The Argument For the City Foreverfree · 8:54pm Sep 27th, 2017
Introduction
I am completely aware that no argument I make here is likely to be supported by canon. The Castle of the Royal Pony Sisters is in its origin a playset (which is the Doylist reason why it has the prank trapdoors), and the production team is hardly composed of demographers or historians. Nor would I expect it to be, for a children's show.
Nevertheless, I strongly believe that, in-universe, the old Castle was the citadel of a city -- and a fairly large one. This city I call Foreverfree, which I also assume to be the older (and formal) name of the castle.
I. Reasons
First of all, the Castle of the Royal Pony Sisters is a very large and well-built one. This is not always appreciated from a fantasy background standpoint, but most historical castles were small and relatively lightly-built -- usually just a keep, a curtain wall and gatehouse, and constructed largely of earthen embankments topped by wood or moderate masonry. In contrast, the Castle we see in the Everfree has spacious grounds and numerous halls: it's magnificent even in ruins. It's a major military fortress, solidly built of thick stone.
Secondly, we know that the Castle was a national capital. Celestia and Luna were the rulers of the whole country of Equestria (though a thousand and more years ago, this dominance may have been more theoretical, and over a smaller nation, than is the case today). This means that where ever they lived, they must have had the apparatus of national government close to hoof.
The officials, artisans, guards, servants and other Ponies required for such an establishment must have lived and shopped somewhere. So must have their families, which in those days of fewer labor-saving devices would have included whole forces of their own servants. And the private artisans and merchants who supplied the various goods and services also must have lived somewhere, and so must their families and servants.
And, so far, everypony I've mentioned is a specialist. We haven't yet gotten to primary food producers or resource extractors, or any of the Ponies involved in moving all these materials around. A rule of hoof in a pre-industrial culture is that there must be ten or more unskilled laborers for every skilled official, artisan, guard or servant -- to feed and otherwise supply them with primary resources.
It is logistically necessary that there must have been hundreds or thousands -- and, possibly, many more -- Ponies living in the vicinity of the Castle. If they all live in the Castle, the place would be insanely crowded and uncomfortable for all concerned (including the Princesses). In a world without mechanized transportation, only the Pegasi could possibly have lived more than a few miles from the Castle. Most probably, most of the Ponies involved lived within a mile or two of the place.
Thus, there must have been a city there.
II. What Happened To It?
To put it succinctly, Nightmare Moon.
Even in canon, Nightmare Moon projected dark force beams capable of shearing through heavy structural and armored stone like hot knives through butter. These are what I term her "gravity lances" in the Shadow Wars Story Verse.
When Celestia and Luna fought one another a thousand years ago, Celestia may very well have been careful in what direction she was projecting her beams of blindingly-bright energy (what I have termed her "sunbolts" (aka fusion beams). Nightmare Moon was probably not being so careful.
When Nightmare Moon engaged Celestia in the sky -- because Celestia was trying to take the fight away from the Castle -- Nighmare Moon swung these weapons, ones able to shear through solid stone castle walls, in long arcs ripping through whatever was beneath her. They cut through civilian structures as if they weren't there, causing major structural collapses. They sliced right through the extensive waterworks and sewers needed to enable any city that size to remain even remotely hygenic. As candles and oil lamps and hearths and stoves were shattered, fires sprung up in dozens of places throughout the rubble, massively overloading the firefighting resources of Ponies who suddenly found that their civic fountains no longer worked because the aqueducts had been severed.
Nightmare Moon probably directly destroyed a small portion of the city. But she accidentally set it on fire, and much of it burned down. The survivors found themselves among ruins with no really pure water supplies. Most of the population survived the original battle, but many must have then died due to fire and plague.
III. Why Didn't They Rebuild?
This is an interesting question. I suspect the answer to it, ultimately, is a mix between Celestia's other plans and the emotional trauma she suffered through losing both her sister and her capital city through Luna's treason.
Celestia was probably in one of the most absolute despairs she had ever suffered. Her sister -- her companion through Eternity -- was gone. The beautiful city she and Luna had built was in ruins.
At the same time, she may have already have begun the reconstruction of Canterlot from a small mountain town to the city we know today.
The obvious reason for Celestia to do this is that Canterlot is a good site for a Summer Palace (it must be a very cold place in winter) while the Everfree is a great place for a Winter Palace (the climate is in canon warm temperate to semi-tropical). We can tell from architectural clues that the Castle is older than the Palace. It's possible that the Palace was already mostly finished when the Castle fell.
So Celestia had a more modern Palace and city to reoccupy, and the City Foreverfree was full of painful emotional associations. She abandoned Foreverfree, which may have survived a few generations longer, slowly-shrinking due to its abandonment by the government -- and possibly the unchecked taint infused into the land by Discord, centuries earlier.
And so the city was forgotten, save by a few historians.
Conclusion
There are a lot of ruins out in the Everfree Forest, and a lot of material for fanfics.
One of my major inspirations for this is the work of Cold in Gardez, available on this site. You should check it out.
In the comics, they show Luna being around while Canterlot Castle is constructed. So they'd agree with you that it was probably already either there or nearly there when the battle happened.
Good theory, and I agree with a lot of it. Based on Journal of the Two Sisters, it does seem like both the Royal Sisters were not really "ruling" at first, at least while the 6 Founders and Starswirl were around, they mostly went around fighting monsters/befriending allies/befriending monsters, pretty much what Twilight does now. It's only after Luna is banished that Celestia forms a new military force loyal to her and effectively seizes control of the government, possibly after the rest of the founders died/mysteriously disappeared through time.
But definitely true that a capital is going to be built around the Sisters, and there would need to be a city there. I'm not sure just how strong these force beams NMM was firing off, as I think she just knocked Celestia through a roof, but I could definitely see everyone wanting to leave the Everfree Forest as soon as Celestia stopped insisting they had to stay to guard the Tree.
Castles of that size simply don't work in isolation. This is the only logical and reasonable conclusion one can reach.
Of course, reason and logic don't always factor into the show, but what can you do?
Oh my goodness, I actually have a fanon for something you wrote about!
So, in my Foundations setting (Sun and Hearth, Respect and Respectability, and very soon The Spirit of a Pegasus) Everfree is the city founded by the refugees of the homelands of the three tribes. In fact, the cave where the Hearth's Warming spell was cast is the cave where the Tree of Harmony later grew. When the founders of Equestria decided on Celestia and Luna as princesses, the castle was built for them by the newly united tribes.
As to the fall of Everfree, I tell it a bit differently. I put Discord's first reign at around 500 years after the founding of Equestria. Removing the Elements from the Tree of Harmony destabilized the magic in the area, and it never fully recovered from being the center of his power. Then, over the next five hundred years, Luna began her decent, bringing dark magics into the mix. The forest started to grow wild and out of pony control, and ponies began to abandon the town for the reletivly nearby mining city of Canterlot, with Princess Celestia herself eventually building a palace there to attend to government business while returning to her sister in Everfree each night, despite it becoming more and more unsettling. (A flashback to this part makes up Chapter 12 of Sun and Hearth, and it's some of my favorite writing I've ever done.)
There is another possible reason why Celestia ultimately chose to abandon the old castle: It's situated more or less right on top of the Tree of Harmony. It wouldn't be a stretch to assume it was meant to protect it in some fashion, it and the Elements both. After Celestia banished Luna and the Elements became inert, another reason for the castle's existence went away.
Maybe Celestia came to believe that if she wasn't worthy of wielding the Elements anymore, she had no reason and/or no right to keep the castle built to house them.
Very interesting. I definitely would like to see the Castle of the Two Sisters revisited and the Everfree Forest explored more. Allot of people say it's been de-fanged so to speak, and to a degree yes. in areas the ponies have visited multiple times they've been able to do so just fine. Also I like to think the mane character status the characters has influences it as I generally feel that most normal ponyville residents still look at the forest as dangerous.
Good an idea as any for why the heck the capital castle was in the middle of a forest of death.
Your argument makes sense; I would assume that most of the forest currently around the old city grew back after the battle? I suppose that a millennium is plenty of time for a woodlands to grow back.
A rule of hoof in a pre-industrial culture is that there must be ten or more unskilled laborers for every skilled official, artisan, guard or servant -- to feed and otherwise supply them with primary resources.
I'm thinking this ratio may have been different in Equestria because (a) the ponies can eat grass if need be, an advantage most cultures lack in real life, and (b) the Earth ponies are in touch with the land and know how to grow better crops (or has that been retconned away?), which I assume means that the ponies don't need quite as many farmers as most pre-industrial societies.
Ironically your theory can fit with legend of equestria as we seen the castle still being build into the ground to the mountainside. (Which may take a good many years).
4680210
Yeah. I'm thinking that the town which became the city of Canterlot predated both the Realm of Equestria and (in its earlest foundation) even the Crystal City. I take Alex Warlorn's name for the place "Bahamut's Rest" (where a huge and ancient Dragon once dug a ledge into the mountainside for his own reasons) and assume that originally the town existed to mine the crystals whose ancient workings can still be found deep beneath the city, as shown in A Canterlot Wedding.
The reasons why Celestia and Luna chose it for a summer capital is that it's nigh-impregnable save to flying or burrowing beings, and none too easy even for such creatures to attack, given an active defense by flying or burrowing beings; it commands the Vale of Avalon (the valley in which Mount Avalon sits); and its climate is very pleasant in the summer. At the time they did this, the crystal mines may also still have been producing some mineral wealth.
Celestia's original plan was to have two capitals, but after Nightmare Moon devastated the City Foreverfree, she changed it to moving permanently to the new Palace at Canterlot, merely maintaining small palaces and homes elsewhere in the Realm when she wanted a change of venue (whether for emotional or strategic reasons). Eventually, improvements in her communications systems (including networks of Pegasus couriers, and eventually heliographs and telegraphs) rendered it less important to keep more than one capital, anyway.
4680559
Earth ponies definitely have a couple of legs up on normal pre-industrial farmers.
And there are overgrown forests near here that you wouldn't be able to tell used to be a strip mine 100 years ago without the helpful signs. "This used to be the main street of the company town!"
I think in the comics the castle predates the reign of Celestia and Luna.
A better explanation would be that it was to be a new city, or a new capital even (Peter the Great style), and started with the castle for defence reasons, but it nevet went anywhere for reasons unknown.
4680835
True. You can find that here in Pennsylvania with the old company towns and mining patches. I am also reminded of how long it took to discover Mississippian-style Indian mounds in Georgia; the local builders died off in the disaster that hit North American about1450 or so. By the time white settlers reached them they were so heavily overgrown with forests no one even knew they were there until the last 20th century.
4680222
I have Equestria exist as a Realm under the Two Sisters for about five hundred years before Luna's madness and banishment. Roughly speaking, for the first century or two of this the Sisters quest around, defeating threats to the Realm as a whole, and gaining popular support from their deeds and official alliances with and adoptions into the other royal and noble families. Of course, my history differs in that they're both a bit over a millennium old when they found the Realm in the first place, after a thousand years of Discord's tyranny.
After doing this for a couple of centuries, the Sisters gain enough prestige that they become true rulers. The next three hundred years see them unite the Realm, but things get progressively worse in the Crystal Empire, and in the stress of the defeat of Sombra, Luna is driven mad and becomes Nightmare Moon.
My reason for assuming that Nightmare Moon inadvertently destroyed their capital city is that in both the canon and "Lullaby For A Princess" versions of their fight, they're throwing around some pretty hefty energy bolts. And a lot of their shots are missing.
Heck, Celestia probably damaged the city a bit, but at least she (being sane at the time) would have been trying to avoid such collateral damage. Nightmare Moon probably wasn't actively trying to destroy the city (she wanted to take over and rule, after all), but I don't think Moony was being quite so careful.
4680257
The Show often fails because it's not a novel and has to show everything through the filter of 22 or 45 minute video formats. So for instance, while there logically must have been a city spread out below the Castle (which is even in the classic position for a capital citadel -- on a height commanding a canyon loop that looks a lot as if it was once an actual river), they're not likely to show it. Think of the background design, the required background Ponies, etc. etc.
And they are also limited by their desire not to shock their audiences. Luna is a sympathetic character. We like her. I like her, or I wouldn't center stories like Nightmare Are Tragic or All The Way Back on her. She's brave, brilliant and honorable.
We know she feels pretty seriously guilty about having rebelled against Celestia as Nightmare Moon, but the Show is not likely to explicitly depict Luna doing things which (even accidentally) resulted in the deaths of lots of innocent Ponies. That would be more than a bit shocking for children, even if the death toll were only strongly implied (as for instance by scenes of her stray beams destroying houses and starting fires).
But I'm fully aware of what Luna probably did in her carelessness and madness. And Luna almost certainly now has nightmares about it. Indeed, it's vanilla canon that she creates the Tantabus to torment herself, and the nightmare shown is probably not the only one she suffers. I would imagine that the deaths of Ponies in the City Foreverfree, and the destruction of that once-fair city, even today haunts her conscience.
4680266
I really like the idea that the Hearth's Warming Cave is the cave that eventually manifested the Tree of Harmony. That makes a lot of sense.
Harmony itself is in the Shadow Wars Story Verse a Cosmic being, and the Tree is a manifestation of it, the same way that Celestia is the manifestation of Fusion and Luna the manifestation of Gravity. Harmony may have manifested specifically to help bind together Ponykind in unity against other threats, possibly at the behest of Fusion and/or Gravity.
The Cosmics are by any reasonable definition alive, but they are not "life as we know it." That Fusion and Gravity choose to manifest as mammals, while Harmony manifests as some sort of silicate tree, is not actually that important (we've seen what almost has to be Harmony's manifestation in the Humanoid world, in Gaia: The Legend of Everfree, and in that form it's more like a sort of geological vine).
Harmony probably chooses a vegetative form because it by necessity must intervene only very indirectly in the affairs of mortal beings: mostly, it grants fruit (the physical Elements of Harmony) or grows machines (such as the Map) or structures (such as the Castle of Friendship) to aid its chosen allies. Harmony cannot itself fight directly, as that would be contrary to its nature. The Tree of Harmony is far more alien to Ponykind than are Celestia or Luna, though they are its allies, and Fusion and Gravity are probably likewise allies of Harmony Itself.
4681010 Given your timeline of the sisters, it makes sense that they would become the true rulers far before Luna fell.
I'd argue about the strength of their energy bolts, but then I'd sound like a conspiracy theorist. "Energy bolts aren't hot enough to cut through steel beams" and all that.
4680267
Oh, yes. It's very likely that either the Castle was sited to protect the Tree, or the Tree manifested where it did because it was drawn to the Castle. The exact sequence is inobvious, but in the SWSV -- following the Pony POVerse -- (an earlier version of) the Castle was built there because of the link to Harmony, then the Sisters came to the Castle with the survivors from Paradise Estate, and finally the Tree manifested itself and provided them with the Elements of Harmony to defeat Discord.
The Tree is quite capable of defending itself against most threats, though the Plunder Vines were specifically enchanted to defeat the Tree and hence constituted a special case. And as it was, the Tree managed to inhibit their growth for a millennium and a half, and only failed in the end because it had invested too much of its power in the Elements.
4680448
Not only have the Mane Six gained more knowledge of the threats of the Everfree (and hence are more easily able to avoid them); they have also grown stronger (and hence are more easily able to defeat them). Most obviously, Alicorn Twilight Sparkle is much harder to overcome than she was when she was a newbie Unicorn mage at the start of Season One.
4680559
Yes. The Forest Foreverfree of course existed a thousand years ago -- it's a hundred or so miles wide -- but there were numerous roads, villages and towns other than the City Foreverfree located within it. Over a thousand years, the forest grew thicker and wilder. Discord's Plunder Vines made the woods more chaotic. And the trade routes shifted north, west, east and south of the place.
Earth Ponies, for any given level of agricultural technology, are more productive than Human farmers. In part this is due to Earth Pony magic. But Earth Pony magic itself is a technology that has grown more capable over time, and the Earth Ponies of a millennium ago were not as productive as are the Earth Ponies of today.
Grass is an option for the Ponies, but a low-energy alternative that is the sort of food they would eat in times of famine. It's also a very diffuse alternative, and there's no way that one can support a whole city or even large castle through natural grazing -- grasses would need to be harvested from farms and fields for many miles around. Notably, we derive a lot of our food from grasses as well -- the special grasses we call grains, whose seeds we've bred to be especially large and nutritious.
Ponies of course farm a lot of grains, though they can eat and digest more of the plants than we can. Naturally, they also find them tastier. Though it should be noted that foods such as hayburgers are made with extensively processed, seasoned and cooked grasses and grains.
4681010
Nightmare even had that castle rebuilt to use it as her seat instead of Canterlot in The Cutie Remark. And yes, there were other ponies there, and they could very well have been hurt if an insane Alicorn started firing mana blasts wildly.
4682600
And there is the Adventuring Principle: Any place that was cleared of monsters will probably be avoided by any weaker monsters too for a while. Risking a tangle with anything strong enough to beat this more powerful monster is not something you want to risk.
4682599
You know... I just imagined what was going through the Tree's mind when it gave Twilight Sparkle the castle seed.
"Girl, I know you've been trying your best with this here castle thingie on top of me, but let's face it, that one's a lost cause. Here, I'll grow you one where you can be with your friends, okay? It'll even have a totally gnarly Harmony Map! Righteous!"
Yes. It sounds like Tree Hugger. Who could likely have been the Element of Kindness herself under different circumstances, but I digress.
4682600
I like to think that the Everfree monsters have gotten more aware of the Mane Six as well, with the result being that they avoid them assiduously when they recognize them. "Ah, dinner -- oh, crap, it's them! Quick! Hide!"
4683476
Just take the spooky yellow eyes from It's Not The Mane Thing About You. Rarity yelled at them. I bet they know by now that even if they can overpower, like, one or two of them, the other five to four will soon show up and kick their butts six ways to sunday. It's not worth it.
An intriguing and plausible take. I personally treat it more of a temple or private sanctum where ponies came only bi invitation, with the business of government always being conducted from Canterlot. But then, I have the Sisters dwelling there for about 300 years - roughly midway between uour take above and the canon centuryish - so it's quite possible it served more than one purpose in that time.