Rainbow Dash

Rainbow Dash is one of the "Mane 6". She is a friend of Twilight, Pinkie, Fluttershy, Applejack and Rarity.

She is also the bearer of the element of loyalty.

Personality
She is fast, blunt, and concerned with looking "cool." She can often be found napping on a cloud, practicing a new trick, or actually doing her job of maintaining Ponyville's weather. Also, she tries her best to reach her goals without giving up.

Use in fan works
Common themes for Rainbow Dash include:


 * Getting killed by various means and/or losing her wings, preferably before she becomes a Wonderbolt as seen in "Cupcakes", "Rainbow Factory", and "The Cold Hand of Mercy." "Tales" inverts this idea, she dies after becoming a wonderbolt and gets to keep her wings in the process.
 * Her ties to the Wonderbolts, who she almost always ends up joining in stories set in the future.
 * Working with Scootaloo on flying or avoiding the small Pegasus's obsessive adoration.
 * Injuring herself badly after failing a new trick (these stories were "banned" from Equestria Daily after the events of S2E03 - "Lesson Zero", but let back in after the events of S2E16- "Read it and Weep").
 * Being shipped with everypony and everything, up to and including the very concept of shipping itself.

Super Rainbow Dash
Created by the deviantART user Super-Rainbow-Dash, Super Rainbow Dash is a fanonical concept of Rainbow Dash having undergone a super-powered transformation. In this form, her blue coat turns to white, her irises from rose to red, the cloud of her cutie mark from white to storm gray, her rainbow mane flares up (similar to Twilight Sparkle's mane in Feeling Pinkie Keen), and her Element of Loyalty necklace appears on her neck. Initially, she was the product of a Sonic crossover, but was later re-characterized by Super-Rainbow-Dash in the fanfic, "Harmonic Spectrum", where Rainbow Dash unknowingly represents and transforms through all of the Elements of Harmony at once, the plot of which was based on the theories of an undisclosed user.

Metal Rainbow Dash
Metal Rainbow Dash is a robot doppelganger of Rainbow Dash, who usually appears in crossovers with the Sonic the Hedgehog video game series. Like the Metal Sonic character from that series, she is usually created by Doctor Eggman.

As far as her personality goes, she is most often depicted as being disloyal, in contrast to Rainbow Dash. Additionally, she is often depicted as having a deep hatred towards Rainbow Dash, and occasionally Sonic.

She appears as Rainbow Dash's rival in most fan works that feature her, which are almost always Sonic and  crossovers. She also has her own ask pony blog.

Relationships
She is most commonly shipped with Applejack; this shipping is called "AppleDash". She is also commonly shipped with Pinkie Pie (RainbowPie), and Big Macintosh.

A less common shipping, though prevalent nonetheless, is the "FlutterDash" ship, which is Rainbow Dash shipped with Fluttershy. She is sometimes paired with a Wonderbolt, most commonly Soarin' or Spitfire. In some cases, she is depicted as having foals with Soarin'. There is also a deviantArt group dedicated to the pairing of Twilight and Rainbow Dash(TwiDash or Rainbowsparkle).

The prevalence of lesbian pairings with Rainbow Dash, and the prevalence of the widely-accepted fanon "understanding" that she is a lesbian in general, has resulted in at least one parody of the concept, Five's Company: There, Rainbow is pursued by all five of her Ponyville friends and turns out to be the only mare to not have homosexual or bisexual tendancies. In that story, as in some others (like The Birds and the Bees), Dash is characterized as completely clueless about sex. The story Skittles inverts that idea.

Non romantic relationships
Lauren Faust has stated that Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo are not related in any way; however, this has not stopped fans from having Rainbow adopt Scootaloo in some cases.

The fan fiction Mommy Nearest, and its continuation, Alicorn, cast Celestia as Rainbow Dash's mother. Celestia explains the reasoning for not admitting to being Dash's mother: having been born a Pegasus instead of a unicorn, Rainbow would not be accepted by the Court of Canterlot. So she gives Dash to an older Pegasus couple who had wanted a foal for many years. At the end of the fic, Celestia implies that Pinkie's father is, in fact, who impregnated her with Rainbow Dash.

Gallery

 * Rainbow Dash image gallery

Fan art examples


Fan music examples


Fan fiction examples


Super Rainbow Dash


Metal Rainbow Dash
