Is it too late for the GOF's slowest poster to do share his thoughts about "Read It and Weep"?
I noticed a couple of interesting things early on in the episode. For one, it seemed to me that Rainbow Dash was a lot more upset about being stuck in bed for a few days than she was about not being able to fly for a few weeks. I thought that was a nice surprise; at the risk of overanalyzing, I thought it made Dash seem more down-to-earth as a character (in a literal sense): although flying is obviously very important to her, it's not so fundamental to her being that she's incapable of temporarily living without it. (I dunno if I'm making any sense; I just thought it was interesting.)
Second, it would appear from Dash's x-ray that pegasi have finger-like bones supporting their feathers. :blink: I guess it would explain why Rainbow Dash needed to bandage her wing in "May the Best Pet Win!" when just one of her feathers was pinned underneath a boulder from the avalanche. It makes you think about the anatomy of pegasus wings, though; maybe they're not as similar to bird wings as we assumed…
I'm surprised no one's commented yet on Daring-Do's nemesis, Ahuizotl.* Even though I had been expecting some kind of monster to show up in the story-within-the-episode, I literally went "whoa!" when he appeared onscreen (and then cracked up when he opened his mouth to speak
). I would have assumed that he was a completely original creature designed for the episode, but his distinctively Mesoamerican-sounding name threw me for a loop; if he was made-up, then the MLP team must have done some very specific research into creating his name. As it turns out, there's an actual creature in Aztec mythology called the ahuizotlóa doglike animal with the paws of a monkey and a hand on its tailóon which this character is based:
The original ahuizotl differed from the MLP version in being small and aquatic (its name translates to "water dog"), with a penchant for drowning humans and eating their teeth, nails, and eyeballs.
(The creature's appearance may have been inspired by otters or the yapok, a semiaquatic opossum whose prehensile tail could have been the basis for the tail-hand.) At any rate, this is the first time I've ever heard of this creature appearing in popular culture, and it's surely the most obscure mythological beast to have been used in MLP so far. (In case I haven't mentioned this before, that's one of my favorite things about this show: the fact that it uses such unique and seldom-seen monsters and fantasy critters.
)
* I will not be looking at the leaked episode or any of its spoilers until Saturday, so my apologies if someone else has in fact already talked about Ahuizotl; I would have overlooked your post in my efforts to avoid spoilers.
