Anonymous No.36779662
Roughly translated from the Gospel According to Foxx0rz:
Mare Do Well is not how Dash is supposed to be...she's supposed to be self-empowered but this episode makes her overly reliant on external validation. Thus it makes her lose what many of her fans like most about her. And while she may be self-centered, she would never be SO self-centered to the point where she prolongs a dangerous situation just so she can milk the crowd, because, well, that's just despicable, no matter which character is doing it.
May the Best Pet Win is generally okay but makes fans wary because of the overuse of the words "awesome" and "cool", which aren't necessarily bad, but because they're repeated so much it suggests Flanderization (compared to season 1 Dash), and leads into the concerns about...
Read It and Weep shows Dash in a rather pathetic state. Once again she's obsessing over what other people think of her, she doesn't want her friends to think she's an "egghead". But before that, she can't even be okay with acknowledging it herself. It's the same "I have to be cool" thing from Best Pet but far worse, and it seems to conflict with the scene where she had absolutely no problem cuddling an adorable parasprite.
Beyond that, my own problem with Read It is when Dash fakes injury to get back in the hospital, because somehow she figures that looking frail and weak is preferable to being caught reading. It makes no sense, because she cares about flying more than anything else, and if she's really so concerned about her image, she'd realize that faking injury does MORE to damage her reputation as a flyer than reading does, not to mention the damage to her DIGNITY.
(As a small note, the off-stage scenes in Hearth's Warming Eve are the same problem as Mare Do Well, but even more removed from reality. It's ACTING you idiot, nobody cares that you're Rainbow Dash, and your character isn't even supposed to be liked.)
As to why you started to like her at the end of season 2, that would make sense considering Dash fans love Hurricane Fluttershy; it's regarded as "the best Dash episode of the season".