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 ‘how tall are ponies’, the more popular one being based on apples, but my favorite one is this: http://cheezburger.com/5577009664. Basically near the beginning of the episode Hearth’s Warming Eve, Twilight specifically calls out one of the giant candy canes as being eight feet tall. Doing the math, we end up with ponies as being about four feet tall at the top of the head, which is small even for a real life pony, but falls within the range for very small breeds like the Shetland pony. People get a weird idea of how big 'ponies' are because of miniature horses, which are technically a different thing. Anyway, this is all fine. As long as everything is to scale for the ponies, there’s nothing saying that’s too small, or too big.

The problems start up when we talk about the size of Equestria itself, not its inhabitants. Taking the official map of Equestria:

You can see how it lines up in a very rough way with a map of North America, as the various town names are obvious puns based on RL cities:

Now, of course, Fillydelphia, Manehattan, and Baltimare are too far apart, and this puts Neighagra Falls somewhere near Timmins, Ontario, but as the official map says ‘Distance Not To Scale’, so we can deal with that and warp the map so it fits:

As a rough estimate, this puts Ponyville somewhere in the Midwest, let’s say Kansas City. No wait, put it in Iowa just because it amuses me to think that the The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000 episode is that much closer to the Music Man. That puts Canterlot as… Chicago? Ignoring the differences in terrain between Equestrian and NA, that’s not that big of a deal. We’re only interested in effective distances between places here. Appleloosa is Oklahoma, and the Changeling Badlands are around New Orleans… HAHAHAHAHAHA… Okay, I’m rolling with that one.

The problem is not the fitting of one map to another, although that is tricky, as the Equestria one is obviously skewed in odd ways, but the sheer distances implied. Those who have grown up with modern airline travel just don’t realize how far away these things are when you’re forced to deal with late nineteeth-early twentieth century level technology.

For example, when the Mane6 went off to the Crystal Empire to organize the reception for the Equestria Games Commissioner, we’re dealing with a trip that is the equivalent of between Iowa and Saskatoon, about 1,500 miles. With steam trains similar to the style used in the show, the speed is about 25 mph on average, maxing out at about 35 mph in best conditions. Allowing for stops for fuel and water (which was about an hour stop for every three hours travel), and assuming they’ve built a line directly from Ponyville to the Crystal Empire, we’re talking about four-five days to get there assuming no delays of any kind. Then the actual stuff they intend on doing, and then another four-five days of travel back.

So they had to be gone for about three weeks. Not a couple of days as implied by the episode, but almost a month. Poor Spike. He should have charged far more for pet sitting.

And this is something that is endemic to the way the show is portrayed. The distances between places, which should be barriers to overcome, are seen to take only moments to travel. Hours, instead of days. And that’s not just train travel. The gates of Tartarus are only a couple of hours away from Ponyville by hoof, apparently. Their equivalent to the Grand Canyon is close enough to Ponyville that a tortoise (not a turtle!) can travel it in an hour or so. There's a massive Dam somewhere in Ponyville, but it's not visible in any shot of the town. So on and so forth.

There is a way to accommodate this. We have to shrink the scale of the world down. A lot.

To get the show’s sense of distances, we’re not dealing with a modified map of North America, but something around the size of the British Isles instead. Which is fine, as that means that there is lots of room for foreign lands like where the Gryphons, Zebras, Saddle Arabians, Minotaurs, etc. come from officially. And those lands can even be close, like the distance between the British Isles and the European mainland.

Until you hit the episodes with pioneers. Hearth’s Warming Eve, Family Appreciation Day, Over a Barrel, and The Last Roundup, are the primary culprits here. These stories depend on the scale of the setting to be big, for there to be lots of room and open space like North America or Europe as a whole, as these stories are lifted with minimal modification from the American Old West setting or something similar. The big one is Hearth’s Warming Eve, to be honest. Take a look at the map of Equestria. If you assume that the Equestria they founded is the same Equestria that exists ‘now’, where did the ponies come from originally? It had to be somewhere they could walk from, if the episode is of any indication. Somewhere large enough for a Unicorn Kingdom rules by Princess Platinum’s father, as well Pegasis and Earth Pony civilizations.

If that map is even vaguely accurate, there really isn’t anywhere for them to come from.

So this really isn’t a case of headcannon conflicting with actual cannon. This is cannon conflicting with itself, and headcannon being a matter of deciding which parts of cannon to discount.

Personally, I go with Equestria being big, and that the travel times are being glossed over a lot. The Equestria of Hearth’s Warming Eve was a small section of what is now called Equestria with the original lands the ponies came from being absorbed into the modern Equestria. The Mane6 were away for weeks during the Equestria Games episodes, and the image of Ponyville we see in the credits is actually just a section of greater Ponyville, with quite a bit more off to the right running into the foothills of a more mountainous area, including the Ponyville Dam and a lot more farmland.

Next time, we get into the bigger problem with cultural and technological development. It's all a matter of Scale: a Stitch in Time.