@Background Pony #4B96
Very original way to tell someone to scram without ever thinking of a proper rebuttal.

@Background Pony #4B96
Last time I checked, Discord didn’t make much of an effort compare to Starlight.

this is how the show works characters mess up and they learn
same with starlight and every other character

@Red-Supernova
your also wrong they both owe up to their mistakes

@Red-Supernova
get a life

Eh, still better than Discord. At least Starlight owes up to her mistakes.

Riiiiigggghhhhtt…

@PuffyDearlySmith
It’s not. It’s beating a crater into the ground the horse died on in order to declaim Ron as a Death Eater & to keep Starlight living rent-free somewhere other than Twilight’s castle.

Kinda like a blind man holding an elephant’s trunk but concluding that he’s holding something else.

Yeah, these screeds are definitely tiresome, especially now. They were annoying even when they were still relevant. Now, it’s just Johnny Come Lately doing what I described to @PuffyDearlySmith.

@Background Pony #FE9C
That’s a big issue. Just because she admitted she made a mistake doesn’t stop her from doing it again. The point is to understand her mistake and never doing it again, not just saying “I was wrong” and then doing it again like she was Logan Paul, who apologized because of what he did in the suicide forest and then socking some dead rats.

The characters in the show have been questioning Discord’s intentions because he was evil in season 2, that makes perfect sense. But the fact that they didn’t give the same treatment to Starlight was not only inconsistent, but also scary. She reminds me of Roman Roy from Succession but without the self-awareness aspect of the show.

Starlight let a single negative incident as a child influence her whole outlook on life, and with no friends and a father who evidently wasn’t any help grew into a full adult without ever questioning her moral compass because she had convinced herself that she knew what was right and didn’t have a healthy reference to draw from. Only when Twilight came around did she really question what she really wanted or what felt right, and while this doesn’t excuse her actions, can you fault someone who, for probably 20-25~ years, had an unchanging moral compass for not becoming a good person overnight? She made mistakes while she was effectively relearning how to be a person and Twilight was exceptionally forgiving and helped her through it, which clearly helped because after the season six finale the mistakes of this nature basically stop happening. (She’s still an impulsive/whatever whatever person, but that’s more of a personality quirk than a moral thing)

In regards to your personal opinions, I think you let her redemption arc over the course of season six affect how you viewed her through the rest of the show, because as I’ve said she becomes a noticeably more caring and understanding pony through Twilight’s tutoring and the mistakes cut down to null.

I don’t mean to be toxic or whatever, but I’ve seen far too many people not even give her a chance/vehemently hate her because she seems “evil” at face value and at this point I’m just tired of it.

@Background Pony #FE9C
She didn’t use magic to purposefully manipulate anyone’s mind again after Season 6, and the last time she used magic on anyone at all in a bad way was Royal Problem in Season 7, so she did stop. The whole point was that Twilight took her under her wing to teach her friendship and how to be a better pony, so of course she’s going to try and be patient when Starlight has some screw-ups.

People are really trying hard to defend her in the comments.

I think that the idea that “at least she understood what she did was wrong” isnt enough to justify the repetition of her actions and the countless times they go unpunished. Yes it’s great that she knew it was wrong, but that obviously didnt stop her from doing harmful magics again. You dont see a judge letting someone go just because they admit that what they did was wrong.

Seasons 6 and 7 were the perfect look at what happens when you try to befriend a textbook sociopath. Maybe she was trying to be better, but it never changed the fact that she can’t feel empathy, doesn’t understand consent, and is genuinely blind to the wrong in her actions until Twilight explains it to her. And it was a continuous, consistent, harmful thing the whole time.

Discord let himself get zapped to provoke her and make her look like a psycho in front of kids

She was actually most of the way home by the time she realized her mistakes. If it was just that the wagon was too big it would have made more sense for her to just keep going rather than turning around and going all the way back. It was having time to think, facing the challenge without Trixie and seeing the other two ponies that made her realize her mistake. Yes, she initially dismissed Trixie and that was wrong, but she initially didn’t understand what she’d done wrong and just saw Trixie seemingly valuing a Wagon over her due to how Trixie said things. Sometimes it takes a bit of time to realize what you’ve done wrong.

No, you can’t just “Apologize abuse away” but this is the only incident where Starlight did something like this to Trixie, she recognized her mistakes and apologized and also made up for it and Trixie chose to forgive her because they’re good friends.

Maybe Starlight would benefit from some kind of therapy or mental health help, but I feel like you’re ignoring all the progress she does make on her own. She consistently becomes a better person in every season she’s in, it’s just that she starts from such a low place that it takes her a while to finally get to being mostly normal.

@Background Pony #7E30
If Starlight had realized what she’d done was wrong because of the way it had hurt Trixie, then you would have a point. But she was completely dismissive of her and only fixed it after it was clear she couldn’t pull the larger wagon on her own.

Things like that do lasting damage. Starlight demonstrated that not only did she have power over Trixie’s things, but those things were worthless to her. You can’t just apologize abuse away. Considering both this, and the fact that Starlight could get away with just about everything by apologizing, Trixie would have ample reason to feel afraid of Starlight. She’s dangerous and unstable, and her self control issues are so bad it can be mistaken for sociopathy.

Starlight doesn’t need to ‘learn from her mistakes’, she needs a psychiatrist and a prescription.

Well if you put anyone’s life mistakes on one peice of paper. It’s easy for anyone to judge that person and call them horrible. Just move on. Get over it already. It’s like the people who hold grudges on others and kost specifically Discord haters even though it showed discord like 20 years later and hes obviously learned from his mistakes. Yet people still hold a grudge.

I mean, I bet if I put all your life mistakes on one paper, youd get quite alot of angry and annoyed people with you. Same would go for anyone else in the world lol. I mean, I ain’t wrong bucko. 🤔 then again I don’t really use this site enough to care. So your word.

@Hyperjade
It was an abusive thing to do, but she realized she bucked up and went back to fix it. That’s the whole point of the show, characters screwing up and having to learn lessons. Starlight wasn’t intending to hurt Trixie by trading the wagon, she was trying to solve a problem and didn’t think of how that’d hurt Trixie. Which doesn’t excuse what she did or make it okay, but makes it more forgivable provided she apologizes and makes it right and doesn’t make a consistent pattern of treating Trixie that way. Which she doesn’t.

What Starlight did to Trixie in Road to Friendship was literally emotional abuse. She didn’t even need to use magic to make Trixie feel worthless and helpless, and for what, because Starlight was somewhat annoyed and inconvenienced?

This is the kind of thing that attracts the kind of people who will hyperfixate on an abuse victim’s flaws to try and protect Starlight from the reality that her character has really messed up implications overall. The same kind of silencing tactics people use on abuse victims in real life.

“Intent vs Execution” is a difficult conversation to have sometimes, but My Little Pony is a show about teaching lessons to children. The execution is more important than anything else in a show about themes and lessons.

I just want to point out that Starlight basically did nothing wrong when she turned Sunburst into a foal? She got the idea to use her magic to bond with Sunburst from Twilight, she created a spell she thought would do the trick, showed it to him and only cast it once he showed and interest in it, and then stopped the spell the moment she realized it was making it uncomfortable. Yes, what she did was strange, but she wasn’t trying to manipulate him in anyway, she just unintentionally made him uncomfortable. That’s it.

On top of that, the Hypnosis was done with Twilight’s consent and was meant to help her, it only didn’t work right because Pinkie interrupted it, the incident in Bottled Up was an accident caused by her actually trying to NOT do something bad in the first place, and Discord had that blast coming because he was terrorizing the students, actual kids. Him insulting her was just the straw that broke the camel’s back and it wasn’t even an attack spell despite how it looked, just a spell to banish him from school grounds.

Starlight has her flaws, but I feel like you’re trying way too hard to attribute malicious intent to some things that weren’t done with it here.

@Myoozik
Agreed.
@Conscious Donkey
Also agreed.

On the other hoof, she is aware of her… uhm… personality flaws, so she is not a lost cause yet.

@Myoozik
The irony being, her unintenionally infecting others with her rage was an attempt at avoiding two of her big flaws: anger issues and trigger-happiness.

Erinnert irgendwie an Mich selbst bedingt 😂😅

You’re right, you’re not a horrible pony, you’re a really great pony! <3
Being serious, the manipulation thing depends on the context on when it was used within the episode.

Her blasting Discord was completely justified giving how much he put the students’ lives in danger in the episode and couldn’t let go the fact that he wasn’t put in charge of the school. His rant about how she herself is far from the perfect candidate for the job may have weight to it, if not for the fact that he’s pretty much guilty of the same. Her selling the wagon I’m pretty sure didn’t have anything to do with magic at all and was more just a conscious decision and an agreement she had with him so I don’t know if that counts as “manipulation”. Her switching the Princesses cutie marks was a sudden impulsive decision since any and all tactic that she was doing was clearly not working and the two sisters were getting ready to tear each other apart. She did feel remorse about it not even ten seconds later and felt guilty and the fact that in the end it actually worked and they got back on speaking terms again. Her turning Sunburst to a child wasn’t out of malicious intent, she was just getting jealous that she was drifting apart from her childhood friend and it didn’t even last long. Her causing Big Mac to talk was because she was still new in the idea of making friends and this was early on in her character development, she barely understood the ideas of social cues and again, it didn’t last long and was more of just a gag. Her hypnotizing Twilight wasn’t manipulation at all and she was just doing her job to help Twilight cure her fear of ladybugs. Not to mention that it is an actual method used by psychiatrists to treat their patients and the Princess even gave her consent to it. Her turning the Mane 5 into brainless zombies is the only instance I can agree with you there and to be fair she was called out mercilessly throughout so it’s not like she got off scot-free. Lastly, her anger getting into the other three wasn’t even her own fault, the bottles just happened to have broken right in front of them since she was fighting with Trixie about them, bottled up anger which she was doing because she was actively trying to learn to not let her emotions get to her.

So all in all, not everything that she did was out of malicious intent, it’s not like she was feeling glee in making others miserable, she had valid reasons for doing what she did. It’s called character development and it’s a slow process that doesn’t just happen overnight. So those arguments about her making the same mistakes that make her great are pretty exaggerated and are not a reflection of her character overall.

This feels like beating a dead horse(pun unintended).