About Starlight

Starlight Glimmer catches a lot of flak. I agree she’s a hard character to like in some ways, but I don’t hate her, I am glad they added her to the show, and today I’d like to explain why.

Reasons to hate Starlight (that I disagree with)

When I go online and read discussions about hating Starlight, I usually see one or a few of the reasons that I’m going to list here given. I don’t find any of them compelling enough to hate Starlight myself, and I’ll set out why as we go through them.

Reason 1: Starlight was a horrific fascist dictator and shouldn’t have been forgiven

The framing and point of view of “The Cutie Map” make what Starlight does in her village seem horrific. If we take a more objective look at what she actually did, all of it was nasty, but all of it was also forgivable:

• She created a sort of anti-cutie mark cult in a village and installed herself as the cult leader.
• She used magic to take away the members’ cutie marks.
• She inducted the members into a philosophy of extreme equality where everypony is completely the same in every way possible.
• Other ponies came, apparently willingly, and joined the cult, allowing their cutie marks to be taken away.
• Later, some of these ponies started to express discontent. Starlight ruthlessly quenched this by putting them through a reeducation program.
• She forcefully stole the cutie marks of the Mane 6 and subjected them to the same reeducation program to try and get a princess in her cult so it would gain legitimacy.
• She lied to her followers and hid that she still had her cutie mark.

All of this was nasty, unpleasant, and points to a dark impulse inside Starlight. At the same time, people in real life have done much worse things and have been forgiven by those they wronged. Starlight didn’t kill anyone, didn’t grievously injure anyone, didn’t incite violence, didn’t torture anyone, didn’t rape or sexually assault anyone, didn’t foster hatred. She didn’t feed her followers poisoned Kool-Aid like Jim Jones, or order them to murder a pregnant woman like Charles Manson, or marry the fillies off to old stallions like Warren Jeffs. She didn’t electrocute dissenters, like IT does in A Wrinkle in Time. Frankly, I’ve heard of tech startups that are eviller cults than Starlight’s.

Of the members we see in the show, the one most wronged by Starlight seems to be Party Favor, who was forcibly reeducated alongside the Mane 6 for a night and had a minor breakdown. But he didn’t seem to suffer any lasting damage. He had the willpower to wipe off Starlight’s fake equals sign cutie mark and out her to the crowd. And he forgives her as readily as anyone. You could argue that maybe he shouldn’t have, but he did, and there’s nothing unbelievable about it. If rape victims can forgive their rapists and children whose parents were killed in genocides can forgive the leaders who instigated the genocide, then Party Favor can forgive Starlight for making him sit through a really boring book on tape.

Reason 2: Starlight is too powerful and good at magic (sub-reason 1 of “Starlight is a Mary Sue”)

Starlight gets called a “Mary Sue” a lot in online discussions. Reading between the lines, this seems to cover three distinct complaints, one of them being that Starlight is presented immediately as a powerful and talented magic-user.

I agree that Starlight’s incredible talent for magic isn’t the best set up or motivated. It works great when she’s a villain, in “The Cutie Map” and “The Cutie Re-Mark”, because she needs to provide a challenge for Twilight, and she does that well. Of all the villains in the series, none of them matches against Twilight as directly as Starlight does. Then she becomes a hero, and she seems overpowered.

On the other hand, if that makes her a Mary Sue, then Twilight’s a Mary Sue too. Twilight was apparently born with incredible magical talent, and was afforded the luxury of sitting around studying all the time to hone it. If anything, Starlight’s less blessed than Twilight: she didn’t get to be Princess Celestia’s prized pupil or have her own observatory or massive library to spend all her time in. She didn’t get to have indulgent friends who would keep hanging out with her even after getting flaked on time and again like Twilight did. Remember, part of the classic definition of a Mary Sue is that the usual rules of the universe seem to bend themselves to create exceptions, loopholes, and special cases that benefit the Mary Sue—the original Mary Sue was a 15-year-old Starfleet Academy graduate who served on the Enterprise in someone’s fan fiction—and that applies much more to Twilight than to Starlight. Twilight’s such a Mary Sue that she was chosen by the all-powerful Elements of Harmony to be their locus; the other Mane 6 just happened to be there, so the Elements were like “Eh, I’ll make do with what I got.”

So why don’t people complain that Twilight’s a Mary Sue? I think there’s a deeper reason why people complain that Starlight’s a Mary Sue, but not Twilight (or Rainbow Dash, who seems to become an incredible flyer who can join the most elite flying corps in the land by napping a lot). Starlight just isn’t likeable. People don’t enjoy watching Starlight because they don’t like her on a personal level, and they don’t feel like she deserves to be good at magic, or to have any of the other good things that happen to her.

The comparison with Twilight is obvious, but the comparison with Rainbow Dash interests me more, because I find Rainbow Dash unlikeable too, yet she’s well loved by fans, where Starlight is extremely divisive. Part of it is the incumbent advantage that Rainbow enjoyed as an early addition to the cast, but I think it’s partially that Rainbow’s particular pattern of antisocial behavior—constant boasting and arrogance—is accepted and somewhat respected in US culture, while Starlight’s pattern—lack of social awareness and anxiety that leads her to extreme measures to try and take control of her situation—isn’t. Of course, Rainbow has had several episodes where she gets knocked down and has to learn to be more humble, which makes me like her a lot more. Starlight has had fewer, and they were usually played more subtly. But some fans whinge and complain whenever Rainbow gets knocked down, so that can’t be how everyone sees the situation. That leads me back to “People like Rainbow, but just don’t like Starlight” as the reason. We’ll talk about this more later.

Reason 4: Starlight does terrible things and then gets out of it without being punished (sub-reason 2 of “Starlight is a Mary Sue”)

This one’s kind of true. There is one case where I think that Starlight does something really terrible and then seems to get off relatively easy. It’s “Every Little Thing She Does”, where she mind-controls the Mane 6 minus Twilight. I’ll discuss later why I still don’t find this enough of a reason to hate her.

Reason 5: Starlight gets too much screen time (sub-reason 3 of “Starlight is a Mary Sue”)

This one is actually directly quantifiable by counting the number of seconds Starlight is on screen in the three seasons in which she appears so far. But I’m lazy, so I won’t do that. I don’t think it would be that illuminating, anyway; at that level we can’t even comprehend the scale we’re talking about.

Instead, I’m going to count episodes which focus on her as part of an A plot or B plot, or in which she plays a major supporting role in an A or B plot. This is a pretty liberal definition, and will include a lot of episodes that you wouldn’t think of as “Starlight-focused episodes”.

In Season 5 we have four episodes:

1. “The Cutie Map”, Parts 1 and 2
2. “The Cutie Re-Mark”, Parts 1 and 2

In Season 6 we have eight episodes:

1. “The Crystalling”, Parts 1 and 2
2. “No Second Prances”
3. “A Hearth’s Warming Tale”
4. “Every Little Thing She Does”
5. “To Where and Back Again”, Parts 1 and 2

In Season 7, we have nine:

1. “Celestial Advice”
2. “All Bottled Up”
3. “Rock Solid Friendship”
4. “A Royal Problem”
5. “Triple Threat”
6. “To Change a Changeling”
7. “Uncommon Bond”
8. “Shadow Play”, Parts 1 and 2

We can also throw in the “Mirror Magic” Equestria Girls special.

So out of the entire series, we have 21 episodes, plus one summer special, that either focus heavily on Starlight or feature her in a major supporting role. That’s five episodes shy of an entire season all about Starlight, so I can see why that would feel like a lot when they’re all clustered into three seasons, especially if every moment she’s on screen is excruciating to you.

Whether this is too much Starlight or not is a matter of perception. Still, look at some of those episodes. They’re some of the best material in their seasons—“The Cutie Re-Mark”, “No Second Prances”, “A Hearth’s Warming Tale”, “Rock Solid Friendship”, “Triple Threat”, those are all amazing episodes. I’d go to bat for “Celestial Advice” and “A Royal Problem” too. Of course, those are all ones where Starlight is a villain or a supporting player. The ones where she’s the main focus, like “Every Little Thing She Does” and “All Bottled Up” are a bit more equivocal. My favorite element of “To Where And Back Again” is the banter between Trixie and Discord, not Starlight.

The other thing to keep in mind is that everyone else has five seasons of screen time under them when Starlight first joins the main cast. To catch her up, they had to give her a lot of screen time. And I appreciate that so many of the episodes she appears in use her in a substantial role. When I look back on the series, most of the episodes I didn’t like as much were ensemble-heavy, because they dilute everything too much. You can see this with the Cutie Mark Crusaders: they spent two seasons doing everything together, and the episodes that focused on them as a group were middling at best. Everything got better for them once we got episodes that focused on one of them at a time.

Starlight’s personality

I hate psych evals on fictional characters. I never feel like they add anything useful to the conversation. They usually oversimplify by trying to fit a character’s behavior to a list of DSM-V symptoms. They often have this self-satisfied air of “Ah ha, I, a brilliant literary scholar slash psychiatric diagnostician, have just given the definitive scientific explanation of this character!” They’ll reach for hand-wavey interpretations that aren’t supported by textual evidence. And in the end, I don’t think they’re helpful. Okay, Romeo had borderline personality disorder. What does this tell us about storytelling or human nature? That some people have borderline personality disorder, and that you can write stories about them? Psych evals are not a literary analysis technique that I find interesting; they’re a medical technique for helping real people who suffer from mental illness by identifying which treatments might be effective for them. As such I find psych evals on fictional characters about as interesting as an armchair diagnosis of the skin condition pointed to by Mikuru Asahina’s star-shaped mole.

Still, with modern fiction, there are times when a character’s personality is so extreme that it does feel like the writers were intentionally trying to make you think of a certain condition. In Starlight’s case, she fits the pop culture profile of autism to a T. She fails to read social cues, often speaks or acts without regard to others’ feelings, has a need to feel in control at all times, is prone to panic when overstimulated, and has a single interest, magic, in which she excels to the exclusion of everything else. These traits all feed into each other. Some of her behavior reminds me a bit of Friendship is Witchcraft Twilight, who “threw herself into her studies to have the world in [her] control”. She never vaporized the competition, but she has the same lack of awareness that led FiW Twilight to claim that “it’s not evil”, and I could see her, during her dark period, imprisoning Cadance Not-Evil Goodpony in the caves under Canterlot. Starlight, though, doesn’t have the sociopathic grandiosity of FiW Twilight. Plus, I bet she’s still allowed in bounce houses. (There was a bounce house in My Little Pony: The Movie, but we didn’t get to see if Starlight was allowed inside.)

Starlight’s time as a villain

When Sunburst got his cutie mark and left her, Starlight felt powerless: her friend just all of a sudden sprouted this thing on his flank and then was whisked off and left her, and there was nothing she could do about it. She could have blamed his parents or Sunburst himself for this, but instead she blamed cutie marks. She started her cult because she wanted to create a controlled, orderly, sterile environment where she would never be powerless. Since she had this childhood belief that cutie marks made her environment unstable and took her power away, she had to get rid of them to make her perfect order a reality. Letting her cult members get back their cutie marks or leave would render her powerless, so she couldn’t allow that and turned to force to stop it from happening. She initially wanted to get Twilight to join the cult so it would expand; the larger her cult was, the less of the world was out of her control, and the less chance she would get the same powerless feeling she’d had when Sunburst left.

At the end of “The Cutie Re-Mark”, Twilight convinces Starlight that she went too far indulging that avoidance of feeling helpless, and Starlight agrees to make herself vulnerable again by having real relationships, ones where she can’t always control what the other pony thinks or does. The first relationship is her friendship / apprenticeship under Twilight: Starlight lets someone else be in control by handing Twilight the reins for her destiny. This is a good first step to overcoming her issues, but it doesn’t solve them all.

“Every Little Thing She Does”

We see throughout Season 6 that Starlight has problems understanding the feelings of other ponies, and admitting that things can’t always go her way, and giving up the power in some situations. Magic is her chief way of exerting control over situations, so when she feels overwhelmed or panicked, she always ends up using magic in some thoughtless way to try to regain command—not because she desires dominance, but because she feels like the situation is slipping into chaos, which makes her panic and try to get things orderly again.

“Every Little Thing She Does”, where Starlight casts a mind control spell on the Mane 6, is a perfect storm of everything she’s struggled with going wrong all at the same time. The episode starts with Starlight feeling apprehensive about the friendship lessons, and trying to distract Twilight by excelling at her one big interest, magic. Because she’s so literal and doesn’t understand social interaction, she misses the point of the list of activities that Twilight gave her, and she tries to finish them “efficiently” by scheduling everything at the same time on the same day. When the others start objecting to the plan she set—Rarity doesn’t like the lighting in the library, Fluttershy wants to take each individual animal where it will be comfortable, Rainbow Dash can’t find anywhere that suits her nebulous idea of a good “chillaxing” spot, and all of them protest that you can’t do the activity by squeezing it into five minute intervals while running between four other activities—Starlight gets overwhelmed and frustrated and uses a mind control spell so they’ll all adhere to her plan, as usual falling back to magic when she panics.

I won’t disagree that Starlight got off pretty easy for this. Using mind control on someone is a fundamental violation of their right to free will. It’s actually worse than anything we saw her do when she was running her cult, at least on a philosophical level (nothing she made them do was inherently unforgivable, just the idea of taking someone’s free will like that). On the other hand, Starlight always seems to be pretty concerned about what other people think of her, and after this incident she got yelled at by Twilight and shunned by the others for a while, so maybe it was harder on her than it seemed. We’ve consistently seen that Starlight feels emotional hurt very deeply. Her hurt when Sunburst left her, for instance. Or her hurt when she thought Trixie was just using her to get back at Twilight in “No Second Prances”, which was pretty intense for someone she’d just met that day. Or the depth of her guilt for what she did in her village, which is much deeper and more persistent than the guilt we see from the other reformed villains like Discord, Trixie, and Sunset Shimmer, even though I’d argue that at least Trixie did worse things. (Luna is a bit of an exception; she also seems to feel her guilt deeply and persistently. And she also seems to have something of a special connection with Starlight, as seen in “To Where And Back Again” and “A Royal Problem”.) So it’s possible that she got more of what she deserved for this incident than we could see on screen.

“To Where and Back Again” and On

As the series goes on, Starlight becomes more able to deal with situations where she loses control, and uses magic in a panic less often. She still does occasionally, such as in “A Royal Problem” when she switches Celestia’s and Luna’s cutie marks, but that was a more heated and difficult situation than what she’d faced before: her initial plan had failed, the princesses were arguing, Starlight had very few options because they’re princesses and she can’t tell them what to do, and she knew that a past argument had resulted in Luna being exiled to the moon for a thousand moons and coming back to try and kill Celestia and plunge Equestria into eternal night. This is, I hope we can agree, a much more difficult situation than Rarity not wanting to sew in the library.

Starlight also turns her lack of social awareness into a strength. She’s willing to be incredibly blunt with other ponies, which helps keep her from feeling like situations are spiraling out of control and avoids seeding the panic that would lead her to do something stupid with magic. She starts learning how to do this in “All Bottled Up”, and it helps her in “Rock Solid Friendship” and “A Royal Problem”, but in “To Change a Changeling” she almost makes a big mistake with this trait when she nearly tells Thorax that he has to exile Pharynx. Her blunt tactlessness also helps her relate to Maud, who’s also pretty tactless, in “Rock Solid Friendship”. The joke of “Maud Pie” was the Mane 6’s frustration when Maud didn’t understand or respond to normal social conventions; the genius of “Rock Solid Friendship” is the way Starlight and Maud bond over this.

Starlight isn’t likeable…but I still don’t hate her

When I said above that Starlight just isn’t likeable, this is what I meant. Her deeply felt hurt, social unawareness, need for order and control, and propensity for panic when she doesn’t get it make her come off as someone with little empathy who thoughtlessly resorts to extreme actions, and yet has an emotional glass jaw and reacts strongly when hurt herself.

The Mane 6 have sometimes exhibited some of these traits, but there was always some kind of counterweight that made them still likeable even after acting this way. Rainbow and Twilight and Rarity and even Pinkie Pie have done things that were lacking in empathy, but all of them have also done things that were very sweet. Rainbow, for instance, mocked and belittled Fluttershy in “Dragonshy”, but supported and encouraged her in “Hurricane Fluttershy”. Rarity acted selfish and superficial in “Green Isn’t Your Color” and “Inspiration Manifestation”, but helpful and kind in “Filli Vanilli” and “The Gift of the Maud Pie”. Starlight hasn’t had many such counterbalancing moments yet. “Rock Solid Friendship” was probably the closest, but she’s also painfully blunt towards Pinkie Pie, which ruins the effect a little. All six have had moments of fear and panic in the series, but none of them handled it as badly as Starlight. Twilight did use something like a mind control spell in “Lesson Zero”, but for the most part, they might cry or sing a whole freak-out aria, but that was it. And Pinkie Pie and Fluttershy both seem to feel hurt very deeply, as we see with Pinkie in “Party of One” and “Pinkie Pride” and Fluttershy in “Hurricane Fluttershy” and “Putting Your Hoof Down”, but they’re usually the sensitive, empathetic characters, so instead of seeming hypocritical, it seems like part and parcel of who they are: their capacity for deep emotion cuts two ways. They also have never been shown to let their hurt lead them to the kind of dark impulses that we see from Starlight in her very first appearance, starting with her establishment of an anti-cutie mark cult.

I don’t hate Starlight, but I can’t exactly say that I like her either. She’s interesting to watch, that’s for sure. I see some of myself and people I’ve known in her, which lets me sympathize with her, but there are also times where I wince watching her fall apart because I know that I’ve also fallen apart like that, and it’s a little uncomfortable to see it play out on screen with ponies. In Season 7 she manages to get her panic and nervousness under control a lot more, but then she starts playing the role of the really blunt friend who says the bad things that need to be said, and the person who plays that role is also hard to like, even if you appreciate them.

But Starlight was a good addition to the show. Watching her may not always be comfortable or pleasant, but she’s added new character dynamics and plot types to explore. Having her around has also been good for Twilight’s character. After “Twilight’s Kingdom”, Twilight is still working on the smaller issues in her life, but the big stuff is all settled: she’s reached the height of her career, she knows who she is as a pony, she has a job and friends and family who love her. Adding Starlight gave us a character who’s still working all that stuff out to follow; without her, there might have been a temptation to retread “Lesson Zero” or “Princess Twilight Sparkle”, but now those kinds of stories can go to Starlight, and Twilight can just keep honing the small things, like she does in “A Flurry of Emotions” and “Once Upon a Zeppelin”, or supporting her friends, like she does in “A Health of Information”. Adding Starlight also gave Twilight someone to interact with in a way we hadn’t seen before: she gets to mentor someone, and we get to see how she’s matured and why she deserves her title as Princess of Friendship. I’m convinced we’ve seen so few Cutie Map episodes in Season 7 because the Cutie Map was a generator for plots that would show off how the Mane 6 have grown and matured, but the writers realized there were better ways to do that, and Starlight was the way for Twilight.