So when i was around 8-9 years old i had this crayola machine that let you make your own paints, and while playing around with it i used the paints i made to create a series of paintings (most of which being finger-painted bc iirc i either didn't have any paintbrushes or the ones i had weren't very good) showing princess luna slowly transitioning from her season 1 design to the design she has throughout the rest of the series. My mom even took one of the inbetweens and hung it up in her cubicle at work before covid hit :3 (i unfortunately don't have any pictures of it since y'know....mom works at home now but here's a depiction of what it looked like from the best of my memory) https://i.ibb.co/cxYtPFh/Untitled568.png

That said, i remembered this moment of my life and made something based on it. That being THIS image!!! I remember seeing a theory once that stated that the in-universe reason why luna looked like that in the second episode (aside from it being because lauren faust probably didn't like the initial design) is because her power level was super low after being trapped in nightmare moon's body and the more she gained her power back, the more she changed into her normal, flowy hair form (hence why you can see a bit of her old hair in one shot in the episode "luna eclipsed") and honestly i just accept it as canon lol