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 beginning of the High Middle Ages, where civilizations around the world were peaking yet again.

In Central America, the Toltec and the Mixtec civilizations are at their height. In Europe, the Byzantine Empire is taking a serious downturn, but former barbarians like the Normans are absorbing the civilizations that had come before, and are dominating most of Europe. In India and the Far East, we’re dealing with the Chalukya Empire and the Song Dynasty respectively.

They’ve just invented movable type in China. Various Greek and Roman inventions, medicines, and architectural techniques are being rediscovered by Norman Europe. It’s still a hundred years before windmills are invented, but improved agricultural systems are given the impetus to come up with similar solutions to deal with a serious increase in food production.

Map this back to Equestria. ‘Modern’ dress for ponies recall Edwardian outfits, especially in the ‘Sweet and Elite’ and Appleloosa episodes. The plough used by the Apples is a cartoony version of the “Scott’s Plough” which fits the time period as well, as well as the mechanical parade floats used in One Bad Apple. So we’re dealing with equivalent to 1900-1915, using us as a yardstick. The pioneer outfits worn by Granny Smith’s family in flashbacks fit this, being at worst a hundred years earlier. So this gives us a good fixed point for the current time.

The traditional outfits for the Crystal Ponies recall Byzantine costumes. This all makes sense, relatively speaking, for a thousand years having passed since they were in the world. The military gear worn by Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy for the jousting scenes are reasonable as Greek Revival, but jousting as a sport (which is technically called tilting) was a relatively recent development from around the 16th-17th centuries. Add this in to Hearth’s Warming Eve, and there's a bit of a strange pattern there. The peasant outfits are discountable, as that style existed over a wide spread of time, but the noble-type outfits recall the 13th-14th century. Sure, this could predate the Crystal Ponies of the time of their disappearance, but that means the cultural development over the last thousand pony years is more like 200-300 human years at best.

And then you have Cherilee’s 80’s outfits, and Vinyl Scratch’s 1950’s turntables. (Yes, this surprises a lot of people, but using a dual turntable setup and mixing station was experimented with in 1930’s and showed up more strongly with ‘scratching’ in the 50’s, long before hip-hop became its own genre twenty years later.) Twilight’s lab also resembles the equipment common in 1950’s laboratories. This throws off our starting point by 50 years, which to a human is a significant length of time.

If we ignoring technology and fashion development as nitpicking, we move on again to actual cultural change.

The most important barometer of cultural change, in my opinion, is language. Using English as the yardstick, because it’s my own native language: the best example of true Old English from a thousand years ago is the poem Beowulf. Here’s a snippet and a rough translation. Remember that both versions here are *English*, just English divided by a thousand years of linguistic drift. (I wanted to put this in a table so you could compare line to line, but I apparently those BB codes aren't implemented in this system.)

Hwæt! Wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum

þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon

hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon

Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaþena þrēatum

monegum mægþum meodo-setla oftēah

egsian Eorl syððan ǣrest weorþan

Listen! We of the Spear-Danes in the days of yore

of those clan-kings heard of their glory

how those nobles performed courageous deeds

Often Scyld, Scef’s son, from enemy hosts

from many peoples seized mead-benches

and terrorized the fearsome Eorl after first he was

If a modern English speaker hears Old English, they can likely pick out a few words (“Oft” becomes “Often”, “We” is pretty much unchanged), and puzzle their way through a couple more (“Hwæt!” becomes “Wait!” becomes “Listen!”), but that’s about it. Relative to this, Luna shouldn’t be speaking in a vaguely Shakespearian English. She should be almost unintelligible. Not just because she’d pronounce words differently and use a different word order, but the word meanings themselves will have shifted as well. I understand that doing this would make the story more difficult, but there are ways around it. Have Nightmare Moon speak Old English at first, and have a brief segment where she uses her dark magic to ‘learn’ modern speech when she realizes that nobody understands her. Her not getting it quite right ending up with Luna’s trademark Late Elizabethan English.

But worse than Luna, the Crystal Ponies were ‘disappeared’ before Nightmare Moon was imprisoned. Yet they don’t even have Luna’s speech pattern; they are completely modern right from the get-go.

Add this all together, and the conclusion is difficult to avoid. Pick *any* thousand year time span that we have records for, and you’ll find that the cultural, technological, and linguistic changes in that time are pretty huge.

Yet, in MLP… not so much, and what little occurs is inconsistently even within its own framework. Pony culture is effectively stagnant for over a thousand years. To us Celestia imprisoned Nightmare Moon at the same time as William the Conqueror led the Norman invasion of England. To the ponies, it was more like when Shakespeare took the stage for the first time. Cultural change in Equestria is hideously slow.

Which reduces historical worldbuilding by an equivalent amount. The timespan between ‘eras’ is so short relative to our models that we can’t really build up past civilizations, because there’s no time for them to have existed. Their cultures won’t be significantly different from current Equestria, because nothing really changes. Stuff is just too static in MLP:FiM, which means that to do any worldbuilding, to improve this setting, we again have to choose which parts of the canon we need to ignore.

Here are the parts that make sense to me: Granny Smith was using 100 moons as an idiom meaning ‘a long time’, while the various time spans in Equestria Girls are to be ignored. Twilight must have meant Earth Ponies in general, and not Ponyville in specific when referring to how long they’ve been doing this version of the Winter Wrap Up ceremony/ritual without magic. Language and culture in Equestria is exceptionally stable due to Celestia’s presence during this time, so 1000 years in Equestria is equivalent to about 300 human years of cultural change.

I've just checked my list of topics for this blog, and realized that I haven't really dented my original list. Mainly because the list has in it all the topics that *could* be worked into fanfiction if I was a better fiction writer, and I've been dealing with more general systemic stuff. Is there anything anyone would like me to talk about, or go into further detail on? Should I be using images more for illustrative purposes, like I did with the morphed maps? Anything? Anyone?