Wow Did the discussions go wild on this one. Well Thread necromancy! Here’s a different explanation, based on something someone wrote in a fanfiction that actually explains this perfectly. Twilight didn’t lose a contest of speed; she lost a contest of preparation. We know Starlight was leading them into a trap. She was planning to unmark them from the start, and they unintentionally gave her the perfect opportunity. So, she had a plan. Basically, what happened was that, when Starlight picked up the staff of sameness, she actually began gathering her strength and preparing her spell to fire. Her speech partially done to keep up her act, was really just a way to stall for time. Notice how she seems to drag the conversation and act kind of theatrical with the staff. She was buying time to get her spell ready. Also, when her minions came in, it further distracted Twilight who began to panic. When Twilight figured it out, it was too late!
Starlight had her right where she wanted her. Unprepared, panicked and distracted. While Twilight thought of the whole room, Starlight focused on only her. Thus, before Twilight could even begin gathering her power to do anything, Starlight had her spell ready to fire. Twilight was doomed before she could even try, and she and the others lost their cutie marks as a result.

Finally, someone not just waiting to get her ass blasted.

@Keith Mowz  
Sure…In fanfiction and potential flashback plot points.  
Anything can be put in a potential flashback plot point, the skies the limit…!
 
…so long as it doesn’t directly contradict the current status quo of that time. Then it becomes an inconsistency, or at worse, a glaring retcon. In Trade Ya!, we indeed get told the opposite during that frame of time. And in the overall status quo of the series, Twilight has always been physically and mentally a resourceful, bookworm mage, not some high flying, high reflex warrior.
 
Can we end this argument already? Please? This insistence that Twilight’s skill was natural during that fight is getting filled to the brim with semantic arguments, and is getting more and more strawman by the second.
 
While Twilight is a great, resourceful mage, there is no reason to believe she is any kind of great warrior in the least. By the moment we saw her boost and fly towards Tirek at near-Rainbow Dash speeds, it was easy to tell that not just her magic was enhanced, but her body and mind had been altered as well by the magic to be physically and mentally capable of such feats. We already have a rather simple explanation that doesn’t conflict with anything and has fairly sound logic. Lets move on.

@CronoM  
Shocking concept; things can happen without us being explicitly told they happen.

@Background Pony #731F  
First off, if your stance is that this is not the place for discussions and the like, why on earth would you contribute to the discussion in your second reply?
 
Second, she seemed pretty focused on fighting the giant worm that was attacking both herself and her sister-in-law. Unlike her spell-casting duel with Trixie, that was a serious no-holds-barred fight for survival. To say we don’t know the limits of her skills in such a situation is just reaching.
 
If the episodes after Three’s a Crowd told us RD was training Twilight really hard and preparing her for fights, it would be far more believable. But instead, they told the opposite, that Celestia had Twilight focused on reading more books then ever during her free time. Even with loose continuity judgement, it still makes no sense without a decent explanation. If the writers plan on explaining it later, I’d like to hear it.

@CronoM
 
To me asking why Twilight pulled some moves she’d never done in previous episodes implies we had seen all she was capable of. In cartoons you should never asssume that, because the characters can always surprise you.
 
I don’t think we had ever seen Twilight focused in such a serious center-stage duel before or pushed so far in a fight.

@CronoM
 
He’s right though. The images on this sites aren’t meant for long debates, text walls and discussions. That’s why the forums and other places exist.

@Keith Mowz  
(shrug) Whatever floats your boat man. No one’s forcing you to read large conversations you aren’t interested in.

@CronoM  
I’m super tempted to unsub from this image because oh my god do you care way too much about this. I can’t even try to read the, what, dozen wall of text rants you’ve gone on with already. Take it to the forums or something, IDEK.

@Hateot  
@Background Pony #E1B8  
Either way, it seems we’ve come to the same conclusion, that Twilight in no way could of done the things she did, magic-wise, ability-wise OR skill-wise without being a power sink to that much alicorn magic, essentially making her a living weapon with amped power and instincts of all races three, essentially overriding pretty much everything except her basic penchant for teleportation, obviously not including her meteor smashes.
 
If there was an episode where she learned some basic combat skills without magic, which I would love, I would prefer it to not anything to do with her being a princess or anything to do with Celestia. That would just distance her characters further from the others, while if she learned where her weaknesses lie when compared to the others, she could learn to relate to them more.

@Hateot  
I was referring to the mid-air teleportations in that sentence, not the teleportations where she was still on the ground. The former were not under her natural skills, while the latter were))
 
And as for her bobbing and weaving, I was referring to not just her midair teleportation, but her near instantaneous fighting reflexes to blast the rocks just as they erupted in her path while flying at high speed at the same time. She wasn’t dodging them, I was mistaken if I said otherwise, but she WAS repossisioning herself slightly a split second after the rocks emerged to blast them dead on. If anything, that takes even more focus and skill she never had. She had to become basically a living weapon to do what she did.
 
…I like to reiterate how unsafe Twilight’s powers, and someone like Twilight having them, are. Not only does she not even have full control over her “own” magic and she can even lose control under the worst circumstances, her magic can be stretched basically indefinitely with magic transfers? Aang from Avatar at least had mental barriers for those kinds of powers, Twilight does not. You don’t give those kind of powers to a weak-willed person, its plain common sense. The same principle goes to Shinji from Evangelion. You make luck out if you plan it properly, but odds are things are going to get fubared in the long run.

@Hateot  
Hm interesting I thought I was the only one thinking about the idea of Twilight receiving extra combat training, focusing on muscle rather than magic. After all there have been already situations in which magic is out of the option and as princess and guardian of Equestria, you should be prepared for anything.

@CronoM  
I said she used a teleportation move followed by a magic blast twice. The most bobbing I saw was in the part where Tirek made those rocks rise from the ground and Twilight flies straight at them and shoots them to bits.
 
Now, what I meant by that last one was that in a fight, if you have the strength advantage and you are say, preparing a throw you can sometimes forgo some of the extra measures like holding your opponent steady or otherwise incapacitating him and just smash the other guy to the ground. It may have gone a little off the mark in my previous comment, but this is what I meant by it and it’s why I think she was able to pull of a meteor move.
 
What you later wrote about transferred non-unicorn talents (flight strength, earth-pony strength) affecting her performance sounds in part similar to what I suggested. That the added wing power, reflexes and such effectively made her a huge energy sink and that made her speed and moves in that fight possible.

@Jarkes  
Ah, sorry about that. I keep on expecting episodes to be named with a reversal or an alteration of a phrase, so when someone else typed it like that mistakenly, it stuck with me.
 
I always liked that headcanon, and I didn’t like how they pretty much wrote that possibility away for S4 when Twilight confirmed in Trade Ya that Celestia was keeping her focused more on reading then ever. I never really liked that line, especially since it kind of fit with the rest of the conflicted theme of Twilight in S4. Heck they even glossed over the fact that Twilight is RD’s flying student whenever she was learning to fly, just for the sake of building Twilight unrealistically high and not inferior to the others in anything.
 
On a side note, given this premier episode, maybe Twilight should get some speech lessons from Rainbow Dash as well. :/ RD’s big from-the-heart speeches like in Games Ponies Play, Flight to the Finish, and Trade Ya seem infinitely more touching and tolerable then Twilight’s lectures nowadays, and Starlight certainly wasn’t afraid to express that frustration when Twilight opened her mouth. XD
 
 
@Starswirl  
Yeah, I can see that. I imagine that while Celestia is a lot more powerful then she was a thousand years ago, her fighting skills way are too complacent currently.

The only way I can accept this is the excuse that she was still in the mindset of Tirek and tried to channel too much unnecessary power into the spell. If she didn’t, she would’ve easily gotten the upper hoof.

@CronoM
 
I should note that you keep getting the title of a particular episode wrong; it was “Three’s a Crowd,” not “Three’s a Company.” Though it is a common mistake, and you’re not the first one to make that mistake regarding the episode.
 
And I’ve had this idea going around in my head for a while of Twilight actually wanting to get more physical combat training in case she needed it in the future, though she would probably first ask Rainbow Dash to be her instructor for that.

@CronoM  
Not to mention that Celestia isn’t a particularly good warrior herself. Yes, she’s powerful, but she’s never shown to have that much finesse. In a sense, Twilight is very much her student even in this.

@Jarkes  
Thanks. :)
 
I agree, and this is my continued reasoning: Consider that she got a major upgrade to both her power(and not just in magic) and her skill. I’m not saying she got such an upgrade that it appeared that she had thousands of years of the greatest warriors flowing through her (obviously a good reference point would be Aang’s Avatar State), but enough she could make high speed maneuvers and highly destructive counter attacks that would of defeated weaker opponents quickly. Enough so that it would look like she’s been practicing high-powered alicorn combat for at least a couple years, unlike the more realistic interpretation of her skills against the worm in Three’s a Company. Nothing super complex, but enough to upgrade pretty much everything she didn’t have normally by a ton.
 
In fact her lack of manipulating the environment suggests that maybe her non-unicorn instincts had a large control over her fighting.

@CronoM
 
That’s… actually a very distinct possibility, though I should note that I don’t really remember Twilight doing anything super complex. More complex than she normally would be, yes, but nothing super fancy beyond moving much faster and making bigger beams than normal. To clarify, I would see using her magic to alter and manipulate the environment to gain an advantage in the fight as well as doing all sorts of flips and loops in her flying as “super complex.”

@Hateot  
That is a ridiculous stretch even compared to your earlier argument.
 

@CronoM  
If you break it down, Twilight’s tactics for the rest of the fight were also basically “fly at him in a straight line and shoot.” She teleports to Tirek’s blind spot only twice in that fight.
 
Admittedly, the second time she used it she sent Tirek to the ground with a meteor smash, which I think was a cool move but I wouldn’t fully agree that executing it would take a huge amount of skill. Mostly just raw power.
 
I guess the way how I explain it to myself is that without a power boost (even as an alicorn) Twilight doesn’t have the energy reserves needed to pull off combat tricks as easily as a more technical fighter could do while expending much less energy. So when she can she substitutes technique with strength and just brute-forces it.

@Hateot  
We aren’t talking about complex or varied compared to Tirek, we are talking about impossibly complex and varied compared to what Twilight is actually capable of.
 
And I partially agree with you regarding Twilight on the fight. At least, the first 30 seconds of it. Then Twilight’s fighting skills go beyond any territory she would know of.
 
I’m pretty sure you don’t need me to outline a more specific description, the scenes after the first 30 seconds of the fight speak for themselves.

@CronoM  
To me it didn’t really feel like her fighting skills were altered that much for the fight.
 
She was just attacking and attacking everything thrown at her with one huge magic blasts after another or moving away by teleporting whenever she had to get out of a tight spot. She’s been primarily using these two in her previous struggles, so the combat maneuvers seen there just didn’t feel all that complex or varied on Twilight’s part compared to all the things Tirek did.

@Background Pony #9158  
As for the rest:
 
I agree that would be a possible explanation, but they made the gap between what she could and what she couldn’t do, too huge for it to be considered natural.
 
And it doesn’t help they did it not only on the power front, but on the martial and combat skill front as well. If it was the former without the latter, that would of been believable, but even the extremely accepting fans have acknowledged that it looked like she trained with Goku for a month with those powers. Her skill sure didn’t increase by even close to that when she was trying to save her sister-in-law from the huge worm. She was still awkward, although she definitely handled herself a bit more then Cadence since Cadence isn’t really an adventurer.
 
Skill can’t increase from a 3 to an 11 at the drop of the hat, let’s be a little realistic here.

@Jarkes  
No problem. :)
 
Yeah, I think I know the guy you mean. Can’t remember his name off the top of my head, but I think I’ve tried to mediate the guy once or twice in conversations. He is WAY too aggressive and inflexible with his arguments, and your right, he almost never gives counter arguments, its all attack, attack, attack with him.