Trivia / Breathers For Applejack

• Diagnosis of God: Twilight Sparkle displays several traits of obsessive compulsive disorder, even beyond her fixation on keeping things organized in the original show. She tends to jump to pessimistic conclusions, obsessively thinks about things that stress her out, and has the compulsive tic of chewing on her hoof-tips when she's nervous or thinking. It's never directly stated in the story, but in a reply to reader comments, the author confirmed he wrote Twilight as someone with OCD. In fact, he has OCD himself, and based his version of Twilight on his own experience.
• Parody Displacement: Pablote thought the inflation gag from "Spike at Your Service" would inspire a deluge of Applejack-focused inflation fetish art and fanfics, and he started writing "Breathers" as a response to this expected trend. But that deluge wound up being a short-lived trickle instead. So this fic was supposed to be a deconstruction of one Fandom-Specific Plot, but instead became the longest-running and most noteworthy example of that specific plot.