Badly done rant about TCB origins and wasted potential. · 5:09pm May 27th, 2015
A remark in this blogpost prompted me to start talking about TCB again, and my comment quickly turned into this gigantic mess. I'm not a writer, just one of your better reader and commenters, but jeez I am surprised I have this much I want to talk about with TCB. It got so big that I've made it a blogpost instead of a comment. If I wanted to do this properly I'd dig through old Ponychan threads (with broken links everywhere) to read those discussions and read those old not-so-good fics, but that would take forever so I just wrote all this off my memory of what things were like. This is not a quality blogpost. (If I spent hours and hours on this, it could be. Not that it would ever get enough discussion to warrant the effort.)
Conversion Bureau: Unlucky Day receives a rare autodownvote for being another one of those shitty “humans aren't evil genocidial maniacs, now lets kill all the ponies to prove it” TCB stories. Why, oh why can't there be a TCB fic that doesn't fall into one of the extreme camps? It's such a great premise that just can never be done right.
I've been saying that for years. (Mind if I rant here a bit?) I was around when TCB first started. It was a thread on the Ponychan board, and it wasn't anything like what it's become. Basically, the earliest TCB fics were character-focused instead of worldbuilding-focused. There was no agreed-upon reason for Conversion Bureaus to exist, just the idea of a building where humans went to become Ponies. Basically a twist on the 'old Human-in-Equestria fic: Legal immigration. Characters struggled to get to a TCB and then to get into Equestria, then they faced figuring out their place in life and all that stuff. There were some fun adventure stories, some interesting character dramas, and some occasional antagonism from the generic mostly-incompetent Human Liberation Front. If you've every read some of those popular sub-genre things that pop up, like those human-in-costume self-insert fics, early TCB was kinda like that but with much more potential in its ideas and scattershot worldbuilding.
Let me give a simple (badly done) example for you to picture: A normal apartment complex in a normal human city in the present day. A nearby neighbor planning on moving out to Equestria. A few people in the building are now Ponies. Your roomate went to a TCB and is now back as a Pegasus, and you're stuck helping her/him deal with his/her new diet and shorter stature (and you're totally not jealous of those wings.) There's a Pony next door who's moved in from Equestria to open a specialty shop of imported food and exotic hays. He's doing great business but is real tired of all the Newfoals asking him about his Mark.
On the horizon of this normal city is a patch of cloud sculptures. They're very sloppy, (not that you'd know that,) but next to the rising sun they look beautiful.
The "great premise that can't be done right" that I remember? It was so early on that people were discussing if Ponies would want to convert into Humans, but noone had written much on that. It was so early people were discussing getting rid of the whole background "Humans did something bad to the planet and have to convert to leave" thing inherited from the first fic, but noone had done anywhere near the worldbuilding it would take to even really explain why Conversion Bureaus were even established. It was just a background detail that was usually not given much thought. Compared to the years that have gone by, all that stuff isn't much, but it seemed like there was so much more potential at the time.
Instead we have an insanely pessimistic Dystopic Human future paired with an insanely optimistic Utopian Equestria. Ugh. (How many Equestria-as-actual Utopia/perfect world fics do you enjoy reading?) Chatoyance may be a creative genius, but it quickly got very hard to enjoy her work when it constantly shoves that in your face all the time.
Right. Chatoyance. Her detractors would never admit it, but she is insanely creative. Her fics didn't get so popular for no reason. I don't hate her, and she never did anything to deserve the hate-flinging she got, (well, noone does,) but she is the worst at internet arguments. You don't fight fire with fire, but Chatoyance has always been quick to respond to both reasonable critique and flamewars by cursing out everyone who disagrees with her. I swear to this day that she deliberately Flanderized her worldbuilding from her earliest works in response to the criticism it generated back in those Ponychan threads.
I say all that as someone who used to read all her work because, again, she's a creative genius.
So basically, TCB for the last few years? Black and white. Earth is being destroyed, Equestria is paradise. Humans are inherently evil and hateful, Ponies are inherently superior and good. Ponies are evil, Humans kill all the ponies. Earth is being destroyed, so Equestria is destroyed in retaliation. Being a Human is suffering, being a Pony is wonderful. Black and white, black and white, black and white.
My favorite TCB story is still an old, unfinished fic where a human and Rainbow Dash fall in love. (Whoops, spoilers.) It's got flaws, but it was a story I could 100% enjoy reading. Make of that what you will.
It's time for lunch and I'm done ranting. *Sigh* 
I greatly appreciate you taking the time to write this. Thank you for it, and for the look at the early days of the concept.
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Read some of these from August 2011 and you'll quickly be not-un-appreciative.
(Seriously, they're not that good. Except for maybe Change of Life. 
)
Surprisingly, I've already read and faved that one too. Shame the author just kinda dropped off the face of the earth. It was pretty decent.
This one will forever be my favorite TCB fic, though. Second MLP fic I ever read. No preachy business here. Just a good and dramatic story. Author's still active on the site, but he hasn't written anything in years.
...May have been a "genius", I don't know how you rate it.
Was the kind of author I loathe: one whose story isn't really a story but a political/philosophical "message" that gets hammered into the reader.
Same as RealityCheck or Terry Goodkind; hate all these assholes.
Double hate for Chatty because the message is "all humans and you personally are bad and need a racial cleansing; superior creatues can do whatever they want to humans and it's not bad in any case, even if it is".
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The worldbuilding is uncomfortable at the best of times, but it's also some pretty creative stuff. I don't really want to get into that, and I probably could have phrased that better. Basically, Chatoyance's stuff was impactful (and popular) enough that it's been the basis of all TCB stories one way or another for years now, even though the basic concepts behind TCB could easily go in other directions.