HI, GIIIIIIRLS!
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The Return of Harmony: Part 1
- Discord has some unsettling elements to his character.
- One of the windows that appears while Celestia is talking shows Discord dangling three ponies over a fiery pit of death. It even bears a startling resemblance to the "Devil" Tarot card. And while we look at the window, the tortured screams of ponies can be heard.
- Right before he shows up, he steals the wings from Rainbow and Fluttershy, and their horns from Rarity and Twilight.
- The majority of the episode's second half is taken up by Discord slowly, one at a time, mind-raping the Mane 6 to be the opposite of themselves. Each has a claim as being the most disturbing for a number of reasons:
- A major part of it all is Discord's Faux Affably Evil personality. It's just so disturbing. He loves what he's doing to them. He loves performing Mind Rape on the mane cast and he didn't even need to do the mundane version; as he showed with Fluttershy, he could've skipped straight to the instant supernatural kind. He did it because he wanted to. No wonder Celestia and Luna imprisoned him in stone for eternity!Discord: Make sense? Oh, now where's the fun in making sense?
The Return of Harmony: Part 2
- The World of Chaos Ponyville becomes while under Discord's rule- soap roads; floating, upside down buildings; odd gravity in general; rapid switching between day and night; strange animals; cotton candy clouds raining chocolate milk; a checkerboard ground; false buldings; and many crazed ponies acting very unlike themselves. And that's only a small taste of his power, "the first changes". One wonders what it looked like 1000 years ago...
- Last episode we got to see the Mane 6 get brainwashed by Discord. But in this episode we get to see the results.
- After fighting with her friends and failing to use the Elements against Discord, Twilight is broken. She turns grey like the others, and gives up on friendship entirely.
Lesson Zero
- The main thing with this episode is Twilight's huge Sanity Slippage.
- We saw a glimpse of it in previous episodes (the biggest perhaps being Swarm of the Century, where she ordered the citizens to rebuild Ponyville off to the side, with only seconds before the Princess arrives), yet here it is the entire purpose to the episode!
- She starts hallucinating at one point. She looks at three fillies jumping rope and sees them as shadows laughing at her, with a hellish landscape behind them.
- Towards the end, where Twilight tries to create a problem, she becomes increasingly frantic and unhinged.
- Her crazy faces
◊ reach the level of Ren Hoek. At one point, she wears a bird nest on her head, which in itself doesn't sound so bad, until you see it (top tier, second left in the collage above) and realise where Twilight's horn is supposed to be at the moment. - Clock is ticking, Twilight. Clock. Is. Ticking!
- Then she approaches the CMC...
Twilight: HI GURRRRRLS! - Her crazy faces
- Celestia's reaction. Especially if you remember what happened with Sunset Shimmer. With that in mind and her voice tone, the idea of what she may do to prevent what happened with her can be terrifying.
Luna Eclipsed
- Luna brings all the fake spiders in a bowl to life. For arachnophobes, this is the scariest part of the episode.
May The Best Pet Win!
- While the Mix-and-Match Critters of the pets in Rainbow Dash's dream aren't that scary and are actually kind of cute, having Opal coming out of its mouth is truly frightening.
Secret Of My Excess
- While nothing too scary (from the audience's perspective anyway) happens in this episode, there is one instance after Spike tries getting flowers from Junebug and Twilight walks away, where he hisses and a second pair of eyelids seen to blink. It's unnerving if you weren't expecting.
Hearth's Warming Eve
- The Windigos. Ghostly horses that feed off of negative feelings and distrust. The blizzard they caused further fueled the emotions that fed them. Close to the end of the episode, their cold became so intense that it froze the leaders of the three tribes alive, right where they stood. A later episode reveals that the Windigos are still around, ready to bring eternal winter to Equestria should the ponies stop celebrating Hearth's Warming Eve.
Putting Your Hoof Down
- Assertive Fluttershy can be unsettling in how disparate her behaviour is from her normal self.
- New!Fluttershy screaming "NOPONY!!!" at the end of her town rant. It's frightening to watch Fluttershy be so angry. To make matters worse, she wasn't even brainwashed into acting this way; her behaviour was entirely her choice! It makes you wonder just how much hidden vitriol she has deep inside her.
- Hell, the whole damn episode is disturbing now that you think about it. Seeing one of the nicest characters on the show act like such a cruel and mean Jerkass is just jarring.
Hurricane Fluttershy
- Fluttershy's fear of being ridiculed at one point is symbolized by her looking absolutely terrified in a tunnel of eyes with a red backdrop, while echoing voices taunt her. And just to make sure all the little kids don't sleep, they throw in an Evil Laugh.
A Canterlot Wedding Part 1
- Queen Chrysalis and her Changeling minions. Not only do they look scary (Chrysalis and the other Changelings even have gaping holes in their legs), they can turn into the ones you love most.
- The ending of the first half. Specifically, the last scene, where Cadence reveals herself to be Chrysalis and imprisons Twilight, right after having discredited her to her friends.Twilight: I'm sorry.
Chrysalis!Cadance: You will be. - Shining Armor's verbal smackdown of Twilight can also be pretty scary, especially to those to have been scolded by a parent or older sibling when they were younger.
A Canterlot Wedding Part 2
- The moment where Twilight was trapped in the abandoned mines of Canterlot, and Chrysalis!Candance showing herself on the crystal walls, taunting her and telling that nopony would ever find her. Also her face when she reveals herself to Twilight!
- As Twilight and Cadance make their escape, they run into Chrysalis' mind-controlled bridesmaids. As they close in, the screen goes to black, their glowing eyes the only thing visible.
- The first glimpse of her true form. As she sheds the last of her Cadance disguise, what we are initially left with is a silhouette of a vaguely pony-shaped creature, her wings and mane being the only things not shadowed out. Suddenly, her eyes are instantly wide open followed by a close-up of her face.
- At first there's the Moment of Awesome where the Mane 6 beat down a group of Changelings that blocked their way to the Elements of Harmony. But then they find thousands more of these bug-ponies flying right towards them, and they have to run because there's too many of them to fight. The girls manage to reach the chamber with the Elements of Harmony... except it's swarming with even more Changelings which they can't get past, and the other Changelings catch up. In the end, the Mane 6 get captured and all hope appears lost. Making the sequence even more frightening is the intense background music and incessant buzzing reminiscent of The Swarm, and the scene ends as the Changelings surround the clearly terrified ponies.
