My Little Pony – Villains through the Seasons (Part 2)

So last post I did a quick review of the basic villains from the my little pony friendship is magic seasons. I stopped short of season five’s first villain, Starlight Glimmer.

A QUICK Warning - SPOILERS for Season 5 Opener and both Equestria Girl Movies 

As I touched base on before the writing team has either gotten better at their craft or has finally been given more rope to run with this season. Reason being this villain is a step in the right direction. Why you may ask? I’ll tell you why in a moment. First two more quick stops down memory lane.

I know not everyone enjoyed the Equestria Girl movies; but I did. Mainly due to the villains in each.

The first one had a very competent villain by the name of Sunset Shimmer, former pupil of Celestia until she turned to evil and murdered your father. Wait forget that last part.

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Sunset escaped to a dimension close to our own only technology seems to have rapidly evolved faster then that of Equestria and a persons color or their skin is thankfully not an issue. (Now if only we could get that right here). She successfully manipulated the mane six of that world (or five as it were) into hating each other all without anyone the wiser. A woman after my own heart.

Only after she tried to enslave that worlds population and return to conquer Equestria in classic “woman-scorned” clichéism did she falter. After a rather colorful beat-down she breaks down and cries..repents..and turns to the light.

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Everything was fine until that last part. MLP villains have this horrifically consistent trait that makes them all go straight at the end of the episode. Now I can understand the need for that to be for the kids who were originally intended to be watching this, but on the big screen you cant just build up a villain whose done far more damage then most of the ones in the show and then..just turn her into a bawling wimp. Sure the message is all bullies are just insecure on the inside but sometimes..and I know this may be a shock…they don’t turn over a new leaf.

Some people just want to watch the world burn.

That in mind, we moved to the second movie where Trixie serves as a nice secondary antagonist to a new set of girls called The Dazzlings.

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Based loosely on the concept of sirens (who if you don’t recall lured men to their death with alluring and often hypnotic songs) these girls were a giant step in the right direction that sunset opened the door to. Callous and calculating their leader successfully pulled off what sunset could not (even going so far as to gloat about it to sunset making the newly reformed member of the mane 7 even MORE insecure and unsure of herself) to a degree where they actually win.

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For a moment.

Sunset Shimmer having doubted herself through the entire movie finally understands the magic of friendship and sings about it. In doing so she unlocks her ultimate mode and joins the others in a clearly not highlighting a new leader in a spin off series moment. The Dazzlings power is destroyed and without their magic they cant manipulate or.sing well for that matter and they run off. Thankfully they don’t turn to the light side.

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In classic villain format they run!

Another step in the right direction.

Which brings me to our newest antagonist, Starlight Glimmer! Shes a crafty one alright. One can almost see the evolution of characters if you sit back and watch the seasons in order and the movies. Shes able to successfully convince everyone that without a cutie mark they’d be happy since they’d be equal…and equality is happiness..right?

I won’t go into the episode’s morale implications in this post but I will say I was happily surprised at how they turned equality on its head and made me believe something for a moment..that’s another post.

Starlight’s motivation is one of the things that I feel is the step in the right direction, namely, we don’t KNOW her motivation. It’s never entirely revealed. That’s the key to a proper villain in my opinion, you don’t dump explanations into the lap of the viewer immediately. You make them speculate, churn their mental butter, and then you slowly see what they like and don’t like as they speculate.

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The cult like village she rules over is practically perfect in terms of obedience, save a few inevitable day dreamers who think there MIGHT be something wrong with all this equality. The only thing we didn’t see was a plot with some poisoned apple cider everyone had to drink, it was flawless in execution.

The real clincher when it came to this villain being an evolution was as mentioned before, she doesn’t apologize and want to be friends with Twilight and company, she RUNS. Yes like any good villain when the hero(s) close in on you, you execute your escape plan, which in this case was a tunnel she had prepared we assume just in case this occurred. Despite her attempt to keep all the Mane 6’s cutie marks she ends up being foiled by her former subjects, who use their talents (which include the talent of..skiing? ) to foil her. The final attack which appeared to have the intent of being lethal to the closing masses is a nice bonus. All too often the bad guys are always pulling punches where this girl was about to vaporize the lot of them, only to be deflected by Twilight.

Her departure leaves this author hoping this isn’t the last we’ve seen of her as she runs off into the caverns, hopefully to plot her revenge. The entire execution of Starlight was only missing “I’ll get you next time, Gadget, NEXT TIME!” which keeps me from giving this new antagonist a perfect score, per say. The writing team still has some leeway to send us spiraling back into happy happy villain territory, a place I hope we don’t go back to.

Thanks for reading my first set of posts, I hope you like and spread my URL about. I’d honestly like to talk more on a deeper level about all elements of the universe.

I’ll also be retrofitting this blog for my two MLP series “The Clopping Dead” (Equestria and zombie ponies, a focus on the adjustment the world would require to such a rapid change in life) and “Equestrian City” (Super Heroes and Equestria Girls, a wonderful combo!)

Thanks again!

-Watchfire

0 thoughts on “My Little Pony – Villains through the Seasons (Part 2)

  1. I love sunset shimmer because she’s once a villain but now she’s reform as one.
    I think she’ll be teriffic of letting the Mane 6 joining herself as the member newly reform member of the gang in ponyville, don’t you?

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