@CronoM  

 
His response should have been guilt in the first place. It doesn’t matter if he didn’t want to be imprisoned, he took the blame for his girlfriend’s actions, he knew there was going to be punishment. If you didn’t really want to have the princesses on his back he would have left that realm of existence entirely to avoid them, or at the very least stop harassing the citizens of Equestria, especially since even if he considered what he did harmless pranks, it was still coming off of the more heinous actions that his girlfriend was responsible for, again, which he took credit for. So he should have seen a harsh punishment coming regardless.
 

 
And you’re completely failing to understand things from the civilians point of view, he came in, caused untold amounts of chaos for his own satisfaction, then continued to prank and pester everyone until the royal sisters finally had enough of his nonsense. As far as the royal sisters and civilians from that time are concerned, he has no right to be angry when he was punished for his own crimes. It doesn’t matter if it was an emotional response, he should know better.
 
Even if the action of his girlfriend weren’t his fault, he took the blame for it. If he had actually explained it at the moment he got out instead of continuing his Rampage of chaos, then things wouldn’t have escalated, but he didn’t think straight and they are for. The punishment he deserves. End of story.
 

 
That’s stupid.
 
Who cares about his terms? He’s the one who put Equestria through an abundance of chaos and turmoil, even after his girlfriend was sealed away he continue to do so. His terms don’t matter. And considering the fact that the elements filled him in stone anyway, his punishment was more than Justified.
 

 
The elements aren’t sentient, they are by Nature able to tell when one is truly evil and deserving of punishment.
 
Therefore, the punishment he received was fair. It doesn’t matter what he thought was going to happen, he deserved it for continuously messing with civilians lives just because it brought him amusement.
 
And for the elements not being usable anymore? That’s an even more stupid move on his part if he actually did feel guilty for his actions, suppose after the seeds depowered the tree a new villain came along and started messing things up and everyone was unable to stop him because the elements had no power, what would his excuse me then, oops?
 
It’s not up to him to decide when one of the main defenses for Equestria can and cannot be used. If he really was innocent he’d have nothing to worry about, but he wasn’t, he was still evil. So the elements punished him accordingly for his actions.
 

 
Again, who cares how he feels he should be punished? You don’t let a criminal choose their punishment just because they feel guilty about it. Especially when said criminal takes the blame for the actions of another Criminal which would get them in even more trouble.
 

 
 
Don’t pretend you speak for me or that your opinion equals fact.
 
Stop bellyaching over the fact that your headcanon on how Discord shouldn’t have been punished makes no sense. If that were the case then he would have repented for his actions, not escalate things just because he was throwing a temper tantrum over how he thought he should have been punished.
 
Discord is lying. FACT.

@Alphamon_Ouryuken  

 
Your under the assumption that his original guilt would outweigh his responsiveness to the punishment after being trapped in stone for 1000 years.
 
Which is INSANE!
 
Again, you are COMPLETELY failing to treat Discord’s revenge as an emotional response instead of some nonsensical philosophical debate your trying to create. Was Discord thinking about the philisophical and karmatic justifications of his imprisonment the second he got out of being stuck in stone for 1000 years? NO! He was mad as heck! From Discord’s perspective the punishment was too cruel and he wanted revenge, end of story.
 
Its not that hard to understand.
 
“@Alphamon_Ouryuken  

 
Umm, cause he only wanted to be punished once on his own terms. Duh.
 
He isn’t a saint. He likes getting away with things. But even if he isn’t a saint, he’s still capable of guilt if something is pushed too far. The seeds ensured that after he received his punishment, which he thought would be fair, the sisters wouldn’t be able to stop his own, less terrible trolling.
 
Hell by his own canon admission, they were supposed to have sprouted ages ago. Ergo, it was an insurance policy. He created an insurance policy cause he knew he might need it. But not only was the punishment the sisters gave him FAR from what he would consider fair, the seeds worked slower then he thought, putting himself in an infuriating situation no matter HOW guilty he initially felt.
 
“Discord is lying through his teeth and that’s my personal headcanon”
 
There, fixed that last sentence for you.

@Background Pony #9DD7
 
@CronoM
 
By that logic, he shouldn’t have suddenly started spreading chaos across Equestria as some form of Revenge when he got free the first time. After all, if he meant to take the blame for his girlfriend’s actions, what right did he have to get mad when he was punished?
 
@Background Pony #8C07
 
If he let himself get petrified out of guilt, then why did he leave a bunch of seeds to weaken and destroy the tree?
 
Discord is lying through his teeth and we all know it.

@Background Pony #9DD7  
Precisely.

@Alphamon_Ouryuken  
That explained as him altering everyone’s memory.
 
If we want to criticize continuity errors, please limit to what we actually see in person or through flashback like how do we reconcile that with Discords appearance in Triek’s backstory comic, which is more canon as it’s referenced in the series finale (the ONLY time the comics were unambiguously referenced).

@Background Pony #A3BA  
Remember the stained glass window of him dangling innocent ponies by puppet strings?
 
Hard to exaggerate that.

@Background Pony #A3BA  

 
You don’t say.

Wait, I just realized the last two panels implies he allowed himself to be (temporarily) petrified out of guilt. Maybe he did something bad enough to provoke them into it (as for the Tree of Harmony part, needlessly convoluted schemes that blow up on him are Discord’s shtick).
 
I don’t know if this makes it better or worse, but it’s clear our biases against this are causing us to miss out on important details.

@Alphamon_Ouryuken  
Except the whole mess is caused by his lying and leaving details out (the existence of Cosmos). Aesop amnesia is a thing, but having it in the middle of the Aesop is ineptitude that even more completely breaks in-universe logic and narrative intent.  
Even if Discord was lying why not show such?
 
I thinks it’s just more likely he did enough evil on his own to justify being petrified. The problem was what did he do that was bad enough to warrant such given his established unwillingness to cause serious harm? I don’t think the writers thought this through.

@Background Pony #8E6A  
Because this is DISCORD we’re talking about, lying through his teeth and conveniently leaving out important details is his bread and butter.

@Alphamon_Ouryuken  
If he were meant to be viewed as lying/exaggerating, why didn’t the comic show it? Why not just show what he did that was so horrible it warranted sealing him away?

@Background Pony #B84D  
I refer you to my below statements

@Background Pony #B84D  

 
Wasn’t that established quite some time ago as being due to him simply being petrified mid-laugh? I’m not sure what needed fixing there.

@Dustcan  
Stans?

@orbsah  

 
Welp. I can honestly give you more credit than 99.9% of the usual IDW stans for being a free thinker. Good show.

@Dustcan  
Katie and Andy seems like fans of MLP to me, at least parts if it. They even got their own OCs appeared in Princess Spike episode.

@orbsah
 
Sure that’s the angle you want to try? The usual narrative is that IDW aren’t fans.

@Background Pony #B84D  
Official fanfic then.

@orbsah  
This is official I have the comic at my house, though I see why you’d think otherwise

:O  
Every time this surprises me  
This both conflicts and heals the story cannon  
It breaks the everfree forest being wild because discord dropped seeds everywhere though that could have been a cover up as well  
But fixes an even deeper story cannon going back to the return of harmony parts 1&2 it fixes why discord looked so happy in his imprisonment. It was a mix of both “that’s not gonna work nice try though” and “I know it’ll work and I welcome it and don’t want to believe it.”  
This also helps with why discord didn’t just kill everypony (before Fluttershy)  
He couldn’t. Or open portals to the human world like midnight sparkle did. He couldn’t. He is chaos just not randomized chaos, joking chaos. He’s confessed to that. And… this ties up so many things I’ll leave the rest for you all to figure out.

Nice fanfic.

@CronoM
 

 
As I said before, it doesn’t in the slightest. Otherwise he would have made it clear that his beef was with Celestia the moment he got out a second time. But he didn’t.
 

 
That doesn’t mean he’s justified in being pissed off about it. He should have seen the consequences coming.

@Frustration in Excelsis  
Anyway, that’s my best analysis of Discord’s reasonsing based on his thorough explanation in this comic, the continuity of the show, and what we know of Discord’s character throughout the series, especially the silly idea of a fickle trickster like him being a long term tyrant like Sombra. It doesn’t really change his character at all, he’s both evil and some good, as always, and his clear cut grudge made his actions against Celestia, ruler of a kingdom, during his introduction make perfect sense. He DID establish his moral grievance of petrification right off the bat afterall. If you have any civil questions, please let me know, and I’ll try to answer as best as I can.

@CronoM  
How about you stop ignoring what I’m saying and face facts? He’s lying in this comic. Maybe not about everything, but he’s definitely not being truthful when it comes to the whole “I just wanted to play around” explanation. So his own era of tyranny still fits.
 
It was more than just clown is antics, he basically warped and distorted several ponies homes and at times the ponies themselves. Not exactly hard to believe considering the fact that we even see that he was perfectly content with making Equestria his playground in the flashback Twilight witnessed.
 
It was not a case of “give the people what they want”, he’s the one who decided to continue ruling Equestria after his girlfriend was taken care of. If you’d still be left Equestria alone none of this would have happened to him. He was evil for the sake of being evil call maybe not as horrendous as his girlfriend, but still evil none the less. He doesn’t get too suddenly feel like he’s being unjustly treated with contempt when he takes responsibility for the stuff his girlfriend dead and yet continues to fall through with his own evil antics.
 
And now you’re just making even more beyond asinine comments. Ignoring everything that’s going on in the comic above, at what point in the show itself did he ever imply or so much as hint that he was simply pretending to be evil just so he could let Celestia and Luna play hero? When did he ever indicate or imply that he was willing to take punishment, just not be imprisoned? The answer is NEVER. He was a being of pure chaos, forcing I usually orderly world under his chaotic rule is perfectly within his nature.
 
STOP MAKING UP EXCUSES.
 
It actually DOES matter what we think in terms of him deserving it, because he pretty much decided to follow through with turning Equestria to his own fun house on a sugar rush after everything that his girlfriend had done.
 
By that point, his opinion on the matter didn’t hold any weight.The opinion of the subjects as well as Celestia DID. And the Elements punished him accordingly.
 
The Elements are semi-sentient, their effect on certain individual depends on exactly how evil they are, or the very extent of their evil nature. Discord wasn’t ashamed of the evil and was willing to spread his chaos throughout the entire world without caring about anyone else’s well-being as long as he was having fun (his girlfriend killing others simply meant for moving pawns for him to mess with), Nightmare Moon on the other hand was a corrupt entity that needed to be purified.
 
And like I said before, he sure as hell didn’t seem to care about his grudge when he was freed a second time. Never once did he admit that he wanted Celestia to admit to anything.
 
So yes, he was still evil then, even when he broke out the first time, and he knows he was evil back then. This comic exampled s just an example of him lying through his teeth.
 
End. Of. Story.
 
Now stop pretending that he’s canonically some sort of saint of a misunderstood trickster with a justified grudge. By this point it’s just becoming idiotic.

And while it’s obvious he’s not truly lying at all, and how his explanation fixes both the timeline issues and Celestia’s flawed description of Discord supposed long term tyranny…
 
… keep in mind with lines like “I couldn’t deny my nature, of course.”…that while he is not lying at all, he IS still trying to garner a tad more sympathy from whom he’s talking to then he possibly deserves. If just a little. He does feel guilty about his girlfriend’s actions, he does love equestria, he does love ponies…but as a chaotic neutral trickster, not an exclusively good person. His clownish antics he loves certainly are more intrusive the Pinkie’s or Cheese’s, he wants a proper balance of annoyance and laughter to the average Joe just as any proper trickster would, the more pompous, the more severe, but by covering up for his girlfriend’s mess, partially out of guilt and partially out of never wanting anyone to remember or bring back that crazy girlfriend again…all he got from ponies during that era was contempt. And while people like young Celestia knew personality-wise he wasn’t completely unreasonable, knowledge wise they thought he was responsible.  
So the only solution was simple…“give the people what they want”.
 
Make it seem like he had gotten too abusive of his power, quickly announce himself as a dictator without actually harming anyone (again, not his nature, especially without a grudge to justify overly evil actions), have the heroic princesses gather the elements he wanted them to gather (so they could be used to defeat him, be “willing and reformed enough to rejoin society sometime in the future, which he already would be with a strict but fair punishment”, and spread seeds so they would be useless on him LONG after this incident had blown over)
 
Again, he had already planned to take a little punishment, he did not want an eternal leash. The seeds and all the new info proved that much.
 
It doesn’t matter if some of WE think he deserved a 1000 years in stone, or even if WE think his crimes and his girlfriend’s crimes combined deserved a thousand years in stone, HE HIMSELF does not believe he deserved a 1000 years in stone. (And it’s not like any of us can attest what that’s like, to be in stone for a 1000 years) Even if there is plenty of bad in him being a neutral chaotic trickster, it’s not like his opinion doesn’t matters. He has plenty of capacity for good, and plenty of capacity for evil mayhem. And the punishment….was not what he was expecting.
 
The trick with the elements is that they are a dues ex machina, and we always expect dues ex machina’s to create a proper resolution based on many factors. But whether it be personality flaws of the users, or the flaws of the elements to begin with, (Stygian’s regretful fall compared to Sunset’s rise to greatness) is an example, Discord was unable to move or speak for a thousand years, and Nightmare Moon was sent to the moon for a thousand years.
 
Not the most understanding of dues ex machina’s back then we’re they?