Director's cut: "When Dating a Sunset..." chapter 5: The pseudo-date, part 2 · 3:05am Nov 11th, 2019
Okay, did I ever say how fun it is to write the competitive side of Sunset Shimmer? If I didn't, it's very fun!
With that out of the way, this was one of those chapters that has very few noteworthy edits, but there's still some to talk about.
First, it's very rare, but I've been pins slide over but not go down in bowling. This was even what gave me the idea to have Eric and Sunset bowl in the first place, so I could have more fun with Sunset. I can see the canon Sunset losing it if it happened to her in the show.
A edit change was Twilight whispering under her breath about Starlight giving her a hard time if she tried to solve Eric's paranoia problems with spells. If you're seen Starlight in seasons 6 and 7, you should know why Twilight said that; having spells backfire was Starlight's thing in seasons 6 and 7.
Because Eric's struggles stemmed from being picked on as a kid, I heavily considered making a last-minute edit and have Fluttershy have the talk with Eric instead of Twilight. But because of the "big sister" role Twilight has, it was tough to think of a way to not have Twilight talk to Eric without doing a larger rewrite to have Flutttershy do it. I thought about having Fluttershy come to Eric's door with Twilight, which would have been much easier to work in. But I decided to leave it as it was. If Fluttershy had a brother-sister friendship with Eric too, then it would have been a no-brainer for me to have her talk to Eric.
As for now Sunset found out about Eric's feelings? How she would find out was something I planned even before writing the first chapter. But believe it or not, I envisioned this to happen at the end of chapter 2 or 3. Was my vision wrong!
It's not often I can use Sunset in these stories, let alone with a large role, so it's fun to finally do it. She's been in two stories I wrote so far, but she...wasn't herself in the first one, "WAY Too Many Marefriends, and Girlfriends(?)" and has a small role anyway. She was herself in this story's prequel, but had a much smaller role compared to this story, which has her as more of a main character.
