7861239
The heck are you replying to three-year-old comments for?

7306960
I agree with you on this, actually.

The Student Six are characters whom I believe held a great amount of potential, but it seemed like they were brought in for questionable reasons. Heck, the idea of a “School of Friendship” also goes against everything Seasons 1-7, and the 2017 film, taught about friendship in the first place.

7861443
Because I found out I forgot to reply to it

7306960
An Idea I Thought of Involving the Student Six

7307582

Really? What's wrong with the idea of an ancient tyrant considered to be mythical? An actual serious bad guy.

From my perspective nothing... but even early on there was a serious question of whether they could deliver on it.

Most of the villain decay you mention actually happened in the same season that Grogar was introduced.

Grogar wouldn't need to be a thing if they had just written Sombra well and I think the fact that they didn't is a stong indication that they weren't going to handle Grogar's character respectfully either.

Season 9 King Sombra is a far cry from his original incarnation, going from this monstrous force to your run-of-the-mill cartoon villain.

They pretty much destroyed the reputation of a great villain over the span of a couple of episodes.

Quite impressive.

Queen Chrysalis started out great, being a trickster with a cool voice and menacing presence but became an ineffectual loony.

Mostly in the mid to latter seasons. Her status decay absolutely becomes apparent in the last two seasons.

Well, Nightmare Moon was just Princess Luna possessed by an outside force that took advantage of her rage and jealousy

If they were going to commit to the nightmare bit, then they really needed to do something with the separate entity.

I actually prefer the more vague cannon they went with, as it keeps open a lot of possibilities.

Still, bringing the Nightmare back was definitely on the table, and they should've pursued it if they were committed to making it a thing, rather than the mess that was Shadow Play.

Discord was a morally-eschew agent of chaos that really wasn't evil.

Ehh... The mind rape and emotional abuse he foisted on Ponyvile begs to differ.

To say nothing about latter seasons.

Lord Tirek was cool, being a foe that can steal magic but that's pretty much it.

To be fair, he was a looot more subtle than any other villains we'd seen up to that point.

The first villain we'd seen willing to wheel and deal to get what he wanted.... He definitely established a pattern going forwards, as far as villains go.

How did she contact Tirek while he was locked away in Tartarus?

Probably the biggest problem with Cozy Glow was the world building around Tartarus, and how it worked. Just a lot of issues there.

You could argue that it's her skills at manipulation but all we've seen of that is her pretending to be a normal innocent little filly and pretty much everyone knows she's not so there goes that.

She absolutely could've been better utilized as a minor villain.

Like a more subtle Diamond Tiara, developing schemes in the background, that doesn't get her ultimate punishment until the final.

She's not the worst part of the final seasons, but she is improperly utilized for a lot of it.

As a child, she's physically weaker than everyone else and is presumably still learning about her pegasus physiology so she lacks speed and weather manipulation.

I mean, we'd seen enough child prodigies at this point in the series to know that that's not necessarily true.

Even ignoring those scenes where she was shown to be incredibly fast and capable of large scale weather organization.

She's not a strategist or particularly cunning or book smart.

We see her hitting the books pretty hard later on.

We see her doing extensive sorting and note taking, even assisting the young six with their homework.

And she managers to stay on as Twilight's assistant, including scheduling her classes.

The general impression is that she's a lot smarter than she lets on.

She isn't a unicorn so magical prowess is off the table too.

As much as I like her as a Pegasus, another powerful Unicorn villain would've come across as much more dangerous, child or not...

Then again, most of the villains up to this point had been unicorns, so they were probably looking for variety.

If the Starlight concept had been applied to a earth pony trying to rid her village of magic, or if Stygian had been a earth pony instead, I think those concepts would have played out better.

If more time was devoted to Cozy Glow's development instead of her being a "twist" villain, then she could've been awesome.

Could've, but development is the one thing MLP didn't do well for the most part, especially when it came to its villains.

I mean, Starlight Glimmer* started off as a better villain before her half-baked backstory and poorly-handled redemption.

Case in point, Starlight Glimmer, who was much more universally liked before they gave her a backstory.

I think that's the main issue with the series: the handling of the villains.

Agreed.