@SuperSonic15 She’s probably too weak to be a ruler if she immediately needed a replacement goldfish. She’s acted like some histrionic hausfrau the whole arc. I’m surprised she didn’t get any flashback where she’s campaigning to eliminate some form of entertainment as a ‘greater evil than all of tartarus’ at this point.
 
Oh shit……Actually that would be pretty funny, soccer mom Celestia.

@Millennial Dan  
What else could Celestia do? She had banished her own sister for who knows how long, and could not handle the guilt and regret from it.
 
Talking to the parallel Luna while she was still good was Celestia’s means to avoid going crazy with grief over how long she would have to wait until she could see her Luna again.

@Background Pony #BE2B  
The real Luna herself called out Celestia on it, and she couldn’t even come up with anything better than “It was a really tough time for me.” That’d be like replacing your mom with a clone or something. Creepy and weird.

@Background Pony #BE2B The only good thing this arc will give us is an excuse for more princest? I guess I can be down with that part.

@Millennial Dan  
i highly doubt it was that simple. heck i think it was co-dependence. celestia luna was lost, and alt luna’s celestia was evil and dangerous. they both found comfort with each other.

@Niggoslav_Krawczyk
 
Honestly, Katie has done a fantastic job in her other issues - 1-4, 9-12, and the Rarity/Luna micros were all great.
 
The problem here is simply she took one of the most perilous plots and stumbled a touch.

@Millennial Dan See, sensible people would have realised it was a terrible idea just from having to utter that line. This is why I hate this writing team more than anything else, not even Gerber and Phipps gets me this boiling over such stark idiocy!

@MorningSun  
As a matter of fact, they admitted as much. They said something like, “We had a particular story that we wanted to tell, and we needed an entire alternate universe just to pull it off.” (Paraphrased, but that was the essence of it.)
 
In other words, the “tragic romance” and forced separation were the primary goals they had in mind, and everything else just had to fall in line.
 
The idea that Celestia banished her sister and then went out and found another Luna replacement to chill with is another thing among many that kind of give me heartburn on this one.

@MorningSun  
Agreed. I wanted to see more of the parallel versions of the Mane Six, Spike, Princess Cadence, and Shining Armor, among others…but they kind of excluded them for the focus on Celestia’s love life with the parallel King Sombra and her past with Star Swirl.
 
Also, I do wonder how Celestia returns home a mangled mess, yet we don’t see much in terms of injuries when we first see parallel Celestia…Perhaps she recovers at the same rate Celestia did, just without the medical aid due to the rift?

I’d agree that the plot suffered a lot from overconvolutedness. Like - it would have been way easier to leave Celestia out of the picture by simply having her too beat up to go back, and ditch the entire ‘balance’ plotline entirely.
 
Or ‘She knows Luna and I, she’ll be on guard for us’, send Twilight & co to fly under the radar.
 
The ‘We’re too harmonized and can’t hurt each other’ is a bit contrived particularly given she comes home beaten to heck and Evil Celestia never shows a speck of damage after.
 
I dunno. I feel like this is one of the cases where there was an end goal in mind from the beginning, and everything else was bent as much as needed to get to that end goal. Price Art is always a joy, but I feel Katie’s story needed another few edit passes.

@Background Pony #4894  
Well, I understand your reasons for hating the comic like you do, but you don’t need to be so hostile or negative about it in the process.

@Starlight Storm  
I’m not the least bit interested in brushoffs, “respectful” or not. All this amounts to is a convenient method for trying to obstruct criticism.

@Starlight Storm  
Thanks for the support.

@Background Pony #4894  
At least he’s being respectful, you can’t deny that.

@Background Pony #4894  
Well, I ain’t going to argue with you. You have your opinions, and I respect that.

@SuperSonic15  
That’s an incredibly lazy dismissal.

@Background Pony #4894  
Whatever man…you have your opinions, I have mine.

@SuperSonic15  
The parallel universe idea was a bad one to begin with, but I briefly had some hope that it would turn out okay because we would perhaps get to see some different sides of characters like Celestia. Instead, all I got was an absurd convoluted mess with all this nonsense about “balance”. They could have kept the tension more real by focusing on problems that might actually happen, but no. The contrived elements of this story are so severe that it completely interferes with the idea of free will for the characters.

@Background Pony #4894  
What do you know then? I actually enjoyed it, but I wish we had see more screen time for the parallel versions of the Mane Six, Spike, Princess Cadence, Shining Armor, and the others…

@CronoM  
Total BS. Evil is never dealt with by becoming evil. All that produces is even more evil. The author of this story is on crack or something.

@hentaispyder  
Dude, I have no idea what comic you’ve been reading… BUT I WANT IT NOW! It sounds way better and more awesome than the garbage we actually got.

So… I think I called it and what we’ve seen thus far was in sombra’s head, where he thinks he’s the good guy and Celestia and every pony else are bad. Now that he’s been shown the light, he’s going to either wake up and they have to escape before getting trapped in his mind or he’s going to try to kill them (which would be easy as they are in HIS mind, he has control.) Either way, I see a mad dash to get back to the mirror before everything falls apart.

@Starlight Storm  
Don’t see how that’s normally a compliment…(shrug) but hey, since you’re honest about it, whatever works for you two is fine by me :)

@Background Pony #B7B0  

@Background Pony #B7B0  
Ok, I admit I DO love to hate Andy Price. I genuinely said that to Niggo as a compliment, not as a bashing, because he usually has an argument for it. And me? Well… Sometimes is nitpicking, others I do have a reason to hate stuff.