>>42330078
You can't iterate on perfection, but let's try anyway, for the fun of it. First of all: what parts of Discord's design are 'essential'? That is, what makes his design stop working if you take it away? He needs an expressive face, so anything with an elongated or non-standard mouth is out. I'd say hands (well, paws) are essential, too, for a wider range of gestures - he's much more physically performative than most other characters - so you can't have a hoof or a flipper or anything like that on the forelimbs. Obviously, he needs to be long. I want to say there's something to his colour co-ordination, too, even if it doesn't look like it at first, but I haven't developed that thought enough yet to speak on it. The shape of his head is unique, too, which I think is something the designs in the OP miss, since they look more like heads from stock critter designs. He's supposed to have the head of a horse, right? Not really. We've seen ponies with horse-like anatomy in the show, in Celestia and the Saddle Arabians, and he looks nothing like that.
Basically, in spite of how things appear, there's still some kind of formula underpinning his design that we've yet to crack. It's probably stupid to go looking for the rules behind chaos, but if it brings us more funny spaghetti dragons, I'm all for it.
