A Winter Wishday Theory/Observation
My My Little Pony theory: The creating of the blizzard made sense. WARNING, Winter Wishday SPOILER.
If you don´t know, My Little Pony has started a new “generation” of ponies. The newest generation is generation 5. The main series is on Netflix called “Make Your Mark” and is a continuation of generation 4. This is important info.
Generation 5 bases a lot of its lore on generation 4, but it rarely answers what happened between gen4 and gen5. The gen5 Christmas special “Winter Wishday” references the past though, but not in a way that My Little Pony fans expected.
See, in gen4 the three main pony races had a genetic talent each. Earth ponies were strong and could grow crops well. Pegasi could fly and be in control of the weather. Unicorns could do the more “typical” magic and in the far away past used to use their magic together to raise and lower the sun and moon. This later job was later given to their country leaders. Unicorns could manipulate the weather (as shown with the unicorn Rarity in episode 13 season 3) but it was difficult for them.
Now in the new special of generation 5, magic is much more powerful than in gen4. Earth pony magic in terms of growing food is now overpowered, but Pegasi have shown no sign of controlling the weather for some reason. The weather is self-sufficient. Unicorns have now shown themselves to outshine the other two main ponies again.
The winter special has the three pony races introducing their own winter celebration and traditions. The unicorns have a tradition of greeting each other with “Frosty Shivers” on that particular Not-Christmas day. Every unicorn, old and young, did this with no trouble. The greeting later proves to be an ancient spell for making it snow on Not-Christmas. The cast learns that since there was no magic for ages (aka between g4 and g5) the unicorns forgot the reason for the saying and now that magic is back (it comes back at the beginning of g5) the greeting suddenly means something more. So the unicorns over the course of a day have created a blizzard.
In generation 4 all the pony races lived together in harmony and celebrated during their Not-Christmas that they all lived together. At the beginning of generation 5, the races were separated and had separate traditions. So I theorize that at some point after they split, the unicorns still wanted snow for their re-branded Not-Christmas Not-Celebrating-Multi-Pony-Race-Harmony holiday and used their limited weather magic together. Probably all doing a small spell together instead of 1 unicorn struggling to control an element that isn´t their genetic specialty (aka Rarity). Since g4 magic was weaker than g5, every unicorn could do it and not create a blizzard. Now that the magic is stronger in the new generation, the greeting “Frosty Shivers” had more power and outdid what their ancestors could imagine. And this is all without even knowing that they are using magic!
Generation 5 has struggled with making the magic system work in the series. The baby dragon has magic that can do basically anything the plot needs it to. Same with the cutiemarks (the butt-tattoos) who suddenly have magic that means more than just a manifestation of a character's talent. The lantern the main character has suddenly can do anything if people get along around it and wish really hard. HOWEVER, one thing that makes sense with the magic and story, is that the unicorns unknowingly created a blizzard with an old tradition they forgot the meaning of. How many traditions do we continue to do without remembering every detail? A lot and a bunch of traditions have had their reasons change.
So it makes total sense that the unicorns both kept their tradition, practiced it, and created uncontrollable weather. Rarity messed up in generation 4 with cold weather too, so it isn´t something pulled out of the blue! This does bring up the question about the pegasus magic though since now unicorns can canonically affect the weather so much with just a bazillion simple greetings in a day. And it also brings up the question if the ancient unicorns that used the spell known for snow, ever needed to think about how often they used it or if the spell was so weak at the time that it didn´t matter.













