BastementSparkle

Granny Smith says no. Considering she's literally been around since the founding of Ponyville which was at least a hundred years ago, probably even more than that. I don't know how typical Granny is, but Grand Pear seems to be of similar age and he's still kicking too. Honestly, I think it's possible ponies might even have naturally longer life spans than humans.

We don't know if Grogar's still alive though, he could easily be dead, or already imprisoned somewhere, or any number of things. For all we know the guy's reformed and retired to focus on his gardening hobby. If he's still around, wherever he is or whatever he's doing, he hasn't posed a threat to Equestria for a long time, so why would they go hunting him down?

Okay, I'm definitely glad they didn't do this. Confirming ships between characters we already know with little to no previous build-up feels kind of annoying as is, doing it with characters we've literally never even met before? That's even worse. If you can't think of a good relationship for them involving existing characters, maybe they just don't need a canon relationship.

It's even kind of depressing when you think about it. The Princess could still be immortal or have a rather long life-span ahead of them, and they go to a retirement community that's probably going to be full of old ponies who from their perspective are going to be dying very quickly? They're probably used to others dying around them but there's no need to speed that process up. Even if you headcanon they've been made mortal or given normal life-spans through some means, still feels odd for them to go there while in their prime.

In the finale though, Luna says to Twilight "I hope you'll visit us in Silver Shoals" which does seem to imply they'll be staying there for a while at least. I can't really imagine them staying for long, but it just feels like a weird idea to put in at all.

According to Big Jim on Twitter, Silver Shoals is apparently a retirement community near Silver Shores. https://twitter.com/TheBiggestJim/status/1183449825565495296 I don't really take twitter statements as confirmed canon, but can I just say the idea of Celestia and Luna just going to an retirement community is kind...really kind of dumb? Like, they might be over a thousand years old but both of them still seem to be perfectly in their physical prime, there's thousands of things they could do, go anywhere and do anything and they just...go to a retirement community.

I'm not sure he actually intended for the Elements/Tree to be destroyed like it was, but he definitely wanted the Mane Six to learn how to use their Friendship powers without them. He specifically told Twilight that she didn't need the Elements to defeat Sombra the first time and he didn't think using them was "Handling things on their own", so he definitely always planned for them to win without the Elements.

Discord as Grogar explained in Frenemies that he was defeated by "Gusty the Great" who took his bewitching bell and hid it atop Mount Everhoof. So, it wasn't the Princesses who defeated him. Tirek apparently heard tales of Grogar's tyranny even when he was small, and mentions that he ruled over the land that "Would become Equestria". All of this leads me to believe that like Hardway above me says, Grogar is before the Princesses time and they very well might never have even met him, but only heard of him.

Even if she's not enough of a threat at that time to hatch any grand schemes, I don't think having her running around and potentially draining ponies of love or hurting them is very good. Just because she doesn't pose a threat to the kingdom at the time doesn't mean she can't still pose a threat to individuals, and most individuals are not Starlight Glimmer. Not to mention, as a changeling she has a natural advantage to stealth. Starlight might be able to take her in a direct fight but if Chryssy decides to get stealthy she or somepony else could be blasted in the back before she even realizes something is wrong.

I really think this just depends on how good his support group is. A lot of his other friends are probably going to be dying around the same time-frame, so he'll be stuck mostly just with any other immortals or long-lived creatures to keep him company. Celestia and Luna, Spike, possibly Twilight and Cadance. One thing to keep in mind is that, considering Discord has never even had friends before Fluttershy, this is going to likely be his first time dealing with real major loss and Discord's already rather immature and not prone to handling emotions well. If his relationship with the others is still solid and he has enough support, I could see him maybe pulling through with minimal damage. If not...things might get very bad, very quick.

Pretty sad. More because of how it ended than anything else though, I know a lot of people really like the Last Problem, but I really didn't. I thought it was a really terrible way to end the show and it left things off on a really depressing note for me. I'd be feeling more bittersweet about things if I enjoyed the episode, but instead I'm just feeling bitter and disappointed.

What would be the moral though? It kind of defeats the purpose if there's no moral, if the CMC get a grown-up to take them and don't get changed into adults themselves, what's there to learn? The rest of the episode can't really play out the same because the CMC aren't going to be thinking they know everything as adults or pretending to be ones and they'll probably take the right train because of Pinkie and her presence pretty much defeats the whole episode. The episode would need a massive rewrite for this to work.

The thing is, Celestia lived and ruled all of Equestria for over a thousand years, and Twilight in the finale is basically a big Celestia recolor. It's not exactly concrete, but that certainly seems to be trying to imply that yes, Twilight is like the royal sisters and will outlive her friends. The problem is that Alicorn's are still just so darn vague though, we really don't know much about how they work. Are they immortal or do they just have really long life-spans? Is the source of that immortality/increased life span something biological or magical? Is there a difference between natural alicorns and ascended ones, what exactly causes the increase in size and flowing mane, does Cadance have that too now and if not, then why not? Really, there's enough of a lack of concrete info in canon that I do think you can just headcanon what you want, despite it seemingly being implied that Twilight will live on. Plus, you know...there's no saying she can't somehow die some other way, as tragic as it might be. Alicorns, if they are immortal at all, only seem to be that way in the sense of eternal youth or being unaging. They aren't invincible.

Nobody. If you can't be bothered to build the ships up beforehand, then don't do them, they don't have any place in the finale. They had a whole prior episode this season where they could have built up CheesePie if they so wanted and yet they didn't, so what's it doing in the finale? I'm not fond of the ships chosen, but my bigger and I think more real criticism is that I don't think ships should be there at all. Write the finale in a way that you can leave the romantic lives of the characters ambiguous and just let fans do whatever they want from there. If you wanted to do real romance with your main cast, you should be doing some of that before the finale, otherwise it's just going to feel forced in, which is exactly what it was.

CheesePie: Not a fan of this, honestly. For a pair of such over the top characters, I've always found this ship to be oddly boring. It feels just like...Pinkie and more Pinkie, like it's just layering on more of the same thing and it doesn't really make it better. I feel like any time I've thought about or read about them being in a relationship, it's just not really that interesting to hear. I feel like Pinkie is really a character who needs someone with more to contrast against her. Maybe it's also cause I really like Pinkie, but don't actually like Cheese all that much, that probably doesn't help. Also, this ship had no prior build up and that annoys me. AppleDash: Yeah...No. on one hand, I'm not happy this was implied. On the other, I'm happy it was ONLY implied and thus can be interpreted differently with a bit of headcanoning. I'm really not a fan of canon shipping of the Mane Six with each other. It's fine for fanfics and stuff, but in canon I've always liked viewing them as a group of six equal best friends and a relationship between them throws that all of and I just don't like it. Plus it kinda feels a bit too stereotypical. Also, again, no build up. Fluttercord: I kinda prefer them as just really good friends, and it's still pretty easy to view them as being that, so I don't have too many issues here. Plus, hey, even if they are a couple at least this one was actually hinted at prior. Yonabar: It's cute...That's about all I got. SugarMac: This ship's better than any of the one involving the Mane Six in the finale. It has actual build-up, multiple episodes dedicated to it, most of which were pretty good to boot. I like it. LyraBon: Cute background detail for fans, also better than any of the Mane Six ships. Their previous interactions in episodes were so obviously poking at the idea of shipping, it's not really a surprise and did I mention it's cute? At the end of the day, my ultimate feelings are that all the ships not involving the Mane Six are pretty good, or at least I'm fine with them. I'm not really fond of any of the Mane Six ships though, whether they be blatantly canon or just hinted at and left somewhat ambiguous. Other than some Fluttercord hinting, those relations had no prior romantic development during the series, and honestly I think the last episode is just too late to do this. If you've made it to the last episode of your show without building up romantic relationships among your main cast, don't do them, otherwise it feels forced and awkward. The ships feel arbitrary and like they're just there to get reactions rather than anything else. Big Jim said on Twitter before they weren't interested in exploring romance with the characters and he certainly wasn't lying, because they didn't explore it. They just...put it there. Which is, to me, the worst way to handle these things. At least they had the restraint to not just go out and canonically ship every single character, not every character needs a relationship and if you really want them in one you just have the freedom to headcanon pair them up with whoever you like. Since they weren't willing to explore these things though, I think that's the route they should have taken with the whole main cast.

Very much what I am trying to do, but my brain likes to be a stickler for canon, so it's a little hard to get used to thinking of something that way.

That's fair, then. I do think it's odd that there's some major ideas for the series they never really discussed or thought about, even if they didn't show up in show I'd figure they'd at least discuss the possibilities.

It's interesting I keep running into the mindset of "We wanted to leave it to the audience" as something supposedly lazy, because it's actually something I wish they did more of. One of my main issues with the finale is that it spent so much time giving answers I didn't want and actually didn't leave things nearly open enough for my liking. It seems like the writers were stuck in-between two mindsets here, those who want answers to as much as possible and those who would actually like more open-endedness, and they tried to create a finale that was kind in the middle.

Best: Frenemies. This was just a really great and fun episode. Finally getting to see things from the villains point of view was a really cool, and despite them still being evil this episode did a great job of making them comedic and even humanizing them a bit. I found myself a lot more attached to the trio of this episode and just enjoying them as characters much more (Maybe a little too much for my liking, based on what happened later.) but nonetheless this was just a really good episode. Worst: The Last Problem. Unpopular opinion time, but I really, really don't like this episode. Twilight has to leave her friends behind, we jarringly jump like 20 years into the future where everything we knew about Equestria is radically different, spend a lot of the episode with much older versions of the characters we're unfamiliar with, and get a very definitive ending that tries it's hardest to beat it into your skull just how over the show is. By skipping so much, this episode completely shattered the illusion that life in Equestria would continue on without us, and to me, it denied me any real sense of closure. I feel like I wasn't given the chance to say goodbye to the characters I love as I knew them, it really feels like they moved on without even saying goodbye to me. This episode just hurt to watch, and I feel like it's an episode that just takes things away without giving anything of value back. The ending of the show is already really sad, and this episode just twisted the knife as hard as it could. I know a lot of people are really gonna disagree on this one, cause pretty much everything I hate about this episode is something someone else loves. But I watched the leaks, I've had a long time to think over this episode and my feelings on it and I haven't warmed up to it one bit, if anything my frustration at it has only grown. I really wish I could love this episode like so many others do, but this episode is just bitter without any sweet to balance it.

I've seen someone argue that the name drops of "AppleDash" in "Sweet and Smoky" and a "A trivial Pursuit" counts as hinting, but then wouldn't Pinkie's weird freak out listing all of her and Twilight's ship names also count as hinting? Cause, that would mean TwiPie was basically more hinted at than Cheesepie too, which just makes the finale feel even weirder. Anyway, I just headcanon that RD moved in with AJ after Granny Smith's passing to try and comfort her and help out around the farm. After a while, Dash sort of just became like a member of the family. Her and AJ aren't together at all, but their rivalry has kind of lessened and taken on the form of married couple-esque bickering, so ponies do mistake them for a couple sometimes and they just laugh it off. They're closer than ever before, but certainly not romantically. It's a headcanon I think works and explains their actions in a way that isn't romantic. I have no problem if somebody likes the ship and wants to take their interactions in this episode in the shippy direction, but I don't really like the couple at all, so I like this better.

Problem with this is, if she's Starlight's and Sunburst's daughter, that means she grew up in Ponyville. She was raised by a pair of ponies who are running a friendship school, in a town which is basically the friendship capital in Equestria, living in the same town as the rest of Twilight's close friends, not to mention her parents are also close friends of Twilight's. How does a mare like that end up not only being as averse and unknowing about friendship as she is, but also not knowing that Twilight and her friends still meet up and that friends don't have to drift apart? She'd almost have certainly been introduced to Twilight by Starlight even before she became her student, and she would definitely know the Mane 5 too. Her entire attitude and views on Friendship make zero sense if this is the case.

I don't think it's too depressing, because we've seen that ponies can still have goals, desires and careers that aren't even really related to their mark, so it's not like they're locked into something because of it. Plus, it seems like the marks kind of represent something fundamental about ponies, something that represents them so well it'll fit for their entire life, and a lot of the marks are pretty ambiguous and leave some room open for interpretation to boot.

Basically, yeah. Discord meant for him to serve as an example and an easy starting test for the Mane Six, and he served that purpose pretty well. His plan didn't go quite as he expected even at the start, he didn't want the Mane Six to get their Elements or for the tree to get destroyed, but other than that the Sombra part went pretty much how he wanted. I like to think he didn't really "Resurrect" Sombra because Sombra was never truly dead to begin with. Sombra is sort of like a half-pony/half-shadow kind of creature to me (Basically an Umbrum like in the comics, though I don't really count those as canon.) and very hard to kill unless you basically completely destroy him like the Mane Six did at the end of the Season 9 premiere. His horn wasn't destroyed by the Crystal Heart, so he was able to survive through that, he can't be resurrected after Season 9 though, he's actually genuinely dead now. That's still part of why they're afraid of it, the forest is out of their control, but it's also just genuinely unnatural to their world. Even without the Plunder vines the thing grows wildly out of control when the tree or somepony isn't keeping it under control, and it's filled with all sorts of dangerous monsters and stuff. Ponies had a lot more reason to be scared of it back in the day, but due to the tree of Harmony being planted inside helping to keep everything under control and Grogar's magic fading, it just kept becoming safer over time, even if it's still more dangerous than most of Equestria itself.