Season Finale Thoughts · 6:16am Oct 25th, 2016
Well, I decided to see the finale. I'm not sure if it's been officially aired yet or not, or if it's still just available because of it being aired early in another country, but I saw it. Thoughts which include spoilers after the break.
So.....I really loved this finale, with some minor exceptions. Let's get those two things that really bug me out of the way first.
1) The changeling transformation into their new forms happens that easily? Just give/share your love and immediately poof! It's done? That makes things really stupid. The idea that no changeling had ever decided to just share their love or give it willingly or whatever is ludicrous and makes the entirety of the changeling hive look like complete morons. If they had said that due to Thorax's exposure to outside thinking and friendship and freely given love were what allowed him to transform and that the others could attain a transformation of that calibre only after similar exposure over time, then that would be fine. Though the idea that Thorax had never given his love to any of his friends in the Crystal Empire seems a little stupid, but I'll let that one slide because the other stuff is worse.
2) The designs for the free love changelings is garishly hideous! If I were Chrysalis I would have refused to be redeemed purely to avoid looking like some of the worst designed OC's made by the fandom. God damn they looked positively dreadful!
Moving onto other stuff that doesn't bug me....
Though I'm not happy with the mechanism of the changelings' defeat, the idea of Chrysalis being overthrown and redeeming a large chunk of changelings sounds perfectly reasonable to me. It's quite possible that many of the changelings that weren't in the throne room decided to remain loyal to Chrysalis which can allow for her to still be a potent threat in the future potentially. Even if not, it did seem to be implied in the first Thorax episode that Chrysalis acted like an actual bug queen by laying a ton of eggs (not confirmed as far as I could tell, just implied), so she could just hatch a new army if need be, though it would take time and she'd need to find a way to prevent her new army from defecting to become the garishly hideous new monstrosities we have just seen. Maybe we'll see that while the new type of changeling doesn't go hungry, they are lacking in power that the pre-metamorphosis changelings have when doped up on a ton of love, or lose their ability to transform (though I kinda doubt that one). If the new ones have a disadvantage, it might make it more plausible for changelings to remain loyal to Chrysalis in the face of the opportunity to go through metamorphosis and in the end you'd be left with only the most vicious and villainous that remained as enemies. If that doesn't happen, then whatever, changelings had a good run, with one more major adventure arc devoted to them than I had expected.
I just realized...this metamorphosis harms one of the stories I had been working on but had not posted....oh well, it's a relatively minor thing and can be written around.
Anyway, stuff I like. The changelings were a tremendous threat. Something that caught my attention is that the princesses were captured without Chrysalis' intervention that may have allowed her to overpower them. They had to have done some serious preparation/planning to have successfully captured all the princesses with just drones....or maybe they just struck while they were asleep, who knows? There was a huge amount of dramatic tension thanks to the threat level of having all the major players taken out of the equation, leaving behind four others who generally aren't the heroes to save the day. Having Discord as part of the team was great, as just ignoring him would have seemed rather cheap. Then you add the idea that Chrysalis has a special throne made of a substance that drains all but changeling magic to help protect her kingdom, which I though was brilliant for explaining how Equestria hadn't dealt with them before now and for limiting Discord's ability to just snap his fingers to fix everything. I also generally enjoyed how the characters played off of one another on the rescue mission.
Now for one of the best parts about the episodes, I think...the hive. Oh holy hell I loved the hive. An ever changing castle fortress that looks like it was carved from a mountain? I couldn't stop looking at the hive itself as the episode went on! It's the kind of thing I am seriously envious over not having thought of myself. it was foreboding, magical in a way that pretty well no other location in the show has been (that I can recall), and fit the changelings perfectly!
I also really enjoyed how the changelings played on Discord's love of Fluttershy to capture him, it was very devious, smart and oh so very cruel. Sure, he probably should have known that none of them would be the real Fluttershy, but could he really take that risk in his obsessed mind? I half wondered why they didn't just all swarm him since he was surrounded, but I enjoyed that scene too much for it to bother me. I can always justify it by saying that first one was just distracting him so that they could surround him, while maybe the others were hoping to leech some love off of him before capturing him or something.
Now for two minor gripes that came to mind that amounts mostly to just nitpicking at this point...first, why did Trixie bother going down the path after the false Discord? I see no reason why one pony would have been able to really distract the entire horde from the others, but whatever...minor gripe. Second was why did Chrysalis just let Starlight talk at the end and convince her subjects to turn on her? If I were her I would have just given the pony equivalent of a backhand to the face, clamped her mouth shut with magic and then put her in one of the cocoons with the others. Oh well.
Now for general observations, some of which may relate to changeling stories I've worked on.
Confirmed that changelings can store love (like in Altered Visage) when Chrysalis says that those taking the place of the princesses would gather a lot of it and bring it back to her. At first I thought she was going to have her drones turn on her because of the "they'll bring all the love to me!" attitude I feared they were going to go for, indicating she cared nothing for her subjects and/or was stupid enough to admit she cared nothing for them. I don't think either attribute (stupid enough to admit she didn't care mostly) would have been appropriate and am glad they avoided that. I mentioned it earlier, but the changeling castle looked to be made of stone and appeared to be caves for the most part, which fits with a fairly common idea that I use with the changelings living inside of a mountain, just with a little more definition given to the outside in the canon case. Night and day continued without a problem without Luna and Celestia. At latest, they were captured in the dead of night (when Luna visited Starlight's dream) before the day that the four went to the changeling kingdom (and it was day at the time), which would mean that either more beings are capable of controlling the rising/setting of the sun and moon than just the really powerful princesses (though admittedly, it could have just been the really powerful changeling queen doing it instead), or that it does still work without their intervention. Personally, I'm of the camp that would say any sufficiently powerful unicorn (or other magic using creature) should be able to control the sun and moon, and that perhaps you don't need to be as strong as an alicorn to do so.
Anyway, that's enough. I really enjoyed this finale, despite the things I had issues with.
On the subject of the fully formed changelings I think the designs themselves were alright. They were certainly buggy enough it was just the color palette that irked my eye. In regards to the sun/moon thing? The answer could have been as simple as that they were simply far enough away from Equestria that the sun was still up.
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Yes, the colour was truly the problem. The design itself wasn't the issue.