With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

[Neruz]

If we limit ourselves to just the cartoon, we can say that the ponies got blindsided the first time and failed to come up with an effective counter later because 1) not much time had past, 2) Celestia was mentally checked out due to her upcoming retirement and 3) Thorax had taken over the hive and was friendly. Not good reasons, but not an indication that anyone involved was a moron.

If we include things like the Changeling Amulet and previous large scale changeling attacks, that is no longer true. Celestia, Equestria's officer corps and whatever other political leadership Equestria has are all pants-on-head retarded, because they had plenty of notice and plenty of examples but still took no action. Nothing there contradicts cartoon canon exactly, but that Equestria is a very different place to live.

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Celestia always struck me as incredibly overconfident to a hubristic degree, so her foolishly dismissing the Changelings as a threat because they've been defeated before seems pretty in character to me.

Though to be fair she is a magical powerhouse who can just body slam her way through 90% of problems, so her arrogance is not entirely misplaced.

 

[Mr Zoat]

Though to be fair she is a magical powerhouse who can just body slam her way through 90% of problems, so her arrogance is not entirely misplaced.

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Is she, though? She lost a fight to Chrysalis during the invasion, and lost a fight to a cloud after Flurry Heart destroyed the Crystal Heart. And off screen she lost a fight to Nightmare Moon, some vines and some regular changelings. The only time I can remember her winning something was when she counterspelled Twilight's Want It Need It spell.

 

[Neruz]

Is she, though? She lost a fight to Chrysalis during the invasion, and lost a fight to a cloud after Flurry Heart destroyed the Crystal Heart. And off screen she lost a fight to Nightmare Moon, some vines and some regular changelings. The only time I can remember her winning something was when she counterspelled Twilight's Want It Need It spell.

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Chrysalis was juiced up for that fight if memory serves, and Nightmare Moon is by all indications not significantly weaker than her, and while Celestia is extremely powerful she's not at all combat focused so if she can't just blindly bash through it with raw magical strength without causing collateral damage she has no real recourse.

I do agree that her and Luna being unable to do anything more than temporarily delay the storm is absurd and makes no sense though, especially since weather management is one of the skills she should be actually good at. Going "northern weather is speshul" does not justify it at all.


e: Daybreaker does also demonstrate that Celestia does not seem be going anything like as hard as she is actually capable of going, presumably because unlike Celestia, Daybreaker has absolutely no problem with obliterating dudes.

Which still doesn't explain the cloud mind you.