Did we ever get confirmation that Chrysalis was the top momma of the entire changeling race? or do the changeling "drones" couple up with other changeling "drones" to pop out green eggs and ham?

what are your favourite fanon ideas if any for our loveable cuddle bugs??

7745601
I personally prefer the broodmother idea—it gives reason to why she’s so different.

Thorax also refers to the hive as “his pack”—I can only imagine he (as a male/King) has turned the typically eusocial biology of the hive into what people originally thought how wolves acted, or like a lion pride.

7745610
For every hive there must be a queen to brood a new generation then?
Unless there is/was only ever one hive and with the thoraxian rebellion, there could be more than one in the future?

- Of the Hive , For the Hive , Aegis of the Hive , Culling of the Hives , Reformation of the Hives . Great Changeling series with a big point on population and growing them.

- The Boopening .
How Chrysalis creater her hive is explained in this story as well.

- Twin Suns .
When Bugwaifu makes her appearance it is mentioned how she creates her Swarm.

- To Be a Changeling .
Swarm population is mentioned. Queens are very important for population growth.

- Selene The Crimson RED Changeling Empress .
Changeling life cycle from egg to Nymph explained.

- To Ne'er Come Down Again .
Changeling familie is a main point of the story besides the clop.

- Inter-species Integration (Or: How to save lives and regret doing it) .
Eggs... Lots of eggs...

7745613
oh yes~
looks like i have some late night research/reading.
much appreciated my friend.

7745613
how do you think the changelings live in G5?

7745617
By killing G5 entirely

7745612
I like to think there are more hives. Maybe outside of Equestria? I’m actually really happy to discuss this, because I’m currently working on a fic about it.

7745620
heh, this went from 0 to 100 in a nano second i see.

7745623
i would love to see or just speculate there being other hives outside of Equestria, so much of the world is still unknown.
i wonder if the other hives also feast on love or other emotions? what if they have different forms and colours based on the places they inhabit?

7745629
Seriously:
- Great animation of the movie, cheap on the series.
- The ignore the Fandom lore and foundation.

So basicly they pulled a Disney Starwars...

7745631
Oh. OH

i personally view Pharynx as definitive proof that there’s different hives out there.

Another point, which I might add if ever you be so interested, I’m speculating in my “Thorax ascension fic”, as it were.

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i get where your coming from, the movie showed the potential of a good 3d driven animation, but i dont understand why they started "a new generation" with one set of VA only to replace them in the series, this bugs me like you wouldnt believe.

im desperately/cautiously optimistic that they will realize just how important the lore of g4 and equestria is and what about it that attracted so many to the show, especially if its meant to be set in the same universe as g4.

7745636
sure bud, throws us a link to your fic and i'll have a dive in it.

7745601

I doubt there was any confirmation either way. And that is why we need fan lore to fill in these details! This is mainly because your fiction can go in either direction; Chrysalis is like a bee queen and the source of all the eggs, Chrysalis is queen because of power/size (ex: Alicorn vs pony) but the rest of the changelings breed like any other male/female society with the community raising the younglings... and the darker source of new changelings being other species somehow assimilated into the hive (which I find rather ridiculous and mildly horrifying in an existential way), usually in the fetishy fiction.

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Lol Ik I’ve just plugged it a lot but don’t feel pressured or anything. Gunna make me feel bad.

Here.

But like—Pharynx’s design is just… yeah. Like I love him, but tf—he’s literally a different colour in every aspect of the word, from eyes to neckfin, from neckfin to chitin. Even his vocal pattern/type.

Everyone else has either a lilted or otherwise “buggy” sounding voice. He has neither.

I like the idea of changelings being able to pair off, and they leave their eggs in the nursery while they go out to gather love.

Well, given that the Changelings are based off of social insects the idea of a single individual providing all the eggs (in other words, the queen) makes a considerable amount of sense. It would explain why she is so important to the hive, and how she derives her "right to rule". And some of that could even be at an instinctive level, not just based on conscious thoughts and feelings. Still, as we have seen, the Changelings are not so instinctive that in unusual circumstances they can't overcome the instinct and complete their metamorphosis, which it seems they didn't even realize they hadn't done before Thorax. So, Chrysalis is still vitally important to the hive, as without her, or another queen, they will eventually die out. Yeah, fun times ahead for the hive at the end of G4, they might be dead by the time of G5.

As for the possibility of there being different hives, that is a big unknown. We only know of one for sure, but it is anyone's guess if there are more, or if there were more then something happened and greatly reduced their number, or if there was only ever one. That would totally be up to the FIMFiction writer.

By cannon? Kinda no?

Ocellus does have a family. I don’t have an image on hand but I recall them actually looking alike. Which is more similarities than what ponies manage. Are they really family? Don’t know.

I’m not personally a fan of making changelings eusocial insects with only a single breeding queen. Chiefly, it’s because of their first appearance in “A Canterlot Wedding”. If Chrysalis were the only Changeling capable of reproduction, then it would make no sense for her to take part in the battle, let alone separate herself from the Hive for a period of at least a few days, without any changelings nearby to serve as guards. If she’s a eusocial queen then she has no business being anywhere but the Hive, safe from death, which would doom the Hive.

The comics make it pretty clear that this is typical behavior for her, too - she is extremely hooves-on and has a tendency to lead from the front, a trait that would be suicidally stupid for a eusocial queen.

Finally, if she really were the only breeding female in the Hive, then the decision to let her fly off at the end of “To Where and Back Again”, already a bad one, becomes monstrously stupid. No way that the changelings would allow their queen, the source of their Hive’s future, to just escape.

So yeah. There are plenty of fics that use the concept of eusocial changelings well, and I don’t begrudge them it. But to me, at least, it would seem to fly in the face of what’s actually presented in the show, in how both Chrysalis specifically and changelings generally behave and act. So I don’t use it for my own writing.

In my Neigh's Anatomy, Chrysalis is just one of a brood of queens, hatched in the pre-Equestrian era, though she appears to be the only member of her brood to remain active with a swarm to the present day. Queens can hatch other queens, but the exact mechanism for this has not yet been revealed. Each queen has her own distinctive coloration for her magical field and mane, as well as a certain other trait that will come into play a little down the line.

7745601
Personally I go with Broodmother idea. Well sort of. There are Princesses. They breed drones and lead hives. There are thirty of them or so. Sometimes more. Usually less, because they kill each other all the time.
There is Queen. That's Chrysalis. She can breed drones too and she too has hive, but her main difference is that she also can breed Princesses, who then go out to build their own hives. At any given time there is only one Queen.
There is King... actually no, there isn't. Changelings don't have kings. They can't have kings. Only reason why Thorax is a thing is Discord's will. Naturally without a Queen or Princess hishive will die off eventually, even if he has stockpile of eggs to offset inevitable finale.

My thoughts:
Canonically, Eusocial. What we're actually shown doesn't seem to support the idea of more than one hive, and unless I massively misunderstood something Thorax seemed to make it clear that Chrysalis was the primary 'parent' for them all.

Personal headcanon, as used in my own attempts at writing: Changelings are more pony-like, capable of breeding among themselves normally. (I also work with the 'Nymph/Imago' setup instead of the 'Larva/Pupa/Imago' setup.) Queens are a special morph that has magic that lets them bind other changelings to themselves to form a nest - the magic is something like a magically-inforced mix between an adoption and a knighting.

Of course, my personal headcanon is that Chrysalis was effectively a Nightmare'd changeling queen, so make of that what you will.

Officialy there is no answer to the 'pre reformation' changeling question, chrysalis acted as mother to the hive from what we can tell but weather she activly laid the eggs that she mothered over or merely took them from there parants to raise as her own is not known, however after reformation they are shown to form distinct family units and behave in ways ponies are more familar with, it also apears there nymphs now skip the grub stage and apear more like pony foals.

as to if there are more hives again official cannon is unkown, however if we go to the comics its explained that chrysalis is the first changeling, born from wild magic interacting with a pony eating plant, its implied again that the swarm are thus her children but even then givens he was being interogated and given her stuborn nature she might have been lieing.

as pointed out here there are 'many' head cannons for this though, my favorite example is ahem, heavily fetishized (if your in for a heck of ride check out Given Shape by Damaged just keep in mind its VERY not safe for woona)

Personally, I'm not a fan of making the changelings a eusocial race for much the same reason I'm not a fan of making them a hive mind; it just doesn't gel with how they're presented even in their initial debut. Personally, to sum things up, I prefer my changelings to individually reproduce, with Chrysalis' unique stature and appearance being a result of either a unique background as the "ur-changeling" who created/corrupted the changelings into her slave race (similarly to the situation in Vdrake77's "The Changeling of the Guard", one of my favorite changeling-centric stories) or a result of her dominant status amongst the race giving her more love energy to burn on permanently reshaping her anatomy into a more grandiose form.

A personal headcanon that I've developed is that changeling reproduction requires a significant amount of love energy to "catalyze" the unfertilized eggs. Changelings are also capable of interbreeding with other races, with the result depending on the parent; if the changeling is the mother, the offspring will usually be changelings, albeit ones who can display traits of the father - however ,if a massive amount of love is spent over the course of the pregnancy, the changeling mother can instead give birth to offspring of the father's race. On the other hand, if the changeling is the father, then the offspring will automatically be of the mother's race - however, when interbreeding with ponies, changeling-sired foals have a strong tendency to have cross-tribal talents (think Fluttershy and her "Earth Pony"-esque affinity for animals) or be of different tribes to the parents. Further complicating matters, if a changeling absorbs a truly significant amount of love from an individual, they can then use that love to spontaneously impregnate themselves with children who are biologically based on that love donor, even if no conventional sexual activity took place. Also, my headcanon changelings are biologically simultaneous hermaphrodites, but many adopt a singular gender identity.

Being one preferential to the Comic origin, where Changelings are Random Nonsense spat out of a magical spring causing undead plants when a rotten acorn fell in that somehow absorbed traits from various other living things, I personally prefer Chrysalis "just" being the nearest-to-Alicorn Changeling who had normal-quantity children long before finding out old age was a thing, let alone that she was the ONLY Changeling exempt from it. And because of that, she ended up the Last Common Ancestor rather shortly in demographic terms.

Changelings being "eusocial" in practice is a matter of being an incredibly specialized Palace Economy revolving around Chrysalis constantly correcting minor problems, because she is REALLY bad at compiling what she knows into useful systems, so they have to work around mountains of anecdotes making it hopeless to get a generalized education for anything changeling-specific. Which is almost everything of day-to-day social function, because they are VERY different from ponies.

my headcanon is it's a mix of hive queen and normal reproduction. the regular changelings can reproduce replacement rate but they need a queen to expand. That said I kinda added the hive queen since my old canon was just normal reproduction.