Season 7 Episode Discussion [Speculation, Discussion, Spoilers] (SPOILER YOUR LEAKS)

Rent-free house, royal mentor, access to all the resources one could ever want, friends, people who at least pretend to be her friends.
 
If I Were in Equestria I’d become a super villain and go on a crime spree, seems to be no downside to it

@Der_Fur_Shur  
That’s what Tirek thought.

@Der_Fur_Shur  
Are you a female unicorn with a tragic backstory?

@Philweasel  
“Tragic”

@Applejack007  
Well given values of tragic here. None of the ‘Twilight kicked my ass and now I understand friendship’ society had excessively good reasons for trying to take over the world.

@Philweasel  
In Equestria you can’t let your friendship value drop to zero or you become a villain.

@Background Pony #B735  
Only at negative twenty do you become irredeemable.

@DanielTepesKraus
 
She wasn’t really given everything she wanted though. One of the things people complain about STarlight is that she spent her time in season 6 moping despite being given ‘everything she wanted’. The cast didn’t really treat her like they were that close, and she clearly felt like shit for AGES, even when she was alone. Almost all of her episodes revolve around her being terrified of LOSING friends. That doesn’t seem like someone who’s in a happy, pacified place to me. She has nam style flashbacks when Sunburst is mentioned. She runs off crying after she thinks TRixie (the first friend she actually felt close to) betrayed her and doesn’t instantly become a monster again. She has a little breakdown when her town try to make her any kind of authority again, because she knows she was the type to brainwash people and thinks she can’t be trusted. She’s terrified that her anger will lead to her losing Trixie again in All Bottled Up and magically changes HERSELF rather than those around her. She’s terrified that she’s growing apart from Sunburst in Uncommon Bond.
 
These are not the actions of someone who is comfortable with their place in life. At least to me.
 
Also, Starlight “destroyed” time to destroy Twilight’s happiness because from her perspective that’s exactly what Twi did to her, and she staunchly didn’t believe that she wAS hurting anyone else.

@Philweasel  
she had her town and it’s townsfolk which would have been friends, a home, and emotional support, if only she of her own free will didn’t decide to force them to suffer under her rule under penalty of torture and brainwashing. it’s a bit like someone who complains about being overweight but eats fast food five nights a week and can’t be bothered to exercise.
 
@gingerninja666  
to be honest, if she’s still not happy, even after being given all that, then we can add “selfish brat” to the list of things wrong with her.
 
that’s honestly why i can’t stand that character. she’s entirely to blame for her bad place in life, she gleefully and willingly cartwheeled over the moral event horizon on multiple occasions, and now that everything has worked out in her favor with absolutely zero consequences or effort on her part she’s still not happy.

@DanielTepesKraus
 
But she doesn’t take out her not being happy on other people. Not anymore really. She doesn’t whine about her place in life. Also, what about those times in TWABA and All Bottled Up where she’s terrified of her own actions because she knows what she was like?
 
It sounds like she’s screwed no matter what happens from your perspective. If she’s happy then she’s just been “Pacified”, and if she’s not happy then she’s a “brat”. Maybe she’s not happy because she’s not a very emotionally stable person a lot of the time and is terrified of being a failure? Of screwing up the things that she’s been given?

@gingerninja666  
i think the big thing really is how gleefully she dove headfirst into doing these really appallingly evil things and never got any consequences for it. if she was just this emotionally unstable person who was terrified of failure and had no real social skills she’s be fine (well, aside from being literally identical to s1 twilight sparkle). it’s that they try to use that as an excuse to entirely justify doing these really inexcusably horrible things.
 
i don’t necessarily mean her consequences could be punishments either. if she actually had to start from the bottom and earn forgiveness, prove she truly intended to be good now, and work hard to keep the trust of the mane six, that would be one thing. her “redemption” just started her out fully absolved of everything and blindly loved and trusted by everyone around her. all of her “struggles” and “problems” are only implied and told, rather than shown. her emotional instability never pops up because she has no problems whatsoever interacting with others on an emotional level: they either warm up to her instantly, don’t react to the bad things she does, or the narrative somehow sets her up to succeed with no problems. answer me this: has she ever been rejected by any of the mane six? have any of them ever said outright “i don’t trust her and don’t want her around”, or even shown any real reluctance to having such a “dangerous emotionally unstable” person around?
 
to put it a different way, it would be as if rather than rainbow dash actually doing arrogant and obnoxious things sometimes, she only ever complained from time to time “oh i’m so arrogant and obnoxious” or had other characters remark on her arrogance and obnoxiousness, but never actually showed it.
 
i will say, however, that the only time she becomes somewhat interesting is when they team her up with trixie. trixie’s the only character who has any chemistry at all with her, and they actually let trixie get some digs at starlight.

@DanielTepesKraus
 
I thought that was the case in Every Little Thing, honestly. Rainbow Dash outright screamed at her and I don’t think she was portrayed as being in the wrong for doing so either. Same thing with AJ getting angry at her for using magic on Big Mac. She wasn’t wrong for being mean, and it wasn’t really portrayed as Starlight being a scamp. AJ was actually mad. Neither of those smacked of them blindly loving her to me. The whole opening of No Second Prances in general was about Starlight failing to really connect with any of the mane 6 and screwing up her attempts to make friends. That’s when she found Trixie who she had a very specific reason for getting along with.

@gingerninja666  
they just don’t play it up enough, and nothing ever sticks. i love redemption stories when they actually focus on the character’s progression from evil to good, but it just seems tacky when all of her “struggles” are only implied.

@DanielTepesKraus  
It’s my little pony man, I really don’t think they want to get too grim and serious with this stuff. The fact that Scootaloo is disabled, Diamond Tiara has an abusive mom, Rarity’s friends have repeatedly torpedoed her career, the Apples are orphans… none of these things are ever treated quite as seriously as they are in the real world, and all of them tend to be resolved after one episode and a pretty moral lesson.
 
…and thank god for that.
 
Starlight’s actually got one of the longest arcs out of her issues, with all her episodes in season 6 pretty much being about her redemption and her trials in becoming a better person. This is an arc that Sunset and Tempest did in one movie, and Discord still hasn’t really made a lot of progress on.

@DanielTepesKraus
 
I feel like if you looked back on episodes about Starlight and watched them without the explicit expectation that she be punished and knowing that MLP episodes ALWAYS have happy endings, you’ll see Starlight struggling and having a harrowing time a lot more than you might think, and the cast don’t act quite as “all adoring” as some people think they do. I kinda feel like that was an idea that came about through the montage at the end of season 5, because AJ and RD and Pinkie have no qualms being mad at her when she screws up, and she’s just kind of awkward around the rest of the remane 5.

@Philweasel  
Sunset had two movies, which adds up to about 7 episodes, roughly the same time Starlight got in season 6.

@EotD
 
I consider Sunset to have been fully redeemed at the end of Rainbow Rocks. She directly sung a song to summon a giant friendship alicorn (big flashy stuff like that is still something that Star hasn’t done yet)
 
And if you’re counting EQG1 in there then we should count Season 5 for Starlight, since they were both villains for the entirety.

@gingerninja666  
No, does like nobody remember EQG 3 outside of the fact that everyone has the survival instinct of lemmings?

@EotD
 
No, I remember it, I just think that Sunset was already well passed Starlight by the time EQG3 started. (you can totally consider that a Feather in Sunset’s cap too)
 
I’d say only now, maybe, has Starlight reached the level Sun was at the end of RR, with them both being able to give Twilight advice to help save the day.

@EotD  
I consider Friendship Games being to Sunset what “Shadow Play” was to Starlight.

@Philweasel
 
I’d consider Mirror Magic as the closest Starlight has come to being handled similarly to Sunset, which of course, is actually pretty ironic. For starters, you have Sunset being surprisingly and uncharacteristically lost for answers and seeking advice. Starlight fills that position instead. Next, while Sunset would have been the one to talk down Juniper under any normal circumstances, she is instead given the “mane five” treatment and taken out so that Starlight can take one hundred percent of the credit for reforming her (unlike in TWABA).
 
Weird to think how the writers were actually willing to take Sunset down a few notches, yet it was only for the purpose of building Starlight up.

@Spinny  
That’s because Starlight is the “big thing” in the main franchise now, so having her be better than the main character of the sub-franchise was a very easy way to beef her up further. It’s really the only reason Mirror Magic exists, even though it was advertised as both Sunset going to Equestria and Sunset teaming up with Starlight (both happened, but in a real bait-and-switch kind of way).
 
A Friendship to Remember would’ve made a much better special than the three “Magic” ones.

@Background Pony #270E
 
Though people also ignore how Starlight would’ve also been captured were it not for Sunset.

Sunset sacrificing herself in order for others to go on and save the day… I guess she is like Celestia after all.
 
It’s also how “A Friendship to Remember” ends, pretty much.

@Philweasel  
this is the same character though who, in her first appearance, ran a town modeled after a wwii era pow camp, used torture and brainwashing to break people into subservience, and had the truly dark line of “you can’t have a nightmare if you never dream”, and in her second appearance caused several lifetimes worth of suffering and death spread over multiple timelines giving us visuals like a child being drafted to war and this truly dark scene, all for the sake of destroying time itself for petty revenge. the boat’s kind of sailed on it not being grim and serious, and honestly her weak “happily ever after lol we luv you now” ending probably would have worked if he hadn’t well-established her as one of the absolute most horrible people to ever appear on screen.
 
i actually felt more sorry for discord because, honestly, he was less evil than she was. what it boils down to for me is i don’t have even an ounce of sympathy for this character because even if she did have a bad upbringing or does have a brain disorder, or whatever her motives are or were, it doesn’t even come close to justifying all the horrible things she’s done. and that’ll never change.
 
@gingerninja666  
nah. if they hadn’t gone so far in using such dark visuals to hammer home exactly how much suffering this truly awful character inflicted, and all for the disgustingly selfish motive of “my boyfriend dumped me”, i’d honestly would be able to buy such a limp redemption.