Discord is the god of…? · 8:26am Nov 17th, 2016
Provoked by Oliver's musings.
One might call him the god of irony, including, especially the oft-proscribed final meaning of "contrary to expectation"; though soap roads require Fridge Logic; "Discord cleans up streets of Ponyville, reduces crime rate 100%" (Hey, if there's no government to make laws, there is no crime…) However, one also often finds this "subversion of expectation" as one of the key components of humor, when people embark on the difficult journey of defining that.
He drinks a glass of chocolate milk. One expects the milk be drunk from that sentence, but it is the glass. Sunrise is used, per Hume, as an event predictable (to us) and reasonably expectable, though not deductively so…one might also say that one could set one's watch by it. Of course, he turns this on its head, too.
The "back where you began" trick similarly fits, and fourth-wall-breakingly so…almost. The Guide to the Elements being able to help one find the Elements is "too good a joke" and beats out having Twilight find them instead in the books she was actually reading "where she began" in S1E1, Predictions and Prophecies or the book about the Two Sisters.
His clapping generating various other stock sound effects is a simple subversion of expectation.
Granting bunnies the long, hoofed legs recalls the bunny stampede of earlier in the show, while re-inverting the danger thereof, making the bunny stampede no longer a thing one might expect to be harmless.
His "discording" of the M6 is then those things that you "would not expect" of the Element Bearers…except that, of course, they absolutely are, just generally subsumed by their opposites. Fluttershy can be very unkind. Rarity can be fatally greedy (both: "Dragonshy"). Pinkie Pie can be despondent and devoid of laughter ("Party of One"). Applejack can and will lie in her own interests, even if it is prima facie obvious that she is ("Applebuck Season"). Rainbow Dash's loyalties are…okay, it's harder to pin down, but "Read it and Weep" and "Hurricane Fluttershy" seem like good picks for how her priorities are not always in order (and, later, "Tanks for the Memories"). Oh, right, "Mysterious Mare Do-Well".
Twilight, meanwhile, having drawn hope from the things others did for her out of friendship (S1E2) to embody that Element, loses all hope that friendship can solve this problem. When else does she think that friendship cannot solve a problem? "Lesson Zero" seems like one case, "Ticket Master" another.
ed:
You would not expect someone invited to bring a monstrous enemy of Equestria to the Gala, but he does.
Unfortunately, as with everything Discord, alarajrogers put it better first: "identifies a macro-scale rule, then subverts it" though she did not cite many examples.