She only looks cute to you.
It had been hard enough, being one of the first. With the walls dropped, leaving her nation, her herd, traveling to Japan and trying to exist among so many strangers... every day had been a challenge. But she'd tried. Day by day, hoofstep by hoofstep, she'd felt she was finding her place in the human world.
But now there are no humans. No other demis or liminals. Nothing to anchor her. She exists among tiny horses and the scent of their fear, or at least what little of it drifts into her cell.
For nopony can look at a centaur and see anything but a monster.
Daily Equestria Life with Monster Girl is a crossover between My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (as a sequel to Anchor Foal and using most of the setting, characterization, and magic rules previously established in the Triptych Continuum) and Monster Musume, written by Estee. The story can be read here
. It is complete, spanning 100 chapters published from February 2019 to July 2022.
Greetings, trope list! I see thou dost remember me!
- Abnormal Limb Rotation Range: Part of centaur biology: any being that large needs some interesting flexibility just to reach the far end of their own backs. It's also how Cerea starts to work on her escape after the original capture: not only did the locals not know how to shackle something with hands, but she's capable of compressing them to be slightly smaller in diameter than her wrists, allowing her to slip the cuffs. (Which still scraped some skin off and hurt like hell.)
- Abusive Parents: To put things in the proper perspective; Cerea's mother may have been such a bitch that Cerea actually perceives Emery Board, a Drill Sergeant Nasty who takes it as a matter of pride that he has never had a student who didn't want to kill him, as the closest thing she's ever had to a loving and supportive parent, simply because he intersperses his explosive outbursts of orders with honest appraisals of her efforts and occasionally gives her some positive reinforcement.
- There's another interpretation: due to the nature of centaur stallions even in the best case, this may be the first time in Cerea's life when an older male has paid real attention to her while trying to make sure she succeeds at something.
- Accentuate the Negative: From two directions. Cerea always stands ready to find the fault with her own actions: have her fight off most of an insect swarm with a weapon unsuited to the task, and she'll focus on one having gotten through. Meanwhile, Wordia Spinner is just waiting to take any centaur-related event and make the worst from it.
- The first example has been noticed by other characters: Chapter 35 sees Nightwatch ask Cerea to, just for a little while, stop attacking herself.
- Adaptational Sexuality: Closer to Adaptational Sexual Confusion. Most of Cerea knows about her own deepest desires is that she's never been attracted to centaur stallions (and has felt like that means there's something wrong with her, as every other mare seems to manage). She's never actively pursued a relationship with a female, but feels that she was closed out of the Gay Romantic Phase of herd life and seems to regret not having gotten to participate in 'the time for love'. The most she ever felt towards any girl in the household was sisterly affection. And she certainly isn't feeling anything towards ponies. Ultimately, there's a suggestion that what she's looking for is anyone who'll both love and accept her, and her eyes may have initially fallen on Kimihito just because he was the first person who listened to her.
- Affectionate Nickname: Taken about as far as it can go in Chapter 15, after Cerea learns that the translation device initially rendered her birth name as 'Centaur'. The sisters want to introduce her by something less fear-inducing, and she has another name to present — but to her, doing so means she's essentially asking the entire world to be her friend.
- Animalistic Abomination: Cerberus, in contrast to the "oversized Gentle Giant three-headed bulldog" seen in the cartoon, is a true monster who has to be placated with a blood sacrifice to allow Cerea and the Mane Six to enter Tartarus. The difference is explained that the more "normal" form is what happens if Cerberus leaves Tartarus, whilst this is the state he attains within Tartarus. In particular, now that he's "on duty", Cerberus possesses a toxic saliva powerful enough to cow even the other Eldritch Abominations present in Tartarus, and Fluttershy's ability to commune with animals has no effect on him at all (he can hear her, but he won't listen).
- Animals Lack Attributes: After wondering about it for weeks, Chapter 35 finally has Cerea learn that ponies have all of the necessary anatomy for reproduction: it's just hidden behind a trick valve (or within a sleeve) until it's needed. The parts are only visible when they're about to be used, which gives new parents about a second of warning before the next diaper-fouling barrage. However, the concealment only serves for that: there's no natural armor effect, and rude stallions can still be kicked normally. It's just harder for mares to line up the shot.
- Anti-Magic: Cerea's only defense, along with being part of the problem in the first place. For some reason, anything plastic which was with her during the transition actively neutralizes any magic it directly touches, for as long as it's in contact. In practical terms, this currently means a few cheap hairpins — and her sword. Slicing through an active corona projection weakens whoever created it. Just holding the sword against a pony makes them feel ill, and nopony can stand to pick the thing up in their mouths. (It can't be lifted via corona or teleported, and no pegasus can fly while in contact with it.) The edgeless practice blade has become a very real weapon — but it's also one of the reasons everypony is so frightened of her: Tirek absorbed magic, while she can attack it directly. It makes it that much easier for everypony to mentally link her with him.
- Cerea herself seems to have some element of this; she can safely touch platinum without ill-effect. On Equestria, platinum is a magic superconductor that continuously draws raw magical energy out of the environment around it—this prevents it from being found in large quantities, because it explodes after a certain amount is put together. (When carefully treated, stabilized, and drawn into wire, it's used to produce self-charging devices.) Ponies daren't touch it without extreme caution, because doing so will, at a minimum, weaken them somewhat while producing feelings of illness — and the same is true for any species possessing its own magic. To Cerea, it's just as ornamental as it would be back on Earth — but she has no magic to steal.
- This eventually becomes Cerea's Cutie Mark-granted Talent; she can manifest or summon her plastic sword and hairpins, allowing her to nullify magic at a touch.
- Arc Words: Or Arc Thought: I'm no better than second to anyone.
- Artifact of Doom: Cerea's plastic practice sword has become one on Menajeria. For some reason, it now negates magic on contact... and every sapient on the planet, except Cerea herself, has some form of magic. Unicorn spells fall apart when it touches them, pegasi lose their flight, earth ponies and minotaurs feel their strength leached away... every creature on the planet fears and loathes that sword. Unfortunately, as its bearer, Cerea finds a great deal of that loathing transferred to her.
- As You Know: Averted. There are certain fundamental facts about the world (that Celestia and Princess Luna are immortal, that SUN and MOON must be manually raised and lowered and that only the Diarchs can do so, etc), that are never explained to anyone other than babies because it's not possible to grow up in Menajeria without learning them. These facts are so well-known that it takes a long time for anypony to realize that Cerea doesn't have some of the fundamentals: Emery Board is sedately surprised that his latest recruit needed to independently figure out the current year. note
- This leads to a moment of dark comedy in Chapter 29, as Cerea nearly winds up piercing the Secret just by reasoning out what kinds of magic would be logically connected to the name 'earth pony'. As the comments put it, her strength/weakness is that she doesn't know what is and isn't possible.
- Overlapping with Thought They Knew Already, Cerea initially doesn't bring up just how sensitive her sense of smell is to the Mane Six on a mission because she thought that they knew (and/or that pony senses of smell were only slightly worse than hers). They get the shock of their lives when she unthinkingly mentions that she can smell the presence of fur dye that was used one night ago... which is only compounded when she clarifies that she can tell both the dye's color and the gender of the ponies that used it. (However, this happens under a full Moon, which effectively puts centaurs into sensory overdrive.)
- The internal revelation about the true natures of Sun and Moon does not go over well, prompting an extended period of hyperventilating in a restroom.
- A Wizard Did It: Averted, as usual for Estee's works. Cerea is able to work out that SUN and MOON must be artificial satellites because she knows that the Diarchs aren't anywhere near powerful enough to be moving a true sun and moon (or even rotating the planet) with magic.
- Ax-Crazy: The arsonist ends up this way, even going so far as to attempt to strangle two foals, just because they're of different species and trying to help each other get away from the final battle. And she not only does this in full public view before multiple panicking witnesses, but she slows down in her escape attempt to go after the children. It takes a sword strike from Cerea to break the field — and the arsonist promptly claims that the centaur made her do it. The end of the story has her in an asylum — which she doesn't even recognize: she thinks it's a place where researchers can study the changes she made to her field.
- Bathtub Scene: The bath in question is in the palace barracks. This makes it roughly the size of a decent swimming pool. It's also designed to be used by a group of ponies.
- Big Eater: As in canon, Cerea's size and herbivorous nature requires her to consume massive amounts of produce to nourish her body. However, she's herbivorous by choice. An examination of her teeth lets the Doctors Bear figure out she's actually an omnivore, and Cerea winds up explaining that she can eat meat (and is in fact supposed to for extended efforts, or if she's healing a large wound) — but her sense of taste is just about as strong as the olfactory. Eating meat on Earth gave her the aftertaste of everything which had happened to the animal — like hormone injections, water pollution for fish, impure feed... At best, she'd been able to choke down a few bites and keep them down long enough to find a safe place for throwing up.
- When she scents some of the meat used to work the ritual with Cerberus, she recognizes that it doesn't come from any species she's familiar with — but it's also pure.
- Eventually confirmed. Cerea can eat meat from Menajeria, which greatly speeds up her healing from injuries.
- Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: Centaurs play with this trope; whilst they have fairly standard male/female sexual dimorphism on the surface, the difference is exaggerated far beyond the norm. Female centaurs are elegant, refined, intelligent, articulate and highly civilized. Males, by comparison, are borderline caricatures of masculinity; immensely strong and equally immensely stupid, impulsive, emotion driven, and bestial, concerned only with sex, violence, and the prospect for either. They're so savage that centaur society revolves around keeping the genders segregated until and unless it's time to procreate, and even then the mares only tolerate the stallions until they have conceived. Cerea herself admits to having wondered at least once whether centaur mares and stallions aren't actually entirely separate species of One Gender Races who just happen to be capable of interbreeding in a Gender Equals Breed manner. Upon learning more from Cerea about the stallions of her race, a horrified Nightwing bluntly asks if Cerea is sure that centaur stallions are even sapient, and an uncomfortable Cerea needs a moment to answer.
- The Blacksmith: Barding is this for the Royal Guard.
- Cerea also was trained as a blacksmith in her gap and introduces Equestria at large to Damascus steel.
- Body Horror: Chapter 79 reveals that Tirek can absorb other creatures' magic because Scorpan constructed a Device inside him by cutting him open and inserting a web of platinum wires, one wire at a time.
- Boob-Based Gag: It's mentioned that Centorea's large bosom was a source of much mockery, derision and vulgar commentary, due to how amply equipped she is compared to humans. And now she's living among a species that only displays some degree of swelling when actively nursing. Whenever any pony looks at her chest, their reaction is invariably Yearrggh....
- Broken Bird: It is repeatedly showcased throughout the story, with varying degrees of explicitness, just how screwed up Cerea has been rendered by her mother's constant demands and emotional abuse. In the finale of chapter 45, Sergeant Board's final evaluation of Cerea lays it out in very stark terms that Cerea is emotionally broken to the point that she can't even accept the validation she so desperately needs, and that whilst she might be able to be propped up if she can build up the extensive and supportive social network she needs, truly fixing her may be all but impossible. For all her positive traits that would make her a desirable guard, her crippled sense of self esteem means that she just may not be able to take the pressure, with Emery concluding that she is only "borderline" suitable and that it's up to the Princesses to make a final verdict.
- Broken Pedestal:
- When Cerea learns that Luna has the ability to enter dreams and has been spying on her nightly ever since she arrived at the palace, she is furious.
- Eventually (and in a much healthier way) the pedestal breaks for Cerea in regard to her mother.
- The Bus Came Back: So Cerea is officially applying for legal immigrant status? There's a pony for that.
- In relation to the Triptych Continuum, this is The Bus Came Back: The Fanfic. Ponies who haven't been seen in years (and even the Royal Frog) keep showing up.
- Further, it had been hinted that this story is in continuity with Anchor Foal, and as of chapter 64, those characters are showing up, starting with Fleur.
- Cain and Abel: Tirek and Scorpan, of course. Except here, Scorpan did not survive his betrayal, if it even was a betrayal. Tirek sees it as such, but also admits that Scorpan was looking for help fixing what they'd done to themselves in the search for magic.
- Cast from Hit Points: All of Tirek's magic turns out to be this. The thaums he drains from others are converted into extra pounds of centaur... and as he uses them to cast spells, are converted back. So every spell he casts costs him a portion of his strength and mass.
- Cast Herd: Enforced. Celestia wants Twilight to work on the problem of getting Cerea home — from a distance. She's deliberately keeping Cerea separated from the Bearers until she's certain that they can be in the presence of a centaur without having something go wrong. The biggest sticking point has been implied to be Fluttershy, who is much less than happy about the situation. And given what happened to Discord...
- It all comes to a head when Cerea and the Mane Six (plus Spike and Trixie) are sent to investigate a possible connection between Tirek in Tartarus and mysterious incidents of dead magic zones. Fortunately, by this point, Cerea has built a rapport with Apple Bloom and Sweetie Bell, which in turn makes Applejack and Rarity inclined to interact with a more open mind than Fluttershy's.
- Centipede's Dilemma: Weaponized by Cerea, who can literally cripple pegasi with words by oh-so-innocently asking them to think about all the physical details of how their wings work, in particular just how many joints there are in each wing. Until they can stop thinking about it, they're effectively incapable of flight. She admits to Nightwatch that she learned the technique from having it used on her as well, and her most effective way of shaking it off was to bank her fetlock into something.
- Cerebus Retcon: Trixie's disdain for wheels whilst under the influence of the Alicorn Amulet was just a bit of comedic Sanity Slippage in the cartoon. In chapter 71, Trixie not only is shown to have it as a standard part of her personality, but breaks down why she feels that way. Namely, wagon wheels are fragile, have a tendency to break at the worst possible moments and in succession, it's impossible to carry enough spares, and they're quite expensive — and traveling wheelwrights tend to mark the price up if they meet a customer on the road. Combine this with Trixie's hoof-to-mouth existence as a traveling performer, the general state of Equestrian roads, and the fact that Equestria largely consists of small settlements separated by huge swathes of untamed, unpopulated, monster-infested wilderness, and... yeah. Trixie has a reason for hating wheels. She taught herself the skills of wheelwrighting because the alternative would have been to die in the wilderness or give up traveling at all.
- Chekhov's Gunman: The traitor who facilitated the insurrection is Ms Manners, the obviously-totally-fallen-into-her-mark etiquette tutor from chapter 13, Uncivilized, as revealed in ch 99, Vengeful. Their motive was because Cerea accidentally hit her while trying to contort herself into an untenable pose on her instructions, leading Ms Manners to conclude that Cerea was an irredeemable barbarian who had been spoiled by a lack of parental discipline.
- Clap Your Hands If You Believe: This is eventually revealed to be the original point of the pony herd instinct. Back in the Discordant Era having the whole herd believe with single-minded fanaticism that the ground was solid and gravity pulled you down, that water was drinkable and air breathable, could often keep reality stable enough to survive in against anything but Discord's direct attention.
- Commonality Connection: Diamond and Cerea begin to bond over missing their mothers.
- Conveniently Precise Translation: Averted. The device loaned to Cerea works with the concept of language, and that's why it can translate something never before heard. However, it has trouble with terms that either party has never encountered, and frequently stutters through multiple, overlapping attempts before it finds something which can be roughly understood. Cerea's attempt to explain smartphone videos ultimately comes across as a "handheld movie camera which instantly places its pictures onto distant screens": similarly foreign concepts can confuse or stall any final results in both directions.
- In particular, after a feverish Cerea introduces herself to Luna in the forest, nopony addresses her as anything but "centaur". It's ultimately explained in Chapter 15 that this is because the device rendered her actual name — Centorea Shianus — as "Centaur Centaur" to pony listeners. Crossing Guard eventually comes up with a workaround: she says her name without the disk and he renders the phonetics as best he can. Unfortunately, the final product is The Unpronouncable.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Chapter 79 gives us Cerea vs Tirek. On one side, we have an Unskilled, but Strong brute, whose primary tactics are to drain an opponent's magic, use energy blasts if that doesn't work, and rely on sheer muscle against whoever's left. On the other, a Strong and Skilled knight-in-training, who has no magic to steal, can No-Sell the energy blasts, and has spent most of her life learning how to properly use her body in a fight. It's over in a matter of seconds.
- Cute Monster Girl: Not any more. As far as the locals are concerned, Cerea is a trotting incarnation of the uncanny valley, and that's on her best day. Everything from the waist down is perfectly suitable (if somewhat oversized): everything from that point up qualifies for Eldritch Abomination.
- D-Cup Distress: Cerea found her massive bosom to be a source of embarrassment and shame even before winding up in Equestria, where it makes her look like a freak as opposed to a porn star. (Chapter 30 states that centaur mares evolved muscles and ligaments to suit their endowments, meaning Cerea doesn't suffer pain due to the size of her breasts. The agonies of Guard training, however, have still left her with a desperate wish for someone who would be willing to rub her shoulders.) It's also pointed out that they can be massively inconvenient; for example, she can't use bows (one of the few ranged weapons that exist on Menajeria, suggested to be a minotaur invention) because her breasts get in the way for the arm position of a proper draw. (Horizontal holds can work for short-range fire, but Cerea finds that undignified and the leverage isn't as good.) Emery Board decides to have her train with a sling instead. It's a problem which can exist for human females — but it's not exactly common.
- She also has something approaching a phobia of being measured, to the point where Luna had to hold her still in a closely-fitted field bubble in order to have her measured for clothes. The other option was a centaur streaking over the horizon.
-
Word Of Fanfic Author describes Cerea's relationship with her build as 'complicated'. On one level, she's proud to have the body of a proper centaur mare, expects to eventually match or surpass her mother's size, and briefly feels upset when the mention of local minotaurs implies someone might be larger than her. (Based on what she's seen of griffons with nothing human about them, she quickly decides it's just the local name for cattle.) On another, it's implied that part of her studies before traveling to Japan involved reading exactly the wrong material — which gets partially confirmed in Chapter 35: she tried examining some of the magazines, and began judging her own body based on what humans might be attracted to.
- Dangerous Forbidden Technique: After teasing its existence for a significant chunk of the story, Chapter 79 finally explains what Cerea's "Second Breath" is: Since a pair of human-sized lungs would never be able to adequately fuel a horse-sized body, centaurs actually have a second pair of lungs, below-and-behind the first pair. In their day to day lives, these have about as much impact as a regular person's lungs, only really coming into play when performing strenuous activity. With training, however, a centaur can consciously use both sets of lungs in tandem, which massively increases their physical abilities due to the increased amount of oxygen in their blood. What qualifies it for this trope, however, is that extra power puts more strain on the body than it could ever be ready for, to the point where it's not uncommon for centaurs to die after using it. Most of this is only revealed to the reader seconds before Cerea uses it to deliver a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Tirek.
- Dead All Along: From all evidence, Tirek. The autopsy showed that several of his organs weren't actually doing anything. It appears that his first attempt to drain magic killed him: he already possessed (ignored) magical sensory enhancement, and trying to add extra capabilities internally is known to be fatal. But just as Discord found his essence trapped in the web of platinum wire, Tirek's soul wound up bound to his body. Absorbing magic brought him closer to true life: his largest observed size had him capable of bleeding. But his digestive system no longer functioned, and the thaums were his only energy source. Cerea breaking the internal wires while the sword was negating stored thaums may be what truly finished him off.
- Death by Adaptation: In Chapter 78 Tirek strongly hints that Scorpan did not survive betraying him in this story.
- Deus Exit Machina: Why hasn't Discord become involved in this? He's in critical condition. We get the full story in Chapter 46: he stepped in to protect Sweetie and Diamond from Tirek, and was drained to the edge of death. He currently exists as a barely-cohesive, heavily weakened chaos storm: unresponsive and unable to assume any other form.
- Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Deliberately invoked and downplayed. The palace wants to create meet-and-greets which let ponies interact with Cerea in a controlled environment. This isn't going over well with certain segments of the population.
- The first meet-and-greet occurred with with Cheerilee's class, since children adapt more quickly to new situations and anypony who lives in Ponyville would be even more used to strangeness. Unfortunately, Celestia didn't remember that Ponyville was one of the worst hit by Tirek and some of the class saw Discord die while trying to stop him. Despite this, the meeting actually goes well after some initial kerfuffle.
- Fancypants also wants to put together a party, allowing Canterlot's nobles to meet her. It doesn't end well.
- Didn't See That Coming: In Chapter 79, Tirek goes through several of these in short order. Most strikingly, Cerea's sword being able to nullify his attacks catches him completely off guard, sending him from "smug gloating" to "utter panic" almost instantly.
- Disability Immunity: Cerea is, apparently, the only sapient on Menajeria with no magic, which means that she can handle platinum with relative safety (it still might explode in her hands, but it won't drain her if improperly prepped), and makes her the only being on the planet who can safely handle the sword.
- It also makes her the perfect counter to Tirek's magic draining.
- Drama Panes: From "Outcast" multiple chapters in, a person confined to a house has only the window to look out of and when she speaks to someone, her observations are basically the only thing she talks about, and her conversation partner is very concerned about what she says, since it seems she's gone more insane with only the window for company.
- Drill Sergeant Nasty: Played with. The legendary retired Sergeant Emery Board is brought back on duty specifically to begin training Cerea for a position in the Royal Guard. He's a figure of terror to most of the Guard, as he trained just about all of them — but he's also one of the few ponies who can deal with Cerea without fear, and he's a good enough sergeant to recognize what she actually needs — namely, positive reinforcement, given that her mother has done an excellent job in emotionally tearing her down, but never bothered to build her back up, which are the two halves of a Drill Sergeant's job.
- Driven to Suicide: It's stated that in the wake of Tirek's rampage, multiple ponies committed suicide, preferring death over the slightest risk of having their magic ripped from them again — or simply unable to recover from the trauma of violation. And when it became known that some variety of centaur was being welcomed into Equestria, more ponies attempted suicide (with none successful, as the police were on watch), certain that she would be another Tirek and preferring the safety of the shadowlands to living in a world where a centaur was allowed to walk free. Cerea winds up suspecting that the Princesses have been lying to her, covering up deaths — and blaming herself for all of it. Nightwatch tells her the truth in Chapter 35: no successes, but eventually, a pony will commit suicide for reasons not related to Cerea — and the Tattler will probably try to blame her for it.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: By the end of the story, Cerea has decided to stay in Equestria until a way can be found to send her home, serving Luna as both a guard and her seneschal. The ponies of Canterlot are finally warming up to her, and Nightwatch is planning to have a house built that the two can share. And at long last, she's moving out from under her mother's shadow and feeling much more comfortable with herself.
- Eat Me: As shown in Chapter 46, this was how Discord defeated Tirek. He allowed Tirek to consume his magic, and because Discord is magic, his mind went with it, allowing him to strip the stolen power from Tirek from the inside out. The sheer number of thaums burned off in the effort, combined with what Tirek absorbed, retained within the inner platinum web, and used while trying to summon reinforcements, didn't leave Discord with enough to fully reform his body.
- Eldritch Location: The "deep places", locations where the rules of physics, magic, and the like are somehow distorted. The mirror pool is one, and Tartarus turns out to be another. In particular, Tartarus is capable of reacting to events taking place within: however, most of that seems to be on a subconscious level. Even the Princesses aren't sure whether it's actually alive — but it doesn't seem to be awake.
- Energy Absorption: As Nightwatch demonstrates in Chapter 34, it's part of how redirecting lightning works. She just can't hold the voltage for more than a few seconds before sending the bolt somewhere else.
- Even the Loving Hero Has Hated Ones: Fluttershy is the Bearer of Kindness. She can befriend and forgive even those who have personally hurt or betrayed her. But she hates Cerea (and hopes she dies of bowel torsion) for being a centaur.
- Everyone Looks Sexier if French: Well, not to Equestrians... However, the story clearly establishes Cerea's herd is located in France, and she considers herself to be a native of that country. Unless she's deliberately trying to use another language, her speech and thought patterns generally default to French.
- Family of Choice: How Cerea eventually starts to look at her life with the other girls in the Kurusu household: they were sisters to each other.
- Fantasy Gun Control: Invoked. Cerea knows the ingredients for gunpowder, but not the exact ratio. She's also extremely aware that gunsmithing is an art all its own, and she would get one test firing before the whole thing came apart in her hands. All things considered, she has no intention of trying to introduce fireams into Equestria.
- Foreshadowing: For Glimmer in the regular Continuum, which hadn't started being published until almost two years after this began. It's established in Chapter 8 that the Bearers were away on a mission with Trixie acting as a consultant when Cerea first arrived, and they return home from that in Chapter 20.
- Friendless Background: Early indications hint that her mother's attempts to push didn't exactly make anyone fond of the daughter: Cerea was forced to compete against just about every filly in the herd, and the times spent outside the competitions mostly found her alone in the bedroom, reading tales of knightly glory.
- Future Food Is Artificial: Equestrian food is noted as being lacking in taste compared to food grown "wild", as a side effect of ponies relying on the Cornucopia Effect to compensate for their utter lack of scientific agricultural knowledge. For creatures native to Menajeria, or at least for ponies, the difference is subtle. To Cerea, the difference is glaring, and she's started wondering if she needs to worry about vitamin deficiencies and other dietary concerns if forced to subsist entirely on pony-grown food. However, she also recognizes that given the sheer amounts she needs to consume, any nutritional deficits would have shown up by now.
- Gay Romantic Phase: Centaur girls exclusively date each other when they're teens, having no desire to date Jerk Jock centaur boys. They're expected to give this up when they become adults, however, because, as Cerea put it, adolescence is the time for love and adulthood the time for breeding.
- Gentle Giant: Centorea is 6'7"... well, 200.66cm. (She's French; she thinks in metric.) Which just about matches Celestia's height and leaves her towering over normal ponies, who aren't exactly confident about the "gentle" part.
- Giving Radio to the Romans: Invoked and zigzagged. Cerea notes the existence of the trope, but also notes that it requires a lot of background knowledge, which she mostly lacks, and thus subverts the trope.
- However, Cerea is a trained blacksmith and does have the background knowledge to introduce Equestria to Damascus steel.
- Played straight when she unwittingly reveals the concept of audiobooks to Nightwatch, who realizes that there is a lot of potential here. The consequences of this disclosure are explored in the short story "Audiokooks."
- Glass Cannon: Downplayed, but Cerea has some elements of this in comparison to earth ponies (the race whose fighting style most resembles hers). A combination of sheer bulk and centaur musculature means that she is stronger than all but the most powerful of earth ponies, but without magic to reinforce it, her body is relatively fragile. She can hit harder than almost anypony, but blows an earth pony might shrug off could cripple or kill her.
- Greeting Gesture Confusion: A brief, self-correcting version in Chapter 31: Ambassador Torque Power initially greets Cerea by extending his fist knuckles-out, but quickly switches to offering a handshake. It leaves Cerea marveling at the sensation of having touched someone's hand for the first time in more than a month — or, given her general treatment, just being touched at all.
- Guest-Star Party Member: The Bearers were on a mission when Cerea arrived, and Trixie was assigned to work with them as a condition of her post-Amulet probation. When the group finally gets back in Chapter 20, she gets one night of thinking she can get on the road again before the palace instructs her to stick around and work on solving the mystery of how that arrival happened.
- Healing Factor: Downplayed: Cerea seems to heal somewhat faster than a human, and none of her injuries to date have resulted in scars — but she still needs time to recover. Pushing herself too hard, with no chance for rest, will just allow injuries to keep compounding.
- Her Healing Factor is improved with the consumption of large amounts of protein. In Equestria where Cerea can eat the local meat without getting sick...
- Heal It With Fire: By the time Princess Luna captures her, Cerea's injuries have become badly infected. Fortunately, Celestia's connection to Sun lets her literally burn out the infection while controlling the heat enough to minimize the damage to surrounding tissue.
- The Hero's Journey: Invoked. Prior to entering Tartarus, Cerea (who's read the book) recognizes that multiple elements from the classic format could be applied to herself. She just doesn't consider herself to be a hero. After all, she's not a real knight...
- Hero Must Survive: Celestia and Princess Luna are the only two beings who can interface with MOON and SUN. If they die, the world dies with them. As such, a Guard must be prepared to sacrifice anything short of the whole world to keep the Diarchs alive.
- Hero Secret Service: The true nature of the Guard. As Cerea is told during her training, they're not police (although they do have some limited power to detain and, once in a great while, arrest). Their first duty is to their Princess. A Guard can act to protect the public — but in any situation where it's a choice between the Princess and any number of ponies, the Guard has to protect the Princess, because to save her is to potentially save the world.
- Heroic Sacrifice:
- Chapter 37 focuses on the death of Blitzschritt, the first and last ibex Guard — one hundred and forty-eight years before the main story takes place.
- As detailed in Chapter 46, Discord made one to defeat Tirek, stripping him of his stolen powers but being nearly extinguished himself in the process.
- Hidden Agenda Villain: The mysterious cult that performed the ritual to summon Cerea. As of yet, we don't know what they were expecting her to do (especially since the Diarchs strongly suspect they didn't intend for her to end up in the wild zone), and thanks to the unpredictable nature of summoning magic in the Continuum we can't be sure whether they were trying for Cerea specifically, or whether they wanted a centaur, or a knight, or even wanted something wholly unlike Cerea and just missed. About all we do know is that they number at least several dozen unicorns, they have access to a power-combining working that lets all those unicorns pool their powers (and possibly for more than just the summoning spell), they possess some very obscure knowledge on summoning, and that they are attempting to summon something.
- And then the theory falls apart, because the summoning was created by Tirek.
- Hidden Depths: As every knight is expected to have at least one artistic skill, Cerea knows how to sketch. (She doesn't think much of her own capabilities there, frequently scrapping efforts and starting over.) Centaur vocal chord flexibility also gives her an impressive octave range for singing — but that's true of the entire species. Additionally, she possesses enough blacksmith skills to make and maintain armor, and her herd's need to maximize the gap's food resources gives her a background in agronomy — which, with earth ponies around, is completely useless.note
- Hit-and-Run Tactics: Implemented by Cerea during her combat exercise against the Guards in Chapter 34. Why? Because there's nine of them. She can't hope to stand against the herd, so she retreats into the woods around the training grounds, then tries to pick them off one at a time. This allows her to negate a third of their forces before lack of familiarity with the paths brings her back into the open.
- Humans Are Ugly: While the ponies think Centorea's horse half is attractive, they think her gorgeous-by-human-standards human half is hideous. When she describes humans to Nightwatch note , she goes visibly green. The very idea that she has body issues with her 'lower' half and that the human species finds her 'upper' half to be the attractive portion of her body is confusing, to say the least.
- At one point, Celestia directly asks Luna if Cerea is considered beautiful — and Luna, who's seen the distortions Cerea places upon herself in dream, can't answer for a very long time. It takes seeing how Cerea sees her mother for Luna to work it out. To Cerea, her mother is perfect, and Luna can see that the daughter is the mirror image of her mother.
- Nightwatch, Cerea's personal guard, goes through mental disorientation when she sees a sketch of Papi, Cerea's harpy roommate — and doesn't do all that well with the image of Lala, either.
- I Need a Freaking Drink: When Cerea tells Luna that she's figured out SUN and MOON are artificial satelites, the latter puts an immediate pause on the conversation, then arranges for alcohol - "Plentiful and NOW" - to be brought to their room.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Nearly every chapter title is a one- or two-word term with some kind of negative trait. For example: "Abomination", "Grotesque", "Uncivilized", "Toxic", etc. The only exceptions are "Sui Generis" (Latin for "unique") and "Sapient."
- Irony: All the flak Cerea gets for her similarities to Tirek. She's ultimately the one who rids Equestria of him.
- Lady Land: As shown in flashbacks and seen colouring her view of Equestria, Cerea's birth culture is completely matriarchal, because the stallions are psychopathic meatheads.The majority are barely literate. Numeration skills often stop at the ability to count up to MINE.
- Lightning Bruiser: By Equestrian standards, Cerea is a virtual giantess, and yet she's capable of sprinting at speeds that nopony other than Celestia or Luna could hope to match on-land (though swift pegasus fliers could keep up with or surpass her).
- Lovecraftian Superpower: Cerea's plastic practice sword has effectively become one. It is a weapon that destroys magic itself and wounds the soul, a weapon only she can wield and made of a substance that exist nowhere else in the world, and it is a large part of the reason that so many ponies associate Cerea with Tirek.
- Lunacy: When Cerea is finally presented to the public, there is a full moon. Cerea becomes scared that it will make her go into heat and go berserk, but what the moon really does is amplify her instincts, so her feelings of fear and doubt go up. Despite this, she manages not to panic.
- And she's actually responding to an illusion. There's always a full moon over the Lunar Courtyard.
- Madness Mantra: The arsonist has two.
- "I'm innocent. It's not my fault. It was an accident."
- "Reinforce, and drag..."
- Magic Misfire: Potentially. According to the sisters, summoning spells frequently can't be focused on a specific target: most of the time, the caster is effectively biting into the dark and pulling back the first thing they can get a virtual jaw grip on. So it's possible that Cerea was summoned by accident — but at the same time, some castings have drawn in exactly what the caster was looking for. As of yet, there's just no way to tell.
- Magic Versus Science: Averted hard. Equestria makes free use of both to the limits of the nation's understanding. They're just considerably more reliant on magic, to the point where spells are used to substitute for science advancements which haven't been discovered — and part of the reason for science being behind is that as with earth pony magic substituting for most basic agronomy, there's been no need to try and advance. Cerea's introduction of Damascus steel doesn't make the palace smith start a war of styles: he just starts to fantasize about what could happen when the usual protective enchantments are applied to a superior base material.
- Mermaid Problem: Played for drama during Cerea's emotional collapse in Chapter 10: she winds up convincing herself that no matter how much attraction might be shown to her upper torso, ultimately, she would have been asking a human to have sex with a horse. It's doubtful she would have appreciated the knowledge that this actually is not as big an issue for humans as she fears.
- And effectively flipped around in Equestria, where to pony sensibilities she has a perfectly attractive (if oversized) mare's body... and then there's a monstrous, inequine thing replacing her head. She's not exactly going to be finding a boyfriend among the locals.
- Mounted Combat: While Cerea has no rider, some of her fighting techniques borrow from this category. In particular, a centaur body allows the real-world use of a tactic which generally doesn't exist outside videogames: circle-strafing. She's capable of galloping around her target at a distance while launching a near-constant stream of sling stones, making it that much harder to strike back at her.
- Muggle: Her biology can create a few surprises, but she's still the only sapient on the continent with no magic of her own.
- Never My Fault: The unicorn supremacist who burnt down Nightwatch's apartment and nearly killed a foal is interviewed in Chapter 59, and she blames the whole thing on: Cerea, for manipulating Nightwatch and the Princesses; the Princesses, for allowing Cerea to interact with ponies; Nightwatch, for using her pegasus magic to set fire to her harmless warning symbol, for willingly associating with Cerea, for being a Royal Guard, for not warning her neighbours that she was a Guard, and for living in an apartment in the first place; Nightwatch's neighbours, for knowingly living next door to a Royal Guard; Pegasi and Earth Ponies in general, for living near Unicorns in the first place; and even the foal she almost murdered, for having not "decided to be born somewhere else".
- No Periods, Period: Averted hard in Chapter 35, which has Nightwatch trying to find the single most awkward subject she can discuss with Cerea: something where nothing which comes after can ever be any worse than that. And what she chooses to ask about is the centaur menstrual cycle. note
- The Nose Knows: One of Cerea's biological advantages: her sense of smell is considerably stronger than that of a pony, to the point where, once she learns which reactions go with what, she can scent what kind of mood they're in. So far, this has mostly meant fear.
- She also needs *context* for most of the scents. Without recognizing body language and facial expressions (with ponies, the second factor is harder), she has trouble linking a new odor with the actual emotion. And "centaur" doesn't indicate "bloodhound." Tracking a scent requires that it be relatively fresh, and it helps if the source isn't moving through several hundred other sources of odor.
- Not Now, Kiddo: In chapter 13, Crossing Guard repeatedly dismisses Cerea's attempts to verbally dissuade him from taking her out of their room without waiting for their official escort, going so far as to grab her arm and physically pull her into following him. It's only after they stumble across a pony who isn't among the palace staff (who know of Cerea's existence) that he finally realizes that Cerea was trying to say that the point of the guard escort isn't to keep Cerea from escaping, it's to clear the way of any unauthorized personnel. Crossing later admits that he was infantilizing Cerea as part of his fear response to her — something which turns out to be fairly common, because the lack of mark makes it easy for ponies to not see her as an adult.
- During the storming of the palace, Squall dismisses Cerea's attempt to warn him that the mob has actually come for the arsonist — either to free her, or to kill her so she won't implicate anypony else. He's a little too busy with trying to get Cerea and Nightwatch out of the palace: one has no magic, and the other is operating with injured wings.
- No-Sell: As long as Cerea is wearing her plastic hairpins she is effectively immune to magic with mental effects including Griffon Domination and Tartarus' mental manipulations.
- No Social Skills: All over the place.
- Cerea was socially stunted by her childhood, and it really shows.
- Cerea also has to learn a different species' social cues and body language while stranded in Equestria.
- Barding, as one of the fallen has lost the ability to care about anything other than his work. Ironically, this means he gets along well with Cerea, as long as they talk exclusively about metalwork. He is also one of the very few ponies encountered (outside of the Princesses) who does not show an instinctive fear reaction to her — because once he recognizes the skills she's brought into the forge, he treats her as a fellow blacksmith.
- One Dose Fits All: Downplayed. When discussing Cerea's treatment with the Diarchs, the Doctors Bear point out that there are only a very few drugs that will work for all Equestrian mammals, and even those are a gamble when dealing with a member of a previously unknown race like Cerea. Interviewing her regarding what she wants to eat when she's sick has given them a few basic treatments — like a stomach tonic. For that matter, they're still trying to work out where all her organs are...
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: As in the Celestiaverse, this story's iteration of Fluttershy is not only the Bearer of Kindness but a Shrinking Violet whose biggest character flaw is an inability to stand up for herself. So when she launches into a vicious verbal onslaught the instant she meets Cerea, and takes every subsequent opportunity to sling verbal vitriol at her, it says volumes about how furious she is at Tirek's actions. After Discord's revival, her anger fades.
- Origins Episode: In Chapter 78, Tirek gets a chance to tell his own story, as he saw it. Once in a land far from Equestria, there were two brothers: a centaur and a gargoyle, both without magic but wanting it. One day they hatched a plan to achieve their greatest wish...
- Our Centaurs Are Different: Cerea works by very different rules than Tirek did, to the point where the Doctors Bear essentially treat her as a member of a separate-if-similarly-shaped species. And both Cerea and Tirek are implied to be very different than the other centaurs who live on Menajeria. Because there have been others, never citizens and very rarely, but sometimes a centaur needed to travel through Equestria. None of them showed Tirek's mana draining abilities. And considering how much of Menajeria remains unexplored, there may be a nation of them, somewhere...
- Partially revealed in Chapter 78. Tirek had parents, and implied that they were also centaurs, but Scorpan was his brother by blood. And none of them had any magic.
- Paradox Person: Cerea, to a degree. It's been repeated at several different points in the Continuum that magic comes with sapience, that anything which can think has some form of magic. Judging by her reactions to platinum and plastic, Cerea has no magic, despite being undeniably sapient — and when everything starts to hit the fan, it makes her the only person whom the Diarchy can ask to enter Tartarus to assess and evaluate Tirek, because she has nothing which can be stolen. In chapter 93, Cerea manifests a Cutie Mark, despite not being a pony... a mark that lets her emit an Anti-Magic Laser Blade, meaning her "magic" is to nullify magic.
- The Perfectionist: Played for Drama with Cerea. As a result of her mother's constant pushing, Cerea has internalized the idea that anything short of absolute flawless perfection is a failure. Have her fight off most of an insect swarm with a practice sword, and she'll label herself a failure because one got through.
- Phlebotinum Dependence: Whatever Scorpan did to Tirek that allowed the latter to steal magic also somehow made his body incapable of metabolizing food. Tirek's body is now sustained by pure magic, and since he is still incapable of generating his own he must constantly drain more power from those around him to survive.
- Possession Implies Mastery: Discussed in chapters 57 and 58. Cerea notes that just having or even knowing how to use something doesn't necessarily mean that you fully understand how it works or how to rebuild it. She can use a cellphone without understanding the electronics or programming involved on anything but the most superficial level, and just because the Diarchs know how to raise and lower SUN and MOON doesn't mean they know how to fix them if they break or how to make new ones.
- Precision F-Strike: The rare accidental version. Chapter 17 sees Wordia Spinner challenge Cerea on any potential ability to speak the native tongue without the assistance of magic, as an immigrant must be capable of natural communication. Cerea, who's angry and still struggling with being moon-touched in the Lunar Courtyard, rejects every term she's been taught in favor of the only thing she's heard which sounded authoritative. However, this means something she's overheard being said with the disc off, giving her no idea of what the actual words were. And as it turns out, Bulkhead has a rather unique way of announcing that he's coming on shift."Okay, asshole: I'll take it from here!"
- In chapter 73, Cerea says it deliberately before she enters Tartarus, to psyche herself up.
- In chapter 93, the Canterlot loyalists and non-ponies use it as their rallying cry as they counter-attack the tribalist supremacists currently besieging Canterlot Castle.
- Pure Magic Being: Though he may appear to take physical form, Discord is actually a living chaos storm, made of pure magic. This meant that when Tirek tried to drain Discord's magic, Discord's mind went with it and was able to tear Tirek apart from the inside out. Unfortunately, it also meant that the magic drain almost killed him, and left him so depleted that he is unable to recharge.
- Rapid-Fire "No!": Crossing is less than thrilled to be working with Cerea.
- Said by the arsonist after Cerea breaks free of her strangulation attempt, and later by Mrs. Panderaghast when Cerea arrests her.
- The Reveal: An interesting example in Chapter 57. To anyone with a working knowledge of the Triptych Continuum, this line is an Internal Reveal, while to anyone else, it's a Wham Line:Sun and Moon are artificial satelites.
- Ripped from the Headlines: Averted with Chapter 83; the author goes out of their way to stress that the story arc concerning the storming of Canterlot Castle that began with that chapter was written and finalized years before the storming of the U.S. Capitol ever took place.
- Runic Magic: Runes light up on a magical magic analysis device when it detects something.
- Running Gag: The fact that Emery Board is currently training a recruit class of one did not prevent someone in it from dreaming about killing him.
- Sanity Slippage: The unicorn supremacist who sets fire to Nightwatch's apartment gets steadily more unhinged with every appearance. Comes to the climax in chapter 93; she tries to use her telekinetic field to strangle Cerea and Nightwatch, and then when fleeing a vengeful Cerea, she spots some foals and immediately tries to strangle them in the same way.By the end, she's so far gone she doesn't even realize she's been placed in an asylum.
- Serial Killer: Strepho, a prisoner in Tartarus, is heavily implied to be an Angel of Mercy, someone who kills because they think their victims would be better off dead. And one is not imprisoned in Tartarus unless they've made a genuine attempt at ending the world...
- Shout-Out:
- Celestia has occasionally had inklings of inspiration to write about fictious creatures that spend half of the day/night cycle frozen in a stone-like state, but they've never gone anywhere; a reference to Disney's Gargoyles. Locally, this is based on centuries-discarded rumors which claimed the first touch of moonlight covers her in ice until Sun breaks her free. The modern era still has ponies insisting that touching daylight means Luna is set on fire.
- After reviewing the newspapers from Cerea's public debut, Luna and Celestia note that "we have met the enemy, and they are us"; a saying that first appeared in in Pogo.
- Mr. Trotter, who teaches Cerea's citizenship class, is a pony Expy of Gabe Kotter, as evidenced by his tendency to "illustrate facts by telling a story about a relative who had to deal with that aspect of Equestria's Society". Based on this, Cerea suspects that at least one percent of Canterlot's total population is composed of his uncles.
- Sleep Cute: Briefly alluded to in Chapter 35. Cerea sleepily admits to having spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to have sex with a human — and none as to how they would just be with each other after, when her resting posture is primarily vertical. (Plus she's too large for a standard mattress, and doesn't exactly expect anyone to join her on the mat.)
- Stealth Pun: Mazein's international press representative, Doric Corinthian.
- "What, you've got a better name for a columnist?"
- Stink Bomb: Used as an anti-centaur weapon in Chapter 34, similar to what Angua has been known to face. Cerea's capable of odor discrimination, but weeks spent in Equestria have allowed that control a chance to relax: the sensory assault nearly strips her of all reason, and it takes most of the combat exercise before she starts to register normal scents again.
- Tartarus also uses scent in an attempt to confuse and disable her.
- Summoning Ritual: Chapter 8 establishes Cerea as the victim of one. She didn't randomly appear in Equestria: somepony found a way of using one of the least-cast categories of magic to call her — and nopony knows why. So far, the only thing we can be relatively sure of is that the caster failed to have her reach the target destination: Celestia is certain having her appear in the wild zone couldn't have been the plan. It gets worse: in a setting where the maximum number of unicorns who can truly combine their strength into a single working is three, the summoning seems to have involved several dozen casters. Not only does that potentially imply a cult, but a working which allows that kind of group effort on any spell could take down the Diarchy.
- Super-Senses: Centaurs of Cerea's species have incredibly acute senses of smell, to the point that whilst Cerea insists that she is no bloodhound, she still pulls off incredible feats of odor detection. For example, she can not only detect that pony fur dye was used in an area two days later, when to ponies fur dye stops being detectable by scent a couple of hours after first used, but she can also easily tell that the dye was cerulean colored and that it was used by a pair of stallions.
- In chapter 71, Twilight begins to understand the depth of Cerea's ability when she realizes that when Cerea described her as "reeking of guilt" earlier, the centaur was being entirely literal. Even by the standards of ponies, whose society is heavily scent-based, Cerea's olfactory abilities are incredible.
- Super-Speed: Downplayed, but Cerea's ground speed is absolutely incredible by Equestrian standards; observing her running for stress relief around a private track in chapter 11, the Princesses note that, whilst they could catch her (and so could a flying pegasus), there isn't a unicorn alive who'd be able to keep up, and even an earth pony would need to have "mythical" physical prowess to be able to match or surpass her. Her stamina is also nothing to sneeze at, either.
- Chapter 34 reveals that she's self-taught herself to run backwards. However, her speed is greatly cut down and she's at constant risk of hitting one bad stone or small ditch.
- Super-Strength: Cerea's sheer size and mass, combined with the unique arrangement of musculature needed to let a centaur function, makes her monstrously strong, even by earth pony standards. However, Emery Board works out that while she's near the far end of the scale when compared to most earth ponies, she lacks the same extra density to her flesh. This means that even with centaur resilience, she needs to rely on her armor to take most of the hits.
- Technology Uplift: Downplayed. Cerea readily admits that Equestria could have multiple advances introduced — by someone with at least six doctorates who possessed either fully-eidetic memory or a fully-loaded tablet equipped with a solar charger. She doesn't qualify. However, as a trained blacksmith, she understands principles which ponies have yet to discover — and so Chapter 28 sees the palace introduced to Damascus steel, completely upending the local weapons vs. armor race by putting armor ahead.
- Terminally Dependent Society: As Cerea discovers in Chapters 57 and 58, all life on Menajeria is dependent on SUN and MOON, a pair of artificial satellites that no civilization on the planet has the slightest idea how to repair or replace. By the same token, the world is also dependent on Celestia and Princess Luna, the only ponies who can interface with and control those satellites.
- The Extremist Was Right: Claimed by Celestia in regard to Kalziver's Severance, a spell that briefly strips a pony of their mark talent. (The mark itself remains, but the link to the pony's magic is temporarily broken.) Celestia admits that she's well aware the spell is "magical blasphemy", a working so fundamentally anathema to the nature of ponies that invoking it for even a few seconds will leave the caster in excrutiating pain for hours. It has also staved off disaster at least three times in Equestria's history, and Celestia cites those successes as the justification for asking Twilight and Trixie to make something equally unnatural: a working to suppress herd instinct.
- The Magic Goes Away: Maybe. To date, the story has included three interludes showing isolated sapients (one pegasus, one earth pony and most recently, a zebra) going through what appear to be brief periods of magical blackout. It's implied that this began with Cerea's arrival. However, it's also been stated that those ponies were each, in their own way, going through forbidden areas. Something is going on, but we can't be sure what.
- Explicitly namedropped at the end of Chapter 61, Recalcitrant, when a newspaper reports on a fourth incident and blames it on Cerea.
- It is revealed in Chapter 63, Uncompromising, that at least the latest incident happened in the Tartarus Classified Area, and in Chapter 79, Sociopathic, that Tirek is attempting to leach magic from the world through Tartarus.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: At the climax of chapter 93, Cerea verbally calls out an insane unicorn supremacist, and unintentionally gives it to the rest of ponykind as a whole due to the crowd that is watching her as she does so.
- That Was Not a Dream: Cerea pulls off a heroic counter-attack on the insane unicorn supremacist arsonist in chapter 93 that she thinks is just a dying dream. She doesn't realize she's actually alive and doing it all for real until the chapter's end.
- Thinks Like a Romance Novel: A variant. Most of what Cerea believes about the human world comes from the stories she's read and in the best case, this just makes her Wrong Genre Savvy. She also believes in magic coming about through repetitive action and ritual — in other words, tropes. This is a girl who truly thinks galloping down an alley as if horribly late for something is the best way to meet your future beloved (as opposed to trampling him), and it's pretty much stated that her advance study on Japan partially consisted of reading a few light novels and getting some really bad ideas.
- This is also the case for Cerea's perception of proper knightly behavior: she's relying more on Arthurian legend than history.
- Translator Microbes: Averted. Upon arrival, nopony can understand Cerea, and all she hears are some rather complex horse noises. The only reason she can currently comprehend anypony (and vice-versa) is the loan of one of the rarest devices on the planet — out of the five known to exist. However, the magic only works on sounds. Cerea finds herself rendered fully illiterate — and for someone whose fillyhood window on the outside world came from stories, who now finds herself surrounded by tales no centaur has ever read, unable to make out a single word... it's agonizing.
- Trapped in Another World: Cerea finds herself in a world of talking ponies who fear and hate her because she is the same species as the villain Tirek, and all she wants is to go back to Earth to her friends and love, Kimihito.
- Uncanny Valley:
- Almost everything about Cerea seems designed to freak out ponies. Even leaving aside her "monstrous" hybrid anatomy, she's ridiculously large, with the proportions making what would otherwise be an attractive mare's body into some uncanny. And then there's her speed; something so big should not be able to move so fast.
- Pegasi like Nightwatch freak at the sight of a sketch of Papi the harpy, which Cerea realizes is because the combination of similarity and alien traits.
- Un-Sorcerer: Cerea has no magic whatsoever, something which is supposed to be impossible (it's repeatedly mentioned that magic always comes with sapience in this setting, that anything that can talk and think has some form of magic). This does have a slight advantage in that she is the only sapient who can touch her Anti-Magic sword.
- It's revealed in Chapter 78 that the first assumption (anything sapient has magic) is wrong. Tirek and Scorpan were without magic as well. Tirek's magic draining powers? Something he did to himself to finally use magic.
- Use Your Head: But only against pegasi. Cerea uses the tactic in Chapter 34 to good effect while half-crazed from the scent bomb — but once rationality returns (bringing a headache along), she realizes that the extra density in an earth pony skull might have knocked her out, and attacking a unicorn that way has one obvious problem. And just for 'dishonorable tactic' bonus points, she manages to invent an internal lecture from her mother.
- Values Dissonance: Invoked In-Universe; Royal Guard are seen as "outsiders" by many ponies since they combine the already alienating position of military/law enforcement with an explicit doctrine of "save the Princess, damn the rest"; it's very hard for the average pony to emotionally or intellectually come to terms with the idea that another pony will let entire cities die to save a single life, even with the vital nature of the Princesses being common knowledge.
- This is also the root of the split between ponies and ibexes. See, there was an ibex who joined the Royal Guard once... but ibex culture worships their mountainous homeland as sacred, and charges every ibex with the duty of giving their life to protect it. So of course there came a time when that ibex Royal Guard had to face a choice; protect her home, or protect the Princess. She chose the Princess, died doing so, and the ibex have basically withdrawn from contact with Equestria for fear of cultural contamination/extinction ever since.
- Voice Changeling: Downplayed: centaur vocal chords are just extremely flexible. Not only does Cerea have a very impressive octave range, but she's capable of accurately imitating pony sounds. With tutoring from Nightwatch and Crossing Guard, she's slowly learning to speak Equestrian. She also tends to mimic the accents of ponies she's quoting, enough that specific voices can be recognized.
- Weight Woe: Nopony can get her on a scale, and just trying to take measurements can set off a near-phobic reaction: both are indications that she has some fairly major body issues.
- She interally admits to being around three hundred kilograms. Out of armor. After rounding down. Way down.
- Actually becomes worse in Chapter 11: Luna, observing one of Cerea's dreams, notes that the majority of dreamers will appear as they truly see themselves — and Cerea's modern-day dream self is constantly switching between frail, overweight, half-blind, deaf... The exact flaw varies, but there's always something wrong.
- Wham Episode: Chapter 93. The magic that Cerea accidentally absorbed whilst killing Tirek integrates into her body by giving her a Cutie Mark. A sword superimposed over a moon that lets her project an Anti-Magic Laser Blade.
- Worldbuilding: As per usual. The story has already gone into how the exchange students went to school (online: some well-connected principals were stalling the building refurbishments), and early indications hint that we'll get a look at the start of the program itself.
- Would Hurt a Child: The arsonist does not finish the story in a state of mental stability.
- Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: Played with, satirized, and ultimately discarded. While Cerea's usual verbal formality is very real, most of the syntax she works with has been picked up from "several hundred stories, most of which had been written by authors who saw research as something which only got in the way of a good tale." As a result, her attempt to "speak properly" in front of the Princesses, processed through the translator, turns into something so severe as to make Luna tell her to reacquaint herself with the concept of contractions. Immediately. She's been speaking a little more normally ever since.
- Nightwatch is the first pony to realize that whenever Cerea starts to become truly upset, she lapses back into formal speech.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: The mob's primary goal in invading the palace is to kill the arsonist so she can't implicate anypony else.
