possession eats you from the inside · 2:42am Jun 12th, 2015
Luna was the Element of Laughter, Honesty and Loyalty. Honesty and Loyalty make sense from what we’ve seen of her... but Laughter? This is a mare who didn’t know the word “fun”.
Or maybe she forgot.
My theory is that possession by the Nightmare ate up parts of Luna from the inside, destroying or damaging the parts of her that did not suit the Nightmare’s purposes. She let it in -- I do not go with the comic book interpretation where you can be kidnapped by Nightmare entities and essentially brainwashed by them into succumbing to them. I believe they have no power over you but what you give them... until you give them enough power that they take it all. But she didn’t voluntarily choose to give up her sense of humor. The Nightmare turned her against her sister (disloyalty), made her lie to herself (ponies can totally survive if the sun never rises! who needs the sun anyway! - dishonesty)... and stripped her of her sense of humor. Had she been Kindness, it would have made her gratuitously cruel. Had she been Generosity, it would have made her greedy. Discord isn’t the only one who knows the pattern for breaking someone’s bond to their Element.
Luna is deadly serious almost every time we see her. A thousand years of solitude, the weight of her own sins, and the insecurities she felt before she fell to the Nightmare have burned humor out of her, but it’s worse than that; she has actually lost memories of fun, and funnyness. She didn’t remember fun because the Nightmare took those memories and locked them away. And being a Princess with a Very Serious Job has not given her any opportunity to recover them.
Ooh.
Ouch.
Maybe that's why we see her watching little fillies' dreams, specifically? To join in with carefree dreamers and try to recover her Laughter?
My headcanon is that the word "fun" evolved while Luna was on the Moon, and she hadn't heard it yet by Luna Eclipsed. Still, your theory stands; she is too dead serious too often to be Laughter. Maybe she's just trying to imitate Celestia's serenity because she knows the public admires her, though.
I agree. I think that she made the mistake of assuming that she could draw power from the Nightmare without having it control her, and it completed a corruption that other traumas had already begun. And in the end it took her over. You can actually see the last stage of this when she transforms in front of Celestia in the "Princess Twilight Sparkle" flashback -- Luna gets a look of horror as she changes, as if something was happening she hadn't bargained for.
She may have to regenerate her capacity for joy. I show her starting the process in All the Way Back, though notably what she mostly takes joy in are friendship ... and combat. To the point that she makes a friend after defeating him in battle.
Having thought a bit about the matter, I would like to propose that Laughter doesn't necessarily imply fun nor silliness.
Pinkie Pie got her Element for 'giggling in the face of danger', which can easily be interpreted as remaining optimistic in any situation.
The way she actively practices her Element in her day-to-day life is by bringing joy to others and deriving joy from that.
While Pinkie does this by the means of parties, Luna's approach to her Element may have been a different one.
What I'm saying is that Laughter can come from sources other that fun. It is my pet theory that Luna tried bringing Laughter to all ponies by bringing them a beautiful and safe night, as well as happy dreams.
And when that wasn't reciprocated, she turned into Nightmare Moon in the first place.
Hmm... from Twilight's ascension(1) we learned that the elements had other names:
Generosity = Charity
Kindness = Compassion
Loyalty = Devotion
Honesty = Integrity
Laughter = Optimism
Oh and Harmony/Friendship/Magic = Leadership(2)
My theory is Luna lost her optimistic hopes for ponykind to come to love her and her night, and that moment of despair left her open to the Nightmare to enter her and begin it's domination.
Thus to keep it's hold on Luna; the Nightmare necessarily systematically crushed Luna's senses of fun joy and hope. The Nightmare also discorded Luna's Honesty and Loyalty but they were not Nightmare Moon's main target.
1) Wherein we see our purple pony protagonist die hideously in a ball of fire, her only mortal remains a scorchemark of the floor of a subsequently detonated library.
2) I'm sure I had a joke to put here, so this space intentionally left blank. Eat at Joe's
I like the Luna depicted by MA Larson, i really hope that her episode is written by him. He gave her own personality while Meghan and others only depict her as the one who only smile and act like wise sage. There is really no difference if this was Celestia in Applebloom episode or if it was Luna in Magical Mystery Cure as they basically act te same way. I'm not even sure if any writer acknowledge the fact that she was a bearer of laughter at this point but i hope something about her past will be adressed in her dream episode.
Also I'm not sure if Luna just turned into NMM because of her own dark emotions or because outside forces. Nuhfer make nightmare forces corrupt her in one comic and then imply that she created nightmare forces in FIendship comic
I'm with 3141018; it wasn't so much the concept of fun Luna was unfamiliar with as the term itself. After all, she still had several centuries of linguistic development left to master come that fateful Nightmare Night.
That being said, it's clear that the Nightmare inverted what was best in Luna, and it likely consumed all of the positive memories that might guide her back. Luna's grimness may in part be because Equestria was more grim a millennium ago, or because she clings to dignity like a security blanket to distance herself from what she sees as Celestia's excessive familiarity with their subjects. I quite like your take on the matter, but I can't help but see other possibilities.
(It's also interesting to see how Celestia has come to embrace Laughter over the past millennium. She's downright mischievous at times. She had to relieve the boredom somehow over those thousand years without her closest friend.)
Convoluted explanations like this are why I always used to give Laughter to Celestia, because Trollestia. :B
I might also add that Luna got her Element during a time when Discord ruled Equestria, i.e. silliness, wacky fun, mischief and Pinkie-Pie-like ridiculousness were probably a) abundant and b) expression of Discord's sway over the land and thereby primarily aspect of Disharmony.
Luna took up the Element of Laughter to defeat Discord; therefore, it makes perfect sense for her interpretation/embodiment of Laughter was completely unlike Pinkie's, since Pinkie's version of Laughter is often almost dangerously close to Discord's idea of fun.
(Addendum: This also gives us an interesting way to look at Luna's problem with the word 'fun'. If we assume it developed similarly as in English, we would find it formerly meant something more along the lines of 'foolish' and 'silly'. It seems quite possible to me that the ponies originally reserved the word 'fun' for Discord's type of mischief, and thereby gave it a thoroughly negative connotation.)
Note that while Luna's personality seems completely opposed to (the Pinkie Pie interpretation of) Laughter, her job duties exemplify it. Her job is to go out there, every night, find people who are scared or unhappy, and cheer them up. She does the Giggle at the Ghostiest routine every day.
So perhaps Luna really was always like this (only a bit less awkward about it), but the Elements care about actions more than personality.
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Oh, I never imagined Luna was anything like Pinkie Pie, ever. But I think she used to have much more of a sense of humor.