Does Rainbow Dash deserve more love?

Poll results: Does Rainbow Dash deserve more love?

No, she’s loved enough.
60.00% 3 votes
Yes, she’s best pony!!!
20.00% 1 vote
Yes, all ponies deserve more love.
20.00% 1 vote
No, I hate her!!!
0.00% 0 votes

Poll ended with 5 votes.

SparkleDash

Professional Shipper
I say she doesn’t get enough love at all. Early on in the show, she was one of the most popular and favorite pony, if not the single most popular overall. Overtime, though, she lost the love and appreciation, despite never declining as a character at all.
 
Do you think she should’ve gotten more love?
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I have mixed feelings about Rainbow Dash.
 
On one hand, I like her in the first seasons and in the MLP film. She’s cocky, but loyal to her friends, kinda like Han Solo after the events of A new hope. On the other hand, I think the writers wrote her being unnecessarily mean in many cases.
 
For example, many people have said many times that she was horrible in Non-compete Clause, but you can see that attitude in previous seasons, and even films. In Rainbow Rocks, she was selfish and mean, which doesn’t make sense to me. In the first film, Twilight reunited a group of friends that was divided by Sunset Shimmer. By understanding, empathy and comprehension, Rainbow Dash went back to be the friend of the mane 6. So, why does she have to go back to be so antagonistic to her friends in the second film?
 
I think most of Rainbow Dash’s shenanigans in the later seasons were there because of the positive reactions of Rainbow Rocks regardless of what they think of her in that movie. After Rainbow Rocks came out, we got an episode in season 5 where Rainbow Dash is so desperate to her turtle that she ended up destroying Cloudsdale. In season 7, she gives some cake to her turtle without considering that cake is unhealthy for it, which is ironic considering how she supposes to care about her turtle. And in season 8 she got an episode where she fights against Applejack just for a trophy.
 
Thankfully, one of her last good episodes, Parental Glideance, shows a Rainbow Dash that is not mean or cruel.
 
Because of all this, I think having four extreme answers, two of them are “yes” and the other two are “no”, I haven’t clicked on any of these options. I like Rainbow Dash, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t see her problems as a character.
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World's Okayest User
Yes, the entire Haber era was basically spent punishing the character(and by extension people who liked the character) often deliberately so. The fact that they made the episode where she became a WB one of the show’s worst(among others) is inexcusable
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If you looked back at Rainbow Dash in Season One, you might assume that the writers had hated her then.
 
She was by far the most flawed of The Mane Six: lazy, arrogant, impatient, reckless, and kind of mean, too. I don’t think she was ever given the moral high ground over another member of The Mane Six, and she got some kind of comeuppance way more than anyone else.
 
But there was a purpose behind it in Season One; it was all building up to Sonic Rainboom. Rainbow Dash was written to be an antihero. Ordinary characters can improve incrementally, but not antiheroes. Their situation isn’t sustainable: either their willingness to push the limits will pay off and they’ll be redeemed, or their character flaws will be their downfall. The latter is what Rarity represented in Sonic Rainboom, and it’s part of why that’s one of the best episodes in the whole show.
 
So I think it’s worth considering that what made Rainbow Dash great in Season One was not repeatable, regardless of how she would be handled later on. The fact that her goal of joining The Wonderbolts wasn’t mentioned once in Season Two tells me that they didn’t have any long-term plans for her.
 
She’s a deeply flawed character, so you can’t validate her too much. But at the same time, her flaws are an integral part of her character. What she really needed was a long-term arc where she fails hard, gets a wakeup call, and gradually redeems herself. You end up with a character whose cockiness is grounded by a firmer understanding of where her limits are.
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