#from the absolute start I hated the main girl with her special person syndrome oh my god

[brunetterightsactivist]

That last post has me thinking….who else’s young adulthood was ruined by the house of night series? I am owed financial compensation

[tirimsil]

“Alicorns” are dumb

Please see “How fantasy works: Symbolic magic / thematic magic” for context.

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In Friendship is Magic, there are four basic pony races, defined here as cartoon horses who normally have cutie marks:

Earth pony, look like normal cartoon horse, much stronk, good w/ plants

Pegasus, have wings, can stand on clouds, fly, generate wind currents

Unicorn, have horns, can do telekinesis & other magic stuff

Stronk + wings + horn, eventually called “alicorn”

When the show was first conceived, the only “yeah I’ll take everything” ponies were Celestia & Luna, the mysterious Princesses of Equestria. There was no special term; both were considered unicorns in early promo material.

Lauren Faust made them like that to symbolize that they were unbiased representatives of all three pony races.

Because they were all three races at once, and so far as anyone knew at that time they always had been, and they were the only two around, they could not be racist in favor of their own race.

... of course, due to Half-Elf Syndrome, this would not completely stop racists from hating them for being two-thirds another race... but it’s a big help.

Now let’s get into the nomenclature of “alicorns”...

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The word “alicorn” originally referred to the material composing a unicorn horn, or to an entire horn intact. In ancient times, swindlers would pass off various animal body parts as alicorn, claiming that alchemical mixtures containing it would promote health and long life. The most popular actor to play alicorn was the spiraled tusk of the narwhal, and today unicorns are almost exclusively depicted with very similar spiraling horns.

Sometime around 1984, fantasy author Piers Anthony re-appropriated “Alicorn” as the personal name of a specific winged unicorn; he apparently saw it used in reference to a statuette of a winged unicorn in an ad, and had never heard of the word before then.

Anthony was a prolific enough author for this errant usage to quickly spread into the fantasy vocabulary of several languages - as in, several besides English, the only language where the word already meant something. Like “Pegasus”, it quickly changed from the name of an individual to the name of a species.

"Alicorn” eventually found its way into the brony fandom, where it became one of those words used obsessively to make sure everyone knows you know the word exists, even though Celestia and Luna are all three races and not only the two covered by the term, and the show lifted it from there.

Oh, right, let’s talk about that.

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We’re all aware that Twilight, originally a unicorn, later became an “alicorn” (with the first in-show use of the term uttered by Rarity) thanks to a Deus Ex Machina. “Here’s a song, have some wings, OK bye”.

I got childishly butthurt about that like everybody else, but I realized in hindsight that it should have been very predictable: The most popular MLP toys were always the most princess-y ones, and Twilight was the main character and easily the most popular of the six both with little girls and with poonhounds, so of course they’d make her a Princess (at least in form) so they could release a whole second toy to make, to use the industry term, “a buttload of money”.

Twilight transforming into an “alicorn” was only mildly a problem unto itself:

It questioned the viewers’ natural presumption that “alicorns” were always that way and not a transformation to begin with.

It threw off the balance of two to a race the main characters had.

It worsened the narrative underuse of Rarity’s unicorn magic by making her even more obsolete in favor of Super Twilight.

It was a very clumsy end to a very clumsy season.

Still, it opened the door for further alterations to the “alicorn” concept.

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What walked in the door was Cadance. She ruined everything.

Faust originally designed Princess Cadance (supposedly a royal family member) as a normal unicorn, the same way that Prince Blueblood (supposedly a royal family member) was a normal unicorn. I distinctly recall Faust’s immediate reaction to first seeing Cadance with a horn and wings was grumpy drunk-Tweeting, but don’t take my word for that.

The spinoff novel Twilight Sparkle & the Crystal Heart Spell, which was obviously written to send back in time to a little girl from the mid-1800s, clarifies that Cadance was born as a pegasus. She just kinda worldspawned in the woods like Minecraft. She beat an evil witch with the witch’s own magic that Cadance turned into love magic despite not being a unicorn and then Celestia showed up out of nowhere like Gandalf to just POOF make her “an alicorn” because apparently Celestia can just do that.

Also Cadance is adopted.

The adopted pegasus is an “alicorn” whereas the actual blood relative of the “alicorns” is just a unicorn. No wonder Blueblood has nothing but contempt for all living things.

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The malafest pit of corruption that is Cadance’s uterus had to make her kid (Flurry Heart) “an alicorn” right at birth.

Celestia and Luna said they’d never heard of a pony being born as an “alicorn”, which means Celestia and Luna weren’t born that way either.

This destroys the entire reason “alicorns” were ever conceived.

If Celestia and Luna were once any of the normal three races (presumably unicorns), then they are no longer race-neutral; racists will still treat them like the race they started as, and the public can accuse them of bias in favor of their original race, all the same as if they were never “alicorns” at all.

Of course, Twilight (unicorn) and Cadance (pegasus) would suffer the same obstacle, with a mild advantage to Cadance in that what her original race is may not be public knowledge since that happened off in the magic fairy forests of horse-Germany and only Celestia, Princess of Trolling, is a credible witness.

Only Flurry Heart, 15+ years down the line, could reasonably claim to be race-neutral... but who’s going to believe her? That’s never happened before. The greatest living minds and oldest memories of Equestria, Celestia and Luna themselves, said they’d never heard of such a thing. The public will much more likely forget any proof they ever had of Flurry Heart’s birth and presume that, like every other “alicorn”, she wasn’t originally one and that she’s trying to hide “what she really is”.

After all, racism is founded on delusion; it doesn’t matter what race Flurry really is, merely what parody of race she can be plausibly dubbed as.

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Race-neutrality was the only reason to have any “alicorns” at all and none of them can fulfill that purpose; not even the one who’s actually race-neutral.

Here’s what we got in exchange for that blunder:

Absolutely nothing

"Alicorns” gained no consistent lore or mechanics for how they occur, nor any clarification of how or even whether they differ from unicorns in magic or from pegasooses in flight.

There is no clear meta-reason why the writers even need them, other than as bland children of destiny, drivers of toy sales, and general fanservice.

None of the events centering around the game of Who’s The Next Alicorn adds anything particularly profound or even consequential, and none of the characters seem to really give a damn about “alicorns” in general. Nobody is even all that surprised to see Twilight’s transformation; they just go “Wow cool!” and roll with it. The only strong reaction is the characters’ horror when they see Flurry Heart’s wings and realize the show officially doesn’t give a shit anymore about making sense or having cohesive themes.

It doesn’t even benefit the people who make bad Mary Sue OCs on DeviantArt, because they were already making “alicorn” OCs when it was only Celestia & Luna. That’s where the show got the term from, after all.

What a complete waste of potential.