Talk:Episodes, films, and shorts/@comment-26973802-20150303032632/@comment-10390252-20150304104102

@Ghost,

No, not MCU, Marvel in general. Although, they aren't exclusive offenders - DC likes hitting the 'resurrect' button too and, of late, has been using reboot too liberally to try to fix their endemic story-telling and characterisation problems... but I digress.

No, I think that Star Swirl is the greatest unicorn wizard of history and things like time have long since ceased to be a problem for him. If I'd been asked to write a scenario to explain his being in season 5, it would be for Twilight to use one of his spells to go back in time to meet him and, based on that meeting, him to follow her back into the future and arrive several years before the time she left. He's since been working in the background, trying to work out where his Alicorn Spell (the last spell in his notebook) might have gone wrong. Ironically, it is his own actions that led Twilight to go back in time in the first place; a paradox - the snake with its' tail in its mouth; somewhere and somewhen The Doctor is nursing one of his continuum headaches.

That said, Star Swirl does not even have to be alive or an active presence for him to be Season 5's villain. All that needs to happen is for Twilight and the Six to spend the season putting right the many mistakes he made trying to become an alicorn and trying to create a 'perfect' pony society. Naturally, Equaltown is one of the least terrible of those mistakes.

IF he appears in the season finale, I can imagine him having been twisted by jealousy at Twilight's achievements into a true villian, so determined to claim what he regards as his rightful place as one of the Immortals that he has turned his back on all his good works. He also has an assistant in the form of somepony who looks like, acts like and sounds like but can't be Sunset Shimmer (it later turns out that it is the human!Sunset who went through the portal in the other direction and has been following her own mirror image of her pony counterpart's quest for power ever since).