So I decided that I wanted to talk about Princess Celestia for a while... (2024)

I have really been meaning to ask people a few questions about how they see Princess Celestia but what really pushed me over the edge was a recent discussion about the latest Friends Forever comic. A conversation about the Princesses' role in Equestria changed into a discussion about how competent Celestia really is at her job.

After I originally posted this, @EquestrianScholar and @PoisonClaw provided some opinions that I did my best to integrate into this new text.

My intention here is not to criticize the character or even the writers for the show, even if I sound confrontational. I want to exchange opinions and interpretations with other fans. To be fair, I am offering my own first. This is a combination of me having too much time in my hands in between study sessions and liking this cartoon way too much. It is an attempt at an honest study about Princess Celestia because I really like this character and I am really disappointed with how she turned out.

Let’s keep drama out of this, please. I’m not going to commit suicide because of a cartoon character nor am I going to kill someone. Just to get this out of the way.

Well then… Celestia is not a real person. She is a fictional character and as any fictional character she only exists in whatever media her story is told along with the fictional universe where she exists. As such, she is subject to the writers' own imperfections, which can lead to corruption of the character concept, nonsensical information and only exists when the writer calls her into existence. Everything else is headcanon.

We can assume that while Twilight was dealing with Spike being jealous of Owlowiscious, Celestia was in Canterlot doing her thing. She probably was listening to some noble babble on about how some law should be changed because he wants to make a few extra Bits at the expense of his employees. Of course being 1000+ years doing this thing, Celestia would be the pony to smell BS like that and put this pony in his place. However, since the cartoon is not about Celestia and most people would think that a cartoon about worker's rights and politics in Equestria is not a good idea, we get the episode about Twilight, Spike and the owl.

Of course, as I said, we assume that Celestia is doing something. What she is doing resides primarily in headcanon territory, since she is not really doing anything because she doesn't exist outside the episode. This is normally okay, unless the action is happening next to Celestia because it drags her into the spotlight and forces the writer to deal with her presence. So, let's see her being the powerful, kind, loving and competent ruler that she is.

Be warned… Spoilers are everywhere. Episodes, Season Five, books and comics.

I’ll start by mentioning Celestia’s description from the book “Elements of Harmony”.

“Princess Celestia is the wise and kind ruler of Equestria. Governing her subjects from her castle in Canterlot, she emanates a commanding presence with both a Unicorn’s horn and magnificent Pegasus wings. Princess Celestia is profoundly magical and some say she is more than one thousand years old. With the help of her sister, Princess Luna, she makes sure the sun and moon rise and set each day.”

That certainly goes well with my opinions on Celestia that I believe are shared by most of her fans. She is kind and caring, certainly an intelligent and experienced ruler. In addition, in the past she did great things along with her sister and now spends her time teaching magic, ruling Equestria bringing the day and eating cake. She is not perfect but there is something about her and her sister that made ponies go “Hey. We really should let them rule the country.” Why? I have no clue today.

Initially I thought that it was because she and Luna literally move the heavens. Seriously, they bring order to Equestria by doing the most basic thing: separating the day from the night. It would be just natural that they rule the country, which I actually thought was the entire world. But Merriwether Williams messed up all that with Hearth’s Warming Eve in Season Two. Turns out that the ponies themselves ordered things in the heavens.

Some people defend that the pageant showed in the episode is not necessarily depicting what really happened in the past, but is a cautionary tale. Unfortunately, (for me) “The Journal of the Two Sisters” kills this idea. Not only did Celestia and Luna share time with Princess Platinum and the other Founding Ponies characters mentioned in the pageant, but it’s said that Celestia and Luna are capable of bringing up the sun and the moon without losing their magic in the process. Instead, both the sun and the moon power their magic up and because of that, they were able to return the lost magic to the unicorns tasked with moving the celestial bodies before them. Therefore, it is undeniable that the ponies did the princesses’ jobs by themselves and my main explanation as to why the princesses rule Equestria is gone: turns out moving celestial bodies is not a big deal in Equestria… Suck it Helios and Selene. Ponies 1 x Olympians 0.

I didn’t care. This is very interesting. But it ends up not making a difference in the show. Not mentioned and obviously added later. So why is it that they rule Equestria? I don't know. It is implied that Star Swirl trained the two to be rulers, or something. Why did ponies go with this for so long? Your guess is as good as mine, and mine was: they just are exceedingly good at it. But looking at the canon of the show and the comics this becomes very questionable.

They are powerful and can defend Equestria. No.

Or rather they were powerful and did defend Equestria. No.

To make this worse, even though the first thing that is said about the Two Sisters in the cartoon, that they rule Equestria, Celestia is irritatingly vague and insecure about her role in Equestria in her entries in the journal.

So let's take a look at what Celestia actually has under her belt, according to the cartoon and the comics.

- She vanished during Nightmare Moon's return. We are never given an explanation. Commonly accepted headcanon and the Word of God say that Nightmare Moon dealt with her. Okay... It is understandable. Nightmare Moon was very powerful and Celestia already fought with her in the past. It was originally said that reluctantly, Celestia wielded the Elements of Harmony against the monster to banish her in the moon after trying to reach out to her sister. Unfortunately, in “Princess Twilight Sparkle” we get something that I call a "cutscene" where we are given an undeniable description of what happened: Luna appears, whining like a brat about Celestia’s glory (which one?) and turning into Nightmare Moon while Celestia was staring at her. Immediately after Nightmare Moon magic-lasers Celestia to a heap in the ground after she chases Celestia flying away. Immediately after, Celestia rises up, gathers the Elements and rainbows Nightmare Moon to the moon in a scene of mere seconds, that sucks the sorrow and vagueness out of the original description like a black hole of emotions. You can barely see that she is crying.

- Celestia and Discord. So we hear that Celestia and Luna defeated Discord using the Elements of Harmony. When we actually see that happening, the two were already princesses and really do nothing more than serve as a conveyance method for the Elements to go from the Tree of Harmony to Discord. I wanted to cry when I saw that. When the Mane Six used the Elements of Harmony against Discord, they went through all the trouble of overcoming what Discord did to them. Not only a UPS employee could have taken the place of the two princesses, but also Discord has all the time to make fun of Celestia like it’s comedy.. Well, it is. And that is part of the problem, as I’ll say later. Not only that, but they actually lost in the end since Discord’s vines just snagged them centuries later and apparently could have kept them through eternity out of Discord's way. That is after Dave Polsky told us in ”Keep Calm and Flutter On”, that Celestia had cast a spell on the Elements to keep Discord from messing with them.

Discord is messing with the princesses, ponies, the audience and even the writers. The magnificent bastard.

- The Pink Wedding. Celestia got her flank kicked by a bug that was high on love. To add insult to injury, it was Meghan McCarthy's alicorn OC and her MUUTBOC (Mildly Useful Unicorn Twilight's Brother OC) that defeated the bug. I understand that I am being unfair and a jerk towards the episode and the characters but it is because if this was in any fanfiction, angry readers would have torn it apart mercilessly. This episode is the sort of story that is shunned as “bad fanfiction”. We have two new characters out of nowhere, related to major characters already in the show, that come out of nowhere to solve a problem. It's not even the Mane Six that solve the problem! Cadance fell out of nowhere to steal the spotlight. And the worst, is that I ended up liking her, but there is no denying what was written into the episode.

Yes, the actual scene seems to be well done since it is made in a way that shows that even Chrysalis is surprised that she actually won. Therefore, Shining Armor’s love for Cadance is so powerful that even though Celestia has been feeding her magic from the sun for centuries (not that writer thought of this, anyway), she lost to Chrysalis. Well, I am not impressed because other measures of Celestia’s magical power from other sources don't really sum up to much. Maybe her magic potential is limited or she just can't tap that much magic from the sun. The problem is that we don't know: this is headcanon.

The problem in this is not that Celestia lost, however. The problem is that Celestia is ALWAYS losing, while this very scene says that Celestia is very powerful.

- King Sombra and The Crystal Empire. The two sisters defeat him, very vaguely, in the distant past and even the latest comic mocks this. However, the Crystal Empire was cursed anyway... Then Celestia sent her student to deal with it. Well, all right... Like in Return of Harmony, Celestia is the chessmaster, putting pieces on the board and letting them do their thing right? After all, she is not only about magical, personal power. It is about how competent she is dealing with crises.

- Discord, Chrysalis, Sombra and Tirek must meet every week in Tartarus to drink a beer and talk about how mind-bogglingly stupid Celestia has become. Somebody explain to me how was Celestia's plan supposed to work in “Twilight's Kingdom”. Because she manages to fail TWICE in this episode. Discord betrayed her and and then Celestia concocts a weird plan to hide the princesses' magic from Tirek. What was Twilight supposed to do, Celestia? Hide until Tirek gave up and decided that using Twilight's friends against her is immoral? Things only worked out in the end because they were lucky and things worked out in circ*mstances completely out of anyone's control that couldn't possibly have been predicted by anyone but the audience.

- But Celestia is still a great ruler that keeps Equestria in peace in normal circ*mstances. No. Trixie stole a city right next to the Capital and Celestia didn't even seem to notice that something was up. Well, she was dealing with the Saddle Arabians, let’s excuse her… She’s probably been briefed later… You know, in my headcanon.

But that is not all. Border town in the brink of war with another race? Celestia doesn't care.

Her sister doesn't have a clue about how do deal with her subjects? People say she was watching from Canterlot, laughing her flank off. I know that she wouldn’t do that but what can I say when someone points out that to me?

There is a categorical villain threatening to turn a part of her kingdom into an overheated badland? Good thing Daring Do is real. In addition, good thing she is real all those other times depicted in her books because it seems that she was the only one who cared!

Someone stole a dangerous and ancient tome from her old palace and made a mess? Beyond Luna, Twilight and Cadance, Celestia is not even mentioned!

Remember that this is an artifact of how the show works. If Celestia came in to solve these issues there would be no episodes or they would be very anticlimactic. But I have two answers to this.

First: Celestia doesn't need to go there and personally solve the problem. Compare “Daring Don’t” to “Dragonshy”. In the former Celestia doesn't even know something is up because she doesn't exist outside of the episode: if nothing is mentioned, everything about it is nothing more than headcanon. In “Dragonshy” Celestia has the situation under control: she knows something is going on, knows what is up, sends Twilight a letter about the dragon and tasks her and her friends to do something about it.

Second: episodes need to happen and so the writers must be excused when they do this sort of thing. No. In “Daring Don’t”, for example, Celestia could have gotten in contact with Twilight and alerted her that something is up and needs to be investigated; so she and her friends need to go there and find a trusted pony already on the case on her own. It solves all the problems with the episode and gives Celestia some needed presence to justify the mythos about the great equestrian ruler and in a proper position: quest-giver and caretaker of the kingdom, without ruining the conflict with a premature resolution or the reveal that Daring Do is real and is A. K. Yearling.

The second reason why writers shouldn't do this sort of thing is because it hurts the characters: Celestia doesn't exist outside the episodes. She is not doing something important while Daring Do is doing the Mane Six’s job protecting Equestria from villains. She is just absent. Saying that it’s okay because the episode needs to happen is giving the writer permission to be careless with the universe he is building. It is excusable because nobody expects perfection but it’s like saying that it’s okay to break a window to get out of a building on fire and then pretending that the window is intact. It’s very understandable, but the window is still broken afterwards. It's excusable that Celestia is absent, but she is still absent.

I'm calling it now and people are welcome to say that I was wrong if I'm (pleasantly) surprised in Season Five: Spoilers from the teaser...

- Celestia should be important to Equestria. She is a Princess! I liked to think that she was born an alicorn, but it’s very unlikely now, so she must have gone through the same sort of development and transformation that Twilight went. I'm not sure what is it that Cadance does (I have a vague idea but I wouldn't be too surprised if she turned out to be a supermodel) and Twilight looks like she is Equestria's guardian, along with her friends. Luna keeps ponies' dreams nightmare-free. This is an interesting concept! Maybe nightmares are actually dangerous in Equestria? It's not explored in the cartoon, but even then, Luna is taking care of her subjects well-being and teaching them stuff. I love this! So what is Celestia doing? Look at Luna's comic in the Micro series to see all the important tasks Celestia does in her day.

Again, I understand that the objective is to entertain. But the window is still broken. Even if they give Celestia some ability like Luna’s dreamwalk, does it really make any difference now? I question myself. Not even if she can see the future and goes by faking surprise and just staying out of the way to let things take their path. It would be better if she never existed. Maybe I'm going to be surprised and Celestia does have some interesting and unique ability that justifies her mythos, but I'm not seeing it yet. By the way… Luna going into dreams was very reasonable and made sense (not taking into account that she didn't want ponies to sleep) because of her “theme”. Does anyone have any idea about Celestia? What is left for her to do that she hasn't screwed up yet?

- And speaking of the comics… In her own comic for the micro series Celestia needs everyone's help to protect Canterlot from "something evil". It's not even important what she’s doing. She doesn't even look like she is commanding. She’s just trying and failing, so others come to help. It is nice, as a message. But the window is still broken. In the same comic she shows that she is wise by allowing one of the teachers in her school to retain the role until she is ready to retire. But it seems (unintentionally) that Celestia is protecting that teacher for personal reasons. In Luna and Pinkie's FF comic it's said that Celestia does stand-up comedy because that would cause the ponies to relax around her. Seriously, that is amusing and I like it. But I didn't notice that was an issue. Actually every time I see her next to other ponies outside of Bird In The Hoof ponies treat her normally, to the point she must later surrender her magic to enter in the stadium, like all others.

The princesses (all of them) are treated throughout Equestria like they are celebrities of mild importance, not like they are important rulers or even, like some have said, “Buddhas”. It’s okay when it happens to Twilight, Luna and Cadance because we’ve seen that they are not useless. But it hurts Celestia in the grand scheme. In her FF comic with Spike Celestia's dialogue is a bunch of self-promotion. Maybe we could see her doing something when a problem is too big for others to solve. Maybe in Season Five? Season Four has come and gone. So did Season Three.

In the main series of the comics, if she is not doing nothing, she is being an insufferable moron. Her only chance of doing anything good was stolen by the good King Sombra in the Reflections arc, after she decided that dating her boyfriend (She pulls a “Rarity” with flying colors) was more important than not ruining up BOTH worlds.

- Luna adores Celestia. In a few instances Luna mentions that she is overshadowed by Celestia. Why? This just increases the problem because it’s not backed by canon. It’s like the writers buy into the fandom’s tendency to prefer Luna because they somehow see her as the underdog. She is Celestia’s equal!

In the Journal of the Two Sisters Luna fawns over Celestia about how she put a dragon in his place and sounds terrified of how angry Celestia was… Like Fluttershy did? She even mentions a flaming mane. Like Twilight? Luna befriends a manticore, discovers the zebras and wins over Princess Platinum. Celestia goes Twilight/Fluttershy on a dragon. That is it? Yeah… Chrysalis really was drunk on Shining’s love: she completely lost any reference of reality.

Maybe Luna knows something we don’t. And I'm not saying that people can't like Luna or even defend that she IS under Celestia. However, Luna is always doing stuff and seems to be more useful. Most likely, this is because the fans favor her. Again… It's excusable. But the window is still broken.

- Celestia trained Twilight, and thus Twilight’s competence is an indirect result of Celestia’s competence. So should we start giving Nobel Prizes to the teachers of those that are given the prize? Not to mention that Twilight screws up a lot so that episodes can happen. First episode that comes to my mind is “Bats!” Celestia taught Twilight so well she is beginning to get her disease. Relax… It's a joke.

If I look at these things individually, they don’t really matter, but when I see that this is actually all that the Princess has got, then I can’t see her as she was supposed to be. In season One and Two she had an aura of importance about her. She appeared sometimes to show that she cares. She used to have some measure of power at her disposal. What made her interesting were the things left for the audience to imagine. Blanks to fill, since there was nothing concrete to her character.

It seemed justified at the time but now... Again, I know that this is an artifact of how the show is not about her, so we don't see her being competent at anything, because if she was, she'd get in the way of the main characters. That is my point. By the way, that didn’t stop Cadance. She fought a monster along with Twilight and the cartoon hasn’t exploded.

Did Celestia change or was she never the way I imagined her? Did I like a character that doesn't exist in the show? After all that the writers did to her, what is still left unsaid and implied that doesn't contradict the canon of the show?

I'm not angry that the character is not the way I wanted it to be. I'm frustrated that she changed so much that her previous self is just impossible now. Maybe disappointed that one of the reasons I like this cartoon is not true outside of fanfiction and headcanon.

I think it's perfectly okay to like a character for what she is supposed to be, but them it's not liking a character in the show. It's liking your own invented version of the character that exists only in your headcanon. And would enjoy liking the character in the show. So that when I want to talk about her, I don't have to resort to headcanon.

So, since I said all this, what do you people think of Celestia and why do you do so? Am I missing something? Do you see a future for her in the cartoon?