A meme I've seen perpetuated by bronies is the belief that unicorns are the most powerful of the three pony races. When I was a young brony and first got into the show up until today, I always thought that this belief was wrong.
Magic Systems
In MLP there is passive and active magic being used. Most races in Equestria seem to have passive magic abilities that are unique to their race like pegasi being able to walk on clouds, manipulate weather, and even being able to fly or dragons being immune to lava and I would assume heat-based damage. With unicorns, their ability is active magic. Their magic allows them to do anything within the limits of the magic system at will as long as they have the spell, ability, and energy. This is the problem with unicorns and why they aren't overpowered as people think. They must have these three things to use their magic which not all unicorns have.
The people that think unicorns are superior to the other pony races seem to fail to realize that not every unicorn is on Twilight Sparkle's level. They look at Twilight who is an extremely powerful unicorn pre-alicorn and assume all unicorns are like her for some reason. The powerful magic shown by unicorns is all done mostly by characters like Twilight Sparkle, Starlight Glimmer, and Starswirl the Bearded. These are all extremely powerful unicorns that studied magic their entire lives with Twilight tutored by Celestia herself. The vast majority of the unicorn population doesn't even come close to the power of these characters. Most unicorns only seem to be capable of levitation and magic related to their occupation.
Active magic in MLP is shown to be something that has to be learned, even by unicorns. While it isn't explained how magic works active or passive, I have my theories that apply to most magic systems in fantasy settings. Magic in general is a manipulation of the physical laws of a universe outside of scientific means. Active magic is the at-will manipulation of these laws to create the desired effect. Active magic however must be learned and casted. Most of the time magic is casted via a spell along with a tool to do said casting. This causes me to think of most magic systems to function like computer programming. Spells being like a script containing the code and a tool whether it be a wand, staff, or in this case, a unicorn's horn to act as the interpreter of that code and cast the spell or execute it.
With this explanation of active magic, unicorns must essentially learn to 'program' which is a genuine skill to be learned. But a skill like this takes time to learn and while anyone can learn how to print or do basic calculations in programming, it takes serious time and effort to get to the point of being able to understand and write code competently. I see spells and active magic being the same way. While most unicorns can do basic levitation or simple spells, it would require serious study, learning, and practice to do more powerful magic. Most unicorns simply do not require the use of this magic and therefore will not learn beyond simple magic. This is why unicorns are not some ultra-powerful master race just as anyone that can write a hello world program isn't suddenly a master hacker. And levitation may not actually really be an active magic as levitation is shown to probably be a spell-less magic unicorns develop as they grow up making it possibly be a passive magic that's just activated at will which would further strengthen my point.
It is also shown that various artifacts have magical abilities and magic potions exist. While unicorns have biological means of casting magic, it may be possible to create tools that can do what a unicorn's horn can do. Artifacts have already been shown to be able to make wielders into powerful beings. Potions are also able to magically affect its consumers. If I remember correctly, wielders of artifacts that become powerful also don't really gain fine-tuned active magic, they usually just get much more raw power and energy. Active magic they do already know could be amplified though explaining any magic that isn't just energy manipulation.
Pony Race War
Something I've imagined a few times is who would win in a war between the three pony races. I think about the abilities of each race and simulate what would happen in my mind. I have come to the conclusion that if the pony races did go to war with each other, it would basically be between earth ponies and pegasi. My rationale being food. Earth ponies having growth magic, something I believed they had years before Gen 5 confirmed it, have a strong advantage in this field. Pegasi being able to manipulate weather, would be able to use weather manipulation to perfectly grow food. In a war, an offensive strategy by pegasi would be to manipulate weather around earth ponies and unicorns to make food growth much harder. Earth ponies having growth magic would most likely be able to easily deal with this but unicorns would have to deal with drought. There would be unicorns able to use spells to try to grow food but this would require learning and enacting those spells at a scale large enough to grow food for the entire society. This would take a lot of energy. Energy to teach the spells to a sufficient number of unicorns and a lot of energy for these unicorns to constantly be trying to grow the food. If a balance is not maintained, either food is spread too thin and morale and total energy to fight goes down or only the privileged get enough food and this could create infighting among the unicorns and weaken them.
Earth ponies and pegasi are also encouraged to innovate and create technology whereas with unicorns and most magical beings in fiction, lack heavily in technology as their magic is the substitute. Earth ponies and pegasi would be innovating much more in terms of weapons and defenses whereas unicorns would mostly be reliant on their magic. In the end, a war would probably result in the well fed, well defended earth ponies and the sly, out of sight pegasi fighting while the unicorns struggle with food problems and societal balancing.
Now if every pony of every race was the strongest we've seen in the show, every earth pony being an equivalent of Applejack, every pegasus a Rainbow Dash, and every unicorn a Twilight Sparkle then I think the unicorns would most likely win but this is not how Equestrian reality is.
Written 2023-5-20 Published 2023-6-1