Conceptual Sources for My Chrysalis and Changelings · 3:43pm Oct 27th, 2014
(this originated as a reply in comments to The Fall of Hive Hunger-Prime, but I thought that -- especially because it credits three FIMFiction writers I admire, I should promote it to a blog post).
>>5191853
Eh ... the thing is, canon Chrysalis derives from two main sources, A Canterlot Wedding (TV show) and The Return of Chrysalis (IDW comic book), and she really is this bad even in those sources. In both sources, she's not just engaging in a regrettable necessity for the survival of herself and her followers, she is positively enjoying hurting others, and in the comic book series rejects an implicit offer of symbiosis from the cat-creatures, preferring to torment and slay them. Chryssie is not a nice ling at all.
Going beyond canon, my main fanon inspirations for my version of Chrysalis and the Changelings are Phoenix_Dragon's three Changeling stories Fragments, Without a Hive and A New Way; Ardashir's Wolf in Pony's Clothing and Manehattan Madness; and Alex Warlorn's Not the Wedding You Remember. All six of these are well worth reading.
In terms of what I took from each of the stories, the characters of Princess Ceymi (who is one of the main characters of my own Collateral Damage and will be mentioned in Chapter 2 of The Fall of Hive Hunger-Prime), Nictis/Meadow Song (who has already been mentioned without naming him/her) and Spark Wheel come from from Without a Hive and A New Way, Azure Sky (who is mentioned as the beloved of Rainbow Dash in Divine Jealousy and the Voice of Reason) from Fragments and A New Way. The concept of the Friendly Hives and Equestria's alliance with them against Chrysalis comes from Wolf in Pony's Clothing and Manehattan Madness. Chrysalis' birth-name Kifuko, her spirit-guardian Maua and some aspects of her personality -- all to be mentioned in Chapter 2 -- derive from Not the Wedding You Remember.
To summarize, the message of all these stories is that Chrysalis is an exceptionally-evil Changeling, and perhaps even more to the point unusually aggressive for a Changeling Queen. The Changelings have spent most of the last two and a half millennia hiding (which is why Celestia is so utterly caught by surprise when a whole horde of them invade Canterlot in YOH 1503). They usually only kill to protect the secret of their own existence, or take Captives to obtain love, and they are very careful about doing either. Chrysalis, standing in Canterlot ranting about how she's going to rule all Equestria, is very, very atypical for a Changeling of any caste.
A very good reason is adduced in Not the Wedding You Remember. Namely, Chrysalis wasn't raised a Changeling. She was raised as a Zebra, and she fundamentally sees her place as in the light. The circumstances of her childhood and adolescence (which included slaughtering her entire birth-village) have left her quite pitiless, and when she fights her way to the top in the Hive which takes her in (originally as a slave) she decides that the Changelings should be a Master Race.
She is thus very analogous to some Humans who immigrated to other countries, fought their way to the top and became dictators. Such as the Corsican Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of France. The Austrian Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer of the Third German Reich. And the (Asian) Georgian Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known to history as Josef Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union.
In each case, the fact that the dictator was originally an outsider to the society they took over enabled them to internally-transcend the limitations of the cultures of their adoptive countries. In each case, the dictator led their country to martial greatness but -- in part bcause he over-reached traditional limitations -- this greatness partially or fully led to disaster. In Napoleon and Hitler's case, the final consequence was conquest of the country by the enemies their aggressions had aroused; in Stalin's case, the Soviet Union (just barely) avoided being conquered by an enemy he'd raised up (Stalin had enabled Hitler's own rise to military might via various agreements of which the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was only the most famous), but he murdered so many Russians and members of other Slavic ethnic groups(tens of millions!) that he crippled the Soviet Union's future both culturally and demographically, with consequences we see today in Putin's crippled and demoralized rump of a once-great empire.
I am, obviously, making an analogy in this story between Chrysalis and Hitler. Her path is closer to Hitler's than to those of the other two leaders, because she institutes an explicit doctrine of racial superiority (my Changelings are in fact a Lost Kind of Pony) and uses it as ideological justification to launch a war of conquest; she drives the other Changeling Hives into the arms of Equestria (her claim to rule all Changelings as High Quen makes peace or alliance with those Hives impossible); in the end the forces she raises against her are so powerful, and so enraged by the atrocities she commits, that she finds herself defending a single Hive and eventually a single bunker within that Hive, awaiting her destruction. There are also overtones of the Imperial Japanese of 1937-45 here -- the Changelings are cooperative, hard-working and very brave in battle, and the aggressions of their leadership put them in a situation where they are confronting a far more powerful foe armed with atomic bombs, reduced to hopeless defensive expedients.
From all three fanfic writers I get the concept of the Changelings as creepy, scary but also pathetic. They were Twisted long ago by Discord into their current genome; over many centuries of the Long Hiding lost much of their culture and their former high estate as one of the Five Kinds; they follow a mad High Queen, and in doing so are experiencing terrible suffering and death on a genocidal scale. They are not inherently evil: they know Friendship, and even Love (though normally less personally and less passionately than do the other Kinds), and their eusociality is recognizably a variant of the Harmony. Their loyalty has been given to a monster, and they are being terribly misused.
But then, I'm an American writer of Jewish descent who grew up on stories, histories and board wargames of the Second World War, and who had as two of his main formative influences in his early appreciation of science fiction the German-produced Perry Rhodan and various Japanese animes, including Space Battleship Yamato and Macross. So the concept of an inherently-admirable people following monstrous leaders to their own destruction is hardly new to me.
You can plainly see my opinion of the Changelings in my version of Ceymi and my OC's of Compound, Carry and Cowl. I'll briefly discusss these characters.
Ceymi was a brilliant thinker whose intellect and aesthetic appreciation were too great for her rather limited birth-culture; she came to deeply appreciate and enjoy Equestrian society. The ideology she'd learned from Chrysalis caused her to formally despise the Ponies, but at the same time she formed strong emotional ties to them, both culturally and to specific individuals. The parents of her main Mask, Starry Eyes, became one of her main sources of emotional comfort and healing; and she fell in love with Thermal Soar. Chrysalis saw what was happening and deliberately broke Ceymi so that she could maintain her dominance over her. Ceymi died, around a decade later, without ever fully making the cognitive leap to appreciating that Chrysalis had betrayed her and more importantly was leading her whole Hive to ruin.
Compound is quite simply admirable, and doesn't appreciate how admirable she is in part because she's been raised by a culture so very deeply poisoned by the tyranny of Chrysalis. She's highly-intelligent, compassionate, and intensely loyal to her friends. What's more, she is an analytical thinker, calm in dangerous situations and a natural leader. Her concept of leadership is that it is something one does when a leader is necessary; she does not desire to abuse others, and she believes that a leader's job is to bear up under stress and make the right decisions for the benefit of her followers. Hatred and vindictiveness are not prominent in her character. She is, thus, close to an anti-Chrysalis -- and would make a far better Hive Queen.
Carry and Cowl, the two lings she has bonded deeply with over the last month and especially the last week, in part because expecting her own death she can open herself up to them in ways she could not when she still was very frightened of arousing the attention of the Specials, love her, and she loves them back in return. Carry is a big, strong guy; not a deep thinker but a ling who has a great capacity to care for others. Cowl is a bit of a nebbish, with more formal education than Carry, but considerably less courage (he's the first to snap under the bombardment, if you noticed).
None of the trio are monsters, and none of them deserve the horrors they're going through. They are just people, and in human terms rather nice people at that, who are enduring as best they can a dying dream of madness.
So, yeah -- sorry, but my Chrysalis is a tyrant, and a monster. But my Changelings, as a whole, are not. They're just a lost Kind of Pony, who got so used to hiding that they mostly forgot why they were hiding, and whose long fear and eusocial trust made them easy victims for a false leader to forge into a conquering army.
The Long Hiding is ending; elsewhere the Reconciliation with the other Pony Kinds has already begun. The Changelings have a great future as a race. But here, at Hive Hunger-Prime, the suffering is not yet over.
have you had the chance to peruse Magic Man's Maternal Instinct? It, and some of his other Ling fics, postulate that the Changeling hives are more like 1920's-30's Imperial Japan and that's the lens I read most of your story through.
I should probably read them. Note that I actually see Changeling culture as more "Japanese" than "German" anyway -- largely because of the intense eusociality and loyalty to the Hives. The real Germans, as opposed to the World Wars propaganda version of them from both Allied and enemy side, were essentially individualistic by the standards of most high-tech civilizations.
I'm honored that you found traits of my fanon useful for your verse. Though I often wonder if I go over the top with the evils my villains enact.
As normal, this is very indepth.
I second this from Alex Warlorn. I'm flattered that I've been able to provide anything that you found useful for your own work.