What fresh hell is this???? Ok I learned a lesson today and I’m going to share it just in case it helps. I uploaded my previous photoshopped version into illustrator thinking “This will only take a few minutes to fix up the strokes and then I can taper them correctly.” No no no. NEVER DO THIS. This took me like 7 hours when just tracing a png file of it could have taken me two or less. I don’t know if I did something wrong or what, but the photoshop file caused so many problems that to me so long to figure out, and then half the time I had to just redraw it anyway because I couldn’t figure out how to fix it otherwise.
 
I had a lot of help on this from different tutorials and stuff.  
https://mlp-vectorclub.deviantart.com/has super awesome tutorials, specifically this one https://mewtwo-ex.deviantart.com/art/Illustrator-Stroke-Width-Tool-Tutorial-365574608 by https://mewtwo-ex.deviantart.com/ who had been very kind and helpful to me
 
and this one https://sircxyrtyx.deviantart.com/art/Illustrator-Pony-Eye-Vector-Tutorial-287369345?q=gallery_{3Amlp-vectorclub}2F36301008&qo=3 which is part of a larger series by https://sircxyrtyx.deviantart.com/  
I also happened to find a youtube video that went step by step through all this https://www.deviantart.com/users/outgoing?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8NurNF0kLc&list=FLAj6bWv_gOXjo9-08hs7Ing&index=1 it’s really long, but if the other stuff isn’t enough this may answer some questions.