Eventually, I decided to make my own interpretation of how The Mane Attraction would go down in my AU, since the original just wouldn’t work with the setting. First, Coloratura is about ten years older than Applejack here.

Coloratura (Ermesinde Colovray) was a scion from one of the first settlers in Ævrefreodeh, close to the Pomme family (Pear Butter taught her how to play guitar) and also related to the Dhanmands - Friyamateš/Filthy Rich’ second cousin, so when Majesty started coming around town to court Friyamateš, which was about 1971 SE, they both wound up meeting and becoming friends, bonding mainly over Coloratura’s love for Mazandarani music and Majesty’s knowledge of the music of the area that she had obtained on tour the previous year.

Majesty, who at this point was just the pianist on Þriestæpe’s backing band, quickly recognized Coloratura as a better singer than even herself, and hooked her up with Svengallop (Sosylos Grammatikopoulos), one of her friends from Spahan who she thought could get her a record deal.

He did, and soon enough, between his talent at promotion and her skill, she was racking up hit after hit, and eventually, moved out of Ævrefreodeh just as Majesty was moving in. Eventually her relationship with Svengallop grew beyond the purely professional level and they wound up marrying.

By 1977, with the success that she had, crossing over to the movies seemed like a natural progression, given all the past singing stars who wound up in Baghdad and occasionally, became genuine movie stars. Soon enough, Coloratura was in a heavy filmmaking schedule, focused on formulaic, modestly budgeted musical comedies.

Coloratura herself had little interest in just singing in the movies - if she was going to do anything in the pictures, she wanted to be a movie star, a serious actress, but when two films in a more dramatic vein were less commercially successful, she reverted to the formula.

To Svengallop the movies were just one more plum in the pudding, a promotional tool which could sell the music and which the music in turn could sell. Nothing could be simpler or more logical: the soundtrack album promoted the movie release, the movie release guaranteed a certain level of sales and publicity for the album. And as he perfected his own brand of synergistic opportunity, it began to become apparent that there was no real need for anything but the soundtrack music. Why record separate singles and albums when the movie material sold better, was more easily controlled, and could serve to fulfill all their commitments to the label?

As the 1980’s wore on, the quality of the soundtrack songs grew progressively worse, but Svengallop didn’t care about that unless it was affecting the bottom line - although it was, slowly. By 1985, Coloratura is deeply unhappy with her career, hasn’t performed live for years and her relationship with Svengallop is growing ever more distant, partly because her own aversion to confrontation keeps her from broaching the matter with him.

Then, her latest movie shoot takes her back to Ævrefreodeh, which she hasn’t visited in years, and soon enough, Majesty and Applejack piece together what’s going on and set out to solve this friendship problem…

Reposting to fix lighting.