In The Conversion Bureau setting, Equestria and Earth are fated to meet. Usually everything goes wrong but somehow turns out ok in the end. Imagine what might happen if everything went "right".
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- Member Since 31st Mar, 2012
- offline last seen Last Thursday
PeachClover
Harmony, should not be a delusion held only by those who have not suffered, but the knowledge that wrongs can be forgiven and life eventually returned to peace.
PeachClover
Joined 31st Mar, 2012 ·
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'Bibliognost' - super cool name for the spell of absorbing knowledge from books.
Interesting premise and story setting! I love the way Equestria is positioned as an amusment park, and the way humanity deals with the wealth imbalance. Really genius stuff there - never did I consider what solid gold bits would do to earth, and I should have. That you did is admirable!
That said, this story needs serious editing. Also, the issue of the memory of Discord felt a little weak to me - in order to sanction straight up execution, I think we need to see that memory, or part of it. I needed to percieve Discord as more of a threat than the show has portrayed him - chaos is nightmarish, yes, but not malevolent per se. Discord just had no comprehension of how chaos hurt others, and thus can be forgiven and made friend of... once he shows the capacity to care. Execution, I think, needs the justification of incurable malevolence at a minimum. If that were demonstrated, the stated goal of having the characters 180 their values feel legitimate would have more weight and believability. Or so I think.
The character of Jody seemed a little wasted. He appears, makes some noise, then only returns briefly at the end. He felt throwaway to me. I feel that more should have been done with him, or he should not have been given such a big initial part. He feels like a red herring.
Analysis and criticism aside, the basic concept here is fascinating. This is an interesting new take on things, and I feel that expanding on how the two cultures, two worlds interact and come to terms with each other could be run with for many stories. The notion of a theme park that is actually another world, one which it is possible to enter and leave at will, but which it is also possible to run away into forever has a LOT of potential. It already has me thinking about possibly, maybe, just perhaps taking it on. There is gold in them thar hills of premise.
Also, I love the cover image, and the Voice Of Serling intro and outro.
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Thank you. I wanted this spell to sound and be described as potentially scary for those who cast it.
It was not my intention to have the reader view Equestria as an amusement park. Most TCB stories are set up with the desperate urgency of the expanding barrier, but I really wanted to demonstrate the two worlds meeting without any potential of the alien invasion cliché, so I wrote Celestia acclimating humans to her presence and appealing to their most plebeian attitudes.
Well, the way I see it is that Discord during his reign was a sadistic torturer and murderer, but he was also the most powerful being. When Celestia fought Nightmare Moon, Discord was shown Celestia's compassion and restraint, because when those two fought they came within a second and a half of destroying the entire universe, so fighting either of them would come down to luck and cost dearly, but fighting both of them would be like a small ice cube versus a volcano. Discord, encased in stone, had to watch that helplessly, and he realized that if he ever escaped his stone prison, even working against them, he would have to play by their rules lest he incur their wrath. Luna could have fought Discord on her own, but a direct confrontation would put countless lives at risk, because her sister's promise was she would only kill him if she had a "real chance" which means nothing short of a coup de grace to her. The memory that Luna injected into the element bearers is something that I would rather leave up to the reader's imagination. I want the reader to know that Discord has done something horrible enough to make a god want to kill him, a god standby and let it happen, and his best friend agree that he deserves to die without traumatizing the reader with the specifics - I want the reader to be able to sit and think about not only the moral dilemma of "does someone still deserve to die if they have murdered and become good" but also to contemplate Luna's refusal to forgive even after her own attempt of also trying to kill every living thing even if out of some twisted concept of compassion - and to explain that to anyone who is reading: it is my belief that Luna was driven mad when long in the past, the ponies acted a lot like humans do today, except she had the power to feel them killing each other and couldn't turn it off, so she devised a way of leveling the playing field by killing off every living thing all at once fairly, and recreating them in a way to not be able to harm each other.
I'm very sorry you feel that way... You see, Jody is what I jokingly call the "every-fan". Jody represents the fans of MLP who just want to go to Equestria and live the rest of their lives as an average pony. He says he hates life on earth and is willing to put his life at risk just to leave. Was Jody abused, neglected, or does he just perceive so much potential that humans aren't living up to, that he feels that daily life is a constant disappointment? I didn't answer this question nor did I explain what type of pony Jody had become, because there is a little bit of all of us who wants to be Jody, and because of that, I invited readers to see themselves as Jody while leaving what Jody did with his life in Equestria completely up to the imagination of the reader. I'm also sure that many readers felt a pang of guilt when Jody says he didn't care about earth. The "Jodies" of the other universes might have acted differently, but this is a story of personal failures. Jody's failure is that he longed to live in a world of beauty, but at a crucial moment, he did the ugliest thing he could do, and helped take the last bit of fight out of somepony who did want to act in beauty.
I had hoped that the subtle hints would frame this better, but you see: no pony, not one, not even Princess Celestia in this universe, can wrap their minds around the desire to have a different body as a form of escapism. That is why the princesses have a moment of mental awkwardness toward Jody's glee at transformation. It doesn't make sense to them because they don't separate sentient beings based on their physical forms. Celestia probably thought that Megan's desire to visit Equestria as a pony was the imagination of a child just throwing nonsense because her mind was set in random mode, like a human child saying, "If I do this thing for you, I want you to take me shopping at the toy store... as the shopping basket." It's that moment of pausing to see if you heard correctly. Twilight and Luna comment about the social differences in English which they don't register as tribalistic discrimination because that is so far in their past it is a foreign concept.
On another note, it is my belief that amusement parks don't exist in Equestria, any Equestria, because the idea that you have to go to a particular place to find amusement, is another foreign concept to ponies who at this point in their evolution are able to find happiness and amusement basically where ever they are. Oh~ every town has a band stand built into the parks, which are literally for bands, and there are particular places where ponies go to experience one particular thing, but the concept of a generalized, paid admission, park where every thing inside of it has the promise of potentially amusing the patron comes off as silly to these ponies, because anything and everything in life has the same potential. Why should they pay for it? Earth has greater potential for amusing ponies like Twilight who enjoys the challenge of puzzling out other cultures in hopes of expanding her scientific knowledge. Luna was pleased as punch because earth offered new sensations that she was aware were literally alien. For a being who has had the time to eat every type of food on the planet, through other pony's dreams at least, experiencing something new can come with a certain hysteria.
If I have inspired you then by all means, let your creative juices flow, but I didn't want this story to come off as Celestia selling "The Authentic Equestria Experience"; she really is, in her mind, fulfilling the utterly ridiculous whim of a child because during a time of need, she made this promise, and this Celestia always keeps her promises unless extraordinary circumstances push her into acting for the greater good, but even this will only delay her promises not break them.
Thank you. I really wanted this story to feel like an episode of some other universe's Twilight Zone, and I cannot in any short terms express to you how meticulously I went over this story to ensure that it came off that way; I even worked to encourage the reader to envision the story in black and white. Nearly every episode gets stuck in my mind because as we were warned, each contains both the summit of imagination and the pit of fear. A good Twilight Zone episode must have enough imagination for us to want it, but enough fear, to make us weigh the consequences very very carefully.