Feb
26th
2019
The (Original) Conversion Bureau Part 5: Bonus Ducks · 6:43am Feb 26th, 2019
Idle ramblings on “interesting” stuff that are somewhat unique to Blaze’s TCB (and not completely stupid and unworkable). Basically, various ideas Blaze had that might have been something interesting in isolation, not all stacked on each other.
- Equestria being on Earth from the beginning, but hidden a la Greek’s Amazons.
- Xeno-Twilight instead of Xeno-Celestia. Misinformation causes Twilight to firmly believe that humans are natural predisposed to be bad, so modifies the initial plan of the Potion to include emotional suppressors
- Equestria having an overpopulation issue, and having it be a problem for once.
- Ponies on Earth having a hell of a time adapting to most infrastructure not built for hooves, unless you’re the lucky third with a horn.
- Ponies who decide to immigrate to Earth finding out being flat broke is hard.
- HLF encouraging more isolationism than outright attack.
- The Potion works as advertised, since pony medicine only really works on ponies.
- The Potion works as Blaze imagined it, mostly to let people become ponies at that’s it.
- Equestria is just another country, science and magic are far more intertwined.
- Potion was a joint human-pony project
#3 is pretty telling, yeah.
I mean, I'm not surprised why the pro-CB stories ignore it... but historically a sudden influx of populace never, ever ends well, or is at least rather unpopular with the actual locals. And that's not even with the whole 'Friendship is Magic' thrown into the mix.
I mean, imagine that period the Irish in the US was basically seen as sub-human, job-stealing scum. But with hate-eating winter-spirits hanging over your head like a blade, drooling at the feast.
That's... really not an aspect of the lore that should be just be brushed aside with a shrug. That's like writing the Lord of the Rings, but instead of Sauron and the One Ring, you place all the focus on some tiny kingdom of losers worried they're trade-routs are about to dry up from the war.
I mean... you COULD base a story on that, but it's just such missed opportunity, you know?
5020290
The entire series is a tower of missed opportunities because Blaze wanted to railroad everything down one path, and if something said earlier didn't make sense, retcon time.
Everyone else ended up writing something only tangentially related to the original plot because there's barely anything coherent in it.
5020302
Had that problem with Pandemic, myself—amazing ideas and characters, ruined by the author's railroad going chu, chu from page one.
That one's a better story at least, even if it drove me bonkers how only the ponies were ever allowed to solve ANY problem, least the humans look the slightest bit pro-active in, you know, stopping their world from ending.
5020290
In retrospect, Blaze's Equestria would make more sense if it was written for G3, where life's realities are slightly fudged to allow for more fun to happen.
5020797
Or 3.5, if you want some true eldritch horror.
The horror.
...I kid a bit, but that's (the 3.0 thing) isn't actually half bad an idea. 4th gen does have a bit more edge to it, so it's more conceivable for something to go wrong, but 3.0 is way more of a sugar-bowl so there being some disturbing rule to the magic that non-nice things just melt away to not bother the ponies actually would make a bit more sense.