@Trickquestion  
Your ideas are clever and straightforward. I like them.
 
I really wish Hasbro and/or DHX Media would look for more people like you.

@Trickquestion
 
No, it’s fine, as I can be pretty verbose myself. I like your idea for Friendship Games focusing on Twilight, and actually makes me wonder if what you described is akin to how EQG3 was originally conceptualised, going on the stinger for RR.

@Ebalosus  
Remove Cinch as a character entirely and make Cadance the principal. Following the stinger of Rainbow Rocks, Twilight is the only person in the world who realizes something is weird at Canterlot High. When the games are announced, she jumps at the opportunity to join the team in order to travel to Canterlot High. In her discussion with Cadance, she drops some exposition about how Twilight never wanted to join any kind of club or event despite her brilliance and Cadance is happy she’s socializing a little more. The Shadowbolts get more screentime in which they make a some effort to reach out to their new teammate (who instead of hating they simply have no idea Twilight even exists, given how reclusive she is on campus) only for Twi to shut them down constantly. At the games, Twilight privately expresses contempt for the whole thing and doesn’t bother showing to any event she doesn’t need to compete in, carrying out her investigation while musing that this could make her the most famous scientist in the history of the world. After getting her amulet charged up, in the place of “Unleash the Magic” her teammates and Cadance confront Twilight over her bad attitude as she tries to slink away again, and Cadance attempts to confiscate the amulet, at which point an increasingly frantic and paranoid Twilight activates it out of desperation and the ending proceeds as normally.
 
You are right, in the sense that it would be derivative of EQG1, but if we want to go into maximum rewrite mode I’d actually have Twilight refuse to change her ways or maybe even succeed, and in contrast with Sunset who only wanted personal power Twilight is doing this because she believes magic is a completely untapped field of human knowledge that deserves to be studied and understood. Yes there would be a desire for fame in their as well, but Twilight wants recognition and adoration from smart people, not (from her perspective) these five idiots from a high school and a cross dimension criminal who are all squandering their knowledge. As a villain (and a version of Twilight who wasn’t Celestia’s student) Twilight’s motivation would be overwhelming, ruthless ambition.
 
Now that I’ve said all that though, I suppose the Cinch/Twilight dynamic they used was the best set up to keep the events in the movie as un-impactful as possible. A sufficiently ambitious human Twilight has the potential to wreck serious havoc on the status quo. Sorry if you were hoping for a little snippet by the way. That got a little out of hand.

@Trickquestion
 
That’s…a fair point actually. My only concern with Twilight-as-main-villain is that we’d probably get an EQG1 style plot-and-ending in both letter and spirit, AFAICT.
 
If not, then please, tell me how you’d structure the plot to avoid that particular pitfall (sincere question)?

The whole reason Cinch exists is because the movie didn’t have the guts to just make Human!Twilight any combination of ambitious, egotistical, cruel or even just coldly curious that would allow her to generate the conflict of the movie on her own. Instead Twilight’s a dull Fluttershy recolor that needs this short-sighted, one dimensional loser to drive the entire plot and suck up screen time.

@Background Pony #B018  

 
I have to agree. I thought there was a LOT of untapped potential with the Shadowbolts (obviously the ones directly opposed to our human 6). Well executed in technicality as a film, but could’ve definitely been done better in the story. My biggest criticism is that we went in knowing minimally about them, and left pretty much the exact same way except that they just kind of… went psuedo-good finally.

I love Adagio, but Cinch was pretty cool too.

@Background Pony #0DE6  
Well, that’s exactly what made her the villain. Her selfishness and the narrow scope of her vision was the reason she ended up causing all the movie’s problems. She didn’t care about the repercussions of using magic or how significant a discovery it was, she didn’t care about the damage she might be doing to her students, she just cared about securing a victory in the Friendship Games and keeping her own reputation intact.
 
I’d like to be optimistic and say characters that short-sighted aren’t believable, but I know from personal experience that people like Cinch can in fact end up working in some schools.

I felt like cinch’s biggest problem came from being the antagonist to a more minor conflict in the grand scheme of things. The games themselves were a good set-up to the problem of magical shenanigans but cinches insistence that they’re so important feels annoying and one note in the face of the conflict that starts building up with the magical device and twilight.

She’s a terrible person, but I thought she served her purpose in the movie pretty well. She’s kind of like EQG’s version of Dolores Umbridge. The only serious complaints I have are her design and how she prevented the Shadowbolts from getting much development.

@Ebalosus
 
She might be one of the most capable manipulators in the entire show. Look at the number she did on Twilight. People say she harps on about Everton, but she stops near the end. She actually shifts her pressure point attack away from that and exploits Twilight’s curiosity regarding magic to get her to use it. How many villains, without resorting to magic, actually manage to manipulate people that sublimely by using their own character tics against them?

@gingerninja666  

I agree with these, and accept your fondness for her on an ironic level. I accept her in terms of plot motivation and setting immersion, even if she is admittedly quite chichéd. As I said here, I can put up with weaker characterisation as long as the rest of the narrative is good, which in FG’s case, it is.

@Ebalosus
 
I like her on an ironic level. For the same reasons I liked Sombra. She’s a collosal bitch and proud of it. She accepts magic INSTANTLY and vows to win in spite of this. This, to me, marks her as completely insane. Her villain song is great and I liked how she pushed Twilight’s buttons.

@gingerninja666
 
I wouldn’t say that I liked her, but I both understand and accept her role in the movie

Sigh. I feel like the only person who LIKED Cinch

@Background Human
 
Fair question. Two reasons mainly
 
1: I’m concerned that it’ll become a crutch for resolving major conflicts in future movies like how it was a crutch in Elements of Harmony. One thing I found so refreshing about both Crystal Empire and Cutie Map, not to mention Rainbow Rocks, was how the protagonists resolved the conflict without the whole and with our powers combined™ cliché. “But Evan” I hear you say “Didn’t Rainbow Rocks and Friendship Games, a movie you really liked use that chiché?” I would argue no, as it wasn’t a case of “We need to get the elements together to overcome the big bad™!” In RR, it was more that the power of their friendship defeated the bad guys, and although they did technically use it in FG, it wasn’t as though Sunset set out to “Ok girls, you represent the elements of friendship, thus if shit really goes down, then we’ll get together and Rainbow nuke the fuck out of the bad guy!” It was more organic in FG, which is better…but still something I don’t want to see them rely upon in future movies.
 
2: It’s plain unnecessary as far as I’m concerned. One that I really appreciated in both RR and Cutie Map is how it was the heroes outwitting the bad guys rather than outmagicing them. Sure, magic was involved in the former case, but it wasn’t what the resolution hinged upon. RR even lampshades it when poneTwi tries it and causes a massive amount of spaghetti spillage both in-film and in the audience. To me, the power of their friendship is powerful enough in the EQG world to overcome any major obstacles, being the ostensible theme of the entire generation of MLP in all, and shouldn’t be broken down into its’ constituent parts.
 
To be honest, I’m not against the elements of friendship if they’re used well, as in the case of FG, I’m just worried that it’ll be a crutch for the next movie with regards to character development and conflict resolution.

@Ebalosus  
Okay, I have to ask. I get why (a) is a problem, but what do you have against (b)?

My biggest beef with her is that she got way too much screen time for what she did with it (basically just tell Human Twilight “Everton this and reputation that” over and over). Screen time that should have been more evenly distributed to any of the Shadow Five not named Sour Sweet. What’s odd is that the Shadow Five were all over the pre-release materials and toy lines, with Cinch hardly in sight. In the actual movie, it’s basically the other way around.
 
I did like her villain song though (not that it’s going to help with her popularity).

Sad, isn’t it?

Oh she definitely brought it down some notches.

@Background Pony #688C
 
I liked FG too, and consider it about on par with RR, with RR winning out due to cohesive integration of all the elements at play within it.
 
There are only two things I didn’t like about FG, and they are a) the under-examination of the impact of magic on this world, and b) the introduction of the elements of friendship to this world.

From a film that turned out better than expected in my opinion, Cinch was definitely the worst villain in not just EQG, but all of MLP G4.

@Ebalosus  
Personally, I liked Friendship Games but Cinch was the single-most damning thing about the movie. Had it not been for her, I would’ve placed it a little closer to Rainbow Rocks. That said, it’s well-above the first movie.

>Fandom’s general reaction to both movies