Trivia / The Apprentice, the Student, and the Charlatan

• Colbert Bump:
  • One of many MLP works to get featured on Equestria Daily. However, it was the audio drama that was featured, as opposed to the fanfic, though the fanfic did see a rise in popularity as well.
  • DisneyFanatic2364 did blind commentaries of the audio drama episodes, exposing said audio drama to her viewership for Bride of Discord and its sequel.
• Creator's Favorite: Rytex is quite unapologetic about Nova being his favorite of his original characters.
• Descended Creator:
  • Truesailorcomet voices Envy and the elder Princess Celestia.
  • Rytex cameos as the train conductor in episode 4.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Due to certain scandals, Performance Major only voices Aegis, Balanced Budget, and Night Light Sparkle up to but not including Episode 4, replaced by Nevel Yashgi and some other voice actors.
  • Spike was originally voiced by Truesailorcomet in Episode 1, but was replaced by Jennabun come Episode 4.
• Outdated by Canon:
  • Rytex's depiction of Sombra is as a calculating, cerebral, and very calm and confident villain. Come the season 9 premiere, it's revealed that the Sombra of canon is more of a laughably-evil Smug Snake type of villain, though Grogar ultimately exhibits the characterization of this fic's Sombra.
  • The timeline of the Elements of Harmony places their creation in the show to be after Star Swirl and the Pillars of Harmony disappeared. In the fic, Star Swirl existed concurrently with the Elements in the past.
• Schedule Slip: 2016-2017 was not kind to either the audio drama or the fanfic.
  • Rytex's writing output hit an all-time low due to his job taking up much of his free time and developed a case of depression, though he eventually was able to get a new job with better hours, and his writing output has returned to prior levels.
  • Truesailorcomet had to deal with hardware issues, juggling work, life, and free time, and DoD and ASC over the course of 2017, resulting in episode 4 of the audio drama being released a whole 14 months after episode 3.
• Trolling Creator: Rytex has been known to generally mess with the fans of the story and audio drama.
• What Could Have Been: Several changes were made over the course of writing the fic. For instance, Trixie and Princess Luna were originally supposed to be part of a Love Triangle with Nova and Twilight. Ray Novus was supposed to be the real Big Bad of the story (something reflected in the old version of the chapters), and Steelshod being much more of a belligerent rival to Nova than the friend and competitor for Clover the Clever's affections he became.
• Write What You Know: Almost all of Nova's hobbies with real-world equivalents are hobbies he shares with Rytex. Especially in the realm of music and sports.