About Monsters in Equestria

So I'd wager it's safe to assume that some people might have been a bit peeved about the notion that all the gestalt monsters in Equestria are just ordinary animals somehow magically combined into one, in regards to the various creatures the Mane Six find detained in Tartarus whose inherent magic they use to breach the doors to the place. (A notion I find strange, seeing as most of them are pretty much no more than dangerous wildlife in regards to the likes of the cockatrice and manticore, albeit Bon Bon/Agent Sweetie Drops mentions the Bugbear from Slice of Life having escaped Tartarus. Yet ones like the Ursa Major are still running free?)

This would imply that none of these creatures occurs naturally and that someone just took a bunch of animals and combined them to see what happens, instead of like in series like Dungeons and Dragons where these creatures are no different as fauna from the likes of deer or wolves (even their dire variants). But this notion got me thinking, in that I heard Doctor Wolf (whose content I don't really follow at all since I do not like the person in regards to how he talked about the infamous ToonKriticY2K scandal) during one of his videos imply that the monsters seen in Equestria are some madman's experiment left to run amuck. But what if we looked at this in a grander scale?

See, Friendship is Magic has borrowed a lot of elements from Greek mythology, such as Tartarus being the Ancient Greek version of what we today would collectively refer to as Hell: A domain in many myths, legends and religions where those of evil natures end up in upon death, right down to being guarded by their own take on the famous three-headed guard dog Cerberus. This got me to think back to a certain small mention done in the season 7 episode A Flurry of Emotions pertaining to Grogar (the less said about what we got in season 9 the better, frankly). Grogar is referred to as a father of monsters. This is not quite as dark as him being referred to as an outright necromancer in G1 My Little Pony, but I think it opens up to something grander.

This brings me to Typhon. For those not as well-versed in Greek mythology: Typhon was the last son of the pre-Titan deities Gaia and Tartarus (not much is mentioned of the latter, but we can say there might be an apt reason as to why his name is also the name of this iteration of Hell), often depicted as a blend of a humanoid being with the tail end of a serpent. Regarded as the most powerful and terrifying of all monsters in Greek legend, whom was eventually imprisoned under Mt. Etna (or Tartarus, depending on iteration, but I prefer Hesiod's Theogony myself) by Zeus when he struck Typhon with his thunderbolts. And this was their second encounter: At first Typhon had managed to repel all the Olympian Gods, with aid of his sister and mate Echidna (Because what's Greek myth without incest?).

Typhon and Echidna together birthed all of the many monsters in Greek mythology: Cerberus, Orthrus, the Colchian, the Hydra, the Chimera, whom themselves would come to be the sires of other monsters, such as Orthrus and Chimera (again, divine incest) making the Nemean Lion slain by Heracles. So I got to thinking: Grogar was described in the story of Gusty the Great as a near unstoppable army-obliterating monster, and that he too created monsters that brought hardship to ancient Equestria, possibly pre-Celestia and Luna or the Pillars.

So here's my theory: Grogar is the Equestrian equivalent to Typhon. If Grogar was so powerful with his Bewitching Bell, what's to say that he took the natural wildlife of the land and molded them into the progenitors of the monsters we see in modern Equestria? While I find it hard to believe the ones we see in Tartarus would be the only representatives of their kind, but suppose that these creatures would breed during and after Grogar's reign, thus as a final insult to the victors that he'd still left his mark on the world at large. Perhaps some of the magic that Grogar originally used to combine these various creatures became inherent to their biology and they passed it down to their offspring to the present day.

And not just the monsters the writers of season 8 stuck into Tartarus for some reason (I'm not gonna deny it, storywise seasons 8 and 9 were weak). Maybe the Dazzlings, or Sirens in general (assuming there are more than just the three) were the product of Grogar. And the Hydra. Or the Bufogren, the Ophiotaurus, etc. Just because they were created by Grogar does not mean they might have remained evil or were just relegated to acclimating as more irregular fauna.

Could this mean other creatures like gryphons might also be the products of Grogar? Or the hippogriffs? I mean it's possible: With the ponies, the Arabian horses, the zebras, donkeys and even the kirin being all equine more or less, and the likes of the Buffalo and the Yaks also being Ungulates, i.e. animals with hooves. I'm not saying it's definite, but it's always a possibility given how lacking information we got pertaining to the history of Equestria barring "a thousand years ago".