2019-11-30 6:14:55 ¶ ●

went on one of my impromptu act rereads last night - late act 3 through to the end of act 4 - and I stumbled upon a page that immediately reminded me of @mmmmalo​‘s musings on bifurcated horses as representations of bifurcated souls.

> You are a little nervous about transportalizing yourself. As a quadruped, grisly bisection strikes you as a very real possibility. Even though you’re too dumb to think of such things.

while I think it would be easy to argue that the line about being sliced in half mid-fenestration poses no significance beyond being a reference to a recurring incident in Problem Sleuth, this line about the transportaliser has no such referential value. Maplehoof passes through the transportaliser just fine in the next panel, and this risk is never addressed again. this very plausibly turns the bifurcation of horses into a motif.

perhaps notably, by traveling through this transportaliser Maplehoof is making its way toward the ectobiology lab in the Veil. it’s from here that Maplehoof becomes attached to Dave Strider and accompanies him to the landing site of his meteor, destroying a record shop on the way down (the bifurcation of the record on Dave’s shirt?): and some 34 pages later we witness Dirk bifurcating a another meteor, simultaneous with the bifurcation of the cruxite egg Dave needs to hatch to enter the game.

Andrew’s commentary for page 1906 suggests that while “most of [the objects held by the paradox clones when they land on Earth] present some attraction to their innate personalities”, “the Dave/pony pair is kind of a head-scratcher. Except when you consider that Dave probably wouldn’t hesitate to ride a pony down to Earth, if given the choice.” while this outwardly implies the horse’s significance in the story is just as mystifying to the author as it is to us, this could be a subtle hint that its association with Dave’s meteoric journey is a key factor?? or maybe i’m just throwing asteroid spaghetti to see what sticks.