If you thought cutie marks and special talents were confusing enough, now try wrapping your head around Equestrian hierarchy and titles. So, it’s been established that alicorns = royalty (or at the very least female royalty, since Equestria seems to be a Matriarchy) and that alicorns are apparently chosen by senior alicorn to ascend after accomplishing one or more great deeds.

… Then they’re not truly royalty, are they? A royal necessarily must be related by blood or marriage (and even those that marry into royal families typically have some blood ties, however distant, to the family they’re marrying into) to another royal, that’s the whole point of royalty. It’s a system designed to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few families at the top.

“But it’s better this way!” one might say “If alicorns are elected on the basis of merit, corruption and inbreeding are less likely and Equestria will be better off.”

Well, it’s a fine way to skirt around inbreeding, but I’m not so sure about the meritocratic part. I don’t remember Celestia gathering the ponies of Equestria to cast ballots for Twilight against a variety of other candidates, she simply subjected her to a series of trials, judged that the passing of these trials made Twilight good, then magically transformed her into an alicorn without consulting or informing anybody else, apart from Luna perhaps. I don’t know what you call that, but it doesn’t sound like meritocracy. You mean to tell me that out of all the ponies in Equestria the best pick for princess was a 20-something antisocial bookworm with rudimentary social skills and a panic disorder? Anyway, Twilight’s parents live in what is apparently the pony equivalent of Paris or London and had enough bits to send their daughter to a special school for gifted unicorns frequented by Princess Sunbutt herself. Moreover, Shining Armor was the captain of the royal guard and later married a princess. When you look at it that way, Twilight stops looking like a plain Jane turned princess and starts looking like Celestia’s carefully selected little future brood mare. Maybe that relationship with Flash Sentry wasn’t as spontaneous as we thought. :stare:

But I digress. Equestrian hierarchy is a mess for a number of reasons:

1. Why is Celestia a princess? We have a title for the reigning monarch of a nation, it’s called a queen.

2. According to Wikipedia, princess is a title given either to the daughters of a queen or the consort of a prince. Neither of these applies to any of the princesses apart from, perhaps, Celestia and Luna. However, this would mean that the sisters were either related by blood to the previous monarch(s) or, at some point in the distant past shortly prior to becoming alicorns, married princes. That Meritocratic Alicorn Theory is looking shakier and shakier. Perhaps it’s a conspiracy. Perhaps the sisters only want to give their subjects the illusion of meritocracy to avoid a revolution.

3. If only alicorns can create alicorns, where did the first alicorn come from? Since the raising of the sun and moon was initially the unicorns’ jurisdiction, I suppose if enough powerful, learned unicorns gathered together they could collectively cast the alicorn spell on any pony of their choosing. If no alicorn prior to Flurry Heart was natural born then this would seem to be the only explanation. That brings up another question: why would the unicorns willingly create alicorn rulers to do the thing they’d already been doing themselves since time immemorial? Especially since Hearth’s Warming Eve established that the unicorns already had a monarchy. Are Celestia and Luna descended from this original royal unicorn family, or did they replace them?

4. If royalty is elected by Celestia on the basis of merit, then what about Blueblood and Shining Armor? Why aren’t they alicorns? You could explain that away by assuming that Equestrians are misandristic and don’t ascend stallions, fair enough, but what about their royal titles? Shining Armor married a princess, but what of Blueblood? Is he married to a sixth alicorn princess we’ve never heard of, or is he the son of a princess? So… in Equestria, the title of the son of a prince and princess is prince? That’s… not confusing at all.

5. Again, if royalty is elected by Celestia on the basis of merit, what happens to the offspring of princes and princesses? Where’s Flurry Heart going to end up? She can’t rule since because meritocracy, but since it’s been established that Equestria is a magical land where destiny is an actual thing and nothing happens by chance then why is it Flurry Heart’s destiny to be an alicorn?

6. How did Cadence manage to squeeze, like, two feet of horn, condor wings, and a skull literally bigger than both of her glutes combined out of her anorexic cooch? That mare should be dead.

Phrew…! These mental gymnastics are wearing me out… it’d be so much easier if Hasbro had just Googled a list of actual hierarchical titles. Queen Celestia, Princess Luna, Grand Duchess Twilight and Cade– Wait… wait, Cadence rules the Crystal Empire, that would make her Empress Cadence. Empress is the highest title in the world… Cadence outranks Celestia.

Hasbro, you need to fix your scheisse. :stare: