The Sun Sets on a New Year... · 9:20pm Jan 2nd, 2016
... may as well start with a small rant to get things going.
Namely, why is it so hard to find good art of Sunset Shimmer?
Seriously, I'm at page 30 of the Sunset Shimmer tag (safe mode, I'll add) and I've only found one piece of solo artwork of her that's actually pretty good.
The rest of it is either bad in terms of quality (or I disagree with the artstyles, leaving it to be a personal taste sort of thing), or Sunset is just blatantly out of character.
I'm not going to single out any examples. That's kinda mean and I've got nothing against the artists themselves. But the biggest offender is Sunset acting all cutesy-wutesy in a ship, most notably with Twilight.
And I'm just like:
Sunset doesn't act cute very often and, when she does, it's usually in the 'you feel good for her because she looks so dang happy right now'.
She looks cute here because she looks so genuine. We can almost feel her joy. But she's not acting all smitten, or like Fluttershy or even Pinkie can act sometimes when they become cute.
There's nothing to suggest she'd act all lovey-dovey in a relationship, and so openly too. Yet all these ship pics have her doing so. Why?
I'm not saying she's a total tsundere. She'd be more like AJ, in the sense that she'd show affection when it means the most, and the rest of the time she just acts normal.
But she ain't gonna be blushing and acting like a giggly little girl now. I mean, this is why I think SunDash makes for a better ship than TwiDash. They both have those fiery streaks in them to play off each other, making Sunset a better fit for Dash than Twilight. I mean, it's much easier to see Sunset doing sporty things with Dash than Twilight. Heck, she even rode a damn motorbike alongside her. At the same time, however, Sunset is still grounded enough to keep Dash in line, like TwiDash itself.
Ah well, maybe I'm just mad. Gief good Sunset art though.
-JaketheGinger
P.S.
Here's the one I found, by the by:
And suddenly the idea of Sunset wearing earrings becomes incredibly appealing to me.
There are two portrayals of Sunset shimmer in love that I find annoying.
The first, most common when she was still living down being a villain, was the assumption that she's sexually-promiscuous. There's no evidence of this in canon: her villainy was in pursuit of ambition rather than hedonism. If she had sex with someone for bad reasons, it would have been status-seeking: she did seduce Flash Sentry when she was hyper-ambitious, and feels bad about it. Though we don't know whether or not she actually had sex with him.
Note well: according to the IDW comics she was fairly young (adolescent) when she went to the Human world, and before then had no time for friends. This strongly implies that she also had no time for lovers. After she went to the Human world, she was living among non-equines. It's been pointed out to me that there's a good chance that she doesn't even find the Humanoids sexually attractive, and may even find them sexually repulsive. (Twilight is xenophilic, but she's weird in several ways).
The second assumption that I find annoying, which is the super-assumption from which the one you mentioned drives, is that now that she's one of the Good Guys she's a really sweet person. This does not follow. She's still rather fiery-spirited, has a bad temper (shown in the third movie), and is a sarcastic supergenius. She's not evil any more, but that doesn't mean that she's all sweetness and light.
3659223
This reminds me of something that slightly annoys me in the show. It at least feels like Twilight used to use more snark. Maybe it is just I am missing it more now but it feels like to me that Twilight is more sweet now than the Twilight Snarkle was at the start. I miss that Twilight Sparkle.
3660363 Being Royalty'll do that to ya, suddenly she's gotta watch what she says.
I hear ya! There ain't enough good art of ol' Sunny Shim.
She's one of my top 3 favourite characters as well, so naturally it's kinda disappointing. She is such a great and three-dimensional character too! Ah well...
derpicdn.net/img/view/2015/9/10/976850__safe_solo_sunset+shimmer_shrug_artist-colon-lamar_bone.jpg