What happened to Rainbow Strike? - A breakdown of the past and future of my male OC · 11:16am Jan 4th, 2020
An important question: What happened to Rainbow Strike?
If you’ve read the first few of the stories I uploaded to this website, you’ll know that I included an OC named Rainbow Strike, the long-lost brother of Rainbow Dash, who ran away from home at a young age to escape his old life.
The order of this series (The Rainbow Strike Series) goes as follows;
- All Rainbow and No Colour
- The Long Lost Rainbow
- Moving On
- I'm Sorry, Pinkie
- The Coldest Winter (Non-official alternate take)
The whole point of this blog is to clarify some points about what happened to him, where his future lead him and any events that may have transpired that you are unaware of or that I didn’t disclose.
To begin with this, Rainbow Strike was the very first Original Character that I made, based mostly off of myself and my own personality. He essentially is me. He’s a guitarist that comes from a troubled background packed with internal conflict, family trouble and issues regarding torment from his school days, which was the main thing that caused him to leave his life behind.
The prequel to The Long Lost Rainbow, All Rainbow and No Colour, goes into detail of his new life, where he ran off to and how he has made a living for himself in an effort to reinvent who he is. He moved to Fordstone, a big city within Equestria, where he met his girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, Remedy, a local singer. When they met, Strike told her that he was a guitarist and then she offered him a place in her small group, which is how he met the drummer, Beats, and her bassist, Blaze.
Things were going well for him, with his new girlfriend and his new job as her lead guitarist, there was nothing in the world that could make him happier. That is, up until some old accomplices, The Elements of Crime, a group of thugs and gangsters Strike used to roam with in a small town named Stockholm, in the days before he ran off to Fordstone, seeking him out in order to resolve gang justice.
The justice was this - when he joined The Elements of Crime, he signed a contract following his initiation, vowing his loyalty and his obligation to the gang and their lifestyle. If he abandoned them at any time and broke his loyalty, there would be a bounty put on his head, meaning death was coming for him. Unfortunately, that’s when his happy life once again became shattered.
He was tracked down by the gang and traced to the penthouse he shared with Remedy. Unfortunately, because Strike wasn’t home, they ran into Remedy instead, so they murdered her. Strike found her soon after, finding she was still conscious but bleeding heavily. He took her to the hospital where she died, but the doctor gave him one last piece of heartbreaking news before she passed - Remedy was pregnant. Strike was going to be a father and he never knew about it.
That was generally what caused his second downward spiral of depression, self-destruction and suicidal thoughts. He had all things in his life that made him happy stripped away from him for a second time, almost more than he could tolerate. From then on, we enter the events of Moving On, where we explore Strike’s return to Ponyville.
Ever since he arrived back in Ponyville, after the events of The Long Lost Rainbow, where he meets Rainbow Dash for the first time, reunites with his parents and then meets the friends of his sister and gains their friendship, Rainbow Strike’s discomfort became clear that he was having trouble adjusting. That’s where Fluttershy enters the equation and she takes it upon herself to guide Strike through his troubles, including his past regrets, conflicts, emotions and the grieving process for the life of his beloved fiancé and the child she was carrying.
I know it’s a risky area when you put yourself in somebody’s mind and you get into detail, as the information can be incredibly sensitive and confusing, depending on how much info you delve into. With Rainbow Strike, he feels what I feel as a general rule, on a mutual level. In fact, most of the feelings Strike displays come from events that have happened to me in real life, so it seemed to me like a very strong, firm point to base his personality from.
Although his heart and mind still belonged to his love for Remedy, during the therapy sessions, Strike had started to develop romantic feelings for Fluttershy. Pretty understandable, mind you, and while I know most people have said to me that they viewed it as awkward and one-sided, as in Fluttershy doesn’t return his feelings, but she does indeed openly admit she likes him.
Originally, I was going to head in this direction with the story, having Moving On be a romance story of sorts, which follows Strike’s crush on Fluttershy, but the reason that never happened and the story became cancelled was because I lost all interest in it after a harsh relationship ended. It completely destroyed and discouraged my ability to care about love or romance, so I felt like I didn’t have it in me to pull it off and finish what I started. I don’t even like writing romance stories anymore, as well as writing in general. It put me off, likely for good.
Even so, the character of Rainbow Strike did find happiness again, even if it was a small amount of it, but it was more than enough to give him purpose. He loved Fluttershy as more than a friend, so he enjoyed her company. He didn’t only want to spend therapy sessions with her, but he also wanted to spend his free time with her whenever he had the chance. That being said, if Moving On did continue, that’s the route it would have gone down.
He would have tried to gain her love, they would have gone on a number of dates, gotten to know each other down to every small detail and then they likely would have gotten a bit romantic, if you get my meaning. But those stories are so cliché that I had no interest in doing it, even if I did want to. It’s an overdone and well-explored topic on Fimfiction, where every romance story between two characters begins with their budding friendship, dates, a conflict here and there, a squabble there, followed by the inevitable marriage proposal, etc. I don’t want any of that.
Anyway, I wrote an unofficial chapter in his series (as I mentioned at the start) called The Coldest Winter. It ignores the events of Moving On, so don’t get it muddled with that story. Being that it’s an unofficial release, it doesn’t exactly have any strong ties to the stories before it. It was an alternate take for what happened to Rainbow Strike once he moved back to Ponyville and picked up his old life where he left off.
As the story tells, he ended up opening his own music shop in town, where he puts his knowledge of guitars and instruments to use by teaching others to play through private one-on-one lessons, as he does with The Cutie Mark Crusaders. So, in this story, he didn’t have any therapy sessions with Fluttershy, he never told her he loves her, he didn’t move in with her, etc.
To keep it simple, the story revolves mostly around the misery Strike is suffering through, leading to his suicide. He is unfortunately discovered the following morning by Apple Bloom. As sad as it is, it is mentioned first in Rainbow Strike’s final note that he viewed her and her two friends as his own children, and it is hinted that Apple Bloom thinks of him as her dad-figure.
So, depending on what you want to believe, Rainbow Strike can either die or he can continue living and going down the road to recovery with Fluttershy. I admit, it’s been a very long time since I’ve paid any attention to the details of the story, but the details are all there in the series, somewhere. All I’m saying is that none of it is official as of yet, and it probably never will be fully disclosed which stories are canon in which are not.
But there you have it - Rainbow Strike did return to his old life in Ponyville and he reunited with his mother and father along with his younger sister. He’s very close friends with Fluttershy and he ended up dating her. They are both in a relationship and Strike also runs his own music shop on the side. That is basically the most simple conclusion I had in mind for this story and for my OC’s background. I wanted him to have a happy ending, although I didn’t actually write it fully.
That’s all I wanted to say at this time. It never felt right to keep it under wraps like that, but when I lost all passion for writing romances and writing in general like I used to do daily, I didn’t find the desire to finish the story like I should have done. I wanted to let you all know what happened to this OC, but I’m betting that nobody remembers Rainbow Strike and that likely nobody has heard or read any of the stories in The Rainbow Strike Series.
This sounds like it would have been interesting to see