@CMC Scootaloo
Two times is an awful lot?
I’m not sure what you mean by skepticism, to be honest – I mean, I get why I could come across as overly harsh or critical, but I’m not certain where skepticism comes in.
Then again, I don’t think I explained myself as well as I should have. Here’s my point: it’s clear that the individual guards are separate ponies who can be assumed to have their own histories, names, identities and such, but the issue is that the royal guard models, male and female, routinely appear multiple times in any given scene.
Their models are not treated as, and do not behave like, unique individuals. Individuals do not generally appear in dozens of different places at once.
If we see a guard in the show, we need to have a name for them so we can refer to them. It doesn’t matter how similar they look, they are still individual ponies.
Very true, but consider these pictures:
All right, they’re all individual ponies despite looking identical. Do we need a second name for the second instance of Guardian Angel in the one on the left? The one on the right has nearly a dozen copies of four identical models – do we name each instance? That’s clearly not feasible. To begin with, we cannot tell which individual a given copy-pasted model embodies – how do we tell which of the various specific guards appears in each shot they show up in? Do the two guards in the picture on the left also appear in the one on the right?
Alternatively, do we name each model and use this name to refer to each picture in which this model appears at least once? That’s much more manageable – we’re doing it for Guardian Angel, the blue mare, easily enough. At the end of the day, that’s what the
royal guard, night guard
and
crystal guard
tags already do, after a fashion.
Or put another way, my point is this:
These two background pony models are used in the same manner in the show; therefore, logically, they should be treated, identified and so on in the same manner. If we decide that the one on the right does not logically warrant an individual name, neither does the one on the left. If we decide that the one on the left
does warrant an individual name, so does the one on the right.
Now, I want to make clear that
I am not saying we should not name the various guards in any way. I
am saying that we need to keep in mind that, when we pair a name with a guard model,
we are naming a general type of guard and that that name will be used to refer to large numbers of wholly separate individuals rather than to a single, sole and specific person, and to models that can, and do and will, routinely appear multiple times in any given shot. Background guards are not used like regular background ponies, who outside of very large crowd shots in the early seasons are generally only used once in any given shot and can thus be said to pair any one Flash model with one specific person.
@SecretTitan
@GenericArchangel
I am very much in favor of this idea. “Gray guard” and “white guard” seem like good general names for the Canterlot royal guards. We already have “
crystal guard and “
night guard; “night guard”, however, seems to refer to both the Canterlot guards’ night shift and to Luna’s bat-winged guards. I would personally differentiate the two by renaming Luna’s guards “lunar guards”, but I’m not sure how easy or advisable it would be to fight the inertia of the fandom’s and this site’s history of calling them night guards.
Sombra’s soldiers already have, well “
sombra soldier. There are also the
pegasus guards from “Hearth’s Warming Eve”; perhaps “ancient guard” for them?