we have a forth wall break!

With tuppence for paper and strings, you can have your own set of wings…

What, is she turned on by them or something? Well, its tagged “safe”, not “suggestive”….

These are my kites. There are many like them, but theses ones are mine!

@G.S.  
I’d like to think that she either had abusive parents which resulted in her running away.  
Or her biological parents were… lets just say MIA, when she was at a very young age that resulted in her being placed in foster care. Either she was abused in foster care and or she was abused by her adoptive parents in her later childhood. There could also be a possibility that she was adopted by loving parents that failed to connect to her because like you said, she was cold and distant by the time she was adopted.
 
I have many reasons to believe she was abused.  
She’s exhibiting certain symptoms that are often associated with those who had shitty childhoods. She’s like a filly in a mare’s body because really never had a fillyhood.

@SeraphimDawn
 
Maybe we can have a Very Special Episode™ rated TV-PG that explores what really happened to Starlight when she was a filly. In a flashback, of course. Maybe it could include mature topics such as ^{%child abuse,%} multiple failed attempts to place Starlight with adoptive parents due to her ice-cold, distant, mean attitude towards the world that she believes hates her, and the dark, unsettled mind of a person that was forced to grow up too fast with a blistering hatred of everyone and everything around her. This hatred was omnidirectional, but it had a convenient target: Cutie marks, the thing that took away the only good thing in Starlight’s life. And, like lightning, this hatred took the easiest path. She studied magic and nothing else for her entire life, because she sincerely believed that the world would never accept her unless she forced it to… and the world kept reaffirming this belief, perhaps because Starlight unwittingly caused it to with her behavior.

@G.S.  
I hope they reveal more about her past in the next season. I feel like they deliberately kept these pieces missing as a way to pave for potential episodes. While she may have technically “graduated” on friendship courses. She still has a lot to learn and still has lingering bad habits.
 
But she’s going to have to open up. Something that she still seems to be very insecure about. Twilight and the others can only do so much for her before they hit a major roadblock in her rehabilitation.

@Daneasaur
 
I notice that Starlight’s life between her time with Sunburst and her starting/taking over Our Town is something she never, ever wants to bring up or discuss with anyone. This is even more concerning because it includes her entire adolescence and probably a large portion of early adulthood.
 
In fact, it seems like her only happy memories in her entire life are her time with Sunburst. That’s… very frightening, especially when you consider that Twilight said that Sunburst is “the first pony [Starlight] ever cared about,” which implies something terrifying about her childhood. What about her parents? Either she had a very bad relationship with her parents, or she lost them, or she never knew them in the first place and was abandoned on the doorstep of an orphanage as an infant… and then she apparently wasn’t loved by anyone during her entire life… other than Sunburst. Sunburst was the only light in her dark life. And when he was taken away…

@SeraphimDawn  
Well, one thing we know is that Equestria has a sort of… “Sensory deprivation” when it comes to harsher topics, so when something minor happens, such as losing a friend, you’re more likely to go off the deep end and not know when to stop or even that you can be responsible for the destruction of the world as we know it.
 
Starlight was taught friendship was everything and Sunburst was indeed her everything in being her only friend, but when he got his mark and he was taken away, she took it to the logical and immature yet extreme view that cutie marks = bad things. She became insanely powerful and even now, her powers have matched, if not trumped alicorn magic, but her skills OUTSIDE of magic are so severely stunted as to be seen as beyond childish.
 
She’s so stunted that most of what she attempts to accomplish seems to be ways of regaining a childhood she… well, lost. A childhood she lost by focusing and obsessing on magic to the point she never gave the rest of her childhood or adolescence any attention beyond the focus in her pursuit of magic to rid equestrians of cutiemarks.

@Daneasaur  
I really think her overall antics and lack of social fluidity could hint a more severe and possibly traumatic experience in her childhood.

@SeraphimDawn  
Writers never saw the episode where she became friends with Maude? Happens to some writers.
 
That said, the episode seemed to… I dunno… feel… crammed? Might have already been too much going on and the board game replaced the kite flying as a more plausible “immature” hobby Starlight was obsessed with to show how stunted she is in certain mental aspects.
 
There was also a disturbing lack of Spike. He lives in the castle doing all the cleanup but he didn’t show up even once as a background element.

@Daneasaur  
I wonder why….?

>TFW They found her kites.

This is when you realize the writers really missed something about Starlight.

Wish Starlight and Sunburst had gotten a kite-flying scene in this episode.

Twilight Sparkle : Starlight, what are you doing? What’s with those kites about?  
Starlight Glimmer : Nothing, Twilight! These are my children!