T. K. Arispe

 More doodling, this time for a My Little Pony fanfic I've been working on (which explains last month's geek rant). 

This is a concept design for the evil version of mirror-universe King Sombra, as the fic is a follow-up to the MLP:FiM graphic novel storyline “Reflections”. That story arc revolves around an alternate-universe Equestria where moral alignments are reversed, meaning that universe’s versions of Celestia and Luna are evil while King Sombra is good. Regular Celestia finds her way into this universe during her studies under Starswirl the Bearded, and she and Mirror-Sombra strike up a relationship that is severed when Mirror-Sombra absorbs the evil inside Mirror-Celestia and Mirror-Luna to prevent them from trying to take over regular Equestria. Celestia is also forced to seal the passageway between the universes to prevent them from becoming inextricably entangled.

 

It was an interesting idea and all, but I just hated how unfair that was to Celestia, to have the one relationship she was ever in get ripped away from her just because of trivialities like the fabric of reality unraveling. If you look at her history, she’s really lived a lonely life, devoting herself to the well-being of Equestria at the expense of seeking her own happiness, and even having to deal with her own sister, probably her closest friend and family member, being banished to the moon for several centuries, leaving Celestia to handle everything by herself.

That, coupled with the fact that at the end of season nine, she and Luna abdicate the throne to Twilight Sparkle so the sisters can retire, led me to write a fic where Celestia (with the help of the other princesses) realizes that her needs are just as important as everypony else’s, and they decide to rebuild the universe-hopping portal and rescue Mirror-Sombra from himself so he and Celestia can figure out a way to be together without warping the spacetime continuum.

In the fic, Mirror-Sombra is still at war with Mirror-Celestia and Mirror-Luna, having completely taken over the Crystal Empire and turned it into a Mordor-esque wasteland. The show’s writers took inspiration from Sauron when creating Sombra, so I decided to take that idea and run with it and design a Sombra who’s gone full-on dark lord mode, with powers surpassing that of regular Sombra because in his universe, nopony’s been able to stop him. That said, he still remembers Celestia, and he’s struggling with the fact that he’s evil not because he wants to be, but because he felt forced to reverse the order of his universe in order to protect Celestia. He just needs a little Friendship is Magic™ power to help him see things right and find a solution that really helps everypony—including him and Celestia.

Maybe it’s because I’m an oldest sibling, but I sympathize with Celestia a lot. She carries a lot of burdens of responsibility, and it seems like she’s lived most of her life running around trying to take care of others at the expense of taking care of herself. It’s good to be selfless and caring, but not to the point where your own needs never get met. And it just wasn’t fair to her that the one thing she ever wanted in her life got taken away from her. So I’m giving it back.

I’m also kind of using the fic as a way to vent my frustrations about some of the stuff I didn’t think worked about season nine, which I feel is the weakest of the seasons both in terms of writing and how the writers decided to wrap up the show.

First off, I really don’t like how a lot of the characters were handled throughout the season. I feel like the idea of Celestia and Luna retiring is almost an insult to them—these ladies are extremely powerful immortal alicorns who have protected Equestria from evil time and again. They’ve been doing this job for centuries. I just can’t imagine them wanting to step away from that.

Especially because Equestria might still need them. Yes, by the time of season nine, Twilight Sparkle was becoming a powerful alicorn in her own right, but there were many times throughout the series when the power of multiple alicorns was necessary to save the day. I just can’t see Celestia and Luna opting to chill on the beach and let Twilight Sparkle handle everything from now on. (Not to mention at the beginning of season four when they gave her that whole big pep talk about how princesses aren’t alone in dealing with their responsibilities… and now they’re ditching her?) It just doesn’t jive with everything that was established about the princesses in previous seasons.

Also, I really hated the fact that Queen Chrysalis, King Sombra, Tirek, and Cozy Glow return to cause more mayhem… and never get rehabilitated. They’re just there to cause trouble and then get turned to stone once they’ve fulfilled their purpose of making Twilight Sparkle feel competent. This is really at odds with how previous seasons treated villains—as people who are hurting and need help. Friendship is Magic even for people who don’t think they need friendship. Every time a villain was reformed on the show, it felt like a triumph, and also an opportunity for that character to grow and show more sides of themselves than just playing the antagonist. Chrysalis, Sombra, Tirek, and Cozy Glow never got that chance, and now they never will, which is sad. I would have found the season finale much more satisfying if it culminated in those four having a change of heart, rather than Twilight taking over for Celestia and Luna--something she never wanted and was never the point of the show in the first place.

Another thing that annoyed me about the writing in season nine was how prevalent Discord was in the overall season arc. Don’t get me wrong—I like Discord. I think he’s a fun character. But I also feel like he’s one of those characters who usually work better in small doses because he has such a strong and distinctive personality and abilities. I think the writers went too far in acknowledging how much of a fan favorite Discord is by deciding to give him a really big role in season nine, to the point where the season premiere and finale just kinda feel like The Discord Show and dampens what the writers were trying to say about Twilight Sparkle (which honestly wasn’t much besides “look how good she’s gotten at controlling her anxiety, now she’s ready to be supreme ruler”). Discord already had a lot of really big – and better-handled – roles in previous crucial storylines (for example, he was amazing and a perfect fit for “To Where and Back Again”). You really, really don’t need to shoehorn him into every single important plot happening purely for fan service.

And what bothered me as a whole about season nine was that it wrapped things up that didn’t really need to be wrapped up. I talked about this in my previous post about Digimon, but not every fictional universe needs a definitive end point. This is especially true if the entire premise of the storyline never demanded an end point. Avatar: The Last Airbender is a really good example of when a series does need wrapping up. The show started with a definitive issue that needed resolving (someone needs to stop the Fire Nation, but the Avatar is missing). The action of all three seasons propelled the protagonists forward on their quest to restore balance in their world, and the show stopped at the right point: when that objective was achieved. Conflicts and character arcs were resolved and the saga was over, and that’s the correct time to bring down the curtain for narratives of this nature. (And that's why it drives me crazy when TV shows with this kind of narrative are cancelled before reaching a conclusion.)

Contrast that example with MLP:FiM, which never had a concrete goal the characters were working toward. Yes, Princess Celestia sent Twilight to Ponyville to learn about friendship, but one could argue Twilight learned plenty about friendship by the end of the series premiere. Every season was really good at being both self-contained and open-ended, and the series as a whole could easily have wrapped up at the conclusion of any of these seasons. Season nine just felt like a solution to a nonexistent problem, and as a result comes across as somewhat strained and forced.

In an open-ended series like FiM, characters don’t need conclusions. I’m not sure how many other fans feel the same way, but with these sorts of narrative structures, I don’t really want or need to be told how the entire cast is going to end up. I think it’s more fun to leave that sort of thing open to the fans’ imaginations. (I honestly hated at the end of Digimon 02 when they laid out everybody’s futures, including who they married and how many kids they had and what their jobs were. I felt that was totally unnecessary.)

So I’m kinda using this fic to fix some stuff about FiM that I think season nine broke. I’m not sure how many people would actually care about that, but I’m doing it as a service to myself, I guess.

(Also, reformed regular Sombra and Radiant Hope from the comics are also in this fic, and I’m not sure how that correlates with Sombra’s fate in season nine. I kinda just didn’t even address it in the fic rather than trying to find some convoluted solution. You can make up your own way to have it fit continuity.)