Break all the tropes · 8:03pm Nov 17th, 2013
I hadn't actually planned to get into this as a fandom per se. My initial reason for getting into My Little Pony at all was that Q being Discord was just such a perfect fit for my Q head canon, where he runs around the universe doing obnoxious things to various species, usually (although not always) with the blessing of the Continuum. But then I started mainlining fanfic featuring Discord, and as generally happens to me when I start seeing repeating tropes, I start thinking of ways to break them. (There's a character who will eventually appear in "My Perfect Enemy", the story of Discord and Celestia's history within the Discord-is-Q continuity, who is to a certain extent a self insert... she boils down to "just like Twilight Sparkle except dedicated to Chaos." Learn the rules really really well so you can break them properly. Analyze everything carefully so you can produce a result that's totally unlike the results that have come before. Obey authority if you have to, but ignore tradition unless you can't. That is me, essentially.) There's limits to what I can do with Discord in a universe where he's Q, because I have so much established history with Q that I don't want to break. So I decided I needed a second origin continuity where Discord isn't Q (well, probably isn't... the way I set it up, we can't actually rule out that we didn't just see the birth of the Q Continuum, but probably not.)
"The Last Draconequus" is the story I'm using to take various tropes out to the woodshed and thrash them.
- A draconequus is a creature made of a zillion different animals/other draconequui look like Discord
Discord is an avatar of Chaos. I have a problem with the notion of an entire species that looks like him. He's just *way* too weird, and it's too much a part of him to be weird. I can't wrap my head around a world where some being that looked like him could ever have been a normal thing. So in my universe, the draconequui looked like what they sound like, dragon ponies. Body of a dragon (including the four legs of a dragon and the wings of one), head and upper torso of a pony. Think of a centaur except that instead of upper body human, lower body horse, we have upper body pony, lower body dragon. And because ponies don't have arms, we don't get the three-limb-set phenomenon of centaurs; a draconequus had two limb sets (plus wings) and they were both dragon limb sets. It's just that the dragon upper limbs attached to a pony-like torso. Discord himself is unique because of Chaos magic. Other draconequui would have a hard time recognizing him as one of their own, if they weren't all dead.
- A draconequus is inherently chaotic
Well, I can certainly see where this comes from; if they did all look like Discord, you'd have to say they were all avatars of Chaos or wielders of Chaos magic. Only the problem is there, Chaos is unpredictable; as soon as you have a repeating pattern it's not Chaos anymore. An entire society of Chaos wielders doesn't work because a society cannot function under conditions of perpetual chaos. Chaos is a necessary component of a society but it must be a small part (which is exactly why Discord cannot be allowed to run anything and should have someone who can say no to him). So I went with draconequui having something similar to cutie marks, which directed the pattern of their magic; a draconequus' magic runs along the pattern of a particular principle. Discord's happens to be Chaos and Disharmony. The other draconequui didn't actually like this any better than the ponies do.
- The draconequui were directly extinguished by the ponies
Discord's nigh omnipotent. If he had a grudge like the ponies actively and deliberately murdered his entire species, the ponies would be dead.
- The draconequui still exist someplace
And they let one of their dudes get locked up in stone for a thousand years? Harsh. Either the draconequui really hate Discord, or they have no clue what happened to him, or they're all dead. Judging from the fact that we've never heard of any that aren't Discord, I'm going with all dead. Discord's a stronger figure of pathos if he's the last one than if he got thrown out or ran away.
- Discord used to be someone completely different before something happened that turned him into an avatar of Chaos.
I have seen this done well once or twice -- for example, one where he was a creator god that represented Freedom, until spending too much time in the mortal plane broke him -- but if he was a totally nice guy or he was all about harmony or whatever, then he wasn't Discord and I'm not interested in reading about him. Likewise stories where the thing that makes him Discord is actually a possessing spirit and if you get rid of the possession he turns into a perfectly normal pony, or an alicorn, or whatever.
What I have tried to set up in my first chapter is that part of Discord's problem is that he didn't change *enough*; behavior that was adorable in a hyperactive, imaginative four year old turns really sinister in the paws of a nigh omnipotent adult. When the thing happens in his adult life that transforms him entirely from a powerful Chaos Mage who's had a hard life into the God of Chaos, part of his psyche regresses to the being he was when he was first transformed by Chaos magic, and his inner four year old who's obsessed with sweets and doesn't understand why the laws of the physical universe can't be broken gets way too much control over his behavior.
So from the very beginning, we're supposed to be able to see the seeds of future bad guy Discord in adorable but totally annoying baby Discord. My goal is to never entirely lose that; that at every point we see him as he matures, we can still see who he's going to become within who he is at that time.
Tropes we haven't gotten to yet that are scheduled for a thrashing:
- Discord identifies with pony values and thus perceives himself as ugly and/or monstrous
I have to confess I don't go with this one because it is alien to *me*. As an overly self-confident bordering on arrogant person who grew up very, very different from everyone else around me and who has never comprehended why, exactly, social rules work the way they do, I think I have a better understanding of what it would be like to be someone like Discord than the people who automatically jump to "he was different than everyone else, therefore he had low self esteem and saw himself as monstrous." Discord's well aware that ponies perceive him as ugly and/or monstrous, but he thinks that just makes ponies stupid. His loneliness is the loneliness of the being who can't get anyone to agree with him about how reality should work, not the loneliness of the being who's internalized a value structure that makes him a pariah.
- Likewise, Discord cares what ponies think about him.
Only to the extent that being unable to find *any* ponies who agree with him that he is a fun guy you should be friends with, not an evil monster you should stab with a pitchfork, isolates him. Discord doesn't want to fit in, he wants to be accepted for who he is.
- Discord turned evil because Celestia rejected him.
OH MY GOD THIS MUST DIE IN A FIRE. I know where everyone is getting this, except that the author of the comic everyone is getting this from has explicitly *said* that their intent was that this was Discord's perception, and what actually happened was that he was evil and therefore Celestia rejected him for being a monster, not that he was a great guy before Celestia rejected him for being weird and ugly looking. People think it makes Discord more sympathetic to say that he turned evil because of the pain of rejection, but that actually makes him *more* evil, not less. Anyone who is so narcissistic and shallow as to say "I thought I loved you, but since you won't love me, now I hate you and want to totally ruin your life and the lives of all the innocent people around you!" never deserved love in the first place. In my version, Celestia never rejected *him* until he gave her no choice; she rejected his worldview and behavior and tried to get him to stop, and he wouldn't because he thought he was right.
- One moment was a turning point that changed him completely.
This trope is similar to the "Discord used to be someone completely different", but usually allows for not-evil Discord to at least be vaguely recognizable as Discord. I don't subscribe to the Killing Joke theory of character development; there is never one day that permanently drops you off a moral event horizon you used to hold important. Discord *does* get a turning point that changes him completely, but it doesn't change him into someone who's evil and likes to torment ponies for fun; it changes him into someone who is godawfully powerful, has just lost everyone he loved for the second time, and has been thrust into the position of feeling he must take on a job he doesn't want, that he isn't good at, and that no one wants him to have, because he thinks he's the only one he can do it. He's also a little bit crazy at that point, but not in the "the voices tell me to do horrible things" way, more like manic and kind of disconnected from reality. There were broaches of the moral horizons before that point, some of which happened with the best of intentions, some of which Celestia flat out told him to do, and there were broaches afterward, and the road to hell was paved with good intentions.
- Discord is insane and that's why he's a bad guy.
Insanity does not equal evil and Discord isn't actually particularly insane. For a guy who's an avatar of Chaos and spent a thousand years immobilized in sensory deprivation he's actually got his shit together more than you'd expect, in Return of Harmony. Discord's a bad guy because he's decided over the years to suppress any empathy he might have had in favor of amusing himself at others' expense. It isn't either Chaos or insanity that makes Discord a bad guy, it's his decisions to do bad things.
- It's all Celestia's fault.
I hate this one. I *like* Celestia. I think she works well with Discord. Yes, she's an avatar of control and order, but she loves sweets and pranks and she can be ruthless when she has to be, and had they had a relationship where Celestia gives the orders and Discord decides whether or not he thinks they're a good idea, argues with them if he disagrees, and ultimately will refuse an order he doesn't agree with, Equestria would have been better off. Instead Equestria ended up with a single unchecked ruler who let the country stagnate but who managed to *not* descend into total evil despotism; her flaws don't make the character evil, just more realistic. And so many of the "all Celestia's fault" stories center around that trope I hate where it's all Celestia's fault because she cruelly rejected Discord.
Celestia holds some small amount of blame in Discord's descent, in my version of events; largely that as a ruler at war, she chose to use her most powerful weapon, risking his life and sanity, rather than letting her love for him stop her from doing what she thought she had to do to protect her people. But it's also not like Discord didn't eagerly volunteer and then hide from Celestia exactly how bad it was getting because he was afraid she'd tell him to stop for his sake, and he believed he was doing the right thing to protect his adopted home. Also, they were both barely out of their teens at the time. She also made a bad, in-character decision to trust that beings who said they wanted to surrender really did, and didn't listen to Discord's misgivings, but when your end goal has always been peace, you *aren't* likely to listen to the guy who's out on the front lines fighting the enemy when he's too paranoid to believe they're willing to surrender. It's not like Discord had anything other than a gut feeling to go on. Aside from in-character misjudgements that a barely-adult ruler could hardly be faulted for making, my version of Celestia is almost entirely blameless; for reasons that weren't her fault, she wasn't there when things started going really, really bad, and by the time she made her way back home, it was too late.
- One of the key factors in everything going wrong was that Discord and Celestia weren't allowed to be together because she is a princess and was not permitted to marry a weird draconequus.
"Everything went wrong because Celestia's parents rejected Discord" isn't better than "Everything went wrong because Celestia rejected Discord." It's true, Celestia wouldn't be able to marry Discord. While they're growing up, it's understood that she has to marry a pony, because her husband would end up with political power equivalent to Luna's, and Equestria wouldn't tolerate a common pony as a King Consort, let alone a weird alien looking creature who's the last of his kind. However, in a universe where magic provides birth control and females are not treated as out and out inferior creatures to be male possessions, there actually isn't any good reason why a Ruling Queen can't have a lover, and honestly a very good reason to do so. A lover who cannot take the throne and has no official political power, but who is a powerful mage in his own right, is a good ally for a Ruling Queen to have if her husband decides that as a stallion, he ought to be the guy in charge (my take on Equestrian gender politics is that when Celestia was young, equality for mares wasn't fully and entirely solidified; nowadays after she's ruled for over a thousand years the balance has tipped and if anything Equestria's now female-dominated, but it wasn't back then). And Discord doesn't need to get married any more than he needs ponies to like him, because marriage is a compact made with a *government* that ostensibly restricts your behavior within a relationship, and Discord doesn't believe in authority, rules, or tradition. It's not in character for the avatar of Chaos to give a shit whether or not he's allowed to get married as long as he's allowed to be with the being he's not allowed to marry. So in my universe, Celestia's father outright advised Celestia that if she wanted Discord, take him, just be discreet about it. Since she never did get married, eventually discretion went out the window too. So they were lovers before everything went pear-shaped, and everypony knew it, and it was something of a scandal but Celestia didn't care.
One of the themes I like to work with is that love isn't enough. Just as I don't believe it's legit for someone to turn evil because their love rejected them, I also don't think love can always save the day. I really like the notion that Celestia and Discord were lovers before it all went bad and it didn't go bad because of anything happening in their relationship, it went bad because Discord did some really awful things. I'm too sympathetic to the character to perceive him as a unilateral evil monster, but by the time he got put in stone, he was obviously not a nice guy anymore. If Celestia ever rejected him, that was why.
- Discord ruled as an evil tyrant.
The title of the chapter where we get to see how Discord runs things is a quote from Dr. Horrible, "Anarchy, That I Run." I think that about sums it up. Discord was a terrible ruler because he didn't actually want to enforce any rules on anypony and because he was much more interested in playing with his powers and altering reality to suit himself than he was in maintaining a government. He didn't rule with an iron hoof, he ruled with a big pile of gelatinous cubes and a slingshot.
I'm sure there will be others, eventually, as the story actually gets written.
Love the deconstruction of the tropes you see often in fics. Keep doing that!