@dRoy: That sounds delicious, especially if it's a cake.

edited 27th Mar '13 8:41:52 AM by edvedd

I guess what bothers me too is, Unicorns have magic (no limits to what that can potentially do), and Pegasi have their weather powers (in RD's case, this involves dazzling light displays and explosions) and E Ps have nothing similar. OK, Pinkie has her 'confetti' effects but...eh, I don't really know what I mean.

I want to know what love is.

I know you can show me.

No, no I won't.

@ JT: Whether it's the real deal is irrelevant. Brainwashed Shining Armour powered Chrysalis up. Want It Need It also resulted in the stronger Big Mac. When Big Mac usually can't even carry a large cake solo. Shining Armour's Shield spell is his magic, it was just powered up as an Earth Pony's strength would be. Crystal Heart and Elements of Harmony are artefacts not a living thing and the Fires of Friendship we've only seen as special effects in a play.

I can show you what love is...

@Applelight: To be honest I do find the vagueness and passivity of EP powers to be kind of annoying. It makes them easy to overlook or dismiss while the other to have very explicit powers that can not.

A possible distinction: love vs. desire.

The want-it-need-it spell creates desire toward an object.

Love poison creates desire between two ponies, but whether this is actual love may be debatable.

Shining Armor and fake Cadence... well, okay, I guess that's still love.

Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me no more.

An official Friendship Is Magic novella aimed at preteen readers. From what I've heard, the plot involves Twilight having doubts about her alicoronation. The book also gives some details about Cadance's past (the big shocker being that, before her ascension, Cadance was a pegasus).

Throwing off a pile of ponies is a lot different than balancing something very tall on your back.

As for the crystal heart thing in the book, as I recall the term was "The strength of a pure-heart of an earth pony". It could mean anything from physical strength to sheer grit, honestly.

edited 27th Mar '13 8:48:00 AM by kegisak

Don't be silly. We both know that love is a battlefield.

My own fanon regarding warfare is that Earth Ponies know about, and use, gunpowder in warfare. They discovered the blasting earths and perfected it to equalize the difference between Unicorns having access to ranged magic and Pegasi being able to stay out of reach and use weather offensively.

It's also why Pinkie is so skilled with fireworks and her Party Cannon.

edited 27th Mar '13 8:51:42 AM by AceOfScarabs

Well the big question is how much existing art and sound effects we can use. I'm sure plenty of fans have created pony zelda sprites, but probably not a full set and not in a consistent style.

I wonder if there's some earth pony that invents a mechanical bola-launcher.

edited 27th Mar '13 8:53:52 AM by KylerThatch

Literally beneath them in the case of pegasi.

And why is that whenever power levels come up, people treat Twilight and RD as typical but make up excuses to say why every EP feat 'doesn't count' for some reason?

As far as warfare goes, I actually had an idea for a sequel to The Colour You Bleed that involved an earth-pony country using a mineral that amplified their powers(But only their powers, any other race trying to use it would burn out rather painfully, as Blueblood would find out). It's obviously unwritten so the passage where one o f the characters used it is in the flux of mind, but in basic, a trained soldier uses it to literally walk between a hail of arrows because they're moving so slow to him, scale a palace wall with a jump, and use a kick designed to dislocate, to shatter. Later he fights another EP with the mineral, and the fight basically moves too fast for anypony not with the mineral to recognize anything but the sheer destruction it causes.

But of course, TCYB has always been pretty high-scale in terms of the destructive potential of magic. In the context of the show, I think what Earth Ponies have that the other races lack is ingenuity and inventiveness. Higher military strategy(When you can make a tornado, do you really NEED to plan?) and more efficient weaponry(Unicorns have a monopoly on dextrous movement, so I imagine they'd get a bit cocky with their melee weapons). In short, Earth ponies get by on skill and surprise.

racism. Probably. Honestly, even among those who allegedly want to see EP's be awesome, they STILL seem to want them to be weaklings.

edited 27th Mar '13 9:00:10 AM by kegisak

Probably because since Earth Ponies do not have explicit/active magic they therefore have to be "normal". It doesn't help that a lot of EP strength (or lack there of) is subject to heavy Rule of Funny.

Probably for the same reasons some people who play martial classes still want Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards maintained in game systems. They think being the Badass Normal is cooler then being the guy with cool powers.

edited 27th Mar '13 9:05:52 AM by Mio

@Kyler: Always, I wanna be with you~

@Badwolf: Again, Chrysalis isn't even a pony, so you can't really use her as a metric. What happened to SA and what happened to Big Macintosh are totally different things. And as has been noted, dragging something behind you for a few minutes is completely different from holding something on your back for an extended period of time. I mean, I can drag a couple hundred pounds for a while without much trouble, but having a 30 pound backpack on makes my back hurt pretty quickly.

Also, I feel compelled to point out that Twilight and Rainbow Dsah are pretty near the top of the ability spectrum for their respective races.

edited 27th Mar '13 9:07:18 AM by JapaneseTeeth

I already see earth ponies equal to unicorns and pegasi as equal personally. Maybe that's because I don't treat every pegasus as Rainbow Dash and every unicorn as Twilight.

Then Big Mac under Want it Need it or Love Poison compared to MMMMystery still counts. It's still ludicrous. A house is vastly heavier than a cake.

It's not completely different. Shining Armour's magic was made more powerful. Big Mac's magic was made more powerful. There is no difference.

edited 27th Mar '13 9:10:12 AM by Badwolfwho

Neither of those are love. The Want-it-need-it spell has nothing to do with love; that's just greed or something. And love poison is a poison for a reason; it obviously isn't the real deal. And again, in no circumstance has a love boost appeared as a passive strength boost. It's always more of a giant power beam. What happened to SA was a one-time explosive burst, not an MAG +10 buff. After the initial explosion, he went back to normal. Anyway, I have no doubt that magic could give Big Mac a huge power surge, but actual love wasn't present in either occurrance.

I do agree that RD and Twilight aren't typical of their races' abilities, though. The vast majority of unicorns are far more limited in scope than what Twilight can do.

edited 27th Mar '13 9:12:38 AM by JapaneseTeeth

So the real problem is that we have no idea what an "exceptional" Earth Ponies abilities would be like and the closest example that people look too (Big Mac) isn't a very reliable one.

edited 27th Mar '13 9:14:45 AM by Mio

Twilight is the odd wizard in a country full of sorcerers.

Want It Need It literally replaces pupils with love hearts I think it involves love. The source quite clearly doesn't matter since Big Mac has vastly different strength when love is forced on him then when it isn't. I'm not saying it gives a passive strength boost, it gives a passive magic boost. Earth Pony magic is evidently keyed into a passive strength boost so a passive magic boost also makes them more powerful.

After the initial love explosion we don't see him use his magic again for that purpose. Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

edited 27th Mar '13 9:15:51 AM by Badwolfwho

Chapter 40 is up. AKA the best damn chapter in the entire story.