...I honestly can't tell if you're coming down on the side of "good thing" or "bad thing".

That Fresh Princess thing was cringey as Tartarus, but the Rarity shorts are great.

Reading through it more carefully, he goes on to say that "this is a normal schedule". So I guess this is how it's always been done. Still sounds alarmingly harsh for a deadline.

Explains the continuity errors like forgetting Twilight's supposed to already have her cutie mark when she's Celestia's student.

This show's always had a love-hate relationship with continuity.

edited 26th Apr '17 9:34:18 AM by TobiasDrake

That sounds about consistent with the schedules of a few other animated shows I know of.

Is that when they finish the episode or when they start it? Because if that's just when it gets done, it could easily be that 90% of the thing is done long before and they're only doing touchups.

Also, do we want to get started on the next RR?

edited 26th Apr '17 2:36:10 PM by JapaneseTeeth

Have we settled the premise? I think there was still some debate about whether we were going to use the magic book store and the villain/MacGuffin plot device.

I'm just concerned about it ending up as a disconnected anthology.

I have some questions about the Round Robin:

• Does it have to be older "classic" literature, or can newer books be used in the story too, such as the Harry Potter series? Are there any restrictions on what books can be used, if at all?
• Are the characters going into the worlds of the books as they are known in the real world, or are these specifically pony versions (as in, all characters who are humans in the original stories have to be turned into pony versions)?
• Related to the above question, does this involve the book-hopping characters turning into the book characters (like in "Power Ponies" where they turned into the superheroes from the comic book), or do they interact with the book characters as themselves?

edited 26th Apr '17 6:23:13 PM by Rainbow

I say we should just go for it with the general understanding that we should prevent it from being a disconnected anthology.

Maybe one way to possibly try to prevent it from becoming a disconnected anthology is that instead of requiring each chapter to be about the ponies going into a different book, maybe they could be allowed to stay in the book that they were visiting in the previous chapter if that writer wants to continue to have them explore that book's story? For example, if writer 3 had the ponies go into Dracula (or whatever the Equestrian equivalent is), writer 4 could have a choice to either have the ponies go into a new book, or let them continue to explore the Dracula story.

I'm also unsure if we've decided on what characters are going to be doing the book-hopping. I remember reading a suggestion that Twilight and the other unicorns from "Amending Fences" were going to be the stars, but I wasn't sure if that was "official" or not at this point.

edited 26th Apr '17 6:44:03 PM by Rainbow

I don't think we ever really settled that.

As for whether it should be more anthologized, my personal thought was that we'd allow for there to be an ongoing plot (something like chasing a villain from book to book) but allow some leeway in how much focus a given chapter gets.

As for limits on what books they go into, I'd leave that fairly open, with the only real caveat that they go into books and not comics, movie scripts, etc. Not because there's anything inherently wrong with that, but because it just keep the premise a bit more cohesive.

The cast, I'd be fine with having it be the Unicorn crew.

I love the idea that Sunset Shimmer returning to Equestria would just be longing for the modern conveniences of the human world.

Time to sleep.

Like, I can totally see the Humane Seven freaking out about being all enchanted and shit, except for Sunset who's just sitting by the mirror trying to figure out the logistics of running an extension cord through it.

• Rarity: Did anyone see that?! I just made a cup float through the air! That was the most incredible thing I've ever experienced!
• Sunset: (not even looking up from her Nintendo handheld) Congratulations on mastering a spell we all learned when we were three.

edited 26th Apr '17 9:21:44 PM by TobiasDrake

I would think she would be more concerned with trying to play a handheld system without thumbs.

Magic?

I don't think we really need to be worried about chapters being disconnected. We had Parents of Ponyville, and that turned out just fine.

Post of the Day #1805

I'm concerned with how pegasi and earth ponies regularly manage to hold cups without thumbs, but apparently that's not an issue.

You know, a MLP: EG movie where, instead of Equestria invading the EG World, the EG World invades Equesteria...that sounds like it would be a interesting movie.

Maybe you could write about that?

In fact, what ideas do you have for EG so far?

edited 27th Apr '17 6:55:15 AM by fredhot16

Mostly, I just have a few rough ideas. Couple major story beats, some scenes and dialogue exchanged I've got in my notes, and a few basic concepts like "Twilight takes AJ on a vacation to the human world and it's all weird and unpleasant for a traditionalist like her" or "EQG cast comes to visit Equestria for the first time and has to adjust to a strange and magical world in which they are small horses".

The trouble with the EQG characters is that it's hard to really hammer down what makes them distinct. Sunset Shimmer has a huge handicap that sets her above the rest of the Humane Seven in that she doesn't have a pony counterpart, so she is a unique and special snowflake.

For the rest, the hard part about writing them is determining how similar they should be to their pony counterparts versus identifying things that are unique about these interpretations of the characters. For instance, the group generally deferring to Rainbow Dash's leadership instead of Twilight and/or AJ's.

Which is hard to ID because the Discount Ponies don't get a lot of focus. Probably because they're Discount Ponies. Sunset and either Twilight tend to be the central characters, while the human counterparts just sort of hang out being vaguely similar to the characters we know and love. Finding things that stand out and make them special is hard work when the writers don't really care much about establishing a unique identity for them in the first place.

@Tobias: Granular Jamming, son!

So what I'm hearing is that a pony's grip strength is entirely dependent on how thick the layer of dirt on their hooves is.

Being able to be prissy about dirt is a unicorn privilege!

Or it could be an inherent property of their hooves rather than them needing to have a layer of dirt to do that? That ball on the robot had the granular material inside of it, not on the surface (so far as I could tell), so maybe pony hooves have a structure like that inside of them?

edited 27th Apr '17 9:58:33 AM by Rainbow

Well, in my verse, pegasi have tactile telekinesis (see with how they can hold objects aloft behind them in defiance of gravity) and earth ponies can create local gravitational attraction to their hooves.