I Am The Night

Just reading the comments I can already tell, I'm not going to enjoy critiquing this one. There are many, many submissions of Nightmare Moon, especially since the release of the Season 4 spoilers, and, sadly, this is not one of my favorites.
Before I go any further, I would like to remind both the artist and the viewers that this critique is strictly centered around my OPINION, not fact. If you acknowledge it, you can choose to respect it, or reject it. And I will respect whatever YOU choose.

There where a few aesthetic choices made that, for me, seemed to pile up in a negative fashion. For instance, the shape of her head seems a bit odd. Her forehead seems unusually broad, wile the rest of her head seems to have a rather large diameter. I suppose it could be argued that the helmet gives the shape more width than usual, but if that's the case she must be afraid of snipers or something, because that gives her head an extra two and a half inches of armor.
The shape of the horn also caught my attention. If you look at the base of the conical horn structure the circle has, much like the head, and unusually large diameter. It just appears a bit to massive to me. Maybe that's why she's so mad in this picture, the horn is giving her a headache and making her top heavy. (That was a joke, but it still appears a little odd to me)
Her mane and her snout seem a bit underplayed. First time I've ever criticized on the design of a horse's snout, but still it just caught my attention, but it almost looks as though there is none. Her mane looks as though it wasn't even a part of her. Artists have used her mane to blend into the background making her look like she truly is the night. This one though, it makes me think of an inkblot cloud hovering behind her head. You gave her hair the night stars, but even they look rather underplayed.
I could also argue that both the wing and the chestplate don't even look attached to herself, but that didn't really bother me as much as the aforementioned choices.

However, I can definitely tell this had a lot of effort put into it. The colors, at least where Nightmare was concerned, seemed to work pretty well, the background with the moon in the corner is nice, and the overall atmosphere of the piece is appealing. It's just the couple of design choices that seemed to add up that keeps me from faving this one. And it's hard to critique something like this because for everyone who shares my opinion on these choices, I know there are several other who would just as soon crucify me.

I reiterate, this is solely my OPINION. This is not my favorite submission from this artist, but I still look forward to his/her next one.

With utmost respect,
--Michael