“I’ve been thinking about the earth pony problem,” Starlight Glimmer said.
“The… is there a problem with earth ponies?” Twilight Sparkle asked. It was a brisk day, and they were out lounging atop one of the gentle rolling hills that hugged the woods south of Sweet Apple Acres. The mid-spring sun toasted their coats, while the wind kissed and chilled them. Twilight relished the sensation of being caught between the seasons, and she let her wings rise to caress the air with each gust.
It was Starlight’s day to choose their activity, and Twilight had barely finished asking Starlight what she wanted to do when the answer exploded from the unicorn: “Kites!” And so they found themselves on Ponyville’s premier kite-flying hill a few hours after breakfast with all the instruments of kite-making laid out before them: balsa rods of all thicknesses, many-colored panels of fabric, rice-paste glue, miles of twine, metal pins, ribbons of every hue and a 64-flavor pack of artisans watercolor sticks. All were held down against the wind with rocks or hooves or little spots of magic when they ran out of hooves and rocks.
They’d agreed on box-kites, which Twilight knew only from picture books as a foal and glimpses of Starlight’s kite collection. She went for the simplest of designs, a rectangular prism wrapped with two panels of fabric. It didn’t look like something that could fly, but even half-assembled, with the glue still drying and the twine yet unattached, she could feel it grabbing at the gusts, threatening to lift off her hill and into the trees beyond. It wanted to soar.
Starlight crafted a far more ambitious design, a pentagonal prism that lacked the easy structural strength of a cubic design. But she’d already improvised a complex internal bracing far more elegant and clean than Twilight’s rather crude glue-and-twine foal’s play. Starlight’s kite looked like something a pony astronaut might use.
Then out came the watercolor sticks. By unspoken consensus they’d agreed on animal motifs, with the requirement that the animal in question had to have the same number of limbs as the kite had fabric panels. So Starlight drew dozens of five-armed starfish on each face of her kite, alternating colors and sizes until each face was more starfish than fabric, and her hooves and lips were smeared with waxy traces of the watercolor sticks.
Twilight gave her own eight-paneled kite an octopus motif, after briefly considering and then rejecting a spiderweb design. An octopus would better match Starlight’s aquatic-theme, anyway. She spent the hour drawing a single twining limb on each panel, adding suckers and spots and rings as fancy took her. She spent a bit of extra time detailing a hectocotyl arm – for her octopus kite was a colt octopus kite – which provoked a minute of giggles from them both.
Finally it was time to fly, and they let their kites spool out into the brisk wind rushing up the hillside. The taut strings, decorated with fluttering ribbons every few feet to make them visible to pegasi, hummed in the air.
And that was when Starlight brought up the earth pony problem.
“No, not a problem with them,” she said. “I mean, I certainly don’t have any problems with them. I like them! But society has a problem with them, right?”
“I… don’t think I follow you,” Twilight answered. Her kite wobbled a bit in the wind, threatening to start spinning. “Like, discrimination? There are still some older unicorns who say—”
“No, it’s deeper than just attitudes,” Starlight interrupted her. Her eyes were on her own kite, which held its position like a rock despite the gusty wind. “Look, you know I have a thing for equality, right?”
“Yes, I’d noticed that.”
“Right. So, have you ever noticed how unequal things are for earth ponies?”
Oh. It was one of those arguments. Twilight arrayed her mental cards and began to deal them. “All ponies are equal, Starlight, they’re just equal in different ways! Sure, earth ponies can’t use magic or fly, but they have durable family bonds and greater physical strength, and nopony can grow things like an earth pony—”
Starlight snorted. “Come on. You don’t really believe any of that, do you?”
“I–” Twilight frowned. “Of course I do. It’s all true.”
“It’s true, but it’s wrong,” Starlight said. “Earth ponies have larger families because they’re traditionally farmers who live in multi-generational households. They’re stronger because they have to be stronger – do you think Applejack has magically powerful legs, or maybe she can kick like that because she spends all day bucking trees? Maud’s one of the strongest mares I know, because she grew up breaking rocks with her hooves. It’s not magic. Any unicorn or pegasus could do the same thing if they grew up under the same circumstance, but no earth pony is ever going to cast spells like a unicorn or fly like a pegasus. How is that equal?”
Twilight reeled her kite in a bit, tugging it down from the stronger upper-level winds. When it stabilized, she pulled out her second card. “It’s equal because it’s harmonious. Unicorns and pegasi have abilities that earth ponies don’t, of course. Nopony would argue that. But pony society functions because each tribe uses its abilities to benefit all the tribes. The ancient Hearthswarming stories warn us about what happened when the tribes were separate. For Equestria to flourish, all ponies are needed, no matter their tribe or their abilities.”
“That’s the same argument traditionalists use when they say earth ponies should only be farmers,” Starlight said. She did something with her string, and her kite described a wide circle in the sky. “And pegasi should just be warriors. And of course unicorns should be all the nobles. Because we’re the natural leaders, right? That’s still harmonious. Society worked great that way for centuries. But it’s not equal, not by a long shot.”
“Okay.” Twilight discarded all the mental arguments she’d arrayed and deployed a new one on the spot. “How about this. Say you have two unicorns, one taller than the other. Being taller gives you certain advantages in life, right? So they’re unequal. But is that unfair?”
Starlight shook her head. “No, that’s part of a standard distribution. Some individuals will be tall, some short. Some pegasi can fly fast, some can’t. The individual might think it’s not fair, but for everypony at large it balances out.”
“Right. Don’t think about ponies as earth ponies or pegasi or unicorns.” Twilight said. “Ignore the categories. Instead some ponies can fly and some can’t. Some can use magic and some can’t. It’s part of that standard distribution, and as a society we’ve decided to call the ponies who can fly pegasi, and the ones who can use magic unicorns, and the ones who can’t do either earth ponies. But while that may be unfair for individual earth ponies who wish they could do magic or fly, it’s not unfair to earth ponies as a category because that category has no objective reality, any more than pegasus or unicorn. They’re just descriptions ponies used to conveniently sort each other by ability, and over time those descriptions became a part of how we organize our society. But they’re still just descriptions – there’s no such thing as earth ponies or unicorns or pegasi, just ponies.”
Starlight shook her head again. “That’s replacing reality with theory. We don’t break ponies into tribes based on height because height doesn’t matter in the end. Magic does. Flying does. Earth ponies will never get to do any of those things, and even if you only think of them as individuals, that’s still unfair. From birth they’re frozen out of so much potential that you and I take for granted. How many earth ponies have become princesses?”
Uh. Twilight was suddenly very conscious of the wings fluttering at her sides, and she pulled them in tight. “Well, none. Yet. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t!”
“You’re a poor liar, princess.”
Twilight bristled. It took her a moment to realize Starlight was deliberately baiting her, and she let out a slow breath. “Okay, fine. Let’s say you’re right about everything. What can we do about it? It is a unicorn’s nature to use magic. It is a pegasus’s nature to fly. It is an earth pony’s nature to do neither of those things. If I thought earth ponies were broken – which I don’t – and there were some way to fix them, I would. But we can’t, and if happiness means accepting the things we cannot change, then you’ll never be happy as long as you think life needs to be fair.”
Starlight was silent in response. She watched her kite, so far above them it appeared as little more than a pink dot against the blue sky. A few pegasi occasionally detoured to dance around it before going on their way.
“What if we could?” she finally said. Her voice was quiet, almost lost to the wind.
“Uh…” Twilight’s string shook, and she realized she’d been ignoring her own kite too long. It bobbled dangerously near the treetops, and she pulled the twine to give it some more lift. “How… do you know something I don’t, Starlight?”
She shook her head. “Just something simple. There’s no way I know of to give earth ponies horns or wings. But that’s not the only way to make ponies equal.”
The chill that swept over Twilight wasn’t born of the wind. “You can’t—”
“I could, though,” she mused. “Just cut off my horn, and I will have made earth ponies equal to at least one unicorn.”
Twilight’s eyes slid to Starlight’s forehead. “You don’t seem to have gone down that path.”
“I know.” Starlight’s shoulders slumped and her ears sagged. “Does that make me a hypocrite, or just a coward? It was the same back at Our Town. I was so happy to condemn all those ponies to a life without their cutie marks, but I wasn’t willing to do it to myself.”
Twilight licked her lips. The past was always a tender subject with Starlight, and she had to set her hooves carefully. “And it was wrong back then, wasn’t it? This thinking is all just repeating the same mistakes.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a mistake. Maybe the only reason you and your friends tried to stop me back then was because you found out I’d been lying about keeping my own mark. But what if I hadn’t been, Twilight? What would you have done? Would you have just… left?”
“I, uh…” What would they have done? There was no law against removing cutie marks; they had only confronted Starlight over her lie, and everything had spun out of control after that.
She could imagine it. Leading her baffled friends back to Ponyville, never having solved the problem of Our Town. They’d have abandoned Starlight to her insane plans, if only she’d been insane enough to really believe them.
“Where would that end?” Twilight asked. “A world with wing-shorn pegasi and dehorned unicorns? I don’t think any earth ponies want that. Certainly none that I know.”
“Sometimes the right thing to do is hard. It requires sacrifice. And you could… do it at birth. There are painless ways. And then we would all be earth ponies. Can you tell me why that would be wrong in a way that doesn’t also explain how terribly unfair the current world is to them?”
“It’s not our job to make the world fair!” Twilight said. “We can only try to be the best version of ourselves that we can! To… to mutilate yourself because your own gifts are unfair would be the first step down a path of annihilating every difference, because the only perfectly equal world is a world of perfect entropy where all things are flat and cold and gray—”
Something snapped high above. They looked up to see Twilight’s kite, some internal spar now broken, falling to the ground. The unmoored fabric panels fluttered like flags as they plummeted. It hit with the crunch of thin sticks breaking.
They both winced. Twilight picked the mess up with her magic and drew it closer. Little remained that resembled a kite.
“Well,” Starlight said. She drew in her own kite and snagged it once it was in range. “It was a good kite while it lasted. And I liked the octopus!”
“Yeah.” Twilight folded up the ruins as best she could. “Hey, Starlight?”
“Hm?”
“What about… if a unicorn uses their magic to make life better for others, especially ponies who can’t use magic, is that still unfair?”
Starlight was quiet for a while. She detached a single spar from within her kite, and the rest of it folded up neatly. She wrapped it with a bit of spare twine and set it on her back.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “Who is the master, then?”
“Maybe there is none.” Twilight collected all the little scraps of their kite-making morning, putting them in her saddlebags. “Wanna talk about it over lunch?”
Starlight smiled. “Sounds great.”
9035687 Absolutely nothing! Which is what Venezuela's currency is worth right now!
Now this was an interesting discussion. Not Starlight going over the top or weird like other chapters. This was a discussion that held a lot of meaning with a lot of unanswerable questions.
There was, however, an earth pony mage.
She got conflated with a unicorn, but then she came back from Limbo.
9034734 Thanks! Exalted is one of my abiding obsessions. I wasn’t sure just from the phrase, but applying it to a magical Thing to enable a person to better repair social bonds uh, rung a bell.
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Then how does she fit through the doors?
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Like a door is going to stop a full-grown dragon.
What standard distribution? (Is Twilight trying to wield central limit theorem incorrectly? For shame, Twilight!) There are 3 obvious clusters and those 3 words exist as a direct consequence of brains doing clusterization properly.
WTF?
Umm, she's a princess
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She's saying that, since you can have unicorns and pegassi born to earth ponies and vice versa, they're not actually different species and so the racial distinction isn't real. In other words, she's arguing that being a pegassus is like being an olympic athlete and being a unicorn is like being a world class musician. It's not quite a perfect analogy since those aren't exclusive categories in humans, but you get the idea.
Her being a princess doesn't mean it's her job to make the world fair either. The world isn't fair, it's never going to be. It is her job to make things just, to help people who need it, and to try to have a society where everyone is happy. But that's not the same thing as fair.
I do think that Starlight would do better to look into Earth Pony magic more deeply, Since, yes, we have at least one mage from there. Plus Pinkie Pie. And if we go with Cadence's backstory, it's definitely possible for pegassi at least to ascend as alicorns. It's not just a unicorn thing. Now that may mean the education system in Equestria has a strong racial bias and needs an overhaul, but that's a different question than going Harriosn Bergeron on everyone. Again.
My headcanon for the above is that Earth Pony and Pegasus magic is more mystical, so it's hard to teach in a scholastic setting. Also that more or less everything they do is magical, especially where their talents are involved. There are some good fics depicting that better than I can describe quickly.
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Ah. But then we return to the part of the story that claims earth ponies are naturally skilled with the growth of vegetation when it could simply be their lot in life that forces them to be skilled. Yes, wings can provide air flow, but how do you know Pegasi are naturally gifted in manipulating clouds/weather?
...Are brainwashing and imprisonment not wrong?
This chapter made me think of Harrison Bergeron and Tryptich. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
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... well Griffons can too, and so can Birds, so it's not something exclusive to pegasi.
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Often very difficult to prove in a court of law. What is brainwashing? Where does a charismatic person offering their own hope to the downtrodden end and brainwashing begin? When they're lying? If they don't write down "ha ha, look at these suckers", how are you going to prove that they are?
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Starlight speaks about pretty well-defined potential problem in reality: some earth ponies could be unhappy or not fulfilling their potential. It's not obvious how pointing that different ponies can bonk each other productively (or any amount of philosophising around, really) can change reality. What Twilight said about normal distribution is just not true.
In this exact formulation it's blatantly false: "pegasus" or "unicorn" is a predicate defined on ponies, "athlete" or "musician" is a predicate defined on pairs (human, population) --- athlete (musician) is a guy who runs fast (plays piano good) in comparison to the rest of population.
Or course it doesnt't mean. She may decide to do something about the problem, or she may decide not to do --- responsibility to decide what is her job is hers, and she doesn't have someone above to shift responsibility to.
That's kinda not really the issue I talked about in this chapter, the issue is epistemic. Starlight says "hey, there's that problem in real world that bothers and saddens me very much, but I don't know a good way to fix it --- all my solutions are shitty and I've previously fucked up royally on similar problem". Now, that's all right claim --- in real world there are a lot of important problems that we don't really know how to solve yet and it's ok to feel bad sometimes about that. After examining the evidence they as well may decide that problem is not that big, or that it's not efficiently fixable under current conditions and prioritize something else above it. The issue it that Twilight comes up with lame excuse after lame excuse after lame excuse to not think about the problem. Starlight is a bit confused herself too, but let's leave it for now.
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Correction: animals not aclimated to cloud surfaces are unable to touch clouds. A pony that has been enchanted to touch clouds may do so. And other creatures with wings such as griffons may also touch clouds as if they were solid.
But then that poses another question. Do creatures who fly adapt to touch clouds, or do creatures that can touch clouds adapt to fly?
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It does undermine the moral part of the moral dilemma presented here, though.
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Who is Harrison Bergeron?
9037175 Wasn't Starlight inspired by Harrison Bergeron in the first place?
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Here you go!
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Thank you so much for that. I remember reading that story but never remembered the name or author.
I miss making kites. Flying kites with my mom was a lot of fun. These day out pieces are really fun. I what Twilight will choose for the next one.
Well Starlight would’ve also had to have chosen not to trip off their Cutie Marks, and trap them in a building.
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It's not a princess' job to make the world fair. It's her job to govern. To rule. To keep things working in a harmonious fashion, or at least an orderly one. To see to the needs and advancement of her own subjects.
The Sisters just happen to also keep the world alive, too.
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I've thought about this, having dealt with an untold number of manipulative people in my life. The answer may surprise you.
Kill the silver-tongued devils, destroy the body, and fill the power gap left by their ascension through thought-guidance, reassert individualistic thought, reinforce what the manipulator weakened in the population to force said population to rely on them - so that the people can rely on themselves and stand up on their own. Guide them on the road back to wellness. But it all starts with skipping the courts and legal procedures that can't convict the monsters anyway. Human history is full of murder for the good of others, after all, who are we to deny facts?
And I thought diamonds were impressive
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Princess's job is whatever forementioned princess decided her job to be. Remember: unlimited power
media1.giphy.com/media/3ornk7nts29Am5LIfm/giphy.gif
I keep feeling like I'm reading pony Calvin and Hobbes.
I actually suspect that pegasi would be the most racist tribe on average, specifically due to the ones that live in the cloud-cities. They could potentially go their entire lives without ever seeing ponies of the other tribes, let alone interacting with them, and so could end up with fairly isolationist and bigoted views, due to ignorance of the other two.
…yes? She can buck a boulder bigger than her hundreds of feet. And Big Mac can drag an entire house behind him. And Maud can dig straight through solid rock with her bare hooves. I think it’s kind of disingenuous to claim that any pony could do this, when we only really see earth ponies doing it.
Are we using “princess” as a byword for “alicorn” here? Because if that’s the case, then it’s only fair to point out that only two alicorns have ascended from the tribes. Luna, Celestia, and Flurry were all born alicorns (or rather Celestia and Luna were foundlings, but they were already alicorns when found and we don’t know if they were any other tribe beforehand to my knowledge). So with only two ascended alicorns, it was inevitable that at least one tribe would be left out.
No more weather control. No more spells. You’d be sacrificing the agricultural, economic, and military stability of the nation.
Anyway, I do actually like this chapter. It’s certainly a fun discussion to have, though again I do feel it’s wrong to try and claim that earth pony strength is just a convenient lie when we’re not given a serious reason to believe that. I’m not a fan of altering the source material just to make a point.
“The Jedi are evil because they kidnap babies.”
“But they don’t. They canonically either adopt orphans, or parents deliberately and freely choose to give up children to the Order.”
“But assume for a moment they did kidnap babies.”
“That would be wrong of them if they did.”
“So the Jedi are evil.”
“…"