PaulloDEC wrote:I absolutely understand the feeling, but I think it actually kinda fits with the way things have been going on the show for a while. The days of two Princesses running everything seems to be coming to an end, first with Cadance, then with Twilight and now with the revelation that naturally-born Alicorns from uplifted Alicorn parents is a thing.
I think it helps to think of it as times changing in Equestria more than the lore of the show changing (however accurate that statement might be).
This is making me ponder things a bit.
There's a kind of common trap that long-running shows fall into, a sort of "familiarity breeds contempt" aspect to the big significant bad guys or good guys that your protagonists only meet on rare occasion. Over time, as you get to know the mysterious bad guys better, they stop being such a threat; same with good guys, they stop being untouchable zen masters or whatever. I'm thinking of cases like BSG—at the outset just
seeing a Cylon means basically you're dead; but by the end of season 2 they're just walking around, people don't much like the situation, but it's hardly as dire as it once was. Or I seem to recall that in the 80's TMNT cartoon, Shredder and Krang were these horrific brutal monsters in the first few episodes; but after half a season they had devolved basically to comic relief. In fact it's so common that it's rare when a story
doesn't suffer from it; I can only think of a few (in LotR, for example, the Nazgûl are just as big a threat at the end as they are at the beginning, largely thanks to some menace upgrades they get along the way, but also because they're not made familiar—the story doesn't go do a side quest from their POV or some shit).
Celestia and Luna have clearly been nerfed in this regard over time too; at the beginning, there was this sense that if you even have the opportunity to be in their presence it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But even before S1 was out, Celestia was making an active play at subverting her own role, what with the tea prank against the Cakes, and

run
But even with that, their actual
nature was never addressed, not until MMC. And even then it's been left pretty much unclear until now just wtf an alicorn is all about. As kind of a natural consequence of the way they've handled Celestia and Luna and Cadance and Twilight, the original two are necessarily seen as a lot less special than they once were. Their characters, and their entire premise as
kinds of characters, are changing, coming down to earth.
But the thing that writers tend to do in situations like this, if they're good, is to play it like the
world is what's changing. In BSG, the Cylons are becoming less of a threat not just because they're becoming more familiar and sympathetic, but also because the story demands they make alliance with the humans, and that they acknowledge common ground for their own survival. I remember the Teddy Ruxpin cartoon in the 80s—Tweeg was the big distant villain at first, then he gradually became a big pushover, but the endgame was that he became such a sympathetic character that he basically joined the good guys and took part in slice-of-life episodes. Steven Universe similarly takes all the stuffing out of seeming-villains like Peridot, and in the process you realize that what you're seeing is not just the evolution of the characters themselves as they re-evaluate their roles in the cast, but also the cast's basic understanding of the premise of the world (what
are gems? Who
were the bad guys? What's Homeworld
actually like?).
If they're doing that with Pony—if they're playing out a long story in which it turns out that the ponies really don't have that good an understanding of unicorn magic, as it seemed from Twilight's actions
way back when; and nobody, not even the Princesses, know what makes an alicorn, and they're all learning their own history right along with the rest of us—I'll doff my hat to them.
I mean, not because they'll have been planning it out this whole time, because they're still clearly winging it. But to pull
any kind of coherent bottom line out of the current mess the universe is in, and doing it in a character-consistent and believable way, would be pretty amazing.
