Equestria Timeline Project

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Re: Equestria Timeline Project

Postby Fizzbuzz (?) » Sun Jun 15, 2014 11:21 pm

Doctor Wheeze wrote:I would say that the Granny Smith/Winter Wrap-Up issue is a bit of a contradiction, but as I said you can handwave that away by assuming Twilight was talking about earth ponies in general.

That example isn't so much a contradiction as it is a lack of clarity. Like you and others have said, it may very well have been referring to longstanding earth pony tradition instead of a specific Ponyville thing. It's not like they've outright said how many years ago Ponyville was founded, to the point where it'd be unbelievable that Granny Smith is still alive.
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Postby PaulloDEC (?) » Sun Jun 15, 2014 11:22 pm

drunkill wrote:I would just like to point out that Before Friendship and After Friendship are amazing terms for dating a civilization. Far better than BBY (Before Battle of Yavin IV) for the Starwars universe.

:gotcha: 1 AF
:-/


I'm glad you approve! I have to admit, it has a certain ring to it.

PictishBeast wrote:Just wanted to say that I love this kind of thing. This type of fannish overthinking is my greatest weakness.

I'd suggest adding more historical figures to the timeline, even if you end up having to put ??? in the years box. Figures like Commander Easy Glider and their accomplishments should help fill out the 1000-0 BF timeframe.

Things you could add:
  • Figures and events from the history of the Wonderbolts
  • Something about the ancient ruler mentioned in Hearts and Hooves day
  • A mention of cutie pox and the Paleo-Pony Period
  • A mention of the "hundreds of years" reference in regard to Ponyville, even if it's just a footnote, to put your "four core and seven seeds ago" placement into context
  • A collective acknowledgment from everybody in this thread that this project is is simultaneously completely silly and completely awesome :-I


It's been a fun project. I've enjoyed digging through the comics and the show looking for mentions of time-periods and whatnot, and bringing the discussion here has made it even better!

I'll definitely be listening carefully next time I rewatch "Testing, 1, 2, 3", I'm sure there's a ton of valid stuff in there. I'm planning to only include things that I can support with at least a single decent piece of evidence, so I'll have to do some fact-checking with a few of the other things you've suggested.

As for the last one, I think we can all agree on that!

The Doctor wrote:I think she was referring to the new Kingdom after the defeat of Discord. Return of Harmony would indicate that Discord wasn't just a villain who showed up, he took over. He was able to, for a time, depose Celestia and Luna. They had to retake their kingdom.


That's definitely a possibility.

My current reasoning is based on the assumption that Discord's takeover wasn't a particularly long one. I don't think there's a ton of evidence to back that up so far, but Luna and Celestia are shown to still have their crowns and whatnot when they take him out, so there's that at least.

Additionally, Discord tends to be more of a re-arranger than a destroyer, and more of a troublemaker than a killer, so I'm not sure Celestia (or anyone else) would reclassify their kingdom post-Discord as a "new" kingdom.

Headless Horse wrote:
Hear hear.

I think there's one thing we can say for sure: nobody on the writing staff has put anything together with anything like the consistency or attention to detail as in this; they're studiously making everything as vague as they can possibly get away with. And hilariously, it's actually more or less working—no major irreconcilable problems yet! :iamapony:


I know, right? I'm pretty impressed with how things are shaping up; it's tending to be more of a case of plugging new events in rather than rewriting parts wholesale.

Bremen wrote:
Agree on it being silly, but I think the funnest discussion on FiM I ever had was a debate on what kind of economy would result from the caste and cutie mark systems, so I'm hardly one to talk.

That said seeing as it's a timeline I think it should be limited to stuff that can be somewhat pinned down by info from official material.

Edit: Minor point, but maybe it would be best to move the formation of the E.U.P. to below Luna's banishment?

Edit2: The "four core and seven seeds" quote was penned in Season 4, so that would probably make it 83-85 years before the start of the show, depending on if you think Princess Twilight Sparkle was exactly one year after the show start.


Good notes, I'll get onto these. Agree on the official material thing, too.

ShieldedDiamond wrote:I feel one of the biggest issues in this timeline project to face, is the differences between writers, and if there is any writer whose lines would hold more "canon" than the other, should a contradiction arise.


Hopefully this never becomes a significant issue! I'd like to think a common-sense approach could sort things out, but you never know what kinds of curveballs might be coming...

Doctor Wheeze wrote:I would say that the Granny Smith/Winter Wrap-Up issue is a bit of a contradiction, but as I said you can handwave that away by assuming Twilight was talking about earth ponies in general.


Yup, I was happy to palm that one off.

Sorry for the massive post guys/gals!
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Postby Chaos Sonic (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 12:05 am

ShieldedDiamond wrote:Perhaps because that was the first major rebel victory against the Empire? My question is why didn't they just blow up the planet between them and the rebel base, so they didn't have to wait. :-I

Because the planet-buster takes a couple hours to charge, which would allow the rebels to evacuate.
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Postby Dexanth (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 12:10 am

Discord not ruling long also makes sense, given the Journal makes explicitly clear Celestia & Luna know right where the Tree of Harmony is (Directly below their castle), so...unless he ends up disabling them for an extended length of time, stopping Discord is just as simple as going down to the basement. :dwi:

That said, at the same time it's not quite as romantic/fantastic a story as some of the ones that have been woven.
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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 12:19 am

Fizzbuzz wrote:I doubt there'll ever be contradictions in the show. Given the review process each episode goes through, as well as FiM's normal way of never revealing anything unless necessary, I think the show will always be consistent to itself. One rogue writer getting past Meghan McCarthy and the Hasbro Studios folks seems highly unlikely.


See, this I'm not sure about. The more Pony there is, the harder it'll be for Jayson or Meghan or AKR or anyone who's being super-nerdy about the corpus of facts they've set in writing to be able to pipe up in a story session and go "Oh, wait, remember that one time in Episode S05E14, when we said XXX happened..."

It's hard enough for the writers of big-budget "grown-up" shows like Star Trek or BSG to avoid contradicting something they said in some prior season, or to make sure they're presenting some idea that was revolutionary in one season (i.e. the Borg) retains its mystique and doesn't turn into some kind of toothless villain-of-the-week (i.e. in Voyager). This is My Little Pony we're talking about, where for my money the fact that they wrote this dialogue:

:whyme: Clean up winter? Who cleans up winter? Don't they just use magic to change the seasons like they do in Canterlot?
:twismug: No, Spike. Ponyville was started by Earth ponies, so for hundreds of years they've never used magic to clean up winter. It's traditional!


—because it sounds intriguing and carries an air of the kind of vagueness and exaggeration that you would have in natural everyday speech and hints at weird racial distinctions and mysteries and sets up and plays off of the ongoing mismatch between Twilight's patrician roots and the countrified ways of Ponyville, rather than because it carefully lays out an accurate chronology of magical pony history with bullet points and flashcards—is a great microcosm of why I watch the show to begin with. My expectations under normal circumstances would have been that they'd do "history" as matter-of-factly and as dryly as possible, if they cared at all about accuracy and consistency. But these writers are approaching it with their priority on humanity and fun, and with that in mind I'm all the more impressed that they've managed to keep things more or less straight so far without anyone stepping on anyone else's toes.

It feels like it's bound to break down sooner or later. Maybe not—maybe the showrunners are actually as completely nerdy about this stuff as the fans are, and they're calculating their vagueness with the skill of virtuosos while at the same time feeding out details bit by bit, and maybe it all fits together into a grand master plan that they've got all worked out, that they're keeping secret until the time is ripe. But I doubt it. I think they're flying by the seat of their pants, cranking out scripts on a super-tight schedule with impossible turnaround times, and they've just got a system worked out by which they focus first and foremost on making the dialogue sound natural and fun and intriguing, and they avoid nailing down any specifics unless they totally have to.
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Postby Fizzbuzz (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 12:55 am

That's sort of what I was getting at earlier, though. The normal way this sort of thing goes is that the show never reveals hard details about the past unless necessary, instead couching it behind proper dialogue like what you describe (or even as an in-context history lesson, like the one Twilight gave in TT123). I too would rather have it that way, as that makes the show feel more like an ongoing series of 22-minute chunks of the lives of these talking magic horses, instead of being some ginormous fantasy thing for nerds. Now sure, I'd love to have a Silmarillion-esque account of the true history of Equestria, but that should be one of the supplemental materials to FiM, not in the show itself.
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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 1:04 am

Yeah, exactly. There's a reason why Tolkien stuck all that timeline stuff into the Appendices, instead of having a chapter or two of "begats".

Which isn't to say that I don't love reading the Appendices every bit as much as the regular story, but... :-I
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Postby PaulloDEC (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 1:04 am

Dexanth wrote:Discord not ruling long also makes sense, given the Journal makes explicitly clear Celestia & Luna know right where the Tree of Harmony is (Directly below their castle), so...unless he ends up disabling them for an extended length of time, stopping Discord is just as simple as going down to the basement. :dwi:

That said, at the same time it's not quite as romantic/fantastic a story as some of the ones that have been woven.


That reminds me actually, do we have any decent information on when the Elements were discovered? I assume the Castle was built on the site of the Tree, which would suggest they were discovered fairly early on in Celestia and Luna's original run. In fact, do we have any info on when the Castle went up?
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Postby Perpetual Lurker (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 1:08 am

According to the Journal, they didn't know exactly what the Elements were when they built the castle, only that the Tree of Harmony was an important force for good.
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Postby Bremen (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 1:24 am

Headless Horse wrote:

—because it sounds intriguing and carries an air of the kind of vagueness and exaggeration that you would have in natural everyday speech and hints at weird racial distinctions and mysteries and sets up and plays off of the ongoing mismatch between Twilight's patrician roots and the countrified ways of Ponyville, rather than because it carefully lays out an accurate chronology of magical pony history with bullet points and flashcards—is a great microcosm of why I watch the show to begin with. My expectations under normal circumstances would have been that they'd do "history" as matter-of-factly and as dryly as possible, if they cared at all about accuracy and consistency. But these writers are approaching it with their priority on humanity and fun, and with that in mind I'm all the more impressed that they've managed to keep things more or less straight so far without anyone stepping on anyone else's toes.

It feels like it's bound to break down sooner or later. Maybe not—maybe the showrunners are actually as completely nerdy about this stuff as the fans are, and they're calculating their vagueness with the skill of virtuosos while at the same time feeding out details bit by bit, and maybe it all fits together into a grand master plan that they've got all worked out, that they're keeping secret until the time is ripe. But I doubt it. I think they're flying by the seat of their pants, cranking out scripts on a super-tight schedule with impossible turnaround times, and they've just got a system worked out by which they focus first and foremost on making the dialogue sound natural and fun and intriguing, and they avoid nailing down any specifics unless they totally have to.


Yeah, the staff wont comb over everything to make sure it's perfect. We could angst about that, or when we find inconsistencies we can shrug, laugh, get creative, and decide that the route to Kessel requires flying past black holes, so faster ships can take a shorter route without being sucked in, and it really is impressive Han did make the Kessel run in 12 parsecs. :v:

Maybe Ponyville is just the name of both the province and the town? :pinkieshrug: I assume seasons would be cleaned up on a provincial or state level, after all.
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Postby PaulloDEC (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 1:30 am

Perpetual Lurker wrote:According to the Journal, they didn't know exactly what the Elements were when they built the castle, only that the Tree of Harmony was an important force for good.


Gotcha. You could take the attitude that they still didn't know what the Elements were when Discord first took over, which would mean they'd have needed some time to make sense of them before they could use them against him. That prevents Discord's reign from being a matter of days, which would kinda suck if it were the case.
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Postby Wylie (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 4:21 am

PaulloDEC wrote:
It's been a fun project. I've enjoyed digging through the comics and the show looking for mentions of time-periods and whatnot, and bringing the discussion here has made it even better!



Fair warning: Be very careful when you're working out the chronology of Moondancer's party approximately 1 week BF. You're going to run into people here with opinions, man. :v:
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Postby PaulloDEC (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 4:28 am

Wylie wrote:
Fair warning: Be very careful when you're working out the chronology of Moondancer's party approximately 1 week BF. You're going to run into people here with opinions, man. :v:


I was actually planning to cover Moondancer's party as a totally separate project. Some topics are just too big to fit within the constraints of a timeline :spoiler:
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Postby Brunellus (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 5:49 am

I think the events depicted in Hearth's Warming Eve are predominantly allegorical.
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Postby PaulloDEC (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 6:20 am

Brunellus wrote:I think the events depicted in Hearth's Warming Eve are predominantly allegorical.


What makes you say that?

It's an interesting angle, in any case.
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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 10:04 am

Hey, you can't just walk into a gathering of strict-constructionists and say that :glare:
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Postby Fizzbuzz (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 12:05 pm

Brunellus wrote:I think the events depicted in Hearth's Warming Eve are predominantly allegorical.

There has to be some amount of truth to them, don't you think? I mean, do you really think something that was presented as the straight-up history of Equestria would actually just be a story with a moral of unity all along?
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Postby PaulloDEC (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 12:23 pm

Fizzbuzz wrote:There has to be some amount of truth to them, don't you think? I mean, do you really think something that was presented as the straight-up history of Equestria would actually just be a story with a moral of unity all along?


Frankly, nothing in Hearths Warming seemed particularly out of the ordinary to me. We've seen enough mystical creatures for Windigos to be entirely real, and the idea of disharmony bringing about disaster isn't so dissimilar from the whole deal with the Crystal Empire.
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Postby Fizzbuzz (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 12:52 pm

That's what I thought. I saw no need to think of it as naught but a tale.
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Postby Doctor Wheeze (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 1:57 pm

If the history of Equestria doesn't involve Fluttershy in a cool hat, then I want no part of it :colbert:
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Postby Perpetual Lurker (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 2:01 pm

The characters from the play are mentioned in the Journal, so they at least existed. :pinkieshrug:
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Postby ShieldedDiamond (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 2:17 pm

My guess would be that the Hearth's Warming Eve tale has as much merit as the legends of King Arthur, in Equestria.
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Postby SoundMonkey44 (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 2:17 pm

Ponys Timeline is like Zelda's it branches into different paths, one that lead to the show we all know & love, the other that created evil Celestia & good Sombras world, and a world where they all mutate into humans. :gotcha:
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Postby Bremen (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 2:32 pm

I would suspect the play is a fictionalized retelling of actual events. For example, I'm pretty sure it wasn't just 6 ponies arriving in Equestria. There would be significant problems with that even if Hurricane was male, and anyways Starswirl got mentioned despite not being in the pageant, but shows up later. It fits the setting if the events really happened though; three tribes in strife until the windigoes arrived and started freezing things, they migrate to a new land, start fighting again, and the windigoes follow them until they learn to cooperate and drive off/kill the windigoes.
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Postby Big Boss (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 2:34 pm

Think of the HWE story as similar to what we tell kids about Pilgrims. :-I
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Postby The Doctor (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 2:47 pm

The journal seems to work with everything we heard in HWE except for the timeframe. It probably should have gone more like this....

:spike101: two, maybe three months before the reign of Celestia....
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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 3:03 pm

kefkafloyd wrote:Think of the HWE story as similar to what we tell kids about Pilgrims. :-I


Yeah, I like this take.
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Postby Bremen (?) » Mon Jun 16, 2014 3:05 pm

The Doctor wrote:The journal seems to work with everything we heard in HWE except for the timeframe. It probably should have gone more like this....

:spike101: two, maybe three months before the reign of Celestia....


Eh, I doubt their first thoughts on arriving in Equestria were "Hey! Let's all band together and get these alicorn sisters to rule us!" But yeah, I expect Celestia and Luna became princesses of Equestria no more than a decade after the events of Hearth's Warming Eve. This even kind of explains why the flag at the end had alicorns on it :twiright:

For that matter, the Journal has Princess Platinum's father in it, so yet more evidence that the ponies in the play were just standins for the entire tribes.
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Postby everyponytothelimit (?) » Tue Jun 17, 2014 4:49 am

HWE is interesting to me because you end up with three layers to it:

-the actual history
-the story being told
-the girl's improvisations and personal flourishes to their characters

The distinction between the first and second layers is probably similar to the Pilgrims as mentioned, or any other 'national/cultural mythos' story we tell. The six major characters and the windigoes DID exist, the pony tribes WERE in strife and migrated, and so on. Did it happen like the play though, with just six ponies striking off into distant lands and getting stuck in a cave together before discovering the magic of friendship? Well... maybe, since uh, you know. Yeah.

The third layer is the interesting one, to me. Some stuff is kind of obviously not in the original script, like pretty much everything Pinkie Pie says, or how Dash has to prompt Fluttershy for her line. Something like the Starswirl mention- was that actually in the script, or just Twilight name-dropping?
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Postby Bremen (?) » Tue Jun 17, 2014 5:06 am

everyponytothelimit wrote:HWE is interesting to me because you end up with three layers to it:

-the actual history
-the story being told
-the girl's improvisations and personal flourishes to their characters

The distinction between the first and second layers is probably similar to the Pilgrims as mentioned, or any other 'national/cultural mythos' story we tell. The six major characters and the windigoes DID exist, the pony tribes WERE in strife and migrated, and so on. Did it happen like the play though, with just six ponies striking off into distant lands and getting stuck in a cave together before discovering the magic of friendship? Well... maybe, since uh, you know. Yeah.

The third layer is the interesting one, to me. Some stuff is kind of obviously not in the original script, like pretty much everything Pinkie Pie says, or how Dash has to prompt Fluttershy for her line. Something like the Starswirl mention- was that actually in the script, or just Twilight name-dropping?


As much as she may geek out about Starswirl, I just don't see Twilight dropping false historical facts in front of impressionable fillies. Their history grades could suffer! :twonk:

I assume Starswirl was probably part of the migration, but just wasn't represented in the play since it was about the leaders of the tribes and their assistants. Agreed with the rest, though, HWE is a really fun episode since there's stuff happening on multiple levels.
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Postby PaulloDEC (?) » Tue Jun 17, 2014 5:25 am

Bremen wrote:As much as she may geek out about Starswirl, I just don't see Twilight dropping false historical facts in front of impressionable fillies. Their history grades could suffer! :twonk:


That's a great point. If there's one character who wouldn't dare mess with historical accuracy, it'd definitely be Twilight.

I'm looking forward to trying to make some sense of the founding of Equestria too, but I'm holding off on joining that conversation too much until I've got my copy of the Journal. The way I understood it from what I've read (by which I mean things people were discussing from the Journal) was that Celestia, Luna and Star Swirl were all present at the actual founding, which is why the flag bearing their image in HWE made such great sense. Is that not the case?

I'm thinking it might be neat to include the construction of some key landmarks in the timeline too. We've got a clear date for Twilight's castle naturally, and I imagine we could probably derive some rough dates for Celestia and Luna's castle, and possibly even a vague timeframe for Canterlot castle. Thoughts?
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Postby Doctor Wheeze (?) » Tue Jun 17, 2014 5:53 am

Bremen wrote:As much as she may geek out about Starswirl, I just don't see Twilight dropping false historical facts in front of impressionable fillies. Their history grades could suffer! :twonk:

It doesn't necessarily have to be false, but maybe Twilight knew this super amazing and interesting trivia about how Clover the Clever knew the coolest unicorn wizard ever and she just had to slip it in there even though it's irrelevant to the play :-I
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Postby everyponytothelimit (?) » Tue Jun 17, 2014 7:42 am

Doctor Wheeze wrote:It doesn't necessarily have to be false, but maybe Twilight knew this super amazing and interesting trivia about how Clover the Clever knew the coolest unicorn wizard ever and she just had to slip it in there even though it's irrelevant to the play :-I


Yes that's what I meant, sorry for any confusion :-I

Tying this in more with the timeline speculation stuff, while I haven't read the Princess Journal or whatever it's called I got the rough idea. I think (head cannon ahoy!) that while the three tribes were becoming friendlier, whether the cave hug time was historically accurate or not, it wasn't instantaneous or unanimous. They probably would still have lingering tensions and whatnot... enter Celestia and Luna, who aren't earth, pegasi or unicorns really and can act as impartial mediators. If they didn't get declared princess-leaders right away they certainly did after defeating Discord and/or Tirek.
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Postby Bremen (?) » Tue Jun 17, 2014 1:05 pm

PaulloDEC wrote:I'm looking forward to trying to make some sense of the founding of Equestria too, but I'm holding off on joining that conversation too much until I've got my copy of the Journal. The way I understood it from what I've read (by which I mean things people were discussing from the Journal) was that Celestia, Luna and Star Swirl were all present at the actual founding, which is why the flag bearing their image in HWE made such great sense. Is that not the case?


Celestia and Luna were already there (apparently in the lands near Canterlot) when the pony tribes arrived. There are a few bits about their history before that but they really kinda raise more questions than they answer. Their first meeting with the pony tribes isn't mentioned, but:

everyponytothelimit wrote:
Yes that's what I meant, sorry for any confusion :-I

Tying this in more with the timeline speculation stuff, while I haven't read the Princess Journal or whatever it's called I got the rough idea. I think (head cannon ahoy!) that while the three tribes were becoming friendlier, whether the cave hug time was historically accurate or not, it wasn't instantaneous or unanimous. They probably would still have lingering tensions and whatnot... enter Celestia and Luna, who aren't earth, pegasi or unicorns really and can act as impartial mediators. If they didn't get declared princess-leaders right away they certainly did after defeating Discord and/or Tirek.


This is more or less how it happens. The first entry in the journal is Starswirl and the three assistants from HWE coming to ask Celestia and Luna to rule Equestria for the reasons you mention; it could be immediately after HWE or it could be a few years later.
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Postby Homeswirl (?) » Tue Jun 17, 2014 6:09 pm

If this project doesn't explain the buried tire in Hearts & Hooves Day, then all is for naught! :flail:
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Postby Doctor Wheeze (?) » Tue Jun 17, 2014 6:20 pm

Homeswirl wrote:If this project doesn't explain the buried tire in Hearts & Hooves Day, then all is for naught! :flail:

Equestria is actually far in the future of the Land of Ooo from Adventure Time. They're the descendants of the Horse Kingdom :ponynet:
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Postby PaulloDEC (?) » Tue Jun 17, 2014 11:06 pm

Homeswirl wrote:If this project doesn't explain the buried tire in Hearts & Hooves Day, then all is for naught! :flail:


Star Swirl travels into the future, discovers tyres, tries to take one back to the present with him, accidentally winds up in the past, has to leave it behind when being chased by primitive Earth Ponies.

Boom, nailed it!
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Postby ShieldedDiamond (?) » Wed Jun 18, 2014 2:49 am

They never did say what happened to Starswirl, did they? I hope that's expanded upon in the show at some point.
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Postby PaulloDEC (?) » Wed Jun 18, 2014 3:06 am

ShieldedDiamond wrote:They never did say what happened to Starswirl, did they? I hope that's expanded upon in the show at some point.


I think that'd be an amazing one to sit on for a while. Establish that he vanished mysteriously, drop a reference every now and then so that he sticks around in the back of the viewers' minds, then BOOM! Have him suddenly show up in a puff of time-travel magic when we least expect it.
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Postby Brunellus (?) » Thu Jun 19, 2014 4:35 am

Fizzbuzz wrote:There has to be some amount of truth to them, don't you think? I mean, do you really think something that was presented as the straight-up history of Equestria would actually just be a story with a moral of unity all along?

The story seemed very compressed and simplified. So me of this may be due to time constraints of the show, the play, or both. Back in Season 2, I had a lot of speculation when I tired to account for the discrepancy between "long before the peaceful rule of Celestia", and the presence of the banner at the end.(Namely that they were already being recognized as sovereigns before they manifested corporeal forms)
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