This question has been buzzing around my head for the last few days. Since the only story I have on my account is a Chrysalis fic, the site likes to recommend them to me more often than not. I've seen plenty of them, and there seems to be a pretty decisive split. Or maybe it's just too small of a sample size for me to figure it out.

So I'll leave the question here for you guys,
Do you prefer Chrysalis as the hero of the story, or the villain.

Now keep in mind, being a hero doesn't mean she has to be reformed. She can be the same sassy Changeling Queen and still be the hero of the story. Similarly, her as a villain doesn't have to be some big evil world-conquering scheme. She just has to be antagonistic.

I personally like her as a redeemable hero. Someone who struggles with their previous mistakes, but is fighting to earn their redemption. At the same time, I feel Chrysalis has to keep her snarky attitude. She can slip out of it, but I feel like removing it completely changes her a little too much.

That's my two cents. What do you guys think?

A complicated answer for me. I like her as a villain, and a hero; redeemable, but not being a hero.

Basically, a villain to the outside world but a hero to her changelings that the MC learns with time. Those are my favorite Chrysalis stories; misunderstood but not completely evil.

As for redeemable; I don’t mind those either but I don’t personally like seeing her as the hero to anyone outside her changelings since that’s just the kind of big she is.

But I may just have bad experiences with those. Most Chrysalis hero stories I’ve read; she acts more like Celestia rather than Chrysalis

She makes a wonderful anti-hero

I think she works best as neither a hero, nor a villain. Moreso, a hero to her people. I love the idea that she will stop at absolutely nothing for her people; that she is all for her Changelings, even more because they are her literal children. It's a really interesting dynamic that many stories fail at properly curating. She isn't a straight up hero, but is most assuredly not a villain.

She is more than willing to do morally ambiguous things for her lings, but isn't going to be murder happy, nor cruel. Adding in a hivemind dynamic makes it even better, because she can communicate with her hive on a level that's deeper than normal conversation, and allows her to be even closer to her children.

Overall, a morally ambiguous hero of her own people, willing to fight and sacrifice for them, no matter the cost.

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I feel justified asking you this since I know you read my story. You say that a lot of stories fail at making her motherly toward her changelings. Does Death of a Queen fail at that?

I prefer to see her as the protagonist or as an ally of the protagonist

some of my favorite fics have her playing either the hero or the 'its complicated' cahricter...for example we have 'saveing equestria' by damaged which is an AU with an adorkable version of chrysalis conquering equestria not to enslave it, but to save it from what she perceives as celestias inablity to properly defend it, she doesnt mind celestias civil policy but she takes serious umbrage to her military doctrin with regard to threats such as nightmare moon and discord

then we have a story old enough that all of you should have at least heard of it 'integration' this one isnt 'about' chrysalis but shes in it and she is a very complex charicter here...this is a chrysalis who was not lieing when she said that she was doing what she did for her people...and whos failure cost them greatly and who, presented with an alternate route, isnt shy about makeing amends...a similar situation is shown in the short fic 'nobles oblige' (horible spelling) i like stories that portray chrysalis as a complex charicter not simply good or bad but a true neuanced indavlidual with clear motivations for what she does.

Why chose? Be both.
Good and evil are often view points. Ever played a neutral Necromancer for instance?
I know a few storys were Changelings are the evil guys because of there looks or simply because there so powerful they get envy so strog from other races they spread misinformation and hatred to spite em.
Shall i send you some really good Changeling storys for example? Like 5-8 just so you have sufficend view points to make your own story?

She should be...complicated. But no matter what her driving motivation should be the first thing we ever heard her say as herself:

“As Queen of the Changelings, it is up to me to find food for my subjects!”

This actually still works brilliantly for post-Reformation stories as it lets you write Chrysalis as having no idea what to do now that her people no longer need her to be their food-finder.

Like Megamind?

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Its all about presentation . . .

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Sure, I'm down for that.

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PM or in this treat so other might add it to there 'read later bookshelf?

I like to think her as a anti-hero type, not being friend with ponies because she want to, but because of her hive survival. Keeping her savage and smug attitude towards ponies, leading to some funny comedy moment.

"I Think This Is The Beginning Of A Beautiful Friendship."

Antihero. Definitely antihero.

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I'd go with:

A villain who, at best, thinks she's the hero.

More likely thinks she's an anti-hero, fully aware she's going to do increasingly questionable things but always ready to justify it with some greater good (that not-so-incidentally flatters her so).

Keep in mind, her canon rap sheet includes: forceful brainwashing; social manipulation while disguised to deflect suspicion; kidnapping; imprisonment of ponies, without obvious provisions or due charge; taunting of said prisoners, implied to be a trick to get one to fight the other; marrying under disguise with no intention of honouring her vows; military assault of a capital city and its protector; deliberately sabotaging national defences; terrorizing "every stallion, mare, and foal"; and intended invasion of an entire country. Keep in mind also that this was just her first appearance: she didn't exactly improve after that.

I like Chrysalis - she's an entertaining villain - but I don't see her being any kind of hero other than a morally tarnished one. Sure, she wanted to feed her hive, but that doesn't by itself justify a massive invasion force. It certainly doesn't justify the petty cruelties she gleefully indulged in along the way. And at the time, the changelings themselves had no problem with her morally questionable approach to getting food either.

Personal pride, sadism, and conquest play big parts in her characterization too. Given all that, I personally think she's too cruel, self-important, petty, and greedy to be anything better than an anti-hero, even in her own twisted mind.

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No! Actually, it does it quite well. You can clearly see the connection between Chrissy and the other lings. Merely based on the realization of how lonely she is, we can see pretty well that she cares for her children a lot. Plus, you use the idea that they know each other's true feelings through the hivemind, allowing us to infer that the entire hive was incredibly close. Your story also doesn't really need to exemplify that relationship further, and as such you've shown that idea really well, and as far as you need to in your story.

This is also a lot of opinion and ideas, so some of it may not make sense. Take it as you will.

Villain, pure and simple. She was born as the most powerful being of her kind with the belief that there is only one purpose for her kind, to feed on love, and the more love there is to feed on the best for her kingdom even at the harm of other creatures. The fact she won't take any other option to help her subjects, as well as take the love of her own kind if they abandon her, is pretty telling of one who ensures obedience and loyalty to the most toxic degree. To her subjects, it's either follow her rule or they die, that's how much control she has on them.

The thing is that I find any possible route to redemption would ultimately make her character worse, one because she's fun as a villain and when you take away the villainy she's not fun anymore, and second, because the show had a tendency to make redemptions a friendship problem for others to fix and Chrysalis doesn't have a friendship problem. Chrysalis at least has a leadership problem, a problem no one else but herself can fix and she never wanted to change. You can't save someone who doesn't want to save themselves.

So yeah, I'd say let villains be villains with this one.

I write her in Changeling Space Program as a villain-protagonist. She has Pet the Dog moments and hints of possible redemption, but she's also happily, self-consciously evil and not in the least repentant.

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Hero and being reformed obviously.

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So, I guess this is an extension to the question (supposing this thread doesn't die) is this:

If a story treats Chrysalis different than your preferences, would you still read the story? Specifically, does a conflicting portrayal of Chrysalis ruin your enjoyment of a story you've liked?

I wouldn't mind her being an anti-hero. I seen some good fics of her keeping her personality and 'charms' yet still be considered a good guy. But most time feels like she anti-hero that always struggles cause of her nature. hard to explain, But a lot fics out their that probably explain what i mean

Chrysalis seem like the typical aunt about who you can't say anything because you are 'educated' while she keep insulting almost everything, is better to be 'reformed', because as a villain she don't seem to do it right

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I prefer Chrysalis as a villain. Because it made her sinister and this is what Lauren Faust visioned her as a complete monster rather than 'just a predatory animal trying to survive', but then Hasbro ruined her vision as they made the Changelings good just to sell more toys. I personally don't like that idea of reforming villains depending on the writing, and I don't want Chrysalis to reform, or it'll ruin my all-time favorite MLP villain. Because it's unrealistic and pure evildoers don't change their ways, no matter how hard you try, because they mistake being evil for happiness, the good he/she seeks.

I, personally, prefer to think of Chrysalis starting her life as a wildly alien amoral monstrosity, with her active cruelty and want to rule coming in over time as simply the natural result of her formative experiences. If we go by the comics origins, Changelings started off with absolutely nothing. They knew nothing, there was nothing to eat, they crawled out of dead trees to nothing but more of eachother.

So her first moments were viciously beating off kin trying to eat her and deciding against the risks of joining the cannibalistic frenzy to look for a way out, and was followed by the enormous majority of the actually functional Changelings as the truly irreconcilable abominations were the initiators and most willful participants in the initial cannibalism.

And note that, at this point, the only thing she knows of consumption is literal devouring of magically-rich flesh. She doesn't know the love-draining is possible. She doesn't know the reason for needing magic is because Changeling anatomy is a dysfunctional chimeric absurdity. So when she sees ponies? Can smell the magic coming off them? The response is eating them alive. Not leaving thoughtless husks, leaving shards of bone and hide.

Villages simply gone between one visit and the next, bloodstains everywhere. By the time news gets out, she's figured out that there's more ways to get the magic to keep living than eating magical creatures, so by the time "Changelings" are a known quantity they've ceased the immediately lethal consumption for the chance at longer yields.

And she does this for centuries. Cobbles together a society with literally no instruction. Figures out logistics completely from scratch. Has to deal with population dynamics, turnover of experts, disease, everything involved in making a civilization all constantly building up and revolving around her because she was the first to even consider telling others what to do, and can't die of hunger or age, alongside an utterly flawless memory.

Every solution ever discovered gets remembered by her, so no matter how long it is between instances of an issue, she always brings back the old answer if there is one, and she cannot forget the frantic setup so she knows much, much better than to get stuck in her ways to seriously screw up handling a new problem.

In essence, her egotistical canon character is the natural result of a newborn with almost adult cognitive ability stumbling into ruling a species by pure seniority, like how the Kinderquestria version of Celestia is just a normal functional adult in a world of toddler-level ponies. My favorite direction for her as a protagonist is having her utterly absurdly competent in a ridiculous number of things, from actually doing things throughout all her life and never losing skills. Character-wise, sticking with much the same sass and ego, but frequently lensed as a variety of "knows better than you" archetypes.

The arrogant jock who not only beats you into a pulp, but styles over you while doing it. The trickster mage who's got a bag of tricks with no end, pulling an unreasonably perfect answer to every problem. The prideful noble who's grasp of their estate is not simply absolute, it's wise without peer. Functionally a primitive, brutal version of the Philosopher King, an absolute ruler who knows not only how to rule, but what all the matters important to the state require, and enacts them extremely well. But from the direction of long centuries of being there to witness everything be built and learn to rule.

...Which makes me think of writing an AU that begins with Chrysalis going full Conan. Especially the joy in lamentations of war-widows.