Talguy Rants: How to do Rainbow Dash *CORRECTLY.* · 4:57am Sep 3rd, 2015
Ok, so if you've talked to me for five seconds about MLP, then you know Rainbow Dash is my favorite pony. For Pony Merch, I have 4 T-Shirts, 2 Necklaces, 1 custom coin, a pair of socks, and at least a dozen buttons. (And of course my Blue Lightning Plushie, which I adore) Of this, almost 95% of it is Dash merch. ...I may have a problem.
But while Rainbow is my favorite Pony, she has become my least favorite Human in Equestria Girls. Yes, even below the notorious Flash "Brad" Sentry. You might be asking yourself, "How is this possible?" To that I answer this:
Rainbow Dash, as portrayed in Rainbow Rocks, is an insufferable, arrogant, loud, self-absorbed, attention-whoring bitch.
Rainbow is many things as a character. She is arrogant. She is cocky. And yes, she often expresses a high opinion of herself.
But something we saw almost nothing of in Rainbow Rocks especially is her other side. Her relatable and enjoyable side. Rainbow will sacrifice anything for the sake of her friends. She puts herself on the backburner against her very nature because her friends mean so much to her. What she does not do is write a whole song designed to stroke her ego, then have her friends play it in front of the whole school while she completely upstages them! She doesn't ever write off a group effort as 'hers', nor does she do so without noticing herself.
To add insult to injury, we got Awesome as I Want to Be, the first Rainbow Dash Solo Song in the show out of the deal, but the song, while not terrible on paper, just rubs this disconnect in harder. I get that Human Rainbow hasn't had the character development her pony counterpart has, and I. Don't. Care. Even as far back as Episode 1, Rainbow was better than this. Hell, Lightning Dust, a character made essentially as a personification of all those traits, is more likeable than Human Rainbow!
At least it looks like she's learned her lesson come Friendship Games, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
I'm Talguy, and this has been a rant. A rant about colorful cartoon horses, and a spinoff doll line movie. And why the latter has made me mad at my favorite character in all of fiction.
Fun Fact: EQG1 Human Rainbow is what my Human Rainbow is based on in my stories. She was perfect there for all five seconds for her camera time. Confident but sage and helpful. Kinda like 2012 Master Splinter. I just built off of that. How naive of me.
While I'd love to jump on the RRHRD hate train (because yeah she was one of the movie's few low points for me too), she actually has an excuse--she wasn't herself. Not going to bother with spoiler tags because it has been a year:
The entire H5 were actually influenced by the Dazzlings just as the rest of Canterlot High had been. The Magic of Friendship the girls possessed just made it take longer, but the effects in the end were actually worse, as the Magic itself got corrupted--or as Sunset put it just before the climax, became "something worse."
Thus, all five of them became their worst Flanderized selves--Rarity became obsessed with her fashion schtick, Pinkie turned into the Fun Fuhrer, Fluttershy became borderline bipolar (switching between passive-aggressive and just plain aggressive), AJ became a by-the-books drill seargeant, and Rainbow became...
derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/10/21/747348.gif
...uh... became...
derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/11/11/762673.gif
...w-what was I saying again?
R-right. Thus Rainbow turns from mild egotism (let's face it, even Pony Dash WOULD write that song--she already canonically writes self-insert fiction!) to Narcissus incarnate. It's super-subtle until the house of cards falls for all five of them and it's a bit of a masterstroke for the movie to be able to break our hearts like that, then come out of the nosedive during the finale.
Anyway, I wasn't a fan of her guitar string stunt in the FG 10-minute preview, but she saved herself with that song, so for now, she's simply on The Watch.
My point is, there's no escape no matter which Rainbow you follow. Rainbow's ego crosses dimensions.
3366007
I had actually never considered the Dazzlings' magic angle. I'm going to have to think on that.
My point however is that while Pony Dash would write the song, she wouldn't have her friends play second-through-sixth string in front of the town of Ponyville.
...and dark magic doesn't excuse the first Dash Song in the show being... that. Then again, maybe I'm just mad because we'd waited for four years for a Dash Song only to get what we did.
Scratch that... I am definitely just mad. Egads, they've turned my Dash Fandom against me! Maybe listening to Dazzling songs on loop for so long got to me too...
3366023
Well, she did start the band and the others did agree to it.
But yeah all the concert stuff was them already mind-warped.
Can't help you on the Dash song cicumstances. Maybe Ashleigh just wanted to keep her voice as intact as possible because of her RL band stuff.
...now please stop having me defend Rainbow now it actually saps my very life force
3366031
I never said you had to defend her, to be fair.
I have plenty of rotten tomatoes to share if you need to throw something!
(And before you ask, I got them through using the forbidden magic of copypasta granted to me by the gods of 'teh interwebs')
Or maybe I should just go to bed.