Why we write changelings the way we do · 5:00am Oct 11th, 2014
Fanfic authors have a good amount of leeway in how they write changelings without going against canon -- at least, as far as the show's concerned. I haven't really read the comics. They invaded Canterlot, they got blown away by magical love beams, and they weren't mentioned again. Whatever authors decide to go with, they have their reasons, and since I know many of my readers have their own headcanons, I thought it'd be interesting to share.
For my own part, I don't really care for the use of changelings as a race of two-dimensional mindless cannon fodder bad guys. It just doesn't seem to gel with the spirit of the show to me.
I'm not trying to go holier-than-thou on anyone here. I've played D&D and fantasy RPGs, and I've whacked my share of goblins and orcs and kobolds. Having these things doesn't make a work bad or make someone a bad person for enjoying it. I just don't think it fits well in a show called My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
On the other hand, one of the common "solutions" -- justifying the invasion of Canterlot by making the ponies into evil bug-hating bigots -- didn't seem any better. Well, if ponies are good and changelings aren't irredeemably awful hordes of monsters, why did they wage an obvious and unjustified war of aggression?
Well, I figured, why do people? It's not a coincidence that the worst aspects of The Hive in Body And Mind (fanatical hatred of "others", widespread abuse, veneration and ritualization of violence, treating dissent as treason, extreme nationalism) are also generally present in real-world aggressor nations. This directly results in how Pincer is reformed into someone who can peacefully coexist with ponies; he's forced to look his enemy in the eyes and see that they're not the monsters he's always considered them. When you look at how Equestria tends to handle villains in the show, I think this is exactly the sort of thing they'd try.
Of course, there's also the unavoidable fact that changelings feed on love. I've seen a lot of people assume that this makes them inherently hostile to ponies, making peaceful coexistence impossible.
Obviously, I don't agree. Peace and cooperation might be the less obvious choice, and more difficult to plan and implement than violence and looting, but it can require a bit of creativity and looking past the surface of the problem. Fundamentally, yes, changelings need the love that others provide. But we're all dependent on things that we need to get from others. That's how society works. We can't all grow our own food and make our own clothes and build our own machines, but that doesn't mean we go around stealing them from people. We compensate them for providing these things, so that they do so willingly.
While love obviously isn't as transferable as something like apples or electronics, I don't see any reason the same couldn't apply. The way for changelings to peacefully coexist with ponies, at least in my story, is to become the sort of people that ponies would willingly give love to. Acting seemed like an obvious route, which is why Pincer eventually becomes an actor. Changelings are practically natural-born actors, and it's a line of work where success can mean more adoring fans than they will ever meet.
And yeah, I think they could do it without draining ponies to death or anything - Chrysalis drew enough love from Shining Armor to smack down Princess Celestia, and Shiny didn't get any worse than being tired and googly-eyed for a while.
As far as other aspects of my changeling society go -- the social structure, the nature of the queen, what their habitation is like, etc. -- I drew on some common science fiction takes of insect people and added a few of my own twists.
Well, that's about all I had to say. Anyone else want to share their thoughts on imaginary bughorses?
I like to write them as 1/3rd controlled by Queen Chrysalis,
1/3rd hive mind and
1/3rd individual free will.
I think changeling characters are great for interspection.
There are just so many ways to go with them--the hive politics and grey morality of Integration, the fae world building of Mendacity, the banal evil of my own White Space, the list goes on.
I never really liked stories that tried to make one side (the changelings or the ponies) out as "the bad guys". Why can't they just be misunderstanding instead of just maliciously hateful? It's hard to change an entire line of thinking, but I wouldn't say that's evil.
I know there's a lot of routes that people try to go with the changelings or Chrysalis as a whole, but I think my preferred one is where the invasion is seen as a last resort, as something to try and feed her dying race. I hate when I see Chrysalis painted as a tyrant leader who dragged along her entire civilization for a suicide mission so she could be powerful. Maybe that's just because I like seeing both sides instead of assuming that someone's inherently evil because they want to be.
Overall, though, I like the changelings because they provide a lot of content. We were given a brief glimpse of a race of SHAPESHIFTERS, and then they just disappeared. It's great to see all these people fleshing out an entire race that had so little screen-time.
I think part of why I liked Body and Mind so much is that you seem to have a very similar outlook on changelings as I do, and several of the things you mentioned here are very much like my own thoughts. Needless to say, I approve.
I suppose I look at changelings the same way I look at kobolds; strange and alien, and worth exploring.
Granted, more than 90% of my PCs are kobolds, so….
I have an insanely large headcanon about Changelings. And especially considering that i am studying philosohpy at the moment, my head is spinning with just, all the new possibilities for changelings.
I mean, Considering a world where we have an energy, Magic, which can be seemingly called out of nothing, and A Race, Changelings which can turn something completely immaterial, The idea and concept of love, into sometihng material, food. My head is just slowly exploding XD
I barely got the hang of Metaphysics, and now I suddenly see all sorts of ways to apply it...
Oh Faust my head hurts...
I like to portray changelings has having very bad leadership, but with enough individuality that some conscientiously object to Chrysalis's policies, and would rather live peacefully in Equestria. The country is probably large enough to absorb the entire hive should the changelings disperse across Equestria.
I like changelings because they are alien. Whether that means that they are completely irreconcilable or a different species that must learn to co-exist, that difference is the great part of any changeling story.
If they are just Swiss cheese ponies who are hated by the evil racists, there's no impetus to explore their culture or personality. In the show, they did attack ponies. They did seem to delight in feasting like locusts on love or whatever. That doesn't have to make them monsters in one's story, but don't try to sweep it under the rug. Explain it! Overcome it!
That said, people write sympathetic changelings because we all want to see redemption from our pony show. It's an admirable reaction, and even in lackluster changeling stories, it forces people to write closer to the show's heart: solve your friendship problem by making friends, not with some gruesome grimdark war or making every pony out to be irredeemable villains instead.
I guess what I'm getting at is: Changelings can be different without being cookie-cutter baddies. Look at the bugs in Ender's Game. They fought to the death over a misunderstanding, and even in the end, they're very, very different races who can barely communicate. And that's okay!
Edit: And that's not to say that you can't do a funny story about wacky evil changelings, but I assume we're talking specifically about the overly-dramatic genre here.
it varies between each mind.
from where i stand with my own ideas, coexistence i hampered largely because the vast majority of changelings are two dimensional and mindless. there are three forms of mind for changelings. the queen's mind, who births all her soldiers and drones. the hive's mind, coneected to the queen and the ocllective thoughts of the drones. and the mind of the transcended, changelings drones who manage to go through a metamorphosis that made them individual sapient beings.
other than that, the changelings are also cursed from a sickness millenium old, so old that no one remembers where it came from. aall that it knows is that it distabalizes the emotions of changelings and is believe to be the primary reason why they feed on love. madness is common amongst the queens in particular, the most active minds of the hive.
The changelings are... weird. The first arc of the comic centers around them, and annoyingly the drones get absolutely zero fleshing out. So here's my take...
The changelings are all linked to each other. They can feel each other's presence in the world, and thoughts and emotions at shorter distances. Changelings are still individuals, but can be heavily influenced by the presence and thoughts of others of their kind. This also lends them the ability to coordinate with each other extremely well. Chrysalis, as their queen, is basically the hub from which this whole network spreads. She's not strictly necessary to the survival of the species, but if she goes away then so does that link. This leaves the changelings with a problem. Chrysalis is obviously an incompetent psychopath, but doing something about it means having to give up one of the fundamental parts of being a changeling.
I also assume that feeding on love is directly harmful, but not immediately lethal. How harmful I can't really figure, but it's not good news. I think if a changeling just takes just enough to get by, from a large pool of victims, everything would probably be fine. But if they take a lot at a time or almost exclusively from one pony, then problems begin to occur.
I don't limit myself to any one interpretation of Changeling; each of my stories has a different "kind" (except "For Mother", which has identical headcanon as "Love Mine"). For me, just the exploration of the possibilities themselves is one of my biggest reasons for writing (and reading) Changeling stories.
Hiveminded? Individuals? Naturally individuals but forced into a hivemind? Freely-given love doesn't hurt? Freely-given love still hurts? Freely-given love hurts the Changeling? Bring it all on! The only point I won't budge on is that Changelings do need love to survive (whether or they also need or can still use physical food is irrelevant to this point). "Changelings don't need love! They just use it to power their magic!" or anything similar is just a cop-out to remove one of the biggest hurdles to pony-Changeling harmony in a Changeling redemption fic.
I think is great how everyone has their own interpretations of these buggy little guys.
I have a headcanon where changelings, both as individuals or as a collective mind, are intelligent enough to fully understand emotion. But they can't actually feel anything themselves beyond the most basic desire or feral rage, and so instead they mimic what they see the ponies do.
In addition, in my headcanon what they're feeding on is not actually love, but instead they're tapping into a pony's emotions as a gateway to feed off their life-force, with love and fear being the emotions that offer the most potent gateways to feed through (my explanation for why they were terrorizing ponies during the invasion even though they supposedly feed off love, not fear).
I also favor the idea of Chrysalis not actually being "queen of all changelings" as she claimed, but instead merely a leader of a larger and more powerful faction, meaning there are other changelings out there, some of which might have radically different views on ponies, and different methods for surviving.
But as for peaceful coexistence (at least with my headcanon in place), it wouldn't be easy to maintain; what with the negative effects of how changelings feed, the stigma towards changelings after the invasion, the few bad changelings who go rouge and kidnapping ponies, those few unaccepting ponies who will take matters into their own hooves and kill what they see as monsters, the general awkwardness of inter-species relations, etc. etc.
Likely the best scenarios for a successful coexistence (in my opinion) would either be a very distant relationship between the two races, where two would parties meet on neutral ground, exchange goods with one another, and depart shortly after, leaving little time for anything to spark off and go wrong.
OR
Where a faction of changelings infiltrate Equestria, spreading their numbers throughout in order for their people to live out their lives in disguise. All the while they'd maintain tight control on their faction so that nothing reveals them. Meanwhile the ponies would be none the wiser of their presence.
=====
But anyway, I just love changelings no matter how they're portrayed (so long as it's done well). And there's just so many possibilities for what they could be like; it's awesome!
That might be one of the reasons they were never fully fleshed out in the show, so now they can be whatever we want them to be... and fit whatever gets the most sympathy and admiration... and we'll love them all the more because they're what we love the most and- OH GOD, THIS WAS THEIR MASTER PLAN THE WHOLE TIME!
You never explained why Chrysalis is the way she is. You never analyzed that. How did she grow to believe that ponies and changelings can't live together? Why did she even want to or need to make propaganda to anyone?
That is not to say she wasn't evil. But still... i don't understand WHY she was evil. I am sorry but it is dramatic irony of how Chrysalis in your story is exactly what you described... villain fodder.
If you wish to i could link you my own headcanon. I have a great collection of that ranges between diet, birth, abilities e.t.c.
One thing that's hardly ever explained is why Changelings eat love/emotions. I can think of only a few stories that actually go beyond "we do it or die because reasons," into how they became so dependent on emotional energy and what happens when they run out, and most of those are "Discord did it."
Personally, I think having any major part of physical health being tied to outside emotions past theoretical emphatically-powered life-support spells to be rather silly, so I have instead come up with two separate theories on why Changelings need to "eat" love.
1) For whatever reason, Changelings are unable to produce emotional energy of their own. This means that in order to feel anything, joy, sadness, anger, fear, they have to take it from someone else. They prefer love because it's the most powerful type of emotion and can be broken down into more of any of the lessers, whereas it takes a significant amount of any lesser emotion to build up to a greater one.
Needless to say, if they run out they become completely devoid of emotion, but suffer no major physical effects beyond that.
2) They're not hungry, so much as power-hungry, and use they stolen love-energy to supercharge their own magic. love has no nutritional value, draining it has no purpose beyond powering up, and not draining any leaves them no more or less powerful than the average pony.
They're not starving, they're just dicks.
That and whatever fallout he had from being mindraped which factored into his overall condition.
2525054 I am very much with you on this. There are tons of ways to get two fundamentally decent groups into a war, especially when the ponies have well-established xenophobic tendencies and the changelings have a very real biological need to be accepted. When you throw in the emotions and fallout of whatever history you want to go with, the results can be a wonderful mess of epic proportions where the readers genuinely like and feel for both sides while accepting that a bloody, pointless war is inevitable which is just awesome.
2525210
Perhaps I can change your mind on this with a bit of my own headcanon. I personally think that changelings are not naturally capable of absorbing magic from the environment like other creatures do because they happened to loose it at some point in their evolution, but their bodies are still dependent on it for critical functions. This means they must acquire it from other creatures like ponies, but ponies have natural barriers to prevent this which are lowered during periods of extreme emotion to allow more magic flow. This means changelings could also feed off enraged ponies if they wanted to, however that increased magic flow from the lowered barriers makes enraged ponies more difficult to work with. Some other extreme emotions like despair and fear can also be used to some extent in a pinch, but outside a dangerous fight the barriers are weakest with love which is why changelings strongly prefer sneaking around and stealing that.
This is fairly comparable to how we as a species happened to loose the ability to produce certain proteins we still need to live, so while a changeling that is unable to feed will loose its ability to use magic and fly first, that will be followed by a degradation of brain functionality and eventually death as organs start to fail or loose too much capability to keep the changeling alive.
Another very interesting consequence of this is that because it is just magic and natural barriers, ponies can play a more active roll in this by consciously lowering their barriers or directly feeding magic into changelings. They would obviously have to learn how to do this, but the ability for ponies to choose gives them a lot more agency and makes the process of feeding more interesting.
Also, I do have changelings needing physical food because this makes their systems fairly conventional outside of how they interact with magic. In fact, I actually have them needing a bit more food than ponies do because one of their adaptations to not being able to absorb magic is that they rely more heavily on biochemical processes than other species in order to conserve magic.
My only thoughts are that you need to write more, because you're really good at it.
I'm of the view that any individual changeling can survive on non-love rations over the same course of time that any human being can survive without food. However, to do so is like running a car on less than half a gallon of fuel. Love is needed for much of the substantiable life for a changeling to survive at par levels of energy.
Semi-connected hivemind lets some of the more "developed" changelings hop in and out of the collective conscious at any given interval, provided that they are within a certain distance of at least one other changeling. Some are more heavily dependent on groupthink than others. Mileage varies, you know?
I agree about the peaceful cooperation with pony society. It's not impossible, just difficult and it will probably have a lot of mess-ups before it becomes an apparently plausible solution.
Take the concept with grains of salt and all that.
*Cracks knuckles*
Welp, time to delve into headcanon (you'll know most of this already, Starman).
Changelings, as far as the show's concerned, are portrayed as a a wholly different family, perhaps even phylum, from that of the Equestrian pony. While it's not explicit, the athropod influences are very much implicit. Because they are vastly different species, their baseline morality is similar but wholly different from that of ponies' in my mind. They see ponies as a source of food not unlike how we see cows as walking steaks. Changelings can and are entirely willing to be friendly with their food because it'll provide far more than if they just went with the 'kidnap 'em and suck 'em dry' approach. It's just a bigger investment for the hive.
Speaking of hives, there are multiple asides from Chrysalis' in my headcanon. Socially they are analogues to ants, albeint with sapience, of course. As for the general agenda of each hive, that's determined by the queen. Some are more sublte and favour stealth, while others, like Chrysalis, are more militant and aggressive. All do use subterfuge in one way or another.
As for the whole 'Love = Food' thing, it's been shown that love is more than a chemical reaction in the body in FiM. I see it as an another form of energy which can be absorbed by a drone to later condense it into a tangible food pellet. These pellets are what the changelings actually eat. They can't eat love, not directly. It's like pollen. Bees need pollen to eat, but they don't eat the pollen: they turn it into honey which they do eat.
2525261 I didn't focus on why Chrysalis became the way she is because it's not her story. It's a story of all changelings. What does it matter why a particular one went bad? The story isn't about exonerating her, and it never was. All of the changelings who are alive when the story has taken place are being affected by her long history of cruel leadership. Where that leadership came from 800 years ago has no real bearing on their situation, nor is there anything they can do about it.
Goldfur's entire oeuvre is (currently) devoted to changelings who mostly prefer to coexist with ponies. If you liked Body and Mind, you should definitely check out Change of Life (what happened next to one changeling who wasn't happy to be in the invasion) and Conversations in a Canterlot Café (in which a Canterlot invasion survivor who now reviles changelings learns about broader changeling culture). The rest is related and good too.
2525631
I don't know what you're trying to change my mind about, since it sounds like these Changelings still need love to live... Perhaps you thought I don't like Changelings that need love for both survival and magic? No, I meant love fueling only magic (or anything else) instead of survival.
Also, how love contributes to a Changeling's survival doesn't matter to me. "Well, it's a special type of magic... that... contributes magically to the body." is just as fine as "love is like a protein that the Changelings can't synthesize in their own body, so without it all their organs start to fail."
2526226 I'll have to look into these!
2526211 Well yea but she is still pictured as fodder, thus the reason i mention it. It's not just the changelings that were two-dimensional. Chrysalis was too. I mean the story could very well do without her, with a suicide or honorable last battle. I think she wouldn't like to be captured.
Let me be PERFECTLY HONEST. I didn't see something different than i would see in a "Changelings integrate with Equestria" fic. Not truly. It was well written, awesomely written at parts, but the thing is i didn't see something out of the ordinary that i should notice. Maybe it had a bit more realism than normal fics but still i can't really say it stood out for something more than its' quality.
Personally I like using a Changeling OC and Changelings
1) When they all look the same it isn't about how cool they look or how cool they sound. They're all the same so its comes down to personality so you've got to try and make everyone unique by personality alone.
2) Trying to create my own backstory for an entire race that are "Parasitic" by nature and make them more than "Monsters" is fun.
Taking something that looks inherently evil and make them almost normal is just fun to me.
[Apologize if this is unreadable, I haven't slept in awhile.]
Your headcanon is cool.
I don't personally count the comic book depictions of changelings towards canon-canon. That series was sort of... too comic. No pun intended. I loved it, but a lot of it was just jokes and it wasn't terribly serious, if you ask me.
My personal belief is that changelings hate ponies. I mean, wouldn't you? Think about it. You eat love (yeah, I go on that assumption), so therefore, you wouldn't give it back to the love-cow you got it from, would you? Do you give a cow its milk back after milking it? Do you give the milk to a different cow? No. You just don't. Given that hate is the opposite of love: changelings hate ponies.
Because they must. Because it's all they know. They don't necessarily want to, they just feel like they have to. On the flip side of this, I think changelings would all pretty much be very cool with each other. I mean, how couldn't they be? Share the love, right?
The popular concept that they live in a hive where everything is horrible and they all hate each other... baffles me. It seems to me they'd have to be a very tight-knit group in order to do things like... oh, I dunno, orchestrate the invasion of a nation's capital? Not to mention gathering love-food. I envision their society as a big family. Not literally all related by blood, but just all very friendly with each other, everyone looks out for one another, so forth.
Imagine for a moment there is a changeling the others really didn't like. I'm pretty sure being love-eaters makes them sensitive to emotions. He'd know nobody liked him. And being unlikeable in a changeling's line of work, means he'd quickly starve to death, unless he went out and found his own pony to prey on.
And, I believe they could coexist with ponies if both parties gave it a shot. Like many wars, fought for political reasons, or for resources (love?), the invasion wasn't necessarily 'we hate ponies, grr!' so much as it was 'we need love, fuck you ponies, we're taking it.'
I can honestly say that I've never read the comics, so I don;t know the other half of the story to changelings. I do know, however, that odd-balls exist in everything. No matter how many times you perform one task, you're bound to eventually make a slight difference with each time you do it. I saw the same thing when it came to changelings. There's differences in each one, each with a different ideal, personality, pep-peeves. The way their queen led them is by fear of her power. That's how a power drunk tyrant would work, am I right? She brainwashes her subjects to make them think that life would be better if she was stronger.
Take my fiction, The nurse and the the bug, for example. In his crippled conditions, my main character questions his hive's relationship with pony kind, while trying hard to reject how wrong his queen was so he may not be tainted by dangerous thoughts when he returns to his home healed. He fears ponies will take his life for just being alive and his queen will take his life for just thinking ponies are friendly.
Starman, while there are a few differences between my idea of Changeling society and yours, I agree that the inherent 'badness' of them isn't so much their nature as it is their leader. I also think Changelings as a people are generally distrustful of others, because by definition, they are shapeshifters. One common trait amongst a society is to believe that at a fundamental level, everyone else is like you. That is to say, in this case, double dealing and deceptive, and their historic worldview must have been made with this general underlying vibe. Their hatred of their 'prey' likely stems from their early attempts at subjugating the ponies, before being routed and forced into hiding by Celestia. Their culture has grown into its modern state harboring a blood feud with the ponies, and Chrysalis is the most recent of a handful of Queens seeking to solidify 'Changeling Supremacy' and uses a ruthless and iron-hooved leadership style to do it. In my stories, any dissent is met with immediate execution, and the portion of the population that might oppose her are either too scared, or merely just indoctrinated into her Jingoist agenda. Of course, I think there are multiple similarities between my Changeling Hive and the real country of North Korea, in that they are isolated nationalists with a populace raised by the notion that their leader is a god, and they must expand their god's sphere of influence. Where my Changeling OCs tend to come from are dissenters who manage to escape Chrysalis' clutches and cause trouble, usually drawing her wrath and causing conflict. Because like North Korea, the populace can still think for itself, and despite harsh punishments for those who stand for other ideals, those people still exist.
So yeah, that's my two bits. Spend them wisely.
I never thought of the changelings as controlled by Chrysalis.
I always imagined the hive mind, to them, being more a constant mental connection to the rest of the swarm, while Chrysalis gives them orders.
At the same time, I never liked seeing them as just "bad guys" as the show tried to portray them. Nothing is that cut and paste, and after some of the things Chrysalis said, I personally decided that the swarm had been starving. Slowly, over hundreds of years, the changelings that hid away from the ponies in fear and desperation were dying out and Chrysalis did what she thought was best to try to save her people.
I'm still really disappointed in the show for not exploring changelings further as both a species and as a moral morass that Twilight and her friends could have explored. But no, Disney ending, and then lets forget the changelings ever happened. Good job everybody.
I don't tend to build head canon, actually. Just a few background explanations that I'm pretty fluid in changing as canon changes. Besides, it's too much fun to world-build differently in each story.
That said, I'm good with any interpretation of changelings that doesn't attempt to justify their invasion or cast ponies as the villains. Whether that makes them individuals or mindless drones that's matter. If I had to choose a favorite portrayal though, I would go with the one in 'This Platinum Crown'.
My take on them is that they are symbionts with the ponies, to their mutual benefit. Chrysalis was an aberration that harmed that relationship enormously. I could rant on, but I have whole stories that cover various aspects of them and their relationship to Equestria and its inhabitants, and I don't want to bog down your blog with it all.
Wow, I missed this journal.
Okay, my personal head canon is rather different to the norm in MLP fanfiction, really in that I do not portray them as a Hive or Hive-mind; in my stories, they're essentially just buggy vampire ponies with a relatively similar pony/human-like society. They have a kingdom, their own families and are entirely individuals. In this sense, there are more things that they and the ponies have common ground with.
The mentality with changelings and why they do what they do in my works centers around their society and how the individual changelings are raised: the changelings are traditional Imperialists who want to expand their power and influence in the world, as well as harvesting ponies like cattle. While some ponies may view them as evil imperialistic invaders and monsters, many changelings simply view ponies as food whom it is their and their children's "right" to devour. It basically plays on the whole "changeling master race"/"Changeling Nazi" theme which with the way the changelings have so far been portrayed in the show, it may not be a long shoot that that is what their leaders spout.
Chrysalis is a ruthless, glory and power-hungry tyrant of the kind we've seen throughout history: Napoleon, Caesar, Attila the Hun, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, etc.
I think they're actually rather sad. They need love to live, but Chrysalis knows nothing about real love. Therefore she wages wars in desperate acts to protect her people from inevitable starvation.
In one story I read (and I love its take on Changelings), the reason for the Changelings invading was partially their nature- as bugs, they are pretty much programmed to follow the Queen, and the Queen in this case was Chrysalis, who is described as a "female, adult Prince Joffrey".