Ahhhhhhh

all I hope is that twilight isn’t the only pony who believes spike is still alive.

Wonder where this is ultimately going.

@Fwelin  
We can agree to disagree on whether she should have know better. Still, given this and other social behaviors(and the fact that Spike himself seemed to have better social skills than Twi herself in S1) I am still left feeling that Twilight would not have been a great primary caregiver for Spike pre-S1 without stunting his social growth.

@Fwelin  
Spike has lived with Twilight his entire life. She should have known that something was bothering Spike by the way he was acting. It was obvious to anybody, even her new friends pointed it out, yet she did not sit him down for a conversation about his feelings. Then it turned out that she was aware of his feelings, but did nothing to de-escalate the situation. What didn’t help matters was Owlowicious getting the exact same treatment as Spike the day after the meteor shower (bow tie included), which suddenly made all of that appreciation he got the previous night devoid of any meaning, despite the girls having just met the owl. What really didn’t help was that throughout the episode Spike was getting showed up by Owlowicious, during the day, when the owl was only supposed to take a minor role and help out at night.  
Sure, Spike overreacted but he is a child and Twilight did nothing to ease his worries while being aware of his jealousy. Her lack of sensitivity and action resulted in her ward running away from home and nearly getting himself killed. Again, she should have and did know him by then.
 
Zero signs that he was jealous?  

 
 
Your human parent analogy makes no sense because human parents are the same species as their children. For all we know dragons could be inherently deathly allergic to almond butter or something. You don’t get an exotic pet without researching their needs either, because they have a tendency to die or develop behavioral problems if you fail to treat them as what they are.
 
You say that there wasn’t any known need for more info before that point. How about the fact that getting one too many Birthday presents resulted in him growing into a 50-foot greed beast that wreaked mayhem over the course of a day?  
Doesn’t this beg the question what else we should know? A responsible guardian would be asking that question.
 
But I’m done arguing.

@Background Pony #AF79  
Yeah, they noticed the same outward signs of slight jealousy that Twilight did. Twilight then took further action to remedy that.
 
Spike then proceeded to ignore Twilight’s reassurances and go off on worse tangent than he ever showed signs for after completely misinterpreting Twilight’s scolding, but that’s not Twilight’s fault for not being able to read his mind.

@Fwelin  
>literally zero  
>entire circle of friends realize something is bothering him  
Even if it was only slight jealousy, a nice sitdown would have likely still helped.

@Background Pony #AF79  
No one would have known he wasn’t okay to a degree that those words wouldn’t have helped from the signs that Spike was giving off in her presence. The only reason we knew better was because of his scenes when alone or only with Owlowiscious.
 
Spike was giving literally zero signs of feeling more than just slightly jealous at any point that Twilight was around, and Twilight took suitable countermeasures to try to fix what she believed Spike was thinking about. You’re expecting her to be literally psychic.

@Fwelin  
Which is the general answer someone gives when someone doesn’t want to avoid a conversation. She just kinda let it hang there even when she knew he wasn’t okay. Like I said, she was not a bad pony, just not good at reading social situations.

@Background Pony #AF79  
They DID have a conversation like that, but Spike blew it off afterwards. She was very specific in saying that Spike was not being replaced, and then later told Spike that there was still work for him when he was worried about it again.

@Fwelin  
Like I said, a conversation could have resolved most of that. Something as simple as asking ‘You know Spike, if you’re worried or having doubts about Owlowicious, you know you can come to me with anything, right?’

@Background Pony #AF79  
She knew that he was minorly jealous about having someone to share Twilight’s attention with, but that’s normal, and does not normally require more than she did do to reassure him. She reassured him that Owlowiscious was only there to support Spike in a junior role, and then later told Spike that he was still useful even with the new addition.
 
The problem was that Twilight didn’t know that Spike based much of his self-worth on being useful as Twilight’s assistant, that he got a mistaken idea that Owlowiscious was doing everything, and that he thought she didn’t love him any more when she was no longer solely relying on his help. That was not indicated in any of his actions or words towards her until he ran away, and there was no way she could have guessed that on her own.
 
 
Pre-S1 Twilight would not have been a great parent, but she treated her family closer than she did with her (lack of) friends, and would very likely be a passable mother by the time she was old enough to handle it on her own.

@Fwelin  
A nice conversation in OWTEW might have gone a long way towards preventing large parts of the problem from taking place. It was already obvious to Twilight about a third of the way through the ep that Spike was jealous but rather than sit down with him and talk about the new addition to their home, she did nothing until the end of the ep after Spike ran away to really address it. Of she had simply said what she did to Spike after rescuing him from the dragon immediately after realizing he was worried about Owlowicious, the whole back half of the ep might just have been avoided. Keep in mind that this was near the end of S1 which would have beenn a while after she gained the basic social skills necessary for friendship. That doesn’t say anything good about caregiving skills pre-FiM. Again, I’m not saying she’s a bad or malicious individual, just that I think who Twilight was before the series did not make it likely she would be emotionally/socially mature enough to ensure Spike would grow up in a healthy and socially enriching environment if she was her primaey caregiver. I also think Celestia and Twi’s parents wouldn’t be blind to this and would take it upon themselves to do most of the heavy lifting raising him while encouraging interactions with Twilight if only for the purpose of drawing her out of her shell a bit more. Again, just my thoughts on the matter. Really would help out a bit if the writers at least brushed on this a little, especially after all the family stories in S7. We got an AJ’s dead parents ep and yet we still don’t have much of an idea about how seemingly one of the few dragons integrated in pony society was raised.

@QueenCold  
Your points do not follow. Twilight not going through every single book no matter how remote the chances of them finding new info on dragons does not mean she never looked through the more likely books before, nor was there any known need for more info before that point. Real life responsible parents are not expected upturn entire libraries in an effort to find obscure information that may or may not exist, and that may or may not ever become relevant, and there’s no reason for Twilight to either until it’s called for.
 
Also, Twilight did nothing wrong in Owl’s Well that Ends Well. Spike internalized the literal worst case scenario, out of line of what Twilight did, and there’s no way Twilight could have expected that. Faulting her for how Spike reacted in that episode is like faulting Celestia for how Twilight acted in Lesson Zero.

@Fwelin  
Spike is her ward and as such she has a responsibility to care for him properly. Her lack of knowledge about his needs resulted in the destruction of half of Ponyville once. Despite this, she didn’t even try to find any information about dragons in her library despite her studious nature or she would have known her library contained no useful information.  
This isn’t the only evidence of her being a terrible guardian. Owl’s Well That Ends Well is another episode that casts her in a bad light when it comes to caring for Spike.

@QueenCold  
It’s been stated several times that even the princesses know very little about dragons (beyond what Spike has taught them, assumingly), and I don’t really see what’s off about Twilight not having exhaustively searched those books for dragon information is. Keep in mind that Twilight had only moved to that library less than a year beforehand, and she doesn’t need to look up stuff for things she’s seen from Spike for years or read from books from Canterlot.

@Background Pony #AF79  
This is the problem with the canon information being so conflicting. It seems like ponies don’t know anything unless it’s convenient for them to know specific trivia to advance the plot. The princesses being knowledgeable about dragons would be EVEN worse, because it would give Twilight absolutely no excuse not to know more about her ward’s species. Then again, Dragon Quest showed that she lacked even the knowledge that her books lacked information, which implies that she never looked for it.  
Not to mention Zecora’s existence and the fact that we know Twilight knows she has information about dragons.  
See what a mess this is? At this point there really isn’t any way to answer any of these questions without making someone look really bad.

@Fwelin  
Doesn’t negate the fact that growing up with a ‘mom’ like pre S1 Twilight would not be a healthy environment for any child which I doubt Celestia or Twilight’s parents would be ignorant to. Not to mention the fact that Twilight was just a kid herself. If you follow the mama Twilight headcanon, I’m not going to bash you for it, I’m just explaining why I’m not someone who can get on board with it.

@Yoga is boring  
Spike was one of the only exceptions Twilight regarding her having non-existent social skills (they were just mediocre instead), and Twilight is obviously accustomed to raising Spike on her own by the time season 1 starts.
 
I don’t go by IDW, and Twilight doesn’t need to have started off raising Spike very much; at first, she might have only taken care of him for an hour or two a day, with very limited responsibilities. As Twilight got more mature and more used to it, her responsibility would have been ramped up until she was fully handling it.

@QueenCold  
That’s sven worse but doubtful seeing as the prinesses seem to have at least a basic understanding of dragon culture in GoF (enough to know there is a culture to begin with).

@Yoga is boring  
It is also quite possible that given the limited knowledge that ponies have about dragons, they did not even realize Spike was more than a pet until they saw how he developed. Fluttershy was unaware dragons could talk in the pilot and unfortunately Dragon Quest is canon.

@Yoga is boring  
It doesn’t help that being Celestia’s personal students already puts incredible pressure on her. It’s telling that she only really learned to relax after she’d been gone from Canterlot for a good long while.

@Fwelin  
Older sister maybe but not a mom for the simple reason that she’d be really bad at it. Just look at pre-series Twilight in the comics and in Amending fences, she was not fit to raise a kid in a healthy manner. I doubt either Celestia or her mom would allow her to raise Spike being the way she was back then. They’d realize that not only was Twilight not fit to be a mom but that Spike wouldn’t grow up in a healthy manner with a socially inept filly for a ‘mom’ nor would he benefut from picking up a social skillset from filly Twilight. Heck, she suffered with basic social skills well into S1 so I doubt it was simply a matter of age. At the same time, I do think they’d let Spike hang around Twilight in hopes that a genuine friendship would blossom so that Twilight would at least have someone she could call friend other than the semi one sided ‘friendships’ she had with her old classmates.

@Yoga is boring  
Nah, she’d be a great “mom” as long as it was done jointly with Celestia or Twilight Velvet, with her share slowly increasing as she got older.

@Jarkes  
Assuming that the artist is staying true to the three-act structure, which it definitely looks like they’re doing, it is actually about time the plot gets moved along. I have confidence that it will soon.  
It really doesn’t matter how many pages the artist plans on making. What matters is that there’s a story and how this story is told. Padding is padding, planned or not.