Sombra is going to be one of the big players in my next story and I have a hard time getting his personality down outside of "HURR CRYSTALS." This is particularly tricky in my case because I'm writing a version of Sombra that never tried to enslave the Crystal Empire and is, for lack of a better word, "good."

But I'm having a hard time pinning his personality down and I'm hesitant to go completely off script and make one up for him. So what would you say are Sombra's defining character traits aside from the fact that he's evil and likes crystals? Feel free to incorporate fanon and headcanon

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Toy selling bad guy.

~Hearn

I'd like to thing that he was screwed up by something, like NMM. Maybe there were different types of illness like that. Jelousy, rage, etc.

963239 Let me show you some headcanon I found displayed perfectly on DA:

963239 From what the show gave us he's quiet and calculating. He prefers not to talk and let's his actions speak for him. He never rushes into things and tries to set up systems to ensure he can't fail or be defeated.

963239 My headcanon, Sombra is kinda like the typical prince. He's haughty, removed, and arrogant. And now he's the corrupt version of it. So add sadism and wrath to the list.

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Instead of treating it as a lack of knowledge, see it as the advantage of freedom. You can write Sombra however you want, including backstory and such.

Hell, you've already destroyed what little he's done in canon with him not actually enslaving anyone, so have fun with it.

Not sure how I'd play him, personally. Never used him as a character. Could check out Soothing Stone's "Kiss From The Dark", since that features a lot of Sombra.

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These reason he's so unpopular is exactly that; he had no real defining traits in his appearance, so you're free to do whatever you please with him. That said, I think he'd be an egotistical dictator, but not a complete monster (part of my headcanon is that he likes children, and hates to see them come to harm). He wants to be a ruler that's not unlike a tyrannical Celestia, overseeing a kingdom of obedient ponies of great character and loyalty to him. He'd see his enemies as misbehaving children. So just take an inverse of all that for a 'good' Sombra.

Welp...
The only iteration of him in my stories is basically a prelude to Season 3 With Changelings, and while he's not quite on HURR CRYSTALS level, he's still not gone beyond generic ominous villain character so far.

BUT! As a unicorn in a very earth pony dominated kingdom, I'd suppose you could get something out of that.

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pinning his personality down

kinda hard when he doesn't have one

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My headcanon for him is having a polite but easy to anger attitude.

963239 I've got a story, Warrior of Love, Sweetie Honey, where he's the main villain, so that should give you an idea of my personal headcanon.

I like to think that in his prime, he was a master schemer. One who would layer his plans with failsafes and contingencies. Also, given his unique character design, he may have had a transhumanist (or equine equivalent) philosophy, using dark magic in order to alter himself and overcome the limitations of natural pony biology. His bad luck that none of that was enough to stand up to two princesses who each had the raw power to move celestial bodies.

We know he's clever; think of the obstacles Twilight had to pass to get to the Crystal Heart. He knows how to plan, he knows how to use his magic to great advantage, and if he wants something hidden, it generally stays hidden.

I think it's also safe to say that even a "good" version of Sombra would be ambitious. Maybe the desire to expand his holdings is what led him down the path of evil in the first place, but prior to that, his thought process could be about how much good he could do for ponies if more of them lived under his benevolent rule. Trying to take over other lands is for the greater good, really...

Personally, if I were to write Sombra in any fasion...I would write him like either David Xanatos or Lex Luthor. Someone who has plans within plans. Watch a few epsodes of Gargloyles or the Superman animated series and go from there.

I think my favorite way to use Sombra is that he was a student of Celestia

The student of Celestia.

Bright, ambitious, gifted...but selfish, manipulative and controlling. Celestia didn't want to empower him further by making him an alicorn and he didn't take it well so he left and tried to harness the power of the Crystal Empire to achieve his own ends/prove his worthiness to Celestia. And when he finds out that Celestia made an upjump little goody twohooves teacher's pet an alicorn instead of him, oh boy, you better believe he was pissed. That was his crown, she was wearing and he intended to knock it off her head and take what was his, one way or another.

I think this makes him a good foil to Twilight; her shadow, if you will. Twilight herself has shown that she can be bossy and demands order in her life to the point of cracking and brainwashing an entire town to create a problem to solve. He's a much better antethesis to Princess Twilight than Trixie could ever be.

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Sorry to link to TV Tropes, but scroll down to King Sombra and read up the entry on Dangerously Genre Savvy. On top of all that, look at the construction of his dungeon. You have to go down a crazy length of stairs, survive the 'worst fear' spell, go up another crazy length of stairs, fight your way out of a dark crystal prison, then backtrack those same two lengths of stairs. And as soon as someone gets to the Heart, Sombra is notified. So by the time you get back up that last spiral staircase to his throne room, completely exhausted and low on magic, Sombra will be standing there waiting for you.

On top of all that? The only thing the two Princesses could do was seal him under the ice. Not kill him, not banish him to a prison, not redeem him. Just seal him away, and he still managed to make an entire empire disappear for a millenium. Given the timing, my headcanon says his dark magic could have started Luna going Nightmare.

Put it simply, he has the potential to be the most dangerous villain in the series, outstripping all the others in cunning and control. Have fun!

I kind of see him as being like Makuta, of Bionicle Lore. An extreme schemer who devises plans within his plans in case something were to go wrong, who is cold and calculating, and coolly mocks his adversaries while taking care not to underestimate them. He will wait years for his designs to come full term, and in the event that something completely changes the course of his plans, will quickly adapt a new one.

I'm writing a fic about him too right now, and I am getting my inspiration from King Henry the 8th from the Tudor Dynasty. History is a major influence on my writing. Perhaps you can look into royal history of tyrannical kings and queens for ideas.

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My favorite part about this is that he isn't a spuerpowered alicorn princess or spirit of chaos; he's just a regular unicorn who thought to himself one day "Fuck it; I'm running this show now" and ran roughshod over the Crystal Empire until a pair of demigoddesses had to get of their powdered thrones and delay him

Couldn't kill him (yeah I know, kids show)

Couldn't stop him permanently

Just delayed him

And if it wasn't for Shining Armor's arm and Cadence and Spike's quick hands, the Crystal Empire would have been renamed the GARR CRYSTALS Empire

And I like how Twilight is the one who gets the wings for sorting this one out even though her brother, her sister-in-law and her postman had that on lockdown more than she did

Um I think hes sinister calculating, and has a obsession with slaves and stairs.

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And if it wasn't for Shining Armor's arm

My headcanon for Sombra goes like this.
He was the Shining Armor of his era; leader of the Royal Guard, kind, charismatic, approachable, etc., and also a diligent student of magic.
But he found dark magic.
The requeriments along with the power it gave him, corrupted him and turned him into a power hungry schemer.

After envisioning a way to use crystals as a source of magic power, he insisted on being sent to the Crystal Kingdom as an embassador of the royal sisters.
There, he used his fame as a hero to discredit the nobles and crown himself as the king.
The new king enslaved his subjects to mine crystals and to power his magic with an spell that drained and converted the crystal ponies' emotions into energy for himself.

The rest is canon.

963239 Go to tvtropes and check out their fridge brilliance/horror entry on his episodes. They point out that the guy was a genius. Possibly smarter than Twilight. "How would his intelligence alter his social life?" is the question you should ask yourself. He also had ambition, skill with magic, and immense power. Really, he was like a darker male version of Twilight from a thousand years ago.

My headcanon: Sombra was Luna's lover, but due to unknown circumstances he became evil and took over the Crystal Empire. Luna was forced to imprison him in the icy wilderness beyond the Crystal Empire, an act which left her broken and hopeless. Sombra's final act before being locked away was to curse not only the empire, but also Luna, corrupting her and turning her into the demonic Nightmare Moon.

Think about it: Luna became Nightmare Moon and was banished one thousand years ago. Sombra was imprisoned within the ice one thousand years ago. Coincidence?

This is also why Celestia wouldn't allow Luna to go with the Mane 6 to the Crystal Empire: She feared that Luna's emotions would get the better of her, and thus she would be a liability at best, an ally to Sombra at worst.

In addition, due to ten centuries worth of brain freeze, his mind is completely broken, which is why he rarely speaks; he literally has become incapable of forming coherent thoughts.

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I don't even think that Sombra needed to corrupt Luna; the act of one of her closest friends becoming evil and abandoning her would be enough to push her over the edge

963875 I meant to say that Sombra going evil left her vulnerable to his dark magic, which made it much easier for him to corrupt her. (Word of God does mention that she was affected by an outside force)

But that's certainly true.

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This so much this... I pretty much thought of that as well because honestly thats the only way it makes any sense for Celestia to get involved in the first place. Think about it, the crystal empire isnt part of Equestria so basically big C and L just jumped into another nations politics and took down their monarchy? That seems quite ooc for the alicorn sisters... Unless Sombra was Celestias student and she planned on ascending him to prince alicorn status so that he could the better rule the crystal empire. Obviously he failed and and got corrupted.

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FiM current comic book arch shows what corrupted Luna. I shall spoil nothing.

964200 Ah.

I reject your canon and substitute my own

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I'm writing an origin story of the Crystal Empire as a whole (More or less) which I called "Crystal Heart"

You can take a look at it once I get the final chapter done, but the first two are already up ifn you're curious.

963239 I'm from New Jersey. I'd base him on the Governor here. For all intents and purposes he is a guy who wants to be good, but makes some bad decisions becasue he can't help himself.

Though Hades from Disney's Hercules was a loveable bad guy as well, you just didn't want to not accomplish what he wanted.

In my fanon mind, he is Fluttershy, because in my upcoming fanfic, Fluttershy becomes him. Interpret that however you want.

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I...I kind of want to read that

ASk-king-sombra on tumblr, he one with the OC Coffee Talk, that is my head canon for all things Sombra.
I did read a featured fiction not to long ago about Sombra and Twilight going on a date in a circle of hell where his only dialoge was Crystals as a replacement for everything. It was funny for about two paragraphs and then became a gimmick that annoyed and retracked from the story.

964963 Actually, that was Fluttershy. http://www.fimfiction.net/story/90870/sombra-and-fluttershy-share-a-romantic-vacation-in-the-seventh-circle-of-hell

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Sombra is, at best, a kind of Sauron-esque force of abstract evil.

If one removes that evil from him... I'm not sure what's left.
Not much, really.

It takes a certain breed of arrogance to enslave everyone, that might still be a thing, even if he's good. He's probably pretty good with magic, maybe especially mind-altering magic, given the door. Maybe crap like time or dimensional magic, from the weirdness we saw in the episode.

Oh, and the bastard really likes stairs. Clearly, they're the pinnacle of architecture.

963875 I have a pretty outlandish theory on the subject that you might be interested in.

My theory? King Sombra started out life as a unicorn wizard named Starswirl the bearded.

It sounds crazy, but here's my reasoning; On at least one occasion, Princess Celestia has told Twilight that "Starswirl didn't understand friendship like you do". At first glance, this might seem like a fairly innocent statement: She might have meant that Starswirl was simply a grumpy old sod who couldn't/wouldn't make friends, so he could never fully understand the magic of friendship. Now, put yourself in Starswirl's position. You've spent almost your entire life studying the elements of harmony, but you've never been able to fully understand them simply because you're not friendly enough. I think that's enough to enrage anyone.

Now, what we do know about Starswirl is this:

a) He had an insatiable appetite for knowledge.

b) By unicorn standards, he was pretty damn powerful and very good at creating new spells/forms of magic.

Perhaps Starswirl, was driven mad by his inability to fully understand the elements of harmony, and tried to create an identical form of magic in desperation, but instead of feeding off love and friendship and whatnot, it fed of hate, anger and fear. This "Dark magic", sent him over the edge into complete insanity, causing him to enhance his body and magical power through the use of said magic, and to take a new name: King Sombra.

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