Could've sworn one of the official MLP things I saw when I was looking for "quick summaries" for the parts I didn't watch implied Daybreaker was a thing at one point. Maybe not. Could've thought it was official but in reality it was a fanfiction or something. If I remember it, I'll look it up to check, but otherwise I'll just assume you guys know better than me because you objectively do on matters of canon.
*Do want to apologize if I'm talking too much about EaW. It's my main point of reference so it's most of what I do have to talk about here when there hasn't been an update for a while. I'll stop if it is annoying you guys or Questor
Personally I find the EaW info interesting. I'm not a fan of the original game, so I don't have much interest in trying it, but it offers a decent idea of "what-ifs" scenarios.
I don't
think Questor is taking much from it, so I don't think it's necessarily too relevant... but I've been wrong before, and in any case it's as valid as any other fanon material, and I've mentioned those as well when they felt relevant anyway.
About Daybreaker, in the actual cartoon it ONLY appeared in a dream (episode in which Starlight Glimmer swapped the princesses cutie marks to have them experience each other's difficulties and duties), and while patrolling the dream-world Celestia basically has a nightmare and faces "Daybreaker" (AND also Nightmare Moon).
Now, it
might be that Daybreaker was actually a thing in Celestia's past, and THAT is why she dreamt of it. If we accept the comics, she DID meet Daybreaker in other dimensions. and, again, fanon sometime has it that the "nightmare" form is sort of an alternate personality hidden inside an Alicorn, waiting for them to fall to darkness...
Or it might simply be that it's just a nightmare, based on her memories of Nightmare Moon and her mind going "but what if it happened to me?"
MLP is so vague in the nature/possibilities of magic and alicorns that it's really just up to Questor.
That depends on how far-reaching her abilities can actually travel. I was under the idea she can't affect dreams en-masse, but rather has to individually go into each dream to affect them. Even with time distortion of dreams and a lot of magical ability, she probably can't (or at least won't) go into the dreams of hundreds of thousands of troops to leave every or almost every single one vulnerable.
My impression of her abilities is that her reputation for being fearful is based on the "what-if". Dictators don't need to carry people off to stop dissent. Rather, they need to make people afraid that they
will be carried off unless "insert course here". It's partially propaganda, in the sense that she theoretically has the capability but might not always have to
use it. If you create the fear of something bad happening - like nightmares - then it will become self-fulfilling as morale becomes lower and more fearful of said bad things happening. That in turn creates the effect intended without having to individually affect every single one.
Therefore, should the basis of my thought of her only affecting individual dreams be true rather than being able to just cast some giant shadow over a collective consciousness, then we'd really only need to protect key individuals and not entire armies. That, along with a healthy dose of propaganda and other things to keep morale high enough among the ordinary soldiery should be sufficient to "snuff out the nightmare" as it were (pun intended
)
mh... fair points. I have a few things to mention though.
1) in terms of reach: We can at the very least presume her minimum range is Canterlot to Ponyville. More likely than not, it covers all of Equestria.
If we assume she was trapped in the Changeling hive when she went into Starlight's dream (when, somehow, the changelings
stopped her and got her back from that dream, possibly due to her being in a pod and/or as a side-effect of the Magic-nullifying obsidian throne), her range probably covers Hive-to Ponyville distance too, with the Hive presumably being decently far away from Equestria itself.
2)Luna
seems to be able to enter only a dream at a time... though, as you mention, time is not quite consistent in dreams, so it would make sense for there to be some kind of time-dilation in the dreamrealm.
There's two more abilities she shows in the show, though. One is mostly meaningless: She can apparently "fuse" dreams together, allowing multiple people to dream a shared dream. She does it for Ponyville once. It seemed to be very trying though, so it's probably not much more than a city-scale ability at best. Maybe more as Nightmare Moon, as Nightmare forms
seem to be a bit stronger, but I don't think it would make for a meaningful difference.
THe second ability is more interesting/has more potential: She can apparently create "dream entities" (the Tantabus in the show), capable of inflicting nightmares on ponies.
This entity, once it went rogue, went from dream to dream (if it's in your dream, and you dream of someone else, it can go in THEIR dream), and
nearly managed to cross into the real world.
Now, we don't know how dangerous it would have been if it managed to cross (the implication is that it would have been quite dangerous), not do we know how
easy it is for Luna to create such entities (she only made the one (that we know of), and only to inflict nightmares on herself as a form of self-inflicted punishment (basically the mlp version of cutting herself, really), but if she made one, presumably she could make more.
...all of this to say that she could, in theory, create entities to invade her enemies dreams, instead of having to do it all by herself.
Apologies for my vagueness. I know we can probably create wards, but I was speaking of Equestria because I was basing off the assumption of unicorns having some kind of spell for "good dreams" or "mental protection" or whatever that could already be used or modified for such a Nightmarish event rather than have us create something from scratch. I should have clarified what I was speaking from. My bad!
maybe, maybe not. It's never really clear just what unicorn magic can do.
Or to be more precise: Unicorn magic can apparently do basically anything... but it's never clear if an appropriate spell already exist.
And even in that case, it's only a tiny minority of unicorns that actually study advanced spells, so, even if a dream-warding spell existed, it could very easily be known/usable by very few unicorns.
ANd, of course, there's also a chance that dream-magic is an exclusive talent of Luna, and nobody ever develop dream-affecting spells before her.
