Review: Children of the Night

Okay, I'm going to start off by saying that the animation, voice acting, and song were all simply amazing. Seriously, the people who worked on this are incredibly talented and deserving of every ounce of praise they get. Now that's out of the way, I didn't care for the story. Honestly, it creeped me out.

I can't tell if the writers were meaning to portray Luna in a positive light, or a negative one. To me, it seemed incredibly negative. Here's the run down: Equestria is barely recovering from Discord's reign, Luna proposes to move ponies to a new colony, Celestia forbids it, and Luna uses her magic to kidnap a bunch of children and follow through with her plan anyway. That's pretty evil in my mind. It can be argued that the children Luna took were orphans or homeless and she was giving them a better life, and I'm okay with that. But not all of the children were like that, at least one had a home and (I assume) a loving family that Luna selfishly stole her away from.

To add to Luna's misdeeds, she used a sleep spell to knock out the royal guard and her older sister so that they couldn't stop her. Again, a rather villainous thing to do. We all know from the show that there was a rather huge breakdown of communication between the sisters, which is what ultimately led to Luna's rebellion. Alot of the fandom puts the blame solely on Celestia, but as the video shows us, Luna holds her share of the blame, as well. The point of corulers is that they only go through with something when both agree, so as to avoid the temptation and corruption of putting all the power in one person's/pony's hooves. Luna completely ignored that and went ahead with her plan even though Celestia was against it. This is simply not the act of a lawful ruler or hero, though she likely deluded herself into thinking that she was doing the right thing. And as the prologue shows us, the children she kidnapped think so, too. Which, maybe she did, maybe what she did was ultimately for the best. But that doesn't change the fact that her methods were those of a villain, not a hero.

So, in conclusion, if the creators were trying to highlight Luna's descent into darkness and her own self-delusion than they did an absolutely terrific job of doing it in the best way possible (through song). However, if they were intending to portray Luna as a hero of the downtrodden and a wise ruler, they failed horribly. I don't know what they meant by the story, I haven't spoken to them. If somebody can link me to an interview, blog, or something where it's explained, please do so.