How The Legend of Everfree Redefines Nightmare Moon · 4:47am Oct 12th, 2016
(Note: The following essay starts by completely spoiling the plot of the fourth Equestria Girls movie, The Legend of Everfree. Read no further if you do not wish to be spoiled.)
At the climax of The Legend of Everfree, the idealist character Gloriosa Daisy overdoses on Equestrian magic and transforms into the mythical figure of Gaia Everfree. As Gaia, she responds to the threat of economic repossession of Camp Everfree by surrounding the whole area with brambles, locking the campers away and using increasingly strong attacks against those who attempt to talk reason with her. Towards the end of her rampage, vines are attacking campers indiscriminately. As explained by Sunset Shimmer, Gloriosa has effectively gone insane. Indeed, it would seem that her initial goal of protecting the beauty of Camp Everfree for generations of future campers has morphed into protecting this spot of nature by exterminating as much of the human race as possible. It is only when the source of Gaia’s magic is separated from her that she transforms back into Gloriosa, who is horrified by her actions under the influence.
This sequence of events line up well with what happens with the (human) Twilight Sparkle at the end of the previous Equestria Girls movie: The Friendship Games. In that film, Twilight also overdoses on magic and becomes monomaniacal, but in her case the obsession is with learning instead of protecting. As a result, she tears cracks between dimensions that she readily acknowledges could lead to the end of the human world, but considers that an unimportant side-effect for the grand cause of learning more about magic.
From these two examples, we can speculate that perhaps escalating monomania is a standard side-effect of acquiring large amounts of Equestrian magic, just like Trixie experienced with the Alicorn Amulet in the FIM episode “Magic Duel”. Applying this formula to the original Equestria Girls movie serves to remove one of the many plot holes that the movie suffers from:
Under the influence of the Element of Magic, Sunset Shimmer mentally enslaves the student body and declares her intention to use them as a zombie army to conquer Equestria. This plan is absurd, because not only would her army have to be marched one at a time through a portal that could easily be deactivated, but also because every human who passes though would have to spend some time adapting to suddenly being a pony, a scenario so inept that even the Equestrian military would stand a good chance of succeeding against it.
My theory is that this was not part of Sunset Shimmer’s original plan, but got added on as part of the madness acquired from “Equestrian Magic Overload Syndrome” (or EMOS). Her original plan was probably to become all-powerful, then go through the portal by herself and demand from Princess Celestia the respect that she thought she deserved. Not a very good plan, admittedly, but one that could be rationalized a lot easier than the “zombie pony army” plan.
So it looks like Equestrian Magic Overload Syndrome consists of a physical transformation and escalating madness tied to whatever the individual was obsessed with at the moment of acquiring the power. I’m holding to this, despite the fact that Equestria Girls didn’t give Demon Sunset much time to escalate in her madness, and “Magic Duel” did not involve any transformations on Trixie’s part.
Now to me at least, what I described sounds a lot like what happened to Princess Luna when she became Nightmare Moon. Therefore, it’s possible that the demonic possession theory that a lot of us have been running with all this time is no longer supported by canon.
Let me try describing a scenario that would fit this theory, and I’ll let you decide for yourselves if it makes more or less sense than your current headcannon:
Luna feels resentful towards her older sister because Celestia is more adored by the public. Luna’s suggestions for public improvements are always swept aside, while anypony who can get Celestia’s ear on a pet project is guaranteed to see it through. Celestia has always been and still is the more powerful of the two sisters by far, and this leads her to see Luna as immature, worthy of protecting but not of respecting. Again and again, Luna has tried to talk Celestia into carrying out her ideas, but if their arguments ever escalated into fights, Celestia would not hesitate to use just enough force to humiliate her.
Eventually, it gets into Luna’s head that it is her relative weakness that is the cause of her position in society. Therefore one night she performs a dangerous eclipse ritual, which steals power from the sun and gives it to the moon, and therefore to herself. The sudden influx of power overwhelms her, and she transforms into the form of Nightmare Moon. She also becomes mentally imbalanced—whereas before she merely wanted equality with her sister, now she wishes to overthrow her and institute eternal night, to force her subjects to love her instead of asking Celestia for the opportunity of earning that love.
Celestia tries to reason with her transformed sister, but after it becomes clear that Nightmare Moon clearly aims to murder her, she resorts to the Elements of Harmony to banish Nightmare Moon for a millennium. What was going through Celestia’s head to make this decision is the subject of a whole other essay—perhaps she honestly believed that her sister had been possessed by a demon, a demon too powerful to be imprisoned even in Tartarus, and so resorted to use of the Elements, which chose their own punishment.
Until we get more evidence, I think that is what happened. Which is kind of a pity, because I preferred my earlier theory. That one stated that Luna felt herself to be in such an impossible condition that she willingly invited the Nightmare into her soul to allow her to overthrow Celestia, despite knowing how disastrous the consequences could be. (I never considered the "Nightmare Forces" theory supplied by the comics to hold much water.) Unfortunately, under the EMOS theory Luna is absolved of most of the blame for Nightmare Moon's actions, since all she had desired was raw power to intimidate her sister, without any intention of using it to do harm. The best we can do is say that she got the spell out of Starswirl the Bearded’s spellbook, and willfully ignored the well-worded warning that accompanied it.
This's an interesting theory, but it seems to run contrary to the repeated statement that "Friendship Is Magic." Overloading yourself with friendship might do a lot of things, but it definitely won't turn you into a monomaniac. I could maybe see Equestrian magic doing strange things in the humanoid universe, because it's not "natural" there - but not at all in Equestria.
Plus, canon provides at least one counterexample. Look at Twilight's Kingdom, where Twilight got the power of all four alicorns - and you could make a case it turned her mentally unstable (though I think it was more likely the responsibility), but it definitely didn't turn her monomaniacal. No, she freely gave up that power rather than let her friends be hurt. You could also make a case for the Humane Five at the end of EqG1, and Apple Bloom under the Cutie Pox - maybe they didn't exactly get overloaded with magic, but if they did, it didn't turn them monomaniacs.
Well, as to how it compares to my current headcanon, it's not far off, but I've always considered the comics and books to be just as canon as the show unless there's a contradiction that heacanon can't reconcile.
I still say that Luna was possessed by the Nightmare Forces, but I do characterise them as demons too. For storytelling purposes, I think her guilt over the incident works better if she were already in open rebellion before the actual moment of possession, and if she willingly let them in for an edge over her sister, as per your previous theory, but that's all just how I'd prefer it. However, I do know for a fact that in comic canon, the Nightmare Forces existed before Luna, and they existed after her; Equestrian demons can clearly survive without their original hosts, and many of them do. If we take the physical transformation as optional, then we can clearly point to the Alicorn Amulet and the Inspiration Manifestation as demons too.
What we are seeing in the Equestria Girls movies is not the same process as what happened to Luna. Luna was posessed, willingly or otherwise, by external demonic forces. Sunset, Sci-Twi, and Gloriosa, on the other hand, birthed new demons in a process that seems unique to the human world, because high quantities of magic have not had that effect on other characters in Equestria proper. Twilight wasn't corrupted by taking in the magic of all four alicorn princesses, nor was Tirek by all the magic he stole. The newborn demons in the human world either come from a quality of that universe, a quality of humans, or (my personal guess) because the demons were all either directly or indirectly taking magic from the Elements of Harmony without the Tree's mystical permission.
It appears to be a bit more complicated than simply "too much magic -> too little sanity." Besides the example of Twilight in the Season 4 finale, there's also the main human cast to consider. They get endowed with progressively more power each movie, including progressively more grandiose transformations. Plus, Twilight overcoming her latent madness is a key part of the climax of Camp Everfree.
The differences seem to be ones of numbers and intent. Stealing magic and working alone lead to madness. Accepting given magic and working together, the latter implying the former, lead to both power and sanity. Luna worked alone. Trixie worked alone. Rarity worked alone when cursed with Inspiration Manifestation up until Spike stopped paying her lip service. Even Tirek didn't seem all there after ingesting the alicorn magic.
It's not quite accurate to say that friendship is magic. Friendship is safe magic. The alternative does not end well.
(And with regards to Trixie not transforming, it's possible she hadn't passed the necessary power threshold. After all, Gloriosa didn't seem entirely sane even before going Gaian.)
It's possible there's 'Magic = DRUGS' going on, but - well, the great thing about NMM is it's rich enough you can go either way. I like the idea of the Nightmare as a separate entity but really, creature or not, there are plenty of stories to tell.
... you put a lot of thought into this.
There is a reason for this and I want you to keep in mind two quotes
"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" and
"Give a man a mask and he shall be his true self"
All that power go's straight to thier head and if you noticed it they changed their names when they transformed, they basically donned a mask and revealed who they truly were, the power didn't supply the form only the metamorphosis, the form was if I'm correct a visual analog of who they were within and if viewed from a psychological view became thier shadows, thier repressed selves all thier flaws exacerbated and enflamed to a tremendous degree and out in the open for all to see