Chaff in my Head Cannon: Starlight Glimmer

So, I was really enjoying the season 5 finale right up until the ending. And that ending got me thinking, and that thinking got me kind of annoyed.

How in the hay is Starlight Glimmer able to use magic that is equal to Twilight? Twilight froze an entire battle, but she couldn't overcome one unicorn? And when she and Starlight fight they both run out of juice at the same time?

It all just smacked of either overpowering a foe so that it's a credible threat, or weakening the hero just so that it's an even fight. It felt like a bit of both, honestly.

But then I got to thinking - "okay, this is canon, now how do I get it to make sense?"

On the surface, that whole finish was pretty bunk, but I did eventually realize a few things that helped. I still think it's a pretty weak finish - Twilight is somehow not able to out magic the bad pony, so she talks them into submission - and since this is my personal head cannon and not something explained in the show, it really is pretty lousy writing.

Here's what I got though.

First, some foundation. Starlight Glimmer seems to be well studied in magic. The obscure unicorn she claimed her staff was a relic of establishes that. The point is double proved when she attacks the ponies who stopped her from escaping with the mane six's cutie marks - Twilight blocks her powerful spell and when she sees that nobody's harmed she exclaims "Wha...but I studied that spell for years!"

She also appears to be older than Twilight. How much is up for debate, but I'd guess she's in her thirties somewhere. How old she sounds, how long she's likely been studying magic, how long it must have taken to found her town, build it, and get a bunch of other ponies to move to it. All of that paints her as definitely older than Twilight who appears to be early twenties since she's basically a college level graduate student at the start of the series. Her taunting of Twilight's aim also hints towards a pony who has had longer to hone their skills.

So that explains why Starlight is a formidable unicorn, but not why Twilight, a significantly more formidable unicorn herself going by her previous feats, could only fight her to a standstill.

This is where we start going off script.

Because of what Starlight did to mess up the time stream, Twilight and her friends never meet and never join together. The Twilight we're watching go through all those alternate timelines is not the Twilight of those timelines. The Twilight who never saw the rainboom is likely some shut-in similar to how Moondancer was.

But this is a Twilight completely cut off from her friends. And, given how much worse off Equestria was without those friendships existing, it's quite possible that Twilight was weakened too. The title of the show appears to be literal - friendship is magic. Without the boost to magic that the mane six provide, Equestria ends up in some pretty bad places. Seeing as the country was so affected, I've decided that Twilight was similarly drained. There's some decent evidence that her magical capacity is increased by her friends considering all of her greatest feats of magic are done either when she is helping her friends, or when they're helping her.

That's what I've decided to believe so that the improbability of that ending doesn't bug me so much anyway. I think they could have written it better to not have Twilight suddenly less powerful and without Starlight able to do stuff nobody else could. (Seriously. She figures out how to alter the time travel spell so that it's worlds more powerful and she does this through use of an artifact which no one knows how it works or why it even came into existence - and the super study nerd who lives with it didn't figure anything out about it first? That is one cavernous plot hole.)

Side note: The finale also seems to imply that written magic is a thing. That the spell somehow breaks if the scroll goes away. I have no idea why Twilight wouldn't be able to create a new scroll or be able to alter it, but written spells have shown themselves to be very powerful two times in the show now - the first was when Twilight finished Starswirl's spell and became an alicorn and now the scroll Starlight Glimmer created. It's definitely some food for thought to try and figure out what that means for how magic functions and how spell creation and use works. For instance - does a common, everyday spell go away if someone destroys the original writing of it? Is that why the Canterlot archives are so big?