"If you ever betray me, I will burn you alive."

Love Letter
Nickname: Love
Parents: Queen Cadence, King Shining Armor
Siblings: Flurry Heart
Special Talent: Potions and fire-based magic
Occupation: Queen of the Crystal Empire (former Lady Royal to Flurry Heart)


Background/Personality

Love Letter was born a few years after her sister, Flurry Heart. She was born without wings, making her a unicorn. As a foal, her mane was vibrant and rich with color. She greatly resembled her father Shining Armor, but as she grew older the color began to fade.

Since Flurry Heart was already promised to the throne, Love became her "Lady Royal," which was basically an assistant to the Queen, although Cadence and Shining insisted it meant they were equals.

Since childhood Love Letter has viewed Cadence's magic as rather… corrupt. It felt odd to force ponies to fall in love. She views the Empire as Cadence's clan of brainwashed citizens. She can basically force them to do whatever they want with her invasive mind-bending magic, and Love finds this tyrannical.

From a very young age she plans to overthrow her mother, not out of spite or jealousy, but to save the Crystal Ponies. She puts on a sweet face for most of her life, and the moment Flurry falls to her demise and Love inherits the throne, she instantly begins to enact her plan.


Relationships

Love and Flurry Heart have a tense relationship, at least from Flurry's point of view. Love is naturally very presentable and neat, whereas Flurry is clumsy and disorganized. She loathes Love for her naturally perfect composure, and gets very jumpy when compared to her sister. Love really doesn't care, and it's not like she's trying to one-up Flurry. Half the time she wishes Flurry wouldn't nervously fidget around her because it gets annoying.

Love keeps Cadence close. Cadence may seem sweet, but Love knows what kind of a pony she is deep down. Everyone is clueless to Love's true feelings, but especially Cadence. When Cadence chooses to step down and appoint Love as queen, she truly trusts that her youngest daughter will be a good ruler.

Love is actually pretty fond of Shining Armor. She understands that he's caught up in Cadence's web of manipulation, so she takes pity on him. Shining really loves doing things with her since Flurry's too busy most of the time. They used to go hiking a lot. As the only two unicorns in the family they had a surprisingly strong bond.

Love is much closer to her cousin Cassiopeia than Flurry would ever be. Cassie's one of the least annoying ponies in her life. She doesn't ask questions, she doesn't talk too much, and she isn't completely boring. Love doesn't mind her company.


Special

- Love has a peculiar affinity to fire. It's an extremely uncommon trait for ponies to possess, and is more naturally seen in dragons. Most of the magic she performs with her horn is fire-based, so she does have to be careful. This is an incredibly powerful trait, and the only other known pony to possess this skill is Celestia.

- Love was meant to be born an alicorn. She still has the ability to ascend and earn her wings as Twilight did, but she chooses not to. Many laugh at this and call it stupidity- who would give up the chance to be an alicorn? An immortal, all-powerful being? But it's a statement for Love. She doesn't need to be an alicorn to rule. She may pursue it one day, but for now she intends to show strength in her mortality.

- She has narcissistic personality disorder, and while Flurry Heart often calls her a sociopath, she's not quite. She has an inflated sense of self importance and believes herself to be superior to most, thus being the only capable ruler. She does care a little, it's not like she's completely devoid of emotion, but she definitely views herself in a high regard.

- Given her abilities with fire, she shares a bond with dragons that's never really been observed before.

- Her colors are faded because she uses dark magic, and because she actively plots to overthrow her family. The combination of this negative energy directly affects her internal magic. And since internal magic is directly related to fur and mane color, her colors become desaturated. This is what happened to King Sombra thousands of years ago. A similar phenomenon known as "Grey Zone" occurred when Discord briefly took over, but they're not exactly the same thing.


i talk a little more about the Grey Zone here

and here's the hair fade i was talking about:



~

I can't stop drawing the pink thing on horse noses ever since I've seen some of my favorite artists start doing it. But anyway, here's Love! I had an old ref for her but never got around to posting it cuz I didn't like it, so I decided to make a new one today. I tried to give her young Khaleesi vibes especially with the braid in her hair. She's got a bunch of different hairstyles but I stuck with this one for the ref

Also changed a few things like the color of her hooves and I added some fur on her back because it's prettyyyy

She's meant to look "innocent" here. She looks relatively harmless which is what she aims for. Also, the "Lady Royal" thing is totally from the Barbie movie, Princess Charm School I think it's called. I don't really draw cutie marks because it's kind of a hassle. I leave them out most of the time, but maybe I'll get around to designing one for Love eventually. Annndddd lastly I used to do clean line art for all of my NextGen refs but lining is my least favorite part tbh, plus the sketch looked s o f t so I kept it like this.

Love is probably my favorite character that I've made, and I've always been super proud of her colors. Hope you guys like her as much as I do! I also gotta pop out a Shining/Cadence family pic because this family is so pretty. But yeah, thanks for checking this out!