Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Pony Thought of the Day: My Laziest Ever!

Many thanks to Derpmind for inspiring this with his comment on yesterday's lack-of-PTOTD.

So, what're your pony-related thoughts today?

13 comments:

  1. I'm gonna talk about my headcanon! I like to think that Equestria is actually a post-Singularity Earth. Where are the humans? They went peacefully into extinction thousands of years ago, their drive to reproduce fully satisfied by the creation of their "daughter species," the ponies they uplifted and engineered to maintain the world for them. Magic is the remnants of ancient technology with which ponies interface instinctively.

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    1. That... actually kinda makes sense

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    2. My headcanon was that the Everfree Forest held the portal between Equestria and Earth... but in Issue #9 of the comic, it does say Big Macintosh only went into a "time warp" and not an alternate dimension.

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    3. "Engineered to maintain the world for them" to me suggests "will try to return and reclaim it after enough centuries of renewal". Plot writes itself from there.

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  2. I'll just quote my own Author's Note from today's Friendship is Dragons...

    "It's been so much fun exploring Rarity's deep, dual-natured character in almost every possible way for the past five months.

    ...

    I can't wait for an arc that has NOTHING TO DO WITH RARITY."

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    1. They do say we're finally getting a Rarity episode in S4.

      I still want Celestia to finally get an episode of her own.

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  3. Pinkie Pie often sings diegetically, but most of the singing done by other ponies is non-diegetic.

    Perhaps Pinkie doesn't know this; perhaps she doesn't care.

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    1. My headcanon is that it's ALL diegetic, and the only thing that varies is whether anypony else can hear it or not.

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    2. Which reminds me, I also think all the soliloquies in Shakespeare plays are secretly diegetic, and function on basically the same "rules" as musical numbers.

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  4. Ooh, I've got a good one I've been saving up for a while. Imagine you were a random townsony during the season three finale and you couldn't remember anything about how things were before the spell. But you notice something's wrong anyways and have to try to figure out who should have which job using only what you know about their personalities. Could you do it?

    Applejack is stupidly easy and in fact we'll say as part of the premise that realizing she should run the farm is how you noticed the problem. Rarity isn't very hard to place if you just look at how she's failing at the new task. That leaves Fluttershy, Pinkie and Rainbow and the jobs of weatherpony, animal caretaker and entertainer. You know nobody should have the job they're currently in.

    Fluttershy must be either the animal caretaker or the weatherpony.
    Dash must be either the weatherpony or the entertainer.
    Pinkie must be either the entertainer or the animal caretaker (can't be weatherpony since she can't fly).

    Since the tack of "Why is this pony failing? Look for the job that most accommodates this failure mode" worked so well on Rarity and Applejack, I try to apply it to the remaining ponies. For Pinkie it's a wash, as neither prospect involves hours on end of repetitive physical labor (well maybe the animal job has a little but that's not the focus). Both jobs are pretty similar anyways, so I drop that line of pursuit and decide to drop her in whichever slot the pegasi don't occupy.

    But here's where I choke up. The animal caretaker job has a lot in common with the entertainer job, enough that I wouldn't expect Fluttershy to like it. Weatherpony, meanwhile, is measured objectively and not very subject to public scrutiny. If you stick to the schedule and the schedule meets everyone's needs you can be satisfied with a job well done and noone will criticize you. Dash is just as bad. Although she is certainly capable of managing the weather, she dreams of being a Wonderbolt and performing for cheering crowds, and her special talent is basically stunt flying. Entertainer seems like a no-brainer. That leaves animal caretaker open for Pinkie. Hindsight immediately tells me that of course that was the obvious answer from the beginning since she was the only earth pony of the three, the same way that you verify that you didn't screw up the sudoku by checking that the last couple cells matched in both directions.

    And thus, through my sound reasoning, I have accidentally placed three out of five element bearers in the wrong job (though not necessarily in jobs they couldn't succeed at or enjoy).

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    1. In the fanfic "You Can Fight Fate," which recently ended, the author makes an interesting case for Magical Mystery Cure. If the cutie marks had been switched the way his fanfic went, there might not have been as much trouble. In it, Rainbow Dash gets Applejack's, Applejack gets Rainbow Dash's, Fluttershy gets Rarity's, Pinkie Pie gets Fluttershy's, and Rarity gets Pinkie Pie's. So Rainbow's calling is apples (not a problem once she marries Applejack), AJ's is racing (which she was shown to like in Fall Weather Friends), Fluttershy's is dresses (again, shown to be good at it in Suited for Success), Pinkie's is animals (she just has fun with them all time), and Rarity's is parties (which she hosts as fancy get-togethers, not raucous parties like Pinkie). It's an interesting concept, even if it is definitely flawed.

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    2. I thought about it some more and I came up with an extra wrinkle: What if I mistook Twilight's funk over screwing up he friends' lives as her also being in the wrong job? I would have to try to convince her that her memory was wrong too, even if she remembered a "plausible" explanation for the mixup, and would without question stick Fluttershy in the library (away from the noise and confusion plaguing her new job) and Twilight on the weather patrol (where her attention to detail and love of scheduling makes her a shoe-in for weather-captain.

      And now I want to write a fanfic set in the future where this is the solution they settled on and find out they were "wrong" years or months later, revealing to the reader the cause of the swaps through hints that build up across the first few chapters of course.

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  5. My pony related thought of the day? "I wonder how I could go about finding George Arthur Bloom's contact info so I could interview him for the G1 book that's slowly coming along? Would he even be interested? Would a writer with an oeuvre as large as his even remember much about some pilots and two films he wrote 30 years ago?"

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