@soundtea
Not exactly. There were two ponies in the script, Cloudchaser and Stormwalker. Cloudchaser was the one to whom Rainbow Dash said, “Nice flexibility!” Stormwalker’s role was…something else. We’ll never know. Stormwalker was cut out of the episode entirely in storyboards.
However, by the time Stormwalker’s scene was cut out of the episode, the animators had already made a (*nearly?) complete set of flash models of Stormwalker. And they hadn’t made any of Cloudchaser. So when they were told to make a model of Cloudchaser, rather than shelve all the work they did making a pony who now wouldn’t exist, and doing all that work over again to make a brand new pony named Cloudchaser, they just used the existing models for Cloudchaser. And to further save work, they didn’t go through it and re-name every single file that makes up the flash model, they just left the names as Stormwalker. Everyone knew the animation files for Cloudchaser were named Stormwalker.
Everyone on the animation team, that is. Not everyone on the team writing the book. Someone involved with making the book took an image from the files as an illustration, and put the image file’s name rather than the pony’s name under it. Nobody thought to tell them, “With this one particular pony, don’t do that. Her name is Cloudchaser.”
*I suspect they weren’t actually done making the Stormwalker files when they stopped working on them. The files seem to have been mostly just copied from the files for Cloud Kicker, who’s a Pegasus of the same body color. They just changed the file names; changed the face, mane, and tail; and changed the cutie mark. It looks like they didn’t completely finish that last part when Stormwalker was cut from the script and they stopped working on the model. And when they suddenly realized they needed a Cloudchaser model, nobody remembered that they still had a bit of work to do. That seems the most likely reason why in a few poses her cutie mark suddenly changes from Cloudchaser’s shooting star to Cloud Kicker’s cloud-and-sun.
