Smugdash, also called Rainbow Dash Dreamworks Face, is a reaction image of Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic wearing a smug, eyebrows-raised smirk.

Where did Smugdash come from?

The face comes from two consecutive Season 4 episodes, "Daring Don't" and "Flight to the Finish", which aired in December 2013.

What does Smugdash mean?

It is used as a shorthand for smugness or sarcastic self-satisfaction, borrowing the DreamWorks-style raised-eyebrow squint that Rainbow Dash pulls in both frames.

How do you use Smugdash?

Fans typically drop the screencap as a reaction image or photoshop the face onto other characters, with a common crossover pasting it over Twilight Sparkle in the Twilicane meme.

Is Smugdash still popular?

It stayed a fixture inside brony art communities like Derpibooru and DeviantArt rather than crossing into general meme circulation, and TV Tropes lists it among the MLP character memes.

Smugdash

2013reaction imageclassic

Published September 27, 2026

Smugdash, also known as Rainbow Dash Dreamworks Face, is a pair of self-satisfied smirking expressions from Rainbow Dash in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. The screencaps came from two back-to-back Season 4 episodes airing in December 2013, and brony art communities on Derpibooru and DeviantArt turned them into a go-to reaction face and photoshop template.

mlp memes reaction memes facial expression memes fan art memes deviantart memes

Overview

Smugdash, alternatively called Rainbow Dash Dreamworks Face, refers to two nearly identical smirks that Rainbow Dash pulls in back-to-back Season 4 episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic1. Both frames show her eyebrows cocked, mouth pulled into a knowing sideways grin, and eyes flicked off camera in the exaggerated pose animation fans nicknamed after the DreamWorks cover-art squint3.

Bronies use the screencaps as a reaction image for anything sarcastic, self-satisfied, or gotcha-flavored. A big chunk of the surviving art traffic is photoshop work rather than pure reaction posts, with the face pasted onto other characters or scenes3. The best-known variant is a crossover with the Twilicane meme, where Twilight Sparkle's head in the Twilicane image gets swapped out for Smugdash's smirk3.

TV Tropes filed Smugdash under its My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic character memes page, grouping it with other single-frame Rainbow Dash reaction faces that circulated on brony art hubs4.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (source) / Derpibooru and DeviantArt (viral spread)

Date

2013

The first Smugdash frame comes from "Daring Don't", the fourth episode of Season 4, which aired in December 20131. Rainbow Dash pulls the smirk after eavesdropping on the villain Ahuizotl trading threats with adventurer Daring Do just before their fight over a plot MacGuffin3.

The second, near-identical face shows up in the very next episode, "Flight to the Finish", giving fans two interchangeable versions of the same expression to clip and reuse2. No single artist is credited with coining the name; the term spread through fan tags on Derpibooru and DeviantArt as bronies started saving and remixing the screencaps3.

How It Spread

Smugdash lived mostly inside brony art hubs rather than general meme sites. By August 2015, Derpibooru returned 388 results for the Smugdash tag, and DeviantArt returned 13 hits for "Smugdash" alongside 408 for the two-word "Smug Dash", though many of the latter were unrelated MLP posts3. The DeviantArt search pages for both spellings are still browsable5.

Crossovers with Twilicane were flagged as one of the recognizable variants, along with straight reaction-image use in fan comments and forum posts3. TV Tropes catalogued Smugdash on its MLP character memes page, which is where casual outside readers most often ran into the name4.

Because the face pulls from two consecutive episodes rather than one clip, editors and photoshoppers had a small pool of near-duplicate source images to work from, which helped the tag stay stable on Derpibooru well after Season 4 ended1 2.

Timeline

2013-12-07

"Daring Don't" airs, introducing the first Smugdash frame during the Ahuizotl and Daring Do confrontation.[1]

2013-12-14

The following episode "Flight to the Finish" airs, providing the second near-identical smirk that fans fold into the same Smugdash tag.[2]

2014

Fan artists on Derpibooru and DeviantArt begin filing the screencaps under "Smugdash" and "Smug Dash" tags and start photoshopping the face onto other characters.[5]

2015-08

Derpibooru shows 388 Smugdash-tagged posts; DeviantArt shows 13 for "Smugdash" and 408 for "Smug Dash", with Twilicane crossovers among the notable variants.[3]

2015

TV Tropes lists Smugdash on its MLP: Friendship Is Magic character memes page.[4]

How to Use This Meme

Typical Smugdash posts drop one of the two screencaps as a reply when a comment or thread feels smug, sarcastic, or vindicated. A common convention among MLP artists is to photoshop the face onto other ponies or into unrelated scenes rather than post the raw screencap, with the Twilicane crossover being a recurring template3.