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My Little Pony: Annual 2013 (Comic Special, October 30th 2013)

The Annual comic includes two functionally independent comics, both related to the Equestria Girls alternate universe.

The Fall of Sunset Shimmer

Summary: How Sunset Shimmer came to Canterlot High

Sunset taking a mid-term test at Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns.

We see cute-markless Twilight plus Cadance and Shining Armor in the background. That gives us a general time-frame for this. Interestingly, Lyra and Minuette are also present as the same age as Sunset, and probably close to the same age as Shining Armor and Cadance, so that gives us relative ages for these characters.

The mirror seems to have some other abilities beyond just being a portal. It's producing hallucinations based on the viewer's desires, much like the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, or the mirror in Snow White.

Celestia is being presented as dealing with 'her' pupil pretty much every day, including some rather casual settings like a picnic. Despite this, she's not really paying much attention to Sunset's behavior and attitudes.

There is a Dark Magic section of the Canterlot Archives, complete with a librarian? And it's not otherwise secured?

Lots of books with occult-sounding titles, and the necronomicon from the Evil Dead movies.

Interesting that 'Canterlot Castle: A History' is in the dark magic section, that it includes information about the mirror, which is therefore would also be considered dark magic.

Also, the story of the banishing of Nightmare Moon is in this section.

Equestria Girls

Summary: How the main 5 met, and actually did become friends.

The school has a freshman fair, where the freshmen sign up for clubs and sports. Honestly, I don't remember this ever happening at any high school I attended (and I attended a lot, my family moved around for various reasons.) The sports teams had no interest in freshmen, and there were only a couple of 'clubs', most of which were primarily for the Seniors as a bolster on their university applications.

That and none of the schools I went to were rich enough to have booths for any purpose.

Pinkie is giving the impression of being a Sophomore here, already involved in various clubs and events.

Nope, not a sophomore, unless she's been held back a year to be in the same classes. Actually, I could see that.

And Mrs. Harshwinny. Though to be honest, given the characterization I would have pegged her as a Ms. Harshwinny. Someone who wants her martial status to be irrelevant to her professional standing.

So this Granny is in fact AJ's granny. The various character's ages may be messed around in this alternate universe, but the relationships between characters are reasonably stable.

And here we have more evidence of the ages being inconsistent between universes, as Babs is being depicted as being the same age or older than AJ.

That's a specialized soccer field, not a generic sports field being used for soccer. Either soccer is *the* sport of this school, or we're dealing with a very rich district that can afford multiple sports fields. Usually American football goalposts have to be permanently fixed, and there's no evidence that this field has anything like that.

Heh, there's two students that look like the gremlins from the Rainbow Dash microcomic.

Huh. The lockers changed design. This school's been renovated at least once, but only certain wings.

I could mention the costumes AJ changes into, but the weasel in the tux jacket with the coffee cup is distracting me.

Oh good, that was just Pinkie being Pinkie. I was having trouble there.

Not sure what Luna's referring to. Maybe it's Pinkie becoming the various event coordinator?

Awww, come on ref! That's a yellow card at least!

And the rest of the issue is characterization, with nothing that I can find for worldbuilding or setting development. With that, I'm done with the 'Season 3' stuff, and we can move on to the current season. The end of daily blog posts are in sight!