Cower in Fear · 1:26am Sep 19th, 2015
Estee presented an interesting thought exercise on a blog today: Who are your top five (and bottom three) scariest ponies? I took a rather more detailed approach than most respondents, and I thought it'd make a good blog in and of itself. (Plus, it'll be a lot easier to back-reference this than a comment on someone else's blog. 
) Let's start from the top.
5. King Sombra
I assure you, I'm going somewhere with this.
A lot of unicorn characters boil down to alternate paths Twilight could have taken. What if Twilight let her talents go to her head? What if her ambition outweighed her devotion to Celestia? What if her thirst for knowledge dominated her life? Sombra is a rather unlikely path: What if Twilight went full Evil Overlord?
For the most part, the rest of this list is terrifying for what they can do. Sombra is terrifying for what he did do. He doesn't get much screentime, but his handiwork does: The layers of physical, magical, and psychological defenses around the Crystal Heart. The lingering traumatic effects on the crystal ponies and their knowledge base to remove any mention or memory of the Heart. The willingness to take an entire magical city-state with him into oblivion. The patience to simply outwait the opposition, content to let slow corruption do his work until the alarm he installed told him he needed to shift to a more active plan, which he immediately implemented. Only an improbable, unforeseeable desperation tactic snatched victory from him.
For all we mock his stair obsession and limited vocabulary, Sombra was very competent, even when largely working off of contingencies he'd put into place before his dissolution. He may very well be the most competent equine antagonist in the show thus far. He just wasn't fighting in his weight class, whether going up against two alicorns or a city-sized emotional resonator.
4. Fluttershy
Not only does Fluttershy have the fury of nature at her beck and call, we've seen the rage simmering under the surface and what happens when she decides to bring it to full boil. Fluttershy is a quiet observer, silently cataloging all of the faults of those around her. If she wants to, she can utterly destroy a pony with a few choice words. That may be part of why she feels so uncomfortable around ponies; she can't help but make that list of their weaknesses. She demonstrates that you have to be cruel to be kind, or at least possess the capacity for it.
And, as I said at the start, there's the fact that she's queen of her little slice of the animal kingdom. And wrestles bears. Even if she doesn't have a psychological angle on a pony, she can still pose a physical threat if pushed. With the Stare, she might not even need to.
3. Celestia
Twilight may be the Princess of Neuroses, but her fear of her mentor had to come from somewhere. It could be the incredible political acumen that's kept a nation stable and prosperous (if not necessarily appreciative) for a millennium and could easily destroy those who displease her. It could be the authority that comes from being god-queen of said nation. It could be the vast magical power at Celestia's command coupled with centuries of experience. It probably isn't that she had to fight long and hard to get where she is now; after all, Twilight, like most ponies, can barely conceive of a time before Celestia. Still, breaking from the framing device, that point stands. Celestia was not handed her current position. She earned it. She gets things done. And those things are threatening her ponies, they get a millennium-long time-out. And those are just the ones we've heard about.
2. Luna
Someone whose duties extend to monitoring the subconscious minds of her subjects is going to have an unavoidable air of Orwellianism, no matter how noble her intentions. The whole "Tried to douse the sun" issue doesn't help matters. And, of course, there's the fact that she's Celestia's equal and opposite. Same power, same determination, less experience in keeping herself controlled around the political parasites. Their different power suites also affect the ranking: Celestia can reduce a body to ash. Luna can reduce a mind to a gibbering mess. She would never do such a thing, of course, just as Celestia would never casually carbonize. But she could, and leaving a living testament to her dread power is all the more terrifying.
1. Twilight Sparkle
Twilight is to Luna as Luna is to Celestia: Younger, less experienced, and probably less stable. The matter of comparative power is unclear, but Twilight's intellect more than makes up for any discrepancy in raw strength. Even before her ascension, she was laying waste to towns, vanquishing living constellations, outmaneuvering vastly more powerful foes, and seeing through ruses that fooled Celestia herself. Twilight is methodical, and therein lies her most terrifying aspect. Given surprisingly little time, she can do just about anything. If she wanted to be a villain, I'm honestly not sure how she could be stopped. Wife tossing might prove instrumental... if she weren't aware of the tactic.
Technically speaking, the least terrifying ponies would be those background characters who we haven't even given personalities, so I limited my bottom three with on-show speaking roles:
3. Coco Pommel. When you can out-moe Fluttershy, you just aren't that threatening. There's a glorious little subgenre I like to call "Coco Pummel," wherein Hatbutt Waifu outdoes Fluttershy on the other end of the emotional spectrum, but in canon, Coco is a marshmallow. She's theoretically as threatening as any full-grown earth pony, but can you even imagine her throwing a punch in a serious context?
2. Silver Spoon. Isolate her from Diamond Tiara, and she'll probably be too busy having an existential crisis to threaten anyone.
1. Tree Hugger. I remain convinced that Tree Hugger's endocrine system produces its own cannabinoids. Really, when Discord doesn't make an impression on you, you aren't in an altered state of being. It's just that your default state is different from everyone else's. She simply doesn't spend enough time in this world to threaten anyone in it.
And now for a few honorable mentions:
Derpy Hooves/Ditzy Doo/Muffins/Bubbles/Bright Eyes/Olórin: Whatever you call her and however you interpret her, Best Pony is often a danger to herself and/or others. But for that she's paved the road to Hell, at the end of the day, she just doesn't measure up to cosmic avatars, shadow liches, OP Sparkle, or the Beastmistress of Ponyville. At least, not in canon, and that was my chief consideration here.
Pinkie Pie: That insistence on canonicity is also why Pinkie doesn't appear on the scary list. For all that I like to portray her as an ancient and/or eldritch entity, baseline Pinkie is more a danger to herself than anyone else. At her worst, whether Pinkamena or discordant, her natural impulse is to isolate herself. Extroversion and an unhealthy mental state just don't coincide in Pinkie's psyche. Yes, Pinkie has the capacity to wreak havoc second only to Discord, but she almost never uses that capacity in a harmful manner. She'll only hurt someone if it won't result in a net loss of happiness, such as during the changeling attack on Canterlot, and even then, she attacked with partillery and a sight gag. To do otherwise would betray her purpose in life.
Cadence: When the top three consists of alicorns, the fourth is conspicuous in her absence. (At least, she is after kudzuhaiku points it out.) So, why didn't Cadence make it into the top five? Mostly because of Celestia. Yes, if Cadence has the ability to create love, as opposed to reinforcing love that's already present, then she is pretty darn menacing. However, she's been under Celestia's wing pretty much ever since she got her horn. Tia has no doubt made it clear what the consequences of irresponsible love magic would be. They would probably begin with an imprisonment/banishment combo. I know I judged most of my top contenders based on what they were capable of rather than what they might realistically do, but much like Pinkie Pie, I just can't see any situation where Cadence's full, terrible power might be unleashed. Not without breaking her so fundamentally that Cadence as we know her would effectively be dead.
... Wow. That went dark.
Discord: Estee asked for the scariest ponies. I figured that disqualified the majority of Discord. Ditto Tirek, only more so.
The Flower Trio: A lot of people put one or more of Daisy, Lily, and Roseluck in their bottom three. I didn't. Even with their reputations, they can incite a riot under the right circumstances. Normally, they're jokes. Under the right circumstances, they're surprisingly effective rabble-rousers.
Okay, first I have to say, "Hatbutt Waifu" is killing me. XD Second, did you read I Taco You Valentine? Because I think Coco's cameo in that story fits this category, not to spoil anything. :V
Quite frankly, the pony that scares me the most is not on your list.
Scariest of all ponies: Princess Cadance. If she ever wanted to challenge Princess Celestia and Luna to a popularity contest, she would win. She could make all who look upon her love her, perhaps with a few exceptions. We're actually shown instances in the show where Cadance uses her magic for conflict resolution, making two ponies love each other and stop fighting.
That is downright Orwellian. You WILL learn to love Big Sister.
Honestly, the idea of a pony being in control of love scares the whimpering poo right out of me.
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She's a hatbutt. Her work in Manehattan makes it clear that she's embraced her nature as a hatbutt.
As for I Taco You, Valentine, I did, and I loved it.
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I thought I'd forgot one of the honorable mentions. Suffice to say, I filed Cadence in the same category as Pinkie: Potentially dangerous, but incredibly unlikely to realize that potential. Not after Celestia's carefully delivered course on magical ethics. ("Pay careful attention, Mi Amore. It took the Elements of Harmony to banish my sister to the moon, but I can banish ponies to the sun on my own.")
Sparkle OP, Blizzard. Nerf pls.
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She isn't forcing you to love her silly. She is reminding you how much you always loved her.
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Cadance is kind of a wild card, since the show never really gets into what limitations her power has. I've heard it said that she is basically limited to a much more effective version of reminding people why they fell in love (sort of like weeks of good relationship counselling in one spell), but I'm not sure how canon that is. If she's limited in the ways I've seen her limited in some fanficitons, she is actually incapable of being a threat beyond her above average magical strength. If she's not limited in any such way, then she is in fact scary for the exact reasons you said (and in a way the same reasons FoME mentioned for Luna).
Basically I don't think her abilities have been clarified enough for us to really compare her to other characters. They probably never will be either, since the little girl portion of the audience doesn't really care about such details.
It's kind of hard to imagine Cadence getting through her teenage years without abusing her powers (come on, a teenage girl with the power to make people fall in love with her?). But she must have, since the apple of her eye probably makes the top twenty list for Mortals That Celestia is Keeping an Eye Out For (future captain of the guard, and brother of her pupil).
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I think that Cadance, fortunately for everypony, is simply too good to use her powers that way, once she understood that it would hurt innocent Ponies to do so. It's not that she isn't extraordinarily potentially dangerous. She is. It's that she's simply too nice to employ the "mind control" setting of her natural abilities save on those who truly deserve it, who are few and far between.
Likewise Pinkie Pie. The SWSV Pinkie would be one of the most terrifying opponents imaginable if not restrained by her morality, and if you look into what vanilla canon Pinkie can do it's not far short of mine. In vanilla canon, Pinkie Pie is a precognitive with some sort of reality-warping ability that can disrupt powerful magics (I give you "Giggle at the Ghosties" which disarmed one of NIghtmare Moon's traps) and enable her to, effectively, move in ways which should be impossible to an Earth Pony (teleporting, flying with minimal mechanical assistance). In SWSV fanon, Pinkie can see parallel presents and possible futures, and can change the probabilities of future events. She has essentially a Limited Wish power.
If Pinkie Pie was malign or even seriously unethical, she'd be a monster, and close to unstoppable one because she could see you coming by precognition. Happily, Pinkie is deeply good.
I think that Tree Hugger is smarter, and more potentially-dangerous, than you give her credit for. You imagine that she's zonked out of her mind, but consider this ... everything she said in her one appearance made sense, was extremely pertinent to the situation, and advanced her goals. The evidence is that she's not crazy, but rather has an unsual set of senses and ways of affecting the world around her. In particular, she really does see auras and sense "vibrations."
She's also definitely one of the good guys.
The Flover Trio aren't scary ponies, they're scaredy ponies!
I like your points on Sombra. He's an underappreciated antagonist, if you ask me.
I was happy to see Sombra get some fear in Estee's thread, though I couldn't seem to get a list together myself. I'd have to be all boring and mundane and only list actual villains, because much as we fanfic writers like to exaggerate every character we can get our hands on, the truth is none of the not-evil people would ever willingly hurt a fly, and will rush to make amends afterwards if they do it unwillingly.
Mind you I would have to include Star Swirl the Bearded on the list, either my own or the canon versions. Before Celestia and Luna grew powerful enough to take over it was Star Swirl who raised both the sun and the moon, a process so demanding that he had five unicorns to help him each time and they all lost their magic permanently in the process so none of them could help him more than once.
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I hate to plug myself but I think it's relevant enough here: this spring I wrote a story all about an immortal Cadance using her powers to ensure that she never has to be alone, and a number of people were quite horrified. More than I had expected them to be, actually. It's here (M-rated) if you're interested.
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If we're going by canon, Cadence was a a pegasus to begin with. Logically, that means she started out having as much trouble with horn magic as Twilight did with flying, if not more so. By the time she figured out love spells, Celestia probably had enough mental defenses up to qualify as a psychic Fort Knox, assuming she doesn't do that out of habit.
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Given the way Cadence embodies capital-L Love, it's possible that the very idea of forcing love into existence where there was none is repugnant to her on an intrinsic level. It would be like Twilight misusing magic or Luna raising the moon in the middle of the day...
Er...
Well, Cadence definitely seems more stable than those two. And I'm sure she knows about the eventual outcome of loving a mortal. On an intellectual level at least.
Look, this is the scariest ponies at the moment, not in a few decades. Though Twilight would probably still top my list then.
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You may have a point. Tree Hugger may have a different way of seeing things, but it's still a coherent one. My favorite take on her is Masterweaver's interpretation in Floral Embrace and Psychadelic, where her innate aura sight allows her vast understanding of the ponies around her even as it makes her seem not all there.
Still, Tree Hugger seems even less dangerously inclined than Pinkie or Cadence. It took nearly getting thrown into a sock puppet dimension just to ruffle her chakras. You'd have to be some kind of horrific un-life trying to sterilize the planet for her to get... mad... at...
You're planning something, aren't you?
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Yes, but they're scaredy ponies that can scare other ponies. They're dangerous in the same way a chain reaction is dangerous, spreading panic until it reaches a critical mass.
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I don't know. We've seen four of my top five display malicious intent at one point or another, and who knows what Celestia might be thinking? I will acknowledge the point about most making amends afterwards, though the fact that Luna can create psychic life that can then assert independence over its creator and seek to escape into reality only makes her more worrisome. Still not as much as the physical embodiment of extraphysical reality alteration, but more worrisome.
And yeah, Star Swirl was kind of ludicrous. I do like that the writers finally branched out from him in Season 5 by mentioning other iconic unicorns like the Great Mage Meadowbrook.
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Everyone can become dangerous if you apply enough blunt trauma to their emotional balance. We've seen it happen to the main characters because, well, they are the main characters. But who's to say Fluttershy-when-angry is any more frightening than the Flower Trio-when-angry or Mr Cake-when-angry or, heck, Featherweight-when-angry? We've never seen it happen and have no idea what special tools they might bring to a fight, but then for most ponies that's also true of Fluttershy.
I'm gonna reserve my fear for the actual villains, who have great power to destroy things and hurt ponies and actively want to do so
Unless you're going up against one of them, the only real reason you'd have to fear anyone else is if you are one of them: everyone else gets shenanigans followed by restitution and apologies. Boring, I know, but true.
I'll accept Luna on the list because Luna has been a big villain and is still not completely free of the impulses that made her fall, in spite of the rainbow blast of friendship and murder, and is so powerful that she's hard for anyone else to stop once she gets going. Whereas if Twilight or Cadance get going I firmly believe it would take just one disapproving eyebrow each from Celestia to stop them in their tracks.
(Featherweight-when-angry might actually be a formidable adversary. He got paparazzi photos of Princess Celestia. When he grows up he can probably overthrow whole governments.)
Also, yarr! Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day, mateys!
Dangit, FoME! My hypothetical list is nearly identical to your real list. Also, I had not had someone suggest that Sombra represented Twi if she'd turned to the dark side before. New headcanon accepted. Now he just needs a second two-sylable name that makes it synonymous with Sparkle. I think I've seen the word "Lucent" used...