Help! My Heart is Full of Pony! - Sleepless in Ponyville Pt. 3 - Luna's Hidden Arc · 4:56am Aug 19th, 2021
When I first saw "Sleepless in Ponyville," it was my favorite episode for obvious reasons. However, there was always one worldbuilding flaw I intentionally overlooked.
If Princess Luna has the power to trot between our dreams, why did she get angry 1000 years ago when ponies slept through her beautiful nights?
The only logical answer is that, a millennium ago, Luna did not know how to navigate the dream realm.
The show never addressed this question directly, but later seasons more or less backed up my theory. In "Royal Problems," Luna states plainly that she budgets time every night to reflect and wrestle with her own personal demons before journeying into the dream realm.
Young Luna could not have done this.
While it is interesting to map the development of worldbuilding surrounding Luna from season to season, and to see how it was all implied rather than expressed, Princess Luna's untold arc is far more relevant as a morality play.
1,000 years ago, Princess Luna was the second most powerful pony in Equestria. She had a cutie mark for raising and lowering the Moon - a major responsibility if ever there was one - and yet, had not yet figured out her actual purpose. She had not awoken to the vast wealth of power inside of her. Not until she was freed from Nightmare Moon, and saw her own faults plainly - admitted to them - and began the hard and earnest work of building herself anew.
Discuss.
-Sprocket
Not necessarily. There is still a difference between dealing with dreams, and Ponies just, not seeming to care about her Night at all. She was feeling lonely, unloved, overlooked, and walking through dreams might actually make that worse. I mean, most happy dreams would likely take place in bright, sunny daytime, while night time set dreams would more likely be nightmares, further pushing her to believe that was how the Ponies saw her.
Plus, it gives a WHOLE new context to her being called 'Nightmare' Moon,
While I don't think that that's the only logical answer, it does seem to make a fair bit of sense looking at (what I recall of) show canon, and I don't believe it's one I've thought of or encountered before.
Thank you, as usual and again, for your thoughts. :)
5571021
Also, it's quite possible that most ponies, like humans, don't remember most of their dreams when they wake up, and while I expect dreams Luna'd personally touched would have greater staying power, there'd presumably only be so many of those a night. If we roughly estimate eight hours a night, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and one hour per pony, Luna could only get through two thousand nine hundred and twenty ponies a year. Even if the population was only fifty thousand ponies, and I'd guess it was significantly higher, that'd mean she could spare a given pony about one hour every seventeen years. And that's if she's trying to serve everypony equally; some ponies might get repeat or more involved visits, though some might also need less time. It seems likely, though, that ponies more often saw Princess Luna in their dreams as something they dreamed up than as the actual Luna visiting. I imagine she'd still be doing good work for those she did visit, but the above numbers don't sound like dreamwalking alone would be a natural route to wide popular appreciation to me. If some sequence of events then transpired that, one way or another, caused her to start losing sight of the people who did appreciate her, the good she did do...
And yes. And I imagine it might be easier to make a dream construct that'll rampage around causing nightmares than to make one that can do good therapy, meaning she could visit the former on ponies at a much higher rate.