Tear Jerker / The Great Alicorn Hunt

• The driving motivation for Celestia and Luna wanting to make every possible being immortal comes down to the fact that they have lived so long that anyone they get close to lives for what is from their perspective a few weeks at best. They have lived for so long and lost so many ponies that they actually compare mortality to a terminal illness that needs to be cured.
  • Even worse is that both of them have suffered personally from their immortality. Celestia after she sealed away Nightmare Moon was completely alone and resigned to losing Twilight at some point, which from her point of view would have been in mere days! Luna was in a Mayfly–December Romance that reached its conclusion with her lover's death.
  • The specific analogy that is used to make Celestia and Luna's situation relative is also bound to provoke a few tears: Imagine being the mother of a terminally ill child, watching that child wither and die in a few months, and then imagine going through that over and over again, for thousands of years, all while you are desperately trying every method under the sun to save them. It's really no surprise that they started to get distant after a while in order to minimize the pain of each loss.
• Pinkie Pie thought for years that her family sent her away because they didn't want her around because of being "Ill-Starred". She spent the entire time she was in Ponyville believing they didn't want her. They sent her to Ponyville for her own protection so that their superstitious neighbors wouldn't try to hurt their daughter, except they never told her that until they were forced to come to Pinkie's Coronation.
• Twilight was a victim of bullying back in magical kindergarten. She'd been carrying the pain inside for years and not even her mentor Celestia knew about it. While she claims to be over it, there are equal chances that she really isn't and her experiences helped feed her more negative traits (her obsessive compulsive behavior) in the present day due to the trauma.
• Rainbow Dash, following her ascension, has to give up her dream of joining the Wonderbolts to avoid making it look like she got by using her newly bestowed title as a princess. To add insult to injury she doesn't even get the consolation of friendship with them because they think she's some egocentric that got lucky by becoming an Alicorn.
  • Even worse is that Spitfire's "The Reason You Suck" Speech had her saying that Dash doesn't deserve her position because joining the Wonderbolts means starting at the bottom and working your way up to the top, something that Dash was actually looking forward to. So not only is Rainbow Dash denied her dream because of a stroke of fate making it so she can't do things the right way, which she wanted to do, but her well meaning attempts at the next best thing only make the ponies she looks up to hate her more.
  • Rainbow's physical and verbal smackdown is both awesome and this. Things got that bad between the 'Bolts and Rainbow, to the point that a fight occurs. Furthermore during her verbal smackdown, Rainbow mentions their poor treatment and behavior towards her...... and gets reduced to tears. Spitfire's subsequent conscience only worsens the mood.
• Mud Puppy's backstory. The little Alicorn of the swamp is one of only two survivors of dozens of stillbirth and infant deaths due to the mothers drinking the pony equivalent of Thalidomide, the other being Twig, a batpony born without the wing webbings, in addition to said wings being too small as well. Because all the foals were born with serious deformities, she grew up her whole life believing she was just another malformed pony that happened to survive instead of being what she actually was. How bad was it? She could fill an entire clearing with a special medicinal plant specifically noted to be extremely difficult to cultivate in just SECONDS by inducing flash growth of Earth Pony Magic... and think's she's being slow due to being "defective" and not being a trained city unicorn.
• Cotton Mouth's story on how he was Driven to Madness. While his own father was a true Snake Oil Salesman, he reveals that he wanted to be a true potioneer, and that he had discovered a vitality booster that would help ponies by enhancing their magical, physical, and mental faculties regardless of whether they were unicorn, Pegasus, or earth pony. The problem was that like the original Snake Oil, which truly worked due to a key component being a specific compound that was only described in general terms, a mistranslation or one of the substitutes that he used made the potion absolutely worthless and in fact dangerous. The end result was horrendous disfigurement (due to testing it on himself) and the guilt of causing 35 foals to either be stillborn or die from massive birth defects. When Luna catches up to him, he begs her for a Mercy Kill - which she grants.
  • And just in case you weren't aware by now - said foals were all age-mates to Mudpuppy and Twig. His efforts caused their misfortune too.
• The climactic moment of Chapter 42: With most of their defenses shattered, the zombies continuing to advance in large numbers, and Mudpuppy too exhausted to use her plant magic any further, Sweetie Belle decides the only thing she can do at this point is sing a gentle song to comfort Mudpuppy. She ends up singing so soulfully that the zombies remember their conscience, feel horrible about what they've done, and then turn on Malifec. Their spirits apologize to Sweetie, who forgives them and sings another song to send them to their final rest.]] Shortly after this, she discovers her new cutie mark, which includes a blue-white star like the ones the spirits resembled. When her family members speculate on what her new cutie mark means, she tells them that it means something very special, but she isn't ready to talk about it just yet, with her mother gently comforting her as she cries.
• Banana Foster's backstory. He's from a wealthy family that owns banana plantations and they want him to be a rich brat and don't approve his love for comedy or his friends.
  • Really all of the Nobody's Fools; they're all misfits for one reason or other and society wants to kick them in the teeth just for being who they are.
    • And then we learn that the reason that Foster's parents don't approve of his interests and friends and the reason they want him hobnobbing with the privileged is because they are trying to get taken seriously by society. They own a banana plantation but are PEGASI; unicorn nobility don't accept them for not being unicorns, pegasi look down on them for working the dirt and earth ponies don't accept them for doing what is traditionally an earth pony job. And they are so obsessed with making it big and creating a business empire that they were completely clueless regarding their son's specialty or how pressuring him to get into business like they want him to was hurting him. His baby sister is the only member of his family he gets along with.
  • AND THEN we learn that all the problems that Foster was having was because his grandmother got a big head after her husband got a mansion built with their money. Her family could have been torn apart because of her pride and ambition.
• Mach himself mentions that due to one of his wing growing wrong, the doctors had to cut it off. Since this effectively disables his flight, he had to be sent to live in Windy City. He resented the mentality of ponies who assured him that it's all right if he is rendered unable to fly forever even as they were finding a retirement home to send him to live in. What's worse? He spent the last night before his operation writing letters in crayon to Princess Celestia, begging for her to come fix his wing before he loses it for good. What makes it still worse is that Celestia was working on this exact thing and Twilight sees the results in one of her Potential-Panacea workshops (Our Lady of Sunshine hospital) but the local hospital administrators refuse to even consider using such treatments because of their absurd "being crippled is good" mentality.
  • His speech to Scootaloo about how ponies look down upon those that do not conform to their standards (like getting caught using magic/flight to do work Earth Ponies do with muscle, being disabled/a weak flyer for Pegasi, and having to be a unicorn to be a nobility member/ enroll in 'gifted schools of magic') is also tear-inducing. In real life what he said could invite controversy, but he had a very good reason for thinking that way, because he, his gang, and (in his words) Scootaloo herself have experienced it at one point in their lives.
  • In the same speech, he points out that Pegasi build their cities in the clouds, not just to exclude eggheads and clodhoppers, but because it's easier to murder defectives that way, by literally bumping them off-and they still don't believe in guardrails, even hundreds of years after the custom supposedly stopped. Please think back to Cutie Mark Chronicles. Remember how nopony helped Fluttershy when she fell?
• In chapter 49, Mach tells Scootaloo why he and Fussbudget are at odds. When Mach was 5 (shortly after he lost his wing), his mom and dad get caught in an accident in the weather factory and died. After that, his Uncle Fussbudget took him in....for about six months. See, he was running for Mayor for the very first time, and he apparently figured that the voters would eat it up if he fostered a ''poor little crippled orphan''. He dragged Mach around for his campaign meetings and rallies, fed him lines to say but when they were offstage Mach didn't even exist to him. Fussbudget had one of his assistants look after the colt. (Quote Mach, "I might as well have been a cardboard cutout, for all he really cared.”) It all came to a head at Mach's birthday that year. The "party" was a fundraiser hosted by a “flightless pride” activist group basically just meant for drumming up support for Fussbudget and he didn't even bother to get Mach a real cake (instead just getting a prop made out of paper mache). Here's Mach on what happened next. It's hard to blame him for snapping like he did.
  They drag me up front; I blow out the candles. The reporters start lobbing fluff questions at me, one of them asks me what I wished for... and I sort of... snapped." He looked a little sheepish. "I told them I wished my parents weren't dead, I wished that I wasn't a stupid cripple, and I wished I was living with anypony other than my stupid, butt kissing, vote-grubbing uncle.”
• In chapter 51 Scootaloo finds out she has a horn, then a Cutie Mark and then she's able to fly. The text is better at describing what happened next:
  A door creaked. Scootaloo turned in midair. It was Rainbow Dash, standing in the front door. She'd obviously been standing there watching for some time. She was smiling and her eyes were shining. “Hey, Squirt,” she said softly. “'Sup?”
  
  She said the first dumb thing that popped into her head. “Hey Dash,” Scootaloo laughed and hiccuped. “I got my Cutie Mark....” She wiped her face with her foreleg, why were her eyes watering, why was it so hard to see—? She flew, literally really flew, into Dash's embrace, colliding with her chest with a thump. Dash squeezed her tight enough to pop. Scootaloo started blubbering like a baby, it was so humiliating but she just couldn't stop, big fat tears rolling down her face in a torrent. “I can fly, I can fly, I can fly, I can fly...”
  • Earlier, Mach One wakes up after ascending and flying for the first time in his life, to find that his wing is a stump again. He has to fight back tears. Luckily, it's only temporary; the wing is gradually regenerating as part of his ascension, and he can conjure a phantom one out of magic in the meantime.
• The reaction of the rich ponies when they learned about the accession of the CMC qualifies as well. They are terrified that they are going to be ruined because this is what happens in their society. What kind of parent installs that kind of fear in their children?