I never said such a thing. I clearly said that that was compared to what came before, which was a lot worse. Also, I never said that monarchies do not have other problems.

I quoted the part from your post and i only said that the way you structured your post imply that. The way you emphasized how monarchies fixed all the problems and all the democracy is needed for later is freedom (seemingly after everything is fixed by the monarchy). Nothing else.

Edited by VeryVileVillian on Feb 27th 2020 at 10:02:56 PM

Lawless Anarchy < Totalitarian Autocracy < Respectable Democracy

This is what Redmess is putting forward. I don't know what's complicated about it.

I already said this before what i find problematic. The speech structure that implies that Monarchy fixes everything and democracy only needed for freedom part. Eh. Okay. Whatever. I drop this.

@G Ninja

You are absolutely right, that is generally how history goes. It's not just cyclical, though. There is also a progression towards more societal complexity, robuster systems of government, more internal stability and complex relationships with neighbours. There is a cycle, but there is also that upward progression between peaks, and that is at least reassuring that we are at least learning from the past, even if we don't always show it.

A safe dictatorship may very well be preferable to the constant threat of anarchy, but I really don't buy that Equestria as it is under Celestia is meaningfully unsafe or unstable in any real sense. Yes, external threats have attacked it from time to time. They're also all dealt with quickly and decisively within a period of a few days at most, and Equestria goes right back to being peaceful, productive and harmonious right afterward. If you jumped into the canon setting like Twilight jumped into the alternate timelines in "The Cutie Re-Mark", just getting a quick glimpse of it like she did, you would hardly see an anarchic wasteland! You'd see a peaceful, happy society with very little overt sign of danger or unhappiness.

@kegisak

This, exactly. I mean, Roosevelt hardly went off to beat the Axis single-handedly, but I would still think he did a pretty decent job of getting the U.S. through World War Two.

Edited by Theriocephalus on Feb 27th 2020 at 6:51:33 AM

> Kennedy hardly went off to beat the Axis single-handedly, but I would still think he did a pretty decent job of getting the U.S. through World War Two.

I think you mean Roosevelt,Kennedy was much later..

Noted and corrected.

The difference there though is that the US had a military, and Equestria doesn't.

The situations aren't really comparable. It would be as if Roosevelt and Hitler would have battled each other in single combat.

No, I actually think they're quite comparable. The point isn't that Equestria uses a military to ensure its stability, as such. It's that Celestia's martial prowess or lack thereof isn't terribly relevant to her keeping Equestria safe, because she's very obviously still able to keep Equestria secure, stable and prosperous on a long-term basis — she may not be able to fight off invasions on her lonesome, but is still able to maintain and bring together people who can. In spirit, that's exactly like the U.S. keeping an army — the person up top is patently unable to fight off all invaders by themselves, so they keep people who can around.

Equestria is obviously not an unstable place. I would hardly call a place where all invaders are routinely and totally defeated within a few days of attacking unsafe — hell, that's a much better track record than any real-life nation has!

Edited by Theriocephalus on Feb 27th 2020 at 7:28:49 AM

That's a good point.

Though we were talking specifically about the alternate universe Celestia, I think. And that episode suggests that Celestia, along with Equestria, is basically doomed without the mane six. It even explicitly says so at the end.

Edited by Redmess on Feb 27th 2020 at 2:31:36 PM

Yeah, but that's all because of Twilight. Not once has Celestia been responsible for the invaders being "routinely and totally defeated within a few days of attacking". If she's even involved at all, it's to get punked out in seconds.

She doesn't make plans, she doesn't give orders, she doesn't command from the rear or support supply chains or provide the crucial leadership that will bring victory. She abstains from the crisis and has Twilight do everything, or she steps foot in the crisis and gets her ass kicked immediately.

She was once successfully defeated and imprisoned by a particularly surly vine.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 27th 2020 at 7:52:08 AM

Yeah, but that's all because of Twilight. Not once has Celestia been responsible for the invaders being "routinely and totally defeated within a few days of attacking". If she's even involved at all, it's to get punked out in seconds.

Given that Equestria appears to have gone through a thousand years of peace and prosperity under her rain, one can presume that she did this to any invaders during that time period, if such existed.

The Twilight stuff is basically just Superhero Paradox.

Edited by storyyeller on Feb 27th 2020 at 1:04:36 PM

Celestia was playing on hand-holding easy mode since she isn't the MLPverse's protagonist.

Well, that's the problem. She's really good at crisis situations in the backstory i.e. offscreen but when she's on screen, the hype falls apart.

I call it "the Stormtropper Incompetence Paradox".

And the whole "doesn't make plans" thing isn't really true, either — she did have a plan for Nightmare Moon, and Discord. She even anticipated Discord corrupting the Mane Six and started sending back friendship reports to remind Twilight of what she had learned.

And later seasons seemed to realize how jobbing the Princesses over and over again was starting to look, and would try to come up with better reasons they weren't resolving the big two-parters themselves — they're not called on because the stakes were more personal then all-of-Equestria threatening, for example, or they'd be off doing something else — fending off an all-consuming storm, keeping the Everfree Forest in check — while the main characters resolved the actual problem.

You joke, but that is basically it.

It's a hard role, being the Big Good. You have to be a force of good that inspires and motives the protagonist, but you can't actually solve the plot.

My Little Pony likes to use Celestia as this absolute force of benevolence in Equestria. She's the kingdom's Benevolent Autocrat, who loves and guides them as needed. She's Equestria's Mom, basically, with all the expectations and responsibilities that come with it.

But MLP also likes opening and closing seasons with these big adventure stories where some malevolent force of darkness threatens Equestria and our heroes must stop it. Always has. Which, in turn, necessitates that Equestria's Mom be removed from the picture.

This dynamic is what screwed Celestia and created the idea that she is woefully inadequate to protect her own kingdom. In order for that second part to happen, that first part needs to get its teeth kicked in. Equestria's Mom has to be beaten, tied up, and locked in a closet so that an Adventure Plot can occur. Again. And again. And again.

That's been the trend literally since the beginning, when Nightmare Moon made her appearance and gloated, "LOL I shitstomped Celestia offscreen and now I'm in charge! MUWAHAHAHAHAHAHA MINE IS AN EVIL LAUGH!"

Since then, she's been kidnapped by vines, shot in the face by the Changeling Queen, voluntarily crippled herself to hide her magic in Twilight, etc. Her worst display is easily the film, where an angry unicorn with a broken horn gets violent and Celestia rolls over and dies without putting up even the slightest token gesture of a fight.

But the most awkward is King Sombra, because Celestia actually had a legit reason for staying out of that. The episode is framed as Twilight's test. Celestia isn't putting all of our hopes on Twilight; she's just giving Twilight the opportunity to do this herself as a test of her mettle and a Secret Test of Character. There's an undertone through "The Crystal Empire" that if Twilight fails, Celestia will show up and "Lesson Zero" Sombra away. But then Twilight will fail. That personal stake (and Twilight eventually learning that it doesn't matter so much) is the core of the entire two-parter.

"The Cutie Re-Mark" botched up that undercurrent by retroactively establishing that no, Celestia could have done nothing to stop King Sombra and Twilight really was the only hope for Equestria once again. This actively harms Celestia's character, especially since she applied the Secret Test of Character arbitrary restrictions on Twilight in the first place. If Celestia didn't have any other hope of stopping Sombra, then handicapping Twilight before sending her out was the stupidest decision imaginable.

Celestia's behavior in "The Crystal Empire" only makes sense if King Sombra isn't really that big a threat. A problem, but not such a problem that Celestia can't afford Twilight screwing up the first attempt. But in the haste to show a WWI-equivalent Equestria under siege, "The Cutie Re-Mark" just sorta threw that out the window.

Tl;dr: Celestia is a leadership figure whose guiding role in the story is constantly being overturned by the demands of high-stakes fighting against horror monsters, because MLP for some reason likes to do that occasionally.

The difference between The Crystal Empire and The Cutie Re-Mark seems to be that Luna is there in one but not the other.

The flashback in The Crystal Empire shows the sisters shitcanning Sombra together. So it could be that Luna and Celestia TOGETHER can defeat Sombra, but that's not viable in a future where Luna was apparently never reformed and Tia is on her own. Which does make a certain amount of sense. 2 Alicorns are better than 1.

Edited by GNinja on Feb 28th 2020 at 3:45:24 PM

Poor Sombra. Reduced from powerful dictator lord of edginess to a practical exam for a pony he's never even heard of.

How the mighty have fallen, indeed.

Post of the Day #2803

Posted by Veni Vidi Pony on Fri, 16th Nov '12 11:48:04 AM - Post #304102 in the old thread

And then he f*cking died.

Sombra doesn't get enough credit for that. People have been whining for years that we don't have a thoroughly irredeemable pony villain that is pure malevolence and never recants it. But Sombra was that villain in "The Crystal Empire". King Sombra was

1. A Pony. Yes, he spends a lot of time as a smoke monster, but he's still a unicorn.
2. 100% pure evil with no sympathetic motive or freudian excuse to justify his actions - unless you read the comics, I guess? The comics are weird.
3. A f*cking corpse at the end. No redemption, no rainbow lobotomy, he just gets f*cked and dies, the end.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 28th 2020 at 8:54:53 AM

"The Cutie Re-Mark" botched up that undercurrent by retroactively establishing that no, Celestia could have done nothing to stop King Sombra and Twilight really was the only hope for Equestria once again.

Keep in mind that the Cutie Re-Mark also showed the Flim-Flams taking over the world. I don't think it has much bearing on who Celestia could have handled in the prime timeline.

One point does not make it worthless and it kinda ignores the point of the stakes it establishes: if Sparkles can't stop Glimmer from changing the future so that they can't become the Elements of Harmony, then Equestria is borked. Luna, Tirek, Discord, Chrysalis, it becomes a game of "pick your poison" if Sparkles doesn't succeed.

Which creates the implication that Celestia couldn't have saved the day when it came down to those.

Edited by fredhot16 on Feb 28th 2020 at 8:10:40 AM

Speaking of Sombra, his death was one of my greatest prediction failures in the show. The fact that they specifically showed him infiltrating the Crystal Empire by regenerating from a piece of his horn, and then at the end when he "died", they specifically showed that his horn was still intact made me sure that they were planning to bring him back at some point.

Sometimes I wonder if they were considering bringing him back at first and left the door open, but then changed their minds later. Although it seems that what most likely happened was that they just didn't think through the implications of putting those scenes together and just showed his horn at the end because it looked cool.

There's an additional element to this that doesn't make a whole lot of logistical sense, but it is brought up by Twilight. I'd forgotten this.

Apparently, timeline damage is accumulative. The more that you try to mess with time, the worse the futures get. Twi mentions several times that each future she comes back to is "worse" than the last. That's why you start getting weirdness like Flim and Flam destroying the world.