Theory is twilight killed her friends in anger

@Cirrus Light  
Thing is, the whole point of Doctor Who, really, is a time-traveller who seeks to help as many as possible.
 
As a result, the writers NEED to keep giving him situations he can’t win, so he doesn’t become a boring Gary Stu-character without flaws. It’s from these tragedies and failures that his character really develops.
 
… aaand that’s why it’s on the air as long as it has been.

@ShimmeringStallion  
But WHO’S “modern times”?
 
I mean, as a whole, it’s a really fantastic series, but there are some derps. I can deal with mlp derps. They’re usually pretty neutral, if not happy, and still if you give them a big benefit of doubt MLP works great.
 
But tragic derps are far less forgivable :p

@Cirrus Light  
I suppose large historical events are required to happen to produce minimal change to the modern times…? I don’t watch Who.

@ShimmeringStallion  
But yeah, it looks like MLP canon is Bill and Ted.
 
Which is still a lot less ridiculous than Dr. Who’s completely arbitrary mess…
 
“Some points can’t be changed!…” WWWWWHHHHYYYY? That makes NO sense at all except to pointlessly force tragedy! What makes that point different? What sets it apart from everything else, ever?

@Cirrus Light  
Taking out probability is rather ugly, it means reality is literally no longer following laws, not even probability laws. It would mean it’s quantum state collapse rather than decoherence, which is ugly, and that reality is being arbitrary at small scales rather than probabilistic, which is also ugly and contrary to all of science ever.
 
Also, I think entanglement actually supports my idea… I’ll have to poke into it a bit more to see. I think my idea of time travel is actually what entanglement is doing in a many-worlds quantum interpretation.

@Cirrus Light  
Bill & Ted made it really awesome, I’ll admit that.

@ShimmeringStallion  
Eh, I’m probably asking too much to expect others to come to that same conclusion about time travel.
 
Or to even accept it as most realistic :p
 
Every other kind though, involves paradoxes, or forcing quantum states to be deterministic rather than the probabilistic they’ve been shown to be.
 
But my favorite kind of the ones media has thus far portrayed is the “It’s About Time” or “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” mode - though that one can invoke the letter paradox, and not only saps free will, but forces quantum state collapse / decoherence to be deterministic.
 
(Future me just told me how this quantum experiment turned out. I’ll test it, then tell past me how it went.
 
Either she successfully predicts the experiment, thus removing probability, and free will, and tells her past self in a seamless loop (Next Tuesday Morning!), OR she tells a different version of her past self different results, which is what I offered)

@Cirrus Light  
You forget one crucial fact: They established how Time Travel works, and its effects, twice in the show.
 
One is to have events simply occur in line with themselves (Episode “It’s About Time”).
 
The second is for entirely different futures to come about as a result (Season 5 Finales).
 
Any other way being utilized, literally demands that the author of the story understands their perception of what Time Travel can bring about.

@ShimmeringStallion  
Depends on how time travel works. The most logically consistent way for it to work would actually be for time travel to really mean traveling into a “parallel universe”…
 
Well, backwards time travel, at least. Future time travel is very real, in fact we’re doing it by sitting in Earth’s gravitational field, going something like 1.0000001x faster forward in time…
 
But that would mean they would have disappeared in this history, so this must be an alternative universe.
 
Example: what happens if they go back to their time and tell Twilight about what happens, so she’s able to pre-emptively wipe out the Crimson Changelings to prevent this from ever happening?
 
Just by virtue of being here, this can’t be their reality anymore - this reality’s version of them died a long time ago.
 
But, nonetheless, they are here and Twilight’s friends, so there’s a real chance the prophesy will still hold.
 

 
Anyways, I know I wouldn’t risk my life on betting time travel works a certain way, and neither is Twi.
 

 
Though thinking about it, I think the prophesy isn’t referring to the rest of the mane six - I think it’s referring to “her friends.” As long as Twilight has friends, she won’t die - but this Twilight has lost her friends, so she’s already died because she’s no longer the kind Twilight that she used to be.
 
So Twilight stopped having friends, so like Annikan died to Darth Vader, Twilight died to this hardened Twilight that was born from a lack of friendship to keep her kind.
 
The prophesy has already been fulfilled.
 

 

 
So, back on the topic of time travel, let’s re-hash a bit: if there were one continuous timeline, and you could travel to earlier points in it, then let’s say Pinkie is poking around the resistance hq and finds a chest with a letter in it. The letter reads: “Dear Twilight, we love you! Please don’t become some meanie that kills hundreds of ponies for raising completely legitimate concerns! - your best gal pal Pinkie Pie! <3”
 
She leaps up and down with excitement! Yes! This is the perfect solution! So she shoots the letter back in time 20 years to Twilight.
 
Twilight gets it, and stores it in a box, that Spike later steals and keeps in the resistance hq.
 
Now when Pinkie comes along, she pokes through the hq and finds the letter. What a great idea! She sends it back 20 years!…
 
Again.
 
And next time, too.
 
And again.
 
How old is the letter?
 

 
What makes a lot more sense and makes time travel paradox free is this: She never finds the letter. She gets the idea and writes it. But how odd, she knows it went back 20 years, but… This Twilight never got it.
 
By sending that letter back, she’s done something akin to, what’s called, in many-worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics, “decoherence.” She has altered that reality, so that reality is now an entirely different one. She can jump into this reality’s past and change it how she likes, then jump to the future and see the consequences of her actions. Then jump back into the past and wave hello to herself.
 
She doesn’t remember a time travel twin waving hello? Not a problem! This is an alternate reality. It’s not her own past, then, it’s more like some echo of it. Her very presence has altered it to be a different one. She can’t actually change her own past timeline, since it’s changing your own past timeline that causes unresolvable paradoxes. So she can only alter “echoes” of it. These “echoes” are perfectly real, though - they’re just not the reality she remembers. Her waving at herself is perfectly real, but not present in her own memory. It will be present in the memory of that twin of hers, though.

@Cirrus Light  
Honestly, the biggest contradiction so far is her saying “I might die, too, if I do that.”
 
See, just in terms of the way time works, that wouldn’t be able to happen; anything done to any of them couldn’t change the events that have happened; if she kills one of them, then they were simply never meant to be a part of the original future.
 
And with that in mind, if she kills ONE of them, BAM; prophecy broken again.

@ShimmeringStallion  
But of course, and she has to keep them safe for her own protection, to boot.
 
I find her earlier pleading for them to stay rather interesting, though. I can’t help but wonder how much she may still care for them.

@Cirrus Light  
Yeah, but it’s pretty clear she’ll keep them around anyways… after all, they know things that she does not.

“ha, you were fools to trust me! now I know the location of your other friends and the rebel base!”
 
“um… we haven’t told you the location of our other friends and the rebel base yet.”
 
“oh… right… so, want some more totally not drugged food?”

@Cirrus Light  
That seems like a bit of a stretch, but I can see where you’re coming from. Twi going all iron wolf on everyone was unexpected.

@Exedrus  
She gave them a feeling of safety and security with a spa, and nice clothes, and a nice, “cordial” dinner. In the sense that she made them feel safe when they were still imprisoned, it was a trap.
 
Also, I don’t fault The Doctor for saying; “It’s kind of a trap in that our expectations of safety have swiftly been destroyed by a sudden threat!” Saying, “It’s a trap!” is probably the better move :p
 
@ShimmeringStallion  
…Twi was very specific about only referring to the safety of Rares and Flutters… Said nothing about The Doctor and Roseluck.

So she’ll just put an iron wolf in the room. You know, just to ensure no one dies…
 
… wait, what?

@orbsah  
Yeah I don’t get it either. Twi holds all the cards at the moment. This isn’t so much a trap as it is her doing whatever she wants.

@orbsah  
I’d say with the spa, dresses, and dinner, that it’s more like they were “under a rest” then “under arrest.”
 
 
@TheAbridgenator  
Well, prophesy said Twilight wouldn’t outlive her friends, not by how much, so the resistance wouldn’t need to kill Twi’s friends, first, it’s just doing so would assure Twilight’s death - at least with the direct and commonly held interpretation of the prophesy.
 
But it might be easier to kill those six than to kill the alicorn princess herself?

“IT’S A TRAP!”
 
How and why? They were already under arrest.

So Twilight needs the girls to live, eh? Looks like Spike is gonna take an interesting turn.

But nothing is stopping here from making sure they don’t go back to the past by killing Roseluck and The Doctor.

@Fidozip  
Lol. I have no idea what that is but lol.
 
Honestly, I’m really annoyed at seeing “for the greater good” used as a evil-identifier trope.
 
I mean, killing is bad, right? So are you evil for being a U.S. GI in WWII and killing the guards of a concentration camp? Godwin’s law comes in because that’s the easiest and most obvious example of killing being justified - but what if some poor guard was unarmed, surrendering, and you’d found out that he’d secretly been comforting the prisoners and trying to find ways to save them - though he hadn’t found any, yet? Then would it be okay to kill that guy?
 
Obviously not. Point is, yes, the ends to sometimes justify the means, depending on the specifics.
 
Going to go ahead and link one of my favorite articles on ‘‘hard’’ morality, ever.
 
I know your comment was joking, but still, ya got me talking about something that’s been on my mind for awhile, now, ever since Twi has said “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
 
I’m still just hanging on to see her justification. If it was, “they might’ve spread fear and caused my regime a few inconveniences,” then no, that’s not really a justifiable response to kill hundreds, and as much as I love her, she’d have heck to pay for that.
 
But if it was that they were suspected changelings, or were trying to use the weakened state of the government (having just been at war with the changelings) to try to overthrow it to get into power, themselves (in this critical time when all of Equestria is at stake), then killing them could very well have been just about the only way to save the rest of Equestria.

@Cirrus Light  
It was for the greater good? You sound like a filthy TAU