@CloudMistDragon
I wouldn’t say Pipp had the Idiot Ball either. I think Pipp has two major character flaws:
The first is that she often doesn’t grasp the gravity of a situation. The Movie established this the first time we saw her in person.
The second is that she’s so used to entertaining and influencing that she has a hard time recognizing when her skillset isn’t right for the situation, or when someone else isn’t interested in what she has to offer. This is a flaw she shares with Izzy and Pinkie.
So I don’t think she had the Idiot Ball; I think she was trying to think about what Zipp would enjoy (for the first time in the series), but her first flaw tripped her up.
@LoreJuniper
I feel like Zipp doesn’t have the right personality to be Queen, but Pipp overcoming her flaws and becoming Queen would be a good arc for her.
The Brand Pillars describe Sunny as “Idealistic, Curious, and Courageous”. So I think she’s going to uncover a piece of information she wishes she hadn’t, and that will seriously challenge her courage and idealism. This dovetails with the idea that Twilight failed to hold her empire together.
Zipp’s current arc involves patching things up with her family. I think that’s going to culminate in her calling Opaline out for being a terrible parental figure, and she’s going to point to Haven as an example of a good parent. After that, I’d love to see them use a relationship between her and Hitch to explore the idea of emotional availability.
Izzy’s arc should consist of her becoming more naturally in-tune with her surroundings.
I think the G5 team has only just started reshaping the Mane 5’s personalities which are about to become as deep as the Mane 6 - they will be as crazy and erratic as the previous generation to Old Discord’s happiness. We know Izzy is just as insane as Pinkie, just different - all of these heirs are different from their predecessors. And that’s the start.
Sunny is idealistic, but her idealism has withstood strong pressure when she was alone in her faith until the movie after her father’s death. Her idealism is probably more realistic as seen with Sprout, we have seen in the game front that she confronted him and forgave him, then left his fate to Hitch and the authorities. Sprout, as we have seen in C2, was sentenced to community service. She is dangerously naive, but has demonstrated that she wants to learn, and in actuality, her naivety is what saved her from Opaline’s manipulations. She has hidden depths like the rest of the herd. And we have seen small signs that she has characteristics that can be developed over time, as Element of Hope this is important for the G5 development.
The herd which can be expanded with a new pony in C5, when S2 of G5 will start, will develop as personality development seemed to be emphasized by the G5 teams.
According to Opaline, Twilight ruled over an empire. We don’t know if she meant Equestria, but it’s highly unlikely because as a pony, she doesn’t want to equate the ponies’ homeland with an empire. Then it may mean that parts of S10 may have become canon in the G5, we saw in this IDW season - which after all left behind a lot of valuable lore - that Twilight intended to continue her policy of openness towards the rest of the world in order to spread friendship and close relations with all powers around. We had learned in S7-S10 that Twilight was greatly affected by the Storm King’s attack on Equestria, and that she wanted to gather the whole world under one roof to fend off new Storm Kings. At the end of S10, we saw the important moment that can be compared to the formation of the United Nations in the year 1945 in our world, when the various representatives and rulers came together and agreed on mutual friendship.
Up until Equestria’s collapse, Opaline had likely followed the development of Twilight’s reign as long as she was under house arrest in the Dark Castle, and this may have contributed greatly to making her bitter in addition to the loss of her magic. That could be why Opaline noted that Twilight had an empire, which could be the world’s (Equus) answer to the United Nations. Her statement that her empire “glitched” interestingly has many hidden messages - she did not mean that Twilight lost her empire, but that it malfunctioned, which may indicate her personal considerations. And our UN “glitched” also in our world…
The technological level in the G5 is much closer to each other in the three different locations than assumed at the start, because there is more talk of the ability to maintain technology than to develop it. The level of technology in Maretime Bay and Zephyr Heights is 100% impossible to create in small communities like small states. This is GLOBAL level of civilization. Then that means there was a global civilization until Equestria’s collapse. It requires resources equivalent to over 100 million sapients, and Equestria probably only had a fifth to a tenth of this at the end of G4. A mobile phone in our world consists of components and concepts from dozens of countries.
Then it means that if Twilight had ruled when Equestria collapsed, she would have succeeded in gathering the whole world and created the same conditions as in our world in 1990-2020. Until it suddenly collapsed when the magic disappeared and when the pony tribes were isolated from each other, probably the same had also happened to the rest of the world. We had noticed that many of the realms seemed to have the same social structure as the ponies, as with Tirek’s homeland where a tripartite with the centaurs, gargoyles and cloud gremlins was documented.
It is possible that Twilight’s disappearance, Equestria’s collapse, and the chaos created by the disappearance of magic - and possibly an attack - may have created fallout conditions throughout the world. If Twilight had an important role in holding together the “empire”, others must take over, but they will succeed in nothing more than preserving the structures of a hollowed out and abandoned system.
Equestria may have been quarantined as the non-ponies are kept away and it may have happened on the orders of Spike who may have taken over from Twilight. Possibly because Opaline had been released, but most likely because he was waiting for the successor after Twilight.
Perhaps the whole world is waiting for the Sunny Starscout that Twilight predicted will be her successor, which Spike and others cannot have been unaware of. This makes the upcoming battle between the two alicorns over Twilight’s legacy that much more important. And Opaline possibly knows that.