I don't like Cozy Glow · 4:18am Sep 27th, 2020
I don't.
I think she's a little monster.
I think sending her to Tartarus was fine.
I think Chryssi and Tirek have a better chance of being redeemed than she does.
Cozy... bothers me in ways I cannot fully explain. I see all these fics attempting to redeem her, and all I can imagine is the writers hugging her and then she stabs them in the back. And once they're down, she starts stabbing them over and over while laughing like a lunatic.
I don't like Cozy Glow.
Redemption fics for her bother me. I don't think her accepting redemption is 'in-character.' Yeah, she had that moment of doubt in the spotlight episode for the Legion of Doom, but they still went for their plan to conquer Equestria.
I wish I could explain why I hate Cozy redemption fics in a way that doesn't sound stupid.
I see her as a little demon, but she is in fact actually a sociopath. she has absolutely no actual understanding of what friendship actually is and made a broken conclusion of it
I think the reason why a lot of people especially can't stand Cozy Glow... But also want to redeem her... Is because she is one of the most common villains ever.
A close friend/family member betraying you.
What they did horrified you to levels beyond most villains because they were your other half, your dearest friend, your most trusted. All that energy and love you gave them, meant nothing. You can't comprehend someone you trusted not caring about you in the slightest, so you make excuses. Try to find ways to see the 'good in them', no matter what. Even if there is no redemption.
Anyway, that's my two cents on why most people, myself included, are the most disturbed by her.
She's the filly you love to hate
One of the very few sins I lay at the show's feet is not even trying to give Cozy a backstory. Like... none. At all. A shit one would have been better!
Hell, I'll go as far as to say deliberately saying there is no backstory would be genuinely great here. Yeah, Villains who are evil simply because they enjoy being evil is the lowest tier of villain, but in Equestria? A world full of sunshine, rainbows, and fairy farts, where everyone has their niche and purpose and the dominate guiding force of the world is literally harmony? That would be downright disturbing. In this perfect world, to have a character, and a child no less, outright say, "No, I wasn't abused, abandoned or mistreated. There's no tragedy. I just... enjoy being evil."
That is absolutely terrifying.
5365082
Yup, she could in theory be redeemed, but I actually found one fic where she says she CAN'T live in a society Twilight made where peace and harmony exist (Albeit in a way where if you aren't harmonious you're temporarily stoned, and Twilight regrets it), and asks to be turned back to stone
You watched seasons 8 and 9? I haven't heard anyone say anything positive about them and threads like this just reinforce that notion. They seem like a total disconnect from the earlier show.
blame her parents
The problem is that she's not so much a character as a narrative automaton. We learn nothing of her motives. We learn nothing of her background. We learn nothing of how her goals even make sense. Etc.
5365082
Looking at her, I think she is a low tier version of Himiko Toga.
A highly functioning Sociopath that Understands how to act like a neurotypical people, but it is just an act or mask to what she truly is and what she wants.
Chrysalis and Tirek both became evil, Cozy Glow being evil at such a young age means that there was either something really bad happening to her at home or she was bad from the get go.
She’s a psycho. Worse than the narcissist that’s Chrysalis and the typical power hungry Tirek, Cozy reminds me of those serial killers from those crime investigation shows. They seem like the normal person next door who’s nice and friendly but they’re a soulless monster inside. They present themselves exaxtly like they want others to see them as to keep suspicion off them. Starlight’s admittedly lacking backstory aside, it did present her as someone who allowed their heartbreak over losing a friend to spiral into yhe craziness we saw in S5 Starlight.
Maybe a backstory would help Cozy but I think it’d be too mature for a show like FiM given the messed up childhoods of other famous psychos.
Cozy seems like a childhood psycho way past the line where intervening help could be given and have any chance of working.
All the people excusing her behavior or saying her punishment was too harsh because she’s just a child just can’t seem to comprehend that kids can be psychs too and that there comes a point where someone is beyond help. A hug and offering a hand in friendship (again) isn’t going to fix Cozy. She’s right where she needs to be.
While some may have said that sending her to Tartarus was to far for a child you have to to remember the scale of the crime she committed and more than that unlike all the previous villains she had no real power of her own, all she had was some artefacts of power that where more or less just lying around and some information from Tirek that's it, and she was able to bring Equestria to its knee's.
Plus she was shown to be smart enough to pull the innocent little foal act whenever she needed to, and all it would take is one dumb guard believing a sob story and she would be free.
As a side note on Cozy's character I found one of her character flaws being she is certainly smart enough to make a effective plan but she seemed unable to understand the consequences of her plans, like her plan to drain away the magic despite the fact that almost everything important in equestria runs on in including but not limited to the weather, crop growth, keeping the Crystal empire habitable, moving the sun and moon, and at least some of the technology.
She comes across as not someone who made bad choices, but more someone who has deep psychological issues. If she could be redeemed it would be through years of therapy and possibly drugs, and it’s entirely possible she is literally irredeemable depending on what sort of condition she has. First guess would either be sociopath or possibly antisocial personality disorder.
Always seemed to me like she would be perfect in an episode of 'Criminal Minds'. Or 'Law and Order'. Or 'The X-Files'.
Basically any show that gets a lot of mileage out of the 'creepy child' trope.
Cozy is, indeed, that level of crazy where you can have anything at all happen to them and not feel bad about it, because there was nothing redeemable there at all. Just Evil Incarnate on a Stick.
Cozy redemption is a hard sell for me. In my experience, it generally requires Sunset Shimmer to step in, both so Cozy has a parole officer who can see her true intentions and so the social structure of the human world can keep the twelve-year-old from organizing another angry mob. And even those need several chapters of wearing down the little terror to feel satisfactory.
I've seen this plotline work, but boy is it a doozy. As others have noted, it doesn't help that Cozy's a blank slate and we never, say, see what her parents think of the whole mess.
5365098
"Total disconnect" is very strong. Season 8 is, in my opinion, the weakest season of the series, but it still has a number of great episodes and intriguing concepts to explore. Season 9 is more consistently entertaining and, by the end, does feel like a culmination of all that's led up to it. (Not necessarily the best culmination, but still a satisfying ending with enough ambiguities to wiggle around the bits people complain about.)
I can understand the aversion to it, as honestly I’m averted to it as well. They’re all redeemable, sure, but the way most fics I see try to go about it doesn’t fit the character. There’s no one way to redeem them, they each have to be redeemed differently. All of them try to appeal to “better nature” and stuff like that, or reconcile horrible past events, the ways Discord, Starlight, etc. were redeemed, but that’s not a one-size-fits-all thing.
I remember one fic I read redeemed Tirek by forcing him to team up with ponies against a bigger threat. I loved it because it made sense. Tirek’s character is disinterested in ponies,he wants power and wants to rule, so the fic laid him low, destroyed his ego, smashed him down by something bigger he can’t face till he was forced to accept help that built him back up.
Now, Cozy Glow is a difficult character. Because she’s a unique baddie in MLP. Discord? Used Magic and trickery. Nightmare Moon? Magic. Tirek? Magic and strength. Chrysalis? Magic. Starlight? Magic and deception. Cozy Glow is unique because she doesn’t use her strength, or her magic, or anything like that. She manipulates ponies. And that’s a huge threat, because she does it so well where you can’t tell she’s evil before it’s too late. I mean, I never personally acknowledged Cozy Glow as a proper character the first few times I saw her. I just figured she was your average background character. I didn’t even suspect when she started getting involved in things like the tree under the school. I suspected something was odd, but didn’t think until it was too late and she was outright being evil.
With Cozy Glow and redemption it’s exactly as you said. She’s so good at lying and being manipulative that it wouldn’t take her much to put on the “act”, and escape when the time is right, or stab everyone in the back.
As said, there’s a way to redeem her of course, no one is irredeemable for that reason, but no fic I’ve seen so far has done it right, made it believable or fitting to her character. It may very well be that nobody knows how to redeem her properly.
That’s my thoughts on why it leaves such a bad taste.
Another thing to note, I’ve seen one interpretation of Cozy as not being a filly, but rather a full-grown mare, just a dwarf. Which honestly is more believable than her being a foal.
BH, I think it would be possible to reform Cozy, but doing so would require competent writers. If I were to do it, I would explore her moments of fear/vulnerability. For example, hiding behind Tirek when Chrysalis frightens her. But beyond redemption there are some major questions revolving around her. How'd she contact Tirek? What was her actual plan? How does a child get that smart and cunning?
(nods) Yeah, she's a sociopath... while some villains can be redeemed, given the right circumstances, Cozy isn't one of them.
My friend Evilhumour and I actually did a series of fics that, at that point in the timeline, gave Cozy Glow an actual reason for being a villain. That still didn't excuse her mental illnesses, which resulted in her being sentenced to spending the rest of her life in prison because even without magic beyond what she was born with, she was dangerous enough to warrant it. In short, part of why our Cozy ended up like she did was because she was an adult stuck in a child's body, like Mary Dahl of Batman: The Animated Series fame.
Until next time...
Anon e Mouse Jr.
Thank you. Thank you so much for saying this. It disturbs me on a fundamental level that so many people on this site bend over backwards to make excuses for her or condemn the other characters for "not trying to help her". Umm, hello, she wrote to Tirek when he was in Tartarus? She *reached out* to him, the guy who stole the magic from Equestria and all that?
You just don't want to know how some minds work. Be they Cozy Glow's or her diehard apologists.
Funny you should mention this, I've been working on a redemption fic based on an idea over in the Wreck-It Ralph fandom... which hardly anyone here is aware of.
I think I might know why Cozy bothers you:
Perhaps the very idea that a character was made for this purpose annoys you? Or bothers you deep down?
I forgot, time stamps don't work in Fim. Her part is at the very end of the video.