don't know.

2172541

If they live on the outside then describing it as a Dyson sphere is pointless, it functions just like a globe.

2165734
Or... Equestria gets eternal night, but the other side of the world gets eternal day. Both sides would eventually die.

I view Celestia and Luna as controlling the obit of the sun & moon (Earth/Equus = center of the universe kinda thing) and without them they simply won't move.

2172588
If you reread my post, you'll see the point I was making is that the globes don't mean anything - They're there because classrooms simply have globes in them, and also apples on the teacher's desk, and sometimes those banners above the blackboard with all the upper and lowercase letters on them, and maybe a hamster or turtle everyone takes turns taking care of. They're just ornaments an animator put in the background, whereas Celstia and Luna raising the sun and moon is both explicitly in the script, and important to the functioning of the actual show itself. They're not lying to their subjects; the background design elements are just there because a round planet is what the audience lives on and recognizes. If there was an actual episode about a globe manufacturer, then they'd carry some weight.

2172826

Or maybe "raising the sun" is just a manner of speaking? In real life we say "get back home before the sun sets," not "get back home before the Earth has rotated in such a way as to make the sun appear to fall below the horizon". Taking a casual phrase in the most literal way possible is hardly any different than taking background objects at face value.

2172864
Right from the opening narration of episode 1 we're told they physically control the rising and setting of the sun and moon, and then we see it happen to drive the actual story. The whole episode is based on very non-metaphorical control over where the sun is, in this case "nowhere." Nightmare Moon was not intent on creating a band of twilight along the terminator that everyone would migrate to.
But if the sun and moon going around a sphere, then they're both constantly rising as well as setting at every instant. You wouldn't have to go anywhere to catch the Summer Sun Celebration, you could just sit at home and wait for it to come to you, or travel east and see it before everyone else. It's really made to look like it's happening everywhere at the same time. The only thing you'd be missing might be a big jerk of it forward for some reason at the horizon of some arbitrary location.

Unless there's an anti-Celestia and anti-Luna on the other side of the planet whom they just hand things off to, but then that's just two hemispherical flat worlds glued together for no other reason than to arbitrarily preserve it being a sphere (and even then, it's still night on the west side of each half when the sun first rises, so they'd have to do it again for each time zone, basically)

What the characters say and do actually has bearing on what's going on and what the whole enterprise is about - It defines what's important in the story. Background objects are just to tell us where it's happening and to look pretty, and maybe offer a little characterization, like what kind of state someone keeps their house in.

2172957

Except again, we use phrases like "sunrise" and "sunset" in real life even though they are inaccurate descriptions of what's actually happening. You are insisting on an absolute literal interpretation of a phrase that is never actually used literally in the English language. Claiming that fairy tales are "very non-metaphorical" is patently absurd; that book was not an encyclopedia or a history book, but a book of myth.

2173009
I think that's really a stretch. For one thing, we don't use the transitive verbs "raise" and "lower" to describe sunrise and sunset here (they went specifically out of their way to make this sun/moon thing the premise, to show that their world works differently from this one. The princesses could have been fighting about anything, or represented any kind of dichotomy), and again, the whole point of the first episode was that all the stuff in that book was actually true. The whole first episode is predicated on all of that happening and being done as described, not as a colloquial metaphor.
...Besides, when has a show or movie ever had a book of prophecy that turned out to not be true? Outside of Scooby Doo, I guess.

My point is that if it's an astronomical metaphor like it is here, it requires way too many assumptions about what's physically happening instead of what the characters say is going on (look at all the ones we've made up in just this thread) and how things are constructed such that they might say those things, and much simpler to say it's just a flat world where everything is as described, and the globes are just background icons. And Pinkie was either just blowing smoke, or meant round like a dish instead of like a ball (you can still use a flat map any way up you want).

2173070
... Does the word sunrise not ring any bells? Seriously, your entire argument is predicated on this notion that the sun can't rise or fall if the world is round. Yet we use phrases like sunrise, sunset, sundown, sunup (relatively archaic, but nonetheless used), and nightfall. The fact that they put the words in opposite order and use slightly different terms means absolutely nothing. We don't use the transitive form of the words because we don't believe there's some supernatural force causing the sun to rise and fall, but if we did we would. One could easily say the ancient Greeks believed Apollo "raised the sun" or that medieval peasants believed that God "raised the sun". Here's a song from a random Portugeuse band titled "Raise the Sun". We say "the sun rises", because for the sun to rise is merely a relative observation based on perspective, and the way the phrase is used in English reflects this. By your argument, the fact that we use any of the terms I pointed out above would mean that the Earth is flat.

So no. The phrase "raise the sun" is perfectly valid on a globe. It thus is completely illogical to go with the theory that tosses out consistent canonical facts that have periodically appeared in every season to go with a literalist interpretation of a phrase never used literally.

2172826

Dude, if it's in the show it's canon. If it ain't it's not.

However, as I posted before, write the story the way you want. But don't call it canon!

2173258

One could easily say the ancient Greeks believed Apollo "raised the sun" or that medieval peasants believed that God "raised the sun".

That illusion is how they got the idea to have the show work that way in the first place. People made up those stories about Apollo because they guessed that's what was happening, but they never saw it, but in the show we do. It's an illusion in our case, but saying it's one in there as well is assuming too much, because it's important to the story that things really do happen as if it were day and night everywhere at the same time, instead of it being always day somewhere and always night somewhere, and we're not given any hints that they intended to undermine that by having a reveal that the world really works differently.

We don't use the transitive form of the words because we don't believe there's some supernatural force causing the sun to rise and fall, but if we did we would.

That's my point. This time there is, so they really do talk and think about them differently. This time it's a single individual with a single location for whom that's true, but it's not true for a round world as a whole, and we have no reason to think it's not Celestia who controls the sun for the whole world. We have to make up all kinds of new things on our own about what "raising" the sun objectively means if it's really just going around and around. You have to spin a bunch of tales about why it still works, essentially from thin air, so that what we're given in the story fits with preconceived notions of what a world looks like, or a drawing someone glimpsed in a background.
Saying it's still round is ironically a lot like the epicycles added to Ptolemy's geocentric solar system, in that it tacks on a lot of behind-the-scenes baggage to explain why things still look like they do, instead of just going with the simpler solution and ignoring the irrelevant info, like traditions that say the Earth is the center, or minor background art showing a round world in this case.
(Of course, I'm sure people have written good stories on here about that very conspiracy to hide the world being round, and whatever scary things live over the horizon.)

It thus is completely illogical to go with the theory that tosses out consistent canonical facts that have periodically appeared in every season to go with a literalist interpretation of a phrase never used literally.

You mean a throwaway gag and some background design elements? Those aren't canonical facts in any meaningful sense of the word, not compared to the actual events in the story, the exposition given for how and why they're possible, and the roles of the characters. Not every element has to be consistent - Some details can just be "wrong" or irrelevant in light of what the story's about, so can just be thrown away. Like the globes in this case.

The stories are written, the characters speak, and the events take place as if they're on a flat world over which the sun travels - Either that you you have to pull out of your ass that everyone's living in the same time zone. Anything outside the story itself or the characters' important actions that contradicts that isn't "evidence" for anything except the animators not being total grognards about worldbuilding, constantly teleconferencing to make sure everything's consistent.

2173601
And my point, that I've made over and over and that no one seems to acknowledge, even to bother disagreeing with, in any thread ever, is that not every single thing that's in the show matters for canon: If unimportant things like production design elements or throwaway gags contradict important things like exposition and story and characters' roles, then the trivial ones are just a fluke and that's the end of it.
It's no different from a boom mic appearing in frame in a live TV show, or a character's watch being on one wrist and then the other in the next shot, or on the wrist of a Roman solider in a period piece - That doesn't mean it's a magic/time travelling watch, especially if that would contradict it being a realistic drama.

In this case, it really does matter for the cosmogony of Equestria, because two important characters fight over control of it as if it were flat and the same time of day everywhere, and the only evidence to the contrary could all be changed without affecting anything in the story at all.