@Doomguy  
Jackie Chan you say?
 

@Poptard
 
no stop just stop
 
That Jackie Chan thing really triggers my ‘gtfo off my screen’ reflex. I don’t need an aging martial acts actor to feed me stupid platitudes.
 
My point, as you apparently missed it, was that folk is basically extended family. In Ponyville, everyone is everyone elses second cousin twice removed, especially if they’re earth ponies, because it’s set up and shown as a traditional, static, agrarian community with a limited number of family bloodlines. Ie. They are a folk. A people.
 
You basically took a statement that pointed out the obvious inter-relatedness of a living community and turned it into a “everyone can be your family as long as you wuv them!!” universalism, which is obviously not true.
 
You can’t love teh everyone, you can’t hug every cat. When you love someone specific you privilege their specific being-ness over other being-ness-es. Chances are someone you love or are friends with is someone you have a lot of genetic commonality with, because you’d be able to relate to them better. Friends have closer DNA than strangers.

@Doomguy
 

 
You’re right, the point wasn’t that family and family traits don’t need to be shared by blood, just if you love and accept the others as part of your own kin, which is why they outright stated that blood or not, they’re part of the same family. Great aesop for adopted children of step-family and in laws.
 
But, the point I made by linking that even if the two were blood related, union between the current members of either family wouldn’t be incest in either a cultural or biological sense/ However, I was still wrong then, since I misinterpreted it, anyway. She said “fourth cousin twice removed by a fifth cousin,” which means “fourth cousin twice removed through a fifth cousin,” so they never shared a common descendant at all, rendering the incest issue a moot point either way.

@Poptard
 
I thought Pinkie was only possibly Applejack’s Fourth Cousin Twice Removed (or something equally tenuous?)
 
I actually thought the central message of that particular episode was that in a small traditional community with lifelong friendships, it’s highly likely that there’s some sort of traceable blood relation between familial friends as well, and that we’re not all ‘just individuals’ but are enmeshed as part of living community.
 
But the only thing the fandom can think about is LUL INCEST. Oh well.

@SFaccountant  
I’m copy-pasting the exact words that Pinkie’s using, but there’s only so many ways you can say “look at this chart, they aren’t quite closely related” before they start to sound similar.

@Vox
 
Except for stunted IQ and such

@Doomguy  
This is a fast ship. This is like the Millennium Falcon.

@Poptard  
Out of curiosity, are you copy-pasting that text for easy posting? Because I’m seeing it a lot.

@Poptard  
In real life, first cousins are allowed to marry in much of the civilised world. The fact fo the matter is that there’s not that much risk of defects outside of one’s immediate family.

@tiarawhy  
Man tiara, you really changed your style. But no need to try to distance yourself from it with this reverse psychology, it’s really great!

I’m not even going to save this or rate it because of the water marks [smug trixie face]

WHOS THE ARTIST?!

guys help i can’t figure out who the artist is D:

Isn’t that the fancy salad Angel had Fluttershy make for him?

@Poptard  
Yeah, it’s an amazing coincidence that both of their first names are “Art”, their middle names are “By”, and their last names are “xCaliAngelx”.

@migotoren  
I went back and looked at the scene in Pinkie Apple Pie where Pinkie explains her possible relation to Applejack’s family, which she says she’d be “a fourth cousin twice removed by a fifth cousin.” If that looks hard to visualize, look at this:
 

 
And fourth cousin isn’t even on there, and twice removing by a fifth cousin would mean they aren’t even related by their great-great-great-great-grandfather. In real life terms, basically over 200 years of divergence. And also in real life, anything off that one chart isn’t considered incest.

Man, I really love the pairing between the helpfully-identified characters, the gentle giant xCaliAngelx and the shy and demure xCaliAngelx. We’ll call the ship xCalixAngelx.

@armadiloeater  

 
you stole the joke i was about to make

@migotoren  

 
Following your logic we’d all be related. It doesn’t count after so many generations.

WARNIN! REMEMBER THAT THEY COULD BE RELATED

this happens so fast now.

Wait, who’s the artist? I don’t think there are enough watermarks, I can’t be sure.