Pony genetics & familial structure

[dragonfly]

Calling all you pony geniuses! I know we've got a bunch of smarties on the boards.

Given that the baby ponies look like their moms, is it safe to assume that the mother ponies have the dominant genes? We know there are Big Brother Ponies, and assuming the ponies are not involved in incestuous relationships (Steamer...) that would mean the MBs are the dads, or there are dad ponies who evidently haven't signed NDAs to be on TV.

Would you say it's safe to assume that the MLP world is a matriarchal society? Pony children inherit names from their moms...the girls - but the boys appear to have independent names. Explain? How has this changed or stagnated between generations? I would say that it becomes more clear that not all ponies are heteronormative in later iterations of the franchise.....and they appear to be a progressive society as this is not stigmatized.

Agree? Disagree? Let's hear your thoughts!

[SpacePinto]

My canon was always that ponies are capable of parthenogenesis and that's why so many babies are literally clones of their mothers, but they can also choose their child to have a father if they want to, which would explain why Mimic had an ancestor who looked nothing like her, or why Nightshade's mother was a horse but he looked more like a pony (probably after his father), or why some babies don't seem to have a matching mother, like Baby Cuddles or Baby Tiddlywinks who look unique because they actually have two parents. Of course that doesn't apply to the UK comics, where baby ponies were simply conjured into existence by a magic mirror.

[Ponybookworm]

I figure the green gene, being so rare, must be submissive, while the pink gene is the most dominant. So if the father of a baby Pony is say Ice Crystal, then the baby will more likely look exactly like Mum. However, if say Fireball is the father, there's a greater chance for a pink body, while if it's say Tornado, they get pink hair.

[ZeldaTheSwordsman]

Not all G1 babies look like demi-clones of adult mares, and that trend started to fade halfway through the line.

I tend to apply the UK comics' explanation for the nearly-identical babies: They're magically cloned from their mothers by a mirror.

[Safflower]

...I just try not to think about it too hard xD

[Carrehz]

I don't really think about it much, either. Though I do like making pony families. :B

or there are dad ponies who evidently haven't signed NDAs to be on TV.

[ZeldaTheSwordsman]

I'm pretty sure that the Big Brother Ponies are the sires of the Newborns seen in "Ice Cream Wars" and "The Prince and the Ponies"

[Fizzy Scrumptious]

Honestly I think that either babies come about asexually (with a magic mirror or otherwise) or ponies have some other sort of sci-fi reproduction process I would agree that it's a matriarchal society especially with mostly-girl royalty and the near-total lack of dudes.

However considering how many girls there are to the ratio of guys, maybe we should throw out heteronormative ideas of family altogether (guy+girl=baby). If you wanna go hard on the progressive/subversive angle of pony society, maybe ponies are allowed to determine their gender for themselves, and most ponies just happen to prefer being women, regardless of ability to carry children.

...idk lol. It would certainly explain some of my pony families.

[SunPony]

I think as a kid I assumed the baby ponies were the same ponies as the moms, just depicted at a different age.  Like, it was literally "Baby version of Surprise" and "Adult version of Surprise"  This would fit with the parthenogenesis theory!  Nice!

That said, yes, pony genes that determine physical appearance could be on the same chromosomes that have the genes that determine sex, and you can have traits that are linked to one sex or the other. So the girl baby ponies could always be the spitting image of mom, while boys could be more a mix of mom and dad.

It certainly seems to be a matriarchal society (at least for G1 and G3).  Another thing to consider is that maybe their society is very divided by sex or gender, and we have an "unreliable narrator" situation where the focus is all on the female ponies because the unspoken narrator is female.  Maybe there are whole other stories being told from the male side of society...idk.  It could also be a reference to actual wild horse herds, where there many more females than males (except for the bachelor herds of all males, which again, maybe we just aren't seeing due to the perspective).

[Mewtwofan1]

I really don’t have much of an answer. I always used the “majesty’s mirror” idea for the babies who look exactly like the adult ponies, but they aren’t exact replicas. It looks the same. But each baby is its own separate consciousness with no memories or knowledge of the original adult.
    As for the family genetics, I’m not really sure what to tell you. They really should be a much more even blend of the parent ponies. IMO, magic has made pony genetics more difficult to understand than our human genetics. Whatever cannot be explained with science is probably magic.

[Lilja]

In the beginning the ponies were depicted as magical beings in a magical fantasy world. There was no reason to assume they'd reproduce the same as animals in our world. They might as well have been born from flower buds or have come into into existance through any magical means. The UK comic mostly seemed to show new baby ponies being born through magic. Ponies in the beginning were also fairly gender fluid (despite always having she/her pronouns because girls' toyline) and seemed to adopt female, male or non-binary identities as they saw fit (the porcelain statue of Moondancer and Glory as bride and groom being the most obvious example).

But then the line evolved and the ponies' world became less magical and more similar to our own world, as well as the ponies themselves becoming more explicitly coded as male or female. In the Tales series one would assume reproduction and family structures work the same as it does for humans. (FiM also seem to have gone with this route, despite those ponies also living in a magical fantasy world). At the end of the G1 toyline there was the Surprise Twins pony, showing that the ponies of that era indeed could get pregnant (and the backcard story states that a Daddy Pony exists as well, albeit not as a toy).

Of course the truth is that Hasbro never had a clear idea of how the ponies or their world worked. The only thing on their mind was what they could sell as a toy. So trying to apply any lore or rules to the ponies' world after the fact can never be done perfectly (but it can be a fun challenge). Early baby ponies looked the same as certain adult ponies because Hasbro thought this would encourage kids to collect both (but strangely mothers and babies were never shown together in the early TV specials or the Movie). Then Hasbro dropped this idea when they started focusing on making more smaller themed sets of ponies (even if they brought back the family concept every now and then).

But most importantly...

and assuming the ponies are not involved in incestuous relationships (Steamer...)

I feel I must clear Steamer's name here and point out that it was Slugger who seemed to be way too much into his little sister Buttons. This episode is also a great example of how Hasbro's extreme focus on just selling toys can screw up the story. Of course they are only called "big brothers" in the episode because that's the name of the set, but this raises the question if all the ponies living at Paradise Estate are siblings???

[rybett]

I am gonna second SP's theory.  Alternatively, some were delivered to Ponyland via The Great Space Coaster. 

[Taffeta]

I;m also going to undermine the "Slugger" relationship inappropriateness theory given that the set over here were called Adventure Boy ponies. The nuance of the set name wasn't literally that they were the brothers of the ponies, but meant I think to represent stereotypically guy things that the kids might have brothers into. Because eighties. There's literally no other reason why it took them so long to be sold in the UK, because the themes are all very American. I'm still sure they only made that call after they realised the kids LOVED BOY PONIES.

...So that's that.

I KNEW the magic mirror story would come into this discussion. I love how it's one of those comic things everyone now seems to know...

But Lilja is right, it's not the only instance of magically generated babies. The newborn twins - Nibs/Dibs and Sniffles/Snookums - were drawings brought to life by Baby Lucky's happy go lucky magic, if I remember right. So I wouldn't rule out the possibility of ponies being born by wishing magic as a viable form of reproduction.

If we really wanna talk genes, though, looking at the family pony lines, the babies have genes from both parents. This is true in all cases. That means that probably all babies that look identical to Mum come from magical sources. All babies who don't look like any adult are probably also from magic - given that for example, the Rainbow Curl Ponies were the guardians of the Rainbow Babies in Rainbow Mountain (think I remember that right?) without any resemblance or obvious bloodline between them.

And that would imply by association that the TAF babies who do not share exact genes with their mothers get some part of their appearance from their fathers, implying their species - although we never saw those ponies.

There's a general convention that male ponies can only be earth ponies except when a kid/collector chooses to change a pony's gender in their own collection, but that's not true. In places like Italy we know a lot of ponies had different genders from in English speaking releases, but even here in the UK, the newborn twin Sniffles was a boy and a baby unicorn. He was created from magic, yes, but he would've grown up as an adult male unicorn, in theory...which makes it more than possible that others could exist.

But what happened to them, who knows?

In the UK comic world of MLP, ponies often arrived in ponyland, or moved to ponyland. We never really learned where most of them moved from, though some were rescued (Whispering Whirligig) and some just turned up because they'd heard about it. This included babies (newborns for example) who seemed to spend more time communing with random bugs/animals/birds than other ponies or adults (Wiggles & Squirmy, looking at you).

The Lullabye Nursery was also the home of most baby ponies but in the UK there were also a succession of basically pony' nannies who also looked after the babies with known mothers (but not the loving family babies I don't think?) Cotton Candy was more of a nurse but Gusty was a nanny as well and so were Lollipop and also Caramel Crunch. So this indicates that parent ponies are not necessarily the ones who look after/raise the babies.

And there's also 'Memory Lane' where older ponies retired to, but no baby ponies seem to live there. Do they leave the babies behind?

In the case of the Mountain Boys, aside one flirting incident with Lightning and Confetti (I read it that way) WHILE she is randomly babysitting baby cuddles...they live on Misty Mountain, hang out with a Wizard, have neuroses and that's about all.

And in that one instance we have baby lickety introducing her cousin FT Baby Lickety. Which in itself implies that there's also more than one Lickety Split (although in the UK there wasn't xD, there actually is across the world) who were sisters with offspring of their own. (BBE can also be brought in here too). We already know we can have identical twins in ponyland, so maybe that's a factor in this as well.

My disclaimer is that all of this is built from the UK pony world, because there's just not enough in the cartoon series to really build consistency.

And Surprise Twins pony is obv. a pregnant pony but she postdated the comic world, so I basically ignore her. Tales world was not really the same as the pre-Tales world anyway, so that's probably a different set of non-magical rules. (The genetics hold up though, thinking of the family ponies, and also the twins from Surprise Twins. My sister paired her ST pony with Tornado because one of the twins is blue and pink).