Unpopular opinion time

@Crystal Neighybánya  
Not if he is somehow possessed by something…

@Jades  
Glimmer’s problem is that she’s plain crazy: friendship lessons aren’t going to change that.

@Crystal Neighybánya  
But why would she be anything to him? If anything, she was the weird girl with mental issues no one would be friends with that his parents made him play with when he was a colt.
 
 
@Jades  
The show showed Starlight thinking that they were friends. He couldn’t have been happier that he had an excuse to get out of there.

@Itsthinking
 
The reason I think the show thought they were friends was because Twilight never points it out despite you know being a Princess of Friendship.

@Jades  
Well we all know she’s still learning herself.

Are we talking about Glimmer again?
 
…yep
 

 
Alright, I’m gonna make an unpopular opinion here: I’m officially past the point of caring about any discussion related to Starlight Glimmer’s role in the finale whatsoever, regardless of whether it’s civil or not. I don’t care to speculate much about anything, and after the note the S5 finale left us on, I’m honestly tired of hearing about it.
 
To be clear, I’m not stopping the rest of you guys, I’m just venting. I’ll try my best to keep tuning it out, but I don’t wanna take part in any discussions until S6 starts up again. I encourage you guys to continue your debates among yourselves, but I just don’t wanna get sucked into any of it for quite a while.

@HeadlessHorselessHorseman  
‘‘For Whom The Sweetie Belle Tolls’’ was the first episode to show her being particularly cruel  
To ho ho ho, not by a long shot.  
 
Gabby Gums was her idea back in Season 2.
 
 
So was this hot mess.
 
When she was fantasizing about having proper Unicorn thaumakinesis, her first thought was using it to torment Diamond Tiara.
 
She’s a good kid, but don’t get on her bad side.
 
@Crystal Neighybánya  
her motivation in the finale didn’t make sense  
From her perspective, she had a good thing going in her little conformist village– and the sudden opportunity to spread her vision across all of Equestria– when this punk upstart from the outside world swooped in and ruined everything; she was clearly deranged already, so haring off on a mad vengeance scheme to wreck that upstart’s life after her own had been turned upside down makes perfect sense.
 
I liked her better in the premiere than I did in the finale  
I really wish there’d been a little more to link the two.
 
why was she so good at magic in the first place?  
Crazy is one hell of a motivator; there’s a reason why so many top scientists are autistic as buck, and the position of CEO pre-selects for sociopathy.
 
lazy writing  
Lazy writing, or lazy viewing? If you’re one of the ones who constantly complains about the show being written like it was intended for eight year olds or something, it doesn’t really help your case if you’re not willing to invest even a little bit of effort into trying to figure out why the things that happen onscreen might logically have happened. I for one don’t mind at all not having every tiny little detail spelled out for me in thirty foot high letters of fire.
 
@PonyPon  
how the hell that the map, an entirely new thing that could not possibly have anything about it published or easily accessible in any equestrian informational source would help her spell work  
It’s almost like she was in the background spying on Twilight throughout the season, looking for ways to %#$& with her.
 
@Itsthinking  
I just don’t want Sunburst to have some sort of guilt about this  
I would love a scene of “Starlight? Whoa, where have you been all these years? I always hoped you would write to me when I went off to the Academy, but you never did, so I thought maybe you didn’t like me any more once I got my cutie mark.” Really twist the friendship knife on the subject of her actions having unintended consequences, use the opportunity to teach Target Audience a specific lesson about considering how the things they do (or don’t do) will affect those around them.

@TexasUberAlles  
Hey, that could work too. Two completely opposite interpretations that would both take Glimmer down a few pegs and give her a real moment of self-reflection.

@TexasUberAlles  
But how would she get information on the map that way?
 
Nobody seems to know exactly how it works. It never explains anything itself. And as far as we know, Twilight hasn’t cracked any big secrets about it. How would she figure it out?

@TexasUberAlles
 
That last part…I really hope that actually happens in Season 6.

@Itsthinking  
give her a real moment of self-reflection  
Maybe one that doesn’t involve the complete destruction of an entire continent for a change.
 
@PonyPon  
But how would she get information on the map that way?  
By… sneakin’ in and studying it? She was able to come and go from the castle without being spotted, so there’s no reason to think she wasn’t spying on the Mane Six when they got their marching orders and figured out how that was working, at least well enough to bodge it together with the modified spell.

@TexasUberAlles
 
I still want my Sweetie Belle learning dark magic episode. I’d feel that be more interesting than Twilight anyways.

@TexasUberAlles  

 
Why’d her desire for vengeance completely override her main goal, namely that of spreading her brand of equality across Equestria? Aside from one scene of her preaching to Fluttershy, she seemed to have completely given up on spreading equality in favor of fucking with Twilight Sparkle and her friends. Didn’t it ever occur to her that she could alter the past so her plans would come to fruition? You could argue that’s what she was trying to do, but she never said that was her goal: throughout the episode, Glimmer explicitly stated that her goal was revenge, not to prevent Twilight Sparkle from ruining her plans.
 
@TexasUberAlles  

 
Same.
 
@TexasUberAlles  

 
Did you seriously just insinuate that “autistic = crazy?” Are you even the slightest bit aware of how offensive that is?
 
@TexasUberAlles  

 
Since when was expecting a reasonable explanation for something “lazy viewing?” All I want to know is how she got so damn good at magic.

@Crystal Neighybánya  
Why’d her desire for vengeance completely override her main goal  
Because she was bonkers. Her desire for vengeance very nearly overrode the fact that she had seen the desolate wasteland of Equestria’s broken future firsthoof; supervillains who go right ’round the bend on mad quests for self-defeating revenge have featured prominantly in actual History books many, many times.
 
All I want to know is how she got so damn good at magic  
Nobody remembers anymore that it was 23 episodes into Season 1 before we got an explanation for why Twilight was so good at magic.

@TexasUberAlles  
For once I agree with you. By the time she sucked Twilight and Spike into that time loop, it wasn’t about equality or herself or cutie marks or whatever. She just wanted Twilight and her friends to suffer for perceived injustices against her.

@Itsthinking  
I’m a big Spike fan, too, you smooth talker.

@TexasUberAlles  
Don’t know how that’s relevant, but segue I guess. Spike has three infamous episodes (regardless of actual quality of them) and everyone hates them and dreads any future ones but Dash has three infamous episodes and people don’t dread hers? Bull.

@Itsthinking  
I know a lot of people have dumb poop opinions about Mysterious Mare Do Well and for some reason seem to think that Dash was literally selling Fluttershy into actual slavery for realz in Trade Ya, but what other one are you thinking of, Rainbow Falls because Dick!Spitfire?

@TexasUberAlles  
Rainbow Falls, MMDW, and Trade Ya! for the “Unholy Dash Trinity,” while the Spike counterpart is Spike At Your Service, Princess Spike, and Owl’s Well That Ends Well. Sometimes you can put Daring Don’t on the Dash list to make it a tetrarchy.

@TexasUberAlles  

 
Fair enough. I suppose I shouldn’t expect any sort of ideological consistency from a madmare like Glimmer.
 
@TexasUberAlles  

 
A valid point. I suppose we’ll have to wait until next season to learn how she became a wiz at all things magic.

Sunburst seems like an asshole.

@Crystal Neighybánya  
I don’t know that’s even so much a matter of ideological consistency as just plain mental stability; she still seemed to believe in her lunatic anti-individualism ideal there at the end– shouting “How can a group of ponies that are so different be so important?!” while ripping the scroll– when it was keeping her from accepting that the blasted hellscape was the result of her jihad. She seemed to have decided that it was Twilight and her friends who had ruined her nascent utopia, therefore Twilight and her friends needed to be punished before she could continue her work anything else happened. Her actions don’t make a lick of sense if you think of her as an evil but otherwise rational person– it was stupid to abandon a cause she seemed to believe in (or a model of petty tyranny that had worked before if she’s viewed as just an ordinary villain) for revenge against the Mane six– but they’re perfectly in line with how a crazy-ass obsessive nutjob would act; she just transferred the blame for all the problems she’d had in her life from cutie marks in general to the Mane Six in particular.
 
@ice1517  
Sunburst seems like an asshole  
We don’t have any clue about his side of the story, though, so it’s entirely possible that he did try to keep Starlight in his life and she refused to accept it once she’d hardened her heart against him everything. She’s a, uh, seriously unreliable narrator. Maybe his parents were jerks and didn’t want him associating with blankflanks, or maybe he just never had as much of an emotional investment in her as she had in him and never realized how much his leaving affected her.

@ice1517  
Sunburst was a problem for me because our sympathies to Starlight were supposed to be centered around this new character we know nothing about and therefore, don’t care about. Maybe they could have done something where the friend was somebody from her village. Maybe Double Diamond; he seemed to be pretty loyal to Starlight’s philosophy before finding out what she did. But Sunburst– I don’t know who this guy is. Why should I care?

@ice1517  
This kind of grinds my gears. We have no explanation of who Sunburst is or how he acts, but because one of his actions upset Starlight, many people have labeled him an asshole. And this is when he was a little kid! Twilight did something very similar to Moondancer, when they were adults!
 
To be fair though, that is partially the show’s fault. They threw Sunburst into Starlight’s backstory just to give her a reason for being bitter, albeit not a very good one when you compare it to her actions, all without actually developing Sunburst’s character at all.

@Background Pony #D72C  
we don’t really know if he tried to write back or not. It still seemed like a dickish move on his part. Maybe when s6 hits, we will find out if he did or didn’t try and keep in con tact with her.
 
Also, Bats! was a good episode.