• Published 1st Apr 2022
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Ideas Entwined - FanOfMostEverything



Sixes_and_Sevens offered a bunch of either/or prompts. I chose both.

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Behind the Horsewords: The Planetary Dynasts

Hey, FoME here. Bit of a spoiler, but one of today's prompts is "Write some nonfiction." Given the other prompt, I'm writing some nonfiction about fiction. We begin with a bit of a history lesson:

Many people did not react well to the revelation of Cadence. She’d been made an alicorn for marketing reasons, with little if any consideration for the peripheral demographic of bronydom. As such, Princess Lovebutt completely threw off many elaborately crafted headcanons about the nature of the diarchs, the cosmology of Equestria, and so forth. (Celestia playing the jobber during the wedding’s climax didn’t help either, but that’s another matter.)

I adapted as best I could, which was fairly easily as I was still figuring out what I wanted to do with my ponyfic at the time. I was still working with my original MtG crossover setting, which provided ample opportunities to warp canon however I wanted. (I was also still growing as an author. I like to think I still am, but with hindsight, it’s clear I was back then.)

I expressed the original concept for the planetary dynasts in the Sideboard of Harmony1 short “Spectrometer of Worlds.” (I was lumping stories rather than splitting at the time, which was probably the right move for expository world-building exercises like that one.) The story is part of Pinkie’s ongoing explanation of how Equestria was made, which she knows because in that continuity, she’s the one who made it. This includes the other planets in Equestria’s solar system, which act to stabilize the plane. And since the creation of Celestia and Luna led to the sun and moon, well, these sorts of things cut both ways.

The inspiration for this stems from the Exalted tabletop RPG, a.k.a. the system where you’re Superman, your previous incarnation’s werewolf boyfriend is a guerrilla (and possibly gorilla) sociologist trying to build a better nation in the remote wilderness, your old advisors are astrology-powered fate ninjas working for Heaven’s bloated bureaucracy, they’ve told an entire empire of element-bending Power Rangers descended from your foot soldiers that you need to be destroyed on sight, and reality as you know it is being threatened by at least four other factions from outside of it on top of its own shoddy craftsmanship. There is, as you might imagine, a lot going on there, but my main inspiration was the Incarnae, the gods of the sun, the moon, and the planets.

You can probably see where this is going.

The Maidens of Destiny, the Incarnae of the planets (Mercury through Saturn, because Second Edition Exalted lived and died by the Law of Five Splats,) were each given a variety of other concepts in their divine portfolio, much in the same way that the Unconquered Sun was also god of virtue and perfection and Luna (no relation) was deity of… well, a lot of things, actually. This is what happens when your titanic progenitor holds a battle royale of all potential moon deities in his imagination and only brings the winner into actual existence.

Yeah, Exalted gets weird. Like many White Wolf RPGs, I find it’s a lot more fun to read about than to actually play. But I digress.

Each planetary Incarna informed her respective dynast, with Cadence naturally based on Venus. Venus is associated with the color blue, which actually worked out quite well given Cadence’s cutie mark. Given the color of love (and all emotions) in Magic, I had a nice, neat association between Cadence and the blue-red color pair that I’ve maintained since. This is also why quotes from her in my pony-based Magic cards are attributed to “Cadence, Princess of Serenity.” That is her official title in that long-neglected setting.

And yes, I'm still spelling her name as the word, more easily trademarked variant spelling be damned.

Of course, the problem with introducing those five planets is that I needed to provide a princess for each of them, which was how my entirely reasonable and logical thought process led me to making four alicorn OCs. In my defense, it was 2012. We had no idea who might pop out of the woodwork down the line when it came to horns and wings.

I wanted to maintain a theme, so I looked for words that didn’t just have the same suffix as “Cadence,” but had that suffix even after being translated into Italian. Up to and including “Mi Amore” equivalents, some of which definitely worked better than others.

Mi Finale Temperanza, or simply Princess Temperance, has the most out-of-‘verse screentime of the four. I’ve made use of her as a pony psychopomp outside of the Elementals of Harmony setting (see They Live on in These Parts2) and she does feel like reasonable fit in Equestria. Based on Saturn, the Princess of Endings embodies the balance between white and black mana and acted as a divine psychopomp in those colors years before Athreos3 made it cool. She’d also head the Royal Assassinorum, if such an organization existed. Which it obviously doesn't. It certainly doesn't count any fandom-notable cellists among its empty ranks.

Mi Illusione Prudenza, or Princess Prudence, could arguably be cited as the reason I haven’t messed with that setting more than I have. She’s also the most prolific offscreen presence, which is quite appropriate for a princess based on Jupiter, making her the Princess of Secrets. Prudence heads the Equestrian Time-Space Administration Bureau, the aspect of that continuity I’ve made the most use of since. After all, it’s the aspect most devoted to working with other ponyfic continuities, and thus has feelers in many other stories. It doesn’t hurt that she represents the green-blue mana balance and thus has a fair amount of creator bias working in her favor.

Mi Milite Vigilanza, or Princess Vigilance, got a few moments in the spotlight in the ill-fated My Little Praetor: Phthisis is Magic4. Based on Mars, the Princess of Battle stays in geosynchronous orbit over Canterlot, watching over all of Equestria and ready to dive towards any incursion at a moment’s notice… in theory. In practice, things like changeling infiltration, Diamond Dog slavers sneaking under the border, and similar approaches aren’t easy to spot from that high up, though she might notice the Storm Fleet… assuming she didn’t mistake it for a storm system. Many ponies think she’d serve better on the ground than as a one-mare panopticon, but good luck telling her that. As would be expected of the most militaristic alicorn, she balances red and white mana

Finally, Mi Corriere Divergenza, or Princess Divergence, has never actually been on screen since I came up with her. The conceit is that the Princess of Journeys is Equestria’s wandering diplomat, ensuring its presence in the minds of the other nations and not so subtly reminding them of who they have to thank for the continued operation of the sun and moon. The reality is that her literally Mercurial wanderlust has her criss-crossing the globe as she pleases, which makes it inconvenient to show her in any story that isn’t directly focused on her. She ended up on the butt end of the process of elimination since Exalted’s Mercury is associated with yellow, and ended up balancing black and green mana. At this point, her absence has become a personal running gag. It might be a more widely known one if I’d actually explained this somewhere before now.

Obviously, Season 3 and later canon shot these concepts out of the water, but I still like the idea of Cadence being an honorary quintuplet. (The dynasts are so named because each gives birth to her identical successor when she is ready to pass the torch. Canterlot nobility traces its lineage back to their non-alicorn children. By this logic, Flurry Heart has some interesting implications for Cadence.)

I suppose the takeaway here is to never be afraid to explore the setting, nor to recognize when ideas don’t work out as well as you’d hoped. Though I do still feel I owe Divergence a story at some point…

(No, that's not a hint for tomorrow's story.)

Author's Note:

Prompt 19: Princess / Write some nonfiction

I suppose I could have gone for in-universe nonfiction, but that felt like more of a cheat than detailing the inspiration for a recurring piece of headcanon. This whole peek behind the curtains is a demonstration of my long-held belief that originality is a matter combining enough sources of inspiration until no one can tell where it all came from.

Footnote links, since putting them in the chapter itself felt gauche:
1. Sideboard of Harmony
2. They Live on in These Parts
3. Athreos, God of Passage
4. My Little Praetor: Phthisis is Magic