Where are all the diamond dogs? · 2:15am May 2nd, 2014
okay here is something that i find myself pondering deeply and darkly. Where the fuck is all the stories that has badguys using diamond dogs are minions? i mean look at them!
big, clearly very strong, useful talent in their burrowing that is perfect for creating evil lairs, easily bribed into service. Hell technically while not the brightest beasts they are several shies more intelligent and cunning than your typical evil minions. They are practically perfect orc equivalents of equestria to use. Why has no one done anything with them? i know fallout Equestria has hellhounds, basically the diamond dogs except evolved and enhanced with uber lethal claws. But they were not evil minions.
Why has no one done anything with these beasts? you would think they would be commonly used.
Well, Changelings could just turn into them. And use mind control on any of the races if they wanted slaves.
Discord has no need of them at all given his immense power and mind-controlling abilities. Heck, if he ever became truly 'EVIL', nothing could stop him. Except giant tentacle worm germs, apparently....
Sombra, being racist and all, would enslave them like everything else. Sombra ALSO has mind-control magic too...
Tirek just wants to suck the magic out of everything and doesn't trust anyone or anything. At least he doesn't have mind-control too! (that's a plus on his side...)
Really, maybe Trixie would be an acceptable Boss to employ them as hired goons when she was still a minor villain... but the others simply have no need for them at all. Also, we don't know much about them other than they aren't that bright and like gems. Would they even agree to work with any other race or villain? They seem mainly loyal to themselves, with perhaps a streak of racial pride that might preclude them from lowering themselves to mere accomplice-level.
On the other hoof, they might be bribed with large amounts of gems. Buuuuuut, then how far would they go before they began to have second thoughts about trusting this villain whom they see behaving really really badly. Again, like most races in Equestria, they're not super-evil. Mainly they're just selfish and stupid. We need more info before we can make any assumptions about potential alliances.
Something that could work is that they, as a whole race, decide to invade Equestria. But that assumes there are enough of them to mount such an invasion. It also assumes there are members of their kind intelligent enough to pull off a plan more complex than "We kidnap pony to find gems for us!" In the sole instance they've appeared... yeah.... not looking too hopeful in the brains department.
But if we assume there are dogs who are intelligent, would they then be subject to the narrow-minded antics of the dogs we've seen?
To sum it up, I think it all stems from the fact that their one episode painted them as comic relief that few take seriously. This opposed to changelings who were outright, unabashedly wicked.
Now, you could point to stories that have the minotaurs as a violent race, despite Iron Will (the only minotaur in the series thus far) being just a simple pitchman selling a product. BUT, with minotaurs, people are gleaning off outside canonical worlds and myths featuring violent minotaurs. The Diamond Dogs exist solely in the show, thus there is no influence from preexisting external mythos to draw from.
There were Diamond Dog stories a year or two after their episode... but there wasn't anything more to do with them than had already been done after the first few, given how little information was had about them. And it's hardly interesting to employ them as mere hired muscle. How often can that be done before it's boringly rote? They don't stand on their own very well as a featured race, thus I believe stems their absence from most fanfiction.
2870889 .... only the bottom part of that had anything to do with the question of why they are not in many fanfics. an even then I was talking about just fanfics and not how guys in the show would use them... you could have summed all f that up easily
also I think we can determine that discord is probably on par to the regal sisters. they might not have been able to beat him, but at the same time he resorted to trickery and possibly unleashing something more powerful than himself in the process.
three alicorns could defeat him.
and four would overpower him.
2870982 That depends on if it's Season 2 and 3 Discord, or latter half of Season 4 Discord, who is much like Star Trek Voyager Q: basically emasculated to a fair extent of all that had made him fascinating as a semi-adversary.
The whole battle with Tirek was as badly power-inconsistent as any of the later DBZ battles. There was really no attempt to truly plan out the relative power boosts.
Season 2 Discord could have taken a dozen alicorns. He was so powerful ONLY THE ELEMENTS OF HARMONY COULD STOP HIM. That was a statement from Celestia at the time.
Anyway, this gets into the whole Chrysalis beating Celestia, but then getting beaten by the puny pink alicorn who was so weak on her own Chrysalis imprisoned her BEFORE taking her place and sucking Shining's love out.
There's too much transient plot convenience going on and no solid basis or scale on the powers. It really is becoming DBZ-level silly.
2874653 ........... it is a show that hwile has the potential to be beyond a kid show, is a kid show dude. and it has tackled intersting things before in their own way as well.
that idea that he could have defeated a dozen alicorns is swept aside by his use of the plunder vines. if you are gonna say it was to destroy the tree of harmony, that has two fallacies. A, the tree was obviously bound to holding the forest in place, otherwise it would be attacking guys like him directly. and b, the everfree is being held in place by a god tree, so what in the world is it if it takes a god tree to bind it?
it is something that seems more than just him being conniving. he access a medium to defeat them that was outside of his powers.
and his powers you are solely basing on his ability to alter reality. however it seems more plausible that he is able to do whta he does more because of the nature of his magic than his, still large, amount of power.
and i have only the complaint about that battle that their hands were likely tied. magic lasers are probably the limit of what they could do, rather than actual spell casting. still at this point we knew they had a level of power that was probably unnatural in their world. and your claim of incosistencies seems more the stubborn want of discord to be Q rather than Genie gone rogue more than anything.
it would make up one seemingly logical fallacy from celestia though. she likely knew that equestria had gathered enough power to contain discord without the elements. it seems plausible he is a match to the regal sisters together. but three alicorns seem to be beyond his power to deal with, both in terms of raw power and with the frustration of dealing with three opponents.
2874709 Uhm... Celestia and Luna couldn't do anything at all to him on their own.
ANYTHING AT ALL.
They were Krillin and Gohan, he was Freiza; he treated them as practically inconsequential. The Elements were basically Goku going SSJ1 by comparison.
2874729 ........ and you are using the tactic of ignoring my counter argument and the evidence i provided........ sighs.
2874745 What evidence? You threw together a bunch of utter conjecture and called it fact!
Where, ANYWHERE is any of this even remotely implied within the series? At what point does he actually try to fight 3 or 4 alicorns or so much as mutter, "Drat! There are 3 or 4 alicorns! I can't beat them!" His actions when antagonistic instead focused solely on the BEARERS of the Elements, and the Tree of Harmony, which is FAR stronger evidence that he considered those things the only threats to him.
The only regard he gave the alicorns at all was hiding Twilight's existence from Tirek as a trump card just in case Tirek didn't hold up his end of the deal... and Tirek betrayed him regardless once he had all the alicorn powers along with the magic of every pony in Equestria. And note, even though Tirek had all that power, the Tree's new Rainbow Power curb-stomped him INSTANTLY. No, Discord never feared the alicorns, he treated them the same way as he did any other pony. The Elements and the Tree were the ONLY things he was really concerned with.
In EVERY case the alicorns have dealt with Discord, they've needed the Elements. It was stated repeatedly that the Elements alone had power over him. Tirek was the ONLY being who could stop him without them, and that was due to his absolute magic-sucking powers which were rather lazily constructed to have no limits. Tirek was a proper power gamer with full cheat codes activated.
2874867 ......... okay now you are just being annoying. i was referencing his use of the pludner seeds. it couldn't be more obvious you are intentionally skipping those details.
and you've clearly forgotten that tirek stole discord's power before facing twilight. he had grown powerful enough to steal alicorn magic, and seemingly powerful enough to take away discord's as well.
even with the might of discord at his disposal, along with either most or a large number of equestria's ponies, he only matched twilight and the power of four alicorns within her. and mind you the power he had gathered made him capable of forcefully taking discord's magic, so you can't say the majority of his power was discord's power.
...... or should i say you intentionally ignored that detail.
also you re ignoring another plausible reason why celestia, luna, and cadance did not fight discord outright, and something discord would know himself. that combat between beings on the level of alicorns and draocnequus are highly destructive. even without the level of might tirek and twilight unnaturally had, a simple defensive battle between nightmare moon caused immense amounts of damage to their castle. just think what little would remain if celestia had tried to match nightmare moon blow for blow rather than fight defensively.
2874947 The Plunder Seeds were to attack the Tree. He says that openly.
Tirek, as mentioned many many many times already, was such a poorly conceived power-gaming villain that NOTHING he did can be taken with a grain of salt. It's debatable if he could even properly use Discord's magic, since all he ever seemed to do was fire energy blasts, create shields, and throw mountains around.
Simply put, Tirek was a very blunt-force villain. He demonstrated so little flexibility in thought and ability that he's no different than a thousand generic anime villains. The fact that even before the episode, I actually predicted the entire plot, based solely on how it would be if it was as generic as possible, stands as stark proof of the lazy effort.
Reality Check: Rise of Darth Vulcan.
3036235 ....... yeaaah, noooo. read that fic and it really doesn't execute that idea well.
like most of its ideas, especially dealing with bat ponies, humans, and specifically celestia. its honestly in part a celestia hate fic. it makes her incompetent, blindly prideful, self important, and obviously not a pony that would tease the cakes for serving her like she was royalty.
3036859 It has the idea, didn't say how it was executed. And yeah, it's pretty much a hate/bash fic
3037640 mmm. true.
i have a hard time understanding the reasoning behind that whole celestia hate thing. its like its hard to believe that she does important, or badss, stuff off screen. issue is not she is some idiot, the issue is that we have been shown scenarios where she is unable to solve the problem, because the main character are the ones that need to.
we seriously need something like celestia beating up a dragon or something to offset it.
comic have done a few things intersting, albeit their status in continuity is kinda debatable i guess. especially some of the more recent projects........
either way, they did a rather itnersting one that shows a bit about how celestia works.
3037780 I think Paper Tigers sums it up rather well. Celestia cannot go all out without major collateral damage (what with being linked to the sun) and her fighting skills when she holds back are rather mediocre. Could also be that she is a bit overconfident in her students and other troubleshooters and sees no need to solve such problems personally.
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2874947 Just found this argument interesting so I would like to add my two bits if thats alright. You argued that Twilights power matched Tiereks. While this is true you arent counting the fact that her power was combined with that of three other alicorns. It's a lot different to have three or four separate powers hitting you at random intervals than to have it combine and hit you all at once. The only way they could've achived this is if they would have had time to "Cross the beams" and even if that happened Discord could simply bend reality due to the nature of his magic causing their magic to be something harmless if not even empowering thus rendering anything, other than Tireks magic absorption power or anything to do with the elements, completely useless.