Distant cousins for sure, but still cousins!
 
So yeah, in my next gen/rewrite/AU Applejack and Pinkie Pie are related. I believe that someone traced it out and determined that they were probably 7th cousins, so that’s what we’ll go with.
 
Honestly, life has been so weird lately, and I just wanted to draw something simple to unwind after… well everything. It feels like no matter how much my interests change or I enjoy drawing humans and making my own stories, I always come back to this simple little show that I almost stopped watching altogether after season five because I really started to dislike where the writing was going. Not going to lie, these are my comfort characters. Something about drawing these stupid little rainbow colored horses makes me feel happier no matter how old I get. Maybe it’s a bit tmi, but I tend to feel bad about dumping vent stuff on my irl friends- Not even a week ago I finally graduated high school and I turned eighteen- yes, on the same day. Everything feels like it’s going so fast but so slow all at the same time. Coming out of school I realize that I’m far from lazy and without schoolwork taking up my time I’m grasping at things to do. I’m kinda craving some more independence because I like being able to do things on my own and have things to do. I’m working to finally get my license, but driving is scary, and I want to get a job and finally open up a bank account so I can get a PayPal set up so I can start earning some money. I’m take a gap year, or two, and possibly taking this online school that I like. I’d like to start saving up money for an actual drawing tablet. Everything… just feels weird. I don’t want to grow up so fast but I also hate being idle and I just want to go. I want to finally get therapy and move out of this house, I want to go on hikes and get a bike and start a job so I just have something else to do. I feel like my dyslexia is getting worse too. But I know that I’ll be fine, I guess things just take time.
 
But anyway, onto these two dorks. I’m not the biggest fan of their canon names, Big Sugar and Little Cheese, so I am renaming them: Apple Cinnamon and Starwberry Cheesecake repsectively. They are aged up a decent bit in this drawing, about teenagers, and they’ve always been close.
 
Strawberry Cheesecake takes more after his dad in build, height, and fluff, but he is totally a mamma’s boy and has Pinkie’s eccentric nature and jovial optimism- with a dash of his dad’s theatrics. There are some differences to canon Cheese Sandwhich that I want to make at a later time, but it’s really just stuff to make sure that he’s not an almost verbatim male clone of Pinkie Pie. I also feel like I should note that Strawberry Cheesecake is male, and was born as such. If I remember right there was a bit of a discrepancy with some of the writers about Little Cheese’s gender, and despite the model used in the final episode being normally used for the fillies he is a colt. Some people have taken to making Little Cheese trans, and I was tempted to go this route but decided that I’d rather just make him a colt, just with more effeminatley associated features. This can always change, nothing is ever set in stone, but I just don’t feel to confident throwing in a random trans character for the sake of it, especially when I’m not so sure what to do with them in the grand scheme of the story,
 
As for Apple Cinnamon, I’d say that he’s a farmer’s son for sure and takes after his dad in preferring to let his actions speak for himself rather than his words. He was always a quiet colt, and enjoys baking with his mom and probably takes up plenty of time helping out at Sugar Cube Corner with Cheesecake and the Cake twins. I guess I don’t really have too much to say for him other than that.
 
I like to think that in pony culture, destiny is a very big deal. Ponies are very into star signs- seasonal, directional, and celestial alignments- and oracles and other creatures who can see into the future are very highly acclaimed. Divination is also very big part of Equestrian culture and upbringing, from something as simple to foalhood games to someone’s whole lifestyle. I’m probably going to play around with the idea that each community has a designated oracle or someone who names and casts the alignments for each newborn foal, but also that coat patterns themselves are considered a way to tell of someone’s character or future. Think like a palm reading, that’s kinda what coat reading is like.
 
Well, basically what I’m trying to say is that Apple Cinnamon has a pink mark in his nose, that mark is called an angle’s kiss and is considered to come from past loved ones literally kissing the newborn on the nose when they’re born. The mark doesn’t appear until soon after a foal is born, and to say that Applejack and Big Mac didn’t shed a tear when thinking that the newest addition to the Apple family was blessed by his late grandparents and Granny Smith would be an absolute lie.
 
I guess one more thing to splurge onto this description while it’s on my mind is what I’m going to be doing with cutiemarks. I sketched up some designs for their cutiemarks but decided to leave them off because I think I’m going to do something different in regards to cutiemarks as a whole. Cutiemarks to me are pretty weird and the older I get the more iffy I get with them. It is solely because ponies get them when they are basically in elementary school and that very mark basically says ‘this is what you’re good at and what you might as well do the rest of your life.’ And as someone who struggled to find my place in this world, especially with the prospect of a job, someone who knows people who struggle with the questions ‘what do you want to be’, and someone who came from a school system that made me feel like I had to have my whole life planned out by the 5th grade- I think you can see why that makes me a bit uncomfortable. For me, I feel like it would be more normal for a pony to get their cutiemark when they are adults, and it’s very rare for even teenagers to get their cutiemarks so young. A cutiemark is also pretty weird when I think about it and look at canon examples. Some are more broad and left very much up to interpretation while others are pretty specific. I guess I’d say that cutiemarks aren’t a dead set on what you have to do with your life, but rather they are a hint at something in your destiny that needs your attention or that you can help with (Like how Cadance’s cutiemark was literally the Crystal Heart, she was destined to help save the empire while also having the ability to help those with their life lives). This is kinda why I want to bring in the idea of the community oracle person who gives a foal their name, that way their name is a hint as to their broader destiny- but that also isn’t always the case.
 
Whelp, that’s enough rambling. My next post might either be related to Celestia and Luna and a whole splurge of text about my concepts for how the world came to be, the era of creatures, and the prophecy that I want to play around with in this reimagining AU, or some Twilight and Discord next gen kids. We’ll see.