The Conversion Bureau/YMMV

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The setting is about My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic enacting a very forceful Assimilation Plot on the whole of humanity, as the better option against the alternative of getting killed by lethal magic. This is depicted as a good thing within the fic verse. No wonder this fic and its spinoffs have become the most divisive fics within the fandom. This is not helped by the many fan writers who use their Conversion Bureau fics as vehicles for misanthropy and misandry, and ramp the mischaracterization of the FIM cast up to eleven.
• Bile Fascination: Genuine fans of The Conversion Bureau do exist, but the setting has also attracted people who are just curious about the setting's misanthropic premise.
• Broken Base: One side loves the setting for its Wish Fulfillment, the other side hates the setting for its misanthropic premise. The one thing they have in common is that they each loathe the opposing side and if they meet, expect to see some spectacular fireworks.
• Canon Defilement: A lot of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fans despise these stories as they feel the messages they espouse are completely contrary to the lessons that the show teaches about friendship.
• Flame War: The original and its spinoffs tend to inspire these. Half of the comments decry the series as disturbingly misanthropic, while the other half fanatically defend it as an accurate representation of humanity's flawed nature.
• Fridge Brilliance: Celestia is dramatically more powerful and has a different personality than her canon self. If the Gods Need Prayer Badly trope is in effect for the Conversion Bureau universe, this actually makes sense: Celestia multiplied her number of followers several times over in just a couple short years, so she's riding high on an ENORMOUS power boost.
• Idiot Ball: An Azure Future, in spades. After an entire story of wanting to remain human and not undergo conversion, the protagonist pulls a complete ideological 180, joins up with a terrorist organization and helps them successfully carpet-bomb a human settlement, then gases a cop whose only mistake was trying to give him a speeding ticket. Making the whole matter worse, the only reason he decided to help the terrorists was so they would convert him in exchange - something that is their entire purpose to do anyway. Not to mention he could've walked into any of a dozen nearby Conversion Bureaus and had the process done legitimately by trained professionals at any time. He receives nothing worse than mild disappointment from Celestia for the whole thing.
• Internet Backdraft: Expect the comments section for any of these stories to get ugly, fast.
• Love It or Hate It: People have very strong opinions about this story.
• Misaimed Fandom: The setting was written by Blaze merely as a means to explain the lack of humans in Equestria and as Wish Fulfillment. The misanthropic overtones were not intentional, but were the result of Blaze's lack of writing skills. Subsequent fans took the accidental misanthropy and ramped it up, using the setting to espouse their Humans Are the Real Monsters views.
• Never Live It Down: Blaze acquired an enduring reputation as a absolute misanthrope due to this story.
  • The misanthropy laced first chapter is widely mistaken as being emblematic of the fic as a whole.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The setting as a whole is better known for the fights it provokes between fans than actual stories. And of those actual stories, many of them them are only known for being overtly misanthropic.
• Rooting for the Empire: Even though the Human Liberation Front are almost always depicted as racist terrorists and thugs, many readers found it easier to sympathize with them because of the obnoxious self-righteous attitudes of the ponies, and because the ponies and the PER are the aggressors.
• Straw Man Has a Point: The primary antagonist group is the Human Liberation Front, who believes the ponies are a threat to humanity and must be destroyed. They're treated as unambiguous, totally evil villains, but they're completely right about the first part.
• Tear Jerker: The spinoff fic Last Man Standing makes both the humans and ponies vastly more sympathetic than the original and treats the Purification as a necessary evil. It centers around a man who is about to get killed in said purification because he refuses to get ponified; he has to come to grips with the fact that his species is about to go extinct, and the ponies have to deal with the fact that there's absolutely nothing they can do to save him. He dies triumphantly though, having managed to preserve human history with the aid of Twilight Sparkle.
• Unfortunate Implications: By the truckload. Most notably, one race is forcing an entire separate race to convert, giving up all of their history, culture, and identity to conform to the new race's rules and order, or be slaughtered. This is treated as a good thing.

Works by Chatoyance

• Anvilicious: The messages in her stories are delivered with roughly the grace and subtlety of a train wreck. The plot commonly is set aside for extended passages in order to expound upon the author's beliefs regarding gender, technology, science, the environment, religion, etc. through what are nominally supposed to be the characters' thoughts. Individual stories are never used to convey a single message; the same worldview is summarized again in its entirety in every single story.
• Bile Fascination: There are genuine fans of her setting but there are just as many, if not more "fans" who are interested only out of morbid curiosity about the author's extreme misanthropy as well as the setting's bizarre and unsettling morality.
• Broken Base: Yep, just like the other Conversion Bureau stories. One faction loves the setting they depict and the worldbuilding. The other faction utterly despises them for what they see are stories full of bad writing, misanthropic overtones, and general Unfortunate Implications. The second point of contention is whether or not her stories can even be called My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction because of just how different Chatoyance's version of Equestria and the ponies are from the source material, to the point that they might as well be original creations. One faction claims that just using the names is enough. The second faction claims that the author has to make some attempt at making the characters and setting match the source material.
• Canon Defilement: Many fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic loathe these stories not just because the messages they espouse are completely contrary to the lessons that the show teaches about friendship, but because the Equestria and ponies that Chatoyance writes about share little more than names with the setting and characters of the show.
• Crap Saccharine World: Equestria is a bright world of plenty ruled by benevolent deities and there is no war, hatred or violence. Too bad that its inhabitants are essentially slaves to an insane goddess.
• Designated Hero:
  • Michealson and Morely of The PER: Michelson and Morely - The Speed Of Right are the heroes of the story but they do things like engage in ponification attacks.
  • The princesses count, too. They're always the heroes even when they're committing genocide.
  • The ponies are always portrayed as being heroes who are morally superior to the humans, even though they're complicit in the conversion/genocide.
  • Even though the bioterrorists in "New Universe Three: The Friendship Virus" were praised both in the narration and by the other characters in the story for bringing about world peace as well as eliminating crime and violence, many readers pointed out that intentionally releasing a virus is reckless at best, and more often than not, straight-up bioterrorism.
• Designated Villain:
  • Humans in her stories are always portrayed as being in the wrong, if not straight-up evil simply because they didn't want to convert or defended themselves against the ponies.
  • In The Reasonably Adamant Down With Celestia Newfoal Society!, the Newfoals who are members of the eponymous group are depicted as being in the wrong simply because they are not entirely pleased with their transformation. The catch is that they have legitimate reasons to be upset as some of them were forcibly transformed by the PER.
• Fanon: Chatoyance openly states that her version of Equestria, the Princesses, and the ponies is “more in line with Lauren Faust's original vision” than that of the show, and can get quite upset when the show deviates from her fanon.
  • Comments about her most recent story, Around the Bend, show that this attitude extends to episodes and setting information written by Faust herself.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Chatoyance rejects nearly the entirety of the show's second season. She also rejects portions of the first season. In fact, she rejects everything about the show that she dislikes, which has resulted in her re-writing more or less the entirety of the setting, characters and events.
• Karma Houdini: The princesses essentially commit genocide and get away with it.
• Mary Suetopia: The ponies of Equestria live in perfect harmony with their surroundings and with each other, free of vice, prejudice, and anything that the author does not approve of.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Any discourse about Chatoyance's stories will be dominated by discussions of their misanthropic nature and her attitude. And of the stories, these three works get the bulk of the controversy:
  • "Ten Minutes: Aftermath", which was widely seen as a spiteful Take That to fans of the original "Ten Minutes" story — as well as fans of anti-TCB stories — it was based on. In addition to that, many also saw it as a Fix Fic or even Hate Fic towards the idea that Celestia was capable of losing. Finally, a lot of people took umbrage with how it was advertised on the original story with a mocking comment^[1]..
  • "New Universe Three: The Friendship Virus" was absolutely savaged for the incredibly sexist premise, sharing only the names of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and The Conversion Bureau, and the fact that it seemed to endorse bioterrorism.
  • The Reasonably Adamant Down With Celestia Newfoal Society! is known mostly for being Chatoyance's Take That, Critics! story thanks to the mean-spirited depiction of the eponymous Newfoals (an obvious stand in for her critics), who were unhappy about their forced transformation.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: The members of the eponymous society in the story The Reasonably Adamant Down With Celestia Newfoal Society! are portrayed by the narration as Ungrateful Bastards who don't realize how great their life as Newfoals are, given that they're magical creatures living in a utopia. Many readers felt their ungratefulness is justified as several of them were ponified against their wills.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: This happens to two characters in The 800 Year Promise
  • The traveling minstrel named Willelmus Learmount helped Celestia when she was stranded in 12th century England and as a reward, he was the first ponified human, being transformed into an Earth Pony named Willelmus Learmount Starshine Blueblood. This granted him a soul, life in paradise, and salvation and he begs her to "help all men as she had helped me", which she agrees to. The narration frames it as Celestia giving the man a well-deserved reward for his good deeds and helping all of humanity, but many readers saw Celestia as a Manipulative Bastard who exploited the man's lack of education and poor living conditions to justify her invasion of Earth and ponification campaign.
  • Likewise with Willelmus Learmount, the narration frames him as a hero for rescuing humanity, but the readers saw him as a selfish man who sold out all of present and future humanity for his own salvation.