flying_whimsy said:
To be fair, I haven't actually watched anything beyond the season 6 premiere: Starlight left a bad taste in my mouth. And it isn't so much that she's a stand-in for Sunset Shimmer (which she totally is), but it's more that from the start the driving philosophy behind her touched a nerve for me. It then didn't help that the season 5 finale was the only one in the entire series I didn't like, not just because she was in it, but because I think it was poorly done to try and shoehorn her in.
I straight up actually just hate Starlight and would rather have seen her banished to the moon or stuck doing Celestia's ***** work now that Twilight has her own royal council. Sombra tried to take over the crystal empire and gets blown to bits, Starlight ends the world dozens of times and gets...tutoring. Like the entirety of season 5, everything about her just feels really off balance to me.
rant rant rant ***** ***** ***** whine whine whine. Sorry, I'm just bitter because I haven't been able to enjoy the show as much over the last year. I'll probably get caught up with it and back in stride once I visit some brony friends this coming weekend.
I certainly sympathize with most of that. The season 5 finale wasn't really my cup of tea, how Starlight is forgiven just like that. Distrust of Luna was brought back in season 2, and her redemption arc was resolved much later (the one where she enters the dreams of the Mane 6 IRCC. Discord was brought back in season 3, but probably wasn't fully accepted until the end of season 4 (post-Tirek). Even though she's learning the "magic of friendship," Starlight's forgival was WAY too fast. I mean, it's not as if Queen Chrysalis has ever been forgiven for her actions, so there's a precedent for not every villain being redeemable.
That said, I wouldn't go so far as to compare her with Sombra, a.k.a. the weakest season opener/ender villain the show's had. As reprehensible as Starlight's actions are, they're at least rooted in emotional backlash, and can be at least sympathized with, if not forgiven. Sombra, on the other hand, wants to destroy the Crystal Empire because...he's evil? It also doesn't help that he basically has no personality to speak of. He just does what he does with no rationale behind it. Not to mention that Starlight's motive was to screw up Twilight's life, but screwing up the timeline and Equestria as a whole wasn't her goal in of itself.
I can't really say if season 6 is any better or worse than past seasons (at this point in time the overall quality generally feels consistent across multiple seasons), but hey, Starlight has barely featured in it so far, so there's that.