"But dear god please be discreet."

*patiently waiting for the next part*

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Discord is refusing to cooperate. He's terrified because he has no reference points from his own species to understand how this works, and he refuses to admit that he's terrified, so he keeps doing things like leaning in to kiss her and then saying "Hey, from here it looks like you have only one eye!" or making other dumb jokes. So it's going slower than you'd think it would. :-)

This is a fairly accurate portrayal of the way which aristocratic mores have generally operated in most societies -- the only difference in most human aristocracies would be that she would be advised not to take the lover until after marriage. Given contraceptive and silence spells, and less of an obsession with virginity than in most human cultures, what her father said makes perfect sense.

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Also in most aristocratic societies it wouldn't be her dad advising her to take a lover. :-) And she would still have to be higher-ranking than her husband, which didn't frequently happen here on Earth; queens were executed for adultery on more than one occasion, but presumably a noblewoman who was the direct heir and ruler of a fiefdom, and married someone of a lesser rank, could have done whatever she wanted if she was discreet about it.

As a student of history and anthropology it irritates the hell out of me when people blindly map modern human mores onto an alien culture practiced by an entirely different species. I have a thing in my Star Trek fanfic where I frequently reinforce that, on the whole, the Q do not practice monogamy because they are immortal and their equivalent of sexuality doesn't result in reproduction, and Suzy-Q's jealousy is in part a put-on and in part a personal flaw, the way Q's obsessive need to flout the Continuum's orders is a personal flaw and not a trait most of the Q share. The ponies are a lot more human than the Q are, but they are obviously much more inherently likely to go matriarchal than humans are (judging from the fact that humans never have, and the ponies obviously did), and an intelligent species that has a heat cycle is probably going to come up with contraception long before humans did, just because our biology works against us there.

(I also found it amusing to present democracy as if it was a totally crazy Discord idea on the level of cotton candy clouds, because that is totally how an aristocracy would have perceived it.)

Discord's idea of democracy and Celestia's reaction to it were hilarious! how's the second part going? XD

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Actually, there are some societies that have been matriarchal societies (a tribal-level one in Cambodia, I believe, though I can't remember the name), it's just uncommon. Certain Native American cultures were closer to egalitarian than their Western counterparts as well. But you are correct, the society that ponies live in and our society might be similar, but their mating rituals and habits (especially since there are three pony sub-races and multitudes of other intelligent races) would be vastly different.

That is an interesting take on their backsttory.

I absolutely love Starfire's character!