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+-SH safe2282972 +-SH princess ember8958 +-SH rarity226304 +-SH spike95550 +-SH dragon92721 +-SH bridle gossip1121 +-SH g42124771 +-SH gauntlet of fire1556 +-SH my little pony: friendship is magic269177 +-SH testing testing 1-2-31591 +-SH deadpan expression9 +-SH debate in the comments293 +-SH female1913691 +-SH implied sparity636 +-SH irony828 +-SH logic178 +-SH male590512 +-SH meme97426 +-SH rarity is not amused761 +-SH ship:emberspike789 +-SH shipping268473 +-SH straight189420
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I didn’t get that impression at all from this pic. Might just be me.
I get that impression, yes.
@raw19
“Oh, Spike, how could you ever know what it’s like to be totally obsessed with a pony only to find out they’re obsessed with somepony else?”
Why Simple Ways per se?
Like I said before, Spike’s chronological was based on Jim Miller’s tweets on the subject. Keep in mind, developmentally he put Spike around 10-12.
@Hellticket
I’ve had some experiences, myself, which probably lead to my own biases. In particular, there was some skeevy behavior from my stepdad when I was 5 and my 13 y/o female babysitter encouraged some very inappropriate behavior when I was 8, both of which lasted for awhile and also messed me up a bit. That being said, when I conceive of Sparity and Ember’s age difference, I’m thinking something like Dipper x Wendy age difference, which is a bit different from your conception of barely a year’s difference, just on either side of the tween/teen divide. Of course, I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem for the shipping for the same reason I don’t see Sparity as being inherently problematic: that being because time exists and 4-7 years difference between kids or a kid and adult is not the same as that age gap between adults. I mean, when my mom was 12, my dad was 20, which would be super inappropriate, except they didn’t start going out until my mom was about 23, just out of college, and my dad was 31. Doesn’t seem so bad then, and that’s an 8 year gap. So I’m fine with Rarity not reciprocating Spike’s crush until he’s grown a bit more, but I like the pairing because of the character development they’ve had plus the dynamic it would create. Besides, I have this suspicion he’ll have another magical age-up at some point.
P.S. On unrelated note, I read quite a few “Spike born as a pony” AU fics. As I read them, I didn’t see our Spike, only purple pony with green mane with same name who acts completely differently. On every single fic. Is it just coincidence, or not? What it tells about Spike and his character?
Edited
This is totally fair and I agree! I guess the only place the water gets muddy for me is the very specific word of “child” here, because it’s a word with a heavy connotation and one I was a little imprecise in throwin’ around. a six year old and a thirteen year old are both Children to me, but the dynamics at play are drastically different. Hottest of takes, but sexuality among prepubescents can be pretty… benign among those of their own peer group, you know? Six year olds “play doctor” and middle schoolers “date” and fool around on the bus, and it’s all pretty harmless so long as they’re safe and it’s only among their peers equally exploratorily, imo, and the obvious harm comes from someone with the wherewithal to Know Better taking advantage of the situation. Like I don’t wanna Go Too Far there, because it’s obviously sensitive, but yeah! I completely agree that in almost any case, an actual intimate relationship between a child and an adolescent would be Super Bad, but the rub there is in the word “child”, which can have some overlap there at the tail-end with “adolescent.”
So, bringing it back to Spike and Ember – it’s all speculation, of course, but I guess my point is just that “Pinning Spike at “approximately the human equivalent of like 12-13 developmentally” and Ember at “about 14-15 in the same regards” isn’t too far-fetched and while is still in possession of an “age gap”, this would reasonably have them within the same life stages/developmental place/peer groups, which lets one be comfortable with a much reduced chance of coerced consent via power differential”, ya dig?
This is annoyingly personal to me and I’m not going to pretend I’m unbiased, because I’m like totally biased, in as much that [tmi, plus talkin about coerced consent more as it relates to me] i was a lil 14/15/16 year old with a crush on a person waaaAAaaayy my senior, and surprise!! it wasn’t a healthy relationship at all and the age diff made true consent possible and it uhh super fucked me up? Whereas the relationships I had with my peers at that same 14/15 year old time were just like, normal and fine? So I project like a moootherfucker, and Sparity is unbelievably distressing to me due to my life; I project onto Spike and desperately want Rarity to NOT return his affections because I see her as an adult and yeah, projection, whereas Emberspike invokes those nostalgic learnin-about-Feelngs-together emotions I associate with peer-to-peer relationships at those ages. SORRY to WAY overshare, it just contextualizes it? and YEAH!! That was way TMI, apologies, but, I felt like it Framed the Hell out of why I um reacted so viscerally at the idea that sparity and emberspike are Just as Bad for The Same Reasons unu;;
Whoa, dude. As much as I like Spike to be older, it never crossed 17 years.
@bico-kun
My theory is: there is different types of greed. Spike’s in SoME was ‘cheap greed’, everything could be acquired too easy, and didn’t have any particular value. It influenced his form: bulky and very big, and thought process: grab it! Classical greed involved gems-only, acquired by own work (if they were to rob weak, but rich sapients, it would quickly turn into ‘cheap greed’). I think there’s also ‘book greed’ (collecting ancient or rare books and scrolls), ‘knowledge greed’ (collecting immaterial knowledge), ‘friendship greed’ (make friends with many ponies, or making small number of bestest friends, or with those who’s hard to make friend with?), etc. Every ‘greed type’ result in different adult form.
I agree with the concept that child x adolescent and child x adult are somewhat different. Personally, I don’t see it as different for the child, but more that the adolescent is slightly less culpable for their actions than the adult. I would still very much label an intimate relationship between an adolescent and a child as abuse, however, based on similar power dynamics and difference of consent.
@Background Pony #8991
As I said before, it does seem like Spike might be 16-22 years old chronologically (I would still say closer to 16, though), while Twilight and her friends are 7-10 years older, so maybe 23-26. That seems reasonable given Twilight was presumably around Kindergarten age when she applied for Celestia’s school and subsequently hatched Spike, and plenty of people have speculated that the Mane6 should be early to mid-twenties if their ages are equivalent to humans. Spike is apparently only 10-12 years old in terms of maturity due to dragons aging slower than ponies.
As for how dragons age after that… I’m not sure even the writers know where to go with that. Your explanation might fit with the strict SoME greed growth, but from what we’ve seen the dragons absolutely don’t control their avarice. It didn’t take Spike that big a hoard to outgrow the teenage dragons, either. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t happen as @DBZFan12 thinks since Spike would have to be older than those teen dragons for that to make sense. Personally, I feel that two possibilities are likely:
A) Dragon greed, even untempered, normally results in the normal growth seen in the teen dragons. Because Spike was never exposed too much in the way of material gifts, however, when he finally was long after normal dragons would have been, he experienced an overreaction that catapulted him into adulthood.
or
B) Dragons have two modes of growth. One is the normal growth that Spike usually experiences and the other is greed growth. Perhaps greed growth is a more defensive response that happens when young dragons are separated from its parents that results in a large but somewhat stupid dragon adult very quickly. Zecora could be most familiar with it because she may have only seen baby dragons separated from their parents.
But, you know, that’s all speculation for now.
My headcanon for dragons is that, when they hit their teens and give in to their greedy nature, they grow into the giant dragons that Spike grew into in Secret of my Excess. But, if they resist their greedy nature, their bodies will stop growing and they’ll keep their teenage, bipedal bodies for the rest of their lives (which may or may not be for thousands of years; it depends on what set of dragon mythology you follow (Celtic European, Asain, Middle-Earth, etc)). Additionally, by resisting their greedy nature, their personalities will personalities may also change. For example, if a young dragon was rude and mean before resisting his/her greedy nature, he/she may become polite and kind. Whether their personality changes or not depends on the individual.
Well it also helps that she’s the “princess of love” and “makes love bloom wherever she goes”. So naturally she MUST be doing a lot of “under the covers work”.
Nah, that would be silly…
Then, what if Spike is a 5000-year-old Time Lord regenerated into an egg? Eh, it too would be silly.
I’m pretty much the same, though i’m not a huge fan of SpikexMale. …Or Granny Smith.
After “Secret of my Excess” I’d always interpreted it as dragons aging relative to their hoard-or the level of their greed. That dragons are taught how to reign in their inherent avarice and build their hoard slowly enough to age at a regular rate. So I don’t see it as Spike being chronologically younger than Ember-much-so much as never being able to age at a normal rate due to never getting those lessons. That said, there’s a world of difference between a ten-year-old and a fifteen-year-old. I suppose it depends on how long Twilight was Celestia’s student, since Spike is explicitly that old. We know she was much younger than Celestia’s normal students-we see her as a blank flank filly when Sunset was physically mature-but how old she was and is now is still up to fanon. Regardless, however, we know Twilight and Rarity are similar in age, so if we say, hypothetically, that Twilight was, say, ten and was a student for ten years-since the Mane Six are definitely age of majority-then there’s at least a ten-year gap between Spike and Rarity. Which tends to be slightly more frowned upon.
which… still isn’t good or cool? Like I ain’t about to start the “How Much in the Problem Attic Is Spike’s Age Vis a Vis Rarity Eternal Holy War” here, I guess I’m just bristled at the implication here it would be inherently hypocritical for a person to be super squicked by sparity but okay with emberspike. Like all age gaps is the same. “Rightly” or “wrongly” I feel like it’s…. a valid and reasonable interpretation to see Rares as “An Adult” and Spike as “A Kid” and Ember as “A Teenager”, and I don’t think it makes a person a hypocrite to see AdultxKid as Ew but TeenxKid as Okay. Especially because it maintains consistency with one side of a belief/debate– that dragon bodies may age faster relative to their minds compared to ponies (that is, even if one believes Spike is physically an adult, it’s easy to see him mentally as a kid, so it’s safest to treat him as a kid). Even if Ember is technically physically “older” than Rarity she sure doesn’t act like it?
like I’m sorry!! I know this is infamously My Buggaboo and I’m not throwing shade (and I know I’ve draw a lllooOOTTTT of sus s//t in the past, I uhh, only ship aged up Spike now ok unu). It just seems… petty, or immature, to try and lawyer a person into “being a hypocrite”, like “ooohh I thought you had a problem with AGE GAPS, HUUUH” and it’s like no!! I have a problem with very specifically an adult-adolescent relationship being valorized! When you change the uhh age variable to be THAT MUCH SMALLER and move the “adult” variable firmly into the “pubescent” set, the formula changes like a LOT!! Yeah it actually…. IS very different…??
again–no shade to you personally, I know my Sparity issue is a me thing, not a you thing, but I’m just huffy at the idea that all age gaps are actually identical regardless of stage of life that they represent, and that one would be a hypocrite to take issue with one, but not the other ): a teenager….. is super different….. than an adult…..
And as a side note, I haven’t seen any fellow Sparity fan criticize Ember for her age gap with Spike. It has generally been the opposite, with Spember fans calling Sparity pedophilic while claiming Spike and Ember are the same age even though it seems Ember is still older than Spike, even if exactly how much is debatable. Any comment from Sparity fans I’ve heard about Ember being too old for Spike has been in response to this, as in (paraphrasing), “Well, if Rarity is too old for Spike, Ember is probably too old for Spike.”
Kind of like how Cadance debuted as a happily married mare (not initially, obviously), but she’s drawn committing infidelity all the damn time. XD
This is also true. one ship existing won’t make another ship STOP existing.
>Anyone worried about ember x spike should chill out, it practically doesn’t exist anyway.
I think the better reason they should chill out is that it’s really not going to effect their shipping, when ships still happen when canon has one then it just proves that shipping will happen no matter what and to be upset over it is just to be butthurt that others like another ship.
Somewhat, but starlight wasn’t “instantly likable”, she needed to earn it, thus the interactions between her and Spike felt more authentic.
Ember falls into the cookie cutter “tough girl who is tsundere and pretty”.
MOST erotic pictures of her show her solo or with humans/placeholders-for-the-viewer’s-delight, because people would rather have her “for themselves” instead of pair her with someone from the show.
Seriously, there is hardly anything between her and spike in terms of fanart (even less containing spike sans wings in some terribly moronic headcanon).
Anyone worried about ember x spike should chill out, it practically doesn’t exist anyway.
I once suggested the law of consent in life change to be limited by sexual maturity and intelligence rather than age, and then I immediately started laughing hysterically because I fully recognize how moronic lawmakers are. XD
This thread reminded me of that comment, which I still believe possible after perceptions have changed over several future generations, similarly to how pink used to be a masculine colour before the end of the second war. Plus, because every character’s ages are unknown and we may as well believe Baby Dragon Spike is old enough to run for Governor of Horse New York, there isn’t anything barring Spike from getting with Rare, save the moratorium on mane character relationships.
Addendum: I’m starting to think not everypony recogizes– Well, no, that’s just what I think about everypony except me concerning everything complex, lel. Anyway, whenever ponies talk about the mane characters, note we, or perhaps I, usually mean the ten central characters, as more often than not, episodes are focused on one or more of those ten, and supporting, secondary, or even background characters star in only two or three episodes in all the series. (Trying and failing to remember such an episode besides E09. XD )
This. Even though we know dragons live for thousands of years (100 years being a nap for them), we don’t know how long each phase takes. We can’t assume its the same as with humans/ponies. Its entirely possible that dragons go through the initial stages more or less at the same rate that ponies (though obviously a bit slower since Spike is still considered a “baby” dragon despite being over a decade at least) and then their aging slows to crawl/halt upon reaching adulthood, staying at that age for millenia.
@YuwenTaiji
alwaysacted like a kid and sometimes showed maturity beyond some of the Mane6 despite what his age “relative for dragons” was (baby), so it doesn’t seem very fair to invert this for Ember and argue that her possibly being hundreds of years old doesn’t matter because she acts younger than Rarity.