Line #29 ArtisticLicenseBiology/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic


1	For all its {{Furry Reminder}}s, ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' is still a kid's cartoon about talking ponies. It takes numerous [[ArtisticLicenseBiology artistic liberties]] (especially with [[SomewhereAnEquestrianIsCrying its horse characters]]) and often gets biology wrong.
2	-----
3	!General
4	* While they may play this trope straight to egregious levels for the sake of the plot and settings, it's also obvious that the animators and writers have seriously [[ShownTheirWork done their homework on the subject]]. Everything from the way the ponies walk to [[GeniusBonus little things]] most people would never notice are actually done by horses in real life.
5	* The most obvious example of this on the show is seeing the ponies in poses that would be physically impossible for actual horses, such as standing upright and crossing their legs. Several times, a pony is shown walking on three legs while holding something on their fourth leg like a hand. Even assuming a horse could hold something with its hooves (and it can't), a horse trying to walk on three legs would send it falling over, face-first.
6	* A large example is the ponies' designs in general. ''Domesticated'' horses look like that. It took thousands of years of domestication and selective breeding to get the ponies we know today. These characters supposedly live in an universe devoid of humans, yet they have pelt colours and flowing manes characteristic of domestic horses. If they were descended from prehistoric horses that gained sentience, they would have manes similar to zebras, stockier bodies, dorsal stripes, and striped legs similar to Przewalski's Horses or Riwoche horses. Of course, this is a pragmatic decision as the characters wouldn't be as recognizable (or likely as cute) if they looked like primitive horses.
7	* Similar to the above and possibly for the same reasons, Zecora is proportioned like the ponies despite being a zebra (which are different from horses and cannot be domesticated).
8	* Horses cannot belch, but that doesn't stop characters from burping for the sake of comedy shots.
9	* Real horses can't throw up, but Pinkie Pie still got a VomitDiscretionShot in "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS1E4ApplebuckSeason Applebuck Season]]" after eating some bad muffins, and Shining Armor got airsick in [[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS7E21OnceUponAZeppelin "Once Upon A Zeppelin"]]. Similarly, Angel once retched when trying a salad for the first time, even though rabbits also lack a gag reflex.
10	* Ponies frequently pick things up and do other fine manipulation tasks despite having blunt hooves. A section of the pen and paper RPG based on the show actually points this out ("No Fingers? No Problem"), and says players should just assume their characters can do things that would normally require fingers. It justifies this by saying [[RuleOfCool reality works a little better in Equestria]].
11	* The ponies are sometimes seen feeding domestic ferrets (which are treated as wild animals, adding a bit of ArtisticLicenseAnimalCare into the mix too) with vegetables and nuts, even though ferrets are entirely carnivorous. One episode has subverted this when Fluttershy is shown feeding them fish.
12	* Rabbits are shown with pads on the bottom of their paws, which they lack in real life. While most rabbits are correctly portrayed with "V"-shaped noses, others like Angel are drawn with cat noses.
13	* [[StockBeehive Wild beehives are commonly portrayed as resembling hornet nests.]]
14	* Parrots, toucans, and woodpeckers are portrayed with generic bird feet with three toes in front and one in back, when they should have two in front and two in back.
15	* Beavers are drawn with white incisors. Real beavers have orange incisors. This might come off as ''even more'' cartoonish and [[RealityIsUnrealistic unrealistic]] to anyone who isn't familiar with real beavers.
16	* Gummy, Pinkie's alligator, has a forked tongue like a monitor lizard. He can lick his own eyes with it, which real alligators can't. [[GreenGators He's also bright green]], a color alligators don't come in. In general, he looks more like a crocodile than an alligator due to having a thinner snout rather a broad U-shaped one.
17	* Ahuizotl's tiger and jaguar minions have slitted pupils, despite big cats having round pupils.
18	* When a pony opens their mouth especially wide, you can often see their uvula -- very few animals outside of humans have uvulas, and horses are not one of them. [[JustifiedTrope Of course, the uvula exists primarily to aid in speech, and Equestrian ponies are much more talkative than Earth ones.]]
19	* Pelicans are drawn with oversized bill pouches.
20	* Whenever a unicorn is shown wearing a helmet, it's structured exactly like the helmets worn by other pony species. Given that the height of the horn is above the depth of the helmet layer, that kind of helmet wouldn't fit them in the first place.
21	* Carrot Cake tries to handwave his unicorn and pegasus children, but his explanation doesn't make any sense due to how genetically distant the twins are to their unicorn and pegasus relatives. First, he explains that his great-great-great-great grandfather was a unicorn, which would imply that the unicorn gene somehow remained unexpressed for not one, not two, but ''six generations in a row''. Second, he also explains that Cup Cake's great aunt's second cousin twice-removed (aka the twins' second cousin ''fifth''-removed) was a pegasus.[[note]]For this to work, this would mean that a pony had a pegasus great-grandchild, and a pegasus (and unicorn) great-great-great-great-great-great grandchild(ren)[[/note]]. While it's still possible, in the world of genetics most would write that off as coincidence unless the gene is ''so rare, that it's doubtful it was brought it into the family by a spouse''. And given the number of pegasi in Equestria... that's ''very'' unlikely to be the case. But assuming what he says is true, then he's essentially won the genetic lottery. On that note, in RealLife, Mrs. Cake and her twins would all be '''extremely''' lucky to even be alive. The chances of a mare successfully giving birth to twin foals are super rare (about 1 in 10,000) and also very dangerous because a horse's body isn't designed to handle multiple births, usually resulting in either one or both fetuses dying, and the added strain of the extra labor is often fatal to the mother as well.
22	* The show falls into the trap of mistaking scorpion pedipalps or pincers for limbs, thus giving them only six legs instead of eight.
23	* Coconut trees are [[MisplacedVegetation found growing inland such as jungles and deserts]], despite coconut trees being coastal plants that grow only near seas. They also rely on tides and currents to disperse their nuts and settle new areas, so it's impossible for them to reach dry, inland places.
24	* Koalas are depicted with only one thumb. Real koalas have two.
25
26	!Episode-Specific
27	!!Season 1
28	* "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS1E11WinterWrapUp Winter Wrap-Up]]": Contrary to what's show in the sequences where hibernating animals are woken up, mice, rabbits, porcupines, and tree squirrels do not hibernate.
29
30	!!Season 2
31	* "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS2E7MayTheBestPetWin May the Best Pet Win!]]": The bald eagle screams like a red-tailed hawk. This is fixed in "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS8E6SurfAndOrTurf Surf and/or Turf]]" several seasons later, where a bald eagle lets out a genuine aquiline screech.
32	* "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS2E4LunaEclipsed Luna Eclipsed]]": Justified. The spiders created by Luna's spell barely look anything like real spiders -- they have solid ball-shaped bodies with no division between body segments, and lack any kind of facial features beyond glowing red eyes. This is because they are actually transformed toys -- Luna animated a basket of fairly stylized plushies, and accidentally happened to make them look more monstrous than she needed to.
33
34	!!Season 4
35	* "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS4E7Bats Bats!]]"
36	** Generally, the difficulties with using new seeds in an established orchard, like tearing out old trees and planting new ones, as well as the wait needed before they start bearing fruit, are completely ignored.
37	** In addition to that, the episode acts like you can grow normal apple trees straight from seed. In reality, apples exhibit "extreme heterozygosity", meaning seedlings tend toward a phenotype that generally isn't at all like their parent trees. The apples that we can actually eat are generally clones produced by cutting and grafting, adding another complication to the idea of using the new sprouts.
38	** The episode uses apple trees (which in the real world do not rely on bat pollination to reproduce) as a metaphor for plants like the agave, which ''do'' benefit from pollination by bats.
39	** Building a sanctuary to house a pest species cannot work, at least not like Fluttershy proposes, because it relies on the animals in question staying inside the sanctuary. When animals are faced with an abundant supply of food, the glut of resources now available to them will cause their population to grow massively until the area cannot support them anymore, at which point the excess animals will migrate elsewhere and look for new sources of food. This will happen more or less continuously, as the animals in the food-rich area will keep producing as many young as possible as long as they can keep doing so, meaning that a sanctuary for the bats to live in unmolested would act only as a never-ending source of new waves of them continuously flooding into the rest of the farm. Furthermore, the only reason why the vampire fruit bats would agree to stay in the sanctuary is that the animals in the world of Equestria are semi-sapient, so they're able to be diplomatically reasoned with.
40	** Bat spit is portrayed as being good for plants. While their droppings can aid plant growth, the same cannot be said for their saliva. This may have been done to avoid grossness, except that would be inconsistent because other episodes, such as "The Last Roundup" and "Baby Cakes", have averted NobodyPoops.
41	* "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS4E12PinkiePride Pinkie Pride]]": The hippopotamus has a long, thin tail like an elephant or a rhinoceros, as well as square-shaped canines like a stereotypical cartoon hippo. Not to mention a common hippopotamus would ''not'' appreciate being ridden on due to its [[AngryAngryHippos aggressive temperament]]. Cheese Sandwich must have found [[HuggyHuggyHippos an unusually docile hippo]].
42	* "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS4E23InspirationManifestation Inspiration Manifestation]]": Fluttershy builds a birdhouse for a robin. Robins don't use birdhouses, as they are not cavity nesters. They build their nests out in the open. Additionally, robins are chiefly insectivorous and thus would have no interest in the birdseed Fluttershy provides.
43
44	!!Season 7
45	* "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS7E15TripleThreat Triple Threat]]": After turning into a bear, Thorax rears on his hind legs and [[PrimalChestPound pounds his chest like a gorilla]] (except with the stereotypical clenched fists rather than open hands like a real gorilla), something real bears never do. Of course, [[JustifiedTrope he isn't really a bear]].
46	* "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS7E18AHealthOfInformation A Health of Information]]": The workers of the flash bee colony are explicitly referred to as being male and aggressively sting intruders to protect the queen bee. In real life, worker bees are all female, while the males (drones) serve no purpose other than to mate with the queen and don't even have stingers. Additionally, Fluttershy is able to fool the bees with a mask, whereas real-life bees communicate through scent as much as by sight. This could be because they're a fictional type of bee.
47
48	!!Season 8
49	* "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS8E9NonCompeteClause Non Compete Clause]]": Yona can't swim, and states that it's because she's a yak. Yaks in real life can swim, in fact they've been known to swim across rapids.
50	* "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS8E22WhatLiesBeneath What Lies Beneath]]": The spiders' legs legs are attached to their abdomens, and they make audible chirping noises. Real spiders' legs grow from the cephalothorax (their "head"), and they don't make any vocalizations.
51
52	!!Season 9
53	* "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicS9E18SheTalksToAngel She Talks to Angel]]", which deals extensively with Fluttershy running her animal sanctuary, falls into this on a number of occasions:
54	** Fluttershy proposes that the predator animals will only eat vegetables while at the sanctuary (we see raccoons, a bear, a snake, and a wolf amongst the group). While the bear and raccoons could likely pull it off due to being omnivores, snakes and wolves are carnivores. Wolves ''can'' and do eat fruit in the wild, but only in small amounts and as a supplement to a chiefly meat-based diet. Snakes however, are [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercarnivore hypercarnivores]], and simply can't digest plant matter.
55	** Antoine is shown chewing the snake treat Fluttershy offers him. Real-life snakes swallow their prey whole since their teeth aren't designed for grinding food. This is somewhat fixed in another scene where Antoine swallows a baby elephant whole; snakes can expand their bodies to accommodate large meals, but even an entire elephant calf is impossible in real life. Additionally, Antoine, a non-venomous python, is depicted with fangs, which only venomous snakes have. He also has round pupils; constrictor snakes have slitted pupils.

Context ArtisticLicenseBiology / MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic