I think the worst thing about how this ended is I fear that it tainted the show. That’s the worst sort of ending, the kind that makes it hard to go back and enjoy what you used to love because you know where it went in the end.
You’re not wrong. Without revealing anything, I am saddened by what the writers chose to do. I’m talking about the part that involved nightmarish disproportionate punishments against characters not credibly capable of doing further harm, meted out eagerly and gleefully by a character previously noted for being kind and merciful to a fault, to the point where it came back to bite her multiple times in the early seasons. Where was this merciless cruelty when Discord betrayed her and went on multiple world-threatening rampages after promising to be good? Where was this thirst for vengeance when Starlight Glimmer destroyed the world not once, but multiple times, requiring the use of dangerous forbidden time travel magic to fix? Where was the smirking delivery of a magical death sentence (how do you say “lex dura, sed lex” in Equestrian?) when Trixie was overthrowing local governments and setting herself up as a dictator? I suppose forgiveness is cheap and easy for insane alien chaos gods who repeatedly prove themselves untrustworthy. It’s easy to forgive quasi-Marxist terrorists willing to create time paradoxes and destroy the world. But when it’s a single deposed Changeling queen who has no army, no followers, who longer even has access to particularly powerful magic, plus a prepubescent filly who is entirely lacking in magical superpowers, now, NOW it’s time to make terrifying examples. Leaving entirely aside the subtext that comes across to the Primary Demographic (“bad little girls get turned to stone forever”), which is about as subtle as an asteroid impact, I have to ask, did the people who wrote this ever watch an episode of the show? I am left shaking my head in bewilderment.
I am not going to pound on the keyboard about my outrage, because I’m not outraged. I’m not angry. I’m not indignant. I’d be lying if I said I weren’t disappointed and disillusioned–and I say this as someone who’s been lowering his expectations further every season since Lauren Faust’s departure. I guess I just didn’t lower them far enough. I didn’t want to give up on the series. I thought it was possible–not likely, but possible–that something in the last season could come out as being worth watching, that the season and the series might have a satisfactory ending that would be worth seeing. I already didn’t expect much and thought that any surprises I got from the show would be pleasant ones, but I suppose not. I guess we’ll always have fanfiction.
