Please, with all due respect, I think you guys are overreacting to this. Yes, this is one of the stranger topics that’s been posted on the GOF (my own reaction when I first saw it was something along the lines of: :huh: :blink:
), but there’s nothing wrong with it! I don’t know what this says about my strangeness level (though the very concept of “strange” is a little subjective if you ask me), but I found it rather thought-provoking, actually. I’d never given any thought to what a pterosaur would smell like before; now I might include some mention of that when I describe a living pterosaur in one of the books I plan on writing.
If you’re really, really interested in something, even if it’s fictional, I don’t see anything unusual in wanting to know what it would be like to encounter that object in real life, along with all the sensory experiences that would come with it: what it feels like, what it smells like, what it looks like close-up, how it would react to you, etc. I find myself thinking this way about dinosaurs, other extinct animals, heck, even modern-day animals (especially ones I’ve never seen in the flesh before) sometimes. I would love to have the chance to pet a
Kakapo, see what a
Stegosaurus’s colors really were, hear the sound a
T. rex makes, even learn for myself whether a giant squid smells as bad as their ammonia-rich bodies are purported to. Just last year I fulfilled one of my odd little ambitions, when I had to chance to pet a binturong (see my post on it
here) and find out whether they really smelled like popcorn, as I’d heard on Animal Planet. And I’ll eat my socks if I’m the only other person in the world who’s curious about his/her passions in this kind of way. -_-
As for Pterano’s popularity, is it really such a big surprise? One-shot characters with large fandoms are far from unheard of. (Sharptooth was technically a one-shot character, wasn’t he?) And there are a lot of reasons that Pterano would draw attention. He's a very complex character: one of the few LBT antagonists who’s not looking for food and/or petty revenge; calculating (trying to gain Littlefoot’s trust, manipulating Petrie to get information from him when that fails, plotting to leave covertly in search of the SoCF to avoid arousing suspicion); ambitious (wanting to seize a allegedly magical object in order to gain great power and respect); and while his motives may be selfish, he’s not out to hurt anyone, and indeed shows remorse when he is responsible for someone’s death (even if, as in Ducky’s case, it turns out to be a false alarm). And unless you dislike Pterano, I don’t understand why you would be annoyed that he's so popular.
I might add that Ali was a one-shot character (with many fans) for a long time, until “The Brave Longneck Scheme” came along. As I'm sure you know, a lot of fans were upset, angered, and/or disappointed at how she was portrayed in that episode. So some Pterano fans might consider it a GOOD thing that he didn't have a guest appearance in the TV series.
