JUMPSCARE S YOU

- First thing’s first, I had to decide what mlp dragon lore I wanted to keep and what I wanted to toss out! In my AU, changelings are technically a split-off dragon species that mimics ponies, so I had to work backwards from there. I decided I like the idea of the molt as a developmental stage, plus it would be super cute for them to gain their wings close together. This is pre-molt Spike :3

- I wanted Spike to be partly bi-pedal, with the ability to walk on four legs as the ponies do (though perhaps with a more awkward gait). You know what other creature can do that? Bears!

- Of course I wanted to base him off of a cute, cartoon bear, so Koda from Brother Bear seemed like a good starting point. Particularly I needed the proportions from his legs, but I also found this screenshot and used it as reference for one of the poses (because it’s very cute).

-Other than that his build is very round, I wanted to keep that baby chubby-ness his original design has

- Unlike ponies, Spike has hands with opposable thumbs. This is quite a useful talent in a world of hooves! He will often handle small fiddly tasks for Twi that would take magic or special tools to deal with, like complicated clasps, fiddly repairs, or writing! He’s still her assistant afterall.

- His feather pen was gifted to him by Celestia during his early childhood, to pacify him during the short period where he and Twilight were separated while canterlot scholars tried to figure out what happened and why he existed. It never goes dull or scratchy and somehow, never gets lost.

- Since Twilight facilitated his hatching though magic, Spike isn’t quite… normal dragon like. That egg would have been impossible to hatch naturally, it simply wasn’t viable. hence why it was available to give to a filly for a magical ability test in the first place! Perhaps it was abandoned, I’m not sure yet. Twilight’s surge of magic awakened Spike inside of it and he absorbed a heavy dose of her special brand of unicorn powers. As such, Spike actually contains about 1/4 of the magic that Twilight once had as a mortal pony. They’re tied together for good :]

- Her magic gives him the ability to perform (small) spells. He could do more if he was a unicorn but unfortunately dragon biology isn’t built to channel it. It can occasionally break out in the form of uncontrollable growing (I didn’t like the greed mechanic lol), but mostly through his fire teleportation ability

- He has a star on his chest and his tailtip that both match Twilight’s cutie mark

-Because I removed Rainbow’s blue color I originally planned to make Spike blue, but he doesn’t read as Spike anymore when he isn’t at least purple-ish… so I guess nobody’s blue in the main protagonists anymore. Whoops!

- Spike is frequently called a “baby dragon” in the show, but he behaves a lot more like a young teenager… I’m compromising a little and making him about 14 (dragon equivalent) because it reminds me of my little siblings. He’s still very small compared to Twi (especially in the top right drawing, where I originally meant him to be 8-9 ish)

- Twilight had a saddle made for him so he can keep up on the rarer occasions she would leave the canterlot library. It comes in much more handy now that she lives in ponyville, and knows what touching grass is like! The horses do have saddles as a fashion accessory, apparently, so why not

This Twi doodle ⬆️ was meant to be low effort and low saturation to keep Spike the Star, but I still think it came out cute…. This guy is a bonus close-up ⬇️

-first off for her story- from what little scraps I’ve seen, the story for The Rise of Cadence comic fits well for what I had in mind! That said, I don’t know if I’m keeping the whole ‘she’s a descendant of a super extra special horse who lived a long time ago’ thing. BUT she was the first (and most successful) student of Celestia :]

-Her colors are based off of a blue peach-faced lovebird- because lovebirds- and also a littttle bit from an unused concept where she’s blue (thank you @ziguanaba for finding the image for me! I had no idea it existed previously and it was a fun inspiration :3)

-The crystal heart cutiemark is now a lock-and-key, with the key similarly being a stand-in for an arrow. I was trying to mash both the ‘heart pierced by Cupid’s arrow’ thing and those heart shaped locks with skeleton keys together

-her horn is also shaped like a key

-Crystal empire influence has spread to her mane and tail, making them all sparkly and pretty! Her original mane and tail had/has a sort of filigree design to it

Nightmare Moon isn’t a unique event so to say- every alicorn could theoretically achieve such a form in moments of high emotion. With practice they can control it and use it on demand, but powerful magic like that can be hard to control. Princess Luna once had a rare and near-impeccable control over hers. After a failed attempt to use Nightmare Moon to get through to Celestia, Luna was consumed by this form for what Celestia assumed was, forever. Hence the banishment. I wonder if Luna even called her Nightmare Moon to start with? Perhaps that name came after from the frightened pony populace

After Celestia and Luna’s ~disagreement~ and Luna being banished to the moon for ages, she can’t control Nightmare Moon anymore and she’s afraid to try. It never entirely left her body, leaving dark patterns and spikes and bat wings and all that good stuff! It’s fun to draw but for her it would probably be just another thing that makes her citizens wary of her in comparison to Celestia’s vibrant colors and cheerful, contained glow. For her, the moon’s surface is a bad memory of dizziness and stars and cold and dust and thick, annoying chains.

For Celestia, she would feel guilty for the fact that she never really tried to get Luna back out.. she simply assumed she was lost and banished what was left. And then more guilty for nightmare night, a custom and then holiday of spooks and scares that popped up while Luna was away which the princess of the sun never exactly discouraged! It leaves Luna with an eternal odd feeling of being the basis for a thousand costumes. Her nightmares still involve turning back into Nightmare Moon

This design is growing on me, I’m figuring it out! I made her chain collar bigger and heavier looking and also swapped some colors around :]

Zecora:

-I gave her a more coily/curly hair texture than canon. I wish I could remember who the redesign I saw that inspired this was made by, but it didn’t come from me haha

-Her scarf/wrap garment is inspired by a research rabbit hole I went down about Indonesian wax print/Dutch wax print/Adire eleko fabrics, where some kind of resist is applied to the fiber to leave a design when it’s dyed. The ponies need to wear more clothes in general, or who is Rarity selling to??

-I also made her jewelry more colorful for my own benefit lol, in my mind’s eye she always has beads but her canon design doesn’t have any at all…? And I also could have SWORN she had green on her

-I’m not sure if Zebras can get cutie marks yet tbh, but her little sun design is still cute so I kept it

Apple Bloom:

-Apple Bloom has the matching piece to Zecora’s scarf, given to her by Zecora as a gift (and to help keep her hair out of the potions!)

-Since I made Applejack’s body patterns pie themed, Apple bloom is apple turnover themed! The white speckles were meant to be like powdered sugar, but I’m not sure if that reads properly.

-She shares the white hooves and pale ‘socks’ with Jackie’s design, but not a hint of green for her.

My AU:

Apple Bloom has a lot of stress about her cutie mark (canon to the show), which is probably worsened by her sister having a super-special cutie mark that connects to the elements of harmony! How is she supposed to live up to that? Worse, what if she’s a blank flank forever? Would her family still be proud of her?

When she asks, they all say stuff like “Don’t think about that, you’ll make yourself sick over something that won’t happen!” Which is well meaning, but it’s not a proper answer, is it?

Only after Apple Bloom tries (and fails) to get her cutie mark for potion making does she get her answer. Zecora tells her she doesn’t need a destiny to keep coming over and making potions, she’s allowed to just come do it for fun. Skills don’t matter any less when you have to work hard for them! It doesn’t matter to her if Apple Bloom burns the brew, or adds the wrong ingredient, or drops the bottle into the cauldron while she’s trying to fill it up. She’s learning, that’s ok. She can learn as long as she wants to, even if she never gets any better at it. It’s for her, not her cutie mark!

Here he is next to Queen Chrysalis! Gosh she’s scary lol

Quick Notes:

-his extra limbs are small, and his front legs are shorter than his back legs. I imagine he walks with a silly hopping stride + he can’t go horse mode like Chrysalis can

-I removed the orange cause I didn’t wanna work with it, so he gets pink instead

-he is BIG! Like, way bigger than a pony and way bigger than Chrysalis. He’s taller than Celestia maybe even

AU Stuff:

Thorax didn’t start out as a monarch, obviously, and as such he’s a lot different from Chrysalis! For one, the amount of love he was able to consume prior to his transformation helped him out a lot. He’s bulkier, stronger, sturdier, and brighter! Much, much brighter. He’s healthier, really. Chrysalis has been starving for centuries, possibly millennia.

My current working idea for the AU is- after failing to take over the Crystal Empire, the hive is near complete starvation. The only thing keeping them going before was Chrysalis’s love for the hive, and now Chrysalis is missing! They’re forced to scatter in hopes of finding her, so she can share her love to them once again. Thorax finds Spike, as in G4, and kind of accidentally learns about sharing love through their friendship + specifically Spike’s loving family with Twilight, Shining Armor, and Cadence (Cadence being essentially changeling enemy #1 lol)

Iiiii don’t remember how ‘To Where and Back Again’ goes anymore but after learning to share love with his hive, Thorax becomes a ‘royal’ changeling the same way ponies become alicorns. I’m not sure if they’ve ever seen a king before, so really this would all be unusual territory for them lol. His subjects become brighter and more cheerful because A.they aren’t starving and B.they have time for hobbies :]

Notes:

(Sweetie Belle):

Originally I was gonna make her like, dark purple or blue or something but I ended up making her mini-rarity because it’s actually so cute to imagine for me lol (inspired by an mlp comic I saw the other day where baby Rarity is depicted looking almost exactly like Sweetie Belle)

She has cute little earrings, and a sweater! Because I think Rarity gets worried if her sister becomes cold (even if she’s projecting)

Like Rarity, she is small and short. Unlike Rarity, she hasn’t grown into her confidence over these things yet

Her hair has little glitters in it

(Scootaloo):

Everyone has a different spin on Scootaloo’s flight abilities (or lack of), and mine is that she’s a flutter pony. One wing is ripped and she has a bent antenna, but I’m not sure why. She can only manage to lift herself a little, with much effort.

As she’s involved in frequent stunt accidents, she wears many band-aids! Her friends have accented them with stickers

I gave her the color scheme loosely based off of her mother- whom I remember nothing about- cause I really could not figure out how to work with the orange and pink! So she gets some blue as well.

She dyed rainbow streaks in her mane and tail + a rainbow dash themed sticker to match

(Apple Bloom):

While Applejack is an apple pie, Apple Bloom is a mini version of an apple pie (ie an apple turnover)

Her white speckles are kinda like powdered sugar :]

Her headband is a gift from (and matches with) Zecora (See my Zecora Post!)

Redraw based on:

Design notes:

-Applejack is an apple pie, Apple Bloom is an apple turnover, and Big Mac is an apple crumble :]

-I made his yoke more realistic I guess? Idk don’t come after me please horse folks; I had one fuzzy reference and a dream

-gave her some flowers and heart shaped freckles for fun, since I’ve kinda given the apple family a heart motif in their cutie marks

-her colors are jarringly red compared to the crust colors of the other Apple siblings, but cmon…. He has to be red, in my heart…It’s important to me……

I’ve decided that becoming an alicorn should come with a cost, different for each pony. Ascending to a different form won’t be so easy, right? Cadence ascended from a pegasus to alicornhood in her early teens- I imagine she and Shining are late 20s-early 30s now

When she got her horn she lost the ability to recognize and mentally picture the faces of ponies around her/herself. I think it’s called Prosopagnosia? For most this would be an easy price to pay, in return for immortality and all the other powers that alicorn royalty possess! It’s pretty rare that one would be required to recognize somebody purely on their facial features, after all.

Unfortunately for the Princess of Love, being saddled with an enormous and unexpected transformation is only worsened by it :( what happens when her loved ones grow old and pass away now? They’re young enough, she has time, but how much? What if she can never remember their faces? Her husband’s face? What would her subjects think if they knew their embodiment of love couldn’t even picture her spouse’s face anymore?

She spends a lot on portraits of him in an attempt to memorize- a manifestation of her immense anxiety about outliving her family. She refuses to have children (Flurry Heart comes along in a different manner) because she doesn’t want to saddle them with that baggage. Two things happen that require her to sort all that out later:

-Twilight becoming an alicorn, which gives Cadence mixed feelings. On one hand she grieves for Twi’s eternal future, which they can bond over. They have the same struggles now. Twilight has Cadence to talk to when she can’t get used to her wings, or her new responsibilities are heavy, or maybe when one of her friends becomes just a little too sick for her liking and she realizes for the first time that one day it could happen again and they might not recover. On the other hand, it could be just a little bit nice to know she won’t be alone…

-When Chrysalis invades the Crystal empire, she impersonates Shining Armor instead of Cadence (my AU gives alicorns a power boost lol). Starving changelings can’t keep their forms perfect all the time! Cadence lives a nightmare for a while of her subjects raising alarms that Shining looks a little different somehow, but no matter how hard she tries she can’t see it. Even after forming her shaky alliance with the changeling queen, it makes her uneasy knowing Chrysalis could take his form again if she wanted.

Ok as for this mess! Princess Luna isn’t the only alicorn to have a nightmare form :] Cadence has one too! This is Heartbreaker. I haven’t finalized her design yet, but I do like her a lot… in this form Cadence’s usual flowing hair changes to mimic a torn wedding veil, her horn turns to an arrow, and she generally takes on the characteristics of a neglected pet bird. Somebody get her some enrichment and a beak trim so she quits plucking her feathers :(

Sketch form that I recycled bits of instead of tossing it in the WIP graveyard ⬇️

First off, I thought it would be so cool if instead of being so pony like, they were also the distant cousins of the dragons. The scales of their ancestors have hardened into that chitin exoskeleton, and the pony-like form simply helped them get closer to their food source of choice (along with the canon shapeshifting and stuff!)

These guys live in colonies or hives, each led by a single Queen (far left), populated by her “children”/technical clones/workers (middle), and guarded by a subclass of workers who have more defensive talents (far right). Biodiversity in the species is dependent on the amount and type of love that the hive is able to feed on, which the Queen then uses to form her workers. Plus magic of course. Also, Queens can swap worker form ideas with one another and changelings can freely interbreed with ponies- which leads to more variety in a hive.

Queen changelings are rare, usually hand-picked from the egg by their parent Queen and raised to succeed them. Any egg (or grub) has potential to become a Queen, but they require special care and magical attention to become one. A Queen grub can never be hatched on accident. Queens have more ornate markings, wings, and a “crown” of horns. They’re also, usually, bigger! Chrysalis would be a Queen.

Workers are the smaller, average changelings. They keep the hives running and venture out to search for love. If you find a changeling outside of a hive, it’s probably a worker. Assigned genders aren’t a thing for them, but individuals will sometimes choose how they would like to be identified if they form connections outside. They only have wings if their queen specifically requires them to for their designated jobs. Thorax would be a Worker.

Warrior changelings are stronger and sturdier than most others. They have darker coloration (although possibly with bright markings), and possess a variety of useful tools the usual worker doesn’t. Venomous bites and stingers are common. The one shown is displaying their warning colors: the inner mouth and tongue are eye catching so as to say “stay back!” Pharynx would be a Warrior.

A well fed hive will have shiny, colorful changelings! A starved hive will have more show-accurate dull ones as its Queen will struggle to provide enough love energy for them as they form. The bright colors themselves aren’t worth budgeting that energy for, because they’re mostly meant to appeal to ponies and garner admiration.

In times of peace most ponies will happily admire the bright shells of changelings- but they also tend to look a bit off-putting for some. It’s like an uncanny valley effect. Their front legs don’t bend like pony legs, they speak in clicks, they don’t have proper hooves, their bottom jaws split into two mandible parts. It can be a bit creepy if you don’t expect it. Changelings sometimes adopt a pony form simply to make ponies less uncomfortable.

AU Notes:

Changelings in my AU are more closely related to dragons than they are to ponies, and they share a lot in their biology (molting, hard outer scales, specialized diets, claws, etc). In times of plenty, changeling hives can be hubs of artistic skill, diplomacy, and bright cheerful colors! These are my version of ‘reformed’ changelings. They collect love and with the help of their queen, they can synthesize it into an edible substance much like honey! This substance is a valuable ingredient in potions and spells (and more importantly, is the only thing changelings can digest). Without a Queen, they have no way to take love from its source and turn it into this food.

Starved changelings lose their color, they become irritable and desperate, they may become emaciated and their wounds may stop healing. Wings and tails will tear and shred like paper.

Chrysalis’s hive is an example of advanced starvation, which I’ll get into when I straighten out my Flurry Heart/Crystal empire lore! The only thing keeping them alive is Chrysalis and her love for the swarm.

Design Notes:

- Her body shape is based on a praying mantis, especially because her “reformed” version in the gameloft app seems to be aiming for some kind of mantis green?

-The body plan I gave her is quite frankly a mess, but I really wanted to lean into the ‘mimic’ aspect. She’s… horse-like. In some ways. Just enough that she can get close to ponies without shapeshifting, if she needs to!

- First set of limbs: grabbing claws, complete with spines that (when in horse mode) mimic feathering from a distance

- Second set of limbs: thin, flexible legs that fold up and tuck against her chest, giving her stick-thin body the illusion of normal pony bulk. The forelegs are light enough to match her tail and mimic a counter shaded ‘underbelly’.

-Technically, she counts as a pseudo-alicorn! However, she has no magic of her own other than typical changeling-type magics. These are poorly understood by pony society, which has been shown in g4 to be… self absorbed at times.

- She’s a little smaller than she looks, here- she lines up right above Cadence, who’s small for an alicorn. Without her swarm she isn’t very physically imposing, as all of her size is in her height. Cadence could lift her with almost no effort if need be

Ok anyways the bonus content for the funniest dynamic the Crystal crew could possibly have:

(Chrysalis considers Cadence to be fun to mess with in a villain way, Cadence sees Chrysalis as her nemesis, Cadence and Shining are married+best friends+life partners, Chrysalis and Cadence are slooooooow burn enemies to lovers, Chrysalis and Shining treat each other with tactical respect and mutual recognition. Also they are all co-parenting a million bugs. I will elaborate on this eventually)

AU stuff:

With my writing/planning for this headworld of an AU, there are two problems stemming from Flurry Heart… A, naturally occurring Alicorns are not a thing, and attempts to create them artificially will result in a failure/incomplete transformation OR destruction of the alicorn-to-be. I’ll get more into that later. B, I’m sortof writing myself into a corner with my poor memory of what G4’s whole deal is.

To solve A- I changed her pedigree lol. Instead of being the child of Princess Cadenza and Shining Armor, Flurry Heart hatched out of the Crystal Heart after a momentary glimpse of mutual understanding between Cadence and Queen Chrysalis at the end of what would be A Canterlot Wedding.

The Crystal Heart, turns out, was originally a changeling egg entrusted to the original Princess Amore during a time of great trust between changelings and the Crystal ponies. She was meant to be raised in connection to both species almost as a sort of stand-in for a ‘political wedding’. However, when Chrysalis showed sympathy for (and hesitance to destroy) King Sombra and by extension the Umbrum, Amore severed their connection and isolated the Crystal heart from all changelings entirely.

Amore encased the egg within a magical bubble in the crystal empire to prevent it from hatching, and the crystal fair and other traditions grew around it as in the show. Flurry’s egg was bathed in the love of ponies for thousands of years, while Chrysalis and her hive starved alone. Which of course is why the changelings and other villains might wish to steal the crystal heart :]

This is fun for me because I imagine Chrysalis has a sort of “you look exactly like my horrible ex from thousands of years ago and I see so much of her in you yet you are kinder than she ever was” opinion towards Cadence and Cadence meanwhile is thinking “how do I coparent this little grub I never asked for with the evil leader of another civilization”. My version of Cadence’s cutie mark is actually a pun-

-because she’s the one who ‘unlocked’ the Crystal Heart :]