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 goes.

Okay, back to the Elements.

As we all know, there are six Elements of Harmony: Laughter, Honestly, Loyalty, Kindness, Generosity, and Magic. At least the first five are what the author called them in that book of mythology Twilight found. The sixth being a mystery to that author.

First off, just because it’s written in a book doesn’t make it true. (Twilight would kill me for saying that, but oh well.) It is very likely that is what the author believed was the truth. However, we have no reason to doubt the author here, given that those ‘elements’ mapped pretty well to their eventual bearers.

The one that is off is Magic, since there is no classic name for it. So Twilight made an assumption: Her specialty is Magic therefore the element must be Magic too. After all, her cutie-mark represents Magic, doesn’t it?

But does Applejack’s cutie-mark represent Honesty? Does Rainbow Dash’s cutie-mark represent Loyalty? No… not as far as they seem to think. So I find Twilight’s assumption suspect, although I can understand it given… I’ll get back to that.

There is another idea. This was pointed out to me at one point, and it took a while for it to sink in. Friendship is Magic. Therefore Magic is Friendship. The Sixth Element is Friendship, which fits the pattern of the others.

This throws an interesting light on the events of the Magical Mystery Cure. Twilight was alicoronated because she explored the magic of Friendship to lengths no other pony had. Does this mean that if Rarity explored the magic of Generosity to lengths no other pony has, she would get alicoronated as well? How about the others of the Mane6?

In any case, the sixth element behaves differently than the other five. It wasn’t in the ruins with the others, it had to be summoned. The others appeared as dull gray spheres marked with different regular polygons. This conflicts with the illustration in the Nightmare Moon storybooks which had all of the elements as colorful gems. I would assume that when they are bonded and in use they are gem-like, and this is what happens when the bond between the wielder (Celestia) and the elements is broken, they turn into these dull gray stone things.

When the five elements were shattered, and reformed, they reformed into the shape of their bearer’s cutie-marks mounted on necklaces. The sixth element then appeared out of nowhere as a tiara with Twilight’s cutie-mark as the central element. Here's another interesting little tid-bit that pulls from that: When the Elements bonded with the bearers, they actually bonded through their cutie-marks. Which implies that what Starswirl's unfinished spell actually did was re-arranged the bonds between the Elements and the bearers, dragging the cutie-marks along with them. The cutie-mark switch was a side-effect.

Another interesting thing about the reformed elements is that the colours don't map to the ones in the original illustration. There is no green element anymore, instead there is a magenta one. And the purple one is not the central one anymore. So there's a good chance all the colours shuffled during the bonding process.

And the final difference is that this sixth element acts as a amplifier for the others. Or more likely a simple focus, allowing the artifacts to work in conjunction where normally they wouldn't be able to.

Why is this one different from the others? For that matter, why six?