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Just as the first time round watching this, I find myself rewinding to watch the song again. So I’ve seen the episode twice and the song in the episode four times, now! Another thing that occurred to me on the second time watching the song is that the ponies don’t just represent a source of joy and optimism in a dark and scary world for viewers both young and old, but they also represent this very same ray of hope for their world too! The doom and gloom that we often feel in January and February is in their world too, but in Equestria it’s not the inevitable turning of the seasons that brings back the new genesis of Spring, it’s the ponies themselves! I just thought it was a neat little parallel, and made me think that in light of all the other species and such that get added later on, I feel like it’s easy to devalue or overlook the ponies compared to how special they really were, and still are.

Then we’re introduced to Rainbow Dash’s weather team. Twilight realising she doesn’t have wings takes on a different note on rewatch for sure, but what note that is exactly I don’t yet know how to say. I’m sure it’s also been noted by others before that Pegasi don’t exactly fit the “Earth pony way”. Whether at this stage the Pegasi and Earth ponies had been established to have magic or not, I  don’t know (though I’d assume from Faust that it would have been in the show bible, though perhaps it was overlooked) but if we take the later Hearthswarming Eve as retroactive canon, it would suggest that in the past, Earth ponies would have had to contract the Pegasi for the weather control. After all, without the Pegasi, the snow and ice doesn’t melt, so there can’t be much in the way of Spring otherwise. However, at this stage in the show’s canon, I’d assume it’s something more like Pegasi have either always been around Earth ponies. Indeed, at this stage, we don’t actually know of a period prior to Celestia’s rule: she’s more of a goddess who’s been around since the beginning of time. I’m not sure which I prefer. On the one hand it’s easier to fit in previous generations in the later show’s canon, but on the other, the whole social-environmental structure works much better with Celestia as effectively a deity. It also makes the world beyond Equestria much more mysterious and potentially scary, as it’s outside the protection of the world’s only known benevolent deities. Uncontrolled weather in regions like the Everfree forest and beyond the borders of Equestria would also be an interesting thing to explore at this stage of canon – perhaps it’s much more extreme and violent. Perhaps lands beyond Equestria are impossible to grow crops in. That would certainly fit in with the more nomadic and hunter-gatherer nature of the early non-pony species we see like buffalo and dragons, and from Gilda’s appearance we could infer that griffons are likely hunters as well. I wonder if some early fanfictions might have covered some of this ground? I’ve also been wondering since our last discussion on stages or phases of canon whether anypony’s tried to reconstruct, say, season-1 era fanon as a “replacement” canon for the later show. I’ve often pondered doing this with Star Wars – take for example all the stuff before Episode 5 came out in terms of novels, comics and even fanworks, if there were any or many – that would be before the big Darth Vader twist, so if you reconstructed a canon from there, it would be a very different story indeed. The best version of this in my book would be if someone reconstructed the season 1 canon of MLP, and using fanon and speculation on where the show was going to go, wrote out all of the rest of the show had it gone in that divergent direction (I did say BEST version, not realistic version). 

Then Spike takes a nap in a bush. Later in the episode, Twilight hides in a bush. It makes me wonder – are bushes in Ponyville (or even in Equestria generally) comfortable? It’s an old childhood dream of mine to live inside a giant, comfortable rosebush, weird as that is to say.