@Jades  
I say heavy in that they were some rather serious and dark subjects [in regards to a show targeted for such a young audience.] Since we saw War, hopeless resistance, implied genocide, etc. The imagery throughout the episode was rather dark and oppressive, especially compared to the usual tone of MLP.
 
Which is why I say the ending song was intentionally more upbeat and positive, in order to end on a high note instead of the rather serious and dark nature the episode had throughout.

@CronoM  
I didn’t mean get rid of his status as an antagonist or go food side entirely. I meant don’t blame everything that happened specifically in the episode on him. Guess I could’ve worded that better. Honestly if they get rid of the antagonist side of him he’ll be entirely worthless to the show tbh.
 
 
Well I can’t really disagree with the notion about Starlight. It might just me trying to be the slightest bit optimistic about her in the future if she appears again. Quite honestly as I think they only gave her that Raw power just to give Twilight a reason to redeem her. I mean they could’ve at least shilled how smart her plan was or how she’s dangerous with how she was able to manipulate the people into the village but they decided to shill an asspull of all things. Meh just don’t find it the slightest bit interesting considering that’s not what I enjoyed about her in the first place.
 

 

 
@Zebasiz
 
I wouldn’t say those timelines were that heavy. They were all irrelevant in the end and could’ve easily been replaced with developing any chemistry between Starlight and Twi Yeah they’re fun to look at but it didn’t impacting the show itself in any meaningful way.

@CronoM  
Didn’t she only become “good friends” with them all during that one last second feel-good song at the end, designed to lift spirits and be light-hearted after a heavy episode?

@Jades  
Well, yeah, that was the only major issue I had with the episode. As if they couldn’t focus on Twilight’s faults for the entirity they had to put it all on Discord at the last minute.
 
But unlike the finale, that only happened in the last minute, not the last 10 minutes, and Twilight had successfully gotten emotional before that because of Discord’s efforts. It was still a short episode, no way were they going to go all the way with tackeling Twilight’s issues.
 
“but it’d be better Discord wasn’t an antagonist at all”
 
But he wasn’t a true antagonist. He’s shaking things up to force a certain moral issue. I’d never want Discord to go full good side, that would mean the end of his character and his indirect meddling.
 
 
@Jades  
Her raw ability was focused on but not elaborated on. She was just an out of the blue freak villain older then Twilight that happened to be more powerful then Twilight at the time. Her exceptional magic was labeled surprising and notable, but not plot important for the future. The very fact they made her good friends with all mane 6 in an instant proves she is a fan/filler character. They made sure there was nothing to touch upon. And if they can ignore the last 10 minutes, they can ignore her magical superiority as well.

@CronoM
 
 
I’m not saying that Twilight’s feelings weren’t the villain of the episode. The technical antagonist in this episode is Twilight’s feelings since they’re conflicting against and it’s well done particularly in that aspect. It’s one of the reasons why I consider her little breakdown at the end so wonderful. Problem I had with Discord here is that he didn’t even need to be an antagonist. I could get him trying to help Twilight because he’s trying to get her out of all that sheltering Celestia gave her but it’d be better Discord wasn’t an antagonist at all.
 

 
It switches the internal conflict coming from Twilight’s internal issues to something Discord instigated.
 
 
@CronoM
 
I’d hardly really call her irrelevant due to the fact she was able to match an Alicorn of all things. Ignoring something like that and she really will appear like someone’s ascended fan character.
 
If she reappears again I’d have zero arguments on why her redemption shifted back to her former đself. It might be a severe retcon but the payoff is a character with good potential instead of at best a tool used to explore other concepts.

@Jades  
Whenever something is presented as a lesson to Twilight, all she learns is the technical aspect of it while still staying completely uninvested emotionally. Presenting it as a lesson would of dampened the effect, and Discord had no interest in being forthright to begin with. What you are suggesting Discord ‘should’ of done is both impractical and impossible for Discord’s personality and Twilight’s personality. Twilight’s issues were much more the ‘villain’ of the episode then Discord’s actions, he simply instigated the situation.
 
Hell, you said it yourself. Twilight was supposed to gain some empathy by now after Amending Fences but Twilight is a real piece of work so its going very slowly. If people don’t stop coddling her, she’ll never get wiser, and she’ll never try to really understand people.
 
 
@Jades  
I completely agree with your second paragraph regarding Starlight and Twilight.
 
As for your first paragraph regarding Starlight, I don’t think that’s necessaily true. She was a unicorn of irrelevant origin and backstory with high magical power, low justification, no relevancy to the past or future of the show, and her entire redemption was montaged in minutes. She is the biggest definition of filler. Her plot line is unresolved and can stay unresolved because there’s no point in resolving a summed-up filler character.
 
As for the last part, are you suggesting that she reappears every now and then and pretend her extreme personality shift never happened, keeping her as a cynic? I wouldn’t be totally against that. But they already made their bed with their character. Retconning the last 20 seconds of an episode is one thing, retconning 8 or so minutes is another matter entirely.

@CronoM
 
Ah okay I see… Still wish it was executed better though mostly because if that was the intention then they should’ve had Discord look way less spiteful because it seems less like he intended for her to learn a lesson and more like he just wanted to torture her and only really stopped when he got caught.
 
 
@CronoM
 
1.Despite how completely rushed her redemption is. They still have the unresolved plot line with her and Sunburst which is why I suspect she’ll play somewhat of a role though quite honestly I don’t really want to see Sunburst anymore considering that any emotional weight in their relationship is completely dead. If they were going to leave a plot hanging like that you’d think they’d give any sort of emotional weight so the fandom could at least make fan fiction off of it or something.
 
Speaking of terms of her actual redemption I always see people point at how Starlight was completely the problem with how OOC she is in the last 10mins when if anything I think Twilight is equally to blame with how completely unempathetic she is to Glimmer. It makes Glimmers reaction completely unbelievable to the point it shattered my Suspension of Disbelief almost instantly. This is incredibly painful because you can tell that they’re trying to have learned that lesson from Amending Fences and apply it here but they kinda missed the empathetic component.
 
2. While I would be more than happy if she never appears again because of her personality flip or that disgusting wasteland scene with horrible implications trailing her character I highly doubt she’d get any development with her new character at the least. As I see it she might be a Discord like character where she has very few episodes and rarely if ever appears at all.

@Jades  
And as for Glimmer
 

@Jades  
I understand your stance but there are a few glaring issues. Since the show’s biggest crutch for the longest while is tip-toeing around Twilight’s feelings because of her connection to Celestia AND having an almost completely worry free and perfect life…I can’t help but ponder what would be ‘too far’ for Discord to do to Twilight. Certainly not What about Discord, not even by a long shot. Keep in mind that the other 5 were fully aware they were giving Twilight a chance to open up or not by letting her ‘diagnose and dissect’ their good weekend or not. Why? Because the main characters aren’t sheep, and are not okay with Celestia aiding Twilight into distancing herself. They just didn’t know that the situation was manufactured. What Twilight did with the situation was the what revealed her issues.
 
Discord is a trickster…he’s malicious when necessary to people who lie to themselves constantly and claps his hands when they finally grow as people. His actions purposefully benefited Twilight’s friendship with her friends by letting her emotional bonds grow stronger.
 
Cause lets be honest. Twilight’s emotional range to anything not Quesadillas related is, well, limited.
 
You say Discord had negative character development? If anything, he was acting more like himself then for a long while. If anything, him being easily fooled in Twilight’s Kingdom and being emotionally castrated in the ‘Keep Discord’ was a departure from his awesome personality, while What About Discord brought it back to where it left off in Three’s a Crowd.
 
Discord created a situation that would of had no emotional damage had she been honest with her feelings from the start. The more Twilight lied to herself, the more malicious the situation seemed to be at first glance, but honestly, it only demonstrated the severity of Twilight’s issues.

@CronoM
 
I respectfully disagree somewhat. My main problem with Discord in What About Discord is that he seems to have taken a major backstep in his development. He seems to be maliciously enjoying keeping Twilight out of the blue when he should’ve already developed past that stage regardless of how the Season 4finale portrayed him. While that could be argued that Discord was actually intentionally acting like that to get Twilight to develop some I feel like the episode went way too far with that portrayal. He felt more unlikable here than any of his other appearances. One of my biggest worries regarding Discord was his character progression and it has been completely inconsistent in the show.
 
I agree with you on Discord being better in the comics though. He’s way more consistent there and doesn’t seem to be suffering from the writers not knowing what to do with him.
 
Anyways back on topic besides Glimmers severe character derailment.
 
2 of my biggest worries regarding Glimmer is
 

@Jades  
Discord’s sympathies is the one thing I’d have to disagree with you on, while I agree with everything else. Discord’s infinitely wiser then Twilight and shouldn’t be trying to be a good guy by being a goody two shoes, he should do so by being a neutral but helpful trickster. He should be helping the heroes by making them face their own issues and hubris like in What About Discord, that’s kind of in the Q-esque job description. He was honestly doing Twilight a favor by actually forcing her to get completely emotionally invested just shortly after the flood gates were opened by Twilight confronting her mistakes with Moondancer. (A few episodes more like those two and Twilight might not be a safety net character anymore. Who knows?) MNFBKD was a bit too emasculating and out of character, although it was admittedly fun in its own way.
 
As for his betrayal in that badly written finale, Discord already gave the Mane 6 the means to defeat Tirek before he ‘betrayed’ them, and Celestia was so happy with Discord at the end its hard to even tell if he ever betrayed her expectations. So its hard to really paint him as someone who needs to be redeemed. He’s way too powerful and set in his ways to be anything more then a sympathetic neutral ally, and he’d lose a lot of his character if he was fully redeemed.
 
Most of the comic portrayal’s of Discord seem to get his character right consistently. He’s trollish but sympathetic towards Fluttershy and her closest friends and will help them in roundabout ways while still messing with them, and trollish and unsympathetic towards Celestia and her princess entourage, who in his eyes is a high-horse control freak and her lackeys, respectively.
 
Discord’s ‘reformation arc’ in the show is a masterpiece compared to Starlight’s, don’t get me wrong. Its just a little all over the place, they are very inconsistent with Discord’s personality episode to episode.

@Jades  
Yeah that was pretty dumb. Having your characters that willing to sympathise with someone who almost murdered them does not make them more likeable, writers. We already know they are the good guys and its okay to let them be pissed at someone.

@Background Pony #51FD
 
The problem isn’t that they don’t call her out on it. At least you could say they silently hate her if they ignore her actions. The problem is that they completely justifies it and acted like it was a good thing.

@Background Pony #51FD
 
Actually I do think Discord got off too easy for his betrayal but MNFBKD restored some of it then What About Discord killed any sympathy I had for him.
 
 
@Zebasiz
 
Yeah that’s what happened but they pretty much redeemed her. I have yet to see any redemption as close to as bad as hers. Comparing any redemption to hers is an insult as far as I’m concern.
 
 
@Dracorex
 
The sad thing about that comic is that everything but the Kelpie was actually good. Seriously literally nothing about it made sense. I wonder just how it got past development stages.

@Jades  
Oh, Its the kelpie you’re reffering to. I must have blocked out that memory. All she had to do was ask for help but instead she chose the path that would have led to hundreds of innocent deaths and No one called her out on it. I non cannoned that so fast it would have made rainbows head spin.

@Jades
 
Ah… I never did read the Kelpie one; the comics are just too poor in general for me get invested in them.

@Dracorex  
Sombra’s redemption was pretty annoying but because it belongs to supplementary matierial like the comics it does not have to be canon if you dont want it to be. I personally realy like a lot of the comics and am happy to include them in the shows canon but some of the story’s are so bad that it is best to ignore them completley.
 
Maybe he thinks discord got off to easy for his betrayal which is understandable. Both starlight and discord had frustrating conclusions to their story.

@Jades  
You sure she was redeemed? The way I saw it: She goes the completely wrong way trying to get help. Then is stopped. And then is helped anyways and goes on her marry way~

@Dracorex
 
Nah I find that redemption way better than Starlights. At least his had some form of setup. I’m referring to that Kelpie in that one comic that started that moronic redemption meme.

@Jades  

 
After all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the past few months, to you, she’s still only SECOND?! Who could possibly be first?!
 
The only character I can think of with a redemption that comes anywhere close to the word ‘insulting’ in the first place is Sombra, and that only happened in the comics which nobody reads anyways.

@Background Pony #A618
 
No I’m not only criticizing only Starlight. If you read one of my comments below stating how everyone else has to be stupid for this to even happen. Starlight not contacting her friend? So why did nobody in her past try to fix it? From what we know of ponies Most are empathetic to a degree and from what little we see of her hometown nobody actually looks like a apathetic idiot. So why did nopony even suggest to even try to contact her friend? Like I said not only is Starlight incredibly stupid but everyone around her in foalhood is too. We’re not trivializing anything we’re judging from what we actually saw and what we saw was someone bitching about the fact someone celebrated. Her backstory is not only incredibly insulting it’s incredibly easily could’ve been solved too. The only answer to this is that she didn’t actually take any advice in which case instead of rejecting reality she still stayed in it in which case has alot of terrible implications about her character and makes her redemption the second most insulting in the franchise. She already had zero buildup she doesn’t need anything more to point out how absolutely no sense her redemption is.
 

 
@Background Pony #51FD
 
The point here is that they solved a relatively minor issue compared to her other ones. A friendship speech would not have been all it took to make her personality switch like that. This is another reason her redemption makes zero sense those last 10mins had absolutely nothing to do with her ideology whatsoever. Her personality switch is completely unjustified. The only answer I can think of is she gave up on it entirely or just plain bad writing.
 
@Background Pony #51FD
 
 
@Zebasiz
 
Well Sunset was mostly hated because she was a poor villain not because of her character. She barely had one and was more of a trope than anything else. Starlight is not the same in that regard however because she actually had a character than was derailed in the last 10mins. @Zebasiz

@Zebasiz  
They already showed the people most affected by starlights actions welcoming her back with open arms so I dont know how they will pull off anything remotley similar to rainbow rocks.

@Background Pony #51FD  
Sunset in RR is what gives me hope for Starlight in S6~

@Background Pony #51FD  
Can you imagine how much hate sunset would have got if rainbowrocks opened with sunset already being accepted by the school she terrorised or if the first movie had ended with a big group hug the moment she crawled out of that hole and sobbed an apology?
 
What if discord DID get a seat at the friendship table like he wanted at the end of season 4? He would have been rightly deconstructed and disliked.

@CronoM  
I think that was confirmed as fake.