The Last Horror · 4:44pm Oct 13th, 2019
WARNING: Spoilers for the series finale below. If you haven't seen it and want to go in blind, turn back now.
Well, FiM is finally over. The downward spiral started in Season 3 has ended. And as expected, I was completely disappointed and almost entirely unsurprised by The Ending of the End. The lack acknowledgement of all the protagonist's sins and hypocrisies, the lack of vindication for past non-villainous antagonists who were initially merely on the wrong side of Protagonist-Centered Morality and made worse than they initially were in subsequent appearances, the villains only losing because of that murderous, tyrannical A.I. the Pillars created while everyone deludes themselves into thinking it's because they're friends, Starlight being propped up as the most powerful, the hypocrisy of Cozy, Chrysalis, and Tirek being punished while Discord and Starlight go free, trying to paint the Mane Six as Twilight's friends and peers when she's still really their ruler and "superior", I predicted and dreaded it all. Spike's promotion and Discord being the evil mastermind caught me off guard, but the latter just makes him and Starlight going free all the more galling, and the former doesn't really make up for everything Twilight's put him through - and let Rarity put him through - up until that point. After all, when all is said and done, he's still just Twilight's lackey, stuck doing everything including writing for her while she does whatever she pleases on the crown's dime*, and don't even get me started on Rarity's constant stringing him along for free labor. No, The Ending of the End was as bad as I predicted it would be, and I was ready for it.
The Last Problem, on the other hand, shocked and disgusted me.
I had honestly never expected the writers to truly tackle the issue of whether all alicorns are ageless or just Celestia and Luna in the show. I just expected them to dodge the issue to the end and let what remains of the fandom debate forever. But now that it is confirmed that all alicorns, including Twilight, are effectively immortal, it just makes her being the only one to ascend infinitely worse. Not only is she the only one to be granted power and glory while all the others she depended on are left as commoners, but now it's revealed she'll live on in her prime while all the others age, wither, suffer, and die. And why? What makes Twilight so special while the others aren't? Just because she finished a spell, as the show claims? If so, so what? What does that spell even do? And why does that make Twilight worthy of immortality? Who decided that? If it was something else, then what? Was the spell itself the key to ascension? If so, why isn't it used on the rest of the Mane Six? Why is only Twilight seen as deserving to live out of all of them? Hell, forget just them, what about the rest of the ponies in Equestria? What did they do to deserve the death penalty? Was it Celestia who ascended Twilight? If so, then I guess we can add omnicide to the list of Celestia's fuck-ups. Who is she to decide who lives and who dies? And for that matter, why does she even deserve to live herself, if so many others don't? And whatever the above case is, what of Flurry Heart, who was born immortal? And all this is made even worse in AUs where the answer is "alicorns are a fourth race that only their descendants can become" rather than an ascended state (and in canon if that's actually the answer), as that just adds the existence of a master race.
And as a side note, this also means that, unless either an unstoppable disaster that leaves all the main characters dead is coming, or Twilight's going to commit suicide, the writers' previous claim that Twilight wouldn't outlive her friends is a big, fat lie. I wonder, what else have they lied to us about?
I knew that, no matter the case, the show couldn't get any worse than what this episode ended on, if only because there wouldn't be any more chances for it to get worse. But it seems the writers decided to make things unable to get worse in the traditional sense as well. I knew the end wouldn't fix anything, but I didn't expect them to find a way to make things even worse at the very end. But they did.
*And unless Celestia was (and now Twilight is) somehow raising that money themselves through some enterprises, "the crown's dime" really means "at the taxpayer's expense" - both here and in general
I think we can both agree that the writers simply fail to think things through.
For the record, I'm not thrilled about Discord being behind everything either. Lots of people appear to feel the same. I can think of all sorts of ways they could have done it differently that would've been at least a little more satisfying, but alas...