Vector portrait of Rainbow Dash, a blue pony with a rainbow mane and magenta eyes

Rainbow Dash

2010cartoon characterclassic

Published September 23, 2026

Rainbow Dash is the sky-blue, rainbow-maned pegasus who broke out as a fan favorite when Hasbro's My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic launched in 2010. Her cocky attitude and Sonic Rainboom stunt made her a mascot of the adult brony fandom, seeding a wave of YouTube AMVs and DeviantArt fan art that helped define early 2010s pony meme culture.

mlp memes fan art memes deviantart memes character archetype memes fandom hype memes

Overview

Rainbow Dash works as a meme through two overlapping tracks. The first is video, fan-made AMVs that pair her flight scenes and race sequences with punk, metal, or electronic music, a style codified by the earliest viral Rainbow Dash upload on YouTube1. The second is illustration, where the pegasus is redrawn constantly on DeviantArt as a tomboy pinup, an athletic showoff, or an over-the-top action hero3.

Her defining visual gag is the Sonic Rainboom, a supersonic dive that leaves a rainbow shockwave across the sky, invoked in fan writing as shorthand for maximum awesomeness2. The catchphrase '20% cooler' turned up as fan slang for anything a brony wanted to hype, right alongside loud Urban Dictionary tributes to her flying skills2.

Origin & Background

Platform
Television (Hasbro's My Little Pony) / YouTube & DeviantArt (viral spread)
Creator
Hasbro / Lauren Faust; brony fan community
Date
2010

Rainbow Dash was introduced as a main character when Hasbro's My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic premiered in 2010, written as an athletic, thrill-seeking pegasus voiced by Canadian actress Ashleigh Ball3. The show cast her as one of two winged ponies in the core group of six, holding the element of loyalty and often shown in flight while the others walk. Fans on Urban Dictionary later summarized her simply as 'the most amazingly tomboyish yet surprisingly girly pony' in the series2.

How It Spread

The Rainbow Dash meme scene took off on YouTube in April 2011, when user TheSlutfox uploaded a compilation of the character's action beats set to a repitched cover of The Offspring's punk anthem 'You're Gonna Go Far, Kid'1. That single upload became the reference template for brony music videos, and by April 2015 it had crossed 20 million views with roughly 90,000 likes and 59,000 comments1.

Fan art moved in parallel. Searches for 'Rainbow Dash' on DeviantArt returned more than 268,000 results during the brony boom, positioning her as one of the most-drawn characters on the platform3. Urban Dictionary contributors piled on with slang entries that treated 'Rainbow Dash' as a stand-in for tomboyish confidence and loud fan enthusiasm2.

Show-derived catchphrases like '20% cooler' and rowdy invocations of the Sonic Rainboom crossed from episode dialogue into everyday brony vocabulary, cataloged in fan-written dictionary entries that read like inside jokes for the fandom2.

Timeline

2010

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic premieres on The Hub, introducing Rainbow Dash as a main character.

2010-12-15

A dedicated Rainbow Dash page is created on the MLP Wiki, about two months after the show's debut.

2011-04-12

YouTuber TheSlutfox uploads a Rainbow Dash compilation set to The Offspring's 'You're Gonna Go Far, Kid,' setting the template for brony AMVs.

2015-04

TheSlutfox's video passes 20 million views with about 90,000 likes and 59,000 comments.

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