• Member Since 13th May, 2012
  • offline last seen Monday

McPoodle


A cartoon dog in a cartoon world

T
Source

A vulnerable population is under attack from a monstrous scourge. Deluded bronies are welcoming their transformations into Technicolor equines, only to have their minds and souls systematically devoured by the ponies whose shapes they are taking.

I am Dr. Nathan Franklin, psychotherapist. I alone realize what is happening. And I will do everything in my power to stop it.


A somewhat unconventional view of the PonyEarthverse. As this is an unfolding story in a collaborative setting, character tags will be added as appropriate.

Chapters (18)
Comments ( 131 )

From da blog

Now I could never write a PonyEarthverse fic.

Just had to prove yourself wrong, didn't you?

That cover pic is from a 1997 video game developed by Westwood Studios: Blade Runner. Joe Turkel voiced Eldon Tyrell.

This is very good insofar, I do like the psychologist's character.

I can't help but notice that the fanfic picture is Eldon Tyrel from Blade Runner, specifically from the Westwood Studios game. Anyways, added this one as my favourite as this one has potential. Keep it up!

If he turns into a pony, wouldn't you have to call the size change between bodies a shrink?

Please lay him down on, or perhaps under your couch and attempt to psychoanalyze him.

Huh. I've been meaning to look into this continuity, and this is certainly an engaging start. Definitely looking forward to more, especially the professional take on an avatar of chaos and insanity.

This protagonist is really entertaining. Great new story, McPoodle!

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I wanted a picture of a famous movie psychiatrist with glasses and looking sinister, but I really couldn't find one, so I figured Tyrell was close enough.

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Yes, yes I would. And don't think that he wouldn't comment wryly on the fact.

Which is neither to confirm nor deny that Dr. Franklin will become a pony in the immediate future.

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Thank you all so much for the words of encouragement!

I'm going to say right up front that my only actual experience of psychiatry comes from the way they are (mis-)characterized in the movies, plus stuff I look up on Wikipedia. I am well aware that some of you reading this are much better informed on the subject than I. So, if I ever manage to make Dr. Franklin act so out of line that it breaks your suspension of belief, feel free to correct me, either in the comments or via PM.

You know, I never could get into ponyearthverse stories. Mainly because of the 'merging' part. (which to me is akin to a personality death and that is one of my pet hates in transformation stories).
But a story from an outsider perspective, who seems to experience similar horror realization? I could totally get behind. :twilightsmile:

Warning: this comment is pure hype and not indicative of the true quality of the story
////////

>Sees description
"hmm, this looks like it could make a really cool and interesting story"
>clicks link
>sees author
"well, looks like this WILL be a really cool and interesting story"

If this is anything like your best of all worlds story it is going to be amazing, and I do love that it's a bit critical of "brony self insert" culture.

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Holy god, I SO am going to need your character. He opens so many possibilities for Glasny's situation, and I've got SO many holes to poke in his observation and reasoning too.

I am confused right now, but don't worry it's good kind of confusion, the kind that makes me want to find out more.

So Discord is out, I suppose, as he is the one causing this. I wonder if alicorn OCs are still on the table?

Oh lookie, a rabbit hole! I wonder how deep it goes!:moustache:

This is the point where I tweaked the chapter to make Dr. Franklin a more believable clinical psychologist using cognitive behavioral therapy instead of the Freudian psychiatrist stereotype I was using earlier.

Plot and character-wise, nothing really changed.

This is the point where I edited this chapter to make Dr. Franklin a psychologist instead of a psychiatrist. I also had him link the video of his appearance on YouTube, so anybody who wants can seek it out.

This is the point where I tweaked this chapter to make Dr. Franklin a psychologist instead of a psychiatrist.

To give you the full effect, let me describe what was going through Little Lulu’s head as she was being herded towards my door:
Today has been a bad day. In fact, to use her vernacular, it positively “sucks”. Her eighth consecutive attempt to steal computers from local elementary schools ended for once in failure instead of success when an off-duty mall cop caught her attempting to flee from an unexpectedly armed security system with a half-dozen hard drives stuffed in the pockets of her long jacket.
Every moment after that had been a constant harassment. The few adults who don’t hate on her for breaking the law or who either use or threaten physical force to put her back in her place in the social hierarchy are all a bunch of fakers, pretending sympathy for her in order to earn a buck. And now, because she was too wise for the “good cop, bad cop” routine, she’s being handed off to some fancy shrink. Well, she’ll show him.
The door is opened, she’s shoved inside, and it’s slammed shut behind her, with a strange sound like a quiet airlock being cycled. The first thing she notices is the heat—it’s got to be a hundred degrees in here. She tries to step forward, only to have her foot unexpectedly slowed down by the thick shag carpeting. The room is circular, mostly, except for the wall containing the door, and all of that circle is glass, revealing a jaw-dropping view of the City of Angels in mid-afternoon. It’s even tinted so you can look out at this time of day without getting a headache.
She looks around. There’s an impressively large set of filing cabinets on one side, and an imposing desk with a swivel chair at the other. Behind the desk is a high-end sound system, playing something too faint to be clearly made out. It sounds Classical—strings and flutes, backed by a slow but insistent rhythm. Between the desk and the cabinets is the kind of couch she’d always imagined in a place like this, and lying face-down on that couch is the shrink, Dr. Franklin. He has himself propped up on one arm, and he’s using the other to fill out some paperwork with a pen. Her paperwork, Lulu is certain. The man’s shoes had been tossed haphazardly in a corner, while lying next to him are a navy blue blazer and a bright red necktie that looks like it had been loosened and pulled over his head to save him having to retie it the next time somebody forced him to wear it.
Dr. Franklin is a tall man, and very fit—he was probably a hunk back in the 90’s, she thought to herself. His hair is short, and also mussed—thereby proving the theory about the tie. He’s wearing tan slacks and a pale blue polo shirt, and has on a pair of large glasses with black square rims. Waiting for him on the corner of his desk is a scotch on the rocks. It’s not even on a coaster.
“Hey,” Lulu says.
“Hey,” Dr. Franklin replies in a bored tone. “I still have to fill this crap out, so make yourself comfortable. Oh, and sorry about the heat—the unit’s busted.”
She looks behind her, and spots the open bar. “Can I pour myself a drink to cool off?” she asks sarcastically.
He glances back at her for a second, and clearly sees that she’s underage. “Take whatever you want,” the man says, turning back to his work. His words are perfectly in time with the rhythm of the song on the stereo.
Whoa, she thinks to herself. He could totally get arrested for that. Seeing what else the bar is stocked with, she decides to push even more buttons by lighting up a Virginia Slims. “Do you mind?” she asks, expertly blowing a smoke ring his way.
He looks straight at her as the ring breaks around his rugged face, not even blinking at the moment it hits. He picks up the paperwork and points at it. “What do you want me to put down?” he asks, and then he stands up.
He’s freakin’ tall!
The question the shrink asks is so unexpected to Lulu that it takes several seconds for her to process it. That, and it’s getting real hot in here. “Uh, what’s the question?” she asks.
“The cops want to know where you and your driver stashed the PC’s before you fenced them,” he says, perching himself on the edge of his desk and toying with the drink. “Which bullshit location would you like to send them to first?” His words are regular and even, spaced according to the beat of the song.
Lulu grips the cigarette between her teeth like F.D.R. and laughs out loud. “What’s your angle?” she asks.
“No angle,” he says, holding up both hands. He glances over at the one holding the scotch, and then takes a swig before hopping down. “They think I’m some kind of miracle worker who’ll do whatever I’m told,” he says, working himself up, “but I just like helping people in trouble, so screw ‘em! I mean, I’m sure you can convince those bastards that you’ve got a whole gang of followers that moved the loot out of the dump you’re going to tell me about the minute after you were picked up.”
“Yeah,” she says with a nod. “Yeah, I like that plan!” Her words too are now matching the music’s tempo. She starts pacing back and forth—the air seems thick and sticky, like the smoke she exhaled earlier has congealed into cotton candy. “We could...we could send them to the dumps! The real garbage dumps!”
“Yeah!” he exclaims, “I’d love to see the look on their faces after having to dig through this for a few hours.” As he says this, he fiddles with his iPad. Walking beside her, he shows her a Google Maps overhead view of a junk heap. “What do you think? This ring of cars?”
“No, how about that pile over there,” she says, pointing. “It looks like it could fall right on top of those pigs!”
He’s...he’s so close to her. She can almost make out his scent underneath the expensive cologne.
“Alright,” he whispers in her ear. “Now with that taken care of, what else can I help you with?”
Lulu thinks back to the look on her lover’s face as he took off in her car, leaving her to take the blame. “Do you think you can help me get back at Tubby?” she asks. The combination of the heat, the music, and the smoke is causing her to sway back and forth.
“Yeah, I think I can do something,” he says, bringing his hands up to her temples. There is a slight press inwards...and the cigarette drops to the floor.
Wait WHAT:rainbowhuh: Wait what?:derpyderp1: Wait wHAT?:twilightoops: WAIT WOT:rainbowhuh: WOT :pinkiegasp:

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Oh good! Somebody noticed. For awhile there, I thought none of my readers minded what Dr. Franklin did in that scene.

I'm admittedly not an expert on this sort of thing, but I'm fairly sure hypnosis doesn't work quite that way. I mean, you can't just tell someone to look into your eyes and rewrite their memories like that! Well, unless Dr. Franklin is secretly Yuri or something, I guess.

I'm really not sure what to think of this story so far. Not in terms of quality, I mean. It is by all measures excellent. But I can't tell what tone it's going for. Conceptually, this whole personality merging thing that the Ponyearthverse apparently does with every story as a rule freaks me out, and I feel a lot of affinity with the psychologist for recognising this for the horror that it is.

However, I'm not sure that I'm supposed to, and the style of writing is a lot like BoAPW, in that it seems lighthearted and full of low key humour. Talking about the looming threat of Discord and all the newsfeeds and focus on global events though, it makes it seem a lot heavier than that, like an actual real world crisis would be, and it helps that you've really taken steps to make it seem like the real world, weird calender dates aside.

And I like how subtly critical it is of self-insert or OC culture and a lot of the other aspects it's playing with here. (I'm going to take a wild guess and say that most Ponyearthverse stories probably use some of these tropes unironically, what with it being a universe full of bronies living out this fantasy scenario.) Yet it also seems very immersed in this universe, what with the frequent references to other stories, and the fact that the villains here (PAPA) seem like they were probably the villains of other stories in this verse as well, and it makes me wonder what the tone we're going for here is.

Is it a subtle parody of an overblown phenomenon of wish fulfilment stories that plays the concept straight instead of as a fantasy, thereby exposing all these implications that the actual authors never thought of and creating something a little more macabre than this universe was intended to be, (a bit like how Conversion Bureau's premise would later give rise to a strain of fics that interpreted the conversions as genocide)? Or is this fully within the spirit of the universe, one of many stories in the continuity that examine this uniquely terrifying idea, and am I just being prejudiced by assuming the former because of the associations with the usual tropes of brony-in-Equestria and self insert fanfiction? Or, hell, am I getting this entirely wrong and seeing all this symbolism and critique and crap when it's not really there, and I'm just being an idiot for reading too much into a story about a funny psychologist talking to pony-men?

What I'm saying is, I don't get your motivation, Poodle.

DA FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!

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Dr. Franklin pretty much admitted that he has some unnatural ability in this field. Have you ever heard of The Shadow? :pinkiegasp:

Yeah, he's not like that. But he's somewhere in the ballpark.

P.S. By "Yuri", do you mean Yuri Gargarin the cosmonaut, or Yuri Andropov the infamous head of the KGB? :rainbowderp:

I don't play video games, or watch anime, so I'm going to guess that the Yuri you're actually thinking of comes from one of those.

2920077 What evil lurks in the hearts of men? The cardiologist knows!

le yuri 4 the unenlightened poodles
pics.mobygames.com/images/covers/large/1179606067-00.jpg

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Hmm...how best to phrase this?

I mentioned in one of my earliest blog entries that I played out all of my desire to tell serious fanfiction in the last fandom I was a part of. In the world of My Little Pony, I consider myself a tourist, and everything I write is for my own amusement first and foremost.

Well, PonyEarthverse is a vacation inside a vacation for me. I'm walking around in this world, and putting down my opinions for you to read. But do not forget that this is a collaborative setting. So perhaps it would be better to consider me a leashed dog on vacation. I do not mind the restrictions; rather, I embrace them--the Road Runner cartoons are as good as they are precisely because of the restrictions Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese put on themselves, after all, and I can never get tired of Tom & Jerry cartoons (except for the ones made by Chuck Jones, ironically enough).

That's the other wonderful thing about writing in a shared setting: You and I may both have a good idea where the common narrative is going to end up, but your guess is as good as mine how we are going to get there.

But the walk to get there is going to be fun. That's the one thing I definitely can control.

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That's as good an answer as any, I suppose.

I'll be following this story's progress intently.

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Also, it isn't exactly wish fufillment. Almost nobody starts out knowing that the other pony is there. When they become aware of it, there is usually a serious freakout. Dash, Twilight, Pinkie, and Rarity's companions all spazzed when they realized what was happening; Applejack's counterpart probably didn't spazz about it because she was already spazzing about being BURIED ALIVE; and Fluttershy's counterpart didn't actually talk to Shy cause they were both so shy until they fused.

This was great.

That last line put a chill in heart and a smile upon my face, this is something i love.

Can't wait to see the world burn.

But the question is if the doctor is a main character.

And no... not that doctor... the one in this story

I do love it when people remember that, in Discord's opinion, a live victim is orders of magnitude more interesting than a dead one.

Also, Dr. Franklin may be one of the most compelling non-villain antagonists I've ever seen. Especially since, in his mind, he's entirely in the right. Heck, he's got me convinced, especially since I'm finding it difficult to get involved in other stories set in this universe. The only reason I'm not rooting for him is that alliance with Discord. Anything the draconequus wants probably isn't in line with what's best for anyone. Except Discord himself, of course.

Eagerly looking forward to more.

Again, allying with Discord - A sign that we're following the story of a villain here. And yet I completely agree with him and want him to win.

He's right, regardless of his "choice" in allies.

It's hard to taking anything discord says at face value, but if he's being legit...

It also helps that I'm not reading any other stories set in this universe, so Doctor Franklin is an ultra-protagonist in my book.

So many ideas... just so many.

Also Psychonauts. I do hope you've brushed up on that.

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Hmm...interesting. Predictably, I had no idea what Psychonauts was before I looked it up, because it's a game. I suck at strategy games, because my thinking is too slow, and I suck at any game requiring hand-eye coordination, because I haven't got any.

I'll watch the first few parts of a walkthrough to get the general feel.

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It's really more of a platform adventure type of game than any MAJOR strategy, but some of the ending levels get pretty frustrating. It's also one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played. I have an extra copy if you'd like to try it out yourself.

I definitely recommend that you go watch Yhatzee's review of Psychonauts if you need convinced of how fun it is.

Well done although i would like to see his reaction to i think it was reid or skyblaze who backed up both personalitys

Or the Pinkie Halloween song. Or the Celestia/Luna missing news with Twilight apparently being shot.

Don't worry. We may be slow going, but soon enough he's going to be meeting a mane cast member.

This xeserves many more upvotes than it has right now.

Perhaps people just dont like POE stories?

I mean, why would he have kidnapped this one pony? And not even one of the Bearers? It didn’t make any sense.

Yes, because Discord is famous for following a wholly rational and sensical chain of logic. :ajbemused:

In any case, a good transitory chapter. Looking forward to more.

Still eagerly waiting to see where this is going.

Good chapter overall. I'm not incredibly amazed or anything, but there is nothing I can find wrong in it.

8!

that's an 8 with a punctuation. Not an e-mote.

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