Crazy Headcanons

@Itsthinking  
I’m imagining Spike wearing light armour and a short sword, speeding through the dragon’s ranks, stabbing and slashing at heels and legs and breathing fire at vulnerable underbellies.
 
He just got way more awesome in my book.

@The_Mungoman  
Spike is best Fighter/Rogue

@The_Mungoman  
Maybe, but I don’t think that could happen without a “can I draw a sword against my own people” crisis. First episode is that, second episode is what you described.
 
Turns out, yes. Yes, he can.

Spoiler alert: the sea ponies win||||everybody else dies.

Through years of evolution and war, all seaponies in existence are unicorn-horned hippocamps.
 
Like so:

@QueenCold  
I don’t think that I called it coexistence if they aren’t willing to defend each other. That sounds more like staying separate, to be honest.
 
Edit: we don’t know how many alicorns there used to be.
 
What about winged unicorns? Aside from Celestia and Luna, they don’t seem more powerful than other unicorns.
 
While it’s unclear how many there were throughout history, there’s been enough that Twilight is unsurprised to see unfamiliar ones in a book.

@Itsthinking  
Yup, agreed. I wasn’t a big fan of Dragon Quest, so having more evil dragons might draw a stronger picture aabout the whole thing.

@Sjogre
 
Back in the day the unicorns seemed a lot stronger. All the ponies seemed a lot stronger, actually.
 
Anyway, the idea was not meant to be taken seriously.

@The_Mungoman  
There’s a difference between a society stigmatizing dragons as evil things and running from them and willfully trying to defeat them in battle based on nothing but their species.
 
I think Spike could maybe sort of understand the first if they told him their one-sided stories (though to be fair the dragons probably think the ponies are evil demons too) but I really don’t think he’d be up for wholesale war against them. Even if he does appear to want to start a trend of dragons with sympathy.

@Itsthinking  
I’ve always figured the reasons dragons seem to be always chaotic evil unless raised within the glorious pony master race is that Sombra took the original dragon race and twisted them into bio weapons, removing all good from their minds, like Daleks. It would explain why they grow upon accumulating wealth, the more successful ones increase in power, quickly weeding out the scrubs from the elites, and explains their single minded evil-ness. Coincidently, that’s where Celestia got Spike’s egg: She took one in order to study Sombra’s work before she beat him.

@Trickquestion  
How does a guy with enough power to screw two entire races at once, on his own, lose to the sisters?

@QueenCold  
Have any feats for unicorns back in the day? At all? We know that Star Swirl was a legend, but that still doesn’t give us any actual information on his capabilities, let alone anyone else.
 
Not that we have much concrete knowledge on the abilities of modern unicorns, either. Aside from Twilight, Shining Armor is the only person that can put a forcefield over an entire city, Cadance was able to put a field of love and light over a similar area, and Rarity, without practice or education, was able to manipulate clouds over the whole of Ponyville.
 
For the other two, the ancient pegasoi were actually militarized, and the earth ponies were likely not allowed to fight, so the ancient pegasoi would probably win while the ancient earth ponies would lose. Of course, that assumes that the modern pegasoi haven’t come up with new abilities and techniques with combat applications in the intervening millennia. We don’t know when the blade wing technique was created, just as an example.

@PonyPon  
Celestia and Luna were a lot more badass back in the day.

@Sjogre  
Well, we know the unicorns raised the sun and the moon. That’s one thing.

@Trickquestion  
The idea of Sombra being that powerful always weirds me out. Even in the cradle of his power, in a place where he could control the ground itself, he got his rump raped. He got the crap beaten out of him so hard that he was rendered intangible, and when he came back, Luna was willing to take him on without help. Well, maybe with Shining Armor and Cadance.
 
Even Celestia used him as a pop quiz rather than taking him seriously.

@Sjogre  
Alternatively, he wrangled a small number of dragons into his laboratory, experimented on them, and then when he was destroyed, the dragons escaped and wandered aimlessly, and eventually outcompeted the natural dragons due to their enhanced power.
 
Also, an immensely powerful dark lord being destroyed in the seat of their power is hardly something FiM came up with.

@QueenCold  
That wasn’t performed by any single unicorn, and we have no idea how many it took then, compared to how many it would take now. We can’t compare it, because only one group did it.
 
That’s a societal difference, rather than a power difference. You might as well point to speaking a dead language to claim that an older group is smarter, or claiming that building the pyramids by hand instead of using construction equipment made a society more powerful.
 
From what we know, magic relies on knowledge and intelligence. Since modern Equestria has had more time to research magic and improve spells, they would seem to have a very important advantage, even if most unicorns no longer study magic themselves. Actually, we don’t even know how many of the ancient unicorns studied magic, so we don’t know if they had a more trained population.
 
Turning Day and Night seems to be everyone tier magic, along with levitation. Since everyone was able to do it, it probably wasn’t that complicated a magic.
 
Sidenote: I don’t have an objection to modern or ancient unicorn being more powerful, I’m just looking for a proper argument either way.

@Trickquestion  
Also, an immensely powerful dark lord being destroyed in the seat of their power is hardly something FiM came up with.
 
You might want to think about that. A bad guy getting trashed in his hideout isn’t odd, but the issue here is how badly he was beaten.
 
The sisters neither used an external power boost, nor did they exploit a special weakness. Sombra, by contrast, had control over both the Crystal Heart, and the advantages granted by his crystal constructs. Not only did those things not help him against the sisters, but everything that we’ve seen about that incident implies that he didn’t even put up much of a fight.
 
Frodo, by contrast, had Sauron’s heart-as-a-ring, and still had to sneak around while his allies made a distraction. Spider-Man invading Doc Ock’s secret laboratory means dodging traps and fighting robots. Mario tosses Bowser into lava, but he probably died a thousand times on the way.
 
Not so much when the Royal Sisters zapped King Sombra.

@Sjogre  
Why didn’t he fight back?
 
That’s the biggest mystery for me. From what we saw, they just showed up and zip, zap, zort! He’s gone.

@Sjogre  
Actually, we don’t know if they used any of those things. The visual and audio exposition given by Celestia is incredibly vague. Sombra is supposed to be powerful and dangerous, but I can see how you remain unconvinced seeing as his only episode was marked by some seriously shitty storytelling. I admit, my idea of Sombra is almost completely Headcanon.

@Trickquestion  
We know that Sombra possessed the Heart, and we know what the visual effect for the Elements of Harmony looks like. Even in the storybook, the rainbow effect was kept, so they weren’t being used against him. Which would also fit with how Celestia didn’t think he was worth unpacking them when he reappeared.
 
Keep in mind, Twilight is vastly powerful and dangerous, but still less powerful than Princess Celestia. Strong doesn’t mean being able to take on the world in a fist fight. Given the traps in his castle, I’d expect that his mind was what made him dangerous. Unfortunately, his fog form didn’t seem capable of reason…
 
@PonyPon  
Enh. We probably only saw the tail end of the fight. He tried, but they were just more powerful than him.

@Sjogre  
Twilight is not a fighter though. “Magic Duel” pretty much confirmed she knows no spells designed for battle, seeing as all her attacks against Trixie stack up as mere pranks compared to what even a 1st level D&D mage can do. The closest she’s come to actually fighting someone through magic is using telekinesis to smack Spike around. So, vastly powerful, yes, but dangerous? Sombra was a full fledged dark lord. He would have turned her into dust.
 
Goddamn did that episode make Celestia an irresponsible asshole.

@Trickquestion  
Well, she does have a decent blaster.
 
Canterlot Wedding.
 
But yeah, she would have been screwed if she had to face him in battle.

@PonyPon  
Good catch, I totally overlooked that one. Still, that was a non-lethal, physical attack, not even an energy beam kind of thing, and you’d have to shoot someone off a cliff for it to be lethal.

@Trickquestion  
I… What? She’s used combat magic. She’s actually the only mane to use magic in a fight. Aside from using magic blasts and levitation, we’ve seen her use winking and Shining’s forcefield to intercept attacks. Twilight’s magic blasts were capable of smashing crystals to bits. And even if she restricted them to non-lethal levels, that doesn’t mean that he’d be able to get back up any time soon.
 
Neither Trixie nor Twilight used a direct attack in the duel. From what we saw, the point was the use the more impressive magic, not actually injure the other.