On Timelines and Unicorns · 6:58pm Nov 30th, 2015
Well, here we are again, my friends. Another season of pony behind us, and another stunning finale to close it all out. It's a shame that we'll have to wait a year for more pony related things...
This isn't going to be a full review of the finale, but I do want to put some words to my thoughts I've had since seeing it (and more importantly, discussing it with friends and realizing how large the spread of opinions is). So consider this your spoiler warning if somehow you're a sad (or just generally unlucky) pone fan who hasn't seen the finale yet. If you're in that category, stop reading this, watch the finale, then come back. Kay? Kay.
Now that they're gone...
So, time loops, paradoxes, the butterfly effect, and all sorts of mischief a unicorn bent on revenge can cause when playing with the very fabric of the universe? Count me in. It's About Time played with this briefly, although it rooted itself in one side of the timeline paradox: "No matter what you do when going back in time, you can't change the future, because it already happened." Meaning that if you go back and change something about the past, the future doesn't change, because when you used your time machine to go back in time, this something that you did had already happened in the past of your timeline. It creates an endless cycle that cannot be broken no matter how hard you try.
Interesting, but I wouldn't think that's how time travel works. Which is why I loved these episodes so much, because they planted themselves on the other side of the time paradox: "The tiniest change to the past can have a cascading series of effects in the future, otherwise known as the Butterfly Effect." We see this many, many times in the time paradoxes that Starlight creates in stopping the rainboom over and over again, and it largely holds true to how the paradox would actually work.
Haber: 1, Larson: 0
Now I don't want to get into the details of each loop or whatever, so I'm just going to go out of my way to say that the Sombra loop was by far the best loop with the most story potential. I mean, look at that picture of Dashie up there. You're looking at a battle-hardened mare who's brushed with death numerous times and even had her wing torn off and replaced with a prosthetic. What's even more amazing about this is that this is the alternate timeline to a kid's show. Where else have you seen anything as amazing as this?
I have to give Haber credit here. He didn't pull anything back when he explored just how dark some of these alternate timelines could get. I mean, we've been shown that Equestria is a pretty happy and friendly place over and over again, and then we step into this timeline where the word "war" is slung around pretty casually. We get a glimpse of the happy utopia of Equestria swung over to a full wartime nation, and the results are as fascinating as they are terrifying. Who knew that Equestria was capable of waging bloody, brutal war without our six heroines?
(Silly pony slap fighting aside, that is.)
I contented myself with looking up art of apocalypse dash (as her tag tends to be on derpibooru) most of last night when I was doing homework. Seriously, this is probably one of the best ideas to ever come from the show. Some of the other timelines were also good (like Nightmare Moon's) but they didn't have the same bravado and feeling crafted into them as Sombra's did. I give Haber more points for pushing the limits of what he could get away with in showing how dark things could have gotten in a kid's show.
Seriously though, Hasbro, if you can somehow sell the idea to your investors to make a PG-13 rated spinoff series involving the Crystal War, I'd love you forever.
Now, onto the thing that seems to be a very divisive issue right now...
Sorry not sorry.
Starlight Glimmer. We've been wondering the whole season exactly how she's going to shape up. She was the only villain we've seen so far manage to shut down Twilight during one of her friendship speeches and get away more or less scot-free (losing Our Town notwithstanding). We've seen her lurking in the background in several episodes, obviously watching Twilight and plotting her next move. What could she possibly have in store for our hero?
As we saw above, it was basically destroying the world. I don't think there was a one of us until Friendship Games aired that figured Starlight's plot was going to be "tear the fabric of the space-time continuum asunder as revenge." When I first caught whiff of that, boy was I excited. And as I've shown above, I wasn't disappointed.
But then just why is Starlight so divisive in these episodes?
I think I've whittled it down to two core complaints. People don't like how powerful and successful Starlight was in her showdown with Twilight (and the events leading up to it), and they don't like how her origins don't match up with her motivations. These two central concepts have a lot of people (wrongly, I might add) calling Starlight all but the worst MLP villain yet (that title is still held by Sombra; sorry buddy, but even though your timeline is the coolest, you didn't say anything to add to the 12 words of characterization you had in the Season 3 premier).
Let's dig into it, one complaint at a time.
I know I left my soapbox somewhere around here...
Twilight should have been able to throttle Starlight. I mean, she's an alicorn after all!
True. Twilight should have been more than a match for Starlight---at least on the surface. She can fly and she has powerful magic at her disposal. But Starlight has something Twilight doesn't have, and that's months and months of planning and preparations. Starlight wired the spell so that whenever Twilight uses it, it brings her back to just before Twilight appears. She knows every time she's brought back that Twilight is going to appear about 5 seconds later, so she's able to get the drop on her. Your fancy wings and alicorn powers don't do much when your opponent lands the first strike every time.
Case in point: there's not much you can do when you're frozen in a solid lump of crystal.
(Sidefic idea: Twilight's never able to break out of the crystal and is unearthed thousands of years later in whatever alternate timeline was spawned from this iteration. Somebody get on that.)
So every time Twilight jumps back to the rainboom, Starlight is there and ready. There's not much of anything Twilight can do at this point except be ready herself. Starlight: 1, Twilight: 0.
Yeah but that's only because Starlight got the drop on Twilight. If Twilight was ready, then Starlight should've been toast!
You mean this?
Here, Twilight gets the first blow, but it's hardly over. In fact, this is only the beginning. This iteration was dominated by an all-out magic-friendship/death-laser duel between the two casters, and it ended in a draw. There goes the idea that Starlight was only able to defeat Twilight because she got the first strike; while it certainly made it easier, and she doesn't actually manage to subdue Twilight when she doesn't strike first, she still wins, because she stops the Rainboom from happening. Here, they fight to a standstill, and the rainboom doesn't happen. More importantly, though is the implication that Starlight has the magical power and skill to go toe to toe (hoof to hoof?) with Twilight---which has obviously put a lot of peoples' panties in a twist.
Since Starlight doesn't need to beat Twilight to win, I'll give her another point. Starlight: 2, Twilight: 0.
But Starlight shouldn't even be that powerful! Twilight's an alicorn!
So? Twilight's only been an alicorn for a year or something like that. Sure she's the Element of Magic and everything, but does that automatically mean she's miles above any other unicorn when it comes to magical prowess? I don't think so. Twilight even says at the end of the episode that Starlight has more magical potential that almost any other unicorn she's seen (pardon my paraphrasing; I don't have the episode in front of me to reference). Starlight is powerful, and even Twilight admits it.
So what does this mean?
It means it's not unrealistic to assume that just because Twilight is an alicorn and the element of magic, she's not head and shoulders above everybody else. Starlight has shown that she has the magical talent and power to keep up with Twilight. She spent that entire episode levitating herself around for heaven's sake, and that's no easy feat. And she did that while casting other magic at Twilight in their duel. Starlight is no rookie, and she's definitely not out of her league here. Especially considering that she could fight Twilight to a standstill.
As an aside, it's not strange to see Starlight levitating herself around. People I've talked to said that that's not possible, hence the thing with giving Rarity wings in Sonic Rainboom, but remember that Twilight herself has done this before, especially in the season 3 premier. Hell, she was messing with gravity itself. Levitating oneself isn't impossible, even if it may be dangerous.
Since this one ends in a draw, no score for this round. Starlight: 2, Twilight: 0.
Now that we've resolved the power issue, let's go to the skill one. Namely, Starlight's prowess and mastery of complex spells.
Starlight shouldn't have been able to cast such a great time travel spell! Twilight used Star Swirl's and it wasn't this good!
The implication here that gives ground to this round of complaints being that Starlight is somehow better than Star Swirl. I say: "Why not?" People tend to look at the old masters of their craft as somehow insurmountable because of the contributions they've made to their fields. They're smart, yes, and incredibly important, but they cannot remain the best of their craft if the field is to have any hope of advancing. How is this relevant? Very simple.
Starlight Glimmer has built upon Star Swirl's work to make objectively better versions of his spells, much like Twilight herself did in the Magical Mystery Cure. She is now a better mage than Star Swirl would be today.
A quick real world example: If I were to enter a physics competition and pick a successful professor at Harvard who has his name on a few papers but otherwise isn't that famous, or Sir Isaac Newton himself,, I would pick the professor. Why? Because the professor has access to both the entirety of Newton's work and the work he's done himself, and what he's synthesized from studying countless other contributors in the field of physics. And I guarantee you that I'd win with this professor, and Newton would be scratching his head.
I just want to reinforce before you lot start getting uppity with me that I am not disrespecting Newton, or in the case of the argument I'm making here, Star Swirl. I am simply saying that because Starlight would have had access to all of Star Swirl's works, in addition to the works and theories of countless other mages that have arisen since then, it is 100% perfectly logical that she could have taken Star Swirl's time travel spell and modified it to make it work better. In fact, this is to be expected. The only way that the spell would have been too advanced for anyone to master and modify with enough work would be if there were no other mages in Equestria between Star Swirl and the present day. That would mean there would be nobody to contribute ideas to the field of magic, which would mean nobody could synthesize new ideas from both Star Swirl's theory and other sources. Now which argument seems more logical?
My argument here is reinforced when Starlight says that Star Swirl did all the hard work, and she just made some changes. This is exactly what is happening in the various scientific fields every single day. People took Newton's work and built off of it, eliminating areas where he was wrong and using the foundations of what he got right to make even more astute, even more accurate observations and models of the world. Newton's early theory and models would pale in comparison to what we have today, but they would still be the root of today's theory. Same with Star Swirl's time travel spell. Starlight synthesized a much better time travel spell from Star Swirl's work and presumably the work of other mages (and maybe her own intuition), but the core of the spell is held in place by Star Swirl's theory, and the scroll itself.
Starlight invented a spell using Star Swirl's theory, something that Twilight has done with Star Swirl's cutie mark spell. I guess I'll take this moment as an aside to also mention that Starlight invented her own spell for removing cutie marks, which may or may not be based off of Star Swirl's research as well. I don't need to repeat myself how this is possible; it's all listed up above. I'll give Starlight another point based on the fact that she's shown she has enough mastery and skill to manipulate and create new spells, two in fact, to Twilight's one (that we know of). Starlight: 3, Twilight: 0.
Hmmm... I feel like I'm clutching at straws for more points to bring up. I'll leave more points to address for people in the comments, if they have anything. As it stands, the final score is Starlight's 3 to Twilight's 0. Therefore, I don't see why people are complaining about Starlight's magical prowess. She had Twilight outfoxed, if not outmatched, from the start. Therefore Twilight's only recourse was to get Starlight herself to see the error of her ways, since she had no chance of beating her herself.
Verdict: Starlight was more than capable of defeating Twilight time and time again, in iteration after iteration of the spell.
Since I've already rambled on long enough, I'll just summarize my thoughts on Starlight's origin story.
It sucks.
People have torn this apart time after time in blog post after blog post, so I don't need to rehash it. All I need to say is that the madness behind the method does not make sense. Starlight would need something much more traumatic to reinforce her ideals into adulthood rather than just one friend leaving. Perhaps this is what happened and we're just never going to see it. I'd like to believe so. Plenty of people on this site whose thoughts are much more concise than mine have listed out better alternative ideas. I like to pretend that's really what happened so it doesn't wrongfully undermine the amazing villain that was set up this season.
So really, what we're left here is a cunning, dangerous villain who has actually managed to outmatch Twilight for perhaps the first time in the series, yet one who is plagued with a terrible origin story that severely undermines her credibility.
I suppose there is one last thing to address before I close this out, and that's Starlight's quality as a villain, specifically in her interactions with our hero (Twilight).
Starlight is a terrible, bland villain who has no motivation and doesn't even really do anything other than fuck with Twilight!
Sometimes I don't feel like I'm watching the same show as everyone else. Maybe it's because I don't really nitpick out all the problems in a given episode; I just like to sit back and enjoy it. But as I nitpick other people's nitpicks, I feel like this is going to be another one of those cases.
There is a very clear and straightforward conflict here, but apparently since it's not threatening Twilight and Equestria's safety in the current timeline (despite how clearly we see it destroys Equestria in iteration after iteration of the spell), people don't recognize it. Starlight's entire motivation here is revenge. She does not set out to gain anything for herself. The only thing she wants to see is Twilight fail over and over and over again to stop her from breaking her friendships. People are assuming that she has some sort of ulterior motive that she's working towards, perhaps the preservation of her rule in Our Town, but that's not the vibe I get from her. She just wants to break Twilight apart, piece by tiny piece, as vengeance for how Twilight destroyed her ideologies and ran her out of her home.
And that's why she's a great villain.
She's similar to the Joker in those regards, especially in the Dark Knight movies. What does the Joker want? Can we really even pin that down for sure? The Joker doesn't want to cause anything other than chaos and destruction and to spin Gotham's moral compass on its head; "Some men just want to watch the world burn." Something similar applies here to Starlight. She doesn't want anything out of this. She just wants to tear apart Twilight's world because Twilight and her friends are an example of something she feels she can't have (which since her backstory is shit, this line of reasoning is admittedly weak. However, were we to get a stronger backstory of how cutie marks have ruined her friendships and her chances for progressing in life when she was an adult, then this would be a much stronger and more compelling reason).
Starlight doesn't understand what she's doing to the future. She can't possibly understand, because for all we know, she's been running Our Town while all these other crises that the Mane 6 deal with have been happening. The Hooffields and the McColts demonstrated that it's not unreasonable ponies on the fringes of Equestria have no idea how important the Mane 6 are to everything. Starlight doesn't understand either, a point proven when she claims that there's no way Twilight and her friends are so important to Equestria that the fate of everything hinges on them being friends.
There's our conflict. Twilight trying to make Starlight understand exactly what she's doing, and Starlight clinging onto her anger and frustration for the idea of revenge. There's probably even a touch of insanity in there as well, as it looks like she was cherry-picking the evidence that supported what she wanted to believe about the world.
Then Twilight shows her what she's been doing.
This whole scene right here starts her redemption arc. It might not be apparent, especially given the fit she throws when she drags Twilight back to see her origin story, but here, Starlight recognized exactly what she was doing, and started to realize how petty she's been. Even still, she wanted to cling onto her revenge because she couldn't think of any other way, but Twilight is finally able to talk her down now that she's seen what she's doing. Seeing the desolation that she's causing finally opens Starlight's eyes, and loosens her stance just enough that Twilight is able to pull her away from the edge and make her stop the careless destruction she's been inadvertently creating.
To recap:
Starlight is a great villain because she's perhaps the most cunning villain we've seen on the show, has the magical prowess to back up her threats, is motivated by reasons entirely anti-parallel to any other villain we've seen yet, has deluded herself into making her actions seem reasonable and blinding her to evidence to the contrary to support her antics, yet still has the heart to know when she's gone too far.
That last item separates her from being a Big Bad Evil Dude like NMM, Tirek, Sombra, or Chrysalis, who are largely the bland, laugh-y type of evil that we're so accustomed to seeing. It casts her as an actual person who's been hurt severely in her life (even if her shown backstory doesn't provide enough weight to the supposed trauma), has grown bitter and despondent, and probably has some mental damage from everything she's been through and done to herself and others. She's a human character, inasmuch that she feels like an actual breathing, living being than simply a piece of evil. In writing, characters can be people or furniture. The four I listed above are closer to furniture than people. Starlight is a person, through and through.
(Discord is Discord because he doesn't give a fuck.)
I think... more than 3000 words is a good enough point to try to wrap this up. I'm sure plenty of you have angry comments you're already typing out for me. I look forward to reading them. I know I'll probably end up carrying on this discussion somewhere below.
tl;dr: Sombra's timeline is awesome, and Starlight is a great villain, y'all muhfuggahs just don't know how to handle her.
Ante Legionem nihil erat, et nihil erit post Legionem
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EDIT: Upon further review, I feel like I've figured out why Starlight originally believes that stopping Twilight from meeting her friends won't carry such a devastating impact, and why she's willing to persist over and over again. She most likely believes that Equestria will find other ways to deal with the villains that the Mane 6 dealt with, either through different Bearers or Celestia getting off her ass and doing something for once. And for most of the timelines, she's mostly right. After all, Nightmare Moon doesn't win every single time just because she's the first villain to appear. So it shows that she is right to an extent that the Mane 6 were not absolutely critical in resolving every crisis that hit Equestria, but they played a major role in preventing things from going horribly wrong.
Also, when Twilight takes Starlight to the desolate future and she still tries to stop the rainboom one more time, Starlight says that "I don't know what I saw." Starlight believes (and was believing the whole time) that Twilight was lying to her about how bad the future was without her friends as a desperate ploy to try to get her to stop. When Twilight takes her into the future, Starlight doubts that's the present day. She thinks that it's billions of years off in the future when everything would be dead anyway. That's why she continues to persist in what she's doing, at least at first, despite having seen exactly what her actions are creating. She simply doesn't believe it.
I'm sure this conflicts with something I said up above somewhere, but I'll give this little revelation superiority over it.
The problem that people have with Starlight's power levels is that lots of headcanons revolve around Twilight not just being powerful, but being, in fact, the most powerful. When show canon contradicts fan ideas on a large scale, like Luna not being shy and depressed and oh god that was three years ago what am I doing with my life, new canon tends to be smoothly accepted. (You can bet that every single one of the finale AUs will have a dozen fics out by the end of the year.) But Starlight being "better" than Twilight? At magic? That gets people angry, even if they don't understand why.
I think you meant to say "Starlight" here.
Other than that, great points.
3582307 Too many [astronomical phenomenon] [adjective] characters going around, I swear.
I like this and will point people to it when they are being wrong and silly. :V
3583008 It was a lot of people being wrong and silly that ultimately forced my hand to make it.
You are the third person I've seen in a fandom of thousands who actually gets why Starlight is so darned great.
Like, the more I see people crying about her, the more I'm convinced that we as a supposedly older, ”smarter” fandom are actually not mature enough to handle this children's show sometimes.
Thank you, and bravo.