How did baby Ember get her cutie mark?

[Taffeta]

I like the idea that Ember got her cutie mark rump marking/symbol by looking through a telescope and finding a star that hadn't been charted before.

Just fixing that for you.

[KarentheUnicorn]

How did baby Ember get her cutie mark?

By sacrificing the souls of the other ponies...muwhahahah..


OR

My original Ember was the blue mail order ember and was I decided a boy. He never got a symbol, he was sort of the class clown and he and baby moondancer were boyfriend and girlfriend.

OR

It was left open for you do decide because at one time toys actually gave you the ability to dream up your own ideas about each pony, instead of strictly following along someone elses ideas. Even back in the day the cartoon for G1 didn't play a huge part in how I thought about my ponies. It was an accessory, take it or leave it, my ponies were nothing like the ones portrayed on the cartoon.

Which was technically what MLP was created to do. It was the idea of a child being able to have their own ponies. Even the backstories invented didn't fully flesh out the personality of ponies. Although since the UK sort of had the comics it might have been a tad different...but I can only speak from my own experience with MLP back in the 80's.

I can still remember getting my first ponies and that it was my mom who bought me Moondancer and Firefly. Then we went to visit my cousin the same day and she had also purchased Moondancer!! It was so funny, we bought looked over the backcard and all the other ponies and were totally IN. We both wanted to collect all the ponies pictured there. I was 11-12 and that would have made my cousin probably 7-8 years old. We were sorta bff/sisters instead of cousins.

We also both took super good care of our ponies, we did play with them a little but we were never really abusive. Although I do remember that one time I'd gotten to the point of having almost 50ish ponies and for some weird reason I could not leave any of them at home while we went on our week long vacation to Florida...YES, all my ponies came with me. So it was me and 50 ponies piled up in the backseat. (haha)

I remember it was around my birthday the year I started collecting ponies and my dad taking me out of town and we went to a store called Woolworths where to my surprise they still had the show stable. And I really wanted it and dad got it for me for my birthday. I didn't have many ponies then, maybe a handful but I thought it was so awesome I'd have a house for my ponies. I still remember how it felt sitting in the truck on the way home with the box in my lap.

It really wasn't about a particular 'character' in G1. I felt like the ponies were one big family and I, as the caretaker needed to collect all the ponies and bring them home. So, even at that age it was a 'collection'. But in that I was always seeing the ponies how I wanted, not how hasbro said the ponies had to be, which again, I never felt like Hasbro originally was pushing for the ponies to be set in stone as far as their personality goes, it was supposed to be about play and imagination and your own ideas.

Back to the symbols on each ponies. Clearly back at the origins, Hasbro wasn't going for some kind of coming of age, your life MISSION if you choose to accept it and too bad if you don't as you'r stuck with a purple cupcake on your flaks. It was more a way to identify the pony and make it 'different' from the other ponies. Which to a certain extend does give the ponies a vague personality. But was Moondancer a space pony, was she a magical wizard unicorn? Or was it just a way to reflect the name and color sceme back then?

I mean ya know, newborns already had their symbols/name in package. (haha) Maybe G1 ponies were just so far advanced of their G4 decendants they knew out of the Hasbro womb who they were and what they're future would be. But I have a difficult time imagining the newborn twins as adults. What exactly is a job profile for Bunkie?

or Tattles...maybe she's a FBI or CIA informant...

[Leave a Whisper]

How did baby Ember get her cutie mark?

By sacrificing the souls of the other ponies...muwhahahah..


OR

My original Ember was the blue mail order ember and was I decided a boy. He never got a symbol, he was sort of the class clown and he and baby moondancer were boyfriend and girlfriend.

OR

It was left open for you do decide because at one time toys actually gave you the ability to dream up your own ideas about each pony, instead of strictly following along someone elses ideas. Even back in the day the cartoon for G1 didn't play a huge part in how I thought about my ponies. It was an accessory, take it or leave it, my ponies were nothing like the ones portrayed on the cartoon.

Which was technically what MLP was created to do. It was the idea of a child being able to have their own ponies. Even the backstories invented didn't fully flesh out the personality of ponies. Although since the UK sort of had the comics it might have been a tad different...but I can only speak from my own experience with MLP back in the 80's.

I can still remember getting my first ponies and that it was my mom who bought me Moondancer and Firefly. Then we went to visit my cousin the same day and she had also purchased Moondancer!! It was so funny, we bought looked over the backcard and all the other ponies and were totally IN. We both wanted to collect all the ponies pictured there. I was 11-12 and that would have made my cousin probably 7-8 years old. We were sorta bff/sisters instead of cousins.

We also both took super good care of our ponies, we did play with them a little but we were never really abusive. Although I do remember that one time I'd gotten to the point of having almost 50ish ponies and for some weird reason I could not leave any of them at home while we went on our week long vacation to Florida...YES, all my ponies came with me. So it was me and 50 ponies piled up in the backseat. (haha)

I remember it was around my birthday the year I started collecting ponies and my dad taking me out of town and we went to a store called Woolworths where to my surprise they still had the show stable. And I really wanted it and dad got it for me for my birthday. I didn't have many ponies then, maybe a handful but I thought it was so awesome I'd have a house for my ponies. I still remember how it felt sitting in the truck on the way home with the box in my lap.

It really wasn't about a particular 'character' in G1. I felt like the ponies were one big family and I, as the caretaker needed to collect all the ponies and bring them home. So, even at that age it was a 'collection'. But in that I was always seeing the ponies how I wanted, not how hasbro said the ponies had to be, which again, I never felt like Hasbro originally was pushing for the ponies to be set in stone as far as their personality goes, it was supposed to be about play and imagination and your own ideas.

Back to the symbols on each ponies. Clearly back at the origins, Hasbro wasn't going for some kind of coming of age, your life MISSION if you choose to accept it and too bad if you don't as you'r stuck with a purple cupcake on your flaks. It was more a way to identify the pony and make it 'different' from the other ponies. Which to a certain extend does give the ponies a vague personality. But was Moondancer a space pony, was she a magical wizard unicorn? Or was it just a way to reflect the name and color sceme back then?

I mean ya know, newborns already had their symbols/name in package. (haha) Maybe G1 ponies were just so far advanced of their G4 decendants they knew out of the Hasbro womb who they were and what they're future would be. But I have a difficult time imagining the newborn twins as adults. What exactly is a job profile for Bunkie?

or Tattles...maybe she's a FBI or CIA informant...

Fantastic! 

[otocolobus_manul]

Bunkie builds bunkers, of course. And Tattles the spy is incredible.

Meanwhile, what do Sticky and Sniffles do?

[Taffeta]

And the Unicorn has arrived xD So nicely put <3 Well said.

On the comics - I don't think they really dictated anything tbh. I mean, I read them obsessively, I chose favourite ponies sometimes based on things in the comic, not just on how they looked - but I never ever played games based on the comic world and the pony stories I wrote didn't involve the characters or settings in the comic - just odd details like the thing I mentioned earlier.

The nice thing about the comic was the two-way approach it had interacting with the kids sending in letters, their own pony designs, photos, and getting replies from Majesty or Spike or whichever pony. And then certain ponies giving tips or craft stuff based on something that happened in a story. It felt kind of like they were giving you all these things you COULD try - but didn't have to if you didn't want to.

I also remember Blue Peter doing a stable or something on their craft section but that's something else.

What's interesting is that quite a lot of pony commercials don't even mention the names of the ponies. I mean ones without those jingles.xD. I can think of at least 2 UK  ones which just refer to "My Little Pony" as the central character. So instead of Peachy it's "My Little Pony" in the grooming parlour advert here. And the ponywear ad names a lot of the other ponies but it says something like "My little pony is having a party because today's her birthday." So it almost puts even that in the hands of the child. "You can change the name if you want to, its YOUR little pony."

...So yeah.

The UK had the storybooks and (on VHS) the TV eps as well. And backcards, which sometimes had stories (the very early ones didn't, and the ones that did are not as long as the US ones until some time later). And the UK comics used some stuff from US backcards we never had...so yeah, go figure that out. Shady's UK persona is based on SS Shady's backcard, as Movie Star Shady doesn't have a backcard story. But the G1 animation's Shady is not really based on more than one line of the US backcard story. Because that makes sense...

Things like Shady's sunglasses and Baby Shady's boat came back several times in the comic but I never wanted to make Shady any sunglasses (and Baby Shady wasn't sold here, but if she had been...I would not have made her a boat just because I saw it in the comic.)

Even the writers picked and chose what they thought was important. And with a semi-rotating cast they were free to do so.


I'm afraid speckles and bunkie to me sound contagious.

[BubbleTea]

this thread is like reading a book that is falling apart

[Shaz]

And Shaz, that's a super cool idea! I love the thought of ponies having cultural traditions surrounding tattoos. G2, with its tendency to have ponies switch names, symbols, hair colors or even species (as in the case of Silver Swirl/Star Swirl), is especially fascinating to think about. What are the rites behind ponies changing symbols or names, or dyeing their hair, or somehow changing species? Is it natural or deliberate? Are they like frogs and have dramatically different appearances based on what stage of their life they're in? This has turned into a speculative thread for pre-G4 symbols and I love it.

Thanks
I don't have many G2 ponies so I haven't really thought about them, but it's definitely interesting to think about. I like inventing elaborate worlds for my ponies!

Just to be clear, my thoughts on tattoos were just about my imaginings for my own pony world, I wasn't intending to trample on anyone else's pony memories/headcanons/adherence to Hasbro facts. My pony 'canon' is just based on stories I've made up about my collection, sometimes inspired by the UK factfile or the G1 cartoon, sometimes just my own ideas. It's no secret that I'm not a huge fan of G4 (each to their own), so I haven't used much of that canon. I also often give my ponies different names and stuff. I like the space to invent my own ideas, and I was always into that as a child (my favourite toys included Ty Beanies and Kitty in my Pocket, who don't really have much overarching canon, you can just do your own thing).

Here's something cute about symbol nomenclature: when my girlfriend was little, she had a pony annual with a story about the Pocket Ponies in it, but she never owned/saw any Pocket Ponies and didn't know about their 3D symbols. So she thought that ponies' symbols were universally referred to as pockets, and would refer to e.g. Posey as being 'a yellow pony with flowers on her pocket'. It wasn't till we started collecting ponies together in 2013 that she realised they weren't called pockets! So I suppose everyone has their own version of the pony world - and if you invented it as a child, it might be quite surreal! (Kitti's childhood PonyLand apparently included a lot of holes which ponies would fall down and get trapped. A pony known as Musical Note [Twirler] would have to twirl her magic horn and send down bubbles to rescue them. This happened a lot, to the extent that Musical Note was basically a full-time rescuer of trapped ponies. I suppose the bubbles were inspired by Fizzy in the cartoon, but the falling down holes is pretty random . Kitti's family still reminisce about it, and her dad still doesn't understand why they never filled the holes in. I think the answer to that is probably 'because ponies falling down holes and getting rescued is a fun game when you're four'!)

[Lilja]

Also, what exactly fosters imaginative play varies by child. As a kid, I preferred universes with pre-existing rules and lore (if a toylike didn't have any I'd incorporate some from some kind of media) so I could focus on imagining how different characters would fit in the established world. I've always been more interested in characterization than worldbuilding, haha. I still got in endless trouble at school for my "overactive imagination" AKA undiagnosed ADHD, but my imagination ran more towards characters and still does.

This was how I worked as a kid too. I preferred having an established universe and characters to work with and expand on that, rather than making everything up from scratch. I would also have loved growing up with the rich world of FIM rather than the lackluster one of the G1 cartoon. If people want to say "kids these days don't use their imagination", you might as well argue kids shouldn't be given toys at all, they should make their own out of sticks and rocks.

Granted I do think there is a lot in MLP that can't have a satisfactory in-story explanation (but it can be a fun challenge trying to come up with one). The UK comic attempted to explain twinkle eyes and where baby ponies come from, but I don't feel like those explanations really add anything meaningful to their world. It would've been just as good to not address those things.

Maybe you don't necessarily need to explain why ponies have pictures on their butts, but it is a bit weird to go 25+ years without ever addressing such an important part of their design. I think FIM's basic idea, that a pony receives their cutie mark when they've found their calling in life works fine in the context of a fairytale world. I don't think kids will take the message as "I need to decide early what I want to do in life, and then I can only do that one thing". It's also a great nod to G1, where the first baby ponies indeed didn't have a picture on their butt. And if someone wants to headcanon the FIM cutie mark explanation for G1, that's absolutely fine.

[Leave a Whisper]

I'd hardly call G1 lackluster.

[Carrehz]

All the lands and different characters in the G1 cartoon and you call it "lackluster"? Geez...

this thread is like reading a book that is falling apart

Good analogy.

[Taffeta]

TBH I was never inspired by the G1 animated world either. Not that I think it would've been a problem for me to only grow up with the TV series, but I suspect I would've ditched it and done my own thing.


Though I disagree on almost all the other points made. I don't want to see G1 described through G4 filters. It has enough of its own.

Not that it is a bad thing to want rules or guidance to create a play world, or that that is a lack of imagination. But FIM is so tied to those specific characters that it's stifling.

I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I am never particularly drawn to characters that are too explicitly described without any room for me to add my own touch. G1 suited that perfectly, as it gave details but not really rules. I feel like FIM has rules. And they may work for FIM, but I don't want them anywhere near my childhood.

Also, these concepts of the baby pony origins and the TE rules and so on and so forth. I often see generalised comments about the comics doing x and y and sometimes that's a simplification.

The comic DOES indicate how the TE ponies got their twinkles. I think that's fine, honestly - well, the story is a bit notorious, but the idea of explaining a pony gimmick in the comic in some way was not uncommon. It's not random and out of place, it's kind of a part of a bigger attempt to introduce new ideas to the kids reading. The comic began in 1985, so those were some of the earliest new 'gimmick' ponies to come out while the comic was running. I think it's issue 11, so very early on.

The comic does NOT, however, categorise 'how baby ponies happen' as such. Unless you want to generalise and say that baby ponies often happen through magic, which I suppose might work. The first issue has the babies coming out of the mirror, but it's only a handful of babies. Nibbles and Dibbles, Sniffles and Snookums are drawings brought to life by Baby Lucky's magic. Most baby ponies move to ponyland, rather than have a magical origin. The Rainbow Babies are the charges of the Rainbow Curl ponies, but we don't know if they are related or how that relationship came about. A lot of babies live in the nursery under the guardianship of Gusty/Lollipop and later Caramel Crunch, but aside the loving families there's no sense of ponies living in family groups in G1. They more often live with their peers, but not always in the nursery. We do have that moment of Lickety Split cousins which suggests extended family, but that is a one off example as far as I know. Baby Half Note is discovered on an island by Locket.

In any case, absolutely no other baby ponies ever come out of Majesty's mirror after issue 1, so it can't really be called an attempt to explain where babies come from overall. And Ember is never in the comics, so Ember's origin is completely unknown and unexplained. The comic seems to present Baby Glory, etc as the earliest babies (because at the time of the comic they would have been, if Hasbro UK had bothered to sell them), so Ember is left entirely with the animation - she doesn't exist.

Of course all of this is later contradicted by Surprise Twins Missile Launcher - although because she comes so late, she is never in the comic - who demonstrates that baby ponies apparently come about the same way as baby people.

Just because there's a couple of stories where a handful of babies come into being by a particular method, that's a long way from attempting to explain where baby ponies come from.

What the comic DOES do is provide a more coherent 'world' in terms of geography and other peoples. It doesn't really attempt to set rules about the ponies down in stone. The rules it does mention usually relate only to one pony/one handful of ponies.. I think it's more coherent than the TV series in regards to the setting that is 'Ponyland' (Dream Valley is only in the animation). That's partly because the TV series comes in chunks, though. There are a number of ongoing locations, characters and other races in the comics that appear from time to time. Because it's a longer run, there's more chance of those elements coming up time and time again. The animation would probably have done this too, but didn't have that same length of time to establish more than a handful of other locations. At best most of them only appear once, with only a few exceptions.

@Shaz - you were absolutely not trampling on anyone with your idea In fact the opposite, your idea is exactly what I mean when talking about everyone having their own concepts of pony.

[Lilja]

All the lands and different characters in the G1 cartoon and you call it "lackluster"? Geez...

It's my personal opinion, but yes I think the world in the G1 MLP cartoon is very boring and doesn't inspire much imagination. For most of the part you just have a bunch of ponies (all of which can be switched out to advertise new toys) living in a big pink building, which of course is a toy you can buy. Their closest community is super small and basically 100% dictated by which toys Hasbro are selling. They travel to different places and meet various creatures, but everything feels invented by the writers as they went along, not like it's part of a larger, coherent world. Most of the time the creatures they meet don't have any meaningful connection to the ponies (and once the episode is over, they're instantly forgotten). It's ok to like this style of storytelling of course, but I much prefer FIM's world where you have so many ponies and creatures living in different locations. Everything feels more coherent and connected, while still always having lots of room for expansion.

[aria_elwen]

Bunkie builds bunkers, of course. And Tattles the spy is incredible.

Meanwhile, what do Sticky and Sniffles do?

Bio-warfare. :p

Clearly they're mad scientists.

[lovesbabysquirmy]

this is totally a generational thing. 

In G1, not all kids had access to the TV show, and UK kids didn't all have pocket money for comics every month. 

So the commercials were yes, "BUY MY LITTLE PONY" but it absolutely was not in the same manner that other toylines had - like if you don't have He-man AND Skeletor, how will you play MOTU?  GI Joe, you gotta have the WHOLE team.  MLP was "pony pony pony" but it wasn't "Firefly Blossom Medley Starshine Applejack".  I don't know if that makes sense? 
But you can look at the commercials - the herd of ponies is standing around the playset and they are wearing outfits and accessories and the girls are playing with the latest gimmick, and the narrator is talking about buying "MY LITTLE PONY" - they are not talking about "re-play Star Wars in your living room with X, Y, Z, etc." 
Buy a pony, any pony, buy MLP, that's the message. 

with FiM, it's pretty clear:  you need the WHOLE team!  it's not generally just buying more ponies with fun and different gimmicks.  and the WHOLE team is repeated over and over in front of your face with the TV show.  yes there are background characters, but we all have acknowledged that Hasbro really fell flat on releasing G4 in the same way as G1, they have this "sentai" thing that works for them in 5 year cycles....

I prefer the term symbol, that keeps it nice and fantasy for me.  If you've had to attend to the reality of branding a horse, it's not a delightful experience like Ember is dreaming it's gonna be.  LOL 

[LadyAmalthea]

It's my personal opinion, but yes I think the world in the G1 MLP cartoon is very boring and doesn't inspire much imagination. For most of the part you just have a bunch of ponies (all of which can be switched out to advertise new toys) living in a big pink building, which of course is a toy you can buy. Their closest community is super small and basically 100% dictated by which toys Hasbro are selling. They travel to different places and meet various creatures, but everything feels invented by the writers as they went along, not like it's part of a larger, coherent world. Most of the time the creatures they meet don't have any meaningful connection to the ponies (and once the episode is over, they're instantly forgotten). It's ok to like this style of storytelling of course, but I much prefer FIM's world where you have so many ponies and creatures living in different locations. Everything feels more coherent and connected, while still always having lots of room for expansion.

I feel the same way about the show. It's so disjointed; like each episode was written by a different person without having watched any of the others to even have a consistent feel of the world they were writing about. I liked it as a kid, but I had a hard time slogging through it as an adult.