(S5 Finale Spoilers) The thing I still want to know... · 2:54pm Nov 29th, 2015
Okay, so, another season draws to a close. This finale was still a little painful but went down much better to my heart. (I still stop re-watching Twilight's Kingdom, a.k.a. The Tirek One, after "You'll Play Your Part," and it remains one of the few episodes in the series I just never go back to.) But there's still one thing I really, really am burning to know, and that's this:
Not every apocalypse closes with eternal night and the victory of NMM in S1. Hell, one even apparently made it all the way through S4 before getting roasted by Tirek. So how exactly were Sombra, Chrysalis, and Discord and NMM defeated in each case to pave the way for Tirek? And I know the mere existence of Tirek doesn't mean the others weren't there, so there's some wiggle room, but the thought experiment remains. Absent the Mane 6, was it just Celestia taking everyone down?
That's how I look at it. Best princess is a badass.
Addendum: I do not mention the Flim Flam Brothers one, because it seems clear to me that universes where they're defeated sans Mane 6 are just strange, bizarro universes where the Apples are not MORTGAGED OUT THEIR BUTTS FOR SOME REASON.
Well, since they all take place at the same point in time I guess that means that whoever is in charge managed to defeat everyone else that came before or after them, it's a king of the hill kind of situation.
Like NMM took care of every other villain including Tirek and kept the eternal night going, Chrisy wasn't dethroned by Sombra or Tirek, Celestia managed to keep hold of Equestria and apparently dealt with Tirek on the side in the Sombra timeline, etc.
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Industrial revolution > magic or friendship.
Well, when Starlight nixed the Mane Six before they happened, Celestia clearly found other champions of Harmony. Perhaps in that first world we saw, it was Sunset Shimmer and five other ponies who stopped Nightmare Moon and handled a number of emergencies, until they failed to prevent the return of King Sombra, and had to retreat to Canterlot in disarray, leading to years of war as Sombra's enslaved armies gobble up more and more of Equestria and ponies. (Cadence is probably around, but is Shining Armor there for her? She probably didn't have enough support to keep Sombra out long enough for Sunset and the rest to figure out a more permanent solution.)
And so on: in every iteration, there was a group of ponies fighting for Harmony, but each time they eventually failed. (In the world that Nightmare Moon ruled, they clearly failed right at the start!) Apparently, the Mane Six have an unusual connection to the Rainbow Power and the Tree of Harmony, and without that, Equestria as we know it is doomed... (Or the alt-Mane Six just have cosmic bad luck!)
I gave this some thought yesterday. For at least two of them, we know the instances were going to happen anyways: NMM's return and the Crystal Empire's return. Those were given hard timers. Also, Luna was never shown in the Crystal War timeline. It's just speculation but, perhaps she was dealt with by Celestia on her return, but not with a happy ending?
The others seem to be based on chance. Discord was freed by the CMC bickering around his statue. Maybe if the Mane 6 never became friends, those three never became friends either or started hanging out. No clue what led Cerberus away from the gates of Tartarus, but if that never happened, no Tirek. I guess someone might have noticed Chrysalis and stopped her either before everything went out of control, or at the time of. Flim and Flam? Eh...don't know why they wouldn't be stopped. They're convincing salesponies/con-artists, but all it takes is someone to say "no" to stop them before they even get started.
And I have no idea what the heck caused the Ashlands timeline. (god, I loved that bit.)
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I dunno, it's much easier to think of Celestia being the reason from stopping some of these situations, but it could easily be a matter of chance or some randompony else.
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No, see, in that universe, they became better enemies, fighting over each other for money, until one day one of them went to one of the princesses for sponsorship, and one thing led to another, which resulted in the formation of the global corporations SunShine Inc, and MoonButt LLC, which eventually rose as conglomerates with eternal spokespersons and the great Brand Wars began.
They marketed and sold everything from entertainment to food to the very air until the great year of our lord Celestia 3749 AH (Anno Harmonius) when Disney bought them both over and now they make popcorn for their theme parks.
In this universe, the Main 6 were hired as mascots.
Pinkie Pie was in the Goofy outfit.
Why do you dislike Twilight's Kingdom so much?
As for this episode, I like to think that, because of the butterfly effect, and the fact that Starlight stopped the rainboom in different ways each time, each future was one where one villain ended up winning an all out clash between them. So in one, Sombra took down the others, in another Chrysalis won, a third Nightmare Moon, the fourth Tirek, the fifth Discord, and the seventh was the result of the villains "tying", meaning that they all wiped each other and Equestria out.
Starlight stopped the Sonic Rainboom slightly differently each time. I just chalked it up to the butterfly effect from there.
I suspect that some villain are beaten by Celestia, some by other unlikely, ragtag bunches of heroes who weren't up to one challenge or another, and some by villain-on-villain violence. Tirek has shown incredible cunning when he's needed to; it's not inconceivable that he could've slipped out of Tartarus under the previous tyrant's nose and siphoned magic until he could claim dominance.
If I had to guess, I'd say he beat Ahuizotl, who in turn used his golden Tower of Hanoi to wrest control of the sun from Celestia.
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Too grim, not enough friendship, I guess. Celestia specifically instructing Twilight to not inform the other Mane 6 that she's the repository of all magic strikes me as hollow. Not that I don't understand it from a cartoon-tactical perspective, but it feels antithetical to the message of the show. Kind of like (in the comics) where the Power Ponies won the day by breaking up the relationships between the villains, using exactly the same tactics Chrysalis used in the first major comic arc. It's like, I get it, but friendship between villains is still friendship, and our heroes have no business trying to break up friendships just to win the day.
I also hate the castle. Sorry. Not only do I hate it aesthetically, I hate the implication that in Ponyville, which is ROUTINELY destroyed and rebuilt, they would leave one building in ruins. This is not organic. It's executive meddling of the worst kind, leaving Two Sisters as a massive dangling loose end while simultaneously hamstringing one of the core symbolic messages of the show: that there's all kinds of ways to be a girl and all kinds of ways to be a hero. You can, in fact, be a princess who loves, works, and lives in a library. Well, not anymore, I guess. Yeah, she's got books in the new castle. Of course she does. But the metaphorical underpinnings have been lost, and I don't like reliving the moment of the authors trying desperately to convince me that this is okay, it's all for the best, we can forget about rebuilding the library she's got a castle instead and it even kinda looks like a tree ISNT THIS SO! MUCH! BETTER!
It is quite literally my least favorite episode. And that's what I've got to say about that. Close rant tag. We like to keep things happy here in Skywriter Land because people don't generally like hanging around a moper, and I want you all to keep hanging around because I love you.
Most of the alternates probably had a crater or two somewhere left by a column of solar plasma.
Notice how Celestia is leading the charge against Sombra, but Luna is nowhere in sight.
3578092 Honestly, I don't really see Twilight's Kingdom as grim. Darker, with higher stakes, and with more action than even most two-parters? Yes. But grim? No.
I actually like how the castle looks. It's cool.
As for them leaving the library in ruins, keep in mind:
Most buildings in Ponyville are, well, regular buildings. They're most likely made out of brick, with wooden frames. Like real buildings.
But the library was literally a tree house. As in, it was an actual house inside of a tree. You can't really rebuild a tree. You can replant one, sure, but even in a place like Equestria, growing a tree of that size would probably take years, if not decades.
And, as shown in Inspiration Manifestation, replacing entire buildings with a magical spell takes a very powerful magic, even more powerful than Twilight has.
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And I honestly -- honestly! -- don't think they've done a good plot/song combination in a premiere or finale well since This Day Aria. Whilst the ending to this one was pure cringe, I vaguely remember last year's making me want to punch something, mostly because it was celebrating exactly the things you've just said.
Gargh.
Zecora could somehow sense that her timeline wasn't real in some way. Perhaps Starlight Glimmer didn't change history so much as destabilize it with cause and effect breaking down and the dead world we saw at the end the final result.
This would explain why Discord even when evil never attempted to change the past. If Starlight could do it he could and the "Weight of History," with events logically progressing is very orderly and unchaotic. But he knew even trying was a very, very bad idea.
I tend to think Celestia had backup plans, and Twilight and friends weren't exactly the only ponies that could be six best friends and use the elements of harmony. In fact, Twilight was still there in those universes. She just didn't manage to hatch Spike, and it's questionable whether she passed the exam. Of course, the thing is, that was a pretty rough exam to put her through, and doesn't seem like a standard exam, so she might have actually passed even with a failure. The extra difficulty might have been to see whether she should be Celestia's personal student.
But who knows, maybe Moondancer defeated some of those villains with her friends, or maybe Princess Cadence did, or maybe the villains in question never decided to attack. Or, of course, it could be that more than one villain conquered Equestria, and the one we see ruling is just the latest one.
I'm still curious about the dead reality, though, and how that came to pass. I would have liked to have seen more of them, too. The Chrysalis one was a lot of fun, and I wish I'd seen more then a glimpse of Discords.
--arcum42
The answer to that question lies on how you write it. All those AU's and infinite possibilities for each one.
The bigger questions:
1. How can an alicorn that has millennia of studying arcane magic, who moves celestial bodies, and has all these magical artifacts lose to a unicorn like Sombra? I'm guessing Sombra found some sort of ancient artifact (the scroll? Alicorn Amulet?) lying around.
2. How come Twilight, the adorkable nerd that she is, cannot seem to further expound on magical theory? She can go back a week, but Starlight was able to back years using the map and the scroll. The map didn't exist during Starswirl's time and yet Starlight was able to figure out the pieces, and solve the puzzle.
With these questions in mind, I wonder how dark past Equestria (pre unification era) was. Guess each race invested a lot in magical superweapons to take out the other races (i say alicorn amulet for unicorns to increase their power, Tirek for the pegasi since his strength could match or overpower earth ponies and magic draining to counter unicorns, the earth ponies would have made the staff SG used to drain ponies of their individuality and control them).
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I acknowledge what you're saying about the time commitment, but I would have nigh-completely forgiven the episode even leaving the library destroyed if they had spent three seconds showing a little shoot coming out of the destroyed tree (as trees are wont to do) or even ponies planting a little sapling nearby, to at least acknowledge that attempts are being made to rebuild this spiritual fixture, that the castle is an addition to the town. As it is we are expected to swallow that the castle will metaphorically replace the library in the eyes of both the inhabitants of Ponyville and the audience, and I just am unable to do that.
Jesus. More specifically, Pony Jesus.
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This seems plausible. I've also heard the theory that iteration seven is the result of not re-confining the Parasprites in the Everfree in time. There are logical problems with the idea but I find the concept amusing.
Just cuz Twi wasn't there doesn't mean there weren't any Elements of Harmony. They were just less successful.
NMM even mentioned making sure the elements were never found. That means she did have to face someone wielding them. She just kicked their asses.
3578321 Well, given that the next episode shows that Twilight and Spike still remember the library, and that it acknowledged their emotional connection to it, plus it shows that the castle and the tree are in two different locations, I don't think that was the intent.
But I do see where you're coming from.
All right, since it's a thought exercise:
Sombra war: Celestia loses hope of finding new bearers for the Elements and makes the heavy decision to destroy rather than save her sister upon her return in order to safeguard Equestria. Through any means she can find (she has had 1000 years to prepare) she succeeds, though she is diminished herself in the effort (members of her guard, including Shining Armor, die as well.) Discord can't help chortling at her act of disharmony, and a more cold-hearted Celestia disposes of him while he's still a statue (let's say she shoves him through the mirror to Canterlot High or something similar.). Inspired, she takes steps to increase the security of Tartarus to see that no other ancient evils arise to threaten her ponies. Equestria is not a fountain of love nor a soft target with this Celestia on the throne, making it less tempting to Chrysalis who decides to take a wait-and-see approach with no royal wedding to use for invasion purposes. When the Crystal Empire returns Celestia sends Cadance, but the young Alicorn, still in mourning for her love lost in the battle with Nightmare Moon, isn't enough to hold it by herself against Sombra. By the time a weakened Celestia does take the field, it is too late to achieve a quick end to Sombra's threat, and a protracted war begins.
For all of the others, just tweak the above to get a last man standing. NMM wins the initial fight, Discord isn't banished while still a statue, Chrysalis exploits a weakened Canterlot, Tirek does escape and steamrolls everyone, all of the major powers wipe each other out and Flim and Flam bring about the rise of industry in their place... Any of them could conceivably be weakened by fighting the others to the point where they were taken down by what would seem to be a lesser foe.
The one thing I personally don't see is "someone else wields the Elements of Harmony". It *might* be possible, given that we actually do see a Luna existing in Discord's version of the present, but Discord might have altered NMM himself as a way of messing with her.
3578321 I admit, my biggest hope for this season was a clearing where the library used to be with a sapling growing in it and a sign reading "future site of the Golden Oaks public library." But then, I know that we can't read pony writing...
The problem isn't so much coming up with plausible ways that Celestia managed to win or lose against a series of threats, but coming up with ways where she won both without the Mane 6, and her winning is actually explicitly dependent on them not being the Mane 6.
The latter clause is much trickier to fulfill. Coming up with the losing scenario is super, super easy; "Nightmare Moon wins" is an entire sub-genre. (The others winning are not, although Chrysalis winning comes close. I'm not sure I've ever seen a serious "Sombra wins" fic. No, the surprising amount of Sombra making all the alicorns his harem stories don't count.) But the winning scenarios are hard. It's easy to imagine generic ways in which she won, but tying it back to the mane 6 is tricky.
The circle gets even harder to square when you consider the fact that there doesn't seem to be any sort of writer's bible for just how much juice alicorns have and how much juice Twilight herself has.
It's like, Twilight with the combined power of the other three behind her is a wrecking machine who can go toe-to-toe with a guy who's vacuumed up all the other pony magic in Equestria. Okay. That seems legit, and it made sense at the time. Cadance can shield the entire Crystal Empire. Still makes sense, although Shining could do the same thing to Canterlot.
Twilight by herself can't even take apart a single well-trained unicorn in a spellslinging contest in which the fate of the world is literally at stake, and attempting to do so tires her out to the extent Timber Wolves of all things now represent a threat to her. (They're made of wood, Twilight. Set them on fire.) Wait... what? Either Twilight herself actually got a half-assed alicorn upgrade or Starlight is some kind of freakish magic savant with a bizarrely potent level of power... or alicorns aren't actually all that.
I keep wanting to think that alicorns are just no more powerful than any individual pony type, they're just all three types at once, and Celestia and Luna's ability to manipulate the heavens isn't so much because they're dynamos of magic equivalent to the combined might of the ancient unicorn nations but because that's their special talent. It would explain an awful, awful lot, except that pouring all of it into Twilight, as previously stated, did seem to make her way, way more powerful than just unicorn x 4, and the alicorn amulet sure as hell gave Trixie one hell of a boost as well.
I'm curious, Sky. I keep seeing people make the very strong assumption that the Apple Family is perpetually on the brink of financial ruin, and it puzzles me.
Well, wait. I should qualify this.
Writing the Apple's as being mortgaged to the hilt and perpetually having money problems is an obvious source of dramatic tension that ties into the well-understood trope of the struggling small farmer. Indeed, the show tapped those themes in the first season more than once, with Applejack usually on the lookout for the next money-making opportunity and the farm needing some fairly major repairs and suchly she couldn't afford out-of-pocket. So in that sense it isn't puzzling.
But people seem really committed to it as a matter of near-canon, and that puzzles me. Applejack may not have the operating capital to do everything she wants to the farm, when she wants it, but it seems clear that she doesn't go to bed every night terrified that the bank is gonna take the land and they'll be out on their plots. She's had the money to do massive teardown-and-rebuild projects multiple times. They make products that are in high demand and always sell out. Most crucially, they didn't actually need to buy Sweet Apple Acres; they received it literally from the hoof of Celestia herself as a royal land grant, and I can't see a family like the Apples ever actually borrowing against it. They're probably very proud that they've got the freehold.
My money is on Celestia taking off the Velvet lined princess booties, just in different ways each time.
Though if you want to pin Discord's release on the CMC's fight in front of his statue specifically, you can easily dispense with him in most of the timelines by just having that field trip go differently or not at all.
It really just comes down to butterfly effect. They even had Starlight sitting in Fluttershy's throne at the start of the episode with its three butterflies on clear display as a subtle hint.
In the comics Celestia admitted to Spike that many (but not all) of the threats Twilight faced are things Celestia could have handled herself without too much trouble. She sees herself as a teacher foremost, so she often stepped out of the way and sent Twilight out to get experience; in some cases she might have even taken a fall for her student. In Twilight's absence she could have dealt with many of the threats or marshaled appropriate forces against them.
That said, I think Celestia's been neglecting Twilight's combat training. Twilight lacks the finesse to handle a skilled opponent and the willingness to kill something pony-shaped. She ends up tiring herself out using brute strength to swing wildly against a foe who's had time to study and prepare to fight her and who can choose the time & place of the confrontation. Her brute strength isn't enough because she's unconsciously missing or pulling her blows. This is a good thing for a Princess of Friendship, but it still means that even with Equestria on the line she'll be at a disadvantage in physical combat against opponents she can't de-equify.
... that's my rationalization and I'm sticking to it!
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Well, this is exactly my point, hence the sarcastic capitals. The reason that the Apple refuse the (admittedly inequitable) partnership with Flim and Flam is yes, a certain amount of high-minded pride in their hoofcrafting methods, but also that the Apples need every scrap of cider profits to keep themselves afloat over the winter. This simply should not happen on prosperous land owned free and clear, absent catastrophic mismanagement or a ruinous tax situation.
The obvious answer to how were the others beaten is clearly Protector Paladin Princess Cadance.
I am personally convinced that the wasteland was what happened when Angel Bunny got his way.
Not sure I was convined that Flim and Flam were worse than Tirek, though, but heyt, at least they are now definitely classified in the evil camp or something... (And Sunset and Trixie, notably, were not...)
I liked the final, right up until the final conclusion. The only way I can grok Starlight's abrupt face-heel turn there is literal insanity. Like, genuine "serial killer" level insanity.
("If your childhood friend moves away, don't bother trying to make an effort to keep in contact with them or anything, just go insane and eventually try to get everyone around you killed so that you can become special friends with the people who try to stop you.")
It was not, in fact, the end of Equestria that made her stop, it was Twilight offering to be her friend (and thus meaning Starlight was now In With the Special Crowd). Starlight is not really interested in equality, she just doesn't want anyone being better than her - hell come to the Our Town was the result of her snapping because her childhood friend moved away. (Which she decided to blame on cutie marks. Because she is medically insane.) I can, at this stage, see everything trotting long right up until the moment there is some sort of friendship crisis and then Starlight Glimmer will instantly go all Party of One/Lesson Zero (in the VERY BEST case scenario).
(Personally, I really like Twilight's Kingdom because of the big fight sequence[1] (and also the awesome music during the transformation sequence at the end there).
I am also, unlike, I think, EVERYONE else in the fandom, entirely ambivilent to the destruction of the library and its replacement with the crystal castle.)
[1]Given Heart of the Matter, this probably won't surprise you, Skywriter...!
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You have a very handy pre-existing headcanon to explain this question away, yes!
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1) Sombra is a unicorn focusing on mastering Dark magic, the power of fear, pride, anger and so on. Now it so happens that he has a large captive slave population to terrorize as he likes, and controls the Crystal Empire, which serves as citywide geomantic focusing device and transmission antenna for emotional states... Or in other words, Sombra is drawing power from every last one of those crystal ponies he's enslaving, and feeding it all into himself via the crystal formations.
2) Twilight's intelligent, but she's always gone for breadth over depth -- she studies everything at the same time! -- and often goes with "brute force" solutions, because she had tons and tons of magical power even before her ascension. Starlight may be crazy, but she's clever and good at magic, and approaches things with a very out-of-box way -- she somehow figured out how to steal away cutie marks, something nopony else even thought possible! I think her time machine spell is a combination of a whole bunch of different magics from various sources, something she's worked on during the year or so since the fall of her little cult... and it seems likely to be one-use only, in the sense that she would have had to destroy the scroll to make the effects stick.
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That's not true at all for two reasons.
The first is that small farming is and always has been economically precarious even on prosperous land owned free and clear. Your income depends upon your harvest and the market for that harvest, both things that are somewhat beyond your control, and if you're at all like most families you probably don't have an enormous cash reserve.
With farming specifically there's a reason big agribusiness has been gobbling up small farmers, and it isn't just because of economies of scale; it's because if there's a soybean blight, Archer Daniels Midland can shrug their shoulders and put up the price of corn. An independent soy farmer cannot.
To put it another way; most people work for wages. For then, facing a sudden and vicious pay cut is very likely to produce some sort of ruinous crisis. It works the same way with many small businesses. I have a job that lets me live comfortably. If that income stream suddenly vanished, I'd be in deep deep trouble, no matter how prosperous I otherwise appear. Sweet Apple Acres could be generating a comfortable revenue stream that the Apples are mostly spending, not because of mismanagement but because that's what people do.
The second is that there's a lot of evidence to suggest that for most people, their expenses will naturally grow to meet their incomes absent iron discipline to keep them in check. It's why you get couples who have combined incomes in the low seven figures complaining that they aren't rich and that their living situations will become completely untenable if their taxes go up a smidge; it's because they've structured their life around living in a high-rent neighborhood in NYC and socking 20% of their income into investments and sending their children to six-figure private schools.
Applejack may or may not have a deep understanding of the overall way finances work, if we read an AWFUL lot into her "fancy mathematics" line from way back when. She probably has a very good sense for when a specific deal is good or bad or if someone is trying to cheat her (not even an Element of Honesty thing, just from long experience) but she may not quite understand that the reason the Apple family needs the profits from every single harvest is because she hasn't set up a strict savings regimen she hews to, but rather simply reaches into her bank account every time something needs doing or saves up for specific big-ticket items, like a new barn.
Flim and Flam were unlikely to be able to actually ruin the Apples in the "reduce them to penury" sense. But I find it believable they could put shut a dent in their finances that Applejack would be forced to do things she found extraordinarily distasteful and shameful to her, like looting Apple Bloom's college fund or selling off the south forty, because she'd already assumed obligations that she was counting on that cider money to meet. That's not mismanagement; everyone who can't make rent until they get paid on the last Friday of the month has done that.
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Fair enough. I think the question of "Why are the Apples fanonically seen as being on the cusp of financial ruin?" comes from this exact moment, though. That, and it's an awfully convenient plot device to make things you want to have happen happen. (Why does Applejack need to prostitute herself to Rainbow Dash in order to make money?
Because the author finds it super hotBECAUSE SHE'S GONNA LOSE THE FARM)3579048 I've always suspected that the writers remember the farm crisis of the 80s and, without really understanding its causes, assume all farmers are just naturally poor. They also don't seem to grok how earth pony and pegasus magic makes farming in Equestria far less precarious than here in the real world. So they write the Apples as always on the verge of disaster which—as you've said—doesn't really make sense.
Personnally, I think that in each timeline, they somehow managed to overcome crisis using alternative ways (killing NMM ? preventing the royal wedding from even existing ?) to the elements of harmony, until some point. Then bad things happen and Twilight and Spike come. So we can even imagine that one timeline bypassed all the crazy probabilities of winning and managed to survive , although the "safest" way is still by using the elements, as far as we know.
And for the wastelands timeline, maybe everything came at the same time ? And then, a giant battle happened between changelings, NMM, Sombra, Celestia, parasprites, Pinkamena, crazy Twilight, Tirek, FlimFlamCorp, etc., and destroyed the entire world ?
in most timelines, we saw rainbow dash being a military pony.
with twilight degraded from being "celestia's prized student", regardles of her actually getting accepted into the school for gifted unicorns or not and most other bond reduced, we could see rainbow trying to solve all the "bad guy" problems headfirst
(she attacking NMM at the end of ep1 actually working out, for example)
on this note, I find interesting how Discord gets the timeline where rainbow gets hit by the enchasing cristal
Because I'm a particularly bitter person:
Starlight Glimmer, you will never be Sunset Shimmer. I want you to remember that. You'll always be number two on the list of Twilight's friendship students.
Always.
To be honest, it's actually kind of amazing they managed to repel all those threats the first time around. Nightmare Moon lost solely because of a well-timed epiphany from Twilight who'd luckily just met and made the exact number of friends needed. Discord by all rights should have won, given his power, and lost only because of some monstrously dumb tactical errors. Chrysalis would have won if she hadn't picked up and run with the villain ball halfway through her double-parter. Sombra lost because Twilight handed the crystal to Spike at the last moment. And Tirek... well, he lucked into as many moments as he lucked out of, so it could have gone either way for him.
Also, given how closely in time all these threats manifested, I'm wondering if they ended up in some multi-faction brawl for Equestria*, and we're just seeing the futures in which each faction won out (Sombra first, then Chrysalis, then Nightmare Moon etc.).
*Which I would totally love to see. Seriously, can we have that show now?
I got nothing on the Flim Flam brothers, though. I'd have thought corrupted Trixie, or the Tantabus, would have been the more obvious choices.
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She really seems like sloppy seconds, doesn't she? I am hesitant about the idea of her being woven into the main cast, if that's the direction they're going, because she is a fscking psycho.
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It bothers me that Sunset Shimmer was totally humbled, left sobbing in the bottom of a smoking crater surrounded by the disapproving looks of everyone who knew her, set to physical labor immediately laying bricks, and the most she got then was a promise that the Mane Five would look after her and teach her about friendship... No hugs. A film later and she's still despised by everyone else in the school, on the fringe of the main group, feeling like everyone is waiting for her to screw up and only finally finds full acceptance when she steps forward and saves everyone from the sirens.
Starlight Glimmer is never humbled, simply agrees to not be evil and stop pressing her vengeance that destroys all of Equestria, and yet it's instantly hugs, parades, singing, time with best friends and being surrounded by the cast of the entire show beaming in happiness. So...yeah. Screw that pony.
I'm not sure if it makes her more or less of a psycho, but I would have liked Starlight's meager backstory much more if it had been about how getting her own cutie mark led to her being shipped off to boarding school and losing her friends, and how being so talented isolated her from everyone. Rooting her equality ideas in self-hatred for her own superiority (with enough Hypocracy that she's not about to give up that superiority) would actually make her an interesting psycho to me. As it stands instead, she's just petty.
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I have a shred of faith that this is an EVERYTHING IS CERTAINLY FIIINE moment to end the season high and that we will see a more natural suspicion/contrition cycle in her inevitable next appearance, main cast or no.
The problem is that her villain rampage was entirely hypothetical and literally never happened at all absent a series of lies to one tiny remote village, so her road to acceptance in-universe is disturbingly and disappointingly easy compared to the distance she needs to travel in our eyes.
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Well, you got to keep in mind that This Day Aria is pure brilliance. I bet people at Disney turned green with envy and wept when they saw it. Most shows never do anything half as good as it was!
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Maybe the last one is where Ahuizotl wins.
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I tend to think that the last alternate future is the one where a threat we haven't seen yet won, i.e., a foreshadowing of something in season six or the movie in 2017. That, or Rainbow Dash succeeded in executing a Triple Rainboom to stop Angel Bunny.
I agree with the folks saying that progress in the other timelines was likely a combination of The Understudy Six and Celestia taking the golden shoes off.
In fact my personal theory for timeline #7 is that the wasteland is Celestia's doing, either because she had to use so much power that Equestria became collateral damage or she tried to channel too much of the sun and lost control of it on the battlefield. She may have even gone personally nova to take out a big bad in her own implosion.
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The obvious Ashlands answer is that the sun got moved too close to Equestria, presumably in a literal scorched-earth campaign to deny victory to an unbeatable foe. Of course, that begs the question of what would threaten ponykind to such an extent that Celestia decided death was preferable. Or, more likely, she was an early casualty, and someone took over the sun who made Very Bad Decisions. (The return of Sunset Shimmer?)
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A scorched earth was Ahuizotl's plan. He was trying to use the dark magic of the Rings of Scorchero to take down the Radiant Shield of Razdon and bring about "800 years of unrelenting, sweltering heat". He only failed because Rainbow Dash was there to help Daring Do keep the Tenochtitlan Basin safe by collapsing the Fortress of Talacon.
Do you even watch the show?
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Well, yes, but nothing about Starlight's plan would have affected Daring Do's history, and Daring wouldn't have lost the final Ring of Scorchero in the first place if Rainbow Dash hadn't distracted her during the first fight scene. That wouldn't have happened, because Dash wouldn't have even been a Daring Do fan if it weren't for meeting Twilight.
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Daring Do lost that fight intentionally so she could get into the Fortress of Talacon. She would have probably still gotten to the avatar before the last ring was placed, but she didn't expect that last ring to be too heavy to lift on her own. Rainbow Dash had to be there to help destroy the Fortress.
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Ah, but Rainbow wasn't there in at least seven of eight alternate histories, and the world didn't turn to ash.
And because this is in danger of becoming a genuine nerdfight, allow me to modestly propose the obvious reason why the Rings of Scorchero didn't destroy the world every time: Miss Harshwhinny. Clearly she was impressed enough by the professionalism of the Daring Do series' writing and editing to seek out its author, and her medal-winning trophy-throwing abilities were repurposed into the required ring-moving skills. However, in universe #8, Rainbow Dash became an Olympian instead of a Wonderbolt, causing Harshwhinny to fall in love with her, thus failing to help Daring out in her time of need.
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This is the best explanation for everything ever. Literally. Up to and including continental drift and evolution.
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I though Skywriter made this blog post for the sole purpose of starting a nerdfight.