I have trouble creating (horse) oc's for poniponi for the following reason:

I have been working on non-horse related personal project for a long time, so the way I like to design characters is usually that I like to design things like. Homebrew races, magic systems and powersets. The obvious problem with that is that if I don't control the worldbuilding, I have to adhere to established rules I didn't create and I can't just arbitrarily decide how common or rare something is as a balancing feature. For this reason the only mare I've had for awhile is Bloona Blazes, which is basically a mareification of the balloonicorn, and I like Bloona alot I'm a TF2 cultist, but the problem with Bloona is I also use Bloonacorn as an artist tag, so I'm hesitant to characterize Bloona, because people call ME Bloon so what I do to her will be applied to me.

As a workaround to my problem, I came to the conclusion the best way to resolve that problem was to simply imagine how I would design my own pony setting. That way, I can still design mares, but they don't have to adhere to any rules but mine! It's just a personal project, and isn't meant to be an objective improvement or anything. Its just a how would I do it thing, to appeal to my personal taste and to work with my artistic process. If I were put in charge of making MLP G4:2, I wouldn't make alot of the same changes, but yknow, I am free to imagine the setting I want.

I will not write a long ramble about how this setting would work, because its both incomplete and not entirely relevant. However I will give a few basic details that contextualize this character slightly. I was partially inspired by Dotkwa's draw about like, making seapones one of the main tribes of poniponi they did awhile back. It occured to me that like, they were basically reverse pegasi, except in the ocean instead of in the sky, and I thought that design concept worked really well. So I am shamelessly taking the idea and running with it (I did talk to Dotkwa and they said it was fine).

You see earth ponies and unicorns I think are too basic of ideas to balance anything around, but pegasi are the only of the 3 kinds with no inherent purpose. They invented that weather was created and manipulated manually and made it their job, gave them cities on clouds and floating islands and a cool faction of their own. That's what I want for them all, really. I'd make a hoof-full more types of poni and give them all something like that of their own.

I have decided on a total of 7 types of pony I'm committed too. I've balanced each of them around the idea of "mobility" and given them a place they excel in more then anyone. I haven't decided if I want to name this kind of fishpone a "Hippocampus" or a "Kelpie" yet though. You see a hippocampus typically, is a horse with a tail of a dolphin but no hindlegs and can only breath underwater. My oc here can breath air and has hindlegs (as I want her race to be relevant to anything instead of being irrelevant water race). Kelpies are also fish-horses, but they're fairies that are partially human, and known for more then anything being incredibly sadistic. But it sounds cuter and its less confusing on the plurals. I will use the former term for convenience, but I have not committed either way.

(I then realized I wrote like 5 paragraphs of worldbuilding details despite saying I wouldn't write about it and cut the parts about how I changed magic, some details about runes and ponies relations to eacho other, non-ponies and the world as a whole.)

Basically unicorns work different and have a different advantage then monopolizing magic. Magic can be used by other non-ponies through the use of things like wands, staffs, ritual circles and runes. Hippocampuses can breath air and water and walk on land. Whaletail can use water magic with her staff, however she would only be able to use water magic unless she had some extra stuff that would allow her to do other things. Which I will not detail here.

I don't have a strong concept for Whaletails personality as of yet, though I'm vaguely leaning towards a curious, empathetic, energetic but inexperienced personality. Iunno, its a rough concept. She would have funny water magic with that staff though. The undersuit is supposed to look like a swimsuit but vaguely function as armor? Iunno. The hat was inspired by Yareli's alternate helmet in Warframe, stole the colors for the undersuit from Zora armor lmao. I'm still not great at drawing gradients, I added the pink for contrast but then realized that might look like a flag so I added the purple to avoid such a concern.

TL;DR: :fish: