FoME Boils Over: The Great Game and the Incandescent Miasma · 12:17pm May 2nd, 2014
I just need to get something off my chest here. I don't know if this is a longstanding trend I only just noticed, a developing situation, or just a flawed bit of patternicity on my part, but I don't like it and I want to address it. I am referring to the practice of making Celestia a political incompetent.
It feels like I keep seeing Celestias who couldn't govern their way out of a paper bag. I don't mean those times where she steps down because she's lost the will to lead, I mean the stories where she's genuinely trying and yet ponies millennia younger than her are running circles around her, the state of the state of Equestria is in turmoil, looting and rioting fill the streets, and Ghostbusters quotes are just waiting to happen.
Let's look at the canon: Celestia ruled Equestria alone for a thousand years, and with Luna for an unspecified number of years before that. A thousand years is a long time. It's the chronological distance between William the Conquerer William-the-Conquering the Anglo-Saxons and fifty-two years in the future. That is, to put it exceedingly bluntly, about twelve metric fucktons of political experience, and that's Celestia's minimum. She should be fairly well-versed in statecraft.
And as for the coups, Luna was all but forgotten when she returned. Discord was thought a symbol of lowercase-d discord. As far as the ponies knew at the beginning of the series premiere, it's been all Celestia all the time since some point after the founders founded Equestria (assuming that the Hearth's Warming story wasn't just a sanitized parable of a much less pleasant history.) There's a reason Celestia often gets represented as the God-Empress of Ponykind; by the time Twilight reads the legend of Nightmare Moon, overthrowing her would seem as impossible as outshining the sun itself.
I'm not saying that Celestia has to be omniscient, just competent on a level that reflects her experience. I'm not saying she needs to be universally beloved, but the millennium of stable, prosperous rule and the direct control over the sun need to be taken into account by any ostensibly sane character who thinks he or she can do better.
Most importantly, I'm not saying that "weak leader" Celestia should never be used in a story. For one, I have no right to make such a dictum, nor any authority to put behind it. (Heh. Authority.) For another, as with any narrative device, it can work so long as it's justified. As noted above, maybe she's been consumed by ennui and has lost the will to govern. Maybe forces from outside Equestria, whether another nation or another dimension, are pulling the strings behind the insurrection. Maybe the sudden arrival of high-Kardashev humans in the solar system have thrown the world's politics in a tizzy. Even something as simple as an Alternate Universe tag will make me sit down, read the story, and do nothing more than politely wonder what butterfly flapped its wings to make this Celestia so different from the baseline.
Okay. That's my two cents, and I probably put them in the collection plate as I preached to the choir. But they were burning a hole in my wallet, and I'm just going to stop right here before I mix any other metaphors into this mess. Thank you for reading. Comments are welcome, as always.
This is a thing? I guess I just don't read those stories. Probably for the best
Problem is, humans don't have any experience-at all-with such long time scales.
We also have no experience with immortality, which is we keep seeing those fucking-godawful wah wah I'm immortal and I have to see everyone I love die piles of angst and shit.
There's always the possibility that she's grown complacent. A few centuries of peaceful rule would be enough for anyone to think that maybe they could sit back and not pay such close attention to the intrigues.
As long as the author justified it in the setting...
I suppose that's the problem.
Or maybe she takes an extreme hooves-off approach because she doesn't want to be a tyrant!
I don't see this much in stories. My preferred Celestia does have some manner of divine power, and any conflict I want to put into a story has to contend with "If it's bad enough, Celestia will banish the offender to the sun."
On the other hand, she's shown in canon being defeated by Nightmare Moon, Discord, Chrysalis, and a tree. She seems to be getting weaker as the series progresses.
2070378
This is probably the worf effect in action, trying to establish how big a threat a villain is by having them take out the supposed god empress of ponykind, and we all know what happens when its abused to much.
Well, much of that is the Worf Effect where you have only 22 minutes to show how bad the new bad guy/gal is, so they go smack a goddess around and one-shot her. They have been fairly good at keeping it implied instead of explicit, with Celestia vanishing in the first two episodes instead of showing a defeat, and sending Twilight and her friends to the Crystal Empire without her, so Sombra had to Worf Shining Armor instead. And I don't think they actually showed Discord defeating her. After all, the best way not to overuse a gag is to avoid using it at all if you don't have to use it.
2069774
As such, even I'm going to encounter something I don't like.
Yeah, that's the problem with diverse tastes. I end up seeing... well, most everything.
2069836
Precisely. So long as someone acknowledges the complacency, I don't have a problem with it.
2070346
This works too. She's revered for operating the sun and moon, but has chosen to stay out of the political arena and restrict herself to little more than a figurehead. So long as that's made clear, then it's fine
2070378
You nicely demonstrate the other end of the spectrum, as opposed to Soft-touch-lestia. The only reason anypony would choose to rebel against a mare with a giant fusion reactor at her beck and call is because they know she'd hesitate to cause collateral damage.
Also, three of those opponents were her crazy but still beloved sister, a vastly more powerful being, and a lifeform specifically created to nullify her. As for Chrysalis, she was both bloated on love for the alicorn thereof and protected by the aforementioned reluctance to harm innocent ponies. When all you have are a squirt gun and an H-bomb, the terrorist with a revolver and a crowd of bystanders has the upper hand.
Writers have no sense of scale. 1000 years is a long time, and when you consider that luna and celestia are old enough that a 1000-year enforced age gap is minor to them, they've been around longer than humans have been civilized. This always bugs me in sci-fi stories, especially spinoffs of mlp, when the writers don't bother to think just how much society, technology, and entropy can change, change, and act respectively over a millenial time period. I'm assuming the castle in the everfree has a serious number of preservation spells on it, what with the library still being intact.
Do yourself a favour and don't read Chains.
Well, I can't be sure, but I think her poor portrayal in the show itself probably has something to do with it... given that despite all her supposed power she is constantly defeated (or refuses to fight) every time shit hits the fan, and almost every decision she's ever made seems to be either a) a bad decision (see most of her decisions in A Canterlot Wedding), or b) a decision that only worked out because of crazy amounts of blind luck (See Reforming Discord).
Unless things have changed in Season 4, I'm not surprised, really.
Which isn't to say I LIKE such patterns. As a character who has lived for over 1000 years in office you are absolutely correct. I'm just saying I can see where the trend comes from.
2070621 "But you have an H-bomb and...ooooh you actually care about the random bystanders. Wish I had known that earlier.". *bomber flies overhead*
****************
"And once they put out the fires from the napalm strike, it was decided that I was never allowed to negotiate a hostage situation ever again."