Starlight Glimmer, Misunderstood Victim Of Circumstances

My comments on the season finale; spoilers below.

The first part of the episode was quite excellent. The "Sombra war" timeline in particular seems enthralling, and if there's an alternate universe somewhere where it was the basis for an entire series, I want the coordinates of the nearest portal. For now, I suppose I'll have to wait for someone to write an epic novel-length fanfic about that AU.

Then came the second part, and it was a letdown. In particular, I felt it utterly ruined Starlight Glimmer's potential by "converting her to the side of good" in an extremely rushed way, even more rushed than Diamond Tiara's redemption in "Raiders of the Lost Mark".

And then there's Starlight's entire excuse as to why she turned evil. TV Tropes calls this kind of thing Freudian Excuse: the villain is evil because of their traumatic past. It can be done well. But it can be also done poorly, and come across as a lousy attempt at making the villain look more sympathetic without actually giving them any redeeming qualities. Case in point: Starlight Glimmer.

She became a ruthless, manipulating fanatic because... she overreacted to her friend getting a cutie mark? ("And just like that, my friend [Sunburst] was gone. His family recognized his magical talent and sent him off to Canterlot. I never saw him again.")

1) Are we really supposed to sympathize with her on that? She comes across as very self-centered in that scene because she cared more about her feelings than about her friend's success. Also, why didn't she ever try to get in touch with him?

2) If this really was enough to make her a villain, then by that logic half of the ponies in Equestria should be sociopaths - after all, something equally (or way more!) stressful happened to pretty much everyone in their childhood. A far more likely answer is that Starlight Glimmer is psychologically messed up, and/or uses the Sunburst incident to quell her conscience ("Well, I was hurt, so it's okay for me to hurt others!") - this explains why she never tried to contact him; because she wasn't actually interested in rekindling her friendship, she wanted to keep using the incident as a "oh, woe is me" excuse. But in that case, a half-minute pep talk from Twilight would definitely not suffice to instantly convert her back.

Oh - and one more thing that left a bad taste in my mouth: ("I don't know what happened that led you to make your village without cutie marks, and I'm sorry my friends and I had to take it away.") Yes, Twilight actually apologizes to the villain for stopping her evil plans. Apologizes. "I'm deeply sorry we freed these torture victims from your cellar. I know tormenting them made you happy, and I know we hurt your feelings. Will you ever forgive me...?"

I'm not sure if the writers feel that it's too child-unfriendly to have a villain who's just plain EVIL - no excuses, no childhood trauma, no "because I never had a real friend!", just pure sociopathy or evil nature (the Fiendship is Magic comics actually do it for Chrysalis) - and who cannot be hastily redeemed within a 20-minute episode; or if it's just the manifestation of a greater trend to blur the lines between good and evil and show the heroes as naive, fanatical, etc. and the villains as poor, misunderstood victims who need help.

Next episode: Twilight Sparkle meets Adolf Hitler and learns that Hitler only started the Holocaust because, when he was a boy, a Jewish man looked at him funny. Twilight explains to Hitler that it's no excuse to cause genocide, at which point Hitler bursts into tears, then into song, then apologizes to everybody and, at the very end, participates with everyone in the final smiling crowd shot. (Though obviously I'm not trying to imply here that Starlight Glimmer is as bad as Hitler, just to be clear.)