My Little Pony – Villains through the Seasons (Part 1)

Well it’s the time of the year finally, time for a season premiere of MLP:FIM! The fifth season I might add, and this time, it’s quite a demonstration of the evolution of the series, namely it’s villains!

In the past MLP’s villains have been ho-hum. Our first real boss fight is in the pilot episode, where we meet Nightmare Moon, who after testing our newly introduced cast with various harmony scenarios, is defeated and returned to her normal self (she later returns to us as Luna, Princess of the Night)

Following that we had the occasional mini-boss, Trixie, who shows us that talking in third perspective can be both silly and effective. Gilda, who is by far the worst possible representative of the Gryphon race (incidentally the only real one we’ve encountered, save backgrounders) and the such.

Our next real villain showed us Discord, voiced by the remarkable John de Lancie. Despite being an obvious homage to Q from Star Trek TNG, he was a step forward. He took the idea of chaos and made it both fun and lethal. I think the one thing that sticks out about Discord is his ability to turn each and everyone of our seemingly incorruptible girls (including Twilight) into the antithesis of what they are meant to represent. He does this all while making us still enjoy his antics, much like Q in that respect.

Plotting (heh) along with our villains, we got two hardly expanded upon characters. Queen Chrysalis and King Sombra. The former was more of a threat then the King (much akin to chess, if you want to look at it like that) and was almost able to overthrow the entire government (Where was Luna anyway?) and despite the fact they weren’t really expanded on (Yet) I think both have some level of improvement on Discord’s concept.

The finale of the fourth season was very exciting, and showed us that the writers were at least trying to step it up. We had Tirek (voiced by Clancy Brown of Lex Luthor and the Kurgen fame) who was able to completely “eat” the magic and special features of..well..everyone! The final survivor was Twilight, infused with all the magic the other princesses hid in her. The inevitable confrontation was brilliant, close to DragonBallZ or superhero battle (including a fireball that would make Ryu jealous)

Then we waited, half wondering if we’d all been had by Hasbro as the small glimpse of the new Super Pony forms was the final hurrah for the series. We waited over a year, and finally, we got our fifth season, a hour long (thank goodness, I hate waiting a week) episode that featured our newest villain: Starlight Glimmer!

Next I’ll explore why she has been a vast improvement!

Thanks for reading the first of I hope many posts! Please, add feedback, can’t hone my posts without it! 🙂