Equestria has seen so many villains that Twilight decided to keep a journal on how to reform them all. You know, for future reference.
Hello, everypony! Twilight Sparkle here.
Things have been pretty quiet since me and my friends rainbow-lasered Tirek, Chrysalis, and Cozy Glow to stone, and even though I'm the ruler of Equestria, I don't have much to do. So I decided to start a guide on how to reform villains, because, why not?
Also, my friends and I won't be around forever, and somepony might need this in the future so they can have some pointers for reforming their own villains.
And so, I present: Princess Twilight's Guide to Reforming Villains.
To start things off, we'll begin with the first adventure me and my friends ever went on. Here are the supplies you will need:
One super awesome nerdy unicorn who is the best at everything and will become a princess and rule Equestria and is so much better than everyone else (this is all you will need, so you can skip the rest of the list) One hyperactive pink pony who continuously breaks the laws of physics One incredibly shy pony who only starts warming up to you when she sees your baby dragon One country horse with dead parents and a lasso and an accent (this is important) One overly fashionable pony that your baby dragon has a crush on One athletic and fast pony to compete with Country Horse One evil night princess Five mysterious Elements of Harmony that are shattered into bits by the Evil Night Princess One mysterious Element of Harmony that is NOT shattered into bits by the Evil Night Princess One not-evil day princess (who only shows up for plot convenience at the end)
Oh, and one baby dragon (he's not important)
Now that you have gathered all your supplies, it's time to go on an epic quest through an evil forest with the ruins of a castle in the middle. Put the five Elements of Harmony that will get shattered by the Evil Night Princess in the castle (but don't break them yet!) in plain sight, but hide the other Element of Harmony somewhere else in the castle for future use. Have your Not-Evil Day Princess go hide somewhere where she will not be important in the story until the end. Have the Baby Dragon go with Not-Evil Day Princess (as I said, he's not important).
Put Nerdy Unicorn, Pink Pony, Shy Pony, Country Horse, Fashion Pony, and Fast Pony in the woods and tell them to walk through the scary woods to the castle ruins. Then have Evil Night Princess make the road under the ponies fall. Before you do this, though, make sure Fast Pony and Shy Pony have wings, and Country Horse doesn't need wings to be rescued. Now you can continue. Fast Pony and Shy Pony save Pink Pony and Fashion Pony, and Nerdy Unicorn almost falls off a cliff, but is saved by Country Horse, who tells Nerdy Unicorn to let go. Nerdy Unicorn falls, but is rescued by Shy Pony and Fast Pony.
See how important Nerdy Unicorn is? She needs both Shy Pony and Fast Pony to rescue her. Just one pony wouldn't be enough.
Next, have a big evil manticore come out and have everyone try to get past it but fail. I would just like to point out that Fluttershy very rudely interrupted the scene before I could totally defeat the manticore, so, yeah, I could have done it by myself. Anyways, have Shy Pony pick a thorn out of the manticore's paw so that he'll immediately let you go past, because, why not?
Then put the five ponies and the horse in some scary trees that are sooo scary (I was totally just acting the whole time, they didn't really scare me) and wait for Pink Pony to sing an annoying yet surprisingly catchy song about how you need to laugh in your fears' faces. And then you activate the Magic of Laughter. Huh. My Little Pony: Laughter is Magic... it has a nice ring to it.
Anyways, next we come to the raging river of death with a sea dragon in it named Steven Magnet. Such a strange name. I would love to know how that happened. [Disclaimer: that was Twilight talking. I know how Steven Magnet got his name. Just wanted to clear that up.] His mustache is cut off, so he decides that, to avenge his fallen facial hair, he needs to turn this nice, calm, not even five inches deep creek into a raging river of death that we can't cross even though we've got two ponies with wings that could just fly us over. So Fashion Pony has to step up to the occasion and cut off her tail to replace the mustache, even though it doesn't match and doesn't look that great. (Shh, don't tell him that.) So now he lets us cross.
And then we come to a broken bridge that we need to cross to get to the castle ruins, where the Evil Night Princess is waiting. Fast Pony finally does something logical with those wings of hers and flies down to get the broken bridge and tie it to the other side of the canyon. Again, why couldn't they just fly us ground ponies over there? Then these evil-looking pegasi come up and ask Fast Pony to join them as the fastest ponies in Equestria, and Fast Pony says, nope, I'm good, and ties the bridge so that her good old ground pony friends can come over.
Finally, we get to the castle ruins. There are the five Elements of Harmony that have not yet been shattered lying on the floor, and because Nerdy Unicorn is so smart, she knows that she has to make a spark to activate the five Elements to create the sixth Element, which is currently hidden in the castle ruins for future use. And so she uses her super-advanced magic to try and create a spark, but the Evil Night Princess didn't want that, so she teleports Nerdy Unicorn and the five Elements to another room in the castle ruins, so the rest of the cast goes looking for Nerdy Unicorn, because she's so amazing.
Nerdy Unicorn bravely faces off Evil Night Princess alone and almost succeeds in creating the spark, but then Evil Night Princess shatters the five Elements of Harmony, much to Nerdy Unicorn's shock and despair. Then Nerdy Unicorn's friends come, and Nerdy Unicorn feels the spark ignite inside her (because she's so special), and she realizes that each of her friends represented one of the five Elements of Harmony, which were now shattered. And since the five Elements are present, the sixth appears (now is the time for the future use of the sixth Element of Harmony), represented by Nerdy Unicorn (cower before Nerdy Unicorn in all her amazingness).
All six Elements together created a magic rainbow that stripped the Evil Night Princess of her evilness, turning her back into a regular old Night Princess. Then the Day Princess comes back, and they find out that Day Princess and Night Princess are related, and Night Princess only turned evil because she was jealous of Day Princess. Then we - I mean, they all went back to Ponyville and had a big party while Pink Pony broke the laws of physics for the grand finale.
So, if you ever encounter an Evil Night Princess, then just get rid of her jealousy of her older sister, the Day Princess, blast her with some magic rainbows, and everything will be fine.
Reforming a chaos god who wants to turn the world into an endless abyss of chaos is actually pretty simple: just have a tea party with him!
Here are the supplies you will need:
One incredibly shy pony who only starts warming up to you when she sees your baby dragon One draconequus chaos lord who originally destroyed the world, was blasted with rainbow lasers, turned to stone, set free, destroyed the world again, was turned to stone again, was set free again, and almost destroyed the world. Not quite, this time One apple farm A couple of beavers (preferably ones you aren't too attached to so that you won't mind them being mind-controlled)
Now that you have gathered all your supplies, it is time to begin. Start by turning the draconequus chaos lord to stone using magic rainbow lasers. You can always call the "Magic of Friendship Rainbow Lasers" hotline if you need to. Then call the "Magic of Friendship Rainbow Lasers" hotline again to turn the chaos lord back from being stone. Then turn a blind eye while he mind-controls your beavers, making them go all red-eyed and saying swears and building a huge dam in the middle of the river that goes through the apple farm.
While your mind-controlled beavers are building their dam, take the chaos lord and send him to the incredibly shy pony's house, where he'll turn the whole place upside down (literally) and set up a tea party for you and your friends. Then when your friends arrive, make sure the whole thing goes horribly wrong so that your friends are starting to doubt the shy pony's new chaos lord draconequus friend, even though shy pony secretly now has a crush on him, so she won't let her friends diss on him. She still insists that he can be reformed and refuses to give up on her mission.
Now you'll all need to go to the apple farm, where you'll see a whole bunch of water all over the place, because your mind-controlled beavers have been busy, and their dam has flooded the whole apple farm, so you have to go around in little boats to get the apples floating in the water. Then have the chaos lord go waterskiing on the water, and have shy pony ask him really nicely to get rid of the water. But the chaos lord tells shy pony that he will only get rid of the water if she promises not to turn him to stone, so shy pony agrees, much to her friends' dismay, who probably now all think that shy pony is dumb. I will admit, I did think that was a very steep deal, and Fluttershy should NOT have risked it.
Turns out, I was right. The chaos lord just froze the water, so now he's going ice skating and scoring tens. Okay, fine, I was extremely jealous. When it comes to ice skating, I've never gotten above a 5.6 in my life. My experiences during my first winter wrap-up were enough to convince me of that. Anyways, shy pony can't really do anything but continue playing the role of chaos lord's friend, until she gets so fed up with him boasting about it that she threatens to break up with him.
Who knew that chaos lords had romantic streaks? Anyways, shy pony denied being chaos lord's friend, and chaos lord was very sad, because he also had a crush on shy pony. So he fixed everything, and he and shy pony started dating, and they never had to turn him to stone again.
Oh, and if he ever turns back to evil, just remind him of everything he had, and he'll come back around. This doesn't mean he still won't make dumb decisions, though. Maybe he'll pretend to be an ancient monster and bring back three of your worst enemies and force them to work together so that he can launch an epic attack on you at your freaking CORONATION to become RULER OF EQUESTRIA to BOOST YOUR CONFIDENCE. Or, at least, that's what he says. Who knows what was really going on?
And please don't tell Fluttershy about the dating. She's already mad at me for accidentally kicking one of her animals at her sanctuary because it scared me. So... just don't mention anything here, okay? Just say that all I did was talk about what a great job she did reforming Discord. Absolutely nothing romantic was mentioned.
You would obviously need to release the shapeshifting bug queen from her stone prison, which would require you to reform the chaos god before you do this. Then you need to show her that friendship isn't the source of all her angers and woes. Then show her how she can fix her problems, while still keeping the best of both.
But that's just a theory, we really have no clue.
In case you do attempt to reform the shapeshifting bug queen, do NOT do this...
Just ask her to be your buddy and pal, because she will say no, unless you've been nice to her for a while, and she kind of likes you, then she might be willing to cooperate. But this will take a long time.
Take the thing she's most proud of and turn it against her, because that will definitely spark some feelings of revenge, which is the last thing you want to do. Of course, if you do that the right way, she could see how much friendship benefits those that she cares about, and might be willing to give it a shot. But this is very hard to do in a way that will not make her infinitely angry.
Blast her with love magic and banish her to the farthest reaches of the earth. Guaranteed to make her stew some vengeful feelings and begin plotting her revenge which makes for a really epic season finale.
Or you could just always not reform the shapeshifting bug queen, because she is a really cool villain, and I personally think we should just keep letting her get away so that she can come back and do more evil bug queen stuff and singing really epic villain songs and doing awesome evil things, since she's so good at that.
But like I said before, if you want to reform this shapeshifting bug queen, you're pretty much on your own, because we have not found a way yet. Please share your strategy if you succeed.
We have no idea. Again. I always think that we reformed a lot of villains, but then I'm looking back, and I'm like, "No, we really didn't." It gets kind of depressing after a while... Anyways. So. Say an evil shadow pony has returned and has enslaved your entire kingdom and might actually go to war with you. What do you do? Of course you don't have any clue; that's what I'm here for.
Our best advice?
Zap 'im with lasers as soon as he shows his ugly face.
Yes, okay, I get it, that isn't the best way I could have phrased that, but you get the gist of it. He appears? Don't waste any time, my friend - gather your friends and send him back to the ether, where he belongs.
Dealing with evil shadow ponies can be tricky. They never really disappear, no matter how many times you blast them to bits with magic. And they always come back. The methods by which they inevitably return vary from ancient curses to others intentionally bringing them back because somewhere in their derranged mind, they think that it is okay to release your worst enemies and intentionally have them attack your own coronation!
*deep breath*
Okay, maybe I'm not being completely fair. I mean, he was trying to help, but still angry.
Moving on. Evil shadow pony. Got it. So. How to defeat them. Well, luckily, there's a few ways.
Option number 1: You can zap him with magic and trap him in the ice. Great idea if you're new to the whole concept of defeating villains and finding permanent solutions to the problem, but once you start to get experience, you will find that this is actually not the best option, because of several reasons. One, it doesn't last. If you do this, he is guaranteed to come back, bigger and badder than before. Two, you apparently can't use it twice. It's a one-shot thing. One try, and you'd better hope it works. Three, it usually doesn't work. So, option 1 is not the best option.
Option number 2: Explode him to pieces. For this, you require an ancient relic that protects an entire empire from frozen conditions, so it's pretty dang powerful. Simply restore this relic to its rightful place, have the citizens of said empire share their love and light with the relic to power it up, sit back, and relax. The magic relic will do the rest, and also possibly give you a really cool makeover that Rarity was very unhappy when it got reversed. This is a pretty sure-fire method, except that the relic is apparently not powerful enough to fight off the evil shadow pony when he gets his dirty hooves on it and hides it in bizarre places, or just sticks it right above his head, so, always have a back-up plan.
Option number 3: Elements of Harmony. Except this doesn't work for long. Or maybe it did, but a certain chaos god brought the evil shadow pony back right after you use these to defeat him, or maybe somepony else did it (like the magic spirit of the Tree of Harmony, but who really knows?). All I know is, the evil shadow pony can very easily destroy these little trinkets, so don't count on them completely. They're good for very temporary diversions.
Option number 4: The Magic of Friendship. Honestly, you should just do this from the start - there is no way to defeat this kind of magic, not for long. You could pull a Discord, but that didn't work, so don't try it. The best part about this is that the evil shadow pony will not see this coming, so you get to see a shocked and surprised face before you vaporize him. But his magic won't work against the Magic of Friendship, so it is extremely effective. And you rely on absolutely nothing and nopony other than your friends, who are always there for you, no matter what. If you ever find yourself facing up against an evil shadow pony, I would recommend this option.
But hey, the choice is up to you! You get to pick which of these many ways to blast your evil shadow pony to bits that you will use.
Based on the pattern of the last few, you can probably guess what I'm going to say.
Yup. Still no idea.
Sigh. This is getting frustrating.
But, just like with the evil bug queen, though we have not actually succeeded in reforming this villain, we do have a few ideas on how to make it possible.
First thing you need to know: this muscle-bound cretin was raised by the most amazing dad in the universe. This guy wins all the awards - Worst Father Ever, Most Likely To Raise A Child Who Will Try To Destroy The World, Singular Continuity From The Comics, the whole shabang. Good ol' King Vorak. In fact, he was such a lovely guy that he (whether accidentally or on purpose, the world may never know) caused the muscle-bound cretin to seek to devour magic, which is something he could do, so that he could compensate for the fact that he was afraid he would never please dear old dad, in the 'wise' words of Discord.
Anyways, so the muscle-bound cretin and his brother came to the land of ponies to steal all their magic, but then the brother decided that ponies weren't so bad and forever committed himself to bronydom. His muscle-bound cretin brother, though, refused to do this as well, so the new brony turned him in and sent him to basically pony h-e-double-hockey-sticks.
This guy wins all the awards for best brother, clearly.
So the muscle-bound cretin spent a couple centuries in the most lovely place in Equestria, seething with anger. Here's a tip: do NOT let your enemies spend a couple centuries seething and plotting their revenge. It won't end well.
The muscle-bound cretin eventually escapes, nearly takes over the world, fails, gets sent back to his lovely prison, acquires a pen pal who fails to take over the world, and then gains a roommate. Then he escapes again and almost takes over the world again - geez, we really need a better Tartarus, preferably one that is harder to escape from - and gets turned to stone, where he can spend a couple more centuries seething and plotting his revenge. I see this ending well. And, no, I was not the one who turned them to stone. It wasn't even my idea, so stop looking at me like that.
But there is a simple way to reform this muscle-bound cretin - show him that you do not need to listen to your parents if what they are doing is not what's best for you. If your parents are asking you to jump off a bridge, don't do it. If they are influencing you to be a school bully and get everything you want by being cruel, don't do it. And, most importantly, if your lovely award-winning dad is making you feel like you need to steal all the magic in the world to be worth anything to him, don't do it! You don't need other ponies' approval for anything you do, and if your parents are terrible parents, no matter how many awards they win, do not listen to them. Talk to them and perhaps change them for the better if you're lucky - ditch 'em and run away if you're not.
But that's just about how you reform a muscle-bound cretin. And, no, definitely not easy, because if you fail, he will probably steal your magic and begin a campaign to take over the world and exact the revenge he's had a couple centuries to think about.
How To Reform A Communist Leader Who Steals Your Destiny
Unfortunately, this one comes with a lot more hardships for you as you go through the reforming process - and also for a bunch of other innocent ponies. As well as a bunch of confusing questions about alternate timelines that had a certain changeling analysis to make about a dozen different videos about it that leave you even more confused after you watch them than you were before...
Anyways. First of all, the communist leader that you wish to reform will steal your destiny and your special talent and the mark that makes you who you are - essentially stealing your identity. Before you can reform said communist leader, you must get your special marks back in a massive revolt against this communist leader, in which you rally all of the poor ponies that the communist leader has convinced to give up their identities to suddenly decide that they want their identities back, and you manage to get everypony's marks and destinies back. These ponies, so grateful to you for showing them how they had been complete idiots before, will proceed on an epic chase after the communist leader, who still has your special marks. You will get your mark back, but the communist leader will disappear into a system of secret caves and vanish for the next season of your life.
The communist leader will spend this season of your life spying on you and trying to find out how she can get back at you where it'll hurt you most, which makes this communist leader the most dangerous of the many villains that you have reformed so far. Then, when you least expect it, she will steal a very important spell from the Canterlot archives, modify it to her own uses, travel BACK IN TIME to change the moment that got you your very special mark in the first place, and connected you with all of your friends.
This change in the timeline will lead to a completely alternate timeline where that evil shadow pony (oh yeah, remember him? Maybe the ponies in that universe could use this very helpful guide to reforming villains to save their universe like we did ours) has taken over and is at war with Equestria-
I'd rather not go into all the details. It was bad enough to see it for one time.
But anyways, you chase this communist leader through a bunch of alternate timelines, each more awful than the last, and battle with her a couple of times to try and stop her from changing the future. Finally, you catch up with her before she changes the future and she shows you her emotional traumatic past that inspired all of her evil actions. You have an emotional speech where you manage to convince the communist leader that friendship is very good. Muy Bien. All the things. Then you go back to the present of the universe that you know, and this communist leader becomes your friend and you and your other friends sing a song and all is at a happy, happy end.
Okay, not quite, the communist leader has a very emotional chat with her foalhood friend who abandoned her and started all of this in the first place, gets some good character development, and becomes the bane of the entire fandom. But she works it out in the end and proves that she is a valuable member of the group who has some great moments and saves the day a couple of times and all the usual things that you have to do to get inaugurated into the main cast of a TV show.
Which is a good thing, too, because after this, the former communist leader helps save a child from going nuclear.
No new information here, except that the communist leader from the last chapter steps up and saves you and your friends and the most powerful ponies in all of the land from the evil bug queen, all while convincing all of the evil queen's subjects to revolt against her and chose a better path, which causes the queen to harbor some very negative feelings that will inspire more evil quests against you and the communist leader. But the good news is that all of the reformed bug creatures become your friends and help you save the world later, so they technically also get reformed!
Just show them a better way, and a creature who chose the better path, and how much happier they are. Then help them rebel against their evil bug queen, kind of like the communist leader. Makes sense that she would be the one leading this, since she probably knows exactly how to do it.
Oh, and the nuclear child turned out okay. Remains one of the biggest mysteries in the world, but ah, well, we can't do much about that, can we?
But, anyways! This is, once again, not a reformative story, but a story about saving a pony who is trapped in the clutches of the evil darkness. I mean, I guess you do reform the pony consumed by darkness, but mostly by rescuing him from the darkness, and now I'm confused. Let's get going.
Firstly, the reason this shadow pony exists is because a poor pony felt ignored and insignificant when he was part of a group of the best and most powerful and heroic ponies of the time, and so turned to darkness, which offered him shelter - or so he thought. But really, the darkness just used his bitterness and anger to attempt to destroy all light and hope in the world, while promising the pony that the ponies who had mistreated him would soon bow down to him and treat him with all of the respect that he deserved. Lies and deception seem to be common with these evil shadow ponies. I always wondered how they got ponies to go along with their evil schemes.
So the ponies that had neglected the pony inside of the evil shadow pony completely forgot to consider his side of the story and crafted a masterful spell that used magical artifacts from each of them to permanently trap the evil shadow pony in limbo forever! It was a work of genius...
Um, Twilight? Focus here.
Right. Thank you, Spike. Anyways... where were we?
Starswirl's spell! Of course! Like I said, it was the work of a genius, and it used usually inanimate objects that were used to create a portal between dimensions without leaving much of a lasting impact on the objects themselves! But it formed a magical connection between the objects and the place where the spell was cast so that, if you bring one of the objects back to the location, then it will show you what happened and-
Twilight!
Sorry.
Just get on with it.
Right.
Turns out, the spell was not permanent, and if somepony who was also a bit of a genius came up with a counterspell to free the ponies who had trapped the evil shadow pony in limbo, but then when those ponies were freed, the evil shadow pony was also freed, and they had to team up with you and your friends to find the evil shadow pony and stop him before he destroyed all light in the world!
Some of your friends might try to convince you that this is more of a friendship problem than a saving-the-world-type problem. But you are so eager to impress your idol, who is a bit unhappy with you the moment for freeing the evil shadow pony in the first place, that you completely ignore them.
Your large task force all goes to find where the evil shadow pony is, and you face him together. But as the evil shadow pony starts to monologue, you think that, perhaps, this might be more of a friendship problem... and then you see that there is a pony trapped inside of the evil shadow pony, and your Friendship Instincts kick in, telling you that you need to save this pony or forever hold your peace!
So you fly inside of the evil shadow pony (and yes, it was just as weird as it sounds) to find another pony inside of the evil shadow pony who claims to be the pony that all of the other ponies that you have idolized and are currently working with were originally friends with before he turned to darkness and they banished him and themselves in limbo. I mean, if you think that you and your enemies have got beef between you...
But after some more monologue, some truth revealing, and some forcing-other-ponies-to-think-about-the-other-side-of-the-story-ing, you and all of your friends, both new and old, work together to free the other pony from inside of the evil shadow pony all while trapping the evil shadow pony back in limbo. After that, there was much rejoicing, as old friends were reunited and old relationships were repaired and everything was all good and dandy.
Unfortunately, even though your new friends are very powerful and were basically the you and your friends of their time, they won't be very helpful in the next entry of this Villain Reforming Guide.
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