This title works so much better, as Luna is spelled in the Roman manner already.

As I mentioned previously, Luna has a lot more complications in her status than Celestia, mostly due to her imprisonment in the Moon. She wasn't around to object to any change in the way the populace viewed her. Everything I said about Celestia applies to Luna, but there are some additional things I want to mention.

First, I want to briefly address Luna's strange aging between Season 1 and Season 2. Last time I talked about how many creatures in mythology become 'unaging' (not immortal) by mastering transformations to the point that they can appear any age they want and time no longer affects them. If this does apply, then what we saw when the Elements of Harmony stripped Luna of the Nightmare Moon... whatever it was, is actually Luna's base natural form once all transformations are nullified, frozen at the age she mastered shapeshifting so as to become unaging. The way Luna appears later is because that's the way she *wants* to look, an idealized self-image of sorts.

Celestia very likely has an similar natural form. In fact, due to the two of them being unaging, it's entirely possible that they are the same effective age. If they were twins even, Luna could be the 'younger' of the pair; something I know for a fact that twins do make a bit of a deal over. Leading to Luna choosing an appearance of being much younger than Celestia simply because that's how she thinks of herself.

The bigger issue around Luna though, is one I've seen raised by Bronies on a regular basis: 'Why didn't anyone remember Nightmare Moon, one the pair of goddesses that previously ruled Equestria and who is the patron of Nightmare Night'.

Here's the trick, I think they did remember. But what they remembered was fragmentary, attributed to different mythological characters, and in many cases plain wrong as her mythology had been filled in by further stories that had nothing to do with her. Euhemerus again, but in a slightly different way.

My thought is that Luna's story was fragmented into at least three or four different mythological characters that the modern ponies simply didn't connect together into a single entity. Those characters being so reduced by this fragmentation that the idea of them actually being a real threat of any kind was gone. They were 'old mare's tales' as mentioned in the first episode, and in many cases a single pony may not even be aware of all the different characters, if any. And only Twilight connected them all up into a single pony because.... well, Twilight.

Let me give a real-life (sorta) example. Everyone knows Jack, right? Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack the Giant Killer, Jack of the Lantern? Sly Jack, Stingy Jack, Jack o' the Pulpit?

The way these stories are told now-a-days, the impression is that they're all different characters who just happen to be named Jack. But in truth, Jack is a base character in fairy tales, the fool, the trickster. When these tales were originally told, they were all supposed to be the same person; Tricksy Jack. But the tales grew in variety and detail to the point that they really couldn't be of the same person because of contradictions between them. Later storytellers would attempt to mix and match different stories to come up with longer tales, but it was no longer possible for *all* of them to be about one person. And now, most people will only know one or two of the stories, and in many cases only partially at that. A recent attempt to recombine all the Jack tales into one person was in the Fables comic series by Bill Willingham, but to do so he had to make Jack and others like him supernatural immortals powered by mortal belief.

For a very on-the-nose example of a story about our Nightmare Night equivalent, that very few people remember yet nearly everyone still follows a tradition connected to it. This is a brief version of the tale of Jack and the Devil:

Jack was a nasty piece of work. He tricked the Devil into climbing a tree, and trapped him up there by carving crosses in the trunk of the tree. In return for not taking his soul into Hell, Jack let the Devil back down.

Eventually Jack died, and because he was a nasty person he couldn't get into Heaven. But the Devil wouldn't let him into Hell either because of that promise. Instead, the Devil tossed Jack a piece of burning brimstone to light his way in the world.

Jack hollowed out a turnip, and put the burning brand into it so he could carry it without burning himself.

Thus, the ghost of Jack became known as Jack of the Lantern. This was an Irish tale from about 300 years ago, trying to put a Christian spin on why people carve faces in vegetables and light them up to scare away spirits. When people colonized the new world and discovered pumpkins, the name Jack o' Lantern transferred because honestly, have any of you tried hollowing a turnip? Pumpkins are much easier.

In the thousand years of Luna's imprisonment, I propose there were several different characters built out of her legend.

The Sister Lost: A Hero that was Celestia's companion/partner/sister during the Quest for the Elements of Harmony and the defeat of Discord, but who was tragically lost at some point after giving in to her fears and jealousy.

The Mare in the Moon: An anthropomorphized.... actually, we need a new term, one that applies to ponies. Equiipomorphized? A ponified force of nature, controlling the tides and the phases of the moon.

The Night Mare: The patron spirit of Nightmare Night. An evil spirit who stalks your dreams, stealing your soul if you cannot escape.

The Nightmare Moon: A creature that fought Celestia, counted along with Sombra, Discord, and probably others. Not a spirit as such, but a physical monster who was defeated and imprisoned, just like the others of her ilk.

The legends and stories would have sufficient clues for someone like Twilight to put the parts together from disparate sources, but the average pony wouldn't even think of doing it. The stories would have been expanded such that the characters were distinct and to assemble the 'real' story would involve discarding parts of the mythology that had been built around them.

But again, the big problem with this is the same problem as Celestia being made into a goddess when she was originally a Hero. It means Celestia has to sit back *and let people forget her sister*.

It's pretty obvious that she did do exactly that, though. Even if Celestia and Luna are proper goddesses by any definition, in order for the events to pan out the way they did, Celestia would have needed to do *nothing* and allow her sister's story be twisted, torn apart, and mostly forgotten. Probably because she wanted people to forget about the awful things Luna did (as Nightmare Moon), and this is the only way she could think of to achieve that. Disconnecting the various stories from each other, and hoping that the good parts of Luna's story would survive while the rest get shunted off. Basically Celestia yet again trusted that Destiny would eventually produce a solution.

I do like Celestia as a character, and I especially like the way she is performed in the show.

But to be honest, for her behavior with respect to her sister's legend, Celestia is a bit of an ass sometimes.