@chainchomp2  
Heh, not the first time something like this happens. In fact, could be worse:  
>>527524 and >>527529  
Those were literally minutes apart (just look at the image ID’s). The comments on the last one are also great.
 
Nevertheless, I understand where the question of art theft came from; there are some people that will actually steal things, not credit original artists, add a bit of whitespace and call it “their” art, etc. and this happens especially on vectors (there’s not really a “I feel like I recognize this art style” to go by).  
Luckily, in this case it’s just two completely different artists vectoring (almost) the same thing, so no need to start merging things.

@Background Pony #59F5  
@DJDavid98
 
I saw it in the episode and wanted to try it out, and actually checked the request thread, although early, to see if anyone else requested it or was working on it. Either no one did at the time yet, or I didn’t notice a request if it was there.
 
I didn’t do it as a request, rather as a personal want, that, judging in the turnout more than one person wanted, apparently. No problem with that. What happened was that I ended up putting it off for a couple more days, resulting in both of ours being uploaded within hours of each other.
 
When I returned to the journal, I saw the request was there, two days old. Since I tend to look at the thumbnails rather than the names as I scroll downwards, that would explain how I might not have noticed it the first time if it was there, as the provided screencap was uncropped, therefore the subject was tiny. That’d be my fault more as opposed to the requester or the request-filler’s.
 
As for the vectors themselves, they’re from the same scene, but off screencaps taken at different timestamps (time-wise, the difference is about a second, pose-wise, Thunderlane’s head is either raised or lowered as opposed to the other). I can say for myself that as a vector artist, I (and probably many) work off the show, so it’d explain why there’d be multiple vectors of the same thing (think back to that face Rainbow Dash made in Daring Don’t that became a meme!). Beyond that, I can honestly say they were made independently, though traced off similar screencaps, but in different vectoring styles and even vectoring platform.
 
TL;DR: It happened as a coincidence where more than one person likes the same thing and wants to glorify it in a high-quality vector, and probably something that the MLP-VectorClub request journal is actually meant to prevent. Whoops! >3>

@Background Pony #59F5  
This image was done for a request which was made in the central pony vector collection group of deviantArt, MLP-VectorClub  
The two possibilities I can think of is that either he also saw the same request and decided to try it for a personal challenge or randomly decided to trace it just because he liked that frame from the episode.  
The only thing I can say for sure is that we did not steal each other’s work, or at least I personally did not steal his.

>>614530 is almost identical and the sources and artists are different. Is someone stealing art? I can’t tell which one was submitted on dA first.

Bros.