There was something indescribable about this scene to me. The barren emptiness, the gray sky and earth … and the utter silence, save for the desolate wind.
The other timelines; they may have been tragic. They may have been dark, or dangerous, or depressing. But there still was something. And with that little something, there still was some little hope. All was not lost, even if one couldn’t see the way out. They still lived. And with life comes hope. Hope that maybe one day, after great sacrifice, they’d restore their world back to harmony.
But this timeline. This reality. Empty. There was no hope. Everything was just… gone. Everywhere was just gone. Everyone was just gone. And so was hope. There was no light, and no darkness. No happiness or strife. No epitaphs, and no memories. Just an empty grey oblivion. This was The End.
Something about the utter bleakness of this scene really affected me. I’ve never seen this show be so dark; I never expected it too. And I feel enriched creatively from it, as a new color has been added to my artistic palette of story-telling.
I guess I just wanted to praise the creators for managing to deliver so powerfully on a scene. And a dark one at that. Dark in a way that I believe will strike a cord with children as well as adults. It will enrich their creative perspective, as it did mine. And that is never a bad thing.
Thank you, to everyone who worked on this scene, for adding another highlight to the world of art and story telling.
Well said.
It’s also a powerful metaphor for the situation they are in as well as how Starlight see her own life.
For Twilight and spike they are caught in an infinite loop against Starlight’s attempts to prevent the 6 from coming together. They have no way out because no matter what they try Starlight resists them. Twilight is losing hope in her ability to actually stop her and tries showing her a future wrought by Starlight’s actions as her last chance to make the future play out as it should. Listen to Twi’s speech in that scene again, the tone of her voice reflects perfectly the setting.
For Starlight, the wasteland is physical representation of how she sees her life. No friends, no one to care about her or be with her. She admits to feeling completely alone and abandoned. She professes to despise cutie marks, the things that make all ponies special but she doesn’t seem to fully grasp just how empty that attitude has left her life. Look at the wasteland. Nothing special about it. Nothing stands out. Flat. Barren. Empty.
The wastes are a good use of imagery to help the focus of the story shift over so that Starlight can narrate her motivations. At least, that’s ho I see it as a storytelling tool from th perspective of a writer.
futakuart