I like writing flawed characters. My personal favorite version of Twilight Sparkle ever is the one in Mentally Advanced Series/Rainbow Dash Presents, and I tend to base my au versions of Twilight off of it. I love Twilight as a cynical pessimist that thinks she's a realist, I love her being sarcastic and sardonic and just trying to put up with everyone's shit. Here's my favorite quote from MAS/RDP Twilight that I think sums how I write au versions of Twilight pretty well:
"Well, the social sciences are nearly impossible to test empirically, and my little case studies are the furthest thing from scientific. So the best thing I can learn is the magic of drinking with Applejack on the weekends but only specifically with Applejack. And those lessons don’t generalize over to other ponies unless the lesson is insanely vague. And sometimes not even then."
There's just something about this cute little purple pony being an overworked cynic a la "confound these ponies they drive me to drink" that suits my fancy. I have a lot of MLP aus that I don't ever talk about, especially shared ones with my partner, and usually Twilight ends up acting somewhat like this (and also usually ends up a stallion... but thats just for fun.)
As for my nextgen's Twilight, I honestly dont write her that way (shocker). That one doodle in the Cozy Glow au image is a veryyy small glimpse into my nextgen, but overall I write my nextgen Twilight the exact same as in canon. I genuinely do believe that Twilight would try to justify keeping Cozy in stone prison, because Twilight loooves ignoring the fact that people can change. It's how she acted with Trixie, its how she acted with the Flim Flam brothers, its how she acted with Discord. Yes she was right about Flim and Flam, but she had no way of knowing that. Twilight as a character in canon has a very hard time believing that people who have done wrong by her and her friends are capable of change. The line I wrote in that image feels very in character to me, I can hear it in Twilight's voice near perfectly.
Don't think that any of this means I think Twilight is cruel or that I don't like her! I love her! I love characters who make mistakes and fuck up and are sometimes bad people! Hell, my top favorite Pokémon characters are all trainers who have either abandoned their pokemon or are otherwise cruel to them (looking at you, Paul...). Basically, I'm not hating on Twilight or writing her like this because I dislike her, I write her like this because I love her
