Discord · 9:32pm Mar 10th, 2017
Like I did in THIS BLOG, allow me to give you some perspective on my personal take on Discord. Once again, first things first, as indicated by the ‘Crossover’ tag in both these stories, the opinions expressed here and in my two stories aren’t necessarily canon. So take what I portray in the stories, and what I am saying here, with a grain of salt- it can’t be wrong, or right, because it is essentially my own personal headcannon.
So. What is Discord? How powerful is he? If Celestia and Luna are demigods, I consider Discord to be essentially an Eldrich abomination, sort of like the Cthulu mythos, except for ponies. He’s broadly in the same category as demi-god, but he is simultaneously both more and less than the traditional greco-roman interpretation of the term.
Discord is Chaos, just like he claims. And this, in turn, essentially means that he breaks all the rules. His personal power level is on par with an alicorn, but his magic allows to him to ignore the normal rules of magic and reality and bend them to his will. He causes things to float by making them ignore gravity. He could take Celestia’s beam of death and ignore the fact that it was plasma and turn it into silly-string, then bends it into a pretzel with his hands. He is the wrench in the universe, the lone wizard following Harry Potter magic rules while the rest of the universe is playing Dungeon and Dragons. Actually, that’s a bad comparison. The universe is playing by the rules of a Serious Business Star Wars RPG and Discord is the lone player that is playing Harry Potter rules. Seriously, everyone’s running around talking about the Force, and the Light and Dark sides, and Sith and Jedi and blasters and drama about struggling against the darkness and Discord is having a grand old time running around shouting ‘Aguamenti!” at the top of his lungs and blasting people with jets of water. There are rules, yes, but they make little to no sense in the context of the rest of the setting and trying to figure them out just from his actions alone is an exercise in futility.
So. What are those rules? What are the limits? I must admit I do not know. And yes, for those out there that want an explanation, this does bother me, I am engineer, I like to know what the limits are as well. Thing is, Discord is meant to break things, and Chaos is meant to change; defining his limits is more like a challenge or advisement than setting a limit. That, and I honestly imagine that the rules and regulations that govern his magic are downright confusing, blatantly contradictory, and always changing. Like Calvinball; the only permanent rule is that the rules aren’t the same each time. Which means that what he can or can’t do, or what happens when he tries to do something, fluctuate wildly based on context, how many times he’s done it before, and how many butterflies are currently in existence across the galaxy.
And because there are rules, believe it or not there are limits to his power. As shown in the series, it can be undone by powerful magical artifacts, or reversed by mages with the know how, and I honestly think that he can only affect a certain amount of area at any given time- part of the reason why in this he needed the Crucible in order to affect the galaxy, rather than just snapping his fingers. After all, the ability to affect several hundred thousand square miles with chaos might seem like a lot, until you realize just how big space really is.
Honestly, the more interesting part of Discord in my opinion is that he is able to control it at all. In my headcannon here, Discord is as much a god of ORDER as he is of chaos. This is how he is able to (mostly) actually do what he wants to do, and how he can undo chaos he has created. Why? Because Chaos and Order are the same thing, the same sliding scale. One eventually leads to the other. Consider, if you will, one particular end of the universe, commonly known in thermodynamics as the ‘heat death of the universe’. A completely uniform distribution of heat, meaning no work can take place, galaxy wide: perfect Order. And yet, entropy (order in a system) never decreases, only increases; disorder, which could be termed chaos, only increases. And yet, this increasing disorder eventually leads to the heat death of the universe, or Order.
See what I mean by contradictory? Discord is both Order and Chaos at once, able to manipulate both at once. Lucky for the ME3 races, in this case, as it means he was able to influence the Crucible detonation into something a bit more friendly to them while maintaining its deadliness against enemies.
Discord’s personality is also opposite of the sisters, in that he does not differ from his power in any way- unlike the sisters, who have a dichotomy between their personality and their power set, Discord’s personality is every bit as anarchic as his power. I honestly imagine him as insane and possibly bipolar, or maybe even as having multiple personalities. It comes with the territory; he is just as chaotic as the power he wields, maybe even because of the power he wields. This is why he is, at best, unpredictable, though his relationship with Fluttershy (friend or otherwise, insert your personal headcannon here) has mellowed him to the point where interactions with other ponies/humans/aliens are possible. And, after all, just because he is insane doesn’t mean that he is lacking empathy, or intelligence, or even reason, merely that his actions lack a logical train of thought that would allow others to understand or predict him. Fluttershy has brought these other features to the fore and allowed others to see beyond his madness, but at the end of the day, he is still a random, moody, illogical, extremely powerful creature.
There you have it, my personal views of the immortal that will never truly be understood, Discord.
This makes a great deal of sense, actually, crossover or not. Discord is Discord, the only thing Authors really have to decide are the limits to the maximum area he can affect, and how much actual control he, personally, has over what his magic does beyond a certain scale. You do both quite nicely here.
>headcannon
i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/013/838/Naamloos-1.jpg
These blogs were a great supplement to the trilogy. Lots of cool background stuff.