Cozy Glow

Cozy Glow is a genius - at least by pony standards. She weaponizes her own cuteness to win the trust of Twilight, (and manipulates her into suspecting Tirek, going to Tartarus, and getting locked inside via use of an artifact that Cozy had personally packed in Twilight's saddlebag).

She wins the trust of the student body of the Friendship School via populism. And when Chancellor Neighsay takes over, and she finds herself unable to bend him to her will, she turns the PTA against him.

When she finds the Young Six trying to undermine her own evil magic-siphoning glyph, she turns the herd against them too, using equicentric and xenophobic rhetoric to appeal to the hidden prejudices of the herd.

She's the smartest villain in the MLP: FiM universe, and a perfect foil to...well...everything.

Because the only folks that she can't fool are other villains. She weaponizes her own adorableness. She preys on trust. And unlike Queen Chrysalis, Cozy Glow does it using her wits alone.

As bad as a role model as she may be if taken literally, she's also an oddly empowering figure. You don't actually need to be the strongest to keep yourself from being stepped on. You just need to play to your own strengths. Cozy Glow is an amplification of Rarity's behavior in Dog and Pony Show seven years earlier, only...making it just plain Evil.

Despite all of this advanced manipulation - despite her ability to outmaneuver every adult who crosses her path - her plan is still fundamentally...childish. Believing friendship to be "power," she reasons that by amassing the most friends, she will rule the world. It's the one aspect of Cozy Glow that's oddly fitting to her schoolfilly stature.

And it's fitting that her classmates bring her down. It is the children who recognize for themselves that her own rhetoric does not align with the friendship lessons they'd learned in class. It is the children who see, in the Young Six, the actual manifestation of the Power of Friendship as they struggle to save one another, even in great peril.

She tries to counter-argue that friendship lessons "aren't applicable in all circumstances," but the kids won't listen anymore. Her fundamental misunderstanding of what friendship (and its magic) entails is both her driving force, and her own undoing.

This makes her the perfect villain.

Because she can outwit the Mane Six, and Chancellor Neighsay - she can manipulate the general populace for a while - but an enlightened populace cannot forever be steered by a tyrant.

In the end, it isn't the Mane Six who save Equestria. It's the kids - those who learned their friendship lessons. The Young Six, and their Elements ex Machina. The student body, and their firmly rooted values and deep understanding of friendship.

That's the perfect lesson for the themes of Season 8, and its expansion of friendship as a mission. It's a perfect lesson for our own times too.

Discuss.
-Sprocket

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Comments

[Sugar Spoon]

I always liked how she was introduced earlier in the season as what seemed like a fairly meaningless side character. I was also always curious about what lead to a fairly young looking filly ending up at a school where the rest of the student body seemed to be teenagers.

[Reese]

Thank you, as usual, for sharing your thoughts.