Why Ponyville?

The story started out as just a simple human in Equestria story with the main character changed into a pony along with other humans as well. And when I first started out with the story, I was literally the main character, name and everything. But after I finished writing the first chapter, the story evolved and I had to change the name from "A Pony of a Story" to "Ponyville", and change the main character's name to something else so it doesn't make me appear ego centric (or at least as much as humanly possible). The main reason why I changed the name of the story was because the overall story was mainly inspired by the film, "Pleasentville" and a few other stories as well (like the fiction novel series, 1632). It was the idea of wondering what would happen if American and Equestrian cultures clashed with one another and they were forced to live with one another. And what effect would it have on Equestria.

The basic idea of the story generally came from my overall dissatisfaction with TCB (The Conversion Bureau). I do not hate the series, and I'll admit that I found a few of the stories interesting, but the premise of the story still bugged me. Who in their right mind, in real life, would honestly go through the madness of choosing to change to another species and living on another world like that? So, after a while, the story of what I wanted started to materialize in my mind, mostly because it was a bit harder to find a good HiE story that I really wanted to read. I wanted a transformation story of humans into ponies, and I was curious about the two worlds meeting, so I came up with the story you are reading today. And to do this without any sort of copy/paste from TCB or any other stories (or at least making an active effort to), and trying to keep it more in the realm of realism, I came up with the following ideas for the story:

1) Force the transformation onto the population without warning or permission. This bypasses the potential ethical ramifications of the process of transformation itself so the reader can focus more on the story. With no immediate reason why the transformation happened, it makes it a bit more plausible since none of them chose or wanted to be ponies in the first place, and there is no immediate way back home either.
2) Leave Princess Celestia out of the transformation equation. This not only makes the story a bit less predictable, but it leaves her with the task of trying to keep the peace and to prevent chaos from causing any damage, and helps to prevent any hint of Conspiracy that she was the one doing it.
3) Make Equestria and the world it resides in less than perfect. In ways, it's better than our world, and much more stable, but it would make a boring story and less realistic if I portrayed it as picture perfect.
4) Drag a sizable population of ex-humans to Equestria along with proof. This makes it next to impossible for the Equestrian government to hide the truth of the new arrivals.
5) Expose the existence of MLP:FiM to at least the Mane 6. I know it's easier for the main character to hide the fact and pretend not to know the existence of Equestria prior to his/her arrival, but I just wanted to see what would happen if they found out and what the philosophical ramifications would be.

There are a few other parts, but for spoiler reasons, I have decided to omit them from this blog entry. If you have any questions/comments/concerns, then please let me know. I'm open for feedback.

P.S. Chapter 10 is mostly written, however I need to do some heavy rewrite in some sections, and some revisions in others.