So, Sombra in Season 9 was the first time the Mane Six ever killed anyone, right? Sure, Sombra died back in Season 3 but that was due to the Crystal Heart and the Crystal Ponies love. This time it was entirely due to the Mane Six's own powers though. Not even any fancy Element of Harmony necklaces involved, it was just them.

Of course, in canon they just shrug it off. The bad guy is defeated once again, the day is saved, hooray! But what if they didn't? What if we decided to go a little more "Real" and have them come to the realization that they've just killed somepony, that their magic can do that, that they didn't just seal him away or banish him or anything like that. They just personally disintegrated him with Friendship.

Maybe they weren't all prepared for that. Sure, they'd probably thought about it before, that one day on these adventures they might have to kill someone. But they've never had to before, things always worked out without them needing to resort to that, and thinking about killing someone is totally different from actually doing it. None of them woke up today prepared to just take someone's life.

It'd probably effect some of them worse than others. I mean, take Fluttershy. She's the Element of Kindness, she's the member of the Mane Six most likely to give someone another chance. But she just killed someone. Not only that but she used the magic of Kindness to do it. Her Kindness was weaponized to cause death. Maybe she didn't even think the Elements could do that and she's suddenly looking back on all their previous foes and wondering how close they got to killing any of them. What if they had vaporized Tirek? Or even worse to her, Discord or Luna? Now she's having a crisis, does she even want to use these powers anymore?

How do they all deal with it? How do they all take it when they find out that Discord set it up? Maybe they even start thinking more about some of the punishments their foes got before and begin wondering if death is really so much worse than those or not. Feels like there's a lot of potential there.

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To be honest, I imagine a group discover the evil side of friendship. I mean the show focus only the positive side of friendship but never the negative or the downfalls. Also given that crap Discord did with the Legion of Doom, using them as pawns for Twilight's confidence and they all forgave him kind of a sigh to me that they'll forgive their friends no matter how criminal their crimes are or how they commited treason. To me, that is the corruption of friendship

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The author of Equestria: Civil War says hi.

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If The Emperor Had A Text-To-Speech Device explored this concept very well with how Magnus talked about the many roles that The Chaos Gods play in the WarHammer 40K Universe as the manifestations of certain aspects brought forth by the minds of everyone that lived and died within the Universe that has a Soul. While the Chaos Gods by nature are very corrupt and have it out for The Imperium of Man, they are also considered to be a source for The Imperiums' very strength and virtues that they value at their very core... albeit in a very broken way that goes against everything that The Emperor stands for.

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That's assuming Discord genuinely resurrected Sombra.

Either way, Sombra was a genuinely evil monster and needed to be put down. They would very likely get over it, given enough time.

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That's assuming Discord genuinely resurrected Sombra.

I mean, as far as the show's writing is concerned there's no reason to assume he didn't resurrect the real Sombra. You can make him a fake for fanfic purposes, but obviously this idea is running with him being real.

Either way, Sombra was a genuinely evil monster and needed to be put down. They would very likely get over it, given enough time.

Perhaps, I don't have an issue with how he was handled. But the thing is even if we brush Sombra's death off as him being an irredeemable monster, they now know their friendship powers can kill. So they'll either have to figure out how to fully control them if possible, or they'll have to go into every conflict wondering if their friendship powers might kill someone this time.

I mean, they're somewhat unpredictable. They banished Luna the first time and reformed her the second, maybe there's a reason for that but who knows for sure what it is? What if next time they kill someone who isn't a completely irredeemable monster for some reason? Plus, maybe it just feels wrong on a fundamental level to some of them, like the Fluttershy example I used. Using the very magic of Kindness to kill.

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Hey, this is all on the writers for keeping things vague.

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Never said it wasn't on the writers.

Would Twilight be thinking of doing that to Opaline?

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Did ya know Moondancer had a great great great great niece?