Author's Notes:

So, here we are again. Over one year later, and I have made it to the end of another long Fall of Equestria arc, though this time with a little less malice behind my actions. I'm sure that some people might see this as just another attack at FoE, and it's characters, but I promise you it's really not. If I truly hated everything about this setting, then why on earth would I take the effort to make such a story that looks at all it's flaws like I have here, or take the time to remember so many characters important to the setting and their roles within. No, this story was created, in a sense, to do something that I felt that FoE was never going to do itself, no matter who wrote about it or made pictures for it. That something was "give Dainn an actual character".

Before I begin, please allow me to say that unlike the story itself, I'm just writing this out as I think of stuff that pops in my head. There are no proofreaders for this section, and no pre-planning (save for the thought that I would eventually write something like this). Thus there will be typos, there will be disjointed sentences, there will be things that sound completely moronic. I am not very articulate, and my mind is a cluttered mess of information. Feel free to see this all as a girl crazily rambling to herself, as that is what this is, and any moments of "insight" are purely accidental, I assure you.

So about that Dainn character (in the literal sense of the phrase). It has been over three years since this setting started, and what can we really say about him? Well we know from stories and images of him that he is the king of the caribou. That he wears an almost permanent frown on his face. That never seems excited or phased by anything, that he pushes the ideals of male superiority, and that he has a thing for sitting down (seriously, 90% of material about him have him flat on his ass). After all this time, and so much done in a universe that is essentially centered around him, this is all we know.

Well, this is all that the average person can glean from general observation at least. There are a few other things that one can decipher about Dainn if they look a little deeper, like the fact that he never personally trains his slaves, handing that job off to anyone else because he can't be arsed. Or that he seldom comes up with plans of action for himself, allowing his council to decide every action the caribou take, never questioning their judgement, even when the actions are silly, stupid, or against his own wants. We can see that sex doesn't really interest him, as he is just bored by the prospect of having two princesses as his personal sex slaves, and thus only seems to participate in the act because it is expected of him as a king. Still, this really isn't a lot of information for the guy to really gauge who he is.

The problem is, that as far as NCN was concerned, Dainn was never suppose to be a thing people focused on. Dainn, and to a further extent the caribou, were simply a plot device to allow FoE to have a "reason" to be, and that is fairly easy to deduce from the material produced by him and his group. If one looks at the images, one can quickly see that for being the big bads of the setting, the caribou have a surprising lack of presence in a kingdom they are suppose to dominate. Nine times out of ten, it is some corrupted male pony who is violating a mare, because the caribou where never meant to be a "thing". They weren't even present in the first images for the setting, as they were a concept invented after its conception.

As a result, the only time the caribou ever got any real attention is when someone else was particularly interested in them, or had some stake in the character. Vestri is a fleshed out character to some degree, because he was someone's personal OC created to prop up the ponisona they created for FoE. But aside from him, Dainn, maybe Ivangir and (to provide a personal example) Gunne, how many of you can even name one of the other caribou council members? How many of you could name someone besides Dainn?

The caribou are, in a sense, stage props. They only exist in FoE because NCN "needed" them to validate his setting, and weren't even his idea to begin with, as they were suggested to him by one of his artists. If he wanted to, he could have just made a setting where male mlp character treated female mlp characters as inferior for no real reason, and gotten the same results. He might have even gotten less hate for it too, as I don't see people like Whitekitten getting bitched at nearly as bad, but perhaps that is because I don't look at comments for him images with as much intensity as those for FoE.

Back to the point though, which is Dainn and his complete lack of character, and how that came about because the person who created him only saw him as a means to an end. It is sad that this happened, really. As much as it might seem otherwise, I like Dainn. I like his concept, and what he represents as a villain, flaws and all. I like that he's egotistical, stoic, and I even the misogynistic subtly racist aspects of his character because those traits are attractive in people who are suppose to be evil (which is a problem for him because in the eyes of his creator, he is not. That is a whole 'nother tangent though). He has the potential to be an incredibly complex and interesting character, but instead he is reduced to a masturbation tool that hardly sees any use.

Now there is nothing wrong with sexualizing a character. We in this fandom do it so often that we have easily recognizable nicknames for characters that go to the point of naming the sexual situations they find themselves in, or the sexualized forms they are depicted in. However, I would like to believe that we, as fans of MLP, enjoy sexualizing these characters because we enjoy their personalities or identify with them on some level. One cannot identify with Dainn in any way more than that they side with the ideals he represents, or identity him as anything more than "the leader of a bunch of misogynistic tyrants". Thus people either ignore him or, again, treat him as a prop, and usually that turns to stories where people just kill him off to get rid of an aspect of FoE they can't possibly enjoy, the caribou themselves. Funny how people can like the setting, all the bondage, slavery and sex, but simply don't want to deal with the caribou cause there is nothing to relate to with them. They aren't even enjoyable as villains, cause they hardly do anything, and when they do, they seem to do it poorly. It all just seems like a waste of a good idea to me.

So I decided the best way to fix this in the case of Dainn was to finally give him focus. To make him a character in a story that explored who he was, and how he'd react to things outside of his comfort zone. The answer seemed to be "poorly", but that is not a bad thing. It just part of his character, and it's not a bad thing to be angry, or depressed, or confused, or what have you when things go spiraling out of control, and I don't care who the fuck you are, you aren't always going to have things stacked in your favor, so these aspects will be even greater when something inevitably go wrong after a long time of getting everything you want unopposed. I find Dainn's reactions in this story to be very natural, and while I might not have expressed what I wanted him to feel as fluently as someone else might have, I still feel this story does more to flesh out Dainn as a person than has been done with him in the entirety of FoE's 3+ years.

Still, I don't really think it gives a good display of his backstory and how he came to be, as all the information is jumbled up and out of order. So, in a last attempt to make Dainn an actual character, here is my written backstory for him and all his accomplishments.

Dainn, The Caribou King:

While Dainn's exploits as a king are very well know, his youth were shrouded a bit more in mystery until his upper teens. He had simply appeared one day in the caribou capital, penniless, without anything to his name save for a strong sense of determination and self importance. Understanding that this alone would not allow his survival, he joined one of the local slaver groups, but found quickly that he was he often fell behind in his job when compared to others who had a lifetime of experience in the task when compared to him, because of a lack of said experience and a mild disability wherein his knees were weak, which led to him needing to periodically sit down. This led to him being discovered by a caribou named Sindri, who had taken note in him because of his complete lack of natural talent, and noticed that Dainn had interests in other matters that most caribou didn't, namely that he had a large interest in their runic magic beyond just the simple use of it.

Dainn wished to actually understand the runes, and how they worked they way they did. In an age where the average caribou didn't understand that a rune was in fact a written word with meaning, this interest was seen as important for a youth to have by Sindri, who was an older caribou general who served King Svarndagr directly. As such, Sindri introduced Dainn to Svarndagr, and expressed his desire to have Dainn trained by the king as one of his disciples.

Svarndagr agreed as a favor to Sindri, but soon found that he had no personal interest in Dainn himself. Dainn did enhance his abilities as a slaver under Svarndagr's tutelage, but his progression was much slower than that of his peers in that field. Many times Svarndagr wanted to be rid of Dainn, but Sindri kept insisting to give him time, to which Svarndagr would relent to as he had owed Sindri much over the course of their lifetimes, and this seemed like such a simple request.

Over time, Svarndagr secretly begun to resent Dainn, seeing Dainn's failures in "male matters" as a failure on his own part, that he then started to project onto others, eventually seeing all his students as failures undeserving of inheriting his throne. This lead to his eventual sexual use of Dainn, believing that if the stag couldn't do the tasks of a male, he would perform the tasks of a female. While sharing the bed of the most powerful male in the kingdom was seen by Dainn as an honor, he soon found that the king held nothing back, and it didn't take long for Dainn to find the act of sex as a generally unpleasant experience. This led to an eventual disassociation to it as a source of pleasure, even when he partnered with a female.

Despite all this though, Dainn never relented in his personal studies, and eventually became one of, if not the, most well read and intellectual caribou in the kingdom. This talent of his went unnoticed by Sarndagr, but was recognized by Sindri, who was amazed by his progress as a caribou scholar, which was a rare vocation in caribou society. As such, Sindri requested that Svarndagr allow Dainn to be in charge of a small brigade of military troops, assuming that Dainn's intellect would allow him to flawlessly guide them.

Past the point of attempting to dissuade Sindri's plans for Dainn, Svarndagr allowed the request, but personally hand picked the worst of his soldiers in every field to act under Dainn, hoping that it would help staunch the damage that he assumed Dainn would cause when given a position of power. Of these men were two who went by Vestri and Ivangir, who would eventually be part of Dainn's caribou council, and Gunne, who was considered cursed by his people.

Some time after that, Dainn stumbled upon the secrets of The Cycle, a terrible prophecy foretelling of a destruction that came about when a caribou king reached the penile of caribou power. Having seen signs within the king that correlated with this, Dainn felt he had only one choice, and gathered up as many of his most loyal and unquestioning followers to follow come with him offshore, in case The Cycle happened immediately. If nothing happened, then they would simply return and plan for the inevitability, but this was a precaution for now.

Knowing the king was too proud to believe the truth, Dainn requested several boats and supplies under the guise of an exploration mission to discover new lands to conquer. Svarndagr agreed, too tired to dispute it, while hoping that Dainn and his group of lackeys wouldn't come back, for whatever reason didn't matter to him. Before leaving though, Dainn asked Sindri to come along too, to which Sindri agreed.

As luck would happen, the night of their departure was met with the destruction of their homelands do to Svarndagr succumbing to The Cycle, causing an explosion so large that just the sight of it told all who witnessed it that the caribou nation was decimated. Having been correct in his assumption, Dainn was now left in charge of a group of what remained of the caribou, a small percentage of their once great nation, and thus guided them towards a land that he had read about in his studies. A land that the caribou had been banished from long ago. A land called "Equestria".

My god... that little back story actually makes Dainn out to be a somewhat interesting character, and gives him a reasonable set of flaws in the fact that his king utterly loathed him and saw him as "less than a man", while still showing that he is actually a capable person who has talents the caribou need, even if they don't appreciate them. Amazing how easily that can be done with just a little effort.

Anyways, I suppose that is all I want to say on Dainn. Thanks to all of you who actually read this, and I hope that it was entertaining for all of you. And here is hoping however Dainn is next depicted (as I know it's gonna happen) it will be in a better way than what we have gotten thus far.