@Major Insane  
TL;DR version would be Twi is who she is today as she made great friends, while Sunset’s reason would be that she used friendship as a placeholder as she came to know herself better, with great friends as a bonus.

@DAPLR  
TLDR :P

@Background Pony #3FBD  
Well, the way I see it, Sunset is something else.
 
Twilight got her alicorn powers ultimately because she understood how much friendship means to her and the means she would go to keep it. Twilight grew as a person, but it’s the bonds she made with her friends that made her eligible for alicornhood.  
Sunset on the other hand used friendship as a way to keep herself steady while she tried to understand herself. When she was ready, she approached herself in a night of contemplation and revelations (‘My Past is Not Today’)  
Sunset and her growth is a journey of self exploration and acceptance. She is her own worst enemy.
 
Oh, and I disagree on the whole, ‘closed forever’, thing. It’s very contradictive to the themes that are constant throughout the show, of redemption and forgiveness. Sunset being closed off to alicornhood because the worst thing she did was mind control a school? Well, Twilight mind controlled half the town in, ‘Episode Zero’. And when the entire town was in throes of violence and mind control, all Twilight cared about was that Celestia was going to miss the friendship letter of the week.
 
This is a fault of Twilight on the opposite end of the scale that Sunset had. Twilight cares too much of what Celestia thinks, to the point she worries more about her being disappointed in her than the well being of the town she lives in. And Celestia knew this! The whole lesson of the Season 3 opener was for Twilight to forgo a direct order from Celestia for the good of the Empire, to sacrifice her pride for everyone else.  
People stumble and fall, and Twilight has screwed up plenty. It’s about admitting mistakes and trying to do the best you can now.
 
Sunset however was a prodigy unicorn who was so obsessed with becoming the best she could be, she was horrified that the only person (that we know of) she was open to had hid a whole new world of possibilities from her (Princesshood). She was so infuriated at Celestia for rejecting her demands that she abandoned her world to try and take over another just so she could arrive back as a conqueror and show Celestia how wrong she was to doubt her.
 
While both grew in both a personal and social way;
 
Twilight became an Alicorn because of her external relationships and what they mean to her.  
Sunset became what she is now because of her internal relationship and what she means to herself.

@Background Pony #3FBD  

That’s possible, but I think it’s unlikely, considering how strongly the ideals of redemption are put forth in the rest of the show.  
I would even go so far as to suggest that, by falling and then being redeemed, and going beyond that to become the redemption for another who fell (Midnight Sparkle), she’s proven herself even more worthy than if she had successfully completed Celestia’s training and ascended that way.

Sunset didn’t ascend in the end of Friendship Games for the plain reason that she can’t.
 
The way I see it, is that once you’re found unworthy of alicornhood that door is shut forever. And she failed to listen to Celestia and got greedy, thus proving herself unworthy, and nothing can or will ever change that. Also, by the looks of it, every single one of Celestia’s students failed in one way or another before Twilight, because her ascension was something that never happened before (aside from Cadence, but she was never Celestia’s student).
 
This doesn’t mean that she can’t become something else, which seems pretty likely, but she will never be an alicorn nor a princess.
 
Of course, if Starlight Glimmer becomes an alicorn despite the things she’s pulled I really won’t know what to think.

@TheAbridgenator  

 
Well, it’s possible the equestrian educational system is a few years ‘faster’  
I still feel the whole ‘Cutie Mark’ thing would make people choose on-the-job training over a lengthy education, for several reasons, so they likely would go into the work-force at an earlier age.  
How old’s a high-schooler? It’s 8->12th ‘grade’, right? So, since they’ve been in school a while, they’re probably between 16 and 18.  
Add a few years because humans aren’t going to decide ‘who needs education, I’ve got a talent!’, and we are just generally further ahead in terms of science so there’s more to learn, and we’ve got 18-20-ish  
That’s still younger than they seem in the show, but come on, this is a show for girls.  
Not women, not even young-adult women, but for kids, older kids, and their parents.  
Of course people are a few years ahead of where they really should be.
 
Except for Rainbow.  
Rainbow’s exactly what you’d expect, if you ignore the ridiculous house (I still think cloud-houses are just really cheap. Or she’s got rich parents. Probably the former) given her ‘weather mare’ job from the start of the show is really not something she cares about, and is probably just something she did while looking for better options.  
The equivalent of working as a cashier while you’re trying to get a job in your actual major.

@DAPLR  
I actually prefer to think that Sunset is LESS powerful than Twilight and simply knows how to use her magic more efficiently as a prodigy trained by Celestia. It’s like the difference between Ichigo Kurosaki and Kenshin Himura, power and intuition vs flexibility and knowledge.
 
Other than that, Sunset is definitely portrayed as the older of the two, and time does get fucked up in EQG, especially since, in the show proper, the Mane Six are pretty clearly shown to be the pony equivalent of early twenty-somethings, but are high school girls in EQG.
 
Of course, all this is irrelevant, since the first Sunset comic pales in comparison to the 2014 Holiday Special Comic, the greatest comic ever written in this franchise. If you want consistency and respect for the characters, look no further than the 2014 Holiday Special!
 
#fuckapplebloom

@Background Pony #D58C  
For you.  

@DAPLR  
wew lad, that’s a big post
 

@FanOfMostEverything  
Vote for her for everything.

@Background Pony #E352  
I disagree wholeheartedly.  
First off, nowhere is it mentioned that Twilight and Sunset are the same age. Sunset being Celestia’s former prize pupil would naturally make her older than Twilight. Her being full grown while Twilight is a filly make sense because if Twilight was also full grown, how could she not know about Sunset? (Even with her as a filly, it’s odd, but at least more believable).  
NOW they may be the same age because the EGQ world does weird things with time. Despite being banished by Starswirl, the Dazzlings landed in present EGQ world a 1000 years later. Babs Seed is as old as Applejack. Sunset also clearly won a crown at three different events, likely annual, before the events of the first film. Inconsistent and even baffling? Yes, but it is a plot device. Sunset was older than Twilight, but currently, she doesn’t seem to be.
 
Next, I particularly enjoyed the comic for showing us what ambitions Sunset had for herself, and giving us a closer look at Celestia’s disappointment in herself for Sunset falling. It gives a interesting new light to why Celestia sent Twilight to Ponyville in the first place, to make sure Twilight didn’t suffer the same fate as Sunset. She thought that by having Twilight understand friendship as well as magic, she could keep her on the correct path.
 
Also, the scene in that comic where Sunset makes a tree/vine grow immensely with little problem shows us how powerful she is compared to Twilight. Twilight couldn’t make a plant change age for more than a second or so, saying Age Spells were only for the highest level unicorns. Sunset did that in a far more dramatic and impressive way, which could imply she was more powerful than Twilight was as a unicorn.  
Now, Twilight also did spectacular magic at a Celestia test, but she was a filly who went through a power fluctuation. When of similar age and no fluctuation, this comic showed us how incredible Sunset is at magic as a pony.
 
Lastly, seeing Celestia fail a student she loved is very interesting to read, both for how she reacts in the moment and afterwards, and how she blames herself.

@Background Pony #E352  
It’s not clear at all what their ages are. The time between the human world and the pony one could be convoluted. It would be more bizarre if they are the same age. Twilight has been a pupil of Celestia since an early age, you’d at least think she would see Sunset about. At the time, there would be no reason to separate them.

@FanOfMostEverything  
I believe they mention in the commentary pf the move that she, in fact, did not ascend.

Vote for her for what?
 
(Also, I remain convinced that Sunset ascended in the climax of Friendship Games. I am fully prepared to eat those words if proven wrong.)

@Verbose  
The art is good, that’s about it. Too many contradictions to the movie/show to be enjoyable as a story.

@Background Pony #E352
 
Is the comic any good though?
 
I suspect it is. I can usually overlook poor placement in terms of the sequence of events as long as it’s entertaining. And I certainly wouldn’t call it “terrible” because of that. Especially if it’s a comic and not a part of the sorta canon EqG movies.

@Thanotos Omega  
She still seemed to know who Twilight was & that she had the Element of Magic. If she left any time before the series premiere, she wouldn’t even have known stealing the Element of Magic was an option, because she wouldn’t have known it found.

@Background Pony #E352
 
Ohhhh ok , I don’t know why i was confused .Probably cause i just wake up xD

@Background Pony #5812  
The comic was the terrible one from 2013, and the movie is the first Equestria Girls movie.

@Background Pony #E352  
The 5 of them are among the most selfless kind and out going characters, Rarity was almost certainly the queen bee of the school before Sunset came along having a group like that would make maintaining her divide and conquer tactics all but impossible, she didn’t give a damn if they were the element bearers because that wasn’t the reason those 5 were a threat to her at the time,

waaait what comic? what MLP Annual ?what movie !?

@Thanotos Omega  
But she couldn’t know that without having seen them become the elements of harmony. She’d have no reason to see them as any more of a threat than any other characters.  
The movie also implied she was Celestia’s student around the same time as Twilight (She BEGAN her studies shortly before Twilight, not she ended them before Twilight began), and the comic has Celestia dropping her as a student and having her removed from the castle, while the movie has Celestia say Sunset left by choice and that she hoped she’d return.

@Background Pony #E352  
While i agree on most points, i would say that targeting the mane 5 would still make sense as in the human world they had already formed their group and as such didn’t need Twilight to be the heroes that would have undone all of Sunset’s work, though they were clearly incomplete without Twi or Sunset as the leader,
 
P.S. Sunset is still best,

The comic is terrible. It shows Sunset (and Twilight’s friends) as an adult when Twilight is a filly, even though the movie makes it clear they’re about the same age. Celestia says she started her studies not long before Twilight, and more importantly, Sunset knows who the Element bearers are, because she knew to work to separate them in the human world, and knew Twilight had the Element of Magic. This means she had to have gone to the human world sometime after the series premiere, otherwise she wouldn’t have bothered to turn the other girls against each other because she’d have had no idea who they were.