what a lot of people overlook about the redemptions in the show is the main characters
don’t seem to care about things like “does this person ‘deserve’ forgiveness” or “is this person redeemable” or “is it right to treat this person as irredeemable?”
they seem to care about “how can we use this person for our own devices?” there’s not been a
single redemption of a genuine villain in the entire series that didn’t hinge on that. if the villain in question doesn’t have anything to offer them, they have
no qualms about dumping them in hell to rot and forgetting about them, or outright killing them and not so much as thinking twice about it. they’ll might tentatively let it slide if the person wasn’t a villain to begin with (thorax, ahuizotl, neighsay, trixie), but they have no interest in trying to change a genuinely bad person to good if that person can’t be put to work for equestria.
you can actually see, in the series, that suelight adopted this mentality from them. she changed from someone who would actually try to offer a genuine villain a chance at redemption for the sake of it to someone who watched her mentor tell a kid “you’re beyond redemption, sorry” and thought nothing of it.
what i’m getting at, is if you treat their motivation for redeeming people as actually believing that people can change or doing it for the sake of good and friendship, it
is a massive double-standard on their part as they seem to pick and choose who they’ll give that privilege to on a whim. when you consider their motivation for redeeming people is entirely self-serving, it’s been a wholly in-character and on-standard affair from day one.
and yeah, it sounds like i’m saying twilight is a massive hypocrite for not practicing what she preaches. yep that’s twilight’s character, 100%. she preaches that
it’s wrong to be too competitive on
two separate occasions but
has no problem acting like that herself, she takes extreme offense
to someone fucking with her to teach her a lesson on
two separate occasions but
has no problem doing it to someone else, she
expects others to forgive someone who wrong them on her behalf but
sees nothing wrong with refusing to forgive someone who wronged her on someone else’s behalf.
as for celestia, her character has always been “nice but can be cruel”, “does what she thinks is right but is far from perfect”, and “does whatever she wants to further her agenda, justice, right, wrong, and the well-being of others be damned”. with that in mind i don’t think she’s
ever acted out of character.
as for why the writers do this on a meta-level? i dunno. maybe they think giving a more substantial motivation beyond “friendship saves” to forgive horrible people makes it more believable and acceptable, maybe they think the power of friendship is stupid and are subtly making fun of it, maybe it’s just one gigantic coincidence and they never intended it to come off this way.
really, my only criticism with any of it is it’s a very cynical take on the power of friendship, as if to say it’s not worth it unless you can get something out of it.
all of that said i actually kind of dig how it makes the main characters seem like not
that good of people at heart. i’ve always been fond of morally ambiguous characters as protagonists, who seem to walk the line between good and evil all the time and struggle with the idea that they’re not good people. it’s actually one of my biggest criticisms about suelight is she would have been an
infinitely better character if they had rolled with the fact that she’s an awful person at heart and actually had characters react to it accordingly.
if you don’t feel like reading any of that, here’s a gif of a rooster chasing a karate kid
