Princess Celestia

Princess Celestia is the supreme ruler of prior to the pilot episode of, and co-ruler later on. While she has only prominently appeared a handful of times, she plays an important role as Twilight's mentor and the recipient of her weekly moral lessons. This has led to a number of assumptions and memes surrounding Celestia.

As of October 26, 2011, she appears in more stories published on fimfiction.net than any other of the supporting characters from the show. In fan art set before Luna's banishment, Celestia's mane is typically colored uniformly pink, a reference to her appearance in the storybook Twilight reads in.

Trollestia
One of the earliest pony memes, Trollestia casts Celestia's actions in the show in a different light. Like an internet troll, some of her lessons to Twilight Sparkle seem needlessly complicated, prankish and prone to spark disharmony. For instance, in she sends only two tickets to the Grand Galloping Gala to Twilight Sparkle despite the fact that she knows her student has five friends; predictably, the ponies end up fighting over who gets to attend and who will have to stay home, until Celestia relents and invites all of them. A later episode reveals that she did so in the hope that the Ponyville ponies would lighten up the stiff gala, which they do, in a fashion: one instigates a foodfight, one destroys the ballroom, and one causes a stampede of animals. Celestia approves.

This prankish nature of Celestia is commonly depicted in fan labor, particulary in short-form fiction like comics.

Celestia is a tyrant
This meme occasionally overlaps with the previous one. Because Celestia banishing her own sister to the moon for a thousand years seemed rather harsh to some fans, and because it seems strange that one person could hold on to power for at least that long, a common motif in fanfics and comics depicts Celestia as a Stalin-like tyrant who banishes people who disagree with her to the moon, often using the phrase "to the moon" (or a variation, as in this popular video version of the meme). Her stern likeness on her Equestria Election poster plays with this idea, as do numerous pieces of fan art and comics that recontextualize Luna's rebellion as a democratic uprising ("New Lunar Republic") against a tyrannical regime ("Solar Empire"); for example, propaganda posters, and a parody fanfic.

One of the gags hidden on the Pony Countdown website is that a click on Celestia changes the background image to a lunar landscape.

Gallery

 * See also a gallery of assorted Celestia images