@EyeGuy  
Movie was pretty bleak too.

It’s been a couple years, and now I think A Health of Information is officially the darkest episode of the show.

@Background Pony #A038  
Just common occurrence. It’s practically everyday standard for cartoons. Yup.

@Ebonysdagger  
Yea, safe, very safe. Nothing wrong at all.  

@Background Pony #8978  
That was intensely disturbing to anyone who is or knows or works with any artist who’s ever tried to keep working through clinical depression.

@Ebonysdagger  
That’s just scratching the surface. Over the course of the second and third seasons of Beast Wars, they killed off more than half the characters. Oh, and then there’s Generator Rex, where every living thing on Earth is infected with nanites that could randomly go off and turn it into a hideously mutated monster at any time.

Personally, I always thought the episode where Luna shows Sweetie Belle a possible outcome of her sabotaging Rarity’s costume was disturbing.
 

 
Something about the thought of Rarity all alone in a decaying, run down boutique, a never ending cycle of checking for mistakes preventing her from ever progressing or trying anything, really gets to me.

@Crayv  
her petrified face that was stuck in an expression of terror  
That was pretty fridge-horrific, yeah. Maybe that’s the deal with the Wasteland Timeline– it was all normal up to the point where the CMC never stayed at Fluttershy’s house for the night, and Twilight’s unbound-by-fate friends never cared enough to go looking for her when she just stopped showing up one day. If Twilight and Starlight had walked over the next hill, there would have been a statue of a terrified Unicorn half-buried in the sand.

I think the scene is Stare Master where we seen Twilight turned to stone with a snail crawling across her petrified face that was stuck in an expression of terror was the darkest thing in the show.

@Frozen Fox @TexasUberAlles Not to mention of course, Discord appears to only ‘sleep’ as part of a gag setup. He likely doesn’t actually need to. 24/7 trolling, whenever and wherever you need it!  
He’s not actively destructive, but eventually through never giving anypony a moment’s rest you’d have a society full of Derpies unable to properly function. Like you just know he turns himself into an alarm clock whenever he sees someone getting sleepy. I was off the mark a little back when I used to compare him to Genie, cuz Genie knows when to stop. He just has similar powers to his.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
Discord is more like the Dodos, or those evil little leprechauns that gave Porky the tap shoes.  
Sooo yea, basically nothing could get done because he’d ‘spook’ everyone trying to do things

@Ichijoe  
Be aware, it was full of computer animation of A Bygone Era™; you could no~~$#!+ animate better CG yourself on a WinXP pawn shop laptop. There were VHS tape OVAs you could get as tie-ins with the toys-~~ which were marginally “interactive” with strobe effects on the screen– that were animated by the same studio that made Bubblegum Crisis, but I’ve never seen any of those, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ on quality.

@TexasUberAlles  

 
Almost makes me want to watch it… If only for the lulz.

@Frozen Fox  
there is no semblance whatsoever of even living a normal life if discord rules  
That’s the main reason I’ve never really liked any of the interpretations of Celestia’s “he ruled Equestria in an eternal state of unrest and unhappiness” line which take that to mean it lasted for any significant length of time; “eternal” pretty much has to be either hyperbole or referring to Discord’s intent for his rule to be eternal (a sort of “Thousand Year Reich” expression), because there just wouldn’t be anything left to rebuild a society from if he’d been in control for very long. We already know from the story of Hearth’s Warming that he hadn’t always been in control, even if you leave out all the supplementary material from places like the Journal Of The Two Sisters, and the rest of Celestia’s story from Return Of Harmony (and the flashback from Princess Twilight Sparkle) imply pretty hard that Discord flew in from offscreen and started wrecking shop long after The Sisters had taken over the throne of Equestria and they had to spend [amount of time] looking for a way to stop him.

@Exedrus  
Definitely not grim or dark, I agree. I also agree with your 2nd point.

@Ebonysdagger  
Aright. Can’t really argue against that.
 
@Niggoslav_Krawczyk  
Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. I guess all of Equestria was affected.
 
@Frozen Fox  
It’d be unpleasant certainly, but it’d be a stretch to call that grim and/or dark. All I was trying to point out was that it’s possible to mention things with grimdark implications without actually making the whole story that way.

@Exedrus  
Actually, the Discord ending strikes me as amongst the most unpleasant, tbh. No one likes to be laughed at, for one, and as someone who gets frustrated when they aren’t taken seriously, living in a world where its ruler basically spends all his time laughing at you and everyone else under his chaotic torture sounds pretty…well, hell-ish to me. Based on what we saw in the Return of Harmony, there is no semblance whatsoever of even living a normal life if discord rules.

@Niggoslav_Krawczyk  
Man, Spiral Zone was tha shiznit; I got my 7th grade post-apocalypse on with a cartoon block of Spiral Zone, Robotech, and Captain Harlock And The Queen Of A Thousand Years.
 
@Ichijoe  
You mean it actually had an ending?!  
_{okay i forgot that “power rangers” was what my friends and i called it not the actual name of the show}  
It was one of those Firefly kind of “grimmer than it was meant to be because Season 2 wasn’t greenlit” things. Lord Dread hacked the teleporter system the Power Team used to keep their secret base secret and sent an army of Bio-Dreads to destroy it while The Girl Pilot was the only one there to defend it; she was mortally wounded, and– after finally declaring her love for Captain Power, ha ha!– self-destructed the base’s reactor with her and the Bio-Dreads inside. That means that without the planned second season (where the rest of the team would meet up with previously-unseen other resistance groups and continue fighting), the series just ends with the Big Bad getting a New Final Form, the team being betrayed and one of them killed, and the survivors left with only one truckload of equipment and no base of operations or means of transport. The freakin’ Bad Guys won.

@Exedrus I think the map in the ep was enough of an indicator it resembled post-Lavos Chrono Trigger  
 
(mind, there’s also greenery even there, but high up in mountainous tundra where the fallout from the laser barrage didn’t spread.)  

 
@Ebonysdagger Well, there’s Spiral Zone, which was like GI Joe srs’d up (aka the movie 100% of the time) but with more ridiculous vehicles like Dirk’s…Wheel-tank thing.  
 
Two characters die on the ‘hero’ side and 3 on the villain side, two of them (the brother and sister) occurring in the same episode (and one being a suicide!) Hero in quotes cuz one of them is actually a turncoat, but is killed in the ensuing chase. It wsa pretty damn harsh! Then again a good amount of the storyboarders and secondary writers went on to Exo-squad, and a quarter of the episodes were written by J “Western Tomino” Straczynski. Awesome atmosphere btw. :v  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Oh heeeeey, there’s a couple familiar names up there!  
Also, there’s a Rambo cartoon. I think I can just leave it at that. WOOOOOOO 80s! If anything, it’s wholly nonviolent cartoons with fwuffy ‘morals’ required in every ep that are the aberration!  
(Also both Exo-squad and Spiral Zone have the harshest episodes come only mid-way through, then after the heroes have lost bigtime, a steady progression builds towards the Pyrrhic victory)  
 
 
It basically combined the movies with the incredulous lunacy of CONTRA, even having a literal shark-jump moment.  
 
It also retcon’d/‘rescued’ one of the worst movie baddies.  
 
 

@Exedrus  
Well lets see… Adventure Time occurs on a post-apocalypse Earth and does very little to hide this. In the Smurfs Gargamel intended to either eat them or turn them into gold (I can never remember which). Gen 1 MLP had one of the most graphic and horrific transformations I’ve ever seen to date and its version of the Smooze was genuinely nightmare inducing. Popeye regularly skirts around the issue of Bluto doing something unpleasant to Olive Oyl. Kaa intends to eat Mowgli after some mind control in the Jungle Book but most seem to only remember Baloo’s song.
 
Yeah, cartoons have quite a dose of grim dark in them and they should be as they are more or less the modern form of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are rather dark affairs if you actually read them and they are aimed at kids to teach them things.

@Ebonysdagger  
Kinda sorta. In my mind, the level of grimdarkness depends on how its portrayed.
 
I mean there are animations like Watership Down, which sort of wallow in the fears of their characters and the horrors of their situation. Or stories like Fallout Equestria that have motifs which remind the reader of all the people who perished and how society more-or-less collapsed as a result.
 
On the other hand there are less dark “end-of-days” like scenereos, like when the alternate timeline where Discord took over:  
I mean, I’m sure there are plenty of people suffering from Discord’s… weirdness? But the delivery is more comic/light hearted than that. The same can be said for some other setups where the main characters say they’re scared of the villain(s) winning but don’t really delve too deep into the horrible things that will result. And I imagine a good amount of children’s entertainment falls into that category. Although, I admit, I can’t speak for all of it, since (outside of MLP) I don’t follow much stuff targeted at younger crowds…

@TexasUberAlles  

 
You mean it actually had an ending?!

@Ebonysdagger  
Kids These Days don’t remember the ending to Captain Power And The Power Rangers, man.

@Exedrus  
The apocalypse is grim dark? It is just the end of the world. Rather common in kid’s shows I thought. I remember back when kids shows tended to have people just barely avoiding it and saying as much. Disney goes farther than that regularly and people still praise their children’s shows.

@epodroznik  
Can’t wait to see how dark the 2017 film will be.

Would it make sense for them to make the show grow with its audience? I remember Batman Beyond and Justice League being more serious than their predecessor. And now some of the DC movies are pretty much for mature audiences only.