Let's Talk "Rainbow Dash Brings the Blitz" · 1:24pm Jun 28th, 2018
So, we have new Equestria Girls books out to go along with the recent soft reboot of the franchise. And yes, it was a soft reboot. The continuity stayed the same, but the girls all have new looks, there's new official art to go with it, a revised logo, we got a new digital series out of the deal which serves as a jumping on point for new viewers and fans, and there's mild revisions to the characters (i.e. Sunset being both an artist and into video games. Never saw that before the Digital Series started. Okay, except for the one Summertime Short with Pinkie in art class, but still.)
We also have a new writer for these new books. (Unless they're going the Stratameyer Syndicate route and actually having multiple authors write these under a collective pseudonym, but given the first book came out a couple of months ago, the second dropped at the beginning of this month, and the third isn't due till October, I don't think so.) And I have to say, I like Arden Hayes' writing style a lot more than Perdita Finn's in the previous run.
(No, I have no idea why Perdita Finn's name is still on the cover image above.)
If you don't know, the previous line of Equestria Girls books started with G.M. Berrow's adaptation of the first EG film. Then Perdita Finn took over writing "Rainbow Rocks" (which was actually an adaptation of the shorts that came out in the run up to that movie), "The Mane Event" (which is the actual adaptation of Rainbow Rocks), then the original story "Sunset Shimmer's Time to Shine," followed by the Friendship Games adapation, “Twilight Sparkle's Sparkly Sleepover Surprise,” another original story, “Legend of Everfree,” “Magic, Magic Everywhere” (adaptation of the three TV specials), and finally "A Friendship to Remember," the adaptation of "Forgotten Friendship/Most Likely to be Forgotten."
This last one actually came out months before the TV special was even announced, making those who had read it wonder if this was another adaptation or another original story. Those of us who did read it were delighted to discover it was an adaptation... albeit a super early one.
And while Finn's books were serviceable, they were pretty perfunctory. More or less straight up transcriptions of the scripts of the movies and specials with no real flourishes. (One exception: the three TV specials that comprise "Magic, Magic Everywhere" actually shuffle the timeline a bit so that Sunset brings Starlight through the portal earlier so she's present for all three stories.) There isn't a lot of character depth and there's a tendency to refer to characters by their full names all the time. It's rarely "Sunset," "Twilight," "Pinkie," and "Rainbow" or "Dash." It’s almost always "Sunset Shimmer," "Twilight Sparkle," "Pinkie Pie," and "Rainbow Dash" whether in dialogue or in description of action. I don't know if this is because Hasbro's mandated this or it's an editorial choice, but it makes a lot of the reading really stilted, even for a kids book targeted for the 6-12 set.
Which is a caveat I need to express: these books are written with younger readers in mind. While the target age is 6-12, these books are clearly geared for the younger end of that spectrum. This is not Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket levels of reading here. The vocabulary is simplistic by adult standards and written in such a way to allow the reader to fill in the blanks with their own imaginations. This is both a good and bad thing as I'll explain later.
Arden Hayes has a much more natural writing style than Perdita Finn. Shortened versions of character names are used, especially in dialogue which makes things much less stilted to read. Also, these books are new stories rather than adaptations. Whether these new books will continue adapting new EG specials and movies remains to be seen.
However, there's also a couple of problems here. I'm not certain when Hayes was contracted to write these books, but there's a couple of things in this book and the next one, "Twilight Sparkle's Science Fair Sparks" (full review coming soon), that seem to indicate that Hayes either was hired and started work on these right after "Friendship Games" or, if she wasn't familiar with the material, only saw the movies (or whatever background material she was given only covered) up to "Friendship Games." It's minor stuff in this book: there's no mention of the geodes or the girls offhandedly using their magic powers, and somehow, the Wondercolt statue has been rebuilt, even though we haven't actually seen it since its destruction in "Friendship Games."
The plot of this story is fairly basic. Rainbow Dash loves a sport called Blitzball (insert Final Fantasy X joke here). From what little information the book gives on the sport, it seems to be an outdoor game that's a hybrid of basketball and soccer, played on a slightly smaller field than you would in a soccer game. There's mention of dribbling, passing, and blocking, but a player can apparently only dribble three times before being required to pass the ball to another teammate. They do use their hands during the game. There are goals, but no goalies and players wear helmets during the game. And that's about all the information we get on how Blitzball is played.
Rainbow gets her friends to come over to watch the Blitzball finals on TV, and interest is pretty much where you'd expect it to be. The only girls who seems to have any real interest at all in the game are Sunset Shimmer and Applejack, while the other girls have varying degrees of interest. The next day at school, Principal Celestia announces that Comet Chaser, professional Blitzball player, has decided to start a youth Blitzball league among the schools in the area.
(Another odd thing: apparently, if you want to believe the book, the human world on the other side of the mirror is also called Equestria. I dunno.)
Dash, naturally, tries out for the team. And as you might expect, she makes the cut, but a monkey wrench is thrown into the works when Dash takes off her helmet revealing that she’s a girl. Guess what? Comet Chaser firmly believes that Blitzball is a man’s sport and girls have no place there. (But he’s perfectly fine with them participating in other sports like soccer, go figure.)
Even Celestia and Luna state that he never specified he was only intending the Blitzball League to be boys only. But Comet basically threatens to cancel the league altogether if he doesn’t get his way. Yes, friends, it’s another Sexism In Sports story!
You can pretty much guess where this is going: Rainbow issues a challenge to Comet Chaser, if her all girl team can beat his all boy team, he’ll let Blitzball be co-ed. If they lose, she drops the subject and doesn’t bring it up again. Comet agrees and tells her to bring a team of seven players next week for the scrimmage. What a coincidence! Rainbow has six other friends right there!
So yeah, obligatory practice with problems sequence follows: Applejack and Sunset get the hang of the game pretty quickly, but Pinkie keeps goofing off, Fluttershy thinks it’s mean to steal the ball from an opposing player, Rarity spends more time adjusting the various Blitzball uniforms she’s developing than focusing on the game, and Twilight keeps worrying about breaking her glasses.
Meanwhile, Comet’s team seems to be doing better, although Rainbow does notice that the coach does have a tendency to yell at his players. Not that she’s in any position to talk when she gets so frustrated at her team’s lack of progress that she has the obligatory blow up at them.
She immediately regrets it, of course, and after a motivational chat with Luna, she goes to apologize, only to find that the girls agreed that they were just as at fault for not taking the game as seriously as Rainbow was. Practice resumes with the four problem girls solving their various problems and learning to have fun playing the game as well.
The book culminates with the scrimmage between Rainbow and Comet’s teams and here’s where I have to give Hayes credit, the match doesn’t play out like you’d expect and the end result is completely different from the possible outcomes of the match.
Of course, Blitzball does become co-ed in the end, but the way it becomes co-ed is actually a very creative choice and subverts the usual “sports underdog” story tropes this book is borrowing from.
Like all the Equestria Girls books so far, this one’s a quick read and you can probably finish it in an hour or two. Overall, adjusting for the expected target audience, this isn’t a bad story and if you’re a Dash fan, there’s plenty of Her Awesomeness to go around. There’s a few problems with it in terms of simplistic characterization and plot, but nothing that breaks the story.
Rating: 3.5/5. Give it a read.
Personally I always believed that was the case since the names in the Human world have never changed from their pony counterpart. Some people would say that makes no sense but I would say they're just overthinking it.
Maybe it's meant to be referred as Equestria Earth since it's humans and all as a counterpart to regular Equestria and the writers didn't mention that part. Makes the most sense to me anyway from a logical perspective.