I CANT BELIEVE THIS SHOW PASSED ON THIS COOL IDEA!!
Way way back in the day, during the S02 finale, a buddy of mine complained that the way Equestria did weddings was too normal. Other than the whole “changeling invasion” thing, of course.
I mean, in season 1 we found that ponies had to manually clean out a season and fabricate a new one. They also have to sing carols every winter or else there won’t be enough Christmas joy around to keep the Windigos at bay. Ponies are magical as hell!
Yet, even though the other wedding featured much later resulted in a magical tree made out of love, both weddings were otherwise exactly a normal human wedding. No one even had to climb Death Mountain for a blue feather like Harvest Moon.
But I’ll do you one better. Not only should ponies not have normal weddings, they shouldn’t have normal babies. This is a child’s fairytale world. Where do babies come from in fairytale worlds?
THE STORKS BRING ‘EM!!!
Friendship is Magic should have literally had divine birds bring babies to their parents. (Not necessarily storks, just as griffons are not necessarily a lion/eagle combo.)
Not only would that be perfectly fitting for the setting but it would have solved a ton of problems and explained a load of issues:
Ponies don’t have to look like their parents (countless examples)
Ponies don’t have to be the same tribe as their parents (e.g. Cake spouses are earth ponies, children are pegasus and unicorn)
Ponies don’t have to have any parents (e.g. Celestia & Luna)
Never bringing up hee-hee is fine and not at all conspicuous, hubba-bubba doesn’t even exist due to storks bringing babies and all
Remember Philomena? That’s okay, neither did the writers. She was Celestia’s pet phoenix.
Or, maybe, in some pretentious jerk’s pretentious AU (I’m pointing at me), REALLY COOL BABIES who are born to the cosmos themselves as scions of the light to drive away evil are brought by phoenixes and Philomena is the phoenix who brought Celestia and Luna to Star Swirl.
(And ponies still do the devil’s dance anyway because eat me.)
Someone likes my phoenix idea and it might catch on and become popular and I'd just like to say that
You can't claim copyright or w/e on a general idea so I can't stop everybody from doing the phoenix thing but
I totally came up with it first, since I still haven't published anything from RevEq this reblog is my proof nyeh nyeh and
In current plans for RevEq Philomena is not the phoenix that brought Tia & Luna because that'd be weird, she is the daughter of that phoenix so that she is their sister not their mom
I'm supposed to be workin' on a pony game. It's kind of really really late but whatever. One day it'll be good 'n' stuff.
You can play the mega early cruddy version on Itch! It's not done. If you whine about the obviously not done parts I'm gonna laugh at you for being dumb.
Out of Season takes place in Reverie Equestria, so some of the characters are gonna look a little different, and references to past events are gonna be different too.
It's gonna be a lighthearted game. No explicit depictions of sex, no bad words, no blood and death or whatever. It's full of jokes and the characters being endearingly stupid. Some of this will only be endearing and funny to vaguely smart people who can understand how people work, and as you might be aware I don't think the brony fandom is rich in that resource (nor is Tumblr) but we'll see!
It'll have a day/night system with weekly character schedules and, possibly, special schedules for special days.
Eventually it'll have custom tilesets kinda like this:
. . . . .
The biggest obstacle to Out of Season is that I'm using it to develop a custom code library called SolaerMV. Some of the implemented features include:
General fixes and toggles for stupid things RPG Maker MV does by default
Letterboxing (public demo cheats, next published version has it legit)
Automatically changing character "Costumes" based on current Class
Ability to change facial expressions mid-message while reflecting Costume changes
Name window on message box
Ability to define different window skins for different windows
"Sixers" - character sprites that animate thru six frames of animation instead of 1-2-3-2
Future features include:
A Final Fantasy V-inspired class change system
Advanced parameters and status effects including stacks and dormant stacks
Enemies which use SV actor sprites instead of still images
... ???
. . . . . . . . .
The other obstacle is drawing lots and lots of sprites and pixel arts. Such as all the unique buildings in each city.
The playable characters need sprites for about 30 costumes for the overworld, a couple dozen face expressions, and their SV battle sprites. In the current alpha they have a few overworld costumes, only one costume's worth of faces, and no SV battle sprites.
The good news is: it turns out you can make face images as big as you want and MV can work with it, so I don't need to get all pedantic about defining exactly how many faces everyone gets. Rarity and Pinkie already have an extra face expression to themselves with no apparent technical issues.
I need to look thru the character list to do sprites for all the minor characters / BGPs and might need to do new designs since the old BGPs are all coherent characters now. Since the Celestia in the above image is out of date, here's a more recent revision of her sprite:
Hi! Since you were disappointed with how MLP g4 turned out by the time it ended (as was I), I was curious if you have any opinions on Equestria Girls? Personally I think it had a ton of potential, as to me Sunset Shimmer is one of the few positive elements that the new writers added to the franchise, but they sacrificed any expansive world building and overall narrative integrity for forced ship pandering, much like the MLP finale did (though in this case with rarijack and sciset and on a much bigger scale), which ofc the fans eat up. I actually think if Sunset was included in the main show, it could’ve let to some interesting and cool plot lines (plus imo she brings the best out of Twilight). I’d like to know what you think! :)
Finally, Summersong has come back to Tumblr.
... to whine on a different account, but it seems this was sitting in my inbox. I have no idea how long it's been there.
Just like old times, it took me a whole day to finish writing this. But anyway it's been a while since I watched this crud so let's see...
Equestria Girls (EQG) was a very obvious cheap cash grab for teen girls. A really successful one, though, since it let Hasbro steal the Disney Princess license from Barbie.
With this in mind... the first two EQG movies are surprisingly decent. The second being the far better of the two with the exception of Trixie repeating her stupid strip club song over and over.
The third movie is garbage other than its songs and the fourth is meh. I despise "Sci-Twi". She has zero of prime Twilight's charm; they didn't expressly address or play on the analogue to prime Twilight having the least connection to the other girls out of the six so we get only the drawbacks of that lack of connection; and Sunset covers all of her contributions to the show from being the leader to having the most impressive powers to formerly being a monster. Sci-Twi is a boring nothing-character there for creeps to drool over a shy nerd girl. Sci-Twi is completely pointless.
Beyond the movies, I saw I guess a couple of the specials and that's about it. So I have no clue what you're talking about with the character shipping. Either that's more apparent in the shorts I didn't watch or the fandom is once again going "Two characters who appeal to my confused understanding of queerness I developed as a coping mechanism for being bullied at school are talking? I can't believe this gratuitous sex is in a children's show!"
EQG is surprisingly good for what it is, but that doesn't mean it's good good. The most obvious problem is how it looks. While the content they designed specifically for Equestria Girls looks okay, existing characters they had to redesign usually look abominable.
The worst casualties are the Princesses.
They kinda tried with Celestia, who has the right eyes (maybe) barely fitting on her face, but the others have completely new eyes (as an awful lot of characters do) and oh yeah Luna's a totally different color.
I mean, some of Luna's toys were also that color since MLP toys often look like bootlegs of themselves...
But also she is now "human", so EQG was bound to irrelevant and racist ideas of "acceptable" human skin color. Big Macintosh couldn't be red, lest the country bumpkin stereotype be mistaken as an indigenous American stereotype, so I presume no one could be too dark either because "NOBODY could be THAT black it MUST be a caricature". This is of course completely ridiculous, but someone pretended to be angry soccer moms and tried to sue Hasbro at least once over bullshit wokery (The Last Roundup), so they were wise not to take such chances.
This original-good / returning-bad rule of thumb applies even to new outfits. EQG Pinkie is kinda gross in her standard outfit, but looks much cuter in the new outfit she gets while working as a waitress - partially because she no longer has giant elephant feet.
(I think they intentionally worked Alice Liddel into the waitress design as a reference to "Pinkie is secretly an ax murderer". See Cupcakes, American McGee's Alice, etc.)
Because it's made for teen girls, EQG stories are incredibly daft and mostly rely on girls being superficial wenches. Literally every single major EQG antagonist except maybe Gloriosa is motivated by ego, jealousy, or otherwise a concern with their public image or vanity. Even Wallflower, who tried to get everybody to forget her, did this because she was embarrassed she was cringe af for real I can't even.
In the comics, someone - I think it's Sunburst - actually writes a college thesis on how Starswirl the Bearded is the Worst Pony and why everything is his fault. One of the reasons is that he recklessly chucked the Sirens (originally from prime Equestria) into a random other dimension, assuming this'd be OK since it had no magic. In the comics Starswirl's abuse of Luna is part of why she became Nightmare Moon and he also accidentally created the changelings.
I don't remember if the Sirens are mentioned in the core show, but other than them, the only EQG character who is ever recognized is Sunset, because she's the only one who ever interacted regularly with the prime Equestrians (being one herself), and because Sunset was already shown in her impossibly adorable pony form in EQG anyway so they didn't need to make new assets for her or have goofy moonfaced "humans" appear in the core show.
Reverie Equestria doesn't incorporate EQG per se because EQG is completely at odds with everything about RevEq and generally incredibly stupid, but the prime Equestrian versions of EQG characters will appear. I know some of them appeared in the comic, usually just in cameo roles, but the RevEq versions won't necessarily match the comic versions.
For instance, here's a sprite for Wallflower Blush if and when she appears in Out of Season.
(Most character sprites don't have the cutie marks put on yet.)
In the comics, Wallflower appears as an earth pony. In RevEq she's a unicorn, because she does the memory-wiping thing herself. Every magic character in RevEq has a signature spell, and Wallflower's is the Oblivion Spell that lets her wipe memories.
And yes, in RevEq, applicable characters consistently have bushwooly hair covering their faces when seen from the right. This is a half-joke about how all MLP characters are designed to look good from the left, since that's how they're put in the toy boxes, and some of them like the Princesses clearly have the entire right side of their face blocked off. It also lets characters like Fluttershy or Wallflower hide their faces from the player's perspective. Maybe I'll have a stealth segment where you can sneak past someone because she can't see to her right.
If you play the very early, not-remotely-finished Out of Season right now, you'll notice Rainbow Dash even has different colors of her hair visible left vs. right, whereas the show just flips her over.
Anyway.
EQG is okay. I didn't expect much and I didn't get much. It has some interesting ideas to transform into better forms for fanfic AUs. Humans suck, pone not munkey.
There is currently precisely one G3 character whom I intend to include in Reverie Equestria (other than the G3 characters who are basically also G4 characters.)
Feel free to guess who it is, if anybody actually reads this blog!
Update: I sat through the agony of watching all G3 content and there are several G3 characters I can work into the story.
Gosh, RevEq is a mess. I wonder if I’d even feel anything if I made any progress on it. Maybe I should work on a smaller part of it and not the big overarching epic I like to pretend it’s gonna be.
idiots: it is strange that horses might be able to speak...
“horses”: [fly around and cast magic spells and stuff]
idiots: i wonder what particular breed of horse that is
“horses”: [eat buttercups]
idiots: isn’t that toxic to horses??
“horses”: [have children of wildly different colors and even different races from the parents]
idiots: that should not be possible in a horse, which these are
“horses”: [getting their rainbow-colored blood examined with super science equipment]
idiots: this dna these horses definitely have looks oddly like lollipops and sparkles, i wonder what alleles code for that
idiots: HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM 🤔
idiots: while everything about these strange beings has been contrary to my presumptions, i will still hold them regardless and assert that these creatures are evolutionary relatives of the Equus genus, based solely on the fact that they are called words for horses 🌌🧠
everyone else: red panda, prairie dog, flying fox, electric eel, seahorse, starfish, ringworm, guinea pig, koala bear, American buffalo, king cobra, flying lemur, honey badger, mantis shrimp, mountain goat, mountain chicken, horny toad, maned wolf, killer whale, bearcat...
idiots: lmao what is this irrelevant copypasta of the necronomicon, smh, stop trolling
Truncated version of earlier, deleted journal for brevity and to avoid RevEq spoilers.
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Hello pones!
Reverie Equestria partially relies on me remembering what '''''great''''' ideas I made up back in the S1 / S2 days that I forgot all about partially because they are strongly at odds with the actual show's later developments so I just kinda put them out of mind, and then choosing which to still go with and which I've changed my mind on.
If anyone saw this journal on FIMFiction, that's probably what I'll do with Scootaloo in non-Reverie Equestria work... mostly the funnier stuff, because it would absolutely get in the way of anything too serious. The entire point of making Scootaloo talk like that would be to make her comically unintelligible.
But the idea I had for Scootaloo's family back in S1/S2 is totally different from what happened in the show canon. In Reverie Equestria you might catch some hints of this in her speech or mannerisms before I get around to writing Scootaloo's inevitable requirement to introduce her family to everyone.
The reason Friendship is Magic started sucking isn’t because because the writers tried to pander to “the fans”
It’s because they pandered to people who weren’t fans.
They pandered to the kind of people who saw a cute show for six year olds where cartoon ponies learned to share and forgive each other and, like their DeviantArt edgelord ancestors, decided the most “thoughtful” way to expand on that was to make it “grimdark” and murder the main character, and do everything they could to not portray the characters in any way that made any sense, because they think doing the exact opposite of what has already been established is the only valid form of creativity when in actuality it is the one red flag of every single last pretentious, uncreative parasite...
... and the kind of people who have such pathetically little self-confidence they project themselves unto a “pussy” character like Spike and then use him as a surrogate to try to fulfill their alpha male fantasies...
... and that would not have been a problem if the fucking writers didn’t (partially) agree with them and, by alternately pandering to them and then scrambling to not look like they were doing that, ruin the show with bullshit.
Expect this to happen with more shows, games, and everything else in the future.
The original reason I conceived Reverie Equestria was because I was 100% sure that, given enough time and confidence, I could do both the optimistic cheer and lovable characterization the show was actually about, and the grimdark sobby my feels bullshit fans bootlegged it into, better than any of these non-fan morons.
But it’s really hard even to get started, and the exact same uncreative parasites would just get butthurt and refuse to acknowledge it if I ever did succeed.
There is currently precisely one G3 character whom I intend to include in Reverie Equestria (other than the G3 characters who are basically also G4 characters.)
Feel free to guess who it is, if anybody actually reads this blog!
I didn’t want to crap on somebody who drew a “thanks for being there MLP : )” fan art so I’m venting this here instead.
This show took me out of depression and put me right back in it.
Nobody needs to "watch the characters grow". We already know about babies growing up, growing old, and dying. We have our light and cheer snuffed out just fine by the real world, watching bright young children become bitter and jaded and boring, watching ourselves become bitter and jaded and boring, watching grandparents lose their minds and forget who they are before they go out like a candle.
We didn't and do not need MLP to do that shit to us too, until we’re so fucked in the head that half of the fans can’t even comprehend Pinkie Pie, the show’s embodiment of innocence and childlike joy, because the show has deviated so strongly from it otherwise.
Watching Twilight lose all of her endearing traits and end up as a snobby know-it-all 60% of the time and a generic heroic protagonist 40% of the time, blatantly saying she is not Twilight anymore, was heartbreaking.
Watching Fluttershy "become more assertive" not by showing courage in the face of fear, but by forgetting her fear and every other part of herself entirely and becoming a rash, back-talking jackass like Rainbow Dash was heartbreaking.
Watching Moon Dancer psychotically obsess with Twilight and flip out so hard that Twilight did not reciprocate that she threw her entire life away, cut off all her other friends, and shut herself up in her house, while said friends were too completely braindead to think anything was wrong, until however much time later when Twilight came back, and nobody brought up that Moon Dancer was legitimately mentally ill while Twilight just accepted what a piece of utter trash she supposedly was, was heartbreaking.
But not “heartbreaking” because I felt so bad for the characters... other than feeling bad that they deserved a better fucking show.
I stopped watching this show for years because it forgot what it was about and started putting out broken, unhealthy, depressing garbage.
When I came back to see it off in its final season, picking up from just before S6 where I had left off, I had no expectations for it. I refused to be angry or disappointed any longer - so I didn't.
(I get all bitter when and only when I interface, directly or indirectly, with some fan or another who doesn’t understand what was wrong with this god damn show.)
And so, by the time this ridiculous finale rolled around, all I could do was laugh.
Laugh at Fluttershy and Discord being married, what fucking lunatic thought this was okay.
Laugh at Applejack and Rainbow Dash being married, which is not only a S1-era fan pander but the most boring imaginable ship they could put either character in.
Laugh at Weird Al getting Pinkie pregnant, fuck that’s gross.
But not laugh because any of this was a good joke; shitting all over the characters and setting when you have no way to resolve a story is never a good joke. No, I laughed because it was just so goddamn tasteless, uncreative, and terrible, a bizarre ending to the bizarre, animated corpse of a once-great show (which was actually good again with the more comical, S1-like episodes of S9, but still ruined by all the shit-tier anime drama.)
A lot of people were only into MLP for the porn. I think they always felt the way that I felt after S5. They just did not find it any good other than having cute character designs. Of course, none of them cared about character potential, they just wanted another popular thing to draw porn of.
And it pisses me off that I simply don’t have the ability or resources to put Reverie Equestria together to do pretentious, sappy “feels” bullshit right.
Maybe that will change soon. It’s been so long I’m not sure I even remember what “right” is or what any of my dream projects are.
But even with all the opportunity in the world, it’s not like anybody will accept it unless it flatters their fucked-up ideals and their personal propaganda.
I CANT BELIEVE THIS SHOW PASSED ON THIS COOL IDEA!!
Way way back in the day, during the S02 finale, a buddy of mine complained that the way Equestria did weddings was too normal. Other than the whole “changeling invasion” thing, of course.
I mean, in season 1 we found that ponies had to manually clean out a season and fabricate a new one. They also have to sing carols every winter or else there won’t be enough Christmas joy around to keep the Windigos at bay. Ponies are magical as hell!
Yet, even though the other wedding featured much later resulted in a magical tree made out of love, both weddings were otherwise exactly a normal human wedding. No one even had to climb Death Mountain for a blue feather like Harvest Moon.
But I’ll do you one better. Not only should ponies not have normal weddings, they shouldn’t have normal babies. This is a child’s fairytale world. Where do babies come from in fairytale worlds?
THE STORKS BRING ‘EM!!!
Friendship is Magic should have literally had divine birds bring babies to their parents. (Not necessarily storks, just as griffons are not necessarily a lion/eagle combo.)
Not only would that be perfectly fitting for the setting but it would have solved a ton of problems and explained a load of issues:
Ponies don’t have to look like their parents (countless examples)
Ponies don’t have to be the same tribe as their parents (e.g. Cake spouses are earth ponies, children are pegasus and unicorn)
Ponies don’t have to have any parents (e.g. Celestia & Luna)
Never bringing up hee-hee is fine and not at all conspicuous, hubba-bubba doesn’t even exist due to storks bringing babies and all
Remember Philomena? That’s okay, neither did the writers. She was Celestia’s pet phoenix.
Or, maybe, in some pretentious jerk’s pretentious AU (I’m pointing at me), REALLY COOL BABIES who are born to the cosmos themselves as scions of the light to drive away evil are brought by phoenixes and Philomena is the phoenix who brought Celestia and Luna to Star Swirl.
(And ponies still do the devil’s dance anyway because eat me.)
I just got a bit bummed out by the whole “Tumblr accidentally deleting my posts” thing and temporarily forgot all about it in favor of other projects such as Listra’s Folly.
Tumblr glitched and deleted this journal the last time I tried to queue it. I’m backing it up before I submit it this time and will post it manually on the day if needed. :)
I have something nice to talk about for once! And a gift for everybody! I dunno, think of it as a New Year’s gift I guess.
G1 MLP did not have a very strong continuity. The TV series, movies, toy line, UK comics, and everything else were all separate and had nothing to do with each other. There’s very little information to build a coherent personality for any of the G1 characters beyond a single gimmick such as “Applejack is a clumsy oaf who knocks everything over”. But why would the guy making a pony AU care about that, hmm...
That said, the UK got a limited-edition disc in 1985 that was simply titled My Little Pony Picture Disc and which was almost lost to time. The more modern name for it is Seven Songs and a Story.
It’s actually eight songs, but #8 is a reprise of #1. They’re united together by a narrative about ponies so stupid they may as well be dead and their gradual meandering towards some brainless birthday party or another. Every time a new doofus shows up, the corresponding song plays.
The G4 fandom is undoubtedly familiar with song #2.
My Little Ponies’ Song
Applejack’s Song
Bow Tie’s Song
Lickety Split’s Song
Posey’s Song
Cherries Jubilee’s Song
Tootsie’s Song
My Little Ponies (reprise)
Indeed, #8′s title does not match the title of #1. Hasbro has never been very good about keeping names consistent, especially when they license other producers to make pony stuff.
Anyway, I found a relatively clean Youtube upload of the entire disc (link) and took the liberty of chopping it up, one file per song, with the vast majority of the narration cut out.
Cherries Jubilee’s Song normally fades in and out and overlaps the narration. I had to edit it in order to remove this and make it sound OK stand-alone. The apparent “skip” near the end of this song was in the original Youtube upload and, so far as I know, is how it played on the disc.
My favorite song on the disc is Posey’s Song, by the way. The biggest ear worm is Cherries Jubilee’s Song.
Please see “How fantasy works: Symbolic magic / thematic magic” for context.
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In Friendship is Magic, there are four basic pony races, defined here as cartoon horses who normally have cutie marks:
Earth pony, look like normal cartoon horse, much stronk, good w/ plants
Pegasus, have wings, can stand on clouds, fly, generate wind currents
Unicorn, have horns, can do telekinesis & other magic stuff
Stronk + wings + horn, eventually called “alicorn”
When the show was first conceived, the only “yeah I’ll take everything” ponies were Celestia & Luna, the mysterious Princesses of Equestria. There was no special term; both were considered unicorns in early promo material.
Lauren Faust made them like that to symbolize that they were unbiased representatives of all three pony races.
Because they were all three races at once, and so far as anyone knew at that time they always had been, and they were the only two around, they could not be racist in favor of their own race.
... of course, due to Half-Elf Syndrome, this would not completely stop racists from hating them for being two-thirds another race... but it’s a big help.
Now let’s get into the nomenclature of “alicorns”...
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The word “alicorn” originally referred to the material composing a unicorn horn, or to an entire horn intact. In ancient times, swindlers would pass off various animal body parts as alicorn, claiming that alchemical mixtures containing it would promote health and long life. The most popular actor to play alicorn was the spiraled tusk of the narwhal, and today unicorns are almost exclusively depicted with very similar spiraling horns.
Sometime around 1984, fantasy author Piers Anthony re-appropriated “Alicorn” as the personal name of a specific winged unicorn; he apparently saw it used in reference to a statuette of a winged unicorn in an ad, and had never heard of the word before then.
Anthony was a prolific enough author for this errant usage to quickly spread into the fantasy vocabulary of several languages - as in, several besides English, the only language where the word already meant something. Like “Pegasus”, it quickly changed from the name of an individual to the name of a species.
"Alicorn” eventually found its way into the brony fandom, where it became one of those words used obsessively to make sure everyone knows you know the word exists, even though Celestia and Luna are all three races and not only the two covered by the term, and the show lifted it from there.
Oh, right, let’s talk about that.
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We’re all aware that Twilight, originally a unicorn, later became an “alicorn” (with the first in-show use of the term uttered by Rarity) thanks to a Deus Ex Machina. “Here’s a song, have some wings, OK bye”.
I got childishly butthurt about that like everybody else, but I realized in hindsight that it should have been very predictable: The most popular MLP toys were always the most princess-y ones, and Twilight was the main character and easily the most popular of the six both with little girls and with poonhounds, so of course they’d make her a Princess (at least in form) so they could release a whole second toy to make, to use the industry term, “a buttload of money”.
Twilight transforming into an “alicorn” was only mildly a problem unto itself:
It questioned the viewers’ natural presumption that “alicorns” were always that way and not a transformation to begin with.
It threw off the balance of two to a race the main characters had.
It worsened the narrative underuse of Rarity’s unicorn magic by making her even more obsolete in favor of Super Twilight.
It was a very clumsy end to a very clumsy season.
Still, it opened the door for further alterations to the “alicorn” concept.
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What walked in the door was Cadance. She ruined everything.
Faust originally designed Princess Cadance (supposedly a royal family member) as a normal unicorn, the same way that Prince Blueblood (supposedly a royal family member) was a normal unicorn. I distinctly recall Faust’s immediate reaction to first seeing Cadance with a horn and wings was grumpy drunk-Tweeting, but don’t take my word for that.
The spinoff novel Twilight Sparkle & the Crystal Heart Spell, which was obviously written to send back in time to a little girl from the mid-1800s, clarifies that Cadance was born as a pegasus. She just kinda worldspawned in the woods like Minecraft. She beat an evil witch with the witch’s own magic that Cadance turned into love magic despite not being a unicorn and then Celestia showed up out of nowhere like Gandalf to just POOF make her “an alicorn” because apparently Celestia can just do that.
Also Cadance is adopted.
The adopted pegasus is an “alicorn” whereas the actual blood relative of the “alicorns” is just a unicorn. No wonder Blueblood has nothing but contempt for all living things.
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The malafest pit of corruption that is Cadance’s uterus had to make her kid (Flurry Heart) “an alicorn” right at birth.
Celestia and Luna said they’d never heard of a pony being born as an “alicorn”, which means Celestia and Luna weren’t born that way either.
This destroys the entire reason “alicorns” were ever conceived.
If Celestia and Luna were once any of the normal three races (presumably unicorns), then they are no longer race-neutral; racists will still treat them like the race they started as, and the public can accuse them of bias in favor of their original race, all the same as if they were never “alicorns” at all.
Of course, Twilight (unicorn) and Cadance (pegasus) would suffer the same obstacle, with a mild advantage to Cadance in that what her original race is may not be public knowledge since that happened off in the magic fairy forests of horse-Germany and only Celestia, Princess of Trolling, is a credible witness.
Only Flurry Heart, 15+ years down the line, could reasonably claim to be race-neutral... but who’s going to believe her? That’s never happened before. The greatest living minds and oldest memories of Equestria, Celestia and Luna themselves, said they’d never heard of such a thing. The public will much more likely forget any proof they ever had of Flurry Heart’s birth and presume that, like every other “alicorn”, she wasn’t originally one and that she’s trying to hide “what she really is”.
After all, racism is founded on delusion; it doesn’t matter what race Flurry really is, merely what parody of race she can be plausibly dubbed as.
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Race-neutrality was the only reason to have any “alicorns” at all and none of them can fulfill that purpose; not even the one who’s actually race-neutral.
Here’s what we got in exchange for that blunder:
Absolutely nothing
"Alicorns” gained no consistent lore or mechanics for how they occur, nor any clarification of how or even whether they differ from unicorns in magic or from pegasooses in flight.
There is no clear meta-reason why the writers even need them, other than as bland children of destiny, drivers of toy sales, and general fanservice.
None of the events centering around the game of Who’s The Next Alicorn adds anything particularly profound or even consequential, and none of the characters seem to really give a damn about “alicorns” in general. Nobody is even all that surprised to see Twilight’s transformation; they just go “Wow cool!” and roll with it. The only strong reaction is the characters’ horror when they see Flurry Heart’s wings and realize the show officially doesn’t give a shit anymore about making sense or having cohesive themes.
It doesn’t even benefit the people who make bad Mary Sue OCs on DeviantArt, because they were already making “alicorn” OCs when it was only Celestia & Luna. That’s where the show got the term from, after all.
How fantasy works: Symbolic magic / thematic magic
Hello pones.
As an artist and writer who grew up on a lot of fantasy, I’ve come to observe that the most vital element of romanticized writing are the symbols/themes in it.
For instance, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde can be seen as representing the classic battle between good & self-destructive evil - not only an internal, psychological or spiritual battle within an individual human being, but between good and bad facets of the human race holistically. The victory of Dr. Jekyll would thus be synonymous with the victory of human goodness, whereas Mr. Hyde’s victory would be synonymous with the victory of human evil. Either of them winning would be a strong statement on the overall nature of humanity - either one of optimism or of cynicism.
Symbols and themes are especially important to get right for fantasy - as in fairytale stuff - because those symbols are frequently shoved out in the open; the themes of fantasy are actual parts of the setting’s physics, or sources of energy, or otherwise very real things. As such, their behavior, if not their very premise, has world-shaking consequence to the narrative and is much less subtle about it than in basically any other genre (except sometimes science fiction, as some science fiction is just fantasy in space.)
Symbols in fantasy are not mere wordplays or coincidences, and one could argue they are not really “symbolic” at all. They are canon forces of nature, whose effects make some amount of sense from the perspective of what the symbol represents; e.g. if a character’s recurring theme is fire, they should have some of the properties of fire, such as being very warm or affectionate to friends but also vicious and caustic when upset. Maybe they solve personal problems with shouting or targeted violence, and sometimes it actually works, because the only way to heal someone with fire is cauterization.
You don’t need to follow all of the cliches for every symbol. You can skip the hot temper for fire, or skip the serenity for water, or whatever else. You can also have different characters, items, events, etc. which explore the same symbol from a different perspective:
Two people who are fire-based, one of them angry, one of them warm and cuddly.
Echoing a past event, but from a different perspective; a war looks very different to the winner than to the loser, and very different to the citizens than to the soldiers
You only need to be sure that whatever symbols you choose are consistent, at least as far as the same character is concerned. If you’re not consistent, or at least good at explaining the symbolic holes and consequential plotholes, then there’s no reason to even have the symbol or theme to begin with.
Fantasy is basically made out of riddles, except all of their answers are taken literally, to some extent. Some riddles have more than one answer.
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Friendship is Magic is a supremely fantasy-driven work that lays down the groundwork for several potentially compelling themes, but fails to expand them into consistently symbolic, cohesive narratives.
There are several facets and many layers to this, and I will go into more detail topic-by-topic with future posts along with criticisms of how the show handles other profound things. Expect future journals to detail:
The Elements of Harmony (biggest problem)
"Love” as Cadance embodies it
The role of “alicorns” in the setting
Things that could have been hints of cool lore, but were not
Bleaaargh
One of my primary goals with Reverie Equestria is to patch up the hole sin these themes, and add more weight and meaning to the emotional aspect, taking into account each character’s personal symbols and how they tie together in the setting’s themes. This takes a lot of thinking and reworking, which is probably why the show did not really do it very well given the strict time budget, and I doubt I will ever get it perfect.
