In Regards to the future of 'Changing Views' · 8:07pm Feb 7th, 2015
Before I go ahead and work on the next chapter, I wanted to know about people's opinions on certain things.
I read a few comments on random fics I've come across that "Red and Black Alicorns" are generally too common, sometimes even earning the fic itself an instant downvote or something like that. Is this true in some way? I mean, Artemis is certainly not an alicorn, but yes, she will have red features where Chrysalis had sickly green/blue. (If she does disguise herself as an actual Alicorn, I already have ideas about how she would look like. Won't be black and red, obviously.)
My reasoning for that is to make it another one of those Changeling things, where each "Queen" has their own unique color, which also transfers to their children, except newborn Princesses/Queens. Though I chose Artemis to have "red" features, it's certainly not because of aesthetics 
Next (And this won't be until MUCH further down the line), should I eventually add some romance into the story? As I mentioned in an earlier post, I can still make it so that changelings actually do need a father to be born. I CERTAINLY WON'T be writing any clop, I'm really not into that kind of stuff.
I'm fine with forgoing Romance, either way. Both choices give me extra paths to take the story towards, and as I now know, taking a path tends to close others. So many choices, yet I can only take a few...
Generally, on this site, if you want to poke fun at overpowered OCs, you make it a black Alicorn with red zebra-like stripes, faster than Rainbow Dash, better at magic than Twilight, stronger than Apple Jack, instantly liked by everyone with very little conflict, and a raging sex machine. If you really want to go the extra mile, you can give him draconic eyes or bat wings.
But yeah, your idea sounds fine.
Changelings with red highlights (as opposed to Chrysalis' blue-green highlights) has been done before at least once with Queen Carnation (Applejack's birth mother) from The Irony of Applejack, and no one had a problem with it; mostly because there were several queens shown in that story, each with a different highlight color. Actually I think the most common color other than Chrysalis' hive that I've seen has been orange, mostly due to several artists liking to draw orange highlights changelings.
It's important to note that in The Irony of Applejack, while the Queen can and does produce children, a Princess are rare but random from a Queen, and that changeling drones can procreate without a Queen, and in fact that's where most of the changelings come from once an initial seed population is created, and that Queens can be under the control of other Queens to speed up the birthrate (and is the reason the antagonists go after Applejack in the first place in that story).
It's having a pony with black fur highlighted by red that is the issue; there are a lot of stories that make fun of it, even some actual decent ones. I think this far into the story no one will care provided there is no attempt to emphasize how it looks cool in some way. Changelings always have a black color scheme for the body by default, unless you run into the bizarre hybrid territory that something like Of The Hive runs into with Twilight Sparkle (and Twilight's host hive has orange as their highlight color in that story, with a grey color scheme for the body).
On the subject of romance, Of The Hive has an interesting compromise. If there is no 'donor', a Queen can self fertilize their eggs, but the result will just be a downgraded clone (maybe gender flipped?) of the Queen. To have them look different at all they need a donor. That a donor can be from their own children is mentioned, but thankfully not really explored in depth. In that story, all changelings come from the Queen, and the Queen can lay up to a dozen per day, making the huge empires of other hives with tens of thousands of drones more intimidating because it takes a ton of time to get that high. A 'royal' changeling in that story requires a ton of love to create and is not something that accidentally happens. It's implied that making Twilight a changeling princess cost love equal to making several thousand normal drones.
I always thought portrayals of self fertilizing eggs that produce children that look wildly different from each other to be pretty weird, but they are magical love sucking vampire bugs so it's all up to your interpretation.
3031181 Yeah, never planned to make Artemis have an Alicorn disguise actually. Would bring more attention than anything else, which kind of ruins the point of a disguise.