Salutations! There have been quite a few villains introduced in MLP, and some more beloved than others. And even funnier that I happen to post Friday topics around the time that coincides with a new MLP episode (I started and saved this topic as a draft and just so happened to pick it as this week’s Friday topic before realizing that a new bad guy will appear in the new episode Saturday).
The new bad guy isn’t on the same caliber as most of the villains here, but it still feels sorta associable.
Nightmare Moon was the one to start it all. When we are introduced to Twilight, she is investigating the tale of Nightmare Night’s planned return. Besides Discord, Nightmare Moon is the most popular villain. Princess Luna felt inferior to her sister, where ponies enjoyed the day and not her night, this the darkness overcame Luna. It gave her a physical transformation: her eyes narrowed, teeth grew razor sharp, wing shape change, body color goes black, a harness thing, her cutie mark actually changes, and she gains a helmet. She plays upon Luna’s feelings of inferiority, and determines to keep it night forever, without thinking of the risks that come with it. She uses tricks on the Mane 6 to test them. But by the power of friendship and magic stones, Nightmare Moon became Luna once again. There is a holiday in honor of her: Nightmare Night, which is the equivalent to Halloween. Nightmare Moon is continuously popular, and has even been worked on with Rarity, though not in the show.
Nightmare Moon is the second most popular villain? That’s news to me! I would have expected Chrysalis. Anyway, yes, the original villain, Nightmare Moon. I don’t have much to say about her, other than that I hope the whole “Nightmare Corruption” thing gets a little more use in the show.
Season 2 introduced Discord. He is a beloved villain-turned-good, kooky, and my favorite of the villains. You never know what he’ll do next. He as a draconiqus, is unique in his design, as he possesses different body parts of different creatures: a fang that hangs out, a snakey tail, goat beard and horn, gazelle antler, a reptilian leg, a deer leg, eagle talon for an arm, lion arm for the other arm, a pegasus wing, and a bat wing. He has been given some air time, and he has developed as a character. Even with the “switch” to being good, he could still be the silly mischievous Discord he was before his reformation. His abilities include manipulation, hypnotism, shape-shifting, make ridiculous things happen, maneuvering, and can make things. Basically, he can do anything. When he was an actual villain in season 2, he was freed from his prison of stone, and caused chaos, what he does best, and in a goofy imaginative way. He is able to manipulate the Mane 6, and takes away from them their horns and wings. He’s eventually defeated, but it’s not the end when Celestia calls on a reformation for Discord. He knows about it, and laughs about the whole thing, thinking he was in control, until he realized he never had a friend before, and he was at risk for losing the one pony who offered him friendship and the benefit of a doubt. In the season 4 finale, he did betray his pony friends for Tirek, but he did have a slight strike on conscious, and essentially went through betrayal of his own to learn true friendship.
I’m pretty sure Discord is my favorite villain too. I’ve read that his design is based on a qilin, but I don’t know how much I believe that. I can sort of see where that idea is coming from, and Discord does look sort of qilin-ish, but… at the same time, he looks as much like a qilin as he does like a bull. If there were some official statement that said that Discord was designed based off of the qilin, that’s one thing, but I haven’t seen it. Anyway, Discord is a great villain who serves for so much humor. He’s funny and likable. For Discord, my hopes are that the rest of the Mane Six beyond Fluttershy will be more accepting of him.
And we have Sombra, the body-less villain. The Headless Horse can find its head right there! Or somewhere his body is looking for it, remembering the words his mother used to say: “you’d lose your head if it wasn’t attached.” I want to poke fun at him because he is by far my least favorite villain in MLP so far. He ruled as a dictator over the Crystal Empire, putting his subjects under a curse before he was defeated ultimately by Spike. He was depicted as a unicorn, yet he was a king. There’s no way he was married, so who’s not to say the missing body had wings, making him an alicorn? I dislike Sombra for having such a bad character development.
Yeah, Sombra was very poorly developed. I understand that the point was for him to be a looming and threatening force, and he does that well, but he was still poorly developed. Sauron may have been the same way in Lord of the Rings, but… The Silmarillion exists, and even though I haven’t read that one, I’m pretty sure Sauron was fleshed out a little more there. I’m pretty sure Sombra is dead, so the only chance of him getting more fleshed out is a flashback episode of some sort.
Chrysalis was/is a queen, the first time we see one of those. She depicts what fairy tales try to tell/sell to girls: princesses are good, queens are bad. Yet her motivations are not just for herself; what she did, she did for her bug-like subjects. I think some of the fan fascination with her was the way she looked; she is different from ponies, yet is a pony. Maybe like a horse fly! And she does look like Swiss cheese or as if she got impaled. What Chrysalis does is feed off of another’s love and will use trickery to get that. Her obvious power is the power of transformation, as she did in Canterlot Wedding.
Chrysalis is the villain I have the most hopes of being reused (after Starlight, of course). She wasn’t killed off or reformed. She was expelled (…by the same force that she eats… yeah….). So she could come back. (She did get reused in the comics, but we don’t really count those.) I find Changelings to be a fairly interesting being, with all their bugginess. And I have certainly seen the fandom love for Chryssie.
We did have a lesser villain from Spike’s comic, the Mane-iac. She was so much that stereotypical villain. So glad she was only a one-time villain. But, it was pretty fun to have a super hero comic book type of episode. I’m more surprised Rarity didn’t know to handle this villain and wasn’t a key victor, since she’s all about appearances and mane styles and controlling them.
I guess Rarity has had one too few bad mane days…
Tirek was one intimidating guy. Even in earlier times, he was such. He looks pretty similar to his original G1 state, and is a centaur, but there were a few changes, as there will always be. I learned from the Generation 1 Tirek version, there was Applejack, who was also captured by Tirek. I also learned Scorpan was a prince that “worked” for Tirek in that one, rather than being his brother. G1 Tirek had a source of power: the Rainbow of Darkness. There’s an oxymoron/paradox/contradiction for you. I think the new Tirek was the closest to scary to me, even though I’ve watched the season 4 finale plenty of times and know the bad guy never wins. He poses the highest threat, not to one area, but to all of Equestria. He was able to easily manipulate Discord into helping him obtain pony magic, and making Discord agree with him on friendship being a restraint.
Tirek was surely powerful. Though, I wonder what his neutral form is like. What sort of power level did he originally start with? I’m not totally convinced that his shriveled-up form in the beginning of “Twilight’s Kingdom” is what he was like when he began his original conquest. He pretty explicitly became weaker than normal during his time in Tartarus, and he pretty clearly became stronger than in his previous conquest after draining all the Alicorn Magic. He could be reused, but I don’t see it. I feel his time has come to a close, and I feel content with him being left in Tartarus.
Finally, we have Starlight Glimmer. She’s the newest and no doubt will show up again. She is unlike the other villains we have seen so far. She extracts cutie marks with her own magic, and she emphasizes equality, even though she has not rid her own, meaning she did not want to make herself “equal” to them. And she’d also be unable to extract the cutie marks of others if she did extract her own. She’s powerful, but she uses it in a different way than that of the other villains. She has far different ideals, even when the town is against her she holds to those beliefs. So far she’s the only one to shut Twilight up during a friendship lecture. And while Twilight is hopeful she has taken their words to heart when Starlight makes her escape, it is highly doubtful, and a confrontation is surely due later, likely as the finale. So, hey, a continued villain, not just Discord. While I don’t find her likeable in the slightest, at least she’s not a forgotten one-time villain. There will be more threats and menaces as time goes on in the series. And as I said, a new one just so happens to be appearing in the next episode of MLP.
I think Starlight is an acquired taste. After the sheer power of Tirek, it’s hard to out-do him with a new villain. So the show took a turn for the different. Starlight is… a different sort of flavor, so it takes a little to get used to her. But I’ve started to rather like her, to be honest. I’ve said before that I think she was mistreated in her past by cutie-marked snobs. Maybe she was a long-term blank flank. Maybe she is a dark foil to Apple Bloom, who Apple Bloom could become if nudged in the wrong way. She’s more easily accepted as a dark foil to Twilight, though, for pretty obvious reasons. I do really think she sincerely believes her philosophy and is just a hypocrite rather than solely seeking power.