Chrysalis: Saviour of Time Chapter 4 · 6:03am Sep 26th, 2016
Alternate title: Chrysalis is a bitch. Actual discussion of the chapter after the page break. Spoilers will obviously be prevalent.
So, yeah. As I said, Chrysalis is a real bitch. She is about as bad at making friends as you can be and manages to emotionally hurt or offend pretty near every single one of the element bearers.
This is officially the longest chapter I have ever posted to FIMFiction at well over 12k words.
Differences from the actual episode:
1- They don't go back to the library to do some research on the elements before leaving, mostly because Chrysalis is afraid of running out of time and having the entire universe collapse due to solving things too much after the original timeline had. Chrysalis used logic to determine the elements' location, and as a result has no idea about the whole "spark" that's supposed to make them work. She is even more clueless on how to use them than Twilight Sparkle had been.
2- As a consequence of not returning to the library, Spike actually goes with them instead of being put to bed. Some might think this unlikely, he stayed behind because he couldn't stay awake in the show, and I'd have to say you're completely correct about that. This is not a case of me failing to take that into account, however. In the cartoon, Spike had been awake presumably since the early morning helping out Twilight. In this story, he did the same at first but was knocked unconscious by a falling time machine at one point and remained asleep until just before they reached Ponyville. This extra bit of sleep allowed him to remain awake longer than his main timeline counterpart and get involved in the journey into the Everfree Forest.
3- Rainbow Dash acting as a scout to guide them to the castle by flying up for a bird's eye view rather than just blindly wandering in the forest. No particular reason for this one in story for the change beyond Chrysalis asking her to do so. Out of universe, I did this because wandering a scary, dark forest completely blind until you stumble upon ancient ruins is a bad idea and only works in show because it's either not something they considered worth explaining in a child's cartoon, or they simply felt they didn't have time to explain how they knew where they were going.
4- Applejack comes not because Twilight/Chrysalis is her friend, but instead because she was basically pressured into it by her own desire to do what was right and her friends' expectations of her. She's butting heads with Chrysalis early on pretty hard. I think it's fitting that the bearer of the element of honesty is the one to get along the worst with a changeling pretending to be Twilight.
5- Applejack's display of honesty. Much of the event surrounding this are the same as in the show, though with some definite key differences. First of all, Spike riding along on Chrysalis' back adds one more person to be saved. Applejack still grabs onto Twilight/Chrysalis to stop her from falling, but her opportunity to express honesty is cut off by Chrysalis when she leaps from the cliff to save Spike, who had fallen from her back down the cliff. Though Chrysalis catches Spike and intends on flying to save them both (risking discovery in the process), they are saved by Rainbow/Flutters before she does so. This event goes well for Chrysalis, as it helps convince the others and Applejack in particular that she has some goodness in her somewhere thanks to her leaping to what may have been her death to save the child, Spike. Yay! Spike is plot relevant! AJ does get a slight bit of showing her honesty by blatantly calling out the fact that Chrysalis isn't worthy of trust, but it's minor and not really anything more than was done before they entered the forest. I never cared much for the way it was demonstrated in the show anyway.
6- In general, Spike's purpose in the chapter is to help humanize Chrysalis somewhat by putting on display her soft spot for children. Without Spike around, it's kind of hard to see much in the way of positive traits in Chrysalis, which would get very tiresome to read I suspect. Hard to root for a character with no positive/likeable character traits.
7- Fluttershy's show of kindness is a little shorter than in the show because Chrysalis, having never seen a manticore before and afraid it may be related somehow to Discord, tosses it into a wall with her magic. Fluttershy still gets to be kind towards it and remove the thorn in its paw, but it happens to be while it is lying in a pained heap. This (successful) attack against the manticore leads Fluttershy to be a little upset with Chrysalis for hurting it. Not a huge difference here, but it does hurt her relations with Fluttershy slightly. Also, she gets the seed of an idea that perhaps kindness can be used to disarm your foes instead of violence, only for Spike to completely disrupt that train of thought and prevent any actual realizations from coming to full fruition. Damnit, Spike! You ruin everything!
8- Pinkie's display of laughter. First of all, fanfiction is not an audible medium, so songs don't work very well, and I'd rather not be linking to songs on Youtube because it may not always be there and it's a little annoying to have to go to another site to get the proper experience. In many cases, this would be fine. Just write as if the song never happened, since generally I think that they aren't really happening, it's just something to entertain the viewers. Winter Wrap Up would be a good example of that kind of song. You can't really do that so much with Giggle at the Ghosties, though, as it is lampshaded by Twilight/Rarity as being very much a thing that's happening and that it is very unusual. I chose to not have most of the lines of the song by having Chrysalis purposely ignoring it out of spite. She does not appreciate Pinkie bursting into song, it's a waste of time, and she doesn't like the others being scared of a bunch of trees because trees are neither dangerous nor scary. She is so irritated by this that once it's over, she has a little tantrum and it hurts her relations with all of the other ponies and even Spike, who seems to take the whole childlike way of thinking it's his fault that his caretaker is angry.
9- Rarity's generosity. Honestly, this is almost exactly the same as the show...except it's almost completely out of sight because Chrysalis had Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy carry her over the river (an obvious solution, I'd think) before they saw Steven Magnet. At this point, Chrysalis has cooled down somewhat and reconciles with Spike. You get to see her interacting with him in a friendly manner to help make up for how much of a colossal bitch she was during Giggle at the Ghosties. Just Spike doing his job of helping to humanize Chrysalis.
10- Rainbow Dash's Loyalty. Dash is perhaps the one who gets the shortest end of the stick when it comes to displaying her elemental attribute. Applejack had been cut off before her canonical display, but she had been effectively showing honesty in various points of the story and nobody would have doubted that she was an honest pony. Rainbow Dash is interrupted before she can choose her friends over the Shadowbolts thanks to Chrysalis using magic to finish fixing the bridge after Dash drops the rope when she's distracted by the Shadowbolts. Worse than that, she's interrupted at a point that makes it look like she may have been about to abandon her friends, making her appear very disloyal. She is emotionally crushed by this belief that Chrysalis expresses, made even worse because Chrysalis treats her assumed willingness to bolt on them with general indifference. She can't even get properly angry about being misjudged because Chrysalis didn't care. Chrysalis doesn't appear to be much worse in the others' eyes thanks to her not getting angry or anything and even forgiving her, but there's the possibility that even her other friends may have doubts about her loyalty. Poor, poor Dashie.
11- Finding the elements. Chrysalis legitimately doesn't know what the elements look like, or where they should be found. Twilight declares to have found them immediately upon setting sight on them. Chrysalis is working under the idea of what they look like later, so is skeptical that these stones are actually them. Chrysalis and Spike stay to guard these stones in case they are the elements while the others split up to search the castle for other objects that could be the elements (as opposed to them leaving Twilight alone to concentrate on getting them to work).
12- Teleportation of the elements and facing Nightmare Moon. Spike gets teleported with the elements along with Chrysalis, and he runs to hide from Nightmare Moon, and he may actually prove to be problematic for Chrysalis in later chapters because of it. Instead of charging at NMM like Twilight does in the original timeline, she tried seducing her by layering on a whole lot of adoration and flirtation. Given that the reason stated in MLP for Luna's change into NMM was based on her being jealous of the love/attention/adoration her sister received, I figured that she would actually react positively to being praised by Chrysalis, going along with it in order to get more of the attention she so craves. Chrysalis goes so far as to kiss her, though discovers NMM's love is tainted and inedible for her, indicating a greater corruption than simply being jealous and throwing a hissy fit because of it. Anyway, she used the seduction as a distraction so she can get the elements away from NMM and they end up by the bearers thanks to her efforts. Here comes the biggest, most potentially catastrophic change to the timeline so far (outside of Twilight dying of course)...the elements don't work.
This should come as no surprise to anybody who reads this story. There is no way that I could ever justify the elements working in this scenario unless I completely do away with the need for having proper bearers who represent their attributes. Chrysalis simply does not represent the element of friendship in any shape or form, she is a terrible person at this point in the story and would need massive character development before such a thing could be considered possible.
How could we get around this, then? Well, Chrysalis has defeated one alicorn on the show itself with Celestia, and logically had to have been able to defeat Cadance too, so is it too hard to believe that she might find a way to defeat NMM? All she needs is a lot of love, and with five willing victims, perhaps it's not too far out of the realm of possibility. That is precisely what she does. She feasts off of the other bearers until they are nearly dead and certainly unconscious. Juiced up with love, she transforms to her natural form with a twist...she makes herself appear much much bigger than she really is in an effort to scare NMM. I think that her actually being frightened is reasonable. She's not seen another alicorn except her sister (as far as we know), had no idea what a changeling is (so assumes it's an alicorn with powers to rival her own rather than a potentially bluffing shape shifter), and sees that this alicorn is easily twice her physical size. Add to this the surprise element of it happening so suddenly, and her being afraid seems justified as far as I'm concerned. Thanks to a power boost, NMM getting sloppy because of fear, and taking advantage of her shapeshifting to avoid the seemingly impossible to dodge wall of magical spears and to get behind her where she could magically sucker punch her into unconsciousness.
Next problems.....Chrysalis is suddenly super powered again and Luna is still Nightmare Moon because they didn't use the elements of harmony to cleanse her. Uh oh. Actually, that was something I had thought of long before writing this chapter. The corruption is based around emotions (jealousy, envy and whatnot), Chrysalis is capable of eating emotions, so she feeds off of NMM's corrupted love until she is cured. This love is practically poison to Chrysalis, and her body has to go through most of the normal love she has stored up just to prevent it from killing her.
End chapter with Chrysalis fainting from the pain and exhaustion from cleansing NMM.
This blog was way too god damn long. I commend anybody who actually got through this entire thing. I also offer my condolences on all the time you're never getting back.
Nah, Chryssie is awesome. She has tons of good sides. And I'm not saying that only because she'll rip my throat out otherwise.
It helps that she voices since of the annoyances I had with his stuff originally went.
Actually there's actually more to Chrysalis character, multiple times she's shown to have a consequentialist morality and she does care to do good, it's just that despite being very selfless she's also very bitter.
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She has morality, and to call her outright evil might be going a bit far, but she's still a pretty terrible person. Even if she is right much of the time, her social skills put her in the extremely abrasive category (a result at least in part of an ends justify the means morality). This whole Nightmare Moon incident is being dealt with for two primary reasons...first is that she made a promise to help Time Keeper for killing one of her foes (though this is less strong of a reason because doing this basically defeated the purpose of offering a reward for Twilight's death in the first place) and because the universe collapsing would harm her changelings. She came to the conclusion that she didn't care if she killed the element bearers in her quest to defeat Nightmare Moon and proceeded to nearly kill them. Justified given the circumstances? Maybe, but that she felt no remorse over such an act is not the sign of a good person. Add to this that she's still a villain that's planning to try and shape history to her benefit as her villainous scheme, which I can assure you does not help out pony kind, and she's looking pretty bad. Go even further and she could have forced Time Keeper to return to his time, admit his mistakes, and have his superiors who are much more experienced with time travel fix the situation, which would have saved the world with much less effort and brought Twilight back to life, but she chose not to.
At this point in time at best she could be described as a jerk with a heart of gold. Yeah, she's bitter because of past experiences. Yeah, she's doing stuff for the greater good. But she's still selfish, lacking in self awareness, quite cruel at times, rude, chooses violence and lies as a first resort, is willing to wipe peoples' minds for her own convenience, and has little care for the lives of anybody that isn't a changeling (or child, but even that she is unwilling to admit to herself).
As i said, I'm not saying she's evil, but she's definitely got a lot more "evil" traits than "good" ones right now. One of the points of this story would actually be to have character development for Chrysalis over time into a better person, but in order for that to happen you can't have her start out completely good, or completely evil for that matter.
Now to try and balance out this negativity by mentioning some of the good traits. She's honourable, shown by her desire to keep her promise to Time Keeper, and this could also be argued to be honesty, but given that she is anything but honest under most circumstances that's kind of hard to justify. She is loyal to those she does care about, shown by her dedication to helping out her changelings to the point where she may have been willing to abdicate her position as queen if it would help them, also she gave up most of her physical possessions to them to the point where she was sleeping with rags instead of a proper blanket, which could actually show generosity too. She deeply cares about the well being of children, willing to go so far as to throw herself off a cliff and risk discovery to ensure that one doesn't get hurt. Here's perhaps a weird one....despite calling her selfish earlier, I feel that selfless may also be arguable too. She gave up her life as Queen in order to help her changelings. Outside of basic urges (lust, hunger, etc) and things in the moment, her long term goals and ambitions tend to not be about herself, but her people.
I suppose the simplest way to explain it is that she's terrible to anybody she doesn't care about, but she's very good to those she does care about, and most of those she cares about are changelings.
So, yeah, she has a foundation of good qualities that are beneath her much more callous exterior (kind of what Applejack noticed during the cliff side collapsing), good qualities that can be worked upon over time to turn her into a truly good character, but right now she isn't.