Starlight Glimmer

"Only way to be really happy is if we're all equal."

- Starlight Glimmer's philosophy

"You'd all still be living your miserable lives thinking you're better than everypony else if it weren't for my magical abilities! I brought you friendship! I brought you equality! I created harmony!!!"

- Starlight showing her true nature to everypony.

Starlight Glimmer is the main antagonist in the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic season 5 two-part starter, The Cutie Map.

Synopsis
In her episode debut, she is the head of the village with equal signs for Cutie Marks and greets the Mane 6 when they enter the village. She and the town explain their philosophy of being equal is what brings true happiness. The mane 6 (except Fluttershy, who is warmed by the townsfolk's benevolence and especially Pinkie Pie, who is adamantly suspicious of the location), find this odd and when they meet a trio of ponies who miss their Cutie Marks, they are informed of a vault inside a mountain which contains the marks. Starlight leads the ponies to the vault and shows them a wooden staff, which she dubs the Staff of Sameness, a magical item. When Pinkie Pie prematurely discloses the ponies who told them about the vault, Starlight immediately sees the ponies as threat to the town's lifestyle and steals their Cutie Marks with the staff and places them in the vault.

She imprisons the ponies in a house, in which the ponies persuade Fluttershy to feign having audacity to be converted and Starlight is convinced of this and releases her (with a free-thinking pony named Party Favor confessing his involvement in longing for his Cutie Mark, subsequently causing him to be sent to be imprisoned with the rest of the mane 6). That night, Fluttershy peeks into Starlight's house and discovers that she has a cutie mark and her equal mark is fabricated. The following morning, Fluttershy convinces Twilight to claim that she'll join Starlight and the rest of the village, but Fluttershy tries to splash water on Starlight to reveal her cutie mark but misses, only for a drop wipe off a smudge of the mark, causing Party Favor to further wipe the mark and reveal her cutie mark, shocking the town. Starlight claims that she hid it to have her magic for the town and admits that the Staff of Sameness is just a regular staff she discovered in a desert. Starlight tries to save face, but the towns folk turn on her for her deception. She tries to hide in her house, but tries to make off with the Mane 6's cutie marks in revenge for exposing her. When the Mane 6 fail to catch up with her since their forced equality causes them to move slowly, Party Favor and other ponies set out to apprehend Starlight and retrieve the marks (and in the process, use their individual talents to counter Starlight's obstacles), with the villain being covered in snow, forcing her magic to release the marks. Starlight emerges and tries to blast her former followers, but Twilight defends them and says to Starlight that her groups' individualities are what led her to become a princess. But then Starlight brags about how her actions presented the townsfolk with an unthinkable kind of friendship, but is shot down by Diamond Double, who claims that she never gave them a chance. Enraged and defeated, she uses her magic to escape. Twilight hopes that Starlight will consider what the townsfolk has taught her.

Personality
When introduced, Starlight Glimmer is shown to be benevolent and laid-back, but is revealed to be a vain, hypocritical, selfish, villainous, deceptive, calculative megalomaniac. She is easily frustrated when things don't work out how she planned. Her only motive for her acts is that she tries to do something in which she views is right, implying that there's more to her than meets the eye.

Trivia

 * She is the first villain in a two-parter to be, or at least have the appearance of, a regular pony. Nightmare Moon was an alicorn with an ethereal mane, Discord was a draconequus, Queen Chrysalis was a changeling with the appearance of an insectoid alicorn, King Sombra was a demonic unicorn with a shadow form, and Lord Tirek was a centaur. The only other villain who is a regular unicorn is Sunset Shimmer, who appeared in a movie and is mostly seen in human form (although Sunset reformed whilst Starlight didn't).
 * Starlight Glimmer's name is similar to that of Twilight Sparkle and Sunset Shimmer.
 * Put she acting like Antithesis of Twilight Sparkle in many ways than Sunset Shimmer.
 * She has a similar color scheme to Aria Blaze.
 * Jim Miller claimed on twitter that Starlight shall possibly return in a future episode. If so, she'll be the seventh recurring villain on the show. The others are: Diamond Tiara, Silver Spoon, Trixie, Discord, Ahuizotl, and the Flim Flam Brothers.
 * Starlight Glimmer is very similar to the Avatar villain, Amon. Both have their own malevolent views on what is right (especially on equality), are very persuasive and have an entire army of followers behind them, but have talents that make them contradict their own claims and cause them to lose their supporters once they were exposed (Starlight still has her cutie-mark and Amon is a bloodbender).
 * However unlike Amon have an tragic backstory that both fake and real, Starlight's seems given hint in Part 2 that her true Cutie Mark seems to present an falling star and at End of Part 2 that she completely mostly want to blaming all to Twilight for having Cutie mark of friendship as she to be in one point of Student of Celestia before Twilight elected as Future princess of equestria.
 * Her hinted past with before she disappeared that she comparing to herself to Twilight seems to be parelleled to other Avatar villian Kuvira put reversed.