Is this actual writer's block? I'm not sure.
From the classic description, writer's block is the dreaded blank page. Where the writer has run out of ideas.
Instead, I've got tons of bits and pieces. I've got pages of ideas, fragmentary scenes, characters, world-building theories, etc.
The problem is I can't seem to be able to force myself to concentrate on any of it. I'm just spewing it out on the page without any rhyme or reason. Not enough of any theme to assemble into a coherent s
I've decided, after a bit of puzzling, to use this Blog to yammer about different world-building ideas I've had around MLP. I've tried starting threads for this before, but in hindsight I honestly think it seems more like blog material. This is stuff that I might eventually use in fanfics, but I haven't worked out how exactly, and I'm not exactly a prolific writer so the chances of any of it appearing in a fanfic is pretty remote. Even if it does, it will likely be hidden pretty deep.
There
Really, that should have been the episode name.
Chimera Here’s something vaguely interesting. Originally, it looked like MLP:FiM was going to use the Dungeons and Dragons incarnations of monsters. The hydra, for example, is not the classic mythological version of a snake with many heads, but the middle ages Bestiary version that is more a giant lizard with many heads. And Dungeons & Dragons original author and editor, Gary Gygax, used the Bestiary version to build much of the monsters f
The Guard as portrayed in the series is odd. What function do they actually have? They appear to act as bodyguards for Celestia, however if they run into anything that Celestia can't handle herself they're going to be hopelessly out of their weight class. They behave more like messengers, and 'mules' for Celestia, carrying her stuff for her. They do appear to act as city and palace guards for Canterlot itself, but we've only seen Guards *outside* of Canterlot when they are acting as Celestia's m
Here's my take on all this: The Guard is a military organization, tasked with protecting Equestria and everyone within it from threats foreign and domestic. They enforce the laws all over Equestria, but are concentrated in Canterlot as the center of Equestria.
They have a relatively flat organization structure with a dozen different ranks at most. They have full mobility within the ranks, mostly because of this flattened structure, however they likely use the old British method of accelerat
Okay, so first things first we have to try to ignore negative evidence as much as possible. Meaning that just because we've never seen something, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist: it's just not considered interesting enough to appear in the show yet. The show uses this a lot, see Shining Armour himself and the fact he's not mentioned until suddenly Twilight has a brother and he's getting married. So just because we haven't seen the guard stationed in Ponyville and other areas, doesn't mean the
Last week, I detailed what I was able to glean from the entire run of My Little Pony 'n Friends. How can we use this information? Well, it's pretty obvious this is not a part of Equestria taken literally. The base rules of the world are different, with a larger variety of sentient creatures, cutie-marks and unicorn magic working differently, and so on.
However, this is the series that inspired Lauren Faust as she developed Friendship is Magic, and several of the things from this series have
Originally I was going to do a couple of entries about how it is possible to pull worldbuilding ideas and information from the previous generations of My Little Pony, when I realized something.
I don't really remember the previous generations well enough to do this.
I remember the first TV movie with the dueling rainbows, but past that point it starts to get vague. If I'm going to tackle this topic competently, I'm going to need to... oh god.
Weep for me, dear readers. For I am going
Alright, I've finished watching the first My Little Pony series: My Little Pony 'n Friends from 1985 to 1987. This involved two TV Specials, a Theatrical release, and a 65-episode TV series (four of which were re-edited versions of the TV specials).
Technically my episode-watching blog for this series isn't quite done yet, as the last episodes of the series will be tomorrow, but those episodes are a re-edit of the 'Escape from Catrina' TV Special. Nothing important will be revealed by this e
This is new for my blog, but will likely show up again on a regular basis as I get farther along. I'm going to do a brief revisit on something I've already talked about before, as something sparked a bit for me recently.
In a previous entry on the Elements of Harmony: http://mlpforums.com/blog/844/entry-4702-the-elements-of-harmony-the-basics/ I listed the various Elements using the names that Twilight read from a history/mythological book. Those names are what the Mane 6 have continued to u
First, a point of order; I’ve had it suggested to me that I slow down the blog entries to one a week, rather than one a day. There was concern about burn-out, where my original intent was to just get this stuff out of my head so I can concentrate on other things. Thinking it over I checked my list of potential topics, and I've only got twelve big ones right now. So I understand their point, and I have decided to try one post a week with topics lasting two to three weeks each, and see how it goe
As with my previous topic, there comes a point where the show itself runs out of information and I have to go into speculation territory. However, there are other sources that are possibly relevant.
Here’s something interesting: The power of the Elements displays as a big, powerful Rainbow. Where have we seen that? The Sonic Rainboom that triggered all of the Mane6’s cutie-marks? Yep. However, there’s something even earlier than that. As far back as Generation 1 My Little Pony: Rescue at Mid
This time I get really deep into speculation. I’ve got nothing to really base any of this off of. It’s a precarious house of cards I’ve built, based on a rather whimsical theory. Next week I'll get back to more solid world-building ideas, but this is one of those 'get it out of my head' things while I'm on the Elements of Harmony topic.
During the Friendship is Magic episode, it is shown that four stars did in fact aid in Nightmare Moon’s escape. What exactly were they?
Let's connect thi
Since I recently got my only MLP fanfic so far actually published (Doctor Whooves and the Terror of Tartaurus. It took a lot longer to get it through editing and proofreading than I had planned, but *shrug*.), I think I'll talk about the specific worldbuilding I dealt with in the story. This breaks down into some sub-topics:
Tartaurus
Tartarus is mentioned in 'It's About Time' as being guarded by Cerberus and containing many ancient evils, which is pretty much what Greek Myth tells us as
Right, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted to this particular blog so let’s do one that has been simmering in the back of my mind for quite some time.
As before, let’s start with what we know: In the MLP: FiM cartoon, Starswirl the Bearded is mentioned several times.
In Luna Eclipsed, Twilight dresses up as Starswirl in a stereotypical wizards hat and cloak, complete with stars and moons (instead of the more common astronomical glyphs), but with the addition of bells all over the hat. Int
Yay, I managed to get this together today, keeping to my schedule of one worldbuilding essay a week. Yeah, it's a bit light, but .
How the various creatures are portrayed in MLP, and how the ponies react to them, is very odd and seemingly inconsistent. As I’ve mentioned before, inconsistencies are opportunities for worldbuilding.
Those who are reading my various posts may have noticed that I am using an odd word ‘Sophont’, where others would likely use ‘Sapient’ or ‘Sentient’. It’s a
Last week we has the Spring and Summer festivals. Now onto the other two seasons.
Fall Festivals
Like the spring festivals, we have two in the fall: Nightmare Night and the Running of the Leaves. The Running of the Leaves feels a lot like the exact opposite of Winter Wrap Up. In this case the ponies are removing the last of Fall to make way for Winter. It’s a time of games and other events, but it doesn’t seem to have the same emotional significance as it's Spring counterpart. It's long
Last week I talked about weapons that are in-show. This week, we do armor, and if I have time I'll dive into speculation about both weapons and armor.
There’s the Canterlot Guard armor, of course, with two variants the golden ‘Day Guard’, and the gray ‘Night Guard’. Shining Armor, as captain of the guard has an identical suit, but primarily purple rather than gold or gray. The guards of the Crystal Empire show up in identical designs, as do Luna’s personal guard (despite their batpony diff
Those that know me will probably be wondering why this essay has taken so long to show up. Mainly this is due to prioritization, enough other people have discussed this topic that I didn’t feel it was that urgent. However, the discussion has reached a point where I am disagreeing just enough with the various conclusions reached that I’ve decided to put this one together.
First, what do we know? There are several references to weaponry in FiM and some of them have interesting features.
Now we move on to ‘magic’ as used by unicorns.
Pseudo-psionics: And the third, and least popular one in mythology is the one that is most often seen in modern fiction. Where the magician simply wills something to happen and it happens because he’s just that cool. There might be some waving of hands around, and some nonsense chanting just to set the mood, but it’s the effort of will that is important and it’s entirely possible to bypass the dressings leaving only the will behind. For those us
[Note: I just noticed the formatting went weird on this one again. I'm trying to fix that. If this shows up as a new entry. Sorry.]
There are lots of strange modern thoughts about what magic is, and what it can do. Historically (well, mythologically), there are three 'styles' of magic. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking this is all past and gone, a lot of this stuff is still in a lot of modern attitudes and habits. It’s just people don’t think of it as ‘magic’ anymore. Also, I’m drasticall
Festivals and celebrations are very important to most cultures and exactly how they celebrate them can tell you a lot about the people themselves, of course. Most of the festivals we’ve seen in MLP:FiM are expys of real-life Western holidays. But not all of them are, and in some cases there are some subtle differences.
Most festivals in real life are sourced from two different places. The oldest come from the various agricultural-driven needs like planting, harvesting, or natural events like
The biggest hindrance to worldbuilding in the setting of MLP:FiM is, in my opinion, the passage of time. Or lack thereof. I was going to do this as one big post, but it hit 10,000 characters and I figured that's too ridiculous. So I've split it in two.
There’s at least three different points where the passage of time is important to the setting while having strange issues that conflict with themselves. Let’s tackle the two smaller issues first to get them out of the way.
Exactly how lo
Okay, this one is a doozy.
Equestria as presented in the show is too big for the travel time it takes to get anywhere, and has too much history but not enough has changed during that time. Unlike my previous blog posts on Equestrian history and backstories, the conflicting ‘official’ information is really at loggerheads on this, and unless we want to abandon worldbuilding in this setting, something has to give.
Let’s deal with the physical first. There’s already been enough analysis on ‘
A thousand years.
This is tossed out a lot in the show as a ‘really long time’ metric. Nightmare Moon was imprisoned for a thousand years. Discord ruled a thousand years ago. The Crystal Empire disappeared a thousand years ago.
Even if that is meant as a figurative or approximate number, in human terms thousand years is a *really* long period of time. Think on how much has changed in the last thousand years. It’s currently 2013, so we’re looking at 1013 as our starting point. The beginni
