Talk:Princess Luna/@comment-98.92.217.120-20110629102406

One thing that really struck me about Nightmare Moon's attempts to stop Twilight & Company from reaching the elements of harmony was that they were pretty benign, especially for a villain who had threatened to starve all life in Equestria of vital sunlight. At the time I thought it was just a kids' show being squeamish, but then at the end when Celestia forgave her, and she apologized so readily and with such heartfelt emotion, it made me look back and think Luna really had been restraining herself and wanting to avoid hurting anyone if at all possible.

When the guards attack her she tells them to stay back, fires off some warning shots, and then actually *runs away*, when they almost certainly pose no real threat to her, as if realizing she'll have to start truly hurting people if she remains there any longer. The landslide is by far the most dangerous thing she tries, but also probably the most unpredictable, and thereafter her obstacles get progressively less potentially harmful until at the end she's resorted to merely trying to talk the ponies out of their mission- by offering to let one of them join her. Considering that there is every indication she can just fry them all with lightning bolts whenever she really wants to, it's hard for me to not see this entire sequence as Nightmare Moon merely wanting to "scare" Twilight & Company out of retrieving the only weapon that could soundly defeat her, getting spooked by how close she comes to actually killing them with the landslide, and thereafter toning it way down until she's eventually faced with the fact that she can't stop them without seriously hurting them and she's not willing to do it.

At the very least, it raises serious questions about how evil she really was even at her worst. Maybe, due to its magical nature, the complete replacement of sunlight in Equestria with moonlight would not be anywhere near as environmentally devastating as it would be on Earth? Or maybe it was an idle threat, made in a state of high distress, that Luna never would have had the necessary malice to go through with, watching Equestria slowly starve and die, but because Celestia fought her and won very soon after the "endless night" began, Nightmare Moon's nerve was never tested?

And it's entirely possible that a much younger and less wise Celestia had no idea what turning the full force of the elements of harmony, backed by the raw magical power of a goddess, upon her sister would do to her, and was only trying to bring about the fastest possible resolution to the situation out of fear for the well-being of their many mutual subjects. It's possible that the whole "sealing in the moon for 1000 years" thing was just a horrible, accidental tragedy that Celestia spent a millennium deeply regretting.

Furthermore, when Celestia re-appears at the end of the pilot, it's not clear that she does this because she's been released from some sort of imprisonment of her own- there's very little to contradict the assertion that she simply stayed away from Nightmare Moon once Nightmare Moon was released, avoiding another titanic battle between goddesses, and observed events secretly much as Nightmare Moon observed Twilight & Company, waiting to see what her sister would do with her freedom. And what she does do with it is actively avoid hurting anyone, which convinces Celestia it's safe to offer Luna forgiveness. The plot portrays Celestia's inaction in the face of Nightmare Moon's imminent release as a test for her pupil Twilight, but considering how clever and manipulative she's been shown to be I think her purpose was twofold: if Celestia had defeated Luna herself, Luna would have been far too humiliated to accept her forgiveness, remained defiant, and Celestia might have needed to imprison her again to protect Equestria; but because Twilight did it instead, Celestia was able to play Good Cop to Twilight's Bad Cop, get through to her sister, and create a happy ending for *everyone*.