Foals - Unicorn surges and Pegasus flying

[Hippo]

Here's where I think we should stand on the whole super-foals issue that has arised from the episode "Baby Cakes".

Rainbow Dash says "As soon as he gets his little wings going, he'll be all over the place."

Rarity says "Baby Unicorns get strange magic surges that come and go"

My analysis and proposal: Foals are not fully developed yet, so their special physical traits can get redeveloped as they grow. Unicorns have dashes of magic given to them while they are very young, but as they mature, they begin to lose the ease of magic and require study to properly tame magic spells. The pegasus thing is quite easy, actually. Perhaps their wings are close to full strength when they are very young, but when they grow bigger, the increased weight makes it harder for them to fly around freely.

In humans, it can relate to flexibility. As babies, all of us are super flexible. But the older we get, the harder we have to work to keep that flexibility. We start off very flexible because our bones are flimsy and underdeveloped. There also may be several quirky stupid human tricks that some of us were capable when we were young, but now that we're in our prime, those activities are impossible to be done with the way our body developed.

To say that Pumpkin Cake has more magical power than Twilight is absurd, and the thought that Scootaloo has an inability to fly is also presumptious.

Constructive criticisms and other comments are welcome.

[Ginger Mint]

hi hi

Sounds good. Ponies really are fast growers. Now, ponies in Equestria are sorta like people and sort of like ponies, but I think there's enough precedent in either case to make things work out just fine.

Foals are precocious developers and, unlike calves or fawns, which tend to lie in undergrowth, can gallop with their dams within a few hours of birth. Foals begin to engage in exploratory trips away from the dam with other foals between one and two months of age.

For Pegasi, its not hard to assume that their wings grow more slowly when they're young and it takes a while to catch up. Add in a healthy dash of how different ponies are going to have different levels of natural ability at one thing or another, and it makes sense. Rainbow Dash did have difficulties performing the Sonic Rainboom as an adult anyway.

As for Pumpkin Cake's (and presumably all unicorn foals) weird magic surges...

• Twilight mentions from time to time that magic takes concentration. Babies are often very single minded when they want something, so there's plenty of concentration there.

• Spike says that Unicorns usually only have a little bit of magic that relates to their special talent, but as a foal, they've only barely started developing a special talent, so they're pretty much pure 100% raw potential at that stage.

• Because they are mentally not very complicated, its not too hard to assume that they might, on occasion, resonate with external sources of magic too. Which might also help explain the random bursts of magic.

[Bramble Rose]

It's rather like human babies. Human babies fall very easily - they go limp, they do all the right things. They react fully on instinct.

As human babies grow up, they start to think about it ... and they stiffen up as they fall, they try to control it. It's not a conscious thing, it's just a natural thing. And that's why little kids start breaking bones when they fall, when similar falls were just fine when they were babies.

In a similar manner, as the little baby ponies grow up, they stop reacting so much on instinct, and they start thinking about it... and then they can't use it nearly so easily. They have to relearn what instinct gave them automatically.

Trying to live one's entire life on instinct would make one a menace to everypony around.

[Hippo]

kids are naturally egocentric. It's nature's way.

[Ashton]

Personally I think it generally has to do with each foal's unique characteristics, to put it into a gaming sense, it has to do with the stats they rolled or are given when they're born. We've seen foals of all 3 breeds struggle with feats of strength in past episodes, while Pound cake seems to be much stronger than any of them. Likely he simply had a high STR(ength) score compared to others. It also could be related to pegasai and their wing-growth vs body growth, as stated above, their wings may be relatively large compared to their bodies at birth, allowing them to fly early, but as their bodies grow they have to either engage in some form of strength training or wait for their wings to catch up (Dash, always athletic, had no problems flying quite fast as a filly, even breaking MACH-1, while Scootaloo, who seems to me to be notably less athletic, can do no more than create gusts of air from her wings)

In a meta-sense, I think it follows (1) Rule of Funny (due to circumstances in the episode), (2) Rule of Cool, and (3) that Pound Cake is, at least in my opinion, a pony Expy of another famous super-strong baby belonging to a certain stone-age family...

Similar circumstances, I think, surround a unicorn foal's magic, though it could also have to do with willpower (which is always a factor in magic) since Pumpkin Cake didn't show any major magic until she had a strong desire to (1) get her toys back (which also could have taught her that she was ABLE to do magic) and then (2) imitate her brother's flying. However, the latter seems to break down when we look at Sweetybelle who is much older than pumpkin and seems to lack even basic telekinesis that all unicorns possess as an inane ability. One might also conclude that surges of adrenaline will boost magic, which would explain pumpkins'a sudden flying magic whens he got excited to see her brother fly (as well as why Twilight, when startled by Dash's Rainboom, released a surge of wild, uncontrolled magic at her entrance exam)