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Anthro Ponies, Cutie Marks, and Pants
4 years ago
Scribbling nonsense all across the board like jaguars leaping from trees of leather bodices encasing aged withered corpses whose eyes dazzle with the light of one million and three silver satellites flying over Los Angeles hiding illegal immigrants from Irish potato farms built atop the golden ruins of El Dorado filled with demonic Ewoks hurling tremendous tankards of tons of Tylenol at the panda bear ninjas that hide around every corner of the magic square building trying desperately to pull up its skirt and set roots on another cubic square inch of the board upon which I am scribbling nonsense.
Imagine, if you will:
Twilight Sparkle and company come to Our Town at the behest of the map. They are met with a host of creepy ponies that definitely isn’t a cult with an insane leader. It’s very clearly sus right from the get-go.
But they’re anthro and they’re all wearing conservative body-concealing clothes, so how are the protagonists going to know that they all have conspicuous matching equality cutie marks? Unless they don’t have a problem baring their asses to show how equal they are.
Being set in a children’s show about cartoon horses, clothing is largely unnecessary, usually little more than a luxury reserved for formal occasions and the classiest of horses. Because nudity isn’t a problem, this means it’s easy to flaunt their flanks and the personalized marks they’ve got dyed into their fur. This starts becoming problematic, though, if you remove cartoon anatomy from the equation and make them anthro (heck, even without making them anthro). How are ponies going to show what their special talents are without going around bottomless in public? How are Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon going to shame Apple Bloom for not having a cutie mark without pantsing her at school and getting detention every day? How are the Mane Six going to lamentably look at their asses with their incorrect cutie marks during Magical Mystery Cure if they’re wearing pants and skirts at the time? Do they have to dramatically pull off their clothes to see that Starlight Glimmer has stolen their cutie marks and branded them with her cult insignia?
The way I see it, there are four possible rationalizations for this conundrum:
1) Pony fashion doesn’t perfectly mirror human sensibilities, with a leaning toward clothing designs that keep the hips exposed so the cutie mark can be visible.
2) (Possibly in tandem with the above) Anthro ponies don’t have to have cutie marks on their hips like canon ponies do. They might instead be located in places that are related to whatever the pony’s special talent is (e.g. Rainbow Dash might have her mark on her wings or the backs of her shoulders). This may still pose problems though if the mark is placed next to or on the genitals so there’s no feasible way to show it without being indecent.
3) Ponies have some form of clothing accessory that resembles the cutie mark so they can have it be easily known. Of course this still leaves the problem of being unable to know when something cutie mark-related happens in the plot and causes them to be removed or changed.
4) Ponies as a society just don’t care about nudity. This is something which applies even to non-anthro ponies, since it just gets confusing when they’re casually walking around without clothes and then suddenly they’re supposed to have genitalia for the sex scenes.
I think it can be difficult to avoid falling into the pitfalls of the societal norms we’re used to when working on fantasy, sometimes it’s necessary to consider that a fantasy culture might differ wildly on very basic matters, even those as simple as wearing pants.
This has been a mini-ramble that I felt like writing on the spur of the moment, possibly as a result of writing around a certain scene. I’m sure plenty of people have already thought about this kind of thing by now but meh.
I really need to get back to (re)writing the Sing ramble.
Twilight Sparkle and company come to Our Town at the behest of the map. They are met with a host of creepy ponies that definitely isn’t a cult with an insane leader. It’s very clearly sus right from the get-go.
But they’re anthro and they’re all wearing conservative body-concealing clothes, so how are the protagonists going to know that they all have conspicuous matching equality cutie marks? Unless they don’t have a problem baring their asses to show how equal they are.
Being set in a children’s show about cartoon horses, clothing is largely unnecessary, usually little more than a luxury reserved for formal occasions and the classiest of horses. Because nudity isn’t a problem, this means it’s easy to flaunt their flanks and the personalized marks they’ve got dyed into their fur. This starts becoming problematic, though, if you remove cartoon anatomy from the equation and make them anthro (heck, even without making them anthro). How are ponies going to show what their special talents are without going around bottomless in public? How are Diamond Tiara and Silver Spoon going to shame Apple Bloom for not having a cutie mark without pantsing her at school and getting detention every day? How are the Mane Six going to lamentably look at their asses with their incorrect cutie marks during Magical Mystery Cure if they’re wearing pants and skirts at the time? Do they have to dramatically pull off their clothes to see that Starlight Glimmer has stolen their cutie marks and branded them with her cult insignia?
The way I see it, there are four possible rationalizations for this conundrum:
1) Pony fashion doesn’t perfectly mirror human sensibilities, with a leaning toward clothing designs that keep the hips exposed so the cutie mark can be visible.
2) (Possibly in tandem with the above) Anthro ponies don’t have to have cutie marks on their hips like canon ponies do. They might instead be located in places that are related to whatever the pony’s special talent is (e.g. Rainbow Dash might have her mark on her wings or the backs of her shoulders). This may still pose problems though if the mark is placed next to or on the genitals so there’s no feasible way to show it without being indecent.
3) Ponies have some form of clothing accessory that resembles the cutie mark so they can have it be easily known. Of course this still leaves the problem of being unable to know when something cutie mark-related happens in the plot and causes them to be removed or changed.
4) Ponies as a society just don’t care about nudity. This is something which applies even to non-anthro ponies, since it just gets confusing when they’re casually walking around without clothes and then suddenly they’re supposed to have genitalia for the sex scenes.
I think it can be difficult to avoid falling into the pitfalls of the societal norms we’re used to when working on fantasy, sometimes it’s necessary to consider that a fantasy culture might differ wildly on very basic matters, even those as simple as wearing pants.
This has been a mini-ramble that I felt like writing on the spur of the moment, possibly as a result of writing around a certain scene. I’m sure plenty of people have already thought about this kind of thing by now but meh.
I really need to get back to (re)writing the Sing ramble.
I mean, if you really don’t care about anatomy, you can skid around the public indecency with their private parts being hidden inside of a slit that only comes out when they want to.
Like a fucking dolphin.
If, however, the work is on the more fetishy side of things, then you should feel free to either go the full nudist route, or mix it with one of the other options to make it interesting. For example, a Human in Equestria™ could be experiencing some culture shock when they see that while ponies dress much as we would from the waist up, from the waist down, they wear little more than what appears to be thong underwear (for maximum exposure).
The way it was presented in Equestria Girls, the marks were on the clothing for obvious, marketable reasons. Yet, in a realistic anthro world, such wouldn't need to exist. As I love MLP lewd, I'm totally fine with keeping the marks on their flanks. And lowering one's pants to show it off is acceptable to those that ask. But I envision Equestria as a sex/body positive world. Outside of relationships between minors and adults, I'd think nudity is hardly seen as an issue. It's part of who we are. When ponies procreate, it's still done mainly in private to focus in on their chosen mates.