Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2021 April 28

= April 28 =

Second try: alligorical meaning of pony music videos

 * Copied from archives. 2601:647:4D00:2C40:982F:103F:C8B3:D678 (talk) 10:09, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

Would someone please explain the allegorical meaning of ? Please compare and contrast with.

I have further questions regarding and.

2601:647:4D00:2C40:CCD0:7BD9:21A8:D1CE (talk) 07:54, 28 March 2021 (UTC)


 * What makes you think there is an allegorical meaning to these videos? Apparently, someone has fun adding My Little Pony animations to the sound tracks of well-known pop songs, such as, for the first two, a cover of "Holding Out for a Hero" by Jennifer Saunders, taken from the soundtrack of Shrek 2. --Lambiam 13:17, 28 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Because there is no such thing as an alicorn unless it's to evoke the idea of an allegory. My question stands. 2601:647:4D00:2C40:982F:103F:C8B3:D678 (talk) 10:09, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * But it has nothing to do with these videos. Why did the creator of the MLP universe choose to add a line of winged unicorn ponies to the menagerie? My best guess is that Hasbro expected they would sell and help to increase their profit. What is the allegorical meaning of money? --Lambiam 10:54, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Agreed, it seems to be solely intended as entertainment for children. As to why we are entertained by talking or singing animals, see The mind behind anthropomorphic thinking: attribution of mental states to other species for some research. Alansplodge (talk) 11:12, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I mostly agree although we should consider there are two aspects here. From what I can tell, those videos are simply mashups of scenes from some My Little Pony cartoons with some other music added. The My Little Pony cartoons were obviously intended primarily as a money generating exercise. I'm sure their creators were also generally interested in creating something entertaining that they could be proud of, bound by the rules and requirements of the studio funding them. Their original target was children, especially young girls but the recent cartoons also found wider success. I'm sure some of the cartoons had some allegories but as cartoons primarily targeted at children, it probably wasn't generally that sophisticated, even after the wider success was recognised. The wider success bit naturally leads to the second issue. There's a very good chance as with a lot of mashups, the people creating them just made them because they thought they would be fun mashups and they either didn't know or didn't care or just hoped they would be fine despite creating what are likely copyright violations, again as with a lot of mashups. They probably weren't intending to create any allegories, indeed probably the thought never entered their mind. I don't know if these videos were even really targeting children, there's a good chance they were made by (and targeting) the wider My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom often called bronies. Even targeting can be misleading, I'm not sure whether both creators necessarily targeted anyone, it's possibly they mostly created it for themselves and posted it since others may like it. Nil Einne (talk) 14:59, 29 April 2021 (UTC)


 * The idea of allegories remains associated with unicorns but there is no rule that placing anew an unicorn will generate a new allegory (to generate a new allegory, knowing that the current discussion has taken place, let us replace one of the unicorns or more in the videos with anything else - but only if it is something of a look-a-like - then we call to the public for comment = output - this is how it works ). --Askedonty (talk) 14:51, 28 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Unicorns and winged horses appear in many mythologies so there are overlapping and multiple symbolic meanings. Some of the aspects that such a creature might represent, from purity (unicorn) to death (horse) to the sun (flying horse) are discussed in sources such as Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human, or The_Continuum_Encyclopedia_of_Symbols. Other wiki articles include White horses in mythology, Horse in Chinese mythology,Pegasus, Solar deity, Hippocampus (mythology), Horse (zodiac), and Unicorn Trend. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 14:57, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

Jacintha Buddicom's Labour Lord
Do we know who the Labour peer was who had a thirty-year relationship with Jacintha Buddicom? Thank you, DuncanHill (talk) 18:17, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Maybe her memoir Eric & Us, or the 2006 postscript by her cousin mentioned in the Wikipedia article name the peer. Perhaps you could check there.-- Jayron 32 11:47, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

New York school districts
How are New York school district boundaries ascertained? Does each one comprise one or more towns or cities (so crossing a town/city border often puts you in a different district), or are districts separate from municipalities (so district boundaries and municipal boundaries are totally different), or something else? A basic Ctrl+F search of List of school districts in New York finds about seven hundred districts, while List of towns in New York says there are about a thousand towns and cities, so I'm guessing that it's not true that every city and town operates its own district. Education in New York (state) has just a tiny section about primary/secondary education, and most of it talks about financing, demographics, and enrolment/employment statistics, with no information about who runs districts. I'm most familiar with Ohio (where districts are totally unrelated to anything else, so they have crazy borders), Pennsylvania (where districts are collections of municipalities), and Virginia (where each county or city runs its own district), so if you can compare New York to one of those, it would help me understand better. Nyttend (talk) 19:39, 28 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not 100% certain exactly how it works in New York, but in most states, school districts are a kind of special purpose district, which are quasi-municipal bodies which are functionally independent from the municipalities and/or counties they overlay. New York appears to have a multi-level hierarchical system (except for New York City... In New York State, almost everything is "except for New York City", which generally operates under its own rules) See Boards of Cooperative Educational Services.  Picking through random school districts in New York, it looks districts can vary a lot from place to place; in some places they may be part of a municipal unit, in some places they may be coterminous with one, and in some places they may cover multiple municipal units.  -- Jayron 32 11:41, 29 April 2021 (UTC)