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The Elements of Harmony: Extreme Speculation


Fhaolan

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This time I get really deep into speculation. I’ve got nothing to really base any of this off of. It’s a precarious house of cards I’ve built, based on a rather whimsical theory. Next week I'll get back to more solid world-building ideas, but this is one of those 'get it out of my head' things while I'm on the Elements of Harmony topic.

 

During the Friendship is Magic episode, it is shown that four stars did in fact aid in Nightmare Moon’s escape. What exactly were they?

 

Let's connect this to another, probably unreleated, thing. Twilight's cutie-mark. The various stars represent Magic, according to Twilight. However, they just happen to map pretty well to her and her friends, and so to the Elements of Harmony. So if in the lexicon of cutie-mark symbology, Stars = Elements of Harmony... What if the stars that released Luna were more Elements? Ones corrupted by the Nightmare magic, or maybe the Nightmare magic sprung from their corruption. Thinking back that would mean that Celestia had five elements (Laughter, Kindness, Honesty, Loyalty, Generosity) and Nightmare Moon also had five: One ‘good’ element (Friendship/Magic), and four ‘corrupted’ elements (Something or other). Much more balanced. In order for this to conceptually work with what we’ve set up before, we’ve got five ‘harmony generating’ elements, four ‘support’ or ‘balance’ elements, and one ‘focus’ element.

 

Which is why all Celestia could do is imprison Nightmare Moon, rather than cleanse her. Nightmare was protected by those four corrupted elements, and controlled the focus as well. Celestia only barely had the upper hand with five ‘clean’ ones. Unfortunately, using the elements against her own sister broke the bond with the elements themselves.

 

When Twilight & Company came along, Nightmare Moon got hit with six full elements, instead of five. One of which was the focus element that Nightmare Moon herself used to wield. All her corruption got stripped off, and ‘dispersed’, along with the four ‘stars’ that aided her escape.

 

The author of the book of Myths didn’t mention the corrupted four, because as far as the author was concerned they weren’t elements of harmony. Maybe they were found after the Discord battle, and were added to Luna’s armament. Maybe that’s why they got corrupted, because they were added later, rather than being part of the original set.

 

Here are my ideas as to four possible ‘corruptible’ elements that are more support-focused than generating Harmony in and of themselves. There are probably others ideas, but these are the ones I’ve settled on.

 

The element of Confidence. Having Confidence in yourself, and in others, is important as without Confidence no one will ever do anything. However, this is easily corrupted into Arrogance. Interestingly enough, we’ve seen a gem-based necklace artifact that matches this concept: The Alicorn Amulet.

 

The element of Forgiveness. Known to bronies as ‘Tolerance’. happy.png Also important, for without Forgiveness, no one will ever get past mistakes. However, this is easily corrupted into Apathy. We’ve also seen an episode where a large number of ponies were acting extremely Apathetic. I wonder if the Crystal Empire re-appeared because the Element of Apathy fell into Smoke Sombra’s…. hooves? Cloud? Whatever. wink.png

 

The element of Discretion. This is actually an important thing for maintaining Harmony. Yes, telling the truth is important, but knowing when to tell the truth and when to not say anything at all is important. However, this is easily corrupted into being Secretive. If I was a betting man, I’d say this was the Dark Rainbow from Gen 1’s Rescue at Midnight Castle.

 

I don’t actually have a clear idea for the fourth one, as we’ve not seen anything resembling a fourth corruption of an Element, unless there is something in the comic series as I've not read those yet. (Should I?) If I was to separate up bad things about Nightmare Moon, I think one aspect of her personality was Zealotry. Which if it was a corrupted version of an element, I would name such an element ‘Faith’.

 

Basically, with the corrupted elements stripped off of Nightmare Moon, they scattered all over Equestria and reformed into their ‘original’ artifacts, to be found in two cases by Trixie and Smoke Sombra. Which means that two others are still out there somewhere. The Gen 4 interpretation of the Dark Rainbow, and the element of Zealotry.

 

Unless someone has any suggestions, next time I'll talk about the Crystal Empire, and the title of Princess.

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