Director's cut: "When Dating a Sunset..." chapter 6: Sunset's question

I got a lot to say in this director's cut.

First, I planned how Sunset would find out about Eric's crush, that she would not immediately form feelings for him, but that she would ultimately be the one to make a move from the start. But what would happen in-between all that I didn't decide until about chapter 2.

I couldn't bring this next part up in the director's cut for chapter 4, because it played a role in chapter 6, but now I can.

In chapter 4, Eric didn't bring up what Sunset did before she changed and said she deserved an "overdo" reward. This was done to help set up this chapter; part of the reason Sunset started having feelings for Eric was because of this. Since the canon characters have brought up Sunset's past -- often followed with an "uh, no offense" -- a number of times, I decided to use that. Or not use it as the case may be, to help Sunset realistically form her own crush on Eric, despite having no feelings for him beforehand.

This chapter also has many of the reasons why I even went with Sunset Shimmer being the canon character Eric Reed formed a crush on. The two have several things in common, including a few things that are exclusive to them. This gave it a lot of sense for feelings between them to potentially form, and not be that I'm just shipping them together for the fun of it. I was setting this ship up without even knowing it, since I had no plans to try to pair up Sunset and Eric as I was writing these stories.

Why Eric formed a crush on Sunset, because she did something he struggled to do, is also one of the biggest reasons I went with this story.

I didn't want Eric to get a crush on her because she's Sunset Shimmer. I wanted much more than that; a more personal reason for Eric, something that would particularly fit his character. It was there, so I used it. But because this reason could have allowed him to form feelings toward Starlight Glimmer --and would have by this point -- I had to take care of why that didn't happen in chapter 5, when he said that he didn't think it happened because he really needed her as a sisterly figure. Starlight was even a character I actually gave some thoughts of pairing with Eric months ago, but I chose not to. It was partly because it was too fun writing her as a big sister to Eric, but also because of why she even had that role; along with Twilight, she's filling a hole for Eric that his two human big sisters had. This was originally a role that I planned for only Twilight to have, which I mentioned in one of the director's cuts for a chapter of my "A Giant Adventure to Equestria" story.

The part with how Eric reacted to Sunset asking him out was something I long planned, and is another nod to how he has some Twilight Sparkle in him. In the season one MLP:FIM episode "The Cutie Mark Chronicles", filly Twilight reacted nearly the same way to Princess Celestia asking her to be her personal protégé, complete with the "Huh?". Twilight peeking her head in the library and nodding her head to Eric while smiling was another thing I meant to do: Twilight Velvet did this when the filly Twilight Sparkle looked at her and Night Light, before she jumped in the air yelling "YES!!" to Celestia's offer. This is why only Twilight Sparkle peeked her head in the library.

But as far as edits go, not much changed. The one (and really only) noteworthy edit was how Sunset said she could try to help Eric believe her when she were going to tell him that she didn't think he looked odd. She originally said that she could asking Twilight or Starlight to cast a truth spell on her, so when she told Eric, his paranoia wouldn't be able to mess with his head. I changed it to her just saying she could look at him in the eyes instead. There is a reason why I made the change, but it's too soon to say why. It will be in a future chapter's director's cut.

But a funny error I fixed was to one of Sunset's lines when she was talking about how she never had "feelings" for Flash Sentry.

“Well, sure, we were ‘dating’ but I was only using Flash and never truly liked him.”

The above is the version in the story. But before the fix it was what it says below

“Well, sure, we were ‘dating’ but I was only using Flash and never truly liked him.”

Shows that you must be careful using italics.