) so I had to wait until it passed. Thankfully, it has, and my next one-shot story is planned to be out on either Friday or the weekend.Director's cut: "When Dating a Sunset..." chapters 16,17,18 · 2:20am Dec 19th, 2019
I was going to do the director's cut for chapter 16 by itself. But since there was really only one notable edit to say, I thought it would be a waste.
Chapter 16 was planned to be the last chapter after I wrote it. But after deciding to have a Sunset Shimmer & Princess Celestia reunion scene, I edited the last part of it. How chapter 18 ended is similar to how chapter 16 originally ended.
Chapter 17 is a very rare chapter that had not one scene cut during editing, but two. One of the two was a scene that had Eric, Twilight, Spike, Sunset, and Starlight standing in front of Canterlot castle. A kinda noteworthy line here was Eric joking about how the castle "looked smaller" on TV to ease Sunset, which didn't work. I took it out to shorten things, and also because nothing was there for the scene to really be needed.
The other cut scene was the gang riding the train to Canterlot. Unlike the first cut scene, Donnnnn suggested cutting it, and the more important lines was bumped up to the scene in Twilight's castle, when Sunset came through the portal. Unlike the first cut scene, the train did have some important lines to help set up the end of the chapter. On a related note, Spike and Starlight originally wasn't even in Twilight's castle when Sunset returned, but moving much of what happened in the train scene meant I had to edit those two in for it to work. The scene in Twilight's castle wasn't very long at first, and potentially could have even been cut or summarized, if left as it was initially.
And a couple of things about "Sci-Twi". First, Sci-Twi thinking to herself that she still had a lot of questions to ask Eric? I just had to have that in there, because she does. Second, I heavily considered bringing Sci-Twi to Equestria and have her be there for Sunset too in a role reversal: she'll be there to help Sunset face her fears, like Sunset did for her in the LoE movie. But before i started writing chapter 17, I decided against it. On a related note, role reversals become a theme of sorts in the last chapters. Some of the feelings Sunset felt in chapters 14-18 were similar to what Eric felt earlier.
Now for some general notes on the reunion scene. I actually more or less planned out how it would go months ago, well before I wrote this story, in case I would ever do it. I also planned for it to go similar to how it did in "Forgotten Friendship" special which is why Celestia wasn't happy when she first saw Sunset. This story, in effect, is the first Eric Reed story to actively ret-con something the show: up until now, almost everything in the stories could have happened "off-screen" in theory. For this reason, future stories with him may have the "AU" tag, or at least if Sunset Shimmer's in them; something I'll have to decide if I need to do or not.
With that out of the way, now for chapter 18. One edit I did was about Twilight getting back at the snobbish Unicorn with hot sauce. initially, she didn't do anything, but later had her do it. This is to show that she can be protective of Eric, but shows it differently than Starlight does. Starlight was growling and ready to let the mare calling Eric a "thing" have it, but Twilight's first thought was to make sure Eric was okay, then secretly came up with an idea to get some payback. She kept her anger hidden so Eric wouldn't suspect that she did something to that snob when she ran back into the castle.
The part with Celestia was mainly unchanged, though she had "normal" hot sauce originally, not "extra saucy" hot sauce. I've been wanting to have a Trollestia moment like this for a while, so I was not going to pass it up!
Because Chapters 17 and 18 was more focused on Sunset and her struggles to face Celestia, I gave thoughts on switching the first-person narration to Sunset's point of view, at least until her reunion with Celestia was over. I wasn't too sure how good a job I might do, so I didn't try it. If I had written Sunset a lot more in stories, I might have given it a try.
Lastly, this is by far the longest story I've written in a while, and the one that even comes close is my very first one, the "A Giant Adventure to Equestria" story. It has the same number of chapters, but still has a slightly higher word count. I thought of trying to write one more chapter to "When Dating a Sunset..." just to break my record of 18 chapters for a story, but chose not to try.
I’m just glad there will still be more. I wonder what you’ll come up with next for Buggie.
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I have at least two story ideas for him right now, and already working on one of them.
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