The Conversion Bureau 767 members · 387 stories
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The most recent topic in the forum started with this line:

Since these topics [the end of the world] tend to be rather central to TCB…

Because of this, I know that I have once again kept silent for too long. The end of the world has never been a theme of The Conversion Bureau, and I can say this with certainty because the phrase “the end of the world” has always pertained to the end of life. If anything, The Conversion Bureau's most central theme is the beginning of life.

I am upset that both inside and outside of the group, a vocal majority of people have become obsessed with the one setting of TCB where everything starts out as shit. The Conversion Bureau is not about the setting – I will remind all of you that the original story by Blaze, “The Conversion Bureau” was NOT dysphoric, was NOT apocalyptic, and was NOT gritty. In fact, the first TCB didn't even have a barrier – that's right: humans could walk freely into Equestria and Equestria was NOT expanding…

The core of The Conversion Bureau then as it is now is to answer the question “What is it like and what does it mean to be an Equestrian Pony?”

I will now explain the depth of this question: in my childhood, I spent the majority of my time living one continuous fantasy with my imaginary friends of the shows I watched. Most children rarely hold a game of pretend for longer than five minutes and never imagine their own actions causing them harm even if these actions are harming others. During one fateful day, I imagined myself living in the world of these cartoons, actually living my life as a citizen of their world. That is when it suddenly hit me that if I were watching this cartoon where I was a character, I would not like myself because I was not a giving person. Where characters from the cartoons would help with anything if asked, I would resist with all my might. Where characters from the cartoons would get over their pains, I would hold on to mine and let it control my mood, my thoughts, and my actions. I felt so ashamed that I wanted to be near these characters because they were so open to giving, but all I wanted it seemed was to take until there was nothing left.

That moment opened my eyes. Because I loved these characters, watching myself hurt them this way hurt me. It is not a happy day when you kick yourself out of paradise because you realize you are a jerk. So I began to ask myself what I needed to change about myself to be accepted there, in paradise with all of it's many changing names. When this question is applied only to MLP and Equestria, the question becomes: “What is it like and what does it mean to be an Equestrian Pony?”

Opening your eyes like this though, doesn't end there. You begin to realize the bigger potential for how the world could be better, and because of that what you really see is how bad the world really is. Jack Kornfield said most people don't want to wake up and see how bad things really are, because you can't go back to not caring and not thinking about the problems in the world. The dysphoric settings of TCB are written for the benefit of those whose eyes are already open to seeing life clearer.

I don't like to talk about my life at all, but where I live is very similar to these dysphoric settings: droves of poor people milling about being hateful all day or begging for money along the highway, rotting buildings empty for miles being slowly consumed by nature, no less than five murders per night, no less than twenty hospitalized by day, weekly hostage events, daily hold ups, muggings by the hour… So for someone like me, the dysphoric setting is not perceived as a shock of how bad things could be, but a soothing honesty of how bad they are. Yes, I said soothing, because pretending things aren't that bad at this level is insult to injury. Depicting the world as nasty is both a reflection of some real locations on this planet and more importantly, as a metaphor for the pain an uncaring world can bring to an awakened person. The purpose of showing such an unpleasant world is to emphasise that no matter how bad it gets, peace and harmony can come into existence. Peace and harmony exist within a person and not without – you cannot pick up a pound of peace or harmony and show it to me, but because peace and harmony exist within, where ever a person who has harmony goes, life will be in harmony.

This is a Buddhist concept and I don't expect everyone reading this to understand. One misconception about Buddhists is that they train themselves to not feel pain. This is not true; they train themselves to accept pain. Just two nights ago, I was listening to a podcast of a Buddhist refusing novocain at the dentist because he thought pain was interesting. Well, having had suffered quite a lot of pain relating to my teeth, I felt offended and for a moment I got angry, but then I suddenly relaxed as I realized that I am not suffering this pain now, and he is not asking me too. Even if he chooses to feel this pain, there is no demand that I do the same nor judgment for not following this action, which is to say even if this person believes that feeling/accepting this pain would make everyone better for it, he would not hold it against me for choosing not to believe him.

The growing barrier in the dystopic setting of TCB is also a metaphor for the growth of the acceptance of the change to this better state of being. Take that rotting building I mentioned before, the layman sees only the ugliness of the rotting building and wants it torn down, replaced by a functioning prosperous place with fresh paint. The Buddhist, and thus the pony, looks under the broken awning on the side covered in shadow most of the day and sees a plant growing up from the broken asphalt and marvels at it's strength to break through eight centimeters of stone in a place where it only gets the sun it needs a few hours a day yet is still healthy. Even though the physical world is still unpleasant, the acceptance toward it changes attitudes towards those who live in it, and when more and more people accept what is, it brings the same positive feeling from seeing that rotting building as the layman would get from seeing the new one.

But just as I was upset by the idea that that Buddhist might ask me to give up novacain, so too are there people who fear and resist changes to the world that might force them to give up comforts or even make changes to themselves, and this is completely understandable. Just a month ago, I was out with a group, and they decided to do this rope bridge obstacle course twenty feet in the air. It sounded fun, and I went with them, but even with a harness, this did not remove my fear of heights which I did not expect from the view on the ground. Getting up there, I became dizzy and my palms became sweaty. My instincts told me that this was bad and I was afraid. It was made worse by the fact that after I passed the easy one, several kids who could not stop themselves from screaming blocked me in every direction. When I was able to get down, my nerves were frazzled, and as I sat waiting for the rest of my group, I heard several parents yelling at their children to get back up on the course. This was the insult to injury. They were scared, they were being pushed, and even if not physically, that push is shoving a person into a situation that they are not ready for and that makes a person more prone to failure and even more terrified than before. And everyone has a story of how they did “die” from being pushed. For me, in that moment, I thought about a time when I was five when my father pushed me in front of a 400lb pig when I was resisting, telling him, the pig didn't like me, he wouldn't believe me, and then having my shoulder dislocated as my dad grabbed my arm and threw me a good twenty feet as said pig squealed and spent the next five full minutes biting and stamping through my dad trying to get to me.

It upset me greatly that these parents thinking that they are helping to strengthen their children are only reinforcing the negative, and that feeling of ugliness and desperation shows up so often in TCB as the bad characters. To show you that the growth and freedom of ponification is possible even in the realness of reality, I'll continue my story: later, we tried again, and the second time, I again felt that fear, but I also felt control. I stood there on the platform and waited several long minutes and focused on the fact that no one was pushing me. I let the idea that something was wrong fade away by proving to that panic that there was no urgency, there was no threat. Eventually, I crossed an obstacle then another, and by the end I found myself laughing at the fact that I looked like I was crawling across the underside of a really long hammock and realized that I wasn't afraid, I was having fun.

When you take all of these elements and put them in perspective, this dysphoric setting of TCB is a metaphor for life: to the scared the change of the barrier is the death of the familiar, to the unafraid the change of the barrier is birth into a higher state of existence. When the writer is able to perceive the ignorance and selfishness of the populous, it becomes the people who ignore the obvious and suffer the long term consequences of their selfishness. The dystopic setting of The Conversion Bureau, and to be truthfully blunt about it, the Chatoverse, is big. Writing in it faithfully takes more experiences, more knowledge, more understanding, and more patience than most people are going to receive in their lifetime.

I said before, I am troubled by this obsession, because many are able to perceive the greatness of something bigger here, but few are able to understand what it really is. It reminds me of how the writers of MLP have treated Pinkie Pie: upon failing to understand her, they write her as random, loud, and somewhat obnoxious, because that is all that they can see. And others, not able to understand this oddity echo it in attempts to find answers – this same pattern of misunderstanding is what has made so many here, and everyone in those other groups focus on “the end of the world”…

The only real cure for a tumor is to cut it out, and that is why I am asking everyone who does not fully and completely understand the complexities of the dystopic TCB setting to NOT write in it… I still appreciate TCB stories, even the ones written in the dystopic setting, but no one can fake that deeper understanding that has made some of those special, and when a writer tries to fake it – that is when all I see is the ugly rotting building. To put it simply, I would rather read a story that is true to the heart of the author than one that is trying to be great.

5319119

The end of the world has never been a theme of The Conversion Bureau, and I can say this with certainty because the phrase “the end of the world” has always pertained to the end of life.

Um, no.

It’s a far from irrelevant point here that the word "world" originally meant something rather different, and much more specific, than it means to most people nowadays. In Old English it’s weorold or werold, wer meaning "man" or "human being" (as in werewolf, literally "manwolf") and old meaning more or less what it means in modern English. The world is the man-old, the time of men or of human beings, or more precisely a particular time defined by a particular humankind, a particular culture or kind of people; we’ll get to that in a future post.

That same habit of using one word to mean "world" and "age" isn’t restricted to Old English. The Hebrew word olam, the Greek word aion, and the Latin word saeculum, just for starters, also have the same double meaning—or, to be a bit more precise, the same single meaning that we, in the modern industrial world, split into two fragments.

The opening quotation from the article in question:

"There is something about the destruction of civilization that connects with the modern reader."

"The end of the world", in this context, clearly means "the end of our current way of life / culture / civilization / era". TCB is about adapting to a new way of life, integrating into a new culture and civilization, and the start of a new era. Q.E.D.

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