Has anyone really put thought into where Discord came from or how he came to be? Is he just some supernatural spirit? Is he the literal personification of chaos itself? Perhaps he is a demon from the pits of Tartarus. Or maybe... he was once a mortal pony who delved too deep into dark magics not meant for equine kind. What's your theory?

I was recently toying around with the idea that perhaps he was actually the first Alicorn, created using the Elements of Harmony to help reunite the three tribes after they began to split again several decades after the Hearth Warming Legend. But his virtually unlimited power over all the other ponies drove him power mad and eventually caused him to go completely insane, thus turning himself into the mismatched monster we currently know as Discord.

Share your head-canon and theories below!

1050029 If you want my personal theory, then I refer you to my fic Dreams of Broken Promise XD

1050029
*clears throat*
Despite common belief, and the Chaos Tyrant's own boasts, he is neither a god nor a spirit. What he is, is a mistake created by the Ancient People of Atlas, a mistake that lead to the down fall of the Ancients.

1050029

In my headcanon there were once alicorns besides the princesses. However they rarely intervened in the matters of ponies.

My personal headcanon for DIscord is that he was an Alicorn, but he was driven to madness by the chaotic magic he had obtained.

In the universe of Chaos and Harmony, Discord was the son of Chaos. He was created out of the essence of Chaos' magic, the same way Harmony did with Celestia and Luna (that's not the full story for the alicorns but in a nutshell, it's that).

In the history I came up with, there were wars between rogue unicorn wizards (sort of like Sombra, for example) around the time of Equestria's founding. They battled one another for power in the Wizard Wars, and they used morphogenic spells to create chimeric monsters. Griffins were made to be soldiers in their armies, and they also created manticores, cockatrices, etc. The Wizard Wars eventually ended after one particularly mad unicorn set off a particularly over-the-top chimera spell and created Discord, who then pretty much wiped them all out with his unleashed chaos.

You might even say Discord was the magical counterpart to a thermonuclear bomb. (The living personification of MAD!)

It's also possible that Celestia and Luna could have been born as the result of a somewhat more benign-and-controlled variant of those spells. I'm sure ever since Discord, that type of magic would be utterly forbidden.

The story I made in Head Full of Cotton Candy and Heavenly Turmoil was that Discord was a culmination of chaotic energy caused by a war that became large enough to gain sentience. The Spirits of Equestria live outside the world, and are created when a significant amount of energy exists in the world, like Nature, Love, Harmony, Death, etc. But a stray life spell cast by a certain white princess was intercepted by the chaos energy before it transcended to the other plane, and it became Discord.

tl;dr, he's a force of chaos that was accidentally given physical form.

1050029

..And he was cast into a slumber where visions were granted unto him by the old god Luna. On this dream the Moon saw fit to pull away the curtain of time and show him thing past and not yet come to pass.

Barren land stretched below him in all directions, blank and raw. The sky rippled as six comets streaked across the horizon. They fell to the earth like feathers and vanished into the soil where they laid. “Those are the elements of Harmony,” the whisper told him. “They are not to be found by mortal hoof”

Moments later six more tore through the sky. This time blasting great craters where they landed. “Those... are not,” he was told.

An aeon passed within the span of a thought. Dirt became wilderness. Wilderness replaced by a rough frontier. Unicorns lived on the mountains in glittering castles. Earth ponies tilled the grasslands. Pegai filled the air. There were griffins, dragons, and deer living in the land too. He watched the six cultures grow and shrink, watched wars flair and fade.

Then the craters from so long ago came back into his sight; they were being found. Each tribe found an impact and each pulled a smoking orb from its bottom.

Time took a fast pace as fire danced across the land. War no longer faded, it only moved and grew. The fire grew till the entirety of its rage was focused in one spot. Six massive armies had met on a great plane. At the head of each host, stood the strongest of their kind, and each held a smoking orb. Yet they did not hold it by hoof, claw, or mouth, the orbs were held within their very soul. Wielding the power of the primordial shard, they lead their tribe by power, coercion, and fear. “They are the Scions of chaos,” the voice whispered to him, “The Scion of: Eris, Moros, Apate, Oizys, Philotes, and Thanatos. The elements of chaos.”

The armies clashed, the stink of blood and fire filled his senses. The scions lead the melee; the thickest of the goar marked their wake. Then something went wrong. The scions found themselves all in one press. For the first time, all the elements of chaos were in one place. The elements, he saw, had a will of their own. They wished to be united and no force that existed could stop them. Arcs of shadow connected the six, bound them, and in one horrible moment dashed them together. A shattered god had found his worldly flesh. Discord stood amidst the battlefield and laughed.

1050710
That was quite interesting. Is that from a story your wrote or did you just come up with it when you posted?

1051051
That is something I'm working on. It's my big project. Sneak peek here. Some chapters are first draft, some are second, none have been scrubbed for spelling or grammar yet. I'm waiting till about ch8 before I start rolling it out.

i found this a while ago

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1051870
Because unlike the OP, you are still on the site.

My Discord headcanon has changed a bit since this thread was made - but quite a bit has stayed the same. Either way, he dates back to the Age of Gods when great powers were shaping the world - he was of their kin, but comparatively just a little brat, so he was eventually "put in time out" for what turned out to be over a thousand years and might have been longer if he hadn't been freed by too-curious pony explorers.

Since then, however, it has become clearer that Discord's physical form is as intrinsic to him as his spiritual nature. So I modified his theory - he is not petty god but overpowered demigod, the greatest of Echidna, the Mother of Monsters, creations. Usually she could combine three creatures tops, but it turns out chaotic essence is great for making the impossible possible. Sure, it letting multiple incompatible biologies blend doesn't make much sense... but that's exactly why it works! (As a corollary, he's unlikely to live a day without his magic - certainly not if he tries eating anything.)

He was still shut up (he still doesn't know whether it was by his mother or one of her enemies), in a cunning prison indeed - a labyrinth that turned his own chaos against him, trapping him in an unreal world of dreams and warped time where most of those he met were empty reflections of his own mind. Is it any wonder that he emerged with little sanity and almost no sense of the value of other beings' lives? (To be fair, those hadn't been his strong points to begin with.) Oh, and the maze was also like a pressure cooker building up his chaos powers to ridiculous levels (ie me reconciling the world-warping levels of power I originally gave him with his somewhat lesser showings since).

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And yet a post with content and a post without are still leagues apart in relevance.

He is one of a pseudo-pantheon of four other spirits roughly correlating with D&D alignment, with Discord being the chaos spirit, of course. There is Order for law, Harmony for good, Strife for evil and Accord for neutral. As you might gather from the names, Order & Harmony were allied, as were Discord & Strife, effecting their initial outlooks but they are each capable of change. There are related pseudo-pantheons of spirits for the elements and emotions.