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Description
Well, this took me quite some time to finish, but I'm glad I'm finally done with those designs!

Okay, so, this character design concept art is based on a musical called "Elisabeth". I already wrote what this musical is about under a pair of my previous artworks featuring those characters (Death and Rudolf), but I'm going to write it again just for clarification.

The musical "Elisabeth" follows the story of life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, starting from her engagement and marriage with Emperor Franz-Joseph following up to her murder in 1898 at the hands of the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni. Throughout the musical the character of Death comes to Elisabeth multiple times and offers her to end her sufferings under the pressure of her marriage and her empire that crumble around her, but she rejects Death's offer each time and continues to fight for her life. Being insulted by Elisabeth, Death decides to make Elisabeth's life a torture by taking those she holds dear and break her so she will start begging him to end her life.

Okay, that's enough on the musical, now onto the choices for the characters, because I know, OH, I KNOW some people are going to say that some characters don't seem to fit their roles like AT ALL!

Applejack as Death - This was one of the hardest choices to make, since Death's character is very mysterious and much more complicated than it seems at the first glance. I picked Applejack because of her complicated relationship/friendship with Rarity. They both sometimes consider each other absolute besties, but in one wrong click they can turn into mortal enemies that dislike each other and argue all the time. Additionally, in the episode "Sisterhooves Social" of season 2 Sweetie Belle gets in a few disagreements with Rarity and runs to Applebloom and Applejack. Seeing how Applebloom is happy with her big sister, Sweetie Belle angrily declares that Rarity is no longer her sister, and goes to stay with Applebloom and Applejack, considering Applejack to be a better sister.
Both of those incidents are very similar to the concept of the relationships between Elisabeth with Death and Death with Prince Rudolf.

Sweetie Belle as Rudolf - Elisabeth is Rarity and she's very directly related to Sweetie Belle. Also the same reason as for Death I mentioned above.

Rarity as Empress Elisabeth - This was also a pretty hard choice, considering that Elisabeth's character switches from not wanting to be an empress to trying to deal with the fact that she's an empress now and there's nothing she cannot do. I picked Rarity for this role mainly because she cared a lot about how she looked like in the musical and she tried everything she could do to stay beautiful. I also really liked the idea of the irony behind picking Rarity for this role, since she, in the show, always adored the life of royalty and always wished to be a part of it as well, but as Elisabeth she finally realizes how hard such lifestyle actually is.

Rainbow Dash as Lucheni - Somebody told me that Pinkie Pie would be great for Lucheni's role and I think they said that because Lucheni appears as a sarcastic and funny dork in the musical, but I decided to look a little deeper with this character and I decided that Rainbow Dash would be better for this role. My main reasoning is that in the episode "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000" Rainbow Dash proved herself to be the loudest voice of the crowd when she accused Applejack of not making enough cider for everypony to drink and many of the background ponies sided with her and agreeing on that. Lucheni as well appears to be the loudest voice of the crowd in the musical, where he accuses Elisabeth of taking milk baths to stay beautiful while people are starving.

Princess Luna as Sophie - Sophie is Franz-Joseph's strict mother with some high levels of confidence. She believes that she knows what's best for her son and his family. I thought to pick someone who's related to Twilight out of the alicorn princesses circle and I decided that Luna is the best pick because she can appear as the strictest and coldest of the princesses, just like Sophie. In addition, Luna was educating Sweetie Belle by teaching her a lesson not to do wrong to her sister, and this is kinda similar to how Sophie took Rudolf from Elisabeth and educated him until Elisabeth stepped in and demanded Franz-Joseph to speak with his mother and give her back her son.

Twilight Sparkle as Emperor Franz-Joseph - Twilight appears to be a very busy and pretty unconfident princess out of all the alicorn princesses, Franz shows in the musical that he can barely make any serious decisions without his mother's consideration, pretty much like Twilight when she's having a hard time thinking of what is the right thing to do as a princess.

All designs of this concept were created by me under Count-Monsparkle 's watchful eye.
Inspired by: Assassin-or-Shadow and TorusTheScribe .
The "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" series belong to Hasbro and Lauren Faust.
The musical "Elisabeth" was commissioned by the Vereinigte Bühnen Wien (VBW), with book/lyrics by Michael Kunze and music by Sylvester Levay.

Description
Well, this took me quite some time to finish, but I'm glad I'm finally done with those designs!

Okay, so, this character design concept art is based on a musical called "Elisabeth". I already wrote what this musical is about under a pair of my previous artworks featuring those characters (Death and Rudolf), but I'm going to write it again just for clarification.

The musical "Elisabeth" follows the story of life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, starting from her engagement and marriage with Emperor Franz-Joseph following up to her murder in 1898 at the hands of the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni. Throughout the musical the character of Death comes to Elisabeth multiple times and offers her to end her sufferings under the pressure of her marriage and her empire that crumble around her, but she rejects Death's offer each time and continues to fight for her life. Being insulted by Elisabeth, Death decides to make Elisabeth's life a torture by taking those she holds dear and break her so she will start begging him to end her life.

Okay, that's enough on the musical, now onto the choices for the characters, because I know, OH, I KNOW some people are going to say that some characters don't seem to fit their roles like AT ALL!

Applejack as Death - This was one of the hardest choices to make, since Death's character is very mysterious and much more complicated than it seems at the first glance. I picked Applejack because of her complicated relationship/friendship with Rarity. They both sometimes consider each other absolute besties, but in one wrong click they can turn into mortal enemies that dislike each other and argue all the time. Additionally, in the episode "Sisterhooves Social" of season 2 Sweetie Belle gets in a few disagreements with Rarity and runs to Applebloom and Applejack. Seeing how Applebloom is happy with her big sister, Sweetie Belle angrily declares that Rarity is no longer her sister, and goes to stay with Applebloom and Applejack, considering Applejack to be a better sister.
Both of those incidents are very similar to the concept of the relationships between Elisabeth with Death and Death with Prince Rudolf.

Sweetie Belle as Rudolf - Elisabeth is Rarity and she's very directly related to Sweetie Belle. Also the same reason as for Death I mentioned above.

Rarity as Empress Elisabeth - This was also a pretty hard choice, considering that Elisabeth's character switches from not wanting to be an empress to trying to deal with the fact that she's an empress now and there's nothing she cannot do. I picked Rarity for this role mainly because she cared a lot about how she looked like in the musical and she tried everything she could do to stay beautiful. I also really liked the idea of the irony behind picking Rarity for this role, since she, in the show, always adored the life of royalty and always wished to be a part of it as well, but as Elisabeth she finally realizes how hard such lifestyle actually is.

Rainbow Dash as Lucheni - Somebody told me that Pinkie Pie would be great for Lucheni's role and I think they said that because Lucheni appears as a sarcastic and funny dork in the musical, but I decided to look a little deeper with this character and I decided that Rainbow Dash would be better for this role. My main reasoning is that in the episode "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000" Rainbow Dash proved herself to be the loudest voice of the crowd when she accused Applejack of not making enough cider for everypony to drink and many of the background ponies sided with her and agreeing on that. Lucheni as well appears to be the loudest voice of the crowd in the musical, where he accuses Elisabeth of taking milk baths to stay beautiful while people are starving.

Princess Luna as Sophie - Sophie is Franz-Joseph's strict mother with some high levels of confidence. She believes that she knows what's best for her son and his family. I thought to pick someone who's related to Twilight out of the alicorn princesses circle and I decided that Luna is the best pick because she can appear as the strictest and coldest of the princesses, just like Sophie. In addition, Luna was educating Sweetie Belle by teaching her a lesson not to do wrong to her sister, and this is kinda similar to how Sophie took Rudolf from Elisabeth and educated him until Elisabeth stepped in and demanded Franz-Joseph to speak with his mother and give her back her son.

Twilight Sparkle as Emperor Franz-Joseph - Twilight appears to be a very busy and pretty unconfident princess out of all the alicorn princesses, Franz shows in the musical that he can barely make any serious decisions without his mother's consideration, pretty much like Twilight when she's having a hard time thinking of what is the right thing to do as a princess.

All designs of this concept were created by me under Count-Monsparkle 's watchful eye.
Inspired by: Assassin-or-Shadow and TorusTheScribe .
The "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" series belong to Hasbro and Lauren Faust.
The musical "Elisabeth" was commissioned by the Vereinigte Bühnen Wien (VBW), with book/lyrics by Michael Kunze and music by Sylvester Levay.