I think a few of your points and examples are somewhat exagerrated to sound more extreme, honestly. I agree with some things.
Sunset is a lot more charismatic that Starlight. I actually put a lot of this down to the actress. Sunset's actress is incredible and commands more presence than Sheridan ever really did with Reformed Starlight.
Sunset's arc is immaculately crafted to engender absolute sympathy towards her. Although, I think it also comes at the expense of taking away any feeling that she was ever a real villain. People are mean to her as if she's still a bad person, but what we see of Sunset in RR is just the kindest, sweetest little put-upon puppy dog ever. We don't want the school to be mean to her, because we can clearly see she's changed and will never do anything bad ever again. It's such a simple story and they tell it really well, but Sunset is NOTHING like her villain self anymore. It feels like she's a new character who's been saddled with all of Villain!Sunset's baggage and past and forced to suffer for it. It isn't cathartic and it doesn't make me feel like justice is being served because these two Sunset's are nothing alike. And it takes a while for her to develop proper character flaws again.
I felt like they were trying something different with Starlight, but the execution was iffy in a few areas, not helped by the fact that the fundamental idea of Starlight is that she's a character who will sometimes relapse, which is already a risky idea. She didn't get rainbow'd out of a super evil super form. She stopped of her own free will and had to put her life back together, but she stumbles along the way because her core flaws (her tendency to overreact and her inclination to sidestep problems rather than actually confronting them) were never resolved. It's a part of her, but I genuinely do think she improves as the series goes on. She goes from flippantly using magic and being annoyed by the idea that she might have done something wrong, to making a mistake due to stress and sleep deprivation, then realizing she's made the mistake on her own and working to fix it.
The thing about Starlight's power is that it's always brought up by people as if it's consistently done a damn thing to help her. In all her appearances, her magic has solved exactly one conflict. A Royal Problem. In every other story, Starlight's power is a harbinger of her making some kind of catastrophic mistake due to her overreactions. Her magic exacerbates conflicts or brings them to a head, it almost never resolves them. She's been jobbed out by plenty of characters. Despite her banishing spell, she was no match for Discord. She was easily detained by Cozy Glow offscreen. She was beaten handily by Chrysalis. Starlight's power is grossly overstated.
I think the same is true for certain spotlight-stealing episodes like Marks and TWABA as well. In TWABA, Starlight doesn't get to save the day because she's better than the mane 6 (and nor does the episode insist that she is in any way) She gets to be the hero because Chrysalis didn't care about her. If she had, there's no reason to believe she couldn't have easily replaced Starlight like she did everyone else. Chrysalis left the opening (like she always does), and Starlight was just the person who happened to be there. The episode IS constructed to give Starlight the spotlight, but not by making her the only competent person in the room. And in Marks, Starlight doesn't do anything Twilight couldn't have done. She doesn't figure out something Twilight missed. Cozy came to HER, and spilled the beans about what she did to the CMC. Starlight is given information Twilight is not given because Starlight's role in the school is to be a counselor and hear this kind of stuff from students in distress. Besides, any moment for Starlight is inevitably soured by the fact that Cozy is playing the hell out of her. Starlight helping Cozy is pretty much a bad thing in the long run because it all feeds into her plan to ingratiate herself within the school.
I think your list of Starlight's "relapses" is the most unfair section to me. You list encouraging Twilight to reopen the School of Friendship as a "relapse". No. Neighsay was wrong. Anything he was correct about is undermined entirely by the fact that he himself clearly didn't care about any of Twi's transgressions, and was using them as an excuse. He literally says:
Quote
" Irresponsible teachers, students skipping class, endangering ponies! Your school is a disaster. Perhaps if you had had higher standards for who was admitted, this could have been avoided."
But even granting that the EEA was completely in the right and Twilight was wrong to reopen the school, Starlight's still not relapsing here. She's not impulsively overreacting. She's calmly and earnestly trying to help Twilight, a person she looks up to and genuinely cares about. She doesn't want Twilight to give up on her dream and uses her own experiences with Twilight to inform her decision to stick by her (noting that Twilight never gave up on Starlight).
When she age-regresses Sunburst she also undoes it seconds later when it becomes clear that he's freaked out. And she only goes ahead with it because he was impressed by her spell and wanted to see it in action. It's still somewhat of a backslide for her, but it's nowhere near as egregious as something like ELTSD.
In Road to Friendship she doesn't turn back because the wagon is too heavy. She'd already made it most of the way back home, through deserts, alligators, swamps, and fire pits. She realizes her mistake after hearing how the mail ponies were inspired by her and Trixie's friendship, which reminds her of how much she cares about Trix. She then turns around and treks back through the alligators, the swamps, the fire pits, and the deserts to find Trixie again. Saying she just found the wagon too heavy is ignoring context for no reason.
And one last thing, I don't think a character needs to necessarily be hated by people in order to feel guilt for their actions. If Sunset only felt bad about what she did because people were angry at her over it, then I think that's a shame. You shouldn't refrain from doing bad things solely because you fear punishment for doing them. You should refrain from doing them because you understand that they're bad.
Edited by gingerninja666
