Crazy Headcanons
Latecomer
@Brass Beau
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/EquestriaDivided
Note that it’s post-Season 2.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/EquestriaDivided
Note that it’s post-Season 2.
Korora 
Let's keep calm here...
G1: We don’t hear from the Flutter Ponies after “The Return of Tambelon” because they were busy rebuilding their infrastructure.
user4897 
that’s an optional equipment towed at the back, to carry more passengers or for salesponies selling their goods
that’s an optional equipment towed at the back, to carry more passengers or for salesponies selling their goods
Brass Beau
Howdy from Shimmer Pope
@RhodieNite
They’re gonna need something with a lot of torque then
They’re gonna need something with a lot of torque then
Brass Beau
Howdy from Shimmer Pope
@RhodieNite
Filthy Rich is a car salesman and AJ has to keep Big Mac from buying that from him.
Filthy Rich is a car salesman and AJ has to keep Big Mac from buying that from him.
user4897
@Brass Beau
scammy salesman
To put him out of business, AJ later orders Starlight to assassinate him using a sniper rifle
scammy salesman
To put him out of business, AJ later orders Starlight to assassinate him using a sniper rifle
Brass Beau
Howdy from Shimmer Pope
@RhodieNite
But Starlight is busy that day so she asks Trixie to do her a favor.
The car lot is now a crater.
But Starlight is busy that day so she asks Trixie to do her a favor.
The car lot is now a crater.
Background Pony #E006
Earth Pony super-strength and durability come at the price of a metabolism like a blast furnace. Pinkie eats all those sweets because she NEEDS them. Applejack and her family aren’t shown eating onscreen as frequently but one of the reasons Sweet Apple Acres is always in financial trouble is that most of the food they produce, they eat themselves, leaving relatively little to sell.
Pegasi are big eaters too but they have nothing on Earth Ponies.
Pegasi are big eaters too but they have nothing on Earth Ponies.
Brass Beau
Howdy from Shimmer Pope
@Background Pony #E006
Building off that, Rainbow Dash eats and sleeps all of the time because of the massive amount of calories she burns flying at the speeds she does.
Building off that, Rainbow Dash eats and sleeps all of the time because of the massive amount of calories she burns flying at the speeds she does.
Korora
Let's keep calm here...
Tales: Patch and Rozy maintained correspondence as long as both were alive.
Brass Beau
Howdy from Shimmer Pope
Extra-Crazy Semi-Headcanon:
There’s gonna be a massive cross over event next year to celebrate the 40th anniversary
There’s gonna be a massive cross over event next year to celebrate the 40th anniversary
Background Pony #E006
@Brass Beau
I wrote some more. Let me see if I can serve up some fresh copypasta.
—–
Worldbuilding ideas that I also posted to 4chins recently:
Ponies are rather distant from horses, anatomically speaking, but they’re still equine, and still have important, non-obvious equine features.
They have a horse-style spleen, which is hollow, with a reservoir that normally holds a huge blob of preoxygenated red blood cells and a big emergency reserve of glucose, ready to dump into their bloodstreams as part of their fight-or-flight response, or in response to fatigue. Even the unicorns, least physically impressive of the pony races, can run for hours, and they can be restless, with an instinctive need to exercise or otherwise exert themselves–though the most magically gifted ones can also tap these reserves while casting complex high-energy spells–to keep emptying and refilling the spleen with fresh new red blood cells.
A human can live without a spleen, and sometimes a human’s spleen must be surgically removed after severe traumatic injuries to halt a hemorrhage. Ponies, like horses, can live without their spleens also–but without it they’re basically crippled for the rest of their lives, and even magic is no substitute. They can only run short distances, which to ponies is as horrifying as losing limbs or being paralyzed.
Pegasi–and alicorns, of course–have highly complex skeletons. They have two separate clavicles AND a furcula. The sternum is massive because it must serve as an anchor point for the flight muscles in the forward half of the torso, and resembles a bird’s carina, or keelbone, much more than a horse sternum.
Pegasi have six limbs, rather than the normal four of vertebrates, and they have extra ganglia in their upper backs that route and process control signals and data for the wings. The torso musculature is equally complex, and all major muscles in the front half are duplicated, the inner set for the forelimbs for walking, the outer layer for the wings.
A pegasus’s bones are hollow, like a bird’s, to reduce weight.
A pegasus could not fly at all without magic–the wing loading is just too high for mere flesh and blood muscles to get them off the ground–but it is, for them, still very intense cardiovascular exertion to fly at non-trivial speeds, as opposed to the adorable hover we see Fluttershy doing so often. High speed flight for long distances requires a high level of physical fitness, over and above skill at the physical and magical techniques involved. Rainbow Dash, and those on her level like the Wonderbolts, would be Olympic-level athletes if they were human.
This is also calorie-intensive. “Twiggie Piggie”‘s love of hayburgers is the topic of gentle ribbing from her friends, whom Rainbow Dash has made a point of never letting them watch her eat–she’s an enthusiastic, and messy, little living garbage disposal, though she eats a lot of the local equivalents of health foods and protein smoothies.
Unicorns have a distinctive build and tend to be slender and petite when compared to other pony races, especially Earth Ponies. Unicorns and Pegasi tend to be ectomorphs, where Earth Ponies are generally mesomorphs. Usually they are petite, though there is a wider range of heights among them than other builds. When you see a tall, lanky pony, you’re almost always looking at a unicorn. Or a chubby pony, though the endomorphic build is uncommon among ponies as a whole.
Unicorns don’t have the magically enhanced strength of Earth Ponies, or the endurance of Pegasi. Of all Pony races, they are the most prone to obesity. Their gift is magic, focused, controlled, and emitted through the horn.
A unicorn’s horn is a complex multilayered structure. At a very gross approximation, it is more like a tooth than anything else. It has a root that is anchored to bone with mineral-dense cementum tissue, it has layers of dentine and enamel that are chemically identical to the dentine and enamel in the same unicorn’s teeth, but there is more. The exterior of the horn is covered in a protective layer of tough, dense, magically conductive keratin, which grows from the bottom and occasionally needs to be filed or trimmed a bit for neatness.
The exact sizes and shapes of unicorn horns can vary. Some are straight and some are curved. Some are even crooked, though that is more often found in the baseline form of Changelings. Spiral grooves on the exterior have long been perceived as a sign of magical potency, and it has been scientifically determined that the spiral grooves in the thaumically conductive keratin act as thaumic waveguides. However, some unicorns have horns that have a keratin layer that appears externally smooth but contain complex structures on the inner side facing the dentine layer that act as resonant cavities, passive amplifiers, and other focusing elements.
Likewise, horn length was for many years considered to be a sign of magical potency, but it has been discovered that the internal volume of the horn is at least as important, and other factors can outweigh this, such as the individual’s intelligence, willpower, overall health–some magic is as strenuous as any physical activity, and unicorns in poor health often find that their magic suffers also.
The biggest difference between a unicorn’s horn and a tooth, however, is the center. The center of a mammalian tooth contains living “pulp” tissue, blood vessels, and nerves. A unicorn’s horn is hollow from base to tip, and there is even a circular foramen, a round hole through the skull, directly beneath it. The center of the horn contains the cornual funiculus, a massive, complex, dense bundle of magically conductive nerve tissue running from beneath its base almost to its point, plus, of course, blood vessels that at first glance seem larger than they would need to be for the volume of nerve tissue they support, but blood circulation also helps carry away waste heat generated by magic. The nerve tissue includes several unique types of nerve cell found nowhere else in the body. The cornual funiculus is an order of magnitude more complex than the spinal cord and not all aspects of its structure and function are fully understood.
Beneath the horn is a compact bundle of nerve tissue, the cornual plexus, connecting it to a structure unique to the unicorn brain, the medulla oblata, which connects the horn to the cerebellum.
The horn is delicate, and it has been known since time out of mind that a unicorn with an injured horn usually cannot use much, if any, magic, ever after, and will be incapable of the more complex thaumic manipulations commonly called “spells,” just as an individual with a damaged spinal cord will suffer great difficulty in moving parts of the body below the injury.
Modern medicine has made great strides in recent generations but one of the things it still cannot do, at least not reliably and repeatably, is repair damage to the cornual funiculus, any more than it is possible to make surgical repairs to the spinal cord, at least with any expectation of success. Horn damage remains very difficult to treat. The nerve tissues within are very vulnerable to infection if the multiple layers of exterior protection are breached, and the damage to cornual nerves tends to lead not only to loss of magical ability but also to a lifetime of chronic pain that can be very difficult to treat. Healing spells are not capable of stimulating regrowth of the cornual nerves either, for reasons not fully understood. Some researchers speculate that the magically conductive nature of that nerve tissue causes healing magic to pass through the intended points and stimulate growth where it is not needed, sometimes a centimeter or more away–and in cases of this kind of nerve injury, the required precision is microscopic. Just as with spinal injury, each nerve fiber must reconnect with the same one from which it was severed by the damage. Otherwise signal interference can lead to crippling or fatal magical signal feedback when the patient attempts to use magic afterwards.
It is not completely hopeless. Researchers at Ponyville General Hospital have reported encouraging results with healing potions provided by a local zebra alchemist, but more studies are needed.
I had some other stuff in my head but I was still trying to come up with more material for Erf Ponies. Like, they’re enormously, insanely strong, out of all proportion to their size, and there’s more to it than just mesomorphic build and higher muscle mass as a proportion of body weight compared to others.
See picture. In that episode, the locomotive was just for decoration and four Earth Ponies pulled the entire train–with very, very impressive acceleration and top speed. Their muscle density is significantly higher than that of other ponies, but this is way past what mere flesh and blood are capable of. There has to be more at work. This is magical super-strength on the level normally associated with people who wear spandex and capes. I assume the magic grants them similar levels of durability, otherwise they’d rip their own limbs off trying to accelerate that much mass.
Also, though microbiology is a science in its infancy in Equestria, and it hasn’t yet been discovered there that bacteria are plants too, this has the potential to go badly wrong. All it’s going to take is one Earth Pony mad scientist with a hard-on for Equestria’s sapient life forms to figure out that his plant growth powers allow him to grow all of his favorite plague bacteria in nearly unlimited quantities and purity. Then he will use them to take revenge on the world for some slight there won’t be anyone left alive afterwards to remember.
Do Earth Pony plant growth powers work on the biochemical scale? Could an Earth Pony chemist carry out a complex synthesis, and make the reaction result in only the isomer he wants, just by putting his hoof on the side of the beaker and willing it to happen? That has potential applications that are almost as frightening. Do we have any chem majors in the house? Yeah.
And another bit that I borrowed from a rather dark story at FIMfiction.
Once ponies began to be able to travel back and forth to Earth, they much prefer to have any kind of medical or dental appointment or procedure in Equestria, by a pony doctors, dentists, or surgeons.
There are several reasons for this. One, it’s not been long enough since portals appeared for the human medical profession as a whole to learn enough about pony anatomy or body chemistry for this sort of thing. When it happens it’s emergencies-only, and for the poor ponies, human medicine ranges from annoying to trauma that gives them night terrors for the rest of their lives.
There are limits to magic, and that includes medical magic. They have operating rooms and surgeons because they can’t just magic a tumor away. They have to cut it out, just like we do–but they know much more about pony body chemistry and drug tolerance than we do, and there are enough differences in body chemistry that drugs that are safe and effective for humans don’t always work the same way on ponies. Likewise, there are magical techniques for–for example–sedation, anesthesia, and pain control that make major surgery less horrific for ponies than it is for us.
Veterinarians know equines have very poor tolerance for sedatives, anesthetics, and narcotic analgesics. IRL they don’t give morphine to injured horses or ponies because they tend to enter a state of “excited delirium” where they appear to be fearful and may attack anyone who tries to come near them. It is speculated that the poor horsie is tripping his balls off and NOT enjoying it a bit. And anesthetics and sedatives can kill them outright for reasons not fully understood. Extend that to ponies, who tell lurid tales of the horrors of human-world medicine–and half of them are true.
>>35603812
Why can’t medical ponies just, you know, TELL human doctors how to treat ponies?
>>35603895
Oh, lots of textbooks have been sent through the portals–both ways.
But “tell me how to treat ponies” is called “medical school” and that’s four years of college as a pre-med major, four years of med school, and then another two to four years as a resident in a hospital, same as here. It’s a LOT of information. Even if you’re a trained physician for one species, if you’re discarding all the unknowns and starting with the basics that are fully understood on both sides and can be demonstrated to be common to both species, you’ve got not much more than Hippocrates to work with.
The pony genome was sequenced within a few years but it’s still being interpreted. They’re more like our world’s horses and ponies, genetically and biochemically speaking, than anything else, but significant differences are constantly being discovered and a lot of very bright humans and ponies on both sides of the portal are still trying to interpret the information. Remember, mapping the human genome took from 1990 to 2003–and seventeen years later, in 2020, they STILL haven’t figured out what all the genes do, much less all the interactions.
For these reasons, the pony who finds herself in one of our world’s emergency rooms as a patient is, to those who will have to treat her, a big fuzzy adorable question mark that’s bleeding out RIGHT NOW and they have to get her into surgery RIGHT NOW and oh God oh God oh God why is she screaming about monsters and fighting us, we just gave her morphine, she shouldn’t even be conscious! Poor poni.
>>35603713
Coincidentally enough the MC in my green is an earth pony facing the amputation of a hind leg. I’d be happy to read some equine orthopedic knowledge you’d care to drop on me. Same regarding the physical therapy and psycology for such a situation.
>>35604546
IRL the prognosis for real life horses with severe traumatic limb damage is poor. The sheer mass of a horse puts hundreds of pounds of weight on each limb and there’s relatively little safety margin. Horses often break a leg by stepping into a hidden gopher hole. And they’re too big, too massive for a prosthetic limb mounted to the stump to do anything but cut off circulation to the remaining healthy tissue of the stump and cause infections and gangrene. Horses have poor circulation in their spindly little legs and leg injuries heal very slowly if at all.
That having been said, in the 21st Century, some vets are willing to take the chance, at least for smaller equines, and engineers have made prosthetic limbs of lightweight polymer for ponies and miniature horses, with encouraging successes–go look up Molly the Pony, who’s had an artificial limb since 2009 and is still alive and healthy.
Physical therapy is a sophisticated discipline for us, and we assume it would be in Equestria. Physical therapy, once the patient recovers from surgery, would likely be like it is for people. The first visit will consist largely of filling out forms, an interview (“What do you hope to accomplish?” “I want to be able to run again without my left ankle hurting,” etc.), and a very thorough physical examination that may go into great depth and detail to determine exactly what sort of problems the patient is having–phantom pains in the missing limb? difficulty walking with the prosthetic? is the patient trying to compensate for the missing limb by making the intact limb on the opposite side work harder, which could result in muscle soreness, cramps, joint pain, and so on, in that limb? The therapists might use massage, hot packs, cold packs, directed exercises, or electrical nerve stimulation to address these problems, and give the patient a list of exercises to be done daily and a printout of future appointments.
Humans–and poni, I suppose–have the enormous advantage that they can communicate with the therapist and follow directions. Imagine a RL horse with a pinched sciatic nerve and chronic pain. There are equine physical therapists who can apply most of these same techniques, but communication imposes limits, as does the fact that the patient weighs three quarters of a ton, is in enormous pain with very tender spots in his muscles and joints, and might just kick the therapist in the face with an iron shoe if she accidentally hurts him.
Now, if you’re talking about an Equestrian pony undergoing all these things in our world, things get interesting. The surgery and aftermath are probably going to be a harrowing ordeal for the character. The physical therapist is likely to say “oh shit, you’re a pony?” while still holding up a diagram of human leg muscles. And a lot of phone calls are going to be made and a lot of emails are going to get sent, in search of help and advice from veterinary physical therapists who might be used to patients a lot bigger, but at least have some idea of where the major muscle groups and nerves are and how they connect.
The psychology is another place where things are going to get interesting. IRL horses are prey creatures and herd creatures. A mare may protect a sickly or crippled foal for as long as she can–that is instinctive for her, she is the mother. But the herd will react instinctively with fear, and IRL normally force out the old, the sick, the weak, and the lame, because they draw the attention of predators and slow down the herd, reducing its ability to flee from predators.
We haven’t this situation in the show. It’s plausible, though, that among ponies, pony Mom may love you and pony Mom will do her best for you, but no one wants to be around someone who’s sick or slow or hurt. Maybe it’s an instinctive revulsion that they don’t consciously understand. Maybe it’s irrational anger–“get away from us, fool! You’re going to get us all eaten by bears!” Maybe superstitious fear, with a belief that injured ponies are unlucky and being near them brings bad luck. Maybe some combination of all of these. Equines, being herd creatures, are much more social and have much greater need for social interaction than humans do–which makes everything that much worse for the one who’s been injured. Obviously ponies are able to overcome the instinct and deal rationally with it, which is why they have hospitals (horsepitals?) and doctors and nurses and don’t just abandon or drive out the sick or injured. Which wouldn’t make a very nice kids’ show, either.
For the patient, how would a pony feel about the idea of losing a limb? I think that it would be a primal fear, especially for Earth Ponies. Pegasi can fly, even missing a leg. A unicorn, even missing a limb, can still use magic. But Earth Ponies can’t fly away from danger or zap it with magical horn lazerz. They can only fight or run, either way using their hooves. Many of them work very physical jobs, requiring them to move heavy objects, carry heavy loads–how can they work after such an injury? How much of their super-strength and durability does losing a limb cost them? 25%? How similar are ponies, psychologically, to humans? Do the five stages of grief go the way they would for humans? Would the ordeal cause him to get PTSD? Severe depression? Did his friends abandon him because of instinct and did that make his emotional state worse? Does he need to talk to a shrink as much as he needs to see the physical therapists? Can a human psychotherapist treat a pony?
I wrote some more. Let me see if I can serve up some fresh copypasta.
—–
Worldbuilding ideas that I also posted to 4chins recently:
Ponies are rather distant from horses, anatomically speaking, but they’re still equine, and still have important, non-obvious equine features.
They have a horse-style spleen, which is hollow, with a reservoir that normally holds a huge blob of preoxygenated red blood cells and a big emergency reserve of glucose, ready to dump into their bloodstreams as part of their fight-or-flight response, or in response to fatigue. Even the unicorns, least physically impressive of the pony races, can run for hours, and they can be restless, with an instinctive need to exercise or otherwise exert themselves–though the most magically gifted ones can also tap these reserves while casting complex high-energy spells–to keep emptying and refilling the spleen with fresh new red blood cells.
A human can live without a spleen, and sometimes a human’s spleen must be surgically removed after severe traumatic injuries to halt a hemorrhage. Ponies, like horses, can live without their spleens also–but without it they’re basically crippled for the rest of their lives, and even magic is no substitute. They can only run short distances, which to ponies is as horrifying as losing limbs or being paralyzed.
Pegasi–and alicorns, of course–have highly complex skeletons. They have two separate clavicles AND a furcula. The sternum is massive because it must serve as an anchor point for the flight muscles in the forward half of the torso, and resembles a bird’s carina, or keelbone, much more than a horse sternum.
Pegasi have six limbs, rather than the normal four of vertebrates, and they have extra ganglia in their upper backs that route and process control signals and data for the wings. The torso musculature is equally complex, and all major muscles in the front half are duplicated, the inner set for the forelimbs for walking, the outer layer for the wings.
A pegasus’s bones are hollow, like a bird’s, to reduce weight.
A pegasus could not fly at all without magic–the wing loading is just too high for mere flesh and blood muscles to get them off the ground–but it is, for them, still very intense cardiovascular exertion to fly at non-trivial speeds, as opposed to the adorable hover we see Fluttershy doing so often. High speed flight for long distances requires a high level of physical fitness, over and above skill at the physical and magical techniques involved. Rainbow Dash, and those on her level like the Wonderbolts, would be Olympic-level athletes if they were human.
This is also calorie-intensive. “Twiggie Piggie”‘s love of hayburgers is the topic of gentle ribbing from her friends, whom Rainbow Dash has made a point of never letting them watch her eat–she’s an enthusiastic, and messy, little living garbage disposal, though she eats a lot of the local equivalents of health foods and protein smoothies.
Unicorns have a distinctive build and tend to be slender and petite when compared to other pony races, especially Earth Ponies. Unicorns and Pegasi tend to be ectomorphs, where Earth Ponies are generally mesomorphs. Usually they are petite, though there is a wider range of heights among them than other builds. When you see a tall, lanky pony, you’re almost always looking at a unicorn. Or a chubby pony, though the endomorphic build is uncommon among ponies as a whole.
Unicorns don’t have the magically enhanced strength of Earth Ponies, or the endurance of Pegasi. Of all Pony races, they are the most prone to obesity. Their gift is magic, focused, controlled, and emitted through the horn.
A unicorn’s horn is a complex multilayered structure. At a very gross approximation, it is more like a tooth than anything else. It has a root that is anchored to bone with mineral-dense cementum tissue, it has layers of dentine and enamel that are chemically identical to the dentine and enamel in the same unicorn’s teeth, but there is more. The exterior of the horn is covered in a protective layer of tough, dense, magically conductive keratin, which grows from the bottom and occasionally needs to be filed or trimmed a bit for neatness.
The exact sizes and shapes of unicorn horns can vary. Some are straight and some are curved. Some are even crooked, though that is more often found in the baseline form of Changelings. Spiral grooves on the exterior have long been perceived as a sign of magical potency, and it has been scientifically determined that the spiral grooves in the thaumically conductive keratin act as thaumic waveguides. However, some unicorns have horns that have a keratin layer that appears externally smooth but contain complex structures on the inner side facing the dentine layer that act as resonant cavities, passive amplifiers, and other focusing elements.
Likewise, horn length was for many years considered to be a sign of magical potency, but it has been discovered that the internal volume of the horn is at least as important, and other factors can outweigh this, such as the individual’s intelligence, willpower, overall health–some magic is as strenuous as any physical activity, and unicorns in poor health often find that their magic suffers also.
The biggest difference between a unicorn’s horn and a tooth, however, is the center. The center of a mammalian tooth contains living “pulp” tissue, blood vessels, and nerves. A unicorn’s horn is hollow from base to tip, and there is even a circular foramen, a round hole through the skull, directly beneath it. The center of the horn contains the cornual funiculus, a massive, complex, dense bundle of magically conductive nerve tissue running from beneath its base almost to its point, plus, of course, blood vessels that at first glance seem larger than they would need to be for the volume of nerve tissue they support, but blood circulation also helps carry away waste heat generated by magic. The nerve tissue includes several unique types of nerve cell found nowhere else in the body. The cornual funiculus is an order of magnitude more complex than the spinal cord and not all aspects of its structure and function are fully understood.
Beneath the horn is a compact bundle of nerve tissue, the cornual plexus, connecting it to a structure unique to the unicorn brain, the medulla oblata, which connects the horn to the cerebellum.
The horn is delicate, and it has been known since time out of mind that a unicorn with an injured horn usually cannot use much, if any, magic, ever after, and will be incapable of the more complex thaumic manipulations commonly called “spells,” just as an individual with a damaged spinal cord will suffer great difficulty in moving parts of the body below the injury.
Modern medicine has made great strides in recent generations but one of the things it still cannot do, at least not reliably and repeatably, is repair damage to the cornual funiculus, any more than it is possible to make surgical repairs to the spinal cord, at least with any expectation of success. Horn damage remains very difficult to treat. The nerve tissues within are very vulnerable to infection if the multiple layers of exterior protection are breached, and the damage to cornual nerves tends to lead not only to loss of magical ability but also to a lifetime of chronic pain that can be very difficult to treat. Healing spells are not capable of stimulating regrowth of the cornual nerves either, for reasons not fully understood. Some researchers speculate that the magically conductive nature of that nerve tissue causes healing magic to pass through the intended points and stimulate growth where it is not needed, sometimes a centimeter or more away–and in cases of this kind of nerve injury, the required precision is microscopic. Just as with spinal injury, each nerve fiber must reconnect with the same one from which it was severed by the damage. Otherwise signal interference can lead to crippling or fatal magical signal feedback when the patient attempts to use magic afterwards.
It is not completely hopeless. Researchers at Ponyville General Hospital have reported encouraging results with healing potions provided by a local zebra alchemist, but more studies are needed.
I had some other stuff in my head but I was still trying to come up with more material for Erf Ponies. Like, they’re enormously, insanely strong, out of all proportion to their size, and there’s more to it than just mesomorphic build and higher muscle mass as a proportion of body weight compared to others.
See picture. In that episode, the locomotive was just for decoration and four Earth Ponies pulled the entire train–with very, very impressive acceleration and top speed. Their muscle density is significantly higher than that of other ponies, but this is way past what mere flesh and blood are capable of. There has to be more at work. This is magical super-strength on the level normally associated with people who wear spandex and capes. I assume the magic grants them similar levels of durability, otherwise they’d rip their own limbs off trying to accelerate that much mass.
Also, though microbiology is a science in its infancy in Equestria, and it hasn’t yet been discovered there that bacteria are plants too, this has the potential to go badly wrong. All it’s going to take is one Earth Pony mad scientist with a hard-on for Equestria’s sapient life forms to figure out that his plant growth powers allow him to grow all of his favorite plague bacteria in nearly unlimited quantities and purity. Then he will use them to take revenge on the world for some slight there won’t be anyone left alive afterwards to remember.
Do Earth Pony plant growth powers work on the biochemical scale? Could an Earth Pony chemist carry out a complex synthesis, and make the reaction result in only the isomer he wants, just by putting his hoof on the side of the beaker and willing it to happen? That has potential applications that are almost as frightening. Do we have any chem majors in the house? Yeah.
And another bit that I borrowed from a rather dark story at FIMfiction.
Once ponies began to be able to travel back and forth to Earth, they much prefer to have any kind of medical or dental appointment or procedure in Equestria, by a pony doctors, dentists, or surgeons.
There are several reasons for this. One, it’s not been long enough since portals appeared for the human medical profession as a whole to learn enough about pony anatomy or body chemistry for this sort of thing. When it happens it’s emergencies-only, and for the poor ponies, human medicine ranges from annoying to trauma that gives them night terrors for the rest of their lives.
There are limits to magic, and that includes medical magic. They have operating rooms and surgeons because they can’t just magic a tumor away. They have to cut it out, just like we do–but they know much more about pony body chemistry and drug tolerance than we do, and there are enough differences in body chemistry that drugs that are safe and effective for humans don’t always work the same way on ponies. Likewise, there are magical techniques for–for example–sedation, anesthesia, and pain control that make major surgery less horrific for ponies than it is for us.
Veterinarians know equines have very poor tolerance for sedatives, anesthetics, and narcotic analgesics. IRL they don’t give morphine to injured horses or ponies because they tend to enter a state of “excited delirium” where they appear to be fearful and may attack anyone who tries to come near them. It is speculated that the poor horsie is tripping his balls off and NOT enjoying it a bit. And anesthetics and sedatives can kill them outright for reasons not fully understood. Extend that to ponies, who tell lurid tales of the horrors of human-world medicine–and half of them are true.
>>35603812
Why can’t medical ponies just, you know, TELL human doctors how to treat ponies?
>>35603895
Oh, lots of textbooks have been sent through the portals–both ways.
But “tell me how to treat ponies” is called “medical school” and that’s four years of college as a pre-med major, four years of med school, and then another two to four years as a resident in a hospital, same as here. It’s a LOT of information. Even if you’re a trained physician for one species, if you’re discarding all the unknowns and starting with the basics that are fully understood on both sides and can be demonstrated to be common to both species, you’ve got not much more than Hippocrates to work with.
The pony genome was sequenced within a few years but it’s still being interpreted. They’re more like our world’s horses and ponies, genetically and biochemically speaking, than anything else, but significant differences are constantly being discovered and a lot of very bright humans and ponies on both sides of the portal are still trying to interpret the information. Remember, mapping the human genome took from 1990 to 2003–and seventeen years later, in 2020, they STILL haven’t figured out what all the genes do, much less all the interactions.
For these reasons, the pony who finds herself in one of our world’s emergency rooms as a patient is, to those who will have to treat her, a big fuzzy adorable question mark that’s bleeding out RIGHT NOW and they have to get her into surgery RIGHT NOW and oh God oh God oh God why is she screaming about monsters and fighting us, we just gave her morphine, she shouldn’t even be conscious! Poor poni.
>>35603713
Coincidentally enough the MC in my green is an earth pony facing the amputation of a hind leg. I’d be happy to read some equine orthopedic knowledge you’d care to drop on me. Same regarding the physical therapy and psycology for such a situation.
>>35604546
IRL the prognosis for real life horses with severe traumatic limb damage is poor. The sheer mass of a horse puts hundreds of pounds of weight on each limb and there’s relatively little safety margin. Horses often break a leg by stepping into a hidden gopher hole. And they’re too big, too massive for a prosthetic limb mounted to the stump to do anything but cut off circulation to the remaining healthy tissue of the stump and cause infections and gangrene. Horses have poor circulation in their spindly little legs and leg injuries heal very slowly if at all.
That having been said, in the 21st Century, some vets are willing to take the chance, at least for smaller equines, and engineers have made prosthetic limbs of lightweight polymer for ponies and miniature horses, with encouraging successes–go look up Molly the Pony, who’s had an artificial limb since 2009 and is still alive and healthy.
Physical therapy is a sophisticated discipline for us, and we assume it would be in Equestria. Physical therapy, once the patient recovers from surgery, would likely be like it is for people. The first visit will consist largely of filling out forms, an interview (“What do you hope to accomplish?” “I want to be able to run again without my left ankle hurting,” etc.), and a very thorough physical examination that may go into great depth and detail to determine exactly what sort of problems the patient is having–phantom pains in the missing limb? difficulty walking with the prosthetic? is the patient trying to compensate for the missing limb by making the intact limb on the opposite side work harder, which could result in muscle soreness, cramps, joint pain, and so on, in that limb? The therapists might use massage, hot packs, cold packs, directed exercises, or electrical nerve stimulation to address these problems, and give the patient a list of exercises to be done daily and a printout of future appointments.
Humans–and poni, I suppose–have the enormous advantage that they can communicate with the therapist and follow directions. Imagine a RL horse with a pinched sciatic nerve and chronic pain. There are equine physical therapists who can apply most of these same techniques, but communication imposes limits, as does the fact that the patient weighs three quarters of a ton, is in enormous pain with very tender spots in his muscles and joints, and might just kick the therapist in the face with an iron shoe if she accidentally hurts him.
Now, if you’re talking about an Equestrian pony undergoing all these things in our world, things get interesting. The surgery and aftermath are probably going to be a harrowing ordeal for the character. The physical therapist is likely to say “oh shit, you’re a pony?” while still holding up a diagram of human leg muscles. And a lot of phone calls are going to be made and a lot of emails are going to get sent, in search of help and advice from veterinary physical therapists who might be used to patients a lot bigger, but at least have some idea of where the major muscle groups and nerves are and how they connect.
The psychology is another place where things are going to get interesting. IRL horses are prey creatures and herd creatures. A mare may protect a sickly or crippled foal for as long as she can–that is instinctive for her, she is the mother. But the herd will react instinctively with fear, and IRL normally force out the old, the sick, the weak, and the lame, because they draw the attention of predators and slow down the herd, reducing its ability to flee from predators.
We haven’t this situation in the show. It’s plausible, though, that among ponies, pony Mom may love you and pony Mom will do her best for you, but no one wants to be around someone who’s sick or slow or hurt. Maybe it’s an instinctive revulsion that they don’t consciously understand. Maybe it’s irrational anger–“get away from us, fool! You’re going to get us all eaten by bears!” Maybe superstitious fear, with a belief that injured ponies are unlucky and being near them brings bad luck. Maybe some combination of all of these. Equines, being herd creatures, are much more social and have much greater need for social interaction than humans do–which makes everything that much worse for the one who’s been injured. Obviously ponies are able to overcome the instinct and deal rationally with it, which is why they have hospitals (horsepitals?) and doctors and nurses and don’t just abandon or drive out the sick or injured. Which wouldn’t make a very nice kids’ show, either.
For the patient, how would a pony feel about the idea of losing a limb? I think that it would be a primal fear, especially for Earth Ponies. Pegasi can fly, even missing a leg. A unicorn, even missing a limb, can still use magic. But Earth Ponies can’t fly away from danger or zap it with magical horn lazerz. They can only fight or run, either way using their hooves. Many of them work very physical jobs, requiring them to move heavy objects, carry heavy loads–how can they work after such an injury? How much of their super-strength and durability does losing a limb cost them? 25%? How similar are ponies, psychologically, to humans? Do the five stages of grief go the way they would for humans? Would the ordeal cause him to get PTSD? Severe depression? Did his friends abandon him because of instinct and did that make his emotional state worse? Does he need to talk to a shrink as much as he needs to see the physical therapists? Can a human psychotherapist treat a pony?
Brass Beau
Howdy from Shimmer Pope
@Background Pony #E006
Well, that was a read.
*ahem*
I think earth pony magic, besides the physical which could be explained by a pituitary-like gland, is more a spiritual matter than physical. They’re more “down to earth” as it were.
As for ponies with disabilities
And
Well, that was a read.
*ahem*
I think earth pony magic, besides the physical which could be explained by a pituitary-like gland, is more a spiritual matter than physical. They’re more “down to earth” as it were.
As for ponies with disabilities
And
Wiimeiser 
(Foil Hat)
@Background Pony #E006
Ponies are still tetrapods, here’s my explanation for the wings: The Thoracic Duct and Right Lymphatic Duct, after meeting the clavicle veins, loop back on themselves (in utero, in the final body plan the loop gets cut off) and extend to the second clavicles. In the winged races these extend further and become the wings.
Ponies are still tetrapods, here’s my explanation for the wings: The Thoracic Duct and Right Lymphatic Duct, after meeting the clavicle veins, loop back on themselves (in utero, in the final body plan the loop gets cut off) and extend to the second clavicles. In the winged races these extend further and become the wings.
Brass Beau
Howdy from Shimmer Pope
I just realized the two examples I used were both pegasi. Coincidence? Probably, yeah, but let’s pretend it isn’t.
Given the pegasus lifestyle is so far removed from the ground, they may be more likely to suffer trauma. And if their bones ate hollow, their limbs are also more likely to break.
Given the pegasus lifestyle is so far removed from the ground, they may be more likely to suffer trauma. And if their bones ate hollow, their limbs are also more likely to break.
Background Pony #E006
@Brass Beau
Perhaps, perhaps not. IRL most species of birds DO have hollow bones–and at least sometimes, the lower overall mass this grants them means they hit the ground with less force, should something go wrong in the sky.
Another headcanon-ish thing I sometimes kick around, but I have rejected thus far writing anything with it, as it would be too HFY-ish.
Part of the explanation for so many of the amazing physical feats of which ponies are capable:
Equestria’s surface gravity is significantly less than Earth’s, but the atmosphere is denser, perhaps even with a slightly higher partial pressure of oxygen. From the pony perspective, Earth is a high-gravity death-world. Given some of the bizarre mix-and-match creatures living in the Everfree, though, Earth may be only slightly more dangerous to equine life.
Perhaps, perhaps not. IRL most species of birds DO have hollow bones–and at least sometimes, the lower overall mass this grants them means they hit the ground with less force, should something go wrong in the sky.
Another headcanon-ish thing I sometimes kick around, but I have rejected thus far writing anything with it, as it would be too HFY-ish.
Part of the explanation for so many of the amazing physical feats of which ponies are capable:
Equestria’s surface gravity is significantly less than Earth’s, but the atmosphere is denser, perhaps even with a slightly higher partial pressure of oxygen. From the pony perspective, Earth is a high-gravity death-world. Given some of the bizarre mix-and-match creatures living in the Everfree, though, Earth may be only slightly more dangerous to equine life.
Interested in advertising on Derpibooru? Click here for information!
Help fund the $15 daily operational cost of Derpibooru - support us financially!