Not even gravity defying teapots can make her enjoy it.
A My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fanfic by Skywriter, centered around Princess Celestia and run on pure hilarity.
For thousands of years, Celestia was thought to be inseperable from her tea. For thousands of years, Celestia's loving subjects showered her with gifts of tea pots, exotic tea flavors, and tea parties. For a thousand years, Celestia put on a smile for her subjects.
But the truth is, Celestia hates tea. She's hated it since day one. She drinks it only because everyone has come to assume she likes it over centuries of her drinking it so as not to offend those who gift it to her and prepare it. But when her faithful student Twilight Sparkle returns from an ambassadorial mission with a present of a new tea flavor, Celestia decides to come clean with her millenia-old secret. What's the worst that can happen?
Can be found here
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Now in comic form.
Has a follow up of sorts. It's considerably less comedic and considerably more meta. It can be found here.
An unofficial continuation by JadeCriminal tweaks the final outcome to make it less bittersweet: Pinkie Pie In: Princess Celestia Hates Tea.
Princess Celestia Hates Tea contains examples of:
- Beware the Nice Ones: Celestia incapacitates all of the ponies assaulting her note , cloaks herself in flames, and destroys part of the Royal Castle to announce that yes, she is Celestia, and no, she doesn't like tea.
- Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: After the Mane Six's visit to Hind, Pinkie prepares a graphically-detailed report regarding the finer points of why one should never eat too much cauliflower vindaloo in a single sitting. For those who don't know, vindaloo is an extremely spicy Indian curry dish.
- Broken Masquerade: Who knew not liking tea would cause such an uproar?
- The Chains of Commanding: Celestia pretends to like tea again after seeing how important it is to her subjects. Her devotion to her subjects is the only thing keeping her from retching with every sip.
- Comically Missing the Point: After Celestia proves to Twilight that she is the real Celestia and she doesn't like tea, Twilight, in an effort to preserve her worldview, assumes that Celestia is actually Discorded and doesn't like tea because of that. And then forces her to relive every memory of "enjoying tea" to "restore her."
- Discreet Drink Disposal: As soon as Mrs. Cozy, the Royal Tea Stewardess, leaves the room, Celestia pours the contents of her teacup into the soil of a nearby potted plant.
- Does Not Like Spam: Celestia really, really hates tea, but has to pretend to like it because everypony else has believed it's her favorite beverage for hundreds of years.
- Downer Ending: Celestia is forced to pretend to like tea again, because of the obscene amount of chaos that will occur if people think she hates tea.
- Easily Forgiven: True to her character, Celestia forgives Twilight for throwing wild accusations that got herself blasted by magic and assaulted by her own guards. And blowing up her castle and the ensuring political mess.
- Greater Need Than Mine: Celestia kept the lie of her love for tea for thousands of years for the sake of her people and her loved ones. She accepts to holding up the lie again for the same reasons at the end of the story, even after she had to willingly submit herself to what could be called Mind Rape for her.
- Groin Attack: Implied. When Celestia is trying to persuade a furious Sergeant Hoplite that she hasn't been replaced by the Changeling Queen, she brings up that she can remember with levels of uncomfortable detail exactly what rather embarrassing part of his great-great-great-grandsire's anatomy was injured to earn him his Purple Heart. He doesn't listen.
- Humiliation Conga: By the simple act of confessing she doesn't like tea, Celestia turns Twilight, the other Elements of Harmony, her own royal guards, and her sister against her, and sends her nation into a state of uproar.
- Masquerade: Celestia hates tea, while the whole world believes it to be her favorite drink. And nopony will believe otherwise.
- Mind Rape: Played for Laughs, as just like restoring her friends from being discorded, Twilight forces Celestia to relive every time she drank tea to "restore her".
- Mood Whiplash: Something Celestia notices in Twilight immediately after revealing her secret.
- Only Sane Man: Poor Princess Celestia. The moment she admits to not liking tea everyone goes nuts. Twilight immediately decides she's actually Chrysalis in disguise.
- Physical God: Celestia finally lets loose to prove she is the real Celestia. And to announce she doesn't like tea.
- Puppy-Dog Eyes: Twilight pulls these on Celestia to get her to reveal her secret hate of tea. We all know how that turned out.
- Rule of Funny: Why is such a big deal made over the fact that Celestia doesn't like tea? How is Twilight's paranoid ramblings able to turn Celestia's own guards against her? How come nopony thinks to cast a simple identification spell? Because it'd be funnier otherwise, of course.
- Serious Business: Tea. There are enough ponies with tea-related Cutie Marks to pack the palace audience hall tighter than a can of sardines, the kingdom almost falls apart when Celestia announces she doesn't actually like it, and as a filly Twilight forced herself to drink tea over and over until she acquired a taste for it because if Celestia likes it then it must be good.
- Snowball Lie: It's mind-boggling to consider how much of Equestria's political stability hinges around people thinking Celestia enjoys drinking tea. And it all started with a little white lie to spare a well-meaning Luna's feelings.
- A Tankard of Moose Urine: Celestia secretly really hates tea and considers it her least favorite drink in all of history, even moreso than some kind of unsugared juniper beer gut-rot that was something of a fad in the early seven-hundreds.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Deconstructed for laughs. Everyone in Equestria and beyond adamantly believes tea is Celestia's favorite beverage. When she tries to come clean and admits that she actually hates the stuff, her subjects refuse to believe it and accuse her of being the Changeling Queen or being Discorded.
- Twitchy Eye: Celestia develops one when Twilight announces that she is going to make her relive thousands of years of tea-drinking experiences to "cure" her.
- Was It All a Lie?: Played for laughs. Mrs. Cozy, the royal tea stewardess and the one who always serves Celestia her tea, is reduced to a sobbing mess after learning that her princess actually hates tea.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Twilight thinks Celestia is acting out-of-character by confessing she hates her favorite beverage, and so Twilight assumes the Changeling Queen has taken her place.
- The Royal Guard is quick to turn on Celestia, because they learned their lesson the last time they ignored Twilight's warnings.
A Short Story by Twilight Sparkle contains examples of:
- Masquerade: Twilight attempts this to prevent ponies from finding out that she was the one who wrote the story about Princess Celestia hating tea. Subverted in that Celestia already knows and doesn't mind it at all.
- Meta Sequel: This fic explains that Princess Celestia Hates Tea was a fanfic authored by Twilight Sparkle, not something that actually happened.
- Self-Deprecation: A rare non-humorous example. Given the in-story nature of the first story, it would seem that Twilight apparently enjoys this. In actuality, she feels the characterization of herself was about the only thing in the story she managed to get accurate:Twilight: I thought it was pretty accurate. Neurotic, check. Hyper-focused, check. Frequently oblivious to reality, check.
- Springtime for Hitler: Twilight never intended for her story to become so popular with the Canterlot literary elite. It was an accident that it even got published in the first place!
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Celestia is concerned about Twilight's characterization of herself in her own story, something Twilight thinks is the only thing about the story she got right due to her actions during certain episodes. It takes Celestia asking how Twilight would hypothetically react if she really did dislike tea to make Twilight realize that she wouldn't act the way she did in the story.
- This only makes her more upset, as she feels that if she can't even write herself right, then there's no point in writing at all. Celestia once again manages to help her by pointing out the special teaware she and Twilight are currently using absorbs the essence of previous teas poured into it, therefore there will never be a perfect cup of tea with that teaware, just as no story is perfect either.
Pinkie Pie In: Princess Celestia Hates Tea contains examples of:
- Fix Fic / Recursive Fanfiction: Zigzagged, nothing about the original fanfic is changed but what comes after makes the original ending less dark.
- For Science!: Revolutionary science that is.
- Immediate Sequel: Picks up with Pinkie's point of view around the middle of Princess Celestia Hates Tea.
- Mad Scientist: Pinkie Pie embraces this trope.
- Spy Catsuit: Worn by Pinkie as she sneaks into Canterlot.
