>>12726
>The ponies don't recognize Nightmare Moon in Season 1 but do so here, I have a friend who considers this a continuity error and first major breach with Season 1; would anypony agree or offer counter point to that?
It could be that after 1000 years everypony thinks Nightmare Moon is fictional. If so, then that would explain why Ponyville in particular panicked at Luna visiting, in which case the reverse of what I said would be true and Luna ought to have visited anywhere but Ponyville!
>Anwyways, I'd rate this episode a 9/10. Favorite of the season so far.
Goodness! As you said later, that is a big gap in opinion.
>>12727
>FaustOnLunaNewDesign
Ah, more or less what had come to my mind too.
>LUNA CAN SHAPESHIFT!
She's also quite good at transmogrifying things, like when we see her change her cape into bats. We've seen Twilight do changing objects too, but overall we do get an impression of a fairly powerful Luna, don't we?
>Maybe that has changed as I have been under a rock for several years but c’mon, you would think with the changelings existing in this setting it would be relevant.
Just goes to show, Luna doesn't get enough respect even in fanon!
>>12728
>I’d say that personally I’d probably run with something other than the hairy potter joke and like the idea of it being connected to Twilight hatching Spike somehow.
I'm in agreement with you, it makes more sense for Twilight to have some personal affection towards what at this stage is a relatively obscure figure in the history of magic if she would have had to become familiar with his work at a younger, more formative age.
>Was this truly one of his greatest feats or an obscure fact that Twilight specifically cared about? It could be both.
As mentioned in my post, he is specified by the epithet "the bearded", similar to how William I was William the Bastard/Conqueror - because after all, there were many Williams. However, when you have particularly significant historical figures, you do this much less frequently. Like if I said Kennedy to refer to JFK, for instance, I could probably get away with that and people would know what I meant, whereas for any of the less famous Kennedys I probably wouldn't do that. I would think that the guy we see later in the series would simply be *the* Starswirl, but here he's always specified as "the bearded".