@Trickquestion  
Such as how she ruined Winter Wrap-Up when she took over organizing it, or how she utterly failed the CMC when tutoring them in “Twilight Time”?
 
@PonyPon  
Yeah, I think you’re taking this discussion in a direction I have no interest in. I certainly didn’t have any sympathy for Starlight Glimmer last season, though she’s earned some from me this season, but I’m not going to argue with someone who disagrees with me on either point.
 
@Background Pony #CD06  
So forgiveness has to be deserved? (And you’ve hit the nail on the head regarding my major complaint about “No Second Prances”; considering Twilight didn’t display any ill will towards Trixie at the conclusion of either of her two previous appearances, the severity of her distrust of Trixie struck me as a plot-driven attitude that was OOC, hypocritical, and damaging to her title as the “Princess of Friendship”.)

@Background Pony #1AE2  
She didn’t do anything to deserve forgiveness, they just forgave her. Where the hell was Trixie’s forgiveness? If they made the path to redemption hard for her, then why would they make it so easy for Starlight?

@Trickquestion  
And good, but not that great at magic either.
 
@Background Pony #1AE2  
Sympathy certainly does.
 
Especially at the point you adopt full grown people because of it.

@Background Pony #1AE2  
Because Twilight Sparkle is spectacularly incompetent at everything unrelated to magic?

@PonyPon  
So forgiveness has to be deserved?

@Background Pony #1AE2  
She really didn’t deserve the amount of sympathy given?

@viamont  
And yet Twilight did forgive her. What’s so horrible about that?

@TexasUberAlles
 
considering the mary sueish characteristics she has you cant blame people for hating her, heck i still dont get how she got a free pass the way she did considering how willing she was to mess up everything for her grudge…shes a very poorly done character and altought i get the message from the show its “friendship” shes going to the extreme…its like asking you to forgive a guy who actively tried to destroy your whole life and all those you care for just because he didnt had friends like you do

@Background Pony #CD06  
haters gonna hate  

Starlight is the worst pony on the show, I wish they would get rid of her. Her backstory is so laughably pathetic that it couldn’t possibly make up for what she did. There are plenty of characters on the show worth exploring, not this generic evil Twilight clone.

@Background Pony #9FCA  
That’s a good point about her not being accepted herself. Maybe if she had parents or some sort of caretaker they just didn’t care, or nobody really recognized her innate talents? Personally I’m extremely interested now in hearing her cutie mark story. My personal theory is that growing up isolating herself turned her into a bit of a sociopath, so not really having anyone she felt she could turn to as a child might’ve been a good explanation for why she turned out like that. Just a theory tho, there’s a ton about her past that we really have no information on right now. For instance, why she ended up travelling through the desert in the first place. A Hearth’s Warming Tail raises a few questions too, depending on how closely snowfall parallel’s starlight. Atm that’s anyone’s guess…

@Background Pony #8545  
Yeah, when she said “She studied that spell for years” it might have meant that it was her best move / one that she’s been honing for years. Seeing it so casually nullified must have been a real surprise for her.  
If she really has been self-taught for most of her life, imagine if she had proper training from Celestia’s school.  
This puzzles me: why didn’t she go to Celestia’s school and how did she get her cutie mark? Twilight got her CM after her power went out of control–so I suspect that her talent isn’t magic per se, but the raw amount of magical power. Twilight can pull off very powerful spells because she has abnormally large magic pool and she can even contain three additional alicorn magics without much problem.  
Starlight was a blank flank even when she could pull off adult level magic. If being gifted an accelerated rate of mastery over a spell is not her “talent”, what then?

@Background Pony #9FCA  
That’s an interesting way to look at it. But also in the village it’s worth mentioning she would’ve been dealing with Twilight + The Villagers + The other mane 6 vs her xD Personally I think it’s possible she might’ve already knew some of those spells that she was using in the finale, but then… I guess it’d be weird that she didn’t use it while escaping the village, so perhaps that’s possible. She does have a very unique set of spells with a lot of magic we’ve never seen before like cutie mark removable, and even rewrote a time travel magic spell written by Starswirl the bearded and combined it with a magical harmony artifact…where the hell did she learn how to do that?
 
And semi related, just cus I see it being brought up a lot; when she said it took her years to learn that ray spell. I think that’d be an accurate timeframe for even talented mages and doesn’t necessarily imply she spent her whole life doing it. “I studied that spell for years! how could you?-” Just look at how long it took Sweetie belle to learn telekinesis, And Starlight by that age was way more talented and controlled. Anyone who has worked hard on a skill for years to learn a trade like art can attest to this. You spend lots of time refining yourself. If Twilight wasn’t there those ponies might’ve been obliterated. Maybe she realized that was one of her more powerful spells and twilight blocked it and then quickly realized she wasn’t ready to deal with her
 
If she’s entirely self taught that’s pretty amazing. She probably got a bit of a start from Sunburst though at least early on before he left.

@Starswirl  
Thank You. Which is why I find Starlight to be one the most interesting magic user villain I’ve seen in a while. Starlight flat out realized back in the village, how outclassed she was compared to Twilight. Starlight only had a chance to really back Twilight into a corner after six months of prep time and an ambush!  
Starlight lessened the huge gap between her and Twilight only by learning how to fly and setting up the battlefield so that Twilight was at a constant disadvantage.
 
Also it’s interesting to know that Starlight is one those genius freaks who has intuitive knowledge on magic control. We saw Twilight’s magical outburst when she was a child and it nearly destroyed the class room. Starlight? Instant total control over a spell. We never saw her ‘misfire’.  
When Starlight in No Second Prances said “when it comes to magic, I don’t make mistake”…I think she meant it–I think that wasn’t just talk.
 
Also she never went to magic school. Think about it.

@TexasUberAlles
 
Yeah, Twilight’s emphasis is more on power, whereas Starlight’s emphasis is more on skill and technique. …Say, where have I heard that before?
 

@TexasUberAlles  
The way look at it is in terms of magical knowhow Twilight probably has the bigger manapool, but knowledge wise unless I see an episode that states otherwise I’m going to assume that they’re more or less even just maybe specializing in different schools of magic as they’ve both rewritten master level mage spells. And Twi admitted to not knowing much about Eastern Unicorns which Starlight is. Plus in that fight Starlight was just completely prepared and fighting really didn’t do Twi any good anyways.
 
So Twilight would probably still be the Sorcerer Supreme since she has Magic Beyond Magic with her friendship and advanced magics to boot, but then with the introduction of Sunburst who seems to know more than even the Princesses in some instances really makes me wonder… If Starlight got her knowledge from him and just had the power to back it up… or learned it from somebody else? Or if she just poured herself into her studies without friends and got there that way? If she had no social interaction though I’m curious how she learned to be as persuasive as a cult leader? A lot of things about Starlight make me scratch my head. I still really like her as a character so I hope they expand on her a bit more in a future episode… right now I’m just really curious what they plan to do with her. I don’t think she’s been entirely explored yet.

@Background Pony #8545  
I don’t really have a dog in this fight aside from having uploaded the image, but I am totally on your side just because you’re the first person I’ve seen in ages who knows how to spell “suped up” correctly.
 
The takeaway I had from the S5 Finale Boss Fight was also that Twilight had the massive advantage in firepower, but she’s a book nerd and only knows how to fight from watching somepony else kick her rump, whereas Starlight was waaay more clever about using the power she had. Also she was nuts.

@Background Pony #8545  
I’ll give you that; she’s shown excellent mobility and spatial awareness since her very first fight, with Nightmare Moon.

@DragonWraith  
To degree I’ll agree with you on that yeah, I don’t think she’s quite so inept though. She managed to show some quick reflexes a couple times in magical duel, and pulled off that teleportation trick during the fight with Tirek, where she blasted him with the godbeam, so I think she’s at least somewhat tactically aware. She’s at the very least competent imo. Never said she was the best. Just that she can fight.

@Background Pony #8545  
She just doesn’t have a very good tactical sense.  
Her style of fighting is similar to Celestia’s: shoot it with lasers until it stops moving.

@untraceablelarry  
Completely missing the point. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t able to quickly adapt and use her power. She was suped up yeah, but she’s been in a dust up before with a world ending monster pretty much on par with her. Bitch can fight.

@Background Pony #8545  
Bro, did you really use the Tirek fight, the one where Twilight absorbed the power of all other alicorns at the time, as an example of her being strong? That isn’t indicative of her normal power at all.

@Background Pony #CD06  

@Background Pony #CD06  
You realize you just described Twilight Sparkle to a tee, don’t you?

@Background Pony #9FCA  
If by genius you mean pulled straight out of her ass, then I agree. Having a character with a nearly limitless range of abilities is stupid. They are so impossibly talented that they render every other pony practically useless, and they receive special treatment that others would never get.