See * for disclaimer

This is another problematic episode from a worldbuilding perspective. Not impossible to work with, but it causes pretty severe shifts in perspective.

Daring Don't (December 7th 2013, 22 minutes)

Summary: Rainbow Dash gets a chance that few ever get, meeting a fictional character.

Fortress of Talicon. Arrow defense. You know, that sounds like a video game. Or a hidden reference to Samurai Jack episode "Jack and the Three Blind Archers".

And Rainbow Dash gets a serious knock on the head... again, giving everyone an excuse that this episode never actually happened. I'm not taking the easy way out on this one though.

The name the author of Daring Do is using is A.K. Yearling, a pun on J.K. Rowling. Yearling being a horse of one year of age, of course.

Classic serial movie 'line on a map' gag, using a line sketch version of the official Equestrian map. Starting at Ponyville, going to the waterfall below Canterlot, doing some loops below Cloudsdale, stopping at the whistle-stop where the rail line splits from going to Vanhoover and the Frozen North, another stop in the Unicorn Range, and we loose it somewhere north of Vanhoover. So we're somewhere in the Equestrian equivalent of British Columbia?

The place is trashed, but there's a fire still burning in the fireplace. If I was a suspicious pony, I would be checking the fireplace for burning papers.

The outfit A.K. Yearling is wearing is reminiscent of some of the outfits Agatha Christie used to wear back in the 20's. Of all the authors that A.K. Yearling could have been modeled on, Agatha Christie is a good choice. Many of her later books were written while at archeological digs with her second husband (who was a full archeologist.)

That's a weird system. The book had locks on the binding, and when unlocked the book opened backwards... Huh. I wonder if when 'locked' the book opens normally and looks just like any other book.

Heh. The goon's cutie-marks are 60's Batman wing-dings.

Okay, here's where I have to do some work. We have revealed that A.K. Yearling is in fact Daring Do. Fine. We have two problems here. The lesser one is that the comics implied that Twilight's mom was the author of the Daring Do books. The bigger one is trying to fit the Daring Do mythos into Equestria.

The bigger one is actually the easier one. There's nothing that we've seen with the Daring Do stories that couldn't fit into the world Equestria is in. The official map of Equestria lines up surprisingly well with a map of the United States, with the Crystal Empire being Canada. What we have seen of the Daring Do world is far more South American with various Toltec, Mixtec, and Aztec imagery. So it's easy enough to put the various Daring Do bits far, far south of Equestria. Plus what we know about Daring Do's adventures are fiction within this setting. So it's very likely what was written was 'inspired' by the reality, and is not an exact match.

The lesser issue with A.K. Yearling and Twilight's mom (officially named Twilight Velvet), is a bit trickier. There's several ways to deal with this. In the comic the award for best writer and the award for Daring Do are two separate awards. Twilight V is definitely an award-wining writer, but the Daring Do award may named after Daring Do, not an award *for* Daring Do. Or she's moved on in her career and is now a publisher, and that's a publishing award. (which means that's how Twilight Sparkle got all this advanced info about A.K. Yearling. She asked her mom.) Finally, it's entirely possible that A.K. Yearling isn't really the author, but dictates her adventures and has ghostwriters turn those notes into novels. Especially with autobiographies and the like, it is extremely common to employ ghostwriters. In fact, my wife has ghostwritten several books (not novels, but technical how-to's on equitation and the like.) This is the least likely scenario, as ghost writers, by their nature, don't get awards.

Why do the Mane 6 just sit there? I'm thinking they're experiencing cognitive dissonance and out-of-context errors. Daring Do has been fictional to them up until right now, and they're glitching, reverting to a passive 'audience' state and watching through the window like it's a movie. Maybe they actually have Daring Do movies, and they are still having trouble believing what they are seeing is real? Which would make sense, except they've been in similar situations before with fairy tales come to life (Nightmare Moon) so you'd think they'd recover from this faster.

Dr. Caballeron. Meant to resemble Belloq from Indiana Jones. Caballero is Spanish for a gentleman, and for a horseman in the same way that 'knight' does. Actually, that's a well done urbane Spanish accent as well. That's one of those that gets messed up a lot in America due to the Mexican influence which is quite different.

More prophecy, this time for eight hundred years. Interesting, as given prior tendencies of the writers I would have thought they would have defaulted to the increasingly annoying 'thousand years' again.

Unrelenting heat. Huh. That sounds suspiciously similar to the G1 'The End of Fluttervalley'. This is the second time that miniseries has been referenced within G4.

No, this is exactly at your head-height. This is what you guys do. What is the issue here?

But you publish those secrets. In books. You, madam, are a nit.

No, Rainbow Dash is the nit it seems.

So, here is an issue. Where the heck are they? The episode implies that we're not that far from Daring Do's house, which was somewhere north of Vanhoover. Yet we've switched to South American architecture and fauna. We missed a travel sequence somewhere.

It is being implied that the eight hundred years of sweltering heat (for just the valley) is going to be from modifying the sun in some way. Probably the rings activate some kind of giant magical magnifying glass system.

He has minions? Interesting. Typical fictional mix of various South American accents. The spears are wrong for the period/region, but what the hey.

What are the rings made of? They look like gold, but gold doesn't shatter like that. They might actually be yellow jade. In direct sunlight yellow jade can appear to be gold from a distance.