Nightmare Fuel / My Little Pony: The Mentally Advanced Series

• Celestia's appearance in episode 8. With ominous music playing in the background, her deep, threatening voice, and Twilight literally screaming in terror in her head while smiling, it's hard not to fear her.
  • Twilight's moment before that isn't exactly pretty itself. See the Tear Jerker page.
  • The Mentally Advanced version of Celestia is much, much scarier than her canon counterpart. She's an authoritarian absolute monarch who is viewed as a terrifying god and never suffers even the slightest insubordination, ruling over Equestria with an iron hoof while rarely showing any concern for the ponies beneath her, if at all.
• Rainbow Dash Presents: The Haunting Nightmare is this in general. Despite remaining a parody, it is based on a horror fanfiction and introduces the first Knight of Cerebus for the series. Such moments include:
  • Twilight's incredibly ominous Nightmare Sequence.
  • "Mrs. Buzzy" taking the guise of one of Twilight's old childhood toys, to put her into a Lotus-Eater Machine and brainwash her into helping torment the others.
  • The characters wandering around the haunted area.
  • Applejack and Rarity being chased in the dark by Smarty Pants during his Villain Song.
    • If the fact that the two were genuinely scared for their lives wasn't enough, the scene also shows Rarity tripping Applejack to distract the monster and save her own sorry hide, only showing regret that her plan didn't work. Rarity has always been a Jerkass who hated Applejack, but now we know that she would actually get someone killed just to save herself.
• Yellow Star slowly Brain Washing Twilight into obsessing over her book and coercing her into helping summon...something." At one point, she casually takes off Twilight's horn and puts it on herself'' to become an alicorn, with Twilight raising no objections. And finally, Yellow Star is a pony that only Twilight can see.
  • The only reason her plan failed was because Twilight accidentally set fire to the barn they were in. Whatever it was she was trying to do, Yellow Star came really close to doing it. It's pretty telling that Celestia herself came to see what happened.
  • It's heavily implied that not only is the book a representation of Celestia's in-universe childhood^note Complete with an abusive version of Lauren Faust's ponysona as her mother as well as a record of an abusive childhood for Luna, but Yellow Star is Celestia's childhood prediction of the tyrant that she herself would become, just even worse. Her speech to Twilight in the end is a warning filled with Fridge Horror:
  "An author places some of themselves in a book. But the reader withdraws something of their own perception as well. A child believes a lie because they know no better. A grown adult sees the lie because it fails to line up with experience. In this way, a child's story can be so many different experiences. With enough subtext, a thing made for a child becomes an entirely different world to an adult. Keep an open mind...there's no telling when subtext will defeat the facade of a thing."
  • The book paints a very disturbing picture of how Celestia grew up and how she viewed the world as a child. She was raised as an omnipotent psychopath by her mother, who groomed her for a world where Yellow Star was always on top and made all the rules of the world. She played games with ponies where she made the rules, with Equestria itself as a giant dollhouse and the population as dolls. Today, Celestia is still doing what she was raised to do. As for their father, he's implied to be an Eldritch Abomination with his own plans for the world; not only does he live outside the known universe, but he promises to return when the stars align. Although he disapproves of his wife's abuse of Silver Crescent, Twilight finds a diary page with words scratched out on purpose by Yellow Star. Yellow Star quickly confirms that her mother died shortly afterwards, and believes that her 'father' is a monster pretending to be her father.
  FATHER MADE FUN NEW GAMES
  YELLOW STAR CHANGED THE RULES
  FATHER MADE RULES FOR YELLOW STAR
  PONIES DID NOT BECOME PONIES
  MOTHER WENT TO SLEEP
  • Perhaps the true horror is that Celestia is implied to have realized how evil and psychopathic she was as a child, and realized what her mother turned her into, but believes she can do nothing to stop who she is now.
• Rainbow Dash often finds herself in this during her Let's Ramble Over Fallout New Vegas videos. Noteworthy examples are:
  • She accidentally gets Veronica and Rex killed, after stumbling into a field full of Cazador's. This leaves her running around all alone, in a place full of one of the Mojave Wasteland's worst predators on a dark night, like a confused child.
  • Later, after having a particularly bad day in the waste, she is lamenting about how bad this day has been, only to make the unfortunate mistake of going into a certain bunker, where she is immediately gassed and wakes up in the hellish landscape that is The Sierra Madre. Horrified, she wonders if she had died and gone to Hell, when an imposing holographic figure appears and informs her that she is in a place pumped full of a poisonous cloud that is slowly killing her and he has placed an explosive collar on her that he will use to kill her if she does not serve his Evil Plan. Things only get worse over the next few episodes.