[Written as part of Notebook Blog Month.]
I’ve saved the most important topic for last. As far as I can tell, nobody on the internet has tackled the vital question of how My Little Pony characters map to Mitford sisters. So I’m going to fix that.
As a bit of background, the Mitfords were a wildly eccentric English aristocratic family. The novelist Nancy Mitford is probably the most famous of them, but her five sisters were an impressively bizarre mix of communists, fascists, socialites, farmers and Hitler obsessives. (There’s also a brother who nobody cares about.) I’m not particularly well up on Mitford lore, but I am a big fan of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, and I’m fascinated by eccentrics of all kinds, so I know the basics.
My Little Pony also has six main characters. (Plus Spike.) They turn out to match up surprisingly closely with Mitford sisters, right up to the point where they don’t, and then I just have to make it up.
So, first of all, Nancy Mitford is Twilight Sparkle. This one is completely obvious. In The Pursuit of Love, Nancy is the narrator of a fictionalised version of the Mitfords’ lives, with her as the quieter, more studious observer. Done.
Deborah Mitford was a famous socialite known for… being social and stuff. Lots of witty correspondence with other witty socialite types. She also ran a big stately home that was open to the public, which is kind of like organising parties if you squint hard enough. So Pinkie Pie.
Jessica Mitford was the most adventurous and rebellious of the sisters, running away to Spain and then later becoming an activist in the US, where she worked on civil rights campaigns and joined the Communist Party. Also investigated unscrupulous business practices in the funeral home industry for some reason. Clearly has to be Rainbow Dash.
Unity Valkyrie Mitford is the oddest of the lot. She became completely obsessed with Hitler, stalked him around Munich, eventually made her way into his inner circle, shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany, survived the attempt and lasted out almost another ten years before dying of meningitis caused by swelling around the bullet, which was never removed. I feel like this is a job for Rarity, partly because of the rhyming name, partly because she’s the only one capable of pulling off this much drama.
OK, this is the point where the mapping gets a bit trickier. The two remaining sisters are Pamela and Diana. Pamela was the most retiring of the Mitfords, staying out of the public eye, at least in comparison to the others. She was practical-minded, loved animals and the countryside and managed a farm for a while. A pretty good fit for either Applejack or Fluttershy. She did still manage to do some weird Mitford stuff, marrying a bisexual millionaire physicist and then becoming the ‘companion’ of an Italian horsewoman after they divorced.
Diana is the dud Mitford. She was another fascist, and not even a spectacularly bizarre one like Unity. Mainly known for marrying Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, editing a fascist magazine, and spending some time in prison during the war for being a fascist.
I don’t really want to lumber either of them with Diana, but I need to make a choice, so I’ve introduced an outside tie break. Fluttershy is best pony. So Fluttershy gets Pamela Mitford and poor old Applejack is stuck with Diana Mitford.
I’m sure everyone’s relieved that this major open question has been definitively answered at last.
drossbucket 