Ever since the video “Starlight the hynotist”:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XW2Qe5-GYY established that Shining Armor had given his sister an extreme phobia of ladybugs by telling her their spots were eyes, I found it amusing that almost every time Twilight meets Cadance they perform their “dance”:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZEHrA0v3AU&t=17s with the line “ladybugs awake!”
With the eye reference I included a little nod to the song “open up your eyes” with the background pony appearance of a young Tempest Shadow aka Fizzlepop Berrytwist. Her being turned into a cactus is a reference to what Twilight does to her parents during the “school entrance exam”:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLReOCIHKDA in which she earns her cutie mark. The “quesadilla incidence” in the final panel refers to “Twilight’s fear of quesadillas”:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8J49drA_as refered to in the episode “Party Pooped” and it is also a nod to the never explained “noodle incident”:https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Noodle_Incident in the Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes.

I’m glad I managed to get this comic done in time for “Shining Armor and Cadance Day 2022”:https://www.equestriadaily.com/2022/02/shining-and-cadance-day-halfway-point.html.
This is one of very many little comic ideas I have had in mind for years but never realized because digital art takes such a long time for me to make. I actually drew and submitted two figures for the first panel back in 2020 but then let the project hibernate till now.
I had hoped to come up with some kind of style that would take me less time to make but got to admit that I utterly failed in that regard, taking more than a month of work for this page. Maybe I can come up with a less time intensive style for future comic pages.