Random Pony thought

(Eventually we will get Season 5, with new episodes. And eventually I will get my schedule to the point where I can get home some days in time to catch the last re-run of the day).

But anyway: I have a lot of time to think in lab. The students mostly work on their own, and I can just walk around. And for some reason, sometimes my thoughts turn to Pony.

And today, I was thinking: Okay, we have Pony Culture, with Cloudsdale having Pegasi ponies, and Canterlot unicorns, and Ponyville "Earth Ponies," and presumably the other towns  and cities have their own particular mix of the three types. And we saw the bison culture out at Appaloosa.

And presumably, there's a griffin culture. There was Gilda, and there were a few griffin athletes, and I know a lot of people have headcanoned up a griffin empire somewhere near Cloudsdale.

And there are dragons.

And there's Zecora, and presumably there are other zebras. (Actually, I'd like to see the zebra culture and what it's like, more than I care about the griffin culture. I could see the prejudice of them being all "wise healer" types and then the reality turning out to be that Zecora is one of the few who does that, and the rest of the zebras have pretty much the same kind of life as earth ponies do....)

And I wondered what other cultures we might see. And then I thought, wait, there are donkeys...or are they mules? (The show seems to use the term interchangeably, which bugs me ever so slightly, because donkeys and mules are different). And then I got to thinking: wait. If there are mules in Equestria, if they are like the mules that exist in the human world, that would have to mean a donkey and a horse got married at some point and....

Heh. Inter-species marriage. And you thought some people had a hard time accepting inter-racial marriage.

And then my mind went to a strange place: someone could write a fanfiction that was a Pony version of "Guess who's coming to dinner?" Given that Pony culture is the "majority" culture we see on the show, I guess the family you see the most of (Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy) would be ponies, and the Sidney Poitier character would be a donkey....no, I'm not going to write it, I don't have time and I've seen the movie only once in my life. But, heh. The weird places your mind goes.


(And I wonder, will anti-donkey/anti-mule prejudice be explored at any point? In one of the early episodes, Rarity gets referred to as a "mule" (because she is being made to pull a cart) and she gets upset because "mules are ugly." Yeah.....I could kind of see Rarity as having some unexamined prejudices.)

(Someone DID do a  fanfiction based on the movie 12 Angry Men, I think the "defendant' in that was a zebra, maybe even Zecora? But it's been a long time since I read it.)

Though I will say, in Equestria, the different "races" of ponies (the idea is that the earth, pegasus, and unicorn ponies are like three different races - same species, can intermarry, but seem to have some visible differences, even if the under-the-skin differences really aren't there) get along far better than humans do, and that's just another reason Equestria seems nicer and more harmonious than the human world.

I really need to finish Chrysalis so I can make one of the smaller, simpler ponies I've been thinking about, maybe the "OC" (or: made-up-by-the-fan) character of Folio (a pegasus who likes books) or Maud Pie, or, I don't know who....