Daring Do

Daring Do is the titular character of the Daring Do book series. She is featured in three episodes, having a major role in Read It and Weep, and very brief appearances in A Friend in Deed and Too Many Pinkie Pies. Her name is a play on the phrase derring-do, meaning "brave and adventurous, often reckless actions". She is a color swap of Rainbow Dash with a similar personality, differing only in cutie mark (a compass rose), coat color, and her "rainbow" hair which is in grayscale; when she snatches the Sapphire Statue from Ahuizotl's hands, she leaves a grayscale rainbow trail behind her, like Rainbow Dash does in several episodes.

Development
Writer Cindy Morrow said that Daring Do's name was "Bravely Blue" in her pre-script, first outline.

Appearance
Daring Do is notably very similar in appearance to Rainbow Dash. Her body color is somewhere between dark khaki and arylide yellow. For most of the episode, she has one wing wrapped up in a series of white bandages. Her manestyle is identical to Rainbow Dash's, and consists of six shades of grey that correspond to the six colors in Rainbow Dash's mane, this color combination is often referred to as a grayscale rainbow. Her eyes are raspberry red, with straight eyelashes, exactly the same as Rainbow Dash's. Her cutie mark is a compass rose, which probably represents a talent for exploration and a strong sense for adventure, as would befit her name. Daring's outfit consists of a dark olivine vest and a tan pith helmet with a dark olive band.

Daring Do and the Quest for the Sapphire Stone
Daring Do and her books are introduced in Read It and Weep, when Twilight Sparkle brings Rainbow Dash the first book in the series, Daring Do and the Quest for the Sapphire Stone. Twilight says she owns all the books in the series, and mentions to Dash that "You'd like Daring. She's a lot like you. Adventurous, fierce, and undeniably, unquestionably, unstoppable."

Later in the episode, Twilight calls the book Daring Do and the Quest for the Sapphire Statue instead of Sapphire Stone, and goes uncorrected.

The jungle
At first Dash tosses the book away, but after a short boredom montage, she reluctantly picks up the book and starts reading it, finding that Daring Do is in a situation similar to hers, and that the text describes it in exactly the same words that Dash used earlier to describe her own frustration from the situation.


 * As Daring Do trekked through the tropical jungle, the wet heat sapped her energy and slowed her every step. If only she could escape this oppressive atmosphere and fly up into the cool blue sky. But her crash landing in the jungle had injured her wing and she was grounded for a few days. Few days... it might as well be a few months, or a few years!


 * The mosquitoes buzzed loudly. The macaws cried from the high trees. Yet all of these distracting noises were not enough to cover the sound of the predators following her every step.

While Rainbow Dash is narrating, the scene fades to the descriptions in the book. Daring Do comes face-to-face with a tiger, who tries to bite her, but misses. She tries to escape, but finds that she's surrounded by the tiger, a panther, a lynx, a cheetah, and a white housecat. She quickly lunges over the housecat and runs away, pursued by the cats to a vast gorge which she crosses by swinging on a vine, leaving the cats behind.

The temple

 * Safely landing on the other side, Daring finally allowed herself a moment to breathe. She turned around to find herself face to face with the long lost temple that she had sought tirelessly for over sixty days and nights!

After a brief scene where Rainbow Dash comes to grips with liking the book and being an "egghead", the scene fades back to the story in the book, at first with Dash's narration. The harp plucking that plays when Daring Do first enters the temple bears a strong resemblance to the music that plays in the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones casually brushes spiders off of his back.


 * The smell of decay and danger hit Daring Do as she peered into the dimly-lit entrance of the ancient temple.

Red glowing eyes peer at Daring Do from inside a statue of a skull, and the floor is crawling with insects. Daring Do steps on a tile which sinks with mechanical noises and a series of hazards plague Daring Do: axes fly at her from the wall, flames rise from a gap that opens in the floor, alligators snap their jaws at her from the ceiling, darts fire at her, spikes emerge from the floor one by one, and eventually a stone door nearly lowers onto her while she narrowly escapes to the next chamber. The frame cuts to a different chamber and strange noises are played while, off-screen, Daring Do makes it to the next chamber, again narrowly escaping from underneath a lowering door, this time with darts stuck in her pith helmet.

The central temple chamber
Daring Do clears her helmet of the darts and turns to look at the chamber. A beam of light shines from a skylight above and onto "the legendary sapphire statue", placed on a pedestal at the other end of the chamber. The scene switches from Daring Do's enamored expression to Rainbow Dash's right as she is interrupted by a knock on the door. She quickly hides the book under her blanket before Twilight Sparkle and Fluttershy enter with a Battleship-style game, which Dash purposely loses and quickly puts away. She thanks her friends for the visit and turns off the lights. After her friends leave she picks up the book and continues reading, with the scene cutting back to the story in the book.


 * Daring Do stood at the entrance to the central temple chamber. At last, she was face-to-face with the legendary sapphire statue!

Daring Do starts to walk towards the statue but stops herself and surveys the room. She kicks a rock onto one of the floor tiles which then sinks, followed by a hail of darts that fly over the tile and embed into the wall. Daring Do looks for a pattern in the tiles, and concludes that the animal engravings on the tiles are all predators, "except rats!" She carefully places her leg on one of the rat-tiles, and seeing that no trap springs she proceeds to hop from one rat-tile to the next in acrobatic jumps and flips. She reaches the sapphire statue's pedestal, surveys it, and prepares to snatch it. She eventually just picks it up with her teeth with a bored expression on her face and places it under her hat.

A cylinder slowly emerges from the pedestal where the statue stood, and the room starts to collapse, with debris falling from the ceiling and the floor crumbling into boiling fiery lava. The chamber's pillars collapse one by one while the lava rises, and Daring Do hops back onto the pedestal to escape it. When the lava almost reaches her hooves she jumps from one collapsed pillar to the next until she's underneath the chamber's skylight. Right as the lava swallows up the pillar she was standing on, she lunges towards the skylight and holds on to its rim by her teeth.

Daring Do makes it outside, and gets blown clear by a gust of air from inside the chamber, which lands her in the jungle, right at the feet of a strange creature. The creature cheerfully says "Helloooo, Rainbow Dash" with Pinkie Pie's voice, and the scene swipes from the story back to the hospital room before the character can be introduced.

Pinkie Pie, Applejack, and Rarity walk into the room and inquire for Dash's well-being. A nurse walks in with Dash's dinner, which Dash eats messily, and her friends awkwardly bid goodbye and leave the room. Dash spits out the food and picks up the book again.

Ahuizotl

 * "You thought you could evade me and capture the relic for yourself, but you are sadly mistaken, Miss Do. And now, you shall meet your doom!"

After the false start in the previous scene, Ahuizotl is properly introduced. He walks on all fours, with dog-like hind limbs and ape-like forelimbs, and a long monkey-like tail with a hand on its end. He has a dog-like head, except his eyes are positioned over his nose at the end of his snout. His overall appearance and name mirror that of the mythical ahuizotl from Aztec culture. He speaks with a Spanish accent.

He takes the sapphire statue which Daring Do had obtained at much personal peril, which parallels the same an action by the character René Belloq from the Indiana Jones film​ Raiders of the Lost Ark. With Daring Do having fallen, with his hand at the end of his tail, he blows a cat-shaped whistle. The whistle makes a whistling and meowing sound, and the tiger, the cheetah, the lynx, and the panther hop from out of the bushes, carrying a mace, two lengths of rope, and a spiked club. The white house-cat also shows up, affectionately purring. Ahuizotl laughs maniacally, and the scene briefly cuts to Dash reading the book, with her blanket over her head, wondering who he is, then returns to the story.

Daring Do is tied up on some kind of altar and says, "You won't get away with this, Ahuizotl", and he replies "But I already have." He pulls a lever, waves goodbye, and leaves with his cats, while the room begins to rumble. The walls start closing in, spikes extend from from sockets on the walls, spiders crawl over the spikes, cobras issue from the mouth of an ornament on the wall, and quicksand starts pouring into the room.

Rainbow Dash's doctor's voice interrupts the story, and the scene cuts back to the hospital, where Rainbow Dash is discharged before she can finish the book. After a few attempts to get the book back, she decides to steal it, but she's caught red-handed and drops the book while trying to escape. Dash's escape attempt parallels the first scene of the storybook where Daring Do jumps over the smallest cat that surrounds her, with hospital crew in place of cats. Eventually Dash is caught, and she admits to her friends that she likes to read. Twilight lets Dash borrow a copy of the book, and she hurries to read the last chapter.

The story continues with Daring Do stretching her hat with her mouth over one of her hooves and launching it off. After a complex trajectory it hits the lever that Ahuizotl pulled, and the walls reverse, the sand lowers, and a door leading to the outside opens. She breaks free and concludes, "another day, another dungeon."

The scene cuts to Ahuizotl petting the white house-cat, a cinematic element made famous by the character Ernst Stavro Blofeld of the James Bond series. Ahuizotl proclaims "With Daring Do out of the way, the world will suffer mightily at my hands. I am victorious!" He laughs maniacally and holds up the sapphire statue with his tail-hand, at which moment Daring Do swings on a vine and snatches the statue from him. He calls out "What? Nooo! Curse you, Daring Do!"

Epilogue
Daring Do runs towards the frame with the sunset behind her, while Rainbow Dash narrates the end of the book:


 * And so, with Ahuizotl defeated, and the sapphire statue secured...the world was safe and sound once again, thanks to Daring Do!

Rainbow Dash puts down the book and takes another book from the top of the stack on her nightstand, "Daring Do and the Griffon's Goblet", after which the scene fades to black and the episode ends. The book's spine is blue with yellow bands. In A Friend in Deed, Rainbow Dash reads a Daring Do book with a similar spine and a similar cover, but the title on the cover is "Daring Do and the Sapphire Stone". In Too Many Pinkie Pies, Rainbow Dash reads the original Daring Do and the Sapphire Stone again.

Homage to Indiana Jones

 * See also the section for Read It and Weep on the list of allusions

There are several allusions to the Indiana Jones franchise in Read It and Weep:
 * The harp plucking that plays when Daring Do first enters the temple bears a strong resemblance to the music that plays in the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indiana Jones casually brushes spiders off of his back.
 * The sunlight shining into the chamber is a reference to the map room scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the sunlight shines on a crystal at the center of the room.
 * The way Daring Do makes her way to the Sapphire Stone's pedestal mirrors a scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where the titular hero navigates a trap floor by only stepping on the correct tiles.
 * The scene where Daring Do retrieves the Sapphire Stone mirrors a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which Indiana Jones retrieves an idol statue from a pedestal.

Nightmare Night costume
A layout artist for the show explained the similarity between Daring Do's outfit and one of the costumes featured in Nightmare Night which occurred in the episode Luna Eclipsed. In order to fill out the crowd scenes and due to time constraints, Daring Do's shirt was recolored and the outfit was then used as a costume, worn by the pony Berry Punch. The shirt was recolored so that there were no future episode spoilers.

Depiction in comics
A parade balloon of Daring Do appears on page 6 of.

Merchandise
A mini-figure toy of Daring Do was leaked in early August 2013. Daring Do appears on the Season 2 poster.

Series 1 of Enterplay's trading cards includes a Mare Do Well & Daring Do card, #28. The back of the card shows their names both with trademark symbols. They are listed as a unicorn and pegasus, respectively. The description is divided into two paragraphs, one for each character, with Daring Do's reading "Daring Do is a treasure-hunting pony and the star of Rainbow Dash's favorite book series. Whether escaping crushing walls, a pit of snakes, or a giant rolling boulder, Daring Do is undeniably, unquestionably unstoppable!"

My Little Pony mobile game description
A Pegasus pony who hunts for treasure, Daring Do is adventurous, fierce, and undeniably, unquestionably unstoppable.

Twilight Sparkle and the Crystal Heart Spell
The book Twilight Sparkle and the Crystal Heart Spell mentions in chapter 1, "A Crown Achievement", that Spike shows Twilight a book in her library, "Daring Do and the Trek to the Terrifying Tower", and that Twilight "had already read all the books in the series about the fearless pony adventurer at least three times." Spike uses the book to explain to Twilight that she should seek guidance about her new role as a princess from others with similar experience, as Daring Do seeks tips from "Professor A. B. Ravenhoof" about overcoming her fears.