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What sorts of creatures are too dangerous to let roam around Equestria that they have to be locked away? (Aside from those in Celestia's rock garden)

From mlp.wikia.com:

Tartarus is a place mentioned in It's About Time. It's a place where evil creatures are held prisoner and guarded by the three-headed dog, Cerberus. Tartarus is from Greek mythology, being a deep dark pit below the underworld where many of the damned are imprisoned.

I'd like to think that our ol' pal Tirek is the ruler warden of it.

The fact that he would be keeping the evil creature at bay would mean that Tirek isn't really that bad a guy

and must have had some sort of agreement with Celestia, if not a formal treaty-sort then at least an unspoken understanding. I mean, all things considering he does play an important role in keeping Equestria from descending into all heck.

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That picture with Tirek and the animals!

Got a ton of stuff to add but passing out from tiredness. Will add in morning.

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Got from awesome blog of awesome

All of the earlier generations' villains are likely sealed within Tartarus.

Tartarus itself may be extradimensional; while its gates are just a few hours' jog from Ponyville, they could lead to an entirely different plane of existence, an infinite prison as horrific as its occupants.

Religion: Many of those trapped in Tartarus were once revered as gods, or at least received more than the recommended daily allowance of groveling. As such, cults of personality clash and vie for supremacy within the prison's depths.
Magic: Unspeakable. From the Rainbow of Darkness to the shoggoth called "Smooze," My Little Pony has a surprisingly rich assortment of eldritch magics in its continuity. With little else to do, the prisoners of Tartarus have refined these fell powers to sanity-stripping perfection.
Culture: As many as there are inmates. Some are suave, charismatic corruptors that would seek to corrupt and deprave all that is pure and innocent. Some are brutish louts who want nothing more than to smash all that those allowed to walk free beneath the curséd Daystar have wrought. And some seek true, total oblivion, the cessation not only of their imprisonment, but of existence itself.
Politics: Another favored pastime. Whole new schools of geometry and topology have had to be devised to describe all the ways the denizens of Tartarus have backstabbed one another.
Technology: Lacking. While there are some great (and terrible) minds among those who Cerberus guards, the lack of both raw materials and of interest in such mundane pursuits have resulted in very little technological development in the pits of Totally-Not-Hell.

Well, it depends on how mythological we want to get and which mythology we want to use. Twilight Sparkle only says "monsters" are locked in there. In my Chronomistress, I made the monsters Titans, and in my Princess Trinity, I made the monsters demons from Paradise Lost, along with some G1 villains.

I think Titans would be more in keeping with the show, but I suspect that if we hear mention of Tartarus again, or if it ever becomes important to an episode's plot, the monsters will be of some sort of more generic variety. The idea of G1 villains locked in Tartarus is appealing too for the crossover potential, though we know that can never make canon because of the copyright issues.

How about this? What if the Shadow World from G1 is in Tartarus, and it contains the city Tambelon, ruled by Grogar, that G1 goat demon guy?

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Grogar?

Grogar

Both pics are from the awesome blog
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While I first thought of Tirek as a warden because I was reminded of Magellan and his bunch running the show in Impel Down (One Piece)

for a random/adventure story I'm writing called "Twilight's Inferno" (where the mane 6 have to go and rescue Spike for making a deal with Tirek to have a wish granted in exchange for becoming his servant) I've also thought of Tartarus as ironically being a sort of demon night club that the biggest bads of G1 begrudgingly hang out in where there's a looping soundtrack and raucous fun to be had.

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Ha! That sounds awesome. The night club has high comedy potential.

I just discovered the awesome blog thanks to this thread. Awesome blog is awesome.

If you want justification for setting Tirek as a warden of sorts on Tartarus, the centaurs, if my memory serves, are depicted in Dante's Inferno guarding the River Phlegethon, where murderers are submerged in boiling blood. The centaurs shoot them with arrows if they try to get out of the river. I think the Minotaur is down there with them, too, but I may be misremembering.

Another question to ask, in depiction of Tartarus, is whether it's just a prison for ancient monsters or actually pony hell. If it's the latter, we can go hog wild with source material.

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My hell. Tartarus is a neverending butter lettuce party.

So yeah, my shitty headcanon:

Tartarus is Tirek's corpse. The incredible magic inherent in it allowed other divine beings to turn it into a prison of sorts. Several heroic figures, including Remus of the First Diamond Nation, Young Zephyr the Just, and Princess Luna, spent centuries hunting down monsters and imprisoning them in Tartarus. Young Zephyr became corrupted and then destroyed by his griffon friends, with what remained of his soul became another prisoner. It's basically a holding pen for anything that doesn't have divinity-level powers, like Nightmare Moon or Discord.

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Would that make Tirek physically huge in your headcanon, or are those souls dragged into his corpse that's guarded by Cerberus?

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Physically he's only the size of an ursa major, but the dark shadow magics that he controlled and was borne from meant that when his corpse sank into the earth, it became a far larger system. It also has a TARDIS effect, being far larger on the inside.

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Alright, just gonna toss my headcanon in here.

The Tartarus we know in MLP is just a node of a much larger prison that spans across every world, designed to keep demi-gods, deities, and other incredibly powerful and/or evil beings locked away.

So yes, every depiction/expy of Hell in every work of fiction/religion/idea is interconnected.

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What if Tartarus was superjail,

and the warden is secretly a draconequus that gets his power from all the chaos that goes on there.

How else could the warden construct and maintain such a place without discords level of magic.

In super-jail there is a portal deep underground, a locked door going down that says 'superhell', when opened monsters pour out and kill inmates.
559020 The warden also explicitly states that superjail is the biggest jail in all the local multi-verse. Considering the amount of prisoners they go through it's pretty obvious the warden gets his creatures and inmates from multiple realities.

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The crossover potential for that is mind boggling.

RIP AND TEAR!

I just had an odd idea. What if the gates of Tartarus lead to Earth? Because most of the demons and horrors in Equestria rely heavily on magic the only way to safely contain them would be to banish them to a world without magic where their powers would be nullified. Over the years though, they have been killed off, passing into myths and legends on Earth.

This could be an excuse as why so many things in both worlds are similar or have made other historical appearances. It also explains why Discord was never sent there as he draws his power from Chose rather than magic.

Anyway, just throwing rough ideas around. Feel free to steal it.

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I can just imagine nightmare moon being sent there, captured and injured by jailbot before she could cast the finial blow to Celestia 1000 years ago. I was going to start a tumblr about it when and if I get good at art actually.

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THEORY BUILDING TIME!

The deepest level of Tartarus is actually Earth, where all magic is nullified. Since everything in Equestria needs magic to survive, they would essentially die the second they put a foot in there. The inverse situation, something from a non-magical world entering Equestria, would lead to said non-magical entity not dying, since it doesn't need magic to survive.

Essentially, the reverse of the TCB barriers. Humans can get in and out, but ponies can't, and there isn't a way to convert the ponies into humans.

That would actually make a good story.

We are Eldritch Abominations to them

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Sorry in advance for getting off topic.
What if when humans enter the ponies world they gain supernatural powers akin to second in the story 'human'. And end up becoming godlike beings or at the least supermen without flight.

Perhaps humans harness magic on a much more efficient scale because our world is nearly void of the stuff, to the point anything sent there will succomb to magic exhaustion within weeks. But in a world where excess magic saturating the air constantly coalesces into crystals in the ground, well you can see how that'd have an effect.

On topic, once more. Maybe Tartarus isn't some huge, sprawling underground complex that spans multiple universes, but an infinite collection of pocket dimensions where a personalized hell is created by the one known as the Warden. The title of Warden changes hands every couple of centuries, because creating a personalized hell takes a lot out of mental stability.

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That... that actually makes a metric fuckton of sense. Also, wouldn't being super-efficient magic metabolize-rs mean we literally give off next to zero waste magic, since our bodies use the three Rs (Reduce, reuse, and recycle) in an organic sense?

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Yea so we'd probably be immune to any magic flung at us (it be absorbed before it ever hit) and actively act as sink hole where creatures around us are weakened. Also if I human were to walk through a magic force-field the shield would fail and likely be sucked into their bodies.

Thus explaining why humans are so often immune to magic.

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Maybe we should make a thread, for everything unrelated to species and instead the mechanics of the world itself. Unless that's against the rules.

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Sure, this probably doesn't fit here anyway.

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You or me?

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I've oft wondered if anyone's done a fic on that idea. It's used enough as a riff that the human character in an HiE is an Eldritch being to explain why everyone is acting OOC that it just makes me wanna read a story that actually runs on that idea.

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Oddly enough that just reminds me more of Dante's idea of the lowest pit of hell being frigid cold. So the bottom of Tartarus would be like that except in a magical sense. Another way to explain how Equestria's worst of the worst could be contained.

I want to point out that Discord was apparantly not deemed dangerous enough to lock away in Tartarus. As in, a nigh-omnipotent incarnation of chaos who is morally capable of mind-raping and driving ponies deep into despair, is not deemed worthy of Tartarus. By this logic, whatever is trapped within Tartarus has to be unspeakably powerful and destructive.

Also, the show's canon indicates that Celestia owns Cerberus (Spike mentions she was sending out lost dog flyers when Cerberus went on a rampage), so I don't think some other power rules Tartarus.

Several of you said Earth. While I believe this is a suitable answer, I differ on my explanation.

In a magical world full of things like Ursa Majors (not so much monster, but whoa), Dragons, Hydras, Manticores, and Angel bunny, what monster could possibly be so horrible and terrible that it would have to be locked inside a gate guarded by Cerberus? When all those other vicious and violent creatures are free, what deserves to be locked away for world peace?

Humans.

Tartarus is essentially the pony version of Alcatraz. It's the place where creatures go if they're too dangerous to remain in pony society but not dangerous enough to warrant using the Elements against them. Discord wasn't sent there because it was believed that he had already been sufficiently neutralized. That said, the more dangerous inmates have a sector underground which contains more sophisticated security systems.

Cerberus needs to be there because his three heads, powerful noses, and brute strength mean that anything that manages to escape from its cell and pass the guards can't get past him. Celestia makes it easier for him by putting him at a bottleneck entrance, so that even the vent shafts have to pass right by him and his sensitive doggy ears. He is allowed to let visitors in, of course, provided they're accompanied by one or two of the Royal Sisters, the Captain of the Royal Guard, or a noble of sufficient rank.

As for the guards, we've seen them in the show already. They were the ones pulling Luna's chariot in Luna Eclipsed. Originally simply the section of the Royal Guard assigned to Luna, they were reluctantly forced by their vows of duty to serve on her side when she was corrupted.

After Nightmare Moon's initial defeat, Celestia took control of the dark army and promised them amnesty for past actions if they swore their loyalty to the kingdom as a whole, with the promise that Princess Luna would one day be returned to them. Since most of them were having difficulty integrating into society for fighting on the wrong side, and since many of them had been forced to fight against former friends, they accepted. Thereafter, Celestia recruited them as guards of Tartarus, both to keep them out of the way and to make sure that they were still useful and beneficial to society.

Also, here's a couple of ideas to link canon events together: Queen Chrysalis was originally imprisoned in Tartarus and her fellow changelings disbanded, forcing them to hide on the outskirts of Equestrian society. However, Chrysalis escaped during the events of It's About Time to reunite with her exiled fellows, and having rounded up her colony, she planned a means of getting back into power and of restoring them to former glory. Shining Armour eventually discovered the breakout, which naturally brought about the events of A Canterlot Wedding.

If Tartarus is located in the Frozen North or nearby, then perhaps Sombra was imprisoned there under special security arrangements too. Unfortunately, he'd planned his escape long before even arriving there, and broke out with astonishing ease thanks to some hidden arrangements nopony had foreseen (but which Celestia had suspected). Indeed, he might have taken advantage of or even caused the same security lapse that allowed Chrysalis to escape.

Maybe there should just be a Tartarus group dedicated to fanfiction that include it as a major part of the plot. Since we only have a tantalizingly small bit of information about the place. And I've seen quite a few fanfiction that try to tackle it. I've even seen a couple that try to make it pony hell.

But wouldn't it be dangerous to put all of the worst into one place? I get what IN said above. Sombra and Chrysalis could have very well collaborated her escape. And when she failed, Sombra took his turn

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I don't think Sombra or Chrysalis ought to have been imprisoned in Tartarus. Wherever Tartarus is, it can't be that far from Ponyville. Twilight could walk to Tartarus, but she has to take a train to the Crystal Empire. Also, if Chrysalis escaped from Tartarus it seems rather likely that all sorts of other monsters would have escaped as well, and we never hear anything about anything like that. Chrysalis's dialogue also implies the changelings have been searching throughout the world for a nation with lots of love, which wouldn't make much sense if they had just escaped from Tartarus. I think that they just don't do the whole "banished to Tartarus" thing anymore, and that was what rulers prior to Celestia and Luna did. Alternatively, Tartarus is for stuff much, much worse than either Sombra or Chrysalis.

As for the danger of putting it all in one place: my personal headcanon says that Tartarus was originally created by a primordial race to imprison a single, unspeakably powerful monster. Because the protections necessary to imprison this King of Monsters were so great, they are also more than enough for lesser monsters, and so Tartarus was then used by later civilizations to imprison other monsters and villains.

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Chrysalis's dialogue also implies the changelings have been searching throughout the world for a nation with lots of love, which wouldn't make much sense if they had just escaped from Tartarus.

I think the line you're referring to is "Equestria has more love than any place I've ever encountered"? It certainly depends on how long they were there for. Chrysalis and her changelings may well have wandered the globe before being imprisoned.

That said, it isn't my headcanon, per se, that Chrysalis was imprisoned in Tartarus. The most obvious problem is that no one knew what the threat to Canterlot was, but an escaped prisoner would be identified pretty quickly if they had any sort of record-keeping system, and a mass breakout involving a whole swarm of changelings would be obvious to anyone. There's also the implication that Chrysalis had planned out the attack for some time, but the interval between Cerberus' escape and the wedding may well be too short for that.

At the time, I just thought it would make an interesting "alternate history", so to speak, but I am less confident in its logic now.

I recently caught wind of a comment on Derpibooru which has stuck in my head. I guess our odds of actually seeing the layout and inner workings of Tartarus are slim? I'd guess the place would have guards or wardens other than the big three headed dog. So my headcanon is that Scorpan is the warden over Tartarus. He was assigned the job eons ago by Celestia and Luna, both of which raised him since he was a baby, after they fished him from the ashes of a monstrous beast they defeated. Think Pegasus birthed after Medusa was decapitated.

Granted I also like the idea of the warden being Tirek. So this idea conflicts. Maybe Scorpan would be second in command.

But I guess all I really mean to say is, Scorpan is awesome. He needs a fanon purpose somewhere in G4.