YMMV / The Conversion Bureau: The Chatoverse

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Celestia a genuine savior to a dying human race? Or is she a ruthless opportunist taking advantage of a bad situation for her own selfish gains? Or is she a cruel, insane goddess invading and subjugating Earth so she can gain more worshippers?
  • In the comments for her story The Taste of Grass, Chatoyance wrote that she writes "stories of humans faced with the greatest terror of all: actually getting what they imagine they want when they pray to their gods and worship in their churches and temples; an eternal land of kindness and brotherhood, ruled by wise and compassionate, eternal parental figures, freed from the drive to fight and acquire and conquer." With this in mind, it can very well be that the entire series is a Stealth Parody of religious extremism told by an Unreliable Narrator, and that the second interpretation is the correct one.
• Anvilicious: The moral lessons in Chatoverse stories are delivered frequently and unsubtly. The plot is commonly set aside for extended passages in order to expound upon the author's beliefs and worldview.
• Applicability: Although this was presumably not the intent of the author (who is non-religious), it's very easy to read her stories through the lens of Evangelical Christianity, as explained in this Reddit comment pointing out how this series could be seen as Left Behind but with ponies. The entire point may be for the stories to be a Stealth Parody of such millenarianism.
  The inherent Sins of Humanity can only be washed by divine rebirth. Luckily for the world, God has taken an earthly form to Save humanity and bring about the kingdom of Heaven.
  But the unsaved humans are resistant, they don't want to give up their Sins, they are so lost they don't even understand they are. So they attack the prophets sent by God, and the war for humanity souls between the King of Heaven and the Prince of the World begins, with most humans on the wrong side.
  Those humans who choose the side of God are transformed in spirit, becoming more pure and godly, as their sins are washed away.
  Ultimately God Prevails and Ushers in the Kingdom of Heaven, where all those who weren't cast to the pit live in Utopia.
• Audience-Coloring Adaptation: Thanks to her prolific output of stories, a lot of the elements in Chatoyance's stories have made their way into The Conversion Bureau genre as a whole. In addition, she's often thought to be the originator of the genre.
• Bile Fascination: While the Chatoverse has its sincere fans, many readers are interested in the stories specifically because they find the stories' underlying morality strange and disturbing.
• Bizarro Episode: Recombinant 63 is very different in tone from Chatoyance's other stories. In particular, chapter eight was a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment in a story that's already a bit of a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. Apparently, she was sleep-deprived at the time of writing.
• Broken Base: Even more so than the original and the other spin-offs. There are people who love her stories and the universes they depict, and there are those who despise them and see them as a nightmare of bad writing and disturbingly misanthropic implications.
• Canon Defilement: A lot of people criticized the Chatoverse Equestria and ponies for being In Name Only versions of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. In addition fans also criticized how jerkass ponies and the times where the Mane Six had their moments of asshattery were ignored.
• Designated Hero:
  • Michelson and Morely of The PER: Michelson and Morely - The Speed Of Right are the heroes of the story but they do things like engaging in ponification attacks, transforming people against their will.
  • The princesses. They're always the heroes, even when they're arguably committing genocide. And the ponies themselves, who are depicted as being morally superior to humans just because they're ponies.
  • The bio-terrorists from "New Universe Three: The Friendship Virus" are hailed in-story for bringing about world peace and eliminating crime and violence by releasing a DNA-altering virus that changes people's personalities.
• Designated Villain: Humans are depicted as evil unless they convert — even if they have done nothing wrong. Those who convert are merely "misguided" beings who are being "uplifted" into a supposedly better state of living.
  • The newfoals that make up the eponymous organization in The Reasonably Adamant Down With Celestia Newfoal Society are portrayed as in the wrong for not being entirely on board with their transformations (some of them were converted by the PER unwillingly). It's only when they change their minds at the end that they're portrayed more positively.
• Moment of Awesome: "New Universe Seven: Mankind Triumphant". Humans steal the statue of Discord, feed it through a rock crusher, coat a nuclear warhead in it, send it through the barrier, and detonate it, destroying all of Equestria and obliterating all of Celestia except for her still screaming head, which is locked away in a magic-proof box.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: In general, Chatoyance's more radical take on TCB (which itself is also an example of this trope) has made her works just as controversial as the original story, if not even moreso. Specific examples include:
  • The Conversion Bureau: Brand New Universe was an anthology compilation that reinvented the basic premise of TCB as "completely original, shockingly new visions". However, many people are only aware of a single story in that compilation: "New Universe Three: The Friendship Virus". The story itself is an In Name Only Author Tract where bioterrorists created a Synthetic Plague that eliminated most differences between the sexes, bringing about a peaceful utopia...and has attracted criticism for its overtly sexist premise and being an In Name Only My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and The Conversion Bureau story.
  • "Ten Minutes: Aftermath" was written as an entry for a contest where the prompt was to write an alternate ending to someone else's story. Most people know nothing about it, other than it being a Take That! towards "Ten Minutes" and for how the original draft was advertised in the comments section of the original story with a mocking comment:
    This is my answer to this story (HEE! HEE! HEEE!!!!)
    Ten Minutes: Aftermath
  • The Reasonably Adamant Down With Celestia Newfoal Society! was written as a way to explore how the victims felt about their Forced Transformation. It's now known as pretty much as Chatoyance's Take That, Critics! story for how it depicts main characters (who are obvious stand-ins for critics of the Chatoverse) as incompetent whiners for daring to be unhappy about being forcibly transformed.
• Rooting for the Empire: Despite the HLF being portrayed as terrorists and thugs, fans have come to like the high-level HLF operative named Ralph in The 800 Year Promise. He introduces himself cheerfully, completely outwits the heroes, trumps them in a moral debate, isn't afraid to get his hands dirty, and calls Celestia out on her more questionable acts.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: The newfoals that make up the eponymous organization in The Reasonably Adamant Down With Celestia Newfoal Society. The narrative frames them as a bunch of ungrateful whiners who don't realize how great they've now got it since they're now magical creatures living in a Sugar Bowl utopia, but for a great many readers, their complaints are not entirely unfounded as several of them were transformed against their will (one was even ponified in her sleep).
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: To two separate characters in The 800 Year Promise:
  • Celestia, rendered distraught by the horrors of Nightmare Moon and Discord followed by seeing the Crapsack World that is medieval Europe, promised a 12th century English peasant named Willelmus (later ponified into Prince Blueblood) a soul, afterlife and salvation for the human race at his behest. While it was framed as Celestia trying to do the right thing, perhaps maybe clouded by idealism, lot of readers saw Celestia as being a Manipulative Bastard that exploited the man's lack of education and poor living conditions to provide a flimsy justification for invading Earth.
  • The 12th century English peasant named Willelmus was intended to be seen as a hero for giving humanity the keys to salvation, but readers came to saw him as a selfish man selling out humanity for his own salvation.

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