@Background Pony  
Agreed. It’s a pairing, not National Geographic, Cartoon Edition!

Can we not just enjoy Sweetie Belle inviting Spike to a tea party instead of over analyzing the crap out if it?

^ Twilight is rather easy to explain: She didn’t leave home for several years. Her parents live in Canterlot so its no big stretch that she lived at home until she was fairly versed in magic.
 
Applejack is a bit harder. According to the recent Equestria map, Manehatten is a far away from Ponyville, but in her actual flashback she can see it from her window. Equestria is, if not less dangerous, at least dangerous in different ways than Earth so perhaps Granny Smith just let her walk what would presumably be a well traveled path by herself.
 
I’m not saying that Spike being wrong is really prevalent, or forced for that matter, but it does seem to kind be a thing. The first example that comes to mind is in ‘Winter Wrap-up’. Spike pushes Twilight to use magic, which is both a common practice in other places and entirely within Twilight’s skill set, and the end result is one of the few times Twilight goofs a spell in canon. Now I understand why it happened that way, and I can even understand why Spike is the one who pushes her to use magic, but taken with his attitude in this episode and the ending with him on the ice I can’t help but feel that they were trying make Spike the antagonist here, at least a little.
 
I’m not trying to say that Spike is Twilight’s caretaker, she’s a grown, if slightly social inept, mare and she can take care of herself. I’m simply saying that Spike tends to espouse a overall concern for Twilight’s emotional well-being that I don’t see a child, or young teenager, having.
 
I think the mane 6 were in the range of 5-6 when they got their cutie marks and I think the CMC are currently in the range of 7-8. That’s about a one year difference.
 
The thing with ages, especially among the mane 6, is that they are very vague. Fluttershy is a year older then Pinkie, and that’s about all we know in hard terms. Obviously though they are about the same age, and Spike’s age is entirely dependent on Twilight’s age which seems to be about even with her friends across the board.

Okay, that’s a good point. Either their Kindergarten is a bit more advanced than ours, Twilight didn’t actually go to Kindergarten and that was just her exaggerating, or she really was that young. I concede to the point about AJ, though it could have been just 1 year younger. I said around the same age, not exactly.
 
But it doesn’t sit well with me, AJ went to Manehattan on her own, and Twi went to something like a boarding school. For them to be that young, it feels weird. About their actual age I’d put the limit at 24-23 (at least for Rarity).
 
Most of those shows make the guys be wrong because they aren’t of real importance, so if someone is gonna be wrong it’s them. But Spike is more than that. If he does a mistake, it either helps him develop as a character (OWTEW) or it’s just some funny gag with no real impact. Anyways, it doesn’t feel “forced”.
 
Those two examples show that he cares about her, alright, but that’s just what a friend would do. In Lesson Zero he was being the voice of reason, trying to make Twi realize she was exaggerating, but that doesn’t mean he always has to keep Twilight in check, and in the first episode he was simply trying to get her to make some friends. It’s not that Spike was being specially mature those times, it’s just that Twilight was being crazy or antisocial. He was acting as her friend, not as her caretaker.

^ oh, duh. I completely misread that age thing. Sorry, lack of sleep and long shifts apparently destroy my reading comprehension.

^ Simply put I can’t agree with that.
 
Magic kindergarten is a thing, and we know that Twilight’s magical studies all happened under Celestia, after she hatched Spike. We also know that at the very least that Applejack was younger then Applebloom when she got her cutie mark as she was ‘just a little filly, even littler then you.’ in the Cutie Mark Chronicles.
 
I should also point out that I don’t think the mane 6 themselves to be any older than 20 to 22. Twilight at the very least is something of a college student, and there doesn’t appear to be any education beyond elementary school level in Equestria normally.
 
My point is that, traditionally, in girl shows the guys doesn’t get to to be right all that often and I feel that comes into play here on occasion. I’m not saying it happens all the time but that doesn’t mean it never happens either.
 
When I say take care I mean doing things to look after her overall well-being that goes beyond cooking her meals and cleaning up her messes, which is part of his job, and I would point out two things that stand out to me. ‘Lesson Zero’ is Spike very specifically taking care of Twilight throughout the episode until he calls in the big guns when it seems hopeless. And the first episode when he tries repeatedly to get Twilight to lighten up.
 
Why would his age be the same as the gap between the mane 6 and the CMC by the way? I see that mentioned a lot but there is no evidence to it.

^In most girls shows Rarity would be an actual antagonist, but this one is different. I don’t think Spike is wrong sometimes because the show said so.
 
I don’t remember a particular instance of him taking care of Twi, just him taking care of the library, and although besides the time she tucked him in bed I don’t remember the opposite, considering his upbringing he should be able to take care of himself for shorts periods of time at a relatively young age.
 
And my point was that by the time they were singing “At the Gala” she had already dropped the “approval of Celestia and fairy-tale marriage” part.
 
It’s just that I don’t see him as having more than 15 years. If we’re comparing his age to the Mane 6’s, we should considerate that he was born when they were around the same age as the CMC, so their age gape will be the CMC’s age. Either way, it’s more than 5-6 years.

^ His gender is important because he’s the boy in a girl’s show, and as such he doesn’t get the chance to be right very often. Hell, in most girl shows he’d probably spend at least a few episodes as an antagonist.
 
My point about Spike’s job is, that not only does he have one, it seems to encompass a lot of ‘taking care of Twilight’ as opposed to her taking care of him.
 
Also, Rarity’s view on romance didn’t change until she actually met prince Blueblood and he treated her like garbage for a night. And all that did was remove him as the focus of her romantic fantasies.
 
And that’s the point I was trying to make. Spike is younger, by about five or six given what we see/hear in the show, but he isn’t markedly less mature than the mane 6.

Oh yes, you’re right about the candy. About the library, he lives in there, of course he has to take care of it. And Twilight takes care of it too, mostly by giving orders, but still. It’s pretty clear that Spike’s job doesn’t go higher than “Twilight’s assistant”. And while Rarity’s romantics were very fairy-taley at first, by the Gala it basically boiled down to “spend and evening with the prince, who must be a gentleman because he’s royalty”, pretty reasonable.
 
And yes, they act childishly sometimes, and that’s the point. The Mane 6 are young adults with some childish tendencies, and Spike it’s a younger individual with some mature ones. his younger behavior is the one that seems natural. I don’t see how his gender has anything to do with it.

^ When did he go Trick-or-Treating? He went to the festival with Twilight, where he did get a big pile of candy from the refreshments I’d guess, Pinkie was the one going after ‘free candy’. I suppose the job can be viewed that way, but I was talking more about how he seems to be the primary caretaker of the library, of which we’ve only seen twilight re-shelve to her personal specifications once, not to mention Twilight. Certainly, his romantic fantasies are a bit childish, the ice cream house especially, but Rarity had her heart set on a fairytale romance that my 7 year old niece would imagine.
 
I’ve always felt that overall the characters are forced to act childishly on occasion to better connect with their primary audience. Spike gets more of it because he’s the show’s token male main character. Or at least that’s how I’ve always seen it.

Well, if you were raised in Canterlot by princess Celestia and then lived along Twilight Sparkle, there’s bound to be some maturity and connections early in your life. The job could be just something related to his assistant duties or fire breath. He knows his abilities, he may as very well use them.
 
Although he can be the voice of reason, he also does things befitting of someone younger, like going trick-or-treating, playing dolls with Pinkie or his fantasies with Rarity in general. IMO these are things your typical 15 years old at most would be doing.

^ Eh, I guess, though outside the similarities in size all I see is an older guy dancing with the little sister of a friend. I just can’t see Spike, who has a job, gets left by himself for long periods of time, knows Hoity Toity well enough to get him to come to Ponyville as even close to teh CMC in age.

Well, in school they sometimes teach us things we already knew about, to study them more deeply. Maybe they knew the basics already, but some things about Cutie Marks may have been left out until that episode (speculations, of course)
 
Besides, although the wedding photo doesn’t really imply any shipping, it does make it look like Spike and Sweetie are somewhat close in age. And to me at least, the CMC don’t really act like 7-8 year old children.

^ See, I’ve always put them about 7 or 8 since the first real episode they have they’re learning about cutie marks, which strikes me as being a very basic piece of information in Equestria, and how the ‘adult’ charcters treat them.
 
Conversely, I’ve always seen Spike as being somewhere between 15 and 17, depending on the age of the mane 6, due to how he acts/is treated by the other characters.

I’ve always considered Spike to be a young teenager (14-15), especially when compared to the dragons in Dragon Quest, who had the mentality of people around 18 and 20 years. Meanwhile the CMC are around 13 years, since we can relate Cutie Marks to puberty.

*wins not ones
 
Holy hell, I need sleep.

*like to think

If I may interject, I like the age gaps between Spike and the Mane 6 and the CMC aren’t that huge (I consider the CMC middle schoolers and Spike to be barely legal) so that everyone ones in shipping him.

^ Fair enough. I was simply trying to spark conversation to better understand your point of view as this shipping obviously makes sense to you when it doesn’t to me. If you don’t wish to discuss that’s fine too.

V And those of us who do ship it don’t care what you think.

^ Indeed, the complete lack of interaction outside of a few seconds dancing at a wedding is a far greater reason to ship two characters than actual connections. Spike with any of the CMC makes no sense at all.

^And she’s still gonna die ages before he’s even reaching middle age. But oh well, that’s never stopped people from shipping with Spike before, and at least at face value it makes more sense than, say, TwiSpike or sparity.

^ I can’t. Of course I also can’t really see Spike being any less then about 7 years Sweetie’s senior so that’s probably part of it.

I think Rarity would be more than happy to get behind this ship.

“The things I do for Rarity.”