How would you have given Starlight Glimmer a better backstory?

Many people have pointed out that starlight’s backstory seems kind of lackluster compared to what she did as a Villian  
Does anyone have ideas on how Starlight Glimmer’s backstory could be changed to make her villainy more realistic?  
Rules  

When she was a little girl nobody invited her to their birthday parties

@Broken Adam  
They said make it better not worse.

I dunno. I would probably make it so it still had to do with cutie marks (because I think she had a point), but cut the part about her friend going off to school because that is honestly so fucking stupid and petty to me. I don’t think the writers have shown or stated that Starlight made an attempt to contact him through letters or even by trying to get into the school herself.

I’d take what they were going for, and actually execute it properly.
 
Season 5 has a theme working through problems and moving forwards. I think Starlight’s backstory is meant to be petty, so that we juxtapose the terrible alternate timelines with Starlight’s benign past. The moral being that you should work through your own issues before you try and change things in the world around you.
 
So with that said, I would keep her actual backstory the same, but have her remember it as this horrible event that drove her to villainy. She frequently alludes to this awful event, but when she drags Twilight back in time to witness it, she’s caught off guard because she remembered it as this exaggerated, distorted misrepresentation of what actually happened.
 
cough cough
 
As much as I like Twilight’s speech in the original, this revelation would actually give Starlight more agency in her reformation, as well as an actual reason to trust Twilight.

I sort of have an idea but its probably too edgy. And I need time to hammer it out. I almost feel like we’re given so little that making a better backstory out of existing material is too hard.

Drop Sunburst from the narrative completely. Her doing all that evil stuff just because she got dumped by her boyfriend just cheapened her entire motive and no longer justified all the honestly terrifying and irrefutably evil things she did. Have her actually just be a misguided extremist who genuinely believed in her goal of equality rather than her just lashing out at the world like a spoiled brat, which would have made her change from villainy to good actually seem in-character and not like a cop-out. Leave any specific points of her past that could have “drove her to villainy” in the dark, only dropping vague hints at absolute most :D
 
The pettiness of her past was by and far the absolute most damaging thing to the quality of her arc, as it robbed any need for her to actually change and grow as a person (she just needed to be given new friends and problem solved) and also cheapened and reduced her problem from “something wrong with her personality and values that will change in time” to a one-note easily fixable issue, turning what could have been a season-long progression from a bad person to a good person where she began to befriend and identify with Twilight and her friends into someone who got to start out with their entire reformation was complete and friends with everyone, and instead only had to learn the occasional social skill (which was already done, and better, with pre-alicorn Twilight) :P

Cut and paste Wallflower’s story
 
But really I would just drop the backstory. The problem with the backstory is how it’s meant to justify everything Starlight did, but the problem is they made her too much of a villain to make it work. At no point previously to the backstory are we even really meant to feel sympathy or sorry for Starlight. Oh we can say her town had an ideological idea which peaked our interest, but we weren’t ever on Starlight’s side. Really what should have changed was either the decision to redeem Starlight or make her far less villainous. Instead have her go back in time to rewrite the past for her ideology and then have it crumble around her, or something else to make us feel more sympathetic towards her. Don’t have her be going “I am going to spite all of your friendships with my evil plan!” while she cackles evily and looks like a smug villian only to whiplash in the last five minutes and go “well I’m wreally just a poor wittle filly”

@EotD  
I would have had her and Twilight get stuck together in the altered futures and have them team up for survival and to try and get back home. They could have shown an entirely sympathetic side of Starlight without even changing the fact that she was a villain. Then over the course of the two parters have her and Twilight begin to empathize with one another, have Starlight begin to see the error of her ways, and ask for forgiveness and a second chance in the end :D

@Badumsquish  
Yeah that would have worked nicely, though it probably also would have helped if there were less universes altogether.
 
Personally I kind of like the idea of her getting a universe exactly how she wanted it and then her going mad from the revelation it wasn’t the paradise she envisioned and is going insane both from the fact everything she’s worked for was a lie and also she has no way of fixing things

@EotD  
Totally. They could have dropped like the entire 10 minutes or so from the end of part 2, replaced it with that, and ended on her saying the line “I’m ready to take whatever punishment you feel is fair” :D

My main problem with it was that I think we needed to see more of Starlight’s descent after Sunburst left her. I actually believe she did believe in her goal to rid the world of cutie marks, to some extent, and I would’ve liked to see that progression from despair at someone she loved leaving her, to her deciding that cutie marks are the problem, to seeing that belief be reinforced somehow.

I deeply hate the “my ideals are actually a cover up to my childhood issues” thing, its just a way of telling people that  
“the main character’s ideals are based on logic and facts, the villains is based on emotion and thus invalidated” which is worse than evil for the sake of it

@gingerninja666  
The irony is that would have made her much more sympathetic of a character. A character doing bad things because he genuinely believes he’s doing right is not only utterly terrifying, but actually means they’re at heart a good person. :P
 
@Broken Adam  
I have a friend who calls that “The Easy Button”, because it’s an easy and quickly fixable way to give someone an easy and quick “sympathetic” backstory. Of course, it kind of ignores the undeniable fact that someone who would spend 10+ years of their life remorselessly making other people suffer because of one little “tragedy” in their life is a pretty objectively evil and hollow person :P

@Badumsquish
 
But that’s the thing. I don’t think she was consciously lying. I don’t think she created her village while thinking “Ah, everything I’m saying is a load of bollocks, I just want to lash out at the world.”
 
I think she went to bed each night THINKING she was helping them.

@Badumsquish  
Agreed

@gingerninja666  
I stand by how if that was true she wouldn’t have abandoned her anti-cutie mark crusade at the promise of getting new friends (which really has nothing to do with her feelings on cutie marks), nor would she have needed the hollow backstory to begin with :P

@Badumsquish
 
I think both things happened. Starlight abandoned her belief because Twilight proved it wrong. During her breakdown several things are said.
 

 
Now, I’m not saying it was done perfectly, that’s why I came to this thread in the first place, but you can see they were trying to link the cutie mark belief to her other issues. Her belief was that friendships built on differences are hollow and doomed to failure, but Twilight and her friends disprove that. Based on how their friendship is the only reason Equestria even exists. Her belief is shattered and her own magic backed it up. Cutie marks CAN lead to strong friendships, so the problem must be her. Then twilight offers her hope. She doesn’t promise her friends, she just tells her to try.

@gingerninja666  
We’re here to say how it could have been better though, and let’s be honest: Not tacking on a really hollow backstory would have done nothing but improved it :P

@Badumsquish
 
But I really like Sunburst. Any changes to her backstory I wouldn’t want to get rid of him.

@gingerninja666  
Simple. Introduce him as an acquaintance of Starlight’s in the following season. Her knowing of him and being the reason he gets enlisted to help could have been her first non-villainous act and could have also been “proof” that she had good in her: that villain or not she actually had friends. :P

@Badumsquish
 
No, because I like how much he means to her. Like, how desperate and sad she got in Uncommon Bond thanks to the idea that they’ve grown apart. It was like her beliefs from Cutie MAp were coming true again before her eyes. That differences inevitably drive people apart.
 
I feel like there’s a way to have him be someone she had a massive womanly hard on for while also having her descent to full villainy be better handled.

@gingerninja666  
Have him still mean that much to her, but have her turn to villainy be why they’ve been driven apart like he still cares about her but won’t have any part of what she’s doing. As a cause to her villainy it’s insultingly simple and cheap and creates plot holes, but as the result of her villainy it works way better :D

@Badumsquish
 
what if it was a START?
 
I imagine this:
 
The breakup happens pretty much the same as it’s shown in the show. We SEE Starlight make efforts to keep in contact with Sunburst, but he never answers (at first because he’s trying to fit in in school, then because he was ashamed at how much he was failing, especially knowing how strong Starlight is). Starlight actually tries to follow Sunburst to Celestia’s School, but fails the entrance exam because without Sunburst’s guidance, she thinks she can’t do magic that well (as I think was implied in Crystalling).
 
Time passes. Starlight can’t really make herself open up to others out of fear of being hurt again. She just naturally avoids ponies. Not wanting to blame Sunburst for what happened, she finds herself focusing in on the thing that initially caused it all. Cutie Marks. She doesn’t instantly go “Cutie Marks = Evil” but as she watches ponies from afar she starts to see problems that arise. Like, maybe she sees a situation similar to Apple Bloom and Twist in her school. How Twist really did kinda move on from Apple Bloom after getting her cutie mark. Little things like that which reinforce the inkling she’s starting to have. Why DOES society have to be like this?
 
Maybe a pony in her school wishes that they could give up their mark and start over again with something else, and when Starlight tries to help them, she comes out with a very crude version of the Cutie mark removal spell she eventually uses. This causes her own mark to appear. Star realizes just how powerful she is, and realizes that she could’ve gone to Celestia’s school all along, but because of the stupid as all hell way Cutie MArks work, they missed each other until this moment. This moment of her “Destiny”. It galvinizes Starlight and she really starts to believe the stupidity of Cutie Marks. So it still has that emotional beginning. That core. But a true belief sprouted around it.

@Badumsquish  
That’s basically how I did it in a small story I wrote.
 
One guess as to which timeline I chose they get stuck in. Hint: it’s not the wasteland timeline.