A Brief Introduction in 1929
The saying of why the grass isn’t always greener on the side is a classic fable, even if the grass happens to be located on the other side of a dimensional portal that only exists in people’s imaginations. And peoples’ imaginations are especially great at producing utopian societies that rest on a bedrock of contradictions and implications that makes them a place that could safely be said to not be worth visiting…
The details of this lie in a small rural community nestled in the countryside of Pennsylvania known affectionately as Ponyville, complete with enormous fruit orchards. In those times, electricity was still a newcomer to the average family, as was the concept of credit and using credit to buy all sorts of new goodies immediately that the average citizen would otherwise had to save months of wages to buy. The iconic Model T was an uncommon sight on the streets. Most of the locals still walked, but not out of any respect for tradition; every one of them saw those with cars and many felt a burning sense of inferiority; this would drive many of them to buy their own cars on credit as well. This would not bode well in the upcoming years. But very few, and certainly none of the locals, were concerning themselves with the far future when there was so much to worry about today. So concerned with the endless problems of daily life, they were utterly convinced that life as it was could never change.
One sullen pinkish mare was one of many in this group of both satisfied and unsatisfied laborers. She herself was born to a poor family in the slums of New York City, which has always tried to distance itself from the slums that sprung up with the constant flow of immigrants searching for a better life. For our friend, life was better than being farmers in Ireland, but it was much worse than what was promised to them when they first boarded a ship to leave behind all of their friends, family, and cultural ties. The life waiting for them was to be harsh and unsatisfying, especially by modern expectations of decency. They arrived with only enough money for the most basic of necessities, which amounted to some stale bread and cheese. The only tenement they could afford had been built over the burnt ruins of a previous one, speaking to the paucity of construction for the less fortunate. The greatly advertised facilities, such as running water and electric lighting and heating, were myths fabricated by cutthroat landlords trying to ensure that the next big wave of bedraggled foreigners would seek asylum in their buildings instead of their competitors. The room itself was far too cramped to house 2 full grown equines, let alone five, as the mother would eventually have three foals. The job offered to the breadwinner was not enough to pay the bills and to save some money for a better life, so the husband, and later the older foals, would find themselves working in the sweatshops that grew like weeds all throughout the city. Here the family would be lucky enough not to be killed in an industrial accident or chance fire, as life would belatedly start to improve. The arrival of the first world war, instead of being a horrifying monstrosity permanently damaging all those involved in its wanton destruction of human life, served as a great opportunity for those across the Atlantic. Food and munitions were in great demand, and with this came improvements with wages. This was also combined with a political trend sympathetic to the downtrodden; with progressive legislation and fatter paychecks, the family could finally begin to improve their situation. They moved to a better apartment, and they also began sending the foals to school. Thus the little pink filly began to learn about the world, in all its glory and shame, triumphs and tragedies, wonders and horrors. Her tenure in New York was not to last for much longer, though, for she longed for an individual piece of the dream so promised to the impoverished youth of the cities and did not like sharing it with her family. She left in the 20s, eventually to take up baking in a rural town in Pennsylvania.
In Ponyville, the most visible sight is the great stretches of land filled with clusters of apple trees. These acres were first owned by many small farmers, and each farm was not dedicated solely to growing apples, but many other crops, such as wheat, corn, pears, peaches, and many others. This was to change under the guidance of a dedicated mare from one of these farms tired of the inefficiencies associated with divided production. She was a resident of very old family that had always considered diversified farming to be a way of life. She did not share these opinions, but instead embraced the ideals of mechanized agriculture and assembly line production, or at least the closest model of industrial production that can be applied to the life cycles of living organisms. She was the first farmer in Ponyville to buy a mechanical harvester for her apples; which predictably increased the output of the land far above her non mechanized neighbors. Soon the money she made was used for buying out the land from the poorest farmers who were seeking an escape from subsistence life in the cities. This would extend to the more well to do farmers until all the arable land in Ponyville was consolidated under one family. She also introduced monoculture by only producing apples, forever associating the surrounding area with all sorts of apple products. Unfortunately, she was to die from the misnamed Spanish flu, leaving her daughter to run the now massive Sweet Apple Acres as best she could. And times were not good for them, since the whole country had embraced mechanized agriculture to produce far more apples, or any sort of agricultural product, than anyone was capable of buying. The reaction to falling apple prices, of course, was to produce more apples, which would bring down prices even more, which led to more apple production, which again brought even lower prices. So the stout brown mare was desperately trying to hide from her friends and family that she was going to have to sell all her land at some point, though most of them knew anyway. Farm mortgages were no uncommon sight in those times, and the writing was on the wall when apples were worth less than a coin a bushel. Though, of course, all this did mean that dandelion sandwiches were very cheap.
Ponyville was generally not known for being a home for industry of any kind in its history. The practice of manufactured weather generally served as a misnomer to those who thought it meant that a trend of pastoralism was changing, rather than being another faucet of the industrial revolution simply applied to agriculture in a way that was destructive and incomprehensible to the contemporary understanding of meteorology. When it was first introduced it was done under the assumption that water made into clouds would always produce enough rain to re-fill a reservoir, which could be aerodynamically lifted to produce more clouds. This basic tenet that the entire system was based on ignored the fundamental reality that there was always going to be some water lost due to evaporation, and it failed to account for all the water that fell on the crops themselves which was never fully returned. So as the reservoir began to shrink through the years, some of the cloud workers began to notice. One of them was a colorful mare who was also born to parents of foreign origins. They were a relatively well to do family in the city of Munich before the slowly gathering clouds of war drove them to seek peace across the Atlantic. Their children would not grow up with their home culture, but instead would embrace wholly all of the new values offered to them, which the aging parents came to love and detest individually. Such disagreements would drive the eldest daughter away, looking for employment with the assistance of a friend made at a young age. This would eventually lead her to the business of manufactured weather, which was only in its infancy with a better understanding of the chemistry involved in the formation of weather. This job would pay well enough, but it left the deeper yearnings in life unsatisfied for the mare, who was looking for her true passion in life. The job of a weather manufacturer is a very mobile one, and she tried looking for a time in a small town in rural Pennsylvania. This might seem like a coincidence, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Ponyville was never home to many rich mares, and the ones that did live there were still not particularly rich compared to their peers in the stock market that sickeningly grew like an inflatable balloon, with every hint showing that such growth could not be sustained indefinitely. Though, at the time, most of the brokers in those days were unused to the idea that things could radically change, for most of them had only lived with minor economic downturns for one or two years, which would then be followed by a general upsurge in productivity. One such stock broker was not known amongst her fellows for being especially optimistic about the future. She was a child of a wealthy businessmare known for her staunch belief in social Darwinism and all the unfortunate implications that follow it. Her daughter was conversely known for holding the exact opposite beliefs in regards to social structure; she and her mother always had an estranged relationship before the mother died. After inheriting her mother’s wealth the daughter became somewhat famous for philanthropist and eccentric tendencies; she was a lover of rare animals and a large supporter of the fledgling conservationist movement. She was a large espouser of more left leaning policies towards the working class, which made her very unpopular with many nativists ever vigilant of the alleged communist specter taking refuge in their country of freedom. She personally attributed this outlook to a lifelong friend she made in school, who talked about her parent’s experiences in the old German empire more nostalgically when entering an unfamiliar land where the mere idea of pensions would attract ugly looks and harsh words. How much she was actually affected by these stories is debatable, but the friends remained close throughout their lives. She was to first arrive in Ponyville to study the philosophical merits of the agricultural life, only to become disillusioned with how greed could easily control the supposedly incorruptible small farmer as it did the archetypal robber baron. Nevertheless, she had a fondness for some of the town’s qualities, such as its large collection of birds that sung in the spring. This would motivate her multicolored friend to spend a good length time in the town, as well.
Business in Ponyville was generally based on the small, homespun industries that were always struggling to compete with the cheaper goods mass produced in the cities. Which is not to say that a good being homemade was any guarantee of quality; one could find many shady establishments selling their “traditionally made” products in an attempt to feed off the negative reactions to some of the quality loss inevitably created through mass production, even if these homemade products were worse than even the dirtiest industrial factory could ever produce! Nevertheless, there were also many “honest” small businesses that were suffering with the onset of mass production and mass consumerism. The owners of these businesses would try a myriad of methods to keep customers buying their products over what was being sold nationally. One of these was a businessmare in the clothing trade. She originally was a fan of simplicity when selling dresses, but soon had to distinguish her designs from the many other simplistic designs that were a great deal cheaper to make and cheaper to buy. Her response to this was to make her designs more and more complicated, and to incorporate many semiprecious gemstones into them as well. This was a risky gamble to make, as Ponyville is certainly not rich in minerals and buying them would put a large debt on her shoulders that would need to be recouped quickly, or else she would be forced to close down her business. In this case it did work out well for the white mare, who prided herself on saving the family business from the fearful octopus that was modernity in a somewhat backwards town. Of course, this would eventually end up as naught in the greater scope of the world economy, but in the summer of 1929, life was looking good, not just for the businessmare, but for most ponies throughout the nation.
None of these things were the basis for a famous historical figure’s visit to Ponyville in the very late 20s. The lavender mare that was later to be an important political figure recognizable throughout the world started out merely as a small minded government clerk from Canterlot investigating the effects of dragon extermination in the rural countryside by the Rocky Mountains. As a sign of the lack of interest in such a job, the location she was given to investigate was not anywhere near mountains of any sort, and never had any dragons near it at any point in time. These basic observations did not stop her from attempting to do her job as best as possible, so she made sure to bring along a baby dragon in spite of the dangers involved with keeping untamed, flammable lizards around. Danger or rather the kind of danger that is easily avoidable and completely unwarranted was never a problem to the clerk; it was so much of a non-issue that she never noticed when it was actually an issue and resulted in varying shades of catastrophes. But the important thing was that, in the summer of 1929, there were 6 unlike individuals gathered in a rural community in rural Pennsylvania posed to meet a problem that couldn’t be disappeared with an infinite number of magic tiaras*.
*(Not that magic tiaras are very good with problems, as they tend to just create more than they solve.)
