Tear Jerker / My Little Pony: The Mentally Advanced Series

• In the Dragonshy episode, Twilight telling a story of her time while under Celestia's "care", which becomes increasingly sadder, until she completely breaks down and asks if any one had any whisky.. or paint thinner.
  Twilight, while having an emotional break down: Then she tore out all Mrs. Buzzie's stuffing and stuffed her with sliced bread! And said, "I guess you owe me." Then told me to write a three hundred page paper on what that meant and I DIDN'T KNOW!!!
• In the Parasprite episode, we get a glimpse into Twilight's past, showing she was... a happy and innocent looking filly who liked studying, much like her cannon self. Until Celestia shows up. Cut to an image of Twilight crying over destroyed toy, Mrs. Buzzy, as Celestia scolds her.
• Fluttershy was constantly ridiculed as a filly by both other children and her own parents.
  Fluttershy (to Rainbow): I remember your dad only yelled at the TV and your parents didn't fight a lot. That's why I liked to spend a lot of time with you.
  • She’s not only still getting ridiculed and ignored by everyone even as an adult, but she is also so emotionally scarred at this point she cannot even tell the few times when ponies are being nice to her.
• Twilight's past is brought up again in Rainbow Dash Presents: The Haunting, where the monster takes the guise of her childhood toy Mrs. Buzzy and shows her a hallucination, where she can live her greatest desire..., getting to be a child and play with toys again.
• In Rainbow Dash gets a lot of these in Let's Ramble Over Fallout: New Vegas, where she is scarred by the Crapsack World the game takes place in, the Fridge Logic that often pops up and makes her question whether The Mojave's people are Too Dumb to Live, constant torment from raiders and mutated creatures, and especially getting Rex, Veronica, Lilly killed. Especially Lilly, who had been pulling her weight for most of the series at that point and sent her into a massive Heroic BSoD, while Veronica and Rex's death, lead to her taking a level in cynicalism and becoming, increasingly more willing to use violence and thievery.
• The reason Greg ended MAS: by the time he got to the second season, MLP the canon series was starting it's seventh, and MAS got so divorced from the show it was parodying (as he notes, jokes about Dash being too stupid/lazy to join the Wonderbolts fall flat when canon Dash has joined the Wonderbolts, and portraying Celestia as an all powerful tyrannical god-empress makes little sense when canon Celestia gets her hindquarters handed to her once a season) that MAS was no longer a parody, but copyright infringement. He also expressed dissatisfaction with the direction the canon series had been taken.
  • His thoughts on the series as it stood during the middle of the final season reveals he now views Friendship is Magic as the setting of a JRPG...from the point of view of the evil empire that the protagonists have to defeat. (Although to be fair, he said the ponies' worst crime is mindless obedience and the true villain was the Tree of Harmony.)
  I found myself rooting for Tirek at the end of season 8 - the guy was trying to conquer Equestria by writing letters from jail, and he made decent progress in spite of being in a losing position. Maybe it’s not a good idea to let your villains be clever underdogs? Because maybe that’s just a stone’s-throw from hero and it’s why we root for Hannibal in spite of knowing he’s going to eat people.