No one expects people to justify hate for Spike or Pikie Pie or w/e. Only Starlight.
Well it might be asking a bit much to expect people to do so, but I confess to always being curious as to the “why?” whenever someone expresses dislike of a particular character. And honestly, whether I agree with their reasoning or not, I am appreciative when they do offer some form of explanation.
I think one of the problems that does come up in regard to Starlight dislike is that the problems people have with her tend to drift a lot more towards actual evidence based debate then the simple clash of opinions you might get with other characters. Someone who comes in and hates Pinkie Pie because they find shrill, excitable characters like that annoying? That’s hard to argue aside from saying that you don’t think she’s that bad, and maybe running down some of her less hyper moments. A comment about Starlight being terrible because her backstory is lacking, on the other hand, can quickly devolve into the intricacies of childhood psychological trauma, the old adage of “show don’t tell”, disagreements over how much of someone’s early life needs to be presented for their later actions to make sense, and probably a dozen other conversations on top of that. And that tends to be the situation for a lot of other opinions related to her as well, which is a big reason (I suspect) conversations surrounding dislike of her turn into lengthy, multi page discussions far more than they do for a lot of other characters. Starlight hate just tends to be a much more complicated kind of hate, no matter which side you happen to be on.
And it’s easy to end up guilty of that yourself too. The area where I almost always fall into the discussion is when people start breaking out the sociopath/psychopath comments (especially certain people around who seem to quite enjoy tweaking that particular pet peeve of mine), because diagnosable conditions are not exactly a field of personal opinion. Especially when you consider that actually determining such a thing is incredibly complicated and depends on a detailed analysis of the subject and their motivations and thoughts and actions, and that no competent mental health professional would never base a diagnosis solely on the checklist of symptoms everyone loves to bring up in that regard.
… Sorry, went a little overboard at the end there. Like I said, it gets complicated when Starlight is involved. A lot more than it tends to for other characters. And it can be really hard not to respond to stuff like that at times, which doesn’t help matters either.