a big thanks to everypony who participated in this! Composition prevents me from including everyone, but I appreciate all your support! in this image we have:
http://ask-vivacio.tumblr.com/
artist commentary on the sleipnir
This is an OOC post, just as a little insight into my thought process, in case you were curious. there is no tl;dr, you can either read it or not, it doesn’t effect the story.
There are lots of reasons to love My Little Pony, but one of the things that really pulls me to it is its complete lack of human characters. If Friendship is Magic ever pulls a human in, I’m going to cry manly tears of sadness and hide under a rock until it goes away. That being said, I appear to have just posted a half-humanoid horsie on my blog. so what gives, Sev?
MLP does a lovely job of re-envisioning classic mythology in a way that makes it work in their environment. The show tends to stick to Greek roots, but its deviated a few times (the Wendigo being a big one) and it often changes the nature of the legend itself, to allow it to mesh in Equestria. Sometimes the adaptations are small, like with the Hydra being a ‘thing that lives in a swamp’. other times, they completely re-write the myth, like they did with the Wendigo. Even Pegasus ponies are a deviation. Originally, there was only one winged horse, and its name was ‘Pegasus’.
The idea behind the introduction of Sleipnirs as a ‘species’ rather than as ‘Odin’s horse’ is to pull the label of ‘God’ off of Princess Celestia, because frankly, I don’t feel like it fits. She and her sister have talent and ability that reflect their ages, but not the powers of omnipotent beings. Raising or setting the solar bodies seems more the thing someone with a knowledge of obscure spellcraft and a few hundred years practice can do, in a world where a homeschooled unicorn can levitate a bear or teleport her friends out of danger.
By bringing them down from the “Im God” to the “a couple thousand years of this makes me pretty pimp shit” level, we have an opportunity to use some of the classical motivations and tropes of mythological gods (who, by and large, weren’t very clever and were remarkably fickle for eternal beings) which tends to make for good, simple storytelling, and frees up Celestia and Luna to be more personable, with some of the motivations we might expect a real person to have.
Since its a horse’s world, why not use a godlike horse as a godlike figure? Sleipnir fit the bill, so I went with it. Polytheistic stories tend to be more exciting to play with than monotheistic ones, so one Sleipnir became many Sleipnirs. Traditionally, he had 8 legs and was ridden by Odin. I don’t want human’s (or human Gods) in my vision of this environment, so Odin was out. But the idea of a ‘rider’ was still useful, and there are a LOT of humanoid, but non-human, legends and myths that would be a shame to not ever use because they look too much like people. I saw this as an opportunity to play around with that, so I built ‘the rider’ directly into the horse, and gave her an extra set of arms, making her 8 limned, rather than 8 legged. The peacock tail was a means of making the lower body different from a pony, without turning it into an alicorn.
So there you have it, my grok in a nuttshell. hope ya’ll are enjoying the story as it closes up here, we’ve only got a few posts left before Rain or Shine draws its curtain and we move on to greener pastures
