Story Idea "A.K. Yearling"/ reaction to Daring Don't · 9:16pm Dec 7th, 2013
That. Sucked.
First of all, I would like to apologize to anyone who is inconvenienced by this blogpost in their notifications section. I am just like you and find this new feature annoying, but in tradition to writing stories that could be episodes, I want to first write them down in the blog and possibly act on them. I will not be making a habit of episode reviews or my reactions, but I am just really upset about this one. In the tradition with “Just a Dream” , I will do this just so I can put this somewhere for everyone else to see.
Chances are you did not see the new episode when it came out, so I suggest you do so now. I will not do a synopsis.
Overall, the lesson at the end, about measuring self-worth and etc. in comparison to other people is good, and I agree with it. People should know to have some self confidence in themselves and not rule their lives by the standards of others. But my beef is with the whole idea of who Daring do is as well as the general plotholes of the story.
In short, the reason why I don’t like what happened with Daring Do is how lazy her character is. At its very basic, Daring Do came off, to me, as the average feminist character. Before this becomes a flame war, I will not claim to be some sort of educated judge of fictional character, but this is just my opinion. With my previous statements over Daring Do coming off as a feminist, I acknowledge that me saying that can be aggravating to those who are on the opposite side of the spectrum of my thinking saying that she was well made, I will just say that we will disagree, and any further debate would be pointless, because chances are we would not agree.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand, Daring Do, and the episode as a whole, seemed to be a lazy and misanthropic. I’ll ignore that every one of the bad guy’s henchmen was a stallion, that Daring Do manages to save the world from darkness by herself rather than going and finding assistance from A. the police, B. The Military, or C. people in general, to just look at her as a whole.
The first thing that really got me wrong was the name. A.K. Yearling was a play on words of J.K.Rowling, and if they managed to copy her story the same, it would be fine, except that this takes the plot line of trying to find her to get her book published faster to and instead goes to Lara Croft and throws pixie dust at the audience and says “ACTION, MOTHERFUCKER!” It loses all relevance of her as a person and turns her into a stocky action hero type. Hell, put on some short shorts and make her into Angelina Jolie and it could have been the next Tomb Raider movie!
I respect J.K. Rowling and her story. Ms. Rowling’s story is actually admirable and shows an actually relatable tale of a strong independent woman. In case you don’t know, J.K. Rowling, at the time she thought of Harry Potter, was poor. She worked as a secretary for a company, and began to think about Harry Potter when her train was delayed. Next, her life went into a complete rut. She lost her job, became divorced, and had to seek welfare benefits to support her children. She wrote the Philosopher’s stone IN A STARBUCKS while her two year old daughter was next to her in a stroller. The Harry Potter series had a theme of segregation to it, she could relate to it because she was being segregated against! Not because she secretly was a witch! Here, Daring Do is just an action hero for the sake of being an action hero, all of her action and what she did in the episode was weak and hollow.
The other thing I didn't like about Daring Do was her motivation. Like in Doug Walker's review of Patch Adams (Staring Robin Williams) She acted like the average female character, cold and bitter on the outside, but upon as it turned out was actually a "beautiful little butterfly" on the inside. While the episode only lasted a half an hour and there wasn't that drastic of a change to her mentality, it still felt that she changed with almost no real motivation other than "Friendship!"
The next thing I don’t like is that the episode could have done a good thing and taught a legitimate lesson, but really cuts itself short to make fun of its biggest audience, the bronies. Of course there have obviously been mega fans in all sorts of things (I.E. Walmart Wolverines) but here it felt like a low blow on our behalf, maybe me blogging about this is just falling for the trap of their joke, but I still feel it is immature. Yes, it is funny to make fun of a person who can think of a deep symbolic thing out of a tiny detail of a story, (The James Cameron scene about titanic in Entourage) but here it just feel as if they were belittling us in a cheap way over the Brony affection of MLP. In short, I didn’t like it.
Like I said, I didn’t like this episode, I thought it was weak, but I am not going to throw a fit and scream bloody murder because of it.
Now, here is the story I would like to share:
I call it “A.K. Yearling”.
Whereas the episode was about self-esteem and dealing with an idol, my story idea is about dealing with a legitimate thing that we must know, disappointment. Life isn’t fair, and it sometimes take people something horrible to happen to finally realize it. Everything can’t go your way, not everything in life is sunshine and lollipops, even though you want something incredibly badly, it does not mean that it will be that way. It is a life lesson to deal with one’s expectations and also to understand that the outcome may lack the luster that one wants.
This story starts out just like the episode, Rainbow Dash is beside herself because the next Daring Doo book is about to come out and so she counts the days until it does.
When it finally does come out, the mane 6 go out to a big city and wait in line for a night to get the book, and as soon as they do, Rainbow Dash flies home and spends the next two days locked in her house reading it.
Reports come in and the book is a success, people love it, and it is critically acclaimed, but when Rainbow Dash does leave her house, she is not the same person. Twilight, who wanted to talk to about the book, is having the hardest time getting ahold of her. When she eventually does, she learns of the truth. Rainbow Dash did not like the book.
As it turns out, she has been in an out of body experience and feels sick because of how her expectations were destroyed. Twilight tries to help her, but nothing works. Throughout the rest of the story, the other M5 try to cheer her up, to make her understand that it’s alright, but nothing works.
Eventually, Rainbow Dash actually does begin to fall ill over her state of mind, so something must be done.
Twilight writes to Yearling and tells her of what is happening, she gets a response, and the other 5 go to her home. Rainbow Dash is still not doing well, and when they do go to meet Yearling, everyone is surprised.
A. A.K. Yearling is actually the penname of a stallion who hit a rut in the road in his business so he took a stab in the dark and decided to take the bedtime stories he made for his daughter and try to start a book series. No one took him seriously so he adopted a pen name and had his sister/ just used the mail to get a publisher.
B. A.K, Yearling is actually the exact opposite of a badass adventurer, and in reality is happily married and the mother of four. She started the book series as a past time when she was alone in the day and eventually decided to publish them when her husband gave it a read. Now they are both rich with money coming out of their asses.
Either way, A.K. Yearling is alone with Rainbow Dash and thanks her for her support, but tells her that it is just a story. She is glad that she liked all of the stories and appreciates her as a fan, but at the end of the day it is just a collection of words on paper, and that it is nothing to get overly worked up over because “Blah blah, Life’s an adventure, Blah blah.”
Either way, I hope this did not inconvenience anyone, I don’t intend to make this a common thing. If you did enjoy the episode, more power to you.
Thank you for your time.
Yeah I caught on to that too. It seemed really odd.
Or Princess Celestia seeing how there is a magical artifact that threatens to bring almost a millenium of hatred over ponykind but... nah, why should she bother the ruler of the land she lives in with something that could very well destroy that very same land?
... I think this is one of those times that I am thinking that you may be overanalyzing the whole thing. Honestly the thing that annoyed me the most was that it broke away from the supplementary material in regards to who the writer of the series was, which was Twilight Velvet... though it could still be that Velvet does the writing for Daring... that would work though it would still run counter to MCPO Daring Do
1582395 I wrote twi's mom as a scientist who loves to blow shit up and Shining armor and Moonlight both think that Twilight may have been a cloning experiment.
Still, I didn't like the episode because the plot was full of holes, Daring Doo was a stock action hero except with 2 X chromosomes, and the point of making her a writer was beyond nonexistant. Hell, it would make morse sense if she had hired a ghost writer to follow her around everywhere.
But I agree that the femininity could be up to interpretation, granted this show has som feminist ideals in it, (many of which could be countered to make them normal with the Addition of a serious male character-not Spike-) but here I felt it was heavy and also done poorly.
(This is Coming from the highschool athlete who had to read "The bluest Eye" and "The Awakening" back in his senior year.
1582395
I think it was confirmed a couple of times by Andy that the thing in the background of the comic was just an award and not the author itself.
1582500
Since I haven't seen that comic I may just grant you that, and found a picture of one of her toy bios and it says she is an adventure writer... guess we all assumed that she wrote Daring Do
The episode was poor no doubt about it, with Polsky is always a hit or miss.
The name A.K. Yearling have nothing to do with the real Rowling, they just wanted a name that sounded familiar to the kids, thinking more of it is indeed over analyzing.
Shame they lost the continuity with the comics. Yearling being Daring Do, now that was stupid! and random! the kind of thing I expect for cartoons like Regular Show and SpongeBob, not MLP. Where the story went was disappointing. They wanted adventure, fine, I actually liked the action sequences, but I would have even more if there had been a stronger plot behind them. Maybe Yearling got kidnapped by Ahizotl for safe keeping the ring, and Daring Do had to rescue her because she is her friend or something.
Oh well no big deal, for me this was just below average.
1582526>>1582538 now that I've blanched myself in a hot tub, I see that taking the J.K. Rowling thing was a little too far......even though there are bamillions of other names to make fun of, (William Goldman, the author of the Princess Bride could be w. Goldpony). But still, i think the inclusion of her as the author was cheap. Its kind of like how people say a random character is an author so that other fimfic writers are goaded into relating to them.
1582334>>1582500
Anyway, even though the reaction was a big thing, what about the story idea? Yay or nay?
1582619
Uh....I am sorry, but I cannot get behind either one. I am sorry, but I can't really get behind it. While the idea of Dash being destroyed is a GOOD one to get behind to look at her psychologically, the end reminds me too much of that old, "My hero is not who I thought he was and now I have to do something to prove him wrong" trope that has been the bane of my existance for so long. Maybe the ending was changed to something else, maybe, but I personally can't get behind it.
1582526
It's something I assumed too and even made a joke about it in my fics. But I always go for the usualy stand-by "I believe it until they confirm differently" approach to story telling.
1582656
I went with it since we really don't know much about Velvet anyway, So I made her first the Archivist of Equestria, and then the writer for Daring Do
1582645 actually, what I was aiming for was to have the lesson be about disappointment and moving on. Rainbow dash is crushed, but the author tells her that its just a book. You need to move on with your life. In short, your favorite team losing a soccer game is not a good enough excuse to light yourself on fire.
1582619 Wow... thats one way to ignore what has happened in the episode...^^
It sounds like it can work so go for it^^
1582909 some people regularly make fics with alt endings or retrlling of canon to suit their needs or to make a certain character look better. After mare do well, there were an influx of fics about this to make rainbow dash look better.
I don't intend to do this, but I feel that this was an unnecessarily poor episode, while i don't intend to do something to save someone's face, I could do this to retell the story with better backing to a stronger moral which, to me at least, is more original.
In general, I keep a continuum of canons for stories an the show. In this purposed story, Daring is just a character, in another, Daring is real, and is an explorer, but the evil monkey guy is actually her ghost writer who takes her tales and makes them into books. Her actual "rival" is a stallion explorer named Guy Dangerous. A Nathan Drake to her Lara Croft.
Actually, while 'Daring Do is real' was something I was against, the whole idea of 'secret identity' gives her DEPTH, and the fanfic fuel that's been pretty much ignored. How much does Yearling exaggerate in her books? How much does she leave out? How much does she change?
2203112 while it does give Daring Do some extra dynamics, it basically dries up most of the potential of Ak yearling. Going into the episode, the sky was,naturally, the limit. After the episode, though, everything changed. while things could be changed in fiction, what we saw from the episode was pretty concrete, AK Yearling is basically an alias for Daring Do and, from what we see, her life is exactly like her books. I agree that having the stories be exaggerations like Ian Flemming and James Bond would be better, but sadly that mystery is not here anymore.
2204964
I see Daring Do as the Superman persona. And remember the Rainbow Dash on the cover of the new book DID NOT look like how RD did during the adventure.