Some Needed Thoughts · 7:21pm Jan 20th, 2022
This is a bit of mind vomit in the aftermath of some unexpected drama off my latest story, just something I need to get off my chest, now that I've fully collected my thoughts. As such, feel to disregard all of this.
I don't believe I handled that drama very well. It ended on a good note, but it was a messy process and I'm not proud of it. I walked into an interaction denouncing proof of something, knowing full well that there indeed wasn't proof, and I attempted to play ball with that when I shouldn't have. That's on me.
But that wasn't even the main problem. The actual problem was that I had written a very polarizing statement in a story that was meant to be a light comedy story. Regardless of what my headcanons are, or how proveable they are or aren't, the line that triggered the drama shouldn't have been in the story in the first place. It didn't fit, and it lacked tact or further explanation. A failure of outside perspective in my own editing. That's also on me.
With that out of the way, I want to clear something else up, because a lot of Chrysalis fans get the wrong idea about me.
It's true—I demonize Chrysalis unapologetically. I always have, I always will. In my mind, Chrysalis has no business being anywhere on the sympathetic villain scale. Add to that, my personal headcanons always mold her character in ways that paint her actions off-screen in that same light. None of it may be proveable, but after five consistent appearances of being a selfish tyrant with glimpses of possible psychotic traits, I had everything I needed from Chrysalis's depiction to know where I stood in terms of headcanon and lore crafting.
The thing is, I don't do these things because I don't like Chrysalis. Quite the contrary, I really like Chrysalis...as an irredeemable monster.
Chrysalis is at her best to me when she's being selfish, vile, manipulative, and cruel. I loved when she dogged after Starlight, and when she threatened to tear off Spike's wings in the show's finale. To me, her character is a wonderful antithesis of the show's core values of friendship and harmony, having denounced redemption and friendship not once but twice. Even when being turned to stone, while Tirek and Cozy Glow cowered, Chrysalis leapt at her enemies with just as much resolve as ever. She was an immovable wall of villainy in a show that did its best to reform as many villains as possible. That is a profound character legacy if you ask me.
She is an equally beautiful narrative foil for Thorax's character, who is everything she isn't. Thorax's story of ascension, of adopting the changelings in the aftermath of Chrysalis's rule is all the sweeter, the crueler I paint Chrysalis to be.
This tends to make me unpopular with Chrysalis fans, many of whom assume I'm attempting to tarnish Chrysalis's character. It couldn't be further from the truth. When I create lore about Chrysalis's lack of care for her subjects, of her selfish and cruel disposition, I do so to build up a character that I believe to be the darkest villain FiM gave us. I do so to show how deserving Thorax and his subjects are of the love and happiness they attained.
Not every villain needs to be multilayered or live in a moral grey area to be effective, or to be deserving of praise as a character. Every single villain Disney has ever made is a testament to that. All an effective villain needs is cunning, persistence, and a great amount of ferocity wouldn't hurt. Chrysalis fits these more than any other villain in FiM.
As a writer, and as a consumer of creative content, I know that there are uses for both. Embracing a character's dark side might be a hot take for some people, but that is how I've interpreted Chrysalis's character. To take any of her vileness away with benefits of the doubt or sympathy would be the real tarnishment, for me.
That's all. I appreciate anybody who's read through this. 
Feels good to just get it all off your chest, doesn’t it? I’m glad you were able to.
I can actually fully respect your decision of writing Chrysalis. I, for one, know how it feels to have preferations when it comes to taking on a specific character. If you wanna keep writing her as an irredeemable antagonist, I say go for it.
As a Chrysalis fan, I completely agree with you.
Chrysalis is, and will always be, one of the worst villains in the show. And that’s what gives her her “charm”. She’s evil, cruel, manipulative, (and probably mental).
I understand making her redeemable and wholesome can be fun. But Chryssi at her very core is simply an unredeemable monster.
Even if I sometimes don’t like to portray her as such, and give her a few redeeming qualities, I respect your own headcanon and the effort you’ve put into it. After all, it’s your headcanon. No one should get mad over someone else’s own written material.
Well, that’s my 2 cents. Till we meet again.
I love the idea of a redeemed Chrysalis. But yeah if you go by her personality and actions in the show she is the kind of villain that needed to stay a villain. Her being redeemed is best left to alternate universe fanfics.
I see this general demand for Chrysalis being reformed and simply "misunderstood" as part of a plaguing issue of modern cartoon fandoms where basically villains can't be villains anymore. For MLP it's been an issue since Starlight Glimmer, the villain of the day is an irredeemable monster but the show redeems them anyway because "defeating villains sets a bad example". Worse is when bronies see villains like Glimmer, Stygian and Tempest and think they're more relatable than the show's main protagonists, says a lot about a portion of the brony fandom at least.
I'm sure there were Chrysalis fans before who argued Chrysalis was a misunderstood monarch but I'm not surprised that in the lead up to season nine there were threads from bronies hoping she would get redemption despite her cruel iron-hoof style of ruling, and personally, I was glad she didn't, I like seeing her determined to have her way even in defeat than any idea of her suddenly being all forgiven.
While i am on the "Wish Chrysalis had been reformed" wagon. I am happy that she wasn't reformed, as it is the (perhaps sole) reason that we got Thorax, who i absolutely adore. And the rest of the changedlings.
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It's not even just about redemption, tbh. This latest bit of drama spiked from someone misinterpreting my headcanon lore as baseless spite against Chrysalis, when in fact, I love Chrysalis as a ruthless villain, and so my headcanons dive into and reinforce that perspective. It's not the first time someone's gotten into it with me over Chrysalis lore and it probably won't be the last. Sadly, those who need to read this blog probably won't.
That said, there's definitely something to what you're saying even outside actual redemption. People seem to be afraid to enjoy villains as villains. It's like everyone is, as you said, misunderstood and so even if we don't want redemption for them, building on their villainous traits is seen as a bad thing, as if it's tarnishing their character or potential or something. I don't get it.
Not every villain needs to be multilayered or live in a moral grey area to be effective. Every villain Disney ever made is a testament to that. Sure, some of my favorite villains of all time are multilayered and not straightforward, but if they were all like that, it wouldn't be interesting anymore. There are psychopaths in real life and in media who lack the capacity for empathy entirely. You're not gonna see anything multilayered from them, but they're still interesting.
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Yeah I read through the discussion. On the one hand, I get their argument of "antagonise them based on what they do, not what they haven't done", but on the other hand, if we only base our fics purely on the source material, we wouldn't have much creative freedom on our fics.
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I think normally that's the accepted practice, yes. What seemed to instigate the drama was a line of mine thrown in nodding heavily to that headcanon, with no followup. It was out of place, even outside of discussions of headcanon validity, so that's why I sort of apologized and edited the line before moving on. I agreed with them on that front.
That said, they in turn made the assumption that I was utilizing an entire headcanon to dump on Chrysalis, which was never true. Bad perception on all sides imo.
As I see it, Chrysalis is MLP's Joker, because the Joker is almost always portrayed as this frankly crazy and unrepentant loony with a sick sense of humor who just relishes in causing chaos and harm, and the fans of the Joker love him exactly for that. It's the same case for Chrysalis--she is liked by many simply because she is this unrepentant villain that had absolutely no intention of ever changing for the better, to the point you do sometimes have to question her sanity too.
I think a large part of the fanbase's desire to reform her stems simply because that's just MLP's thing--they don't kill off villains, they try and reach to their better sides and encourage them to reform so they don't have to fight anymore. Which is an awesome theme, but as you point out...that can't always happen with every villain. Some are just so strongly villain that you can't reasonably expect them to really want to change (at least from a storytelling perspective), but since it's MLP's thing to reform nearly every villain they ever come across, to not to for Chrysalis feels like a failing that flies in the face of what MLP has long appeared to stand for.
But to try and reform Chrysalis anyway means you have to effectively change who she is as a character in order to do it. I suspect that's where most of these "Chrysalis isn't actually that evil and is just misunderstood" views stem from, it's a fan's attempt to figure out a way to reform her that is actually believable, but do so ignorant of the fact of how much they're altering the character to do so, effectively twisting her into something she, when you really look at it, never was.
In a lot of ways, one just can't win with Chrysalis--you either leave her as-is but have to leave her as one of the select few that just can't ever be reformed...or you reform her, but change her to be something that wasn't at all the character we were all introduced to in the first place, robbing her of the appeal that had drawn so many fans to her to begin with. Either way, some fan looses out.
Personally, I think Chrysalis is best resigned as the unrepentant villain that she is, and that the show had always portrayed her as (I've had a few try and argue with me on that point, but no, it was clear there was never an "unseen good side" to Chrysalis from the start, and everything she did was solely for herself and to be more of a dictator than she already was)...but I can also see why that stance seems like a let down considering how that's the exception to the norm for MLP, so I can sympathize to that side of the matter too, and sometimes that's all a fellow fan wants.
If MLP had put more emphasis on the idea that not all villains will reform, or at least had conveyed that idea clearer for the finale, I'd like to think we wouldn't be in situations such as this...or at least have them not be nearly as venomous as they are.
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So I agree with a lot of what you said, this bit isn't fully correct. Sure, MLP doesn't kill off villains, but there was a point where villains were defeated, not reformed.
Nightmare Moon, Chrysalis (twice), Sombra, Discord, Tirek, even Trixie were villains that were defeated (in cartoons: defeated =/= killed). Any that were reformed had at least full episode dedicated to that reformation instead of a last minute character revelation.
Ever since Starlight Glimmer appeared, villains were given a last moment reformation, they were just misunderstood, they were just lonely. For whatever reason, MLP fans found that more complex than what was before.
It's not that "not killing villains" was MLP's thing, it's used to be their thing for at least the first four seasons. It's that at some point, someone decided that we shpuldn't kill villains and fans went along with ir.
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See, I would agree...if it wasn't for the fact that I distinctly recall fans hoping and pressing for reformations for ALL of those cited villains well before Starlight ever appeared on the scene, so I think it was already a problem well before then, really.
Otherwise I concede that "don't kill off villains" was perhaps not the best way to phrase it...probably should've just launched right into the "they always work to reform villains" bit instead in retrospect.