@Background Pony #2E4C
You can compare and contrast. Twilight and Misty are both unicorns that want the approval of the alicorn they complete tasks for. They both have a fear of failure and disapointing others.
But Twilight and Celestia’s relationship is pretty barebones, and doesn’t develop over the span of nine seasons. Twilight never has to confront the consequences of failure. Not even the Tirek situation is enough to get Twilight to at least question her opinion of Celestia. If you really want to be cynical, you could say that G4 starts and ends with Celestia telling Twilight “No, you have to do this instead”.
Meanwhile, you have Misty and Opaline. The villain-henchpony relationship turns out to be a facade that masks an abusive relationship. We learn exactly where Misty’s fears come from, and she eventually confronts them. She becomes disillusioned with Opaline, and chooses to make a change in her life.
It’s like a dark parallel that goes into more detail.
She doesn’t blindly trust Discord.
Yes she does.
She advocated for releasing a potential ally, so now she gives this ally an important task. If he continues serving Equestria, the safety of ponies is still gonna be in his hands. If she prevents Discord from doing anything of value…then what was the point of reforming him?
Yeah, maybe she should let him prove himself with smaller tasks first. The fact that she puts her little ego project over the safety of her subjects is not a good look for her.
Celestia recognizes she can’t overpower every threat, (especially with the implications of Daybreaker, that she’s holding back a lot), so the all powerful spirit of chaos would be an invaluable tool.
The decision to release him created more problems than it solved, and each of those problems reflects poorly on her decision-making.
Now, you can criticize her approach of ‘crises equals an opportunity for a test of character’. If you disagree with such a way of conducting things, that is also perfectly valid.
Oh, I do.
But that is also how she trained Twilight, and I wouldn’t expect a different approach from her.
She trusts Discord (a character who has demonstrated zero redeeming qualities by that point) as much as she trusts her own faithful student. This makes her look like a really bad judge of character, and like she has a surface-level understanding of the resources at her disposal.
Bottom line is, Discord WAS doing exactly what she asked of him, he captured Tirek within like 30 seconds.
This is the closest Discord ever comes to completing a basic task successfully.
Celestia had no prior knowledge of Tirek being some sort of master manipulator, so of course she believes Discord’s got this. She didn’t know Tirek would try to sway him with words - the last person he tried to convince to proceed with his plans was Scorpan, his brother, and that utterly failed.
Discord is unpredictable, so it wouldn’t even take a master manipulator.
And Discord has a friend in Fluttershy who’d also suffer at Tirek’s hands if he got his way, which provides extra motivation.
So she naively and incorrectly assumed that Discord cared about anyone other than himself. I’ll point out that Discord broke his promise to Fluttershy at the first opportunity in KCaFO. Again, this points to her being a bad judge of character.
Heck, Scorpan himself tattled on Tirek partially because of his friendship with Starswirl. And she’s right, because Discord outright says he’s doing it for Flutters.
That lasted all of five minutes. Which makes this the second time he’s betrayed Fluttershy’s trust.
The main difference being that Scorpan grew to care about other ponies, while most ponies continued being hostile to Discord, so there wasn’t as much connection there, which is why Tirek’s reasoning worked in the first place. Plus, saying “yeah, gag the guy, or he might turn you evil again” could be insulting to Discord, and make him feel like Celestia is treating him like an idiot.
Kind of sounds like she should have actually invested some time and effort into reforming Discord before sending him on this mission, considering this was her project in the first place.
If this is what we do see, then we can infer what she’s like as a ruler off-screen:
- She’s too trusting, and a poor judge of character
- She makes reckless gambles and lacks foresight
- She more of an “idea guy”, who dumps projects onto others
