Thanks to Pumpernickel Rye , I found this,
Click me.
And to quote him

So this how they decided to do the twist from the finale. The problem is they really shouldn't have copied and pasted the twist for a completely different story. Honestly this version does a better job justifying what Discord did. He's put in a situation out of his control where he could possibly lose his best friend forever, the only person he truly cares about. He's fighting fate and making mistakes out of it.

Then they changed it so he did it for the sake of Twilight's feelings.

And while I deeply enjoyed the ""The Ending of the End," the twist was just stupid.

Aye true mate. Too bad Hasbro doesn't give a damn

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"...but the villains even realize the power of friendship by being able to relate to each other, hatred brought them together"

Well, good to know that somewhere in the original plan there was the idea of the villains realizing the power of friendship. Also, while not prefect, this idea would've done a lot more to explain Discord's actions to a degree and have it be less... stupid.

Yeah, there's a lot of Season 9 ideas that were left on the cutting room floor that just sound better. I actually like the Young 6 idea as well. With them more-or-less having officially adopted as the new Elements of Harmony, you could even still have had the Mane-6 as the focus by putting each of them together with their older counterparts in various episodes. Really I think more than any other season, this one would have benefited from being tighter, with more of an ongoing story, and much less episodic.

Although for the love of God, Discord should have been masquerading as literally anyone instead of Grogar. Don't jangle the G1 update keys in front of us just to yank them away. That's just mean.

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Although for the love of God, Discord should have been masquerading as literally anyone instead of Grogar. Don't jangle the G1 update keys in front of us just to yank them away. That's just mean.

Preaching to the choir my brother.

The late, great Harlan Ellison said something to the effect
“They need another screen credit. In addition to ‘written by’, ‘produced by’, etc.
they need ‘Concept Screwed Over By’ “

That’s the G rated version

What's the source on this?

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Yeah, there's a lot of Season 9 ideas that were left on the cutting room floor

That's why I don't understand why this is titled "the Original Season 9." Why are we assuming this was their first thought process? Couldn't this have been the middle of a whole series of ideas they were bouncing around?

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Wait, how do we know the people above them at Hasbro put the kibosh on this? Not that it's unlikely, but why it couldn't it have been one of the writers who decided to change it up, and then another writer who decided to copy/paste the twist that didn't fit.

All things being equal, I'd give my left... um... something I'm very near to, in order to be in the writer's room when they were hashing out *any* of the season scripts. There's probably ten ideas that got floated for every one that hit paper.

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Hey, at least we have Lunaverse Grogar. ^^

I'd expected that a better idea got shot down because I remember the five most lethal words in show business: "I love the idea but....."

As someone once said, a re-tool is when one tool is changing the work of another.

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I think I did a pretty good job with Tirek, too, to be honest. Bound and broken and beaten, he is still treated as by a wide margin the most dangerous thing on the planet at the time, and he manages to shatter Corona’s ego in a way no one else has been able to with just six words.

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Yeah, I quite liked that bit with Tirek. When you see yourself as righteous, nothing shatters your perceptions like compliments from a villain.

More interesting than canon Tirek imo, who always stuck me as 'generic doomsday villain'.

These notes are how I predicted season 9 would originally go. I was sure Discord was Grogar, but I also thought he was doing his whole scheme as some sort of long con to reform all the villains, and I also felt like if Celestia/Luna have to retire, then Discord has to retire/go away as well. That and I've always figured Discord and the Tree are really closely connected.

I wonder if these are just universal fantasy themes we're all dealing with. In any case, I feel like that would have been a much stronger final season.

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No, you didn't. You did a friggin' fantastic job with both Grogar and Tirek. Light-years better than the show in regards to Grogar.

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Thanks for the link. Ah, those most painful of words, "What might have been..."

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As I recall you actually didn’t care much for how I portrayed Tirek as bound and broken at the time - I’m glad your opinion seems to have changed. I hope it’s not just because of show contrast, though.

I was going for just a bit of Silence of the Lambs. He stood in one place and yet was scary. Plus he totally called how Bray was going to survive the events of the story when after Grogar called him a coward, Tirek looks past Grogar at Bray and says “The cowards survive.”

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You're welcome.

Not sure if anyone already know about this but apparently Big Jim has been FAQing over on twitter, which as then been reposted in a more condensed list over on Equestria Daily. (link)

I'm not sure how informative it really is as quite a lot of the responses seem ambiguous or otherwise non-comital quips about stuff that was either never discussed among the staff of intentionally leaving certain things open ended for the fans to decide. Although one big take away that stood out to me was this particular repeated bit when he was twice asked about the Grogar/Discord.

A: It was planned from the beginning. You think we were going to let a brand new baddie (new to this Gen, anyway) be the one to take on our girls at the end? We wanted it to be those 3 to have that personal connection.

A: There was no way we were not going to let those 3 baddies be the ones in the end battle. Besides, the fake out made sense to us given Discord’s demented logic.

And you know what, fine... I can accept that they always intend the trio of Cozy, Tirek, and Chrysalis to be the final enemies, but that still doesn't really explain or justify setting up an intentional fake out in the first place. If the trio is going to be final threat, why not just let them be so from the very start. It really couldn't have been that much hard to find any other way to toss the three of them together, or maybe working from basics of what the season premier gave us just start from Sombra resurrecting on his own, revealing he'd just been biding his time to recover his powers or what not. Then he can be the one to gather the trio, not because he want's to team up, but just because he's an arrogant bastard who wants an audience so he can prove himself the best villain. He can leave them in his lair to watch remotely, where they witness his defeat instead and then with some prodding from Cozy about how the Mane-6 are strong because they work together, the alliance of evil can be forged.

No need to tease the audience with the return of a classic villain, and no need to get Discord involved when he's not even going to suffer any comeuppances.

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To be honest I’m not even exactly mad about Discord masquerading as some other villain to bring them together - its the fact that they specifically chose Grogar.

It’s Iron Man 3 all over again. The difference being that Marvel has an upcoming movie named Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, so it really seems like they’ve learned from their mistake on that front. There’s no way they’re stupid enough to fake us out with the Mandarin twice, and can correct their mistake within their own continuity.

Whereas Friendship is Magic is over. There’s no fixing it at this point, except possibly in the comics. Maybe. Hopefully.