please tell me he gives her a hug or that she hugs him and he thanks her for her kindness

@Background Pony #3344  
“has a capacity he was shown to be incapable of before”
 
youre using this to define retconning/derailment/oocness, but couldnt that be also called “character development” ie, a good thing, adding depth and interest to the character as a whole?

@Background Pony #CE37  
Misinformed children have no bearing on this. And retconning, character derailment, what have you, either way Discord has a capacity he was shown to be incapable of before.

@Background Pony #6282  
“They said he was evil because he was a bully who reveled in giving people grief and crushing their spirits.”
 
You’re not paying attention. That’s not why the CMC said he was evil. They thought he was a statue. They based their assessment on nothing but what he looked like, because they, and their teacher, thought they were assessing a work of art for what it represented, not judging a living being.
 
“Or just the actual canon of him being retconned from a bully to just kind of a dick.”
 
He hasn’t been retconned – to be retconned you’d need to be contradicting past information, that’s what it means. Discord’s still a bully. But just as Diamond Tiara has a best friend and a father she presumably loves, being a bully has never, ever meant you can’t have or want a friend. Because Discord’s friend is a strong-willed individual who is kind, and not a bully, rather than a sycophant like Silver Spoon, he amuses himself with plausibly deniable ways of pushing ponies around and irritating them nowadays, but he still obviously enjoys giving ponies grief and making their lives difficult. Doesn’t mean that, if somepony asks him to help them in a way he finds amusing and takes as a challenge, and then they sincerely thank him for his help and show him affection, he won’t respond with sincere emotion.

@Background Pony #CE37  
They said he was evil because he was a bully who reveled in giving people grief and crushing their spirits.
 
@Background Pony #CF0C  
Or just the actual canon of him being retconned from a bully to just kind of a dick.

@RIG
 
Edgy headcanon about discord god of chaos, death and destruction Vs this canon discord

WTF happened here?

@Background Pony #2F55
 
No one extended Discord an olive branch in Return of Harmony, so I’m not sure where you’re getting “the sort of person who, if extended the olive branch, would just try to shank you with it”; from the moment he first appears, all of them but Pinkie Pie are 100% on board with the concept of using the Elements to turn him back to stone. Which, I can see why ponies would want to do that and why no one would think too much about the implications, but when you consider the utter horror of being paralyzed and unable to speak for a human lifetime, and then multiply that by 10… Discord has really good reasons to do whatever the hell he needs to in order to disable the bearers of the Elements of Harmony. And given his powers, he could just kill them. He doesn’t. (Of course, he could also do something more benevolent than what he did; not saying he’s not an asshole.)
 
In Return of Harmony there is never any discussion whatsoever about negotiating with Discord, offering him concessions, trying to achieve any kind of peace, or doing anything other than shutting him down hard and fast. So you can’t say that the episode revealed anything about how Discord would or would not behave if someone tried to make peace with him, because nobody did. (Not saying they should have, just that they didn’t, so we can’t know how Discord would have reacted.)
 
Discord was established in Return of Harmony as a bully who wants attention, enjoys psychologically tormenting others, and is very good at finding ponies’ emotional weak points and playing on them. Though not perfect – Fluttershy defeated him and he had to use brute force to conquer her, and then Twilight defeated him in the end. He’s also established as someone who, despite his potential to cause damage, does not cause physical harm, who perceives what is strange and bizarre as genuinely wonderful and beautiful, and who is perceived by ponies as evil when they don’t know who he is – the Cutie Mark Crusaders argue over whether he represents confusion, evil or chaos, when all they know is that he’s a weird looking statue of mixed up animal traits.
 
So what we know from this is that there’s no evidence for him being truly mwahaha evil/demonic, that his preference is to cause psychological torment rather than physical harm, that he’s a bully and he does love to cause psychological torment, that what he sees as beautiful and wonderful is something that ponies see as brain-breakingly horrifying, and that his physical body inspires horror and disgust in ponies who know nothing else about him. If this is a story where we’re invited to empathize with villains and see them as redeemable – and, generally, MLP is – then the hooks for KCAFO and the portrayal of emotionally needy Discord have all been set up. Ponies who don’t know him think he’s evil from what he looks like. This is a classic setup for becoming a bully. He can’t get positive attention if he’s seen as evil for his looks before he ever opens his mouth or snaps his fingers, and he wants attention, so negative attention it is.
 
Yes, they could have chosen to go in the direction of making him some sort of demoniac, irredeemable force that is not psychologically realistic because he’s a mere personification and not an actual person. One does not expect Satan to be redeemable because Satan is a personification of evil. Based on Return of Harmony they could have gone that way with Discord. But RoH did not actually establish one way or another whether Discord is a personification (and therefore cannot change) or a person with a powerful and intimate connection to a trait, like the Bearers with their Elements (who therefore became what he is as a combination of nature and nurture, and is capable of growing as a person.) I think a lot of people watch RoH and read stuff into it that isn’t there, because they have preconceptions about what a character like Discord is supposed to be like, and they ended up disappointed because Hasbro had him turn out to be a person rather than a personification. But it wasn’t RoH that actually established Discord as being irredeemably evil, it was fans who read that into it; the setup is there to go either way.

@Background Pony #CE37  

@Background Pony #CE37  
i agree good analysis

@Background Pony #CE37  
**emerges, gasping for air ** ok, I made it all the way through. And it was worth the effort. A very well turned bit of character analysis, and I can agree most heartily with most, if not all that was said. Well done, background pony.

@Background Pony #CE37  
Oh god dat wall of text. Ok, I’m going in. if I don’t come out in 30 minutes send help.

I’ve actually never understood the philosophy that “Discord is evil”. A bully, yes, someone who enjoys messing with people’s heads and upsetting them, yes, but a, that describes most of the population of 4chan and reddit, which doesn’t make most of those people evil, and b, given the forces he represents and the level of power he has… Discord is an entity representing a force that in most cosmogenies is defined as Ultimate Evil, and he uses it to make chocolate milk rain from cotton candy clouds and mutate animals to give them absurdly long legs. He’s thoughtless, he enjoys the emotional discomfort of others, he likes to stir up trouble, and when he succeeds in a deliberate plot to emotionally destroy the enemies who have the only weapons that can harm him, in such a way that they cannot wield those weapons anymore, he enjoys his victory and gloats about it. Yes. he’s not nice.
 
But now that we’ve seen him in four separate canon storylines, a pattern has emerged that’s more complex than “Chaos is bad, mmkay?” Discord is emotionally about five years old, and wants attention, lots of it. Either because he is physically freakish and was never given positive attention, or because he’s the god of being really fucking annoying, or both, he has spent his entire life getting that attention by upsetting other living creatures. He loves causing chaos and conflict because that is what he is, but he loves getting attention because that is who he is. And being the bad guy has never gotten him any positive attention, but being a friend has. And he wants that, obviously. He’s not an incomprehensible anthropormorphic personification of a principle who has no understandable motivations that make sense for a living being; he is, in fact, a living being, regardless of his origin, who has emotional reactions that make sense. “I like to taunt people and make them cry” is an emotional reaction that makes sense to humans; many of us have that desire. But those that do generally also have the desire “I like to have people care about me and want to treat me nicely.” And many a bully has gone from one to the other when given the opportunity.
 
It’s true that Discord doesn’t seem to entirely understand why what he did was wrong, or feel remorse for it, and in that sense he doesn’t “deserve” redemption, but he’s not at that step yet. He’s very smart, very experienced, and his language is very sophisticated, but emotionally, he’s a child. Getting him to feel that others can care about him is the first step to letting him care about them; caring about them is the first step toward empathy; empathy is the first step toward understanding why what he did in the past was wrong; understanding is the first step toward remorse. Discord has to develop empathy for ponies before he can start to feel sorry for tormenting them, and to develop empathy he has to feel like they like him. Fluttershy was the first step, a pony so kind she was capable of seeing good in, and choosing to befriend, someone who had almost no redeeming qualities. Now that the friendship hook is in and therefore Celestia or Fluttershy can pressure Discord into doing genuinely nice things for others, this will lead others to have genuine positive reactions to him, which will help him develop empathy.
 
So the CMC don’t know it but they have indirectly been recruited into the plan for Discord’s reformation. Discord’s sudden onslaught of sap in response to adorable children hugging him and thanking him for all he’s done is not out of character. People think he is hardened and cold because he’s spent centuries being evil, but no; he’s spent centuries being immature beyond belief, and is finally being given the life experiences necessary to allow him to grow the fuck up. This isn’t Sombra, or Tirek, or even Darth Vader. he’s not a moral black hole, he’s a moral blank slate. He’s not actually hardened at all.
 
And I tend to think a lot of people who think the character was “ruined” by Keep Calm and Flutter On just really, really wanted him to be a one-dimensional villain of Evilness, and are very disappointed that anyone thought he could have more complexity to his personality (this is a common emotion re villains; Marvel Comics was schizoid about Magneto for years because of a conflict between leadership where some creators thought Magneto was better as a complex and interesting character with recognizable motivations and others wanted him to just be Bad). Thing is, picking the villain who makes it rain chocolate to be the Exemplar of Total Badness never made any sense; Discord was always more complex than I Is Evilness Yay. The fact that in real life, bullies want friends and they want to be loved and they’re capable of quitting being bullies because their friends think they’re dicks when they do it… sorry, no amount of “But Discord is evil!” eliminates basic human nature.
 
Bullies can melt into emotional puddles of sap because someone is actually nice to them, and still not particularly regret all the times they ever bullied someone, but maybe start thinking about how much nicer it felt to have someone liking them than hating them and maybe they want to quit being a bully, not because the lulz weren’t great but because maybe there’s a greater reward in being liked and having friends. (And I say this as someone whose life was ruined by bullies when I was a child and who will probably never forgive certain people no matter how much they’ve changed, so it’s not like I think bullies are harmless and we should all be their friends.)
 
Besides. This is a series where in the very first episode, a villain is presented who decided to essentially destroy all life on Equestria (unless she had a clever plan to let the moon radiate enough light and heat to make plants grow?) because ponies liked her sister better than her, and she was not only redeemed, she is a co-ruler and a beloved character who is seen as someone who should be equal to the heroine’s mentor. If Nightmare Moon didn’t manage to do anything as bad as Discord did, it was not for lack of trying. She tried to kill her sister; near as we can see, Discord’s never tried to kill anyone. Luna deserves her redemption more than Discord does because she recognizes that what she did was wrong and feels remorse for it, but, objectively, what she did and what she intended was a lot more wrong than what we know Discord did or intended. If you’re going to have a problem with characters who do bad things being redeemed by the power of friendship, please quit watching this show and just go watch some crappy cartoon about heroes who beat up bad guys over and over, because you’re missing the point to this series, hard.

@Background Pony #2F55
 
Sorry bub, the actual canon trumps your headcanon. Save your whining.

@Background Pony #2F55  
No one is forcing you to watch the show.

@Background Pony #1ED2  
Or they just brought him back for fanservice and halfassed a redemption so they could keep him around.

@Background Pony #2F55  
Or, considering we’ve had three our four episodes featuring Discord since Return Of Harmony, and he wasn’t particularly evil in any of them… maybe it’s your perception of the character that’s incorrect. Your headcanon does not get to overwrite the writer’s depiction of how they should act.

@sigh  
And even before the end of KCaFO, he was out of character.

@Background Pony #2F55  
You do realize that there’s been more episodes featuring Discord than that right?

@Keith Mowz
 
@zabchan
 
@Conred
 
I’m not sure I saw the same version of Return of Harmony as you three.

THE FEELS ;-;
 
Poor Discord, I actually cried in this part.

@Background Pony #2F55  
he is a spirit of chaos, not evil and darkness  
he may still enjoy interaction with others, he just dont enjoy order.  
So he is basically chaotic neutral

@Background Pony #2F55  
but even bullies bully for a reason, usually to make themselves feel better about their own insecurities

@Background Pony #2F55  
Translation:
 
But muh headcanons  

And then Discord remembered he’s fuckmothering Discord and started fucking with everything Sweetie holds dear to make her cry.
 
Because he’s a bully. That’s his nature, no matter how much KCaFO tried to convince us it isn’t.