"Times of Strife"

art by AssasinMonkey

They certainly didn't hold anything back in the Season 5 finale!

This isn't the review of that finale promised in my previous blog. Rather, after having watched "The Cutie Re-Mark", I have the urge to talk about timelines, both as they apply to the show and to my stories, Fallout: Equestria and "Origin Story".

With "The Cutie Re-Mark", the writers of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic have embraced the idea of alternate timelines. This is great news for fanfic authors. As seasons pass and the show introduces changes and backstory, most fanfiction will eventually fall into "alternate universe" territory (if they weren't there to begin with). Now, the very notion of alternate universe tales can be considered canon-compliant to the world of Equestria.

Alternate timelines give us an incredible ability to explore the world of My Little Pony. One of the criticisms I hear a lot about the side story Project Horizons is that it deviates form (and occasionally completely rewrites) Fo:E canon. But there is nothing wrong with this. It merely makes Project Horizons an alternate timeline side story. And since none of the side stories are considered canon (not even "Origin Story"), they are all effectively "alternate universe" tales. This gives all Fo:E authors the freedom to play with and tweak the setting.

As fanfiction authors, we are all writing in alternate timelines.

art by MistyDash

Fallout: Equestria was written between April and December of 2011. The last episode referenced within the story was "May the Best Pet Win". But for a very long time, Fallout: Equestria remained canon-compliant with the series, or at least canon-adjacent. I personally consider the point where the story becomes irrevocably Alternate Universe to be "Read It and Weep" because that is when the animators changed Equestria's unique eight-hour clocks to human-standard twelve-hour clocks.

But even after that, nearly everything in the show synced well with Fallout: Equestria, or could be made to fit reasonably with a little massaging. And for everything that was a bit difficult to make sync, there was something that supported the story. (I recall one critic of Fallout: Equestria claiming war was impossible in Equestria because of windigos. "The Cutie Re-Mark" solidly drives a stake through the heart of that argument.) Sometimes, the show echoed ideas or themes in Fallout: Equestria so strongly that a lot of fans suspected the writers were making shout-outs to the story.

And of course there was this...

The hard break came with Twilight's transformation into an alicorn. At that point, there was no arguing that Fallout: Equestria as-written couldn't evolve out of the show's canon timeline. But throughout the series, even after that event, the show has continued to give Fo:E side story writers a wealth of new toys to play with that could easily be integrated into the Equestrian Wasteland. I played with several of these myself in "Origin Story", including virtue chests.

art by OutlawedTofu

"The Cutie Re-Mark" gives us another morsel for thought as it presents us with new information on the speed of development and change that can occur in Equestria under times of stress. (Of course, I find this particularly interesting as it applies to the history that created the Equestrian Wasteland.) Let us take a look at the timeline that the show's content suggests.

The series premiere occurs during the "Summer Sun Celebration". If the show opens in the summer, then by Twilight's first winter in Ponyville ("Winter Wrap-Up"), she has lived in the town for about half a year. Winter-to-winter, approximately another year passes by between "Winter Wrap-Up" and "Hearth's Warming Eve".

The timeline in the show runs into a glitch with "Hearth's Warming Eve", but we can make a reasonable supposition that the episode is aired out of chronological order due to Hasbro syncing it's airing with the real-world Christmas season. If we accept that "Hearth's Warming Eve" occurred chronologically before "May the Best Pet Win", then that fixes the discrepancy with "Tanks for the Memories". According to the episode "Tanks for the Memories", Rainbow Dash is looking forward to her first winter with her pet Tank. Allowing the fix, this means that the events between "Hearth's Warming Eve" and "Tanks for the Memories" occur between winters. Everything from the latter half of Season 2 to the first quarter of Season 5 happens over the course of a single year.

With "Hearthbreakers", we see the marking of a third full year. At that point, Twilight has been in Ponyville for three-and-a-half years. This timeline works out nicely for the story of the Cutie Mark Crusaders. By this, they have been searching for their cutie marks for less than three years. Based on seasons and school years, we can deduce a roughly two-and-a-half year quest. (This is far more reasonable than the idea that they spent five in-show years failing... not to mention never visibly aging.)

Likewise, we can deduce that from the start of the show to the Season 5 finale, Twilight has known her friends for four years, give or take a few months.

You weren't the only one who drew a Fallout: Equestria connection when you saw this.

I am often asked about the timeline for pre-apocalyptic Equestria. The operating concept that I had while writing the story was that the megaspell holocaust occurred roughly thirty-five years after the premiere of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I conceptualized that the Mane Six were in their late teens to early twenties at the start of the show, with Pinkie Pie being the youngest ("I'm a year older than you.") and Rarity being the oldest (as a successful beginning entrepreneur). I assumed five years of show-era Equestria under the idea that there could be up to five seasons, and each would represent a year in Equestria.

(I was wrong on both counts, and yet the assumption still works based on in-show content. )

After show-era, my idea was that there was a decade of "progress and decay" -- a span of ten years where Equestria flourished, enjoying an industrial renaissance, but with growing international tensions. The war itself spanned twenty years, with the first nine years being a relatively low-scale engagement that occurred primarily on foreign soil and in the seas between Equestria and the zebra lands. The ninth and tenth years of the war saw the massacre at Littlehorn, a restructuring of Equestria's wartime government, and a massive shift the zebra's war mentality. The second decade swiftly escalated into a total war.

We have known since the first season that the speed at which Equestrians were capable of inventing and building vastly outpaces our own. In "Griffon the Brush-Off", we see Pinkie Pie invent a pedal-powered helicopter in the space of an afternoon. The town of Appleloosa was built in a single year. And Ponyville is almost completely destroyed by parasprites only to be back in proper shape by the next episode. (In Fallout: Equestria, this is credited in large part to the subtle magical nature of earth ponies.)

Now, in "The Cutie Re-Mark", we gain a whole new appreciation for how fast Equestria can react and change. Within just few years, Equestria shifted into a total war mentality when facing the forces of Sombra, with complete civilian participation in the war effort. In addition, we see the results of a shockingly fast mechanization of Sweet Apple Acres.

"Warponies"

art by Raikoh-Illust

The drastic industrialization of the Flim-Flam future makes the racing speed of Equestria's technological development in Fallout: Equestria seem more like a mosey.

With these revelations in mind, fanfiction writers have been given a much broader available canvas for creating viable alternate universe stories where a point of departure leads to a drastically altered Equestria still within the lifetime of the characters we all enjoy writing about.