Today's Episode: S09E04 · 11:34pm Apr 20th, 2019
So, uhh....
10/10
Tenouttaten
Top Ten Episodes of Show
Wowwwwwwwww
This honestly felt like the good old days of the show. Once I saw that the story idea was done by the voice actors, I knew we were in for something special. This episode? This was something special. What a fun, zany, creative idea for an episode. The pacing was great, the callbacks were rewarding, and the message and payoff were amazing.
After last week's meh episode, this one made me grin like an idiot the whole way through. What a show.
I loved the episode itself; I hated that it essentially just murdered an entire subgenre of MLP fics.
R.I.P.
Twilight and Spike mother-son stories
2011-2019
"Mother's Day was just around the corner, for crying out loud!"
I'm actually a lot less bothered about it than my above statements would imply. All in all, like I said before, I really loved the episode!
We'll always have the AU tag, I suppose.
5047232
How did it murder any of this? Have you seen the moment in the flashbacks when Spike was sitting on her back while she flew kites with Shining Armor? How Spike was in her house with her family, scribbling on the wall?
That was referencing exactly what we've seen in the official comics, in the issue that showed us that Twilight raised Spike while simultaneously attending Celestia's school.
You sound like you haven't paid attention to the episode.
5047274
I guess what I was trying to imply was that by canonically referring to Spike as Twilight and Shining's "little brother", it possibly nullified a popular headcanon (Twilight being a sort of a mother figure to Spike).
Again, there are a lot more subtleties and nuances to their whole situation (ones that you rightfully brought up, I might add) that got lost somewhere in my poor attempt at comedy, but that's the point I was trying to get across. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have used the word "hated".
My bad.
5047545
It was actually the word "murdered" that caught my attention.
When watching an episode, it is important to take into context who said what in which situation. Spike said that he always wanted to be a part of Shining Armor's and Twilight's rivalry "like he was their little brother". That means, yes, Spike never saw himself as Twilight's son, but instead her little brother.
But he also said "But they never really thought of me that way". This statement implies that Twilight never thought of Spike as her little brother. And at the end of the episode, we heard her declaring Spike to be "Sibling Supreme". But it was Shining Armor who said "The little brother we always had". Twilight, though, she never took the word "brother" into her mouth.
With that, the episode contains no notion of it that Twilight sees Spike as her little brother, rather than son. And combining that with what the official comics showed to us and how Twilight's heart got broken when Spike told her "Maybe you just don't like it that I have a real parent now!" while Sludge was there, it adds more evidence.
After that statement, Twilight turned away in tears. Tearing up after the dragon she raised for almost her entire life told her she isn't his real parent (=mom), that's more than it needs to make clear that Twilight sees herself as Spike's mother.
On top of that, Spike never gave any indication that he minds it that Twilight sees him as son. It might have turned out as a bit one-sided now, but that alone doesn't nullify the mother-son relationship yet.