YMMV / Star vs. the Forces of Evil S4 E37 "Cleaved"

• Angst? What Angst?:
  • Star doesn't feel any guilt for destroying the source of magic, which inevitably killed all beings composed of magic. While Word of God is that most of them survived, she didn't know that, nor was it made clear to the audience.
  • Hekapoo and Glossaryck are completely nonchalant about dying (though the latter has died before and given the Stable Time Loop, saw this as inevitable).
  • Marco isn't too bothered by Hekapoo's apathy towards dying. Despite the fact that they had a very close relationship, even spending sixteen years chasing and getting to know her more than anyone. While he's shocked by her response, he doesn't try changing her mind.
  • Despite her horrified reaction, Janna isn't traumatized by the death of Quirky Guy.
• Anticlimax Boss: How some felt about Mina being the last antagonist of the series. It's hard to take her seriously as a threat when every scene she has prior to the final season, and even many moments during the season, are played for laughs. Especially as there were much more suitable threatening enemies such as fan favorite Toffee who never accepted humans, Monster Arm (who swore to return) and even the Spell With No Name, or never before seen terrifying monsters like Seth that could have made the final battle much more memorable as their only weakness was magic and could have been permanently taken out before magic was destroyed. It doesn't help that Mina is easily taken out by the large dark magic unicorn, who himself gets paralyzed and dissolved by the destruction of magic just as he's ready to strike back at Marco and Tom.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: The extreme backlash against the ending resulted in it, andor/the Seasonal Rot that led up to it, are practically the only thing fans have talked about, and thus anyone likely to hear about, the series since.
• Broken Aesop: Star's arc has always been about creating her own destiny instead of following that which has been chosen and thrown upon her shoulders (ergo. being a perfect princess and perfect queen and being forced into a relationship with anyone either for social status and manipulation [Tom] or because of a soul-bonding curse [Marco]). The entirety of "Beach Day" is dedicated to the idea. But "Cleaved" leaves a sour spot in the Aesop because it's heavily implied that Glossaryck's endgame has been destroying the magic all along and, with him being an omniscient being, he always knew that Star and Marco would end up together one way or another. So in one way or another, Star ended up doing things Because Destiny Says So.
• Catharsis Factor: Unless one sees them as Unintentionally Sympathetic, we have:
  • Mina getting dispatched by a corrupted Millhorse and then receiving no aid from none other than Solaria herself.
  • Seeing Rhombulus and Omnitraxus's dead remains at the pizza party over their assumed victory over Eclipsa and all the monsters that they'd previously been enjoying.
• Designated Hero:
  • Star. By eliminating all magic, she essentially committed genocide by inadvertently killing millions of beings made of magic or dependent on magic, yet her only concern is not being able to see Marco again. On top of that, she was willing to abandon her family and friends just to see him again. It's treated as a mild inconvenience at best despite the blatant It's All About Me attitude she displays here. Even her reasoning for doing it doesn't change this: she stops Mina from committing genocide... by committing a different, potentially worse genocide herself.
  • Solaria. Her disowning Mina by turning away as she's crying out for her help comes across as cruel and hypocritical on her part especially since she chose and created what eventually became Mina's current state downright to causing her to lose her mind! Supplementary books like the Magic Book of Spells where her entire entry on monsters consists of racist ramblings and creative ways to destroy monsters on the pretense that they are "much happier that way" don't exactly help either and only make her sudden Heel–Face Turn come out of nowhere and rejecting Mina less heroic and more of a Kick the Dog moment.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Star manages to destroy magic, stop Mina, save Tom, get together with Marco, and unite Earth and Mewni into one amalgam dimension. Happy ending, right? Not quite. What Star did ultimately killed all the inhabitants of the Magic Dimension as well as any being dependent on magic to survive (Omnitraxus and Rhombulus's lifeless bodies being shown, the deaths of the millhorses being shown in detail, and Hekapoo, Reynaldo, and Glossaryck are all implied to have died in the process). The two dimensions may be united, but it's caused a large amount of Culture Clash for both Earth and Mewni, the humans shown reacting in fear to the other dimensional beings, and the people of Mewni like Rich Pigeon adapting poorly to Earth elements. Mina, meanwhile, is both alive and still out there. As she herself declares, so long as there are people with similar ideas to hers, she will never really lose. Echo Creek is still in a panic from the resulting backlash of the Magic Dimension's destruction, the people of Mewni are in disarray from Mina's assault, and magic is ultimately gone for good. Also, there are those like Toffee who will never accept peace with the Mewmans and now have the perfect opportunity to get their revenge (this includes Toffee's ruler Seth, an ageless immortal who is heavily implied to have been the Greater-Scope Villain and unless Moon killed him with the Darkest spell, is still around, and his species are only vulnerable to magic and otherwise nigh-impossible to kill). While the series tries to end on a happy note, it gets marred by all the problems it created in the process, made even worse thanks to Fridge Horror.
• Fanon Discontinuity: The finale to this series was notoriously hated by many viewers and fans of the show that they preferred to pretend that the episode and for some, the overall last season of the show to not exist overall.
• Inferred Holocaust: The logistics of fusing Earth and Mewni together and the destruction of all magic (and magical life) raise disturbing and at times horrifying implications. Word of God jossed most of them, but by no means all of them.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Ludo's appearance here amounts to a short scene of asking Star to play basketball with him and Dennis. Given his previous appearance, you'd think he could have been directly involved with the main plot.
  • Moon's mother Comet is never brought up, despite the fact she provides a compelling counter-argument for why magic isn't evil and can be used for good, as she did spend her entire reign and life to nearly end the Monster/Mewman conflict for good peacefully until Toffee murdered her. Even just from a character interaction POV, the fact she doesn't even interact with her daughter or granddaughter, or for that matter Eclipsa (being the most pro-monster Queen since her) despite the ghosts of past queens being present is seen by many as a serious wasted opportunity.
  • River's screen time amounts to just trying to get Globgor healed in the magic temple. He has almost no direct involvement in the conflict and never finds out about Moon's involvement with Mina. It would have been interesting to see how he would react to her actions.
  • Some people were disappointed that Tom's role throughout the last several episodes of Season 4 wasn't as big as it was in the two-part Season 3 finale. It doesn't help that it seemed as if he only broke up with Star so she could be paired with Marco in the end.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Mina and her army never fight in a battle. The conflict with her ends rather anti-climatically. You'd think there'd be a bigger bang for a show that likes homaging anime. What makes this worse is that Moon and Eclipsa actually suggest to fight them before Star goes through with her plan.
  • The crisis of all the dark magic spreading across the Realm of Magic, which created the dark unicorns and made the nameless annihilation spell go rogue (which is also implied to have affected the big dark unicorn's mind, as it also "lives only to destroy"), goes completely unacknowledged by the characters even as said crisis is looking them right in the face. One would assume this would be a far better reasoning for needing to destroy all the magic than the conflict with Mina and her Solarian warriors.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Some fans see Mina as this since she was turned crazy by Solaria's magic in the first place and yet here she is condemned while Solaria has a moment of redemption. Rhombulus and Omnitraxus Prime as well, since their involvement with Mina and the Solarian Warriors was done at Moon's behest, yet they end up killed off in a way that's Played for Laughs while Moon is Easily Forgiven.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Star:
  • Once she has decided that magic needs to be destroyed to prevent the completion of Mina's genocide of the monsters, her only concern is the fact that doing so will force Marco back to Earth and make them incapable of seeing each other again. This in spite of the fact that doing so will not only rob all life of magic, not just Mewni, but will also kill everything reliant on magic to live, including Glossaryck, the Firstborn Unicorn, and presumably Hekapoo. Arguably this launches Star straight into Well-Intentioned Extremist or even Knight Templar territory, given that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions or billions of beings made of magic in the multiverse (the Spells, the Magic High Commission, and everything and everyone that lives in the Magic Dimension just for a start) and she'll presumably be killing all of them solely to save one country (hers) in one dimension (hers), a genocide comparable to if not bigger than Mina's. Yet Star's only concern is that she won't get to see Marco ever again.
  • She also pretty much was willing to abandon her family and longtime friends to be with Marco on Earth. You just have to hear Moon's heartbroken call at her daughter as Star dives into the well again and, mind you, if it would've worked Moon would never have a chance to properly apologize to Star for her actions, leaving her with the constant guilt of "If I hadn't helped Mina, the magic wouldn't have had to be destroyed and Star would be here and not hating me", and River would've never had a proper reunion with his daughter. It truly shows how completely selfish she is as a person.

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