Director's cut: "When Dating a Sunset..." chapter 4: The pseudo-date, part 1

At first, I thought all that would happen when Sunset Shimmer came to Equestria to spend a day with Eric Reed would be in one chapter. But as I was writing and saw the word count going up, it quickly became clear that the event would have to be made a multi-parter in the story. This is the first time one of my stories had a multi-parter in it since my first story, "A Giant Adventure to Equestria". That story had two different big events in parts; one was a two-parter and the other was a three-parter.

First, I knew I could have some fun with Sunset's competitive side, so writing her when she and Eric was playing "Snake Hunter" was one of my favorite parts to write. The game is actually in the show but I couldn't find out what its name was, so I made up a name. At first, I thought the game's name was "Button Mash" but that was the name of the character that was playing it. Donnnnn reminded me of that, so thanks man!

Unlike chapters 1 and 3, which had no real noteworthy changes during editing, chapter four did, but nothing major.

First, the scene with Sunset, Spike, and the rest of the "Human Seven" was slightly longer, before I did some cuts to slightly shorten the chapter. A big part that was cut had Pinkie ask Sunset if she could read Eric's mind to found out what was wrong. Sunset considered it, but said that it wouldn't be a good idea to try it. Eric, being a brony, already knew that Sunset's eyes glow when she reads minds, and Sunset knew that he knew. She didn't want to risk getting him (and by extension, Princess Twilight) mad by reading his mind, so she threw that option out the window. Sunset also wasn't sure if her mind-reading powers would even work in Equestria. This is also one of the things I like most about having the human OC be a brony: that by itself can change things in ways that a human OC that didn't know about Equestria already wouldn't be able to do.

Another notable change is smaller, and it involves the scene when Sunset "greeted" Eric when she flew out of the portal. Originally, right after she and Eric stopped rolling, Sunset rolled off Eric from the momentum of the rolling, so they didn't stop with Sunset lying on top of Eric. But because this is a romance story with those two, having them stop with Sunset on top was just too good to pass up, so I changed it to that. She still helped him up in the original version, so that didn't change.

One more change is the part where I showed some of the memories of Eric being picked on in 2nd grade to show more of what he went through. This wasn't there at first, but added it during editing.