Ah, nothing interesting to say in a minimum of 3 years.

After finishing the show last year, I think this discussion about this character (especially these comments) clearly shows that Starlight was presented before she was properly written. She needed more believable conflicts and motivations to make her much more relatable. The writers needed her to visually express her desire to be better and eventually redeemed, not doing baffling things so haphazardly that she splitted the fandom.

If she was well written, we wouldn’t had this conversation. All I’m gonna say is, if you give Starlight a redemption arc, she does something that invalidates that redemption arc and nothing happens, like there are no consequences, what’s the point then?

This again?
 

@Alexlayer  
Then why even comment at all? What does your comment add to the conversation?

@darknessRising24  
I never needed to forgive the character. For me, I needed her to be better written. Eventually, she was.

@Background Pony #79B3  
Not exactly…. Twi could have just left Starlight stranded in that particular timeline if she wanted to…
 
As for forgiveness, don’t you think she’s long since earned it thanks to her actions regarding the second Changeling invasion and the incident with the Pony of Shadows?

@darknessRising24  
And that’s where we disagree, because Discord, Sunset, Trixie, they were all overpowered by a group. Starlight was a threat to the very integrity of the elements of harmony, because she undid the events that made them come together. She actually represented a threat to the past, present, and future of the show, and that is why it’s harder to forgive her than a normal run of the mill villain. And then, after posing this huge threat, she was added to the cast XD Again, I’ve gotten over it, but I very much get why some can’t forgive her. She was just too successful, and if not for her gracious acceptance that maybe her revenge wasn’t worth destroying the world, the show would have just been over. Last episode, two ponies and a dragon in a wasteland hating each other. “My Little Pony, I never knew revenge could be so complete…”

@Background Pony #79B3  
That’s technically what made her an effective Villain. I’m just saying that the previous ones that came before her we’re just as much of a threat in their own way.

@darknessRising24  
Starlight may have been ignorant about her actions destroying the lives of everyone in the various timelines she was creating, but she certainly knew she was destroying the lives of those six friends. She was counting on it. She researched exactly how to go about it. And yes, Trixie, Sunset, Discord, they managed to temporarily separate Twilight from her friends, but Starlight very much did it permanently multiple times. And again, only stopped doing it because she was made to realize her revenge was destroying everything, that this set of friends was that important.

@Background Pony #79B3  
That depends on how you veiw it.
 
Trixie and sunset effectively did the same thing, list of different methods. Trixie had the Amulet and separated Twilight from her friends as well as all of Ponyville. Sunset had the upper hand in that she was in a world that she was more familiar with wild while Twilight was struggling to adapt, not to mention she was separated from her friends as well, she just didn’t count on her bonding with their counterparts.
 
If we want to go even further, Discord himself was able to pull that off as well by manipulating Twilight’s friends against each other, to the point where Twilight would have lost if not for Celestia sending her all those notes. Queen Chrysalis pulled the same stunt by manipulating her into alienating herself from her friends, before trapping her in the dungeons, and would have succeeded if she hadn’t made the mistake of leaving her close to the real Princess Cadence.
 
Starlight may have managed to pull it off, however the consequences for her actions were completely unknown to her, which can’t be said for the previously mentioned villains since they intentionally went out of their way to make sure this was the case.
 
however in each case, the reasons for the reformation was somewhat different, Trixie only partly reformed yet still held a bit of a grudge against Twilight, as evidenced by the episode “No Second Prances”, Sunset had to get nuked by the rainbow laser in order to finally get it to her six-goal how selfish she was being, Discord found out that he genuinely valued Fluttershy’s companionship and chose it over having free reign to do whatever he wanted, though he does still go out of his way to mess with them every now and then…
 
Starlight realized exactly how badly she was screwing over the rest of Equestria the moment she saw the Ashlands timeline and even presented herself before Twilight and her friends for any punishment they deemed fit, something none of the other villains have done upon their own reformation.

@darknessRising24  
They still posed no serious threat, because Twilight still had access to her greatest weapons, her friends. Starlight did something that no other villain had managed before; she effectively separated Twilight from any hope of her friends helping her by destroying that friendship retroactively. And she posed a very serious threat of destroying not just the status quo, but everything that had ever come before that. Sunset and Trixie’s petty revenge schemes never held a candle to that. Hell, even Tirek wouldn’t have done as much damage.

50 comments, excellent work everyone. I don’t really think this one will go on for too much longer. That said I’ve been surprised before.
 
So please, do carry on.
 
>>1653993t (merged)

>>Sees there have been about ten more comments since their last.
 
…yeah, not gonna bother with this.

@Background Pony #79B3  
I’m going to have to disagree with you on that, Trixie sought out an evil magical artifact to one-up Twilight, who saved her life from an Ursa.
 
And Sunset became an evil she demon that nearly incinerated Twilight and her friends in the human world.
 
I’d say they both pose a serious threat in their own ways.
 
As for her backstory, here’s an interesting thought user “AC97” brought up:
 
[Sunburst, after leaving town, his mother would write him letters every other day or so, and he, getting sick of it, started throwing them out. Starlight, let’s say she didn’t muster up the resolve to try writing until say, weeks or months down the line (believe it or not, that sounds like something I could definitely see myself doing.), but at that point, Sunburst was routinely throwing out letters that came from that place, automatically presuming they came from Stellar Flare.
 
And that is why Starlight writing to Sunburst didn’t end up working out.]
 
That makes a surprising amount of sense…
 
Children can be mentally fragile sometimes and can end up letting bad experiences shape their entire worldviews, no matter how minor they may seem, and by the time they grow up their mind that is so locked into that worldview that they can’t comprehend thinking outside the box in that sense.
 
It’s never established exactly when after Sunburst left she got her own cutie mark. for all we know she could’ve been a late bloomer, and by that point her mentality had been firmly locked in place by that experience and her inability to put faith in any friendship after losing her foalhood friend for fear of it falling apart again.

@darknessRising24
 

 
True enough, and yet neither Sunset nor Trixie actually posed any serious threat. Starlight had the magical might and know how to end everything we ever cared about. It’s easier to forgive a bungling villain than one who was successful multiple times over and only stopped destroying things when she decided to stop. The show did not let Twilight overpower her, or blast her with friendship lasers, she was a real threat to everything we held dear.
 

 
Well, that’s the thing. Starlight has never been corrupted. She’s not amoral, just incredibly misguided. Even she was able to recognize how badly she was misguided when presented with the evidence that her meddling with time was creating timelines in which life didn’t survive. She didn’t need cleansing, she needed a wake-up call. And if she’d just accepted Twilight’s offer then, that would have been a better start.
 
Then we got her backstory, and good lord, that didn’t help. It actually made her worse in retrospect. I really wish they’d left that out, maybe brought it up much later.
 
As for empathy… it’s rough for her. I mean, let’s look at her past interactions with ponies. She built a cult. That was basically her adult life, convincing strangers to give up their talents in favor of being equally awful at everything so they could avoid conflict. This does not make for a good basis to understand how others feel. She tries, bless her, but it’s like an alien studying human interaction.

@Background Pony #79B3  
Continuously acting like a character hasn’t changed despite several seasons have been gone by since they’ve reformed and then actually showing instances where they have changed is also pointless. Hence why I brought up the conversation to begin with.
 
Plus, the whole “first impression, last impression” thing kind of falls flat on its flank when you remember that these are the same guys who are willing to give Trixie and Sunset Shimmer the benefit of the doubt… and yet act like Starlight is the cancer of the franchise.
 
But that being said, one of the reasons I like Starlight as a characters because she’s one of the whew villains who went through a reformation without having to get blasted by rainbows first.
 
Not only that, but there’s also the fact that we see her show a genuine amount of empathy when it comes to her bad decisions, when she screws up, we actually see her come to the realization that she screwed up and try to have a very least make amends or fix her mistakes, which shows her growing as a character, compared to her villainous side where she only cared about herself and refused to take any responsibility for her own misdeeds.

@darknessRising24  
First impressions are like that, however. Sometimes you cannot get a second chance. It’s just a fact of life. And blaming people for not getting past that first impression is, to be frank, pointless.
 
When I started liking Glimmer had nothing to do with her actions and everything to do with better writing for her. Putting her in a situation she could not solve with that amazing magic talent of hers was a very good idea. It humanized her a bit. Even better, when she tried to make the friendship pitch and was rejected, that was a fantastic move. If she’d succeeded, it would have made her look more competent than Twilight herself at the thing Twilight is the princess of.

@Background Pony #79B3  
While I’m not going to say that a small amount of her appearances didn’t feel a little forced in a certain way, her background appearances would just do that, background appearances, no different than if any of the other main characters made a brief cameo yet didn’t really do anything.
 
The thing is I’m too used to people using “the writers just wanted it that way” as an excuse whenever Starlight actually does show improvement as a character, it just feels like they using that as a crutch to hold on to their hatred of a character whose long since progressed past being the villain she once was.

@darknessRising24  
There you’d be mistaken, in my opinion, at least. Starlight’s problems have little to do with her character and everything to do with bad writing. The character herself was a fantastic villain, and eventually became a decent supporting character. The rough patch was that in between where she was being awkwardly placed in scripts left over from seasons two through four, taking Spike’s role usually, or where she was quite simply a background pony just to get her presence in the scene. It’s very clear she was liked by the writing staff, but that they also didn’t seem to know what to do with her.
 
Now they seem to have figured her out for the most part, and she’s become quite likeable.

@Background Pony #79B3  
Really it depends on what the negative opinion is. I have seen Starlight haters make claims about her that can be proven wrong by the show itself. The best example of this is the claim that Starlight is a Mary Sue.

@Background Pony #79B3  
Not exactly, the difference is that I can acknowledge where Starlight has gone wrong and at the same time acknowledge certain parts where she’s managed to improve.
 
On the Starlight-hate side of things, people on that side only see what she’s doing wrong and specifically only that, pretending that anything she does right is because the writers are shilling her or because “the writers just want that to happen”.
 
For them, it’s either one of the other, there’s literally no in-between that can be reached. Hence why the only focus on her wrongdoings and act like that’s all there is to her.
 
The difference between acknowledging a character’s flaw while still seeing the positivity in them…. and simply pretending that their negative aspects are all they have and all that they are allowed to have.

@darknessRising24  
Having a negative opinion of Starlight does not make a person inherently wrong, it just means they have a negative opinion of her. You can no more change his opinion than he can change yours. One could as easily say you are beating the dead horse of Starlight-love, or at the very least Starlight-acceptance. It’s clear which sides of the fence you both sit.

@Alexlayer  
Actually it does, considering the fact that you’re claiming that her presence is “damage” that the she is “tainted” because of it.
 
You’re basically saying that absolutely nothing good can come from her even when she does things right, that alone is outlandishly petty.

@darknessRising24  
Doesn’t make what I said any less true.

@Background Pony #79B3  
It is when someone is kicking the dead horse that is “Starlight-hate” to the point where you can practically see the Nike symbol embedded in its flesh.