The bottom panel is such a meme material lol

@GrimChariot  

 
Maybe you are right, but creating effective and consisntent magic system is, IMHO, way beyond scope of one finale, if it just for plot twist. Unless you are profesional fantasy writer writing his own series, then it is probably not worth of eforth.

@GrimChariot  
@Alphamon_Ouryuken  
Can ya’ll take it to the forums, please? It’s one thing to theorize about changeling biology or the direction this comic is going, but something else entirely to be arguing about the ethics of the history of pony-changeling relations. Not trying to be rude but it’s straying pretty far from everything else in the comments.

@GrimChariot  

 
Glass houses considering you’re the one pretending that the Changelings and Umbra were always good-hearted Souls until the nasty Ponies suddenly hurt them. Despite them making it quite clear that no one forced them to be evil and that destruction was what they genuinely wanted.
 

 
That’s pretty hilarious coming from you considering the fact that you openly accused the ponies of propaganda with no evidence, you made it pretty clear that you just assumed the ponies were the ones in the wrong.
 

 
Cute.
 
Here’s the rundown, so listen and listen well:
 
The Elements of Harmony had lost of their connection to her and needed to choose a new host. If she just told Twilight “go find a bunch of ponies for the Elements to choose”, it wouldn’t have worked, mainly because the camaraderie they went through and bond they made wouldn’t have been genuine. It would have just been a means to an end and the Elements would never respond to that.
 
Her sister needed to be saved, and Twilight needed to grow past her limitations through the magic of friendship. She didn’t manipulate them, she subtly guided them.
 
But hey, all that doesn’t matter because Celestia is an eeeevil tyrant, just like how Dumbledor is eeeevil, and so is every teacher that hides his/her plans.
 
So please, tell me without lying about Chrysalis and the Umbra being totally good from the start, how they’re justified in trying to basically turn Equestria into a wasteland.

@Alphamon_Ouryuken  
And you are making assumptions and taking statements with no evidence as concrete proof with no contradiction which is a massive assumption and a hypocritical stance.
 
You ignore the previous counterpoints to everything you’ve listed about the umbrum with no supporting evidence or further reasoning to repeat the already flimsy arguments, so frankly I’m not going to repeat myself on this.
 
But please, explain to me how a manipulative ruler risking the lives of anyone following her and lying to the ones she expects to blindly risk their lives to save her sister isn’t a deplorable act, and no saying “everything turned out fine” doesn’t cut it.

@GrimChariot  

 
And yet she claimed “she was always this way” the moment she got free. plus there was the first arc of the comic series.
 
So yeah, she’s always been evil.
 

 
Considering the fact that certain fans like to condemn every other character that got redeemed yet have the audacity to complain when the evil Trio didn’t, that’s a bigger Mark of hypocrisy against THEM.
 

 
Sorry, but you don’t get to make that assumption when the umbra literally make it clear that they only want death and destruction well subjugating the ponies and any other living thing.
 
Keep in mind that they were more than willing to mentally manipulate a young unicorn (Hope) for years on end pretending to be the good guys… Then completely drop that guise and any pretense of being nice the moment they got what they wanted.
 
You don’t get to pretend only one aspect of their character exists while ignoring blatant evidence of the contrary.
 

 
Once again, that’s a different scenario altogether. Especially since Luna was technically possessed. Chrysalis on the other hand is naturally evil and is more than willing to stay that way as she remain in power. Don’t pretend one is the same as the other because you suddenly want Celestia to be the bad guy.

@Alphamon_Ouryuken
 
We got Chrysalis feeding off of Shining and deliberately going to the point of crippling him because Celestia’s a moron and made him the prime target for terror and the only guard worthy of a uniform. We have no hard “drain them till their dead” till the aforementioned IDW comic which can’t be trusted without further concrete information from a reliable source, rather then a person buying time and feeding into their own hype.
 
Considering Ponies don’t care about genocide I’m not going to be the better person, seeing as that typically is just a means of giving one group a free pass in this fandom while condemning another for daring to demand the same treatment to another.
 
If random Ponies can be innocent then the Umburum have the same merit, or is that favoritism speaking for what is most likely in universe propaganda recited as historical fact by any metric of civilization and the bias formed in living minds?
 
Does a ruler risking an entire nation to save their sister deserve mercy or to be unjudged?
 
Frankly no, but everyone just goes “aw, thats so sweet” and acts like it never happened.

@GrimChariot  
Those are different scenarios first of all.
 
Second of all, the fact of the matter is that, they’re shown feeding on SAPIENT individuals and draining them until they are nothing but husks, something that was even shown in the IDW comics long before she got those holes.
 
So yes, they ARE evil for it. Or are you basically saying that any innocent ponies they drained don’t deserve any mercy?

@Brass Beau  
This is part of her self-perception that she is nothing but a monster through her own behavior, during her ravages through the known world in the beginning we saw a reckless changeling who only considered intelligent creatures as food, what happened in Timbucktu was horrible. But not a monster, more a predator that simply survived by attacking its prey. This testifies that she is growing and learning, the defeat against Celestia may have been a strong revival that left its mark on her. For we could see signs of feelings of inferiority that culminate in strong aggression as seen at the end of the show. She was visibly nervous during the wedding when the confrontation with Celestia happened.
 
In any case, it may be in the time after the flight from the volcano, Chrysalis as Celestia’s opposite becomes the queen that we know so well. She had remained in cover for centuries with her hive and survived on infiltration which here seemed to have happened several times. It will thus be time for self-reflection and assessment of one’s own efforts in a foreign world where one must be able to survive in secret. The artist here will possibly show us the time when Chrysalis`s character development starts to get bad.

@Background Pony #C0D1  
So, Chrysalis gets her jollies from inciting fear and using the power that brings to control her hive and manipulate (sometimes through deception rather than direct intimidation) other creatures? Kinky.

@GrimChariot  
The comic still tells us more about the changelings background than the show has done, where a massive rewrite of the whole race happened in season 6 for hands on the writers. Only in the episode "The Mean Six" can we get an idea of ​​the background, as Chrysalis used trees to create evil clones of his enemies. This is depicted in MLP: Fiendship is Magic # 5 where a tree was revealed as the source of the changelings. No one knows where the mysterious seed that turns into the carnivorous tree came from, but it is obvious that there is a mysterious story we do not know about. In any case, we know that the tree grew in a burial ground with skeletons after dead ponies, and that it snatched insects - it seemed that this assimilates substances from the bones and the killed insects and then "creates" a kind of hybrid between the bugs and the ponies. What's interesting is that the changelings came out of the tree fully grown and intelligent - as if they were reborn.   Faust and her staff have created a vague connection between G1 and G4 that often seemed to be in the same universe - and we know about the flutter ponies that were not seen after G1. Ponies with insect wings. What if the seed was an attempt to revive this pony tribe that may have been exterminated when G1 went under, probably while the windigos froze the ponies' homeland that had to be evacuated. It's my head canon, but this can be interesting in itself. And we do not know why the changelings attacked Timbucktu completely unprovoked and exterminated an entire tribe, the sparkly-eyed pegasi. Maybe revenge?   Since the changelings had probably attacked city after city and made themselves very fearful, it is no wonder that residents would react violently every time an infiltration attempt failed. Celestia would have had the changelings exterminated, but for some unknown reason she chose to seal them into a volcano. The comic explained to us that when there is too little food, they can only hibernate at the moment. However, they can obviously not be in hibernation for long periods of time, as they can have a short lifespan with the exception of Chrysalis. When the dragon found the changelings, he did not recognize them - which may indicate that the changelings were still unknown to his kind.   The fan comic here explained to us that the dragons had learned about the changelings, so it is obvious in the time after the flight from the volcano, and we know that Chrysalis made her crown out of King Orions crown. We do not know much about her as a personality in the beginning, as she was little more than an invader who was completely heartless, but had an intense loyalty from her hordes in the swarm. More like an army commander who was popular for her tribe, who had led them to victory after victory. Which was why she took Emperor Incitatus’ revelation of her so hard, her ego was already very big. Which was completely crushed by Celestia not long after. She threw her captain into the volcano because he had put them in danger with a wrong advice in the face of the dragon. Chrysalis took pride in this as when an officer punishes a disobedient soldier, and we see here that she is no stranger to sending changelings to death.
 
But we had not seen which leader she was in the comics or the show until Season 6, when we learned a lot about her personality - which has become very characteristic of the queen we know so well. She meant she knows best for her subjects, and that her leadership is absolute, where there was no room for doubt or disloyalty. More like a tyrannical mother, and we have seen through the memories in Thorax that the changelings are born as larvae through hatching, and that they instinctively seek out her as if she were their mother. The bug civilizations are often based on hives with single queens, and the changelings were no exception in Seasons 2 through 6. We know she cares about her subjects in the least.
 
What sets Chrysalis apart from the others, even other changelings, is that she perceives herself as a monster who cannot be saved, here one must find out why she had become so convinced of this, that it reshaped her character to what is shown appeared in Season 2. The IDW comics showed this, she took pride in being a monster, and this is shown in Season 9 when she smiles mischievously in the face of monsters in the forest. She knew about the windigos, and had wanted to see the ponies decimated in contrast to Tirek, who will destroy these winter spirits right away.
 
We do not see the monster here.

@Sanagi 蛹  

 
True, but sometime it goes the other way around. Like under some pic with sympathtic Chrysalis are comments how much non-canon that is.
 
As for this page, i don’t think it is that much far from canon.

@Meanlucario  

 
Im sorry if you feel that way….
 
||Not all fans are like…that. Lots of Chrysalis fans love the way she is in canon. The finale is flawed but Chrysalis being unsympathetic is not one of them, imho.
 
Slide me in DM if you want my actual feelings about this. I guess there’s a reason why im not post much anymore. ||

Now for something actually relating to the comic page itself.  
That bottom left Chrys a cute.

@GrimChariot  
Yeah, after a certain point it’s hard to make any definitive conclusions about the hows and whys when it comes to changelings. I do like that radio wave idea, though. Hopefully we’ll get some hint of what the writer thinks about all of this in future pages.

@Brass Beau  
I feel as though thats contradicted by Thorax needing to feed in his introductory episode, as it’s implied it’s sustenance for both the physical and metaphysical at that time.
 
The shapeshifting, as it stands, doesn’t make sense if we require abiding by laws of physics and basic conservation of mass, but even without that it’s a massive energy sink from the few times we’ve witnessed or had comments regarding the long term disguises.
 
For the family units that could be ascribed either to us simply not having an opportunity to view any family units in the situations presented or a communal rearing system in place in a more hive like setting. It’s a possibility Thorax attempted to bring more pony like family structure to his species in an attempt to make them more approachable/attempt to distance himself from previous generations intentionally or not.
 
As for magic differences that goes to the oldest question on it-is it a form of power that can carry innate frequency and is it a wave or a particle?
 
Unfortunately at that stage I do not have either the knowledge or experience to make an assumption or pose a strong argument since, well, I don’t hold a PHD.
 
As a personal preference though I think of it as akin to a innate radio frequency-it’s all technically the same thing, it’s just how those frequencies interact with material that changes the inherent properties.
 
This would also allow the Throne to exist as a jamming system set to allow a specific frequency to move unhindered, and explain to a degree why nothing else functions in the small(relatively compared to some other relics) area it effects.

@GrimChariot  
We do have the problems that “love” is a force within this universe, changeling magic is distinct from other forms of magic, we haven’t seen intergenerational familial units until after they changed, the fact that their shape changing seems to be converting energy into matter (the “green flames” that surrounds a changeling when shifting forms, unless that’s a discharge of energy from shuffling the bonds of electrons in the surrounding air) and-  
Well, here’s a strange thought: what if we’re going about this the wrong way. We keep assuming that, much like was done with the sirens, that the energy they’re gathering is “food” as we understand it. What if they aren’t feeding their bodies with “love” but siphoning that energy to fuel they’re magic? Once they could form bonds and generate “love” they changed forms and could freely use their magic because of that. A bit of a hand wave but I think it warrants investigation.

@Brass Beau  
We have a comic stating they only hibernate if they are forcibly contained and can not attempt to gather food ala the castle prison and an active Volcano(though that one was clearly an attempt at mass execution at worst and torture at best)though that goes back to that comic not being entirely trustworthy in context of itself since that entire comic revolves around the Changelings buying time, both on Celestia and Chrysalis respectively.
 
They appear to have a similar caloric intake to ponies from both the food they present and their interactions with others overall- or they’d also require far more sedentary and slow lifestyles since insectoid flight is not cheap energy wise nor is it as likely they use innate magic just to move like ponies do once airborne.
 
And we do see that they reproduce in large numbers or at least as often as ponies do with about average size of brood judging by at least one example of siblings, Thorax and Pharynx, or a family unit consisting of multiple clear generations in Ocellus’ case, where two fully grown, one juvenile and an infant/toddler/nymph are all present at a similar timeframe.
 
They’re shown to basically be more bug like versions of ponies, and if they had been present for the three tribes it points to the three tribes freezing a chunk of the continent over with the Windigo’s as the crux of their initial dispute.
 
It’s possible there was a separate prey species they predominantly subsisted off off and/or domesticated that went extinct or was driven to extinction when the population couldn’t support the Changelings and the subsequent fleeing of the freeze forced immediate action.
 
Editing in: We also have to admit at this stage that their shapeshifting is complete biological reconstruction ala Pharynx, which would be a literal nuke as far as caloric and food intake are concerned due to the need to add mass either by converting energy to matter(unlikely) or gathering mass from surrounding materials and reconstructing it accordingly.

@GrimChariot  
We’re missing some key details that could help narrow down some of those problems into more manageable chunks. Their reproductive cycle, metabolic cycle and frequency of cocooned hibernation could offset some of those issues.  
If a new batch only happens once every few decades, the active population size would remain reasonably small.  
If they could hibernate on an empty stomach, then only a small contingent would have to be fed at a time.  
If they spend centuries sleeping in cocoons and only come out for a couple of months or years, then they wouldn’t need a lot of energy.  
Then again, they could just be an invasive species that doesn’t belong in the natural order of this world. There’s just too many things we don’t know that could have their existence make more logical sense.

@Brass Beau  
Thats accurate but to be frank the amount of power generated would be magnitudes of efficiency that are just impossible.
 
Theres a return of hundreds of thousands for an input of tens, and somehow creating a series of closed loops makes that more productive?
 
In any school of physics that system would collapse relatively quickly if it was able to be started at all.
 
Unless somehow every Changelings the equivalent to a cold fusion reactor gimping along without enough power to fully start till they reformed, but that would also contradict them being only as strong as ponies since they’d have a decently large towns level of power output.
 
And wouldn’t have to feed period since that system would in and of itself be self sufficient with physical energy barring moments when the reactor needs to be refueled, which wouldn’t be days but decades.

@GrimChariot  
Matter (and energy) can neither be created or destroyed; only changed.  
Friendship (and “love”) are a tangible force in the universe.  
Since “love” is a byproduct of communal creatures, and “love” is associated with trust and passivity, that would make the changelings a symbiotic (some would say parasitic) race with the rest of the world, keeping other races on edge. The resulting paranoia and xenophobia would be useful in preventing a race from being over run by less communal races. Now wonder Equestria is so easy to invade. They’ve grown complacent from an abundance of “love”

@secury  
To add to the reason as to why sharing love never came up and why they tend to be aggressive, people have to realize it’s not something that makes logical sense.
 
Love is shown to be a finite resource in every other system excluding the crystal heart, and it’s ancient and not understood so expecting anything else to follow an artificial systems logic is a big leap with no path to get there.
 
Suddenly doing the Changeling equivalent of vomiting on your neighbor makes it infinite.
 
This coupled with the need for the hive to feed multiple members and relying on some not leaving to feed, and needing to subsist for a period of time on others harvest makes those deaths of forward collectors infinitely more damaging to the hive then to their prey.
 
Which goes to why Chrysalis and the others eventually made the cocoons, limiting the inherent threat to operatives(regardless of whether Chrysalis cares about them) limits loss of resources against what was gained, while being a shortsighted solution.
 
Problem is if they are already at the point of being hunted Chrysalis likely doesn’t have the means(IE Equestria bending over backwards to give her a chance) or the desire to attempt to find a middle ground.
 
It’s a giant mess created by a magic system with no structure and exists due to plot convenience more then any realization on anyones part.

@Brass Beau  
I mean if you are writing Chrysalis reformation fic you can’t do anything wrong with few snappy one-liners.