My Little Pony book report time again!!! This time we’re reading:
Princess Celestia and the Summer of Royal Waves
Summary of Amazingness
By Patricia
Princess Celestia is very busy ruling all of Equestria, running a magical school for unicorns, and raising the sun every day with her own magic. But when she receives a letter from her old friend Duchess Diamond Waves, she has to travel to the seaside duchy near Southern Prance called Monacolt to help. Duchess D thinks some scary monster attack is coming soon and only the magic of the young unicorns in her academy can save the kingdom! But her students are all failing her standardized tests so she’s hoping Princess C can help. Princess C is like “FIRST OF ALL, your magical hourglass that’s warning you about monsters seems hella sketchy. SECOND, your students are totes overworked and need some chillaxing time on the beach.” After a few of Princess Celestia’s building sand castle lessons, the students actually start performing magic well! But Duchess D is not convinced that mental health and scholastic aptitude are linked, probably because she’s already sunk so much of Monacolt’s resources into this standarized testing scheme. So Princess C stages a fake monster attack with a giant crab the size of a building in the middle of a beach party to show Duchess D what her students are really made of. Plus, that hour glass ends up being totally fake. The end.
So regal. So wise.
Analysis within MLP Canon and Fanon
By Steven
Unlike the Pinkie Pie book, this one actually stepped outside of the familiar by basically taking a single underdeveloped canon character (Celestia) and tossing her wholesale into a new place populated by new characters, with new backstories, referencing other largely non-show-based canons. So basically there’s little point of comparison—ironic, given that I have a good deal more questions (and gripes) about this one than the last—since the show has yet to ever go into detail on other equine polities (or, really, any extra-Equestrian nations apart from Griffonstone and, to a lesser extent, Yak-yakistan).
Tribal council? Rampage-ocracy? Viking warlord? Who knows.
All of which brings up the first question that this raises within the realm of canonicity, which is: what is the relationship between Equestria and Monacolt? Allied neighbors? Client state? Autonomous region? Feudal fiefdom? Actually, politics in Equestria have always been a little bit hazy, thanks to the show’s reliance on a direct diarchy of quasi-immortal alicorns with some sort of noble class hovering largely unseen off to one side.
(Side note: what does Prince Blueblood DO exactly?)
So now we have a Duchess Diamond Waves, who is apparently a particular friend of Celestia’s from “when they were younger,” which raises all sorts of questions on its own, e.g. “Just how old is this Diamond Waves character?” Actually, there are a lot of references to things I’d like a little more detail about, like Prance, King Nautilus, and the apparently sentient Carcinus species. Then there’s the interesting notion of Celestia offering up a Latin prayer/thanks to the sun when raising it? Which seems more like some personal habit than any kind of necessary ritual (as we’ve seen her raise the sun multiple times without any accompanying invocations). As to the Latin itself, not even going to go there, but suffice to say it could use a verb somewhere. Still, nothing provably off there. Luna does seem oddly playful about her former role as Nightmare Moon, which the author supports by describing it as “after Luna had acted up and been banished to the moon” which plays well with her character in the comics canon more than the show canon, but that’s a toss-up as well.
Basically it’s hard to point any strong fingers at canon leakage and more a case where you end up shrugging and going, “Well, hopefully some of this shows up again somewhere in the show for confirmation.”
Patricia’s Favorites
Character: Twilight Sparkle, who is back home manning Canterlot magic school in Celestia’s absence. She is a total nerd who assigns hella summer reading because it was her favorite part of school, and “I treated some of them to a reading from Star Swirl’s Seven Principles of Unicorn Magic: Third Edition including some of the hoofnotes!”
Part: Duchess D wants her students to get serious, so anyone caught in the halls during class time is attacked by magical spiders. EDUCATION
I’m just trying to help you LEARN, Frodo
Thing I Learned:Standardized testing is not the way to learn. The way to learn is to build sand castles and get fake-attacked by giant crabs.
Steven’s Favorites
Character: Discord, who appears only in a brief memory of a “prank” involving making himself invisible and following Celestia around for a week, repeating everything she says in a whisper. That’s comedy and/or horror gold right there!
Part: The frequent references to her shoes as “hoofcuffs,” the way she’s clearly changed her mind about Twilight’s friendship-spam mail, or the Monacolt-as-gambling-paradise reference. Can’t choose.
Thing I Learned: Basically, trolling and/or pranking is the way to run a country, and pulling one over on fellow monarchs is apparently a longstanding tradition.
Previously: Pinkie Pie and the Ponypalooza