In which I post some more headcanon. · 11:30pm Dec 12th, 2013
Since this is apparently all I am good for, have some headcanon regarding Daring Do, Twilight Velvet, and my desperate attempt to keep the comics in line with the show. Maybe I will even fill some plotholes in the process.
So, the crux of the matter here, comes from this image:
Trouble is, the last episode rather appears to Joss that with wild abandon.
Fortunately, my job is really brain-dead, so I have plenty of time to obsess over it until I work out an explanation. So, without further ado, here is my take on why Twilight's mom has those plaques, as well as why no one realizes Daring Do is nonfiction.
Like many folks, I tend towards the idea that the Sparkle household may be part of Canterlot's nobility. Minor nobility, not much in the way of assets, especially in the more modern world they live in. Twilight Velvet is the heir to the Sparkle title, and she grew up with a writing hobby. She met Night Light when she was around Twilight's age, and when they started dating he saw her little books. All romance novels, of both the trashy and non-trashy
varieties. Finding them rather good, he encourages her to get them published, but her attempts to do so get rejected by the major publishers for the fact they don't want to take a chance on a new author in what they consider a relatively small market and/or crowded market. Discouraged, she was going to give up, since she never really considered becoming a professional novelist to begin with, but Night Light suggests they simply open their own publishing company. They do so, pooling their resources and setting up a small company in Canterlot. She manages to sell some of her works to stores around town, and....they do okay. They aren't smash hits, but they are liked by those who picked them up, with her even winning an award for one. Twilight also advertises her small company to other struggling authors, and over the next couple years they grow into a small but steady business. Sometime during this Twilight Velvet and Night Light get married, and then a bit after that Shining Armour is born.
Around this time, a professor of archaeology at a university in Vanhoover is in Canterlot, with her journal, hoping to get it published on the advice of her colleagues, so it will raise money for her department. Most of her co-workers are not aware that the journal is autobiographical, but rather believe they are stories A.K. Yearling (which is her actual name, Daring Do would be the made up one.) concocted to pass the time out of her digs. She has given up convincing anyone that these things actually happened (The journal contains what would become her first three books), and is content to let people believe what they want. She has ended up having the same problem Twilight Velvet had a few years earlier, and has come to Sparkle Publishing as a final resort. Velvet rejects the journal as well, but tells Yearling that the story is good, but the writing needs work, and if she is serious about getting it published, that Velvet would be happy to help edit it. After a few months of work, it;s ready for printing, and "Daring Do and the Quest For The Sapphire Stone" is off to the stores. And it is THIS that becomes the runaway smash hit. It earns Yearling numerous awards for her writing, and nets a few for Sparkle publishing as well. The royalties from it end up going a looong way towards helping Yearlings department at work, and she strikes up a partnership with Sparkle publishing for any further stories she has.
As an aside, that rival professor scene in the episode, he DID confront Yearling about using his likeness (though he tends to mockingly refer to her as "Daring Do", Aizuhotl (I have no idea how to spell that) doesn't actually know better.). She retorted that he can take her to court if he likes, but if he does, he will basically be admitting to the less than legal things he does in the books, which would result in him getting in more trouble than it's worth. She does agree to give him a SMALL amount of money for it, out of a sense of fairness, but no more. He agrees. Yearling of course, actually has come to prefer that ponies think the accounts are fictional, as it keeps her enemies from finding her in life (Daring Do, for instance, does not work at Vanhoover, but a made up university somewhere else) and takes measures to keep it that way. No one else, until the Mane 6 find her, know what is actually going on, even her publisher. On the flip side, there have been a few adventures, including the latest one, where the danger is overestimated. Aizuhotl thought he could control the sun and roast the valley. Celestia would have noticed the sun getting a tad warm, and would have shut that shit down. Yearling doesn't know that. And probably wouldn't take the risk even if she did.
Okay, that's all the time I got, because I have to get to work. Feel free to poke holes in this. I kinda want to see if this can be made something workable.
Good head canon, I may steal it.
I was just going to go with Velvet writes a competing series. The plaque is an award (maybe the adventure writing award is called a Daring Do just as a mystery writer gets an Edgar). But your thoughts are better.
There is no "for" in that picture. The two plaques are separate. One is "Author of the Year", the other is "Daring Do". Clearly these are separate awards and MLP fans are incapable of seeing two unrelated things in a shot and not trying to combine them into a distorted headcanon of half-truths and assumptions.
1601480
Yeah, I noticed that when I first saw the pic. Still, it is not an unreasonable assumption to think the Daring Do plaque was there because Twimom wrote it. It is likely that was Katie Cook/Andy Price's intent. However, it's nebulous enough for interpretation.
1601165
Please do!
1601067
It's a good canonweld.
I still prefer the idea that Twilight Velvet wrote them herself.
Daring Do's adventures are just... kind of silly. Even by Equestria's standards. They're perfectly in keeping with the idea of "take Equestria as a baseline and go over the top", which works perfectly for fiction that's supposed to be a bit fantastical, but becomes hard to swallow when I'm told the character is "real" in the setting.
1999785
Personally, I agree that Daring Doo shouldn't have been made non-fictional, but it can be fun to try and figure out how things work when the writers go and do stuff like that. It was still probably the weakest episode of the season though.