Director's cut: I Guess I Have No Choice...

The prequel "On Second Thought" was originally meant to be a silly one-off story poking fun about the Princesses' "uselessness", but never planned to write a sequel.

But as I thought about it, I thought of a way to build on it to write a sequel and show how Starlight and Trixie survived the "legion of Cozy". I even had this idea for a couple of months, but had either other stories I thought of first and want to write first, or thought of newer ideas and wanted to write them first; one of which is the "Nopony Interrupts my FRIENDSHIP SPEECH, Starlight Glimmer!!" story.

Part of the reason I wrote this story when I did was because I had some fun at Starlight Glimmer's expense in two stories. First, in my hit story that I already mentioned "Nopony Interrupts My FRIENDSHIP SPEECH, Starlight Glimmer!!" and then in a similar but completely separate story that didn't so as well, but cracked the featured list, "A Stunning Punishment". I wanted to make it up to Glimglam, and this story would be perfect for it.

With that out of the way, one thing I thought of adding as a time when, once Starlight goes "Super Unicorn" (no points from getting where I got that idea from) have Cozy point at Starlight and say something like "She's not a regular Unicorn anymore, but a Super Un--" then have Tirek, Chrysalis, and Grogar cut her off and say something like "We are not doing that!" but I didn't. I thought that would be too meta, and also Cozy was the leader, so that line from the other three didn't seem right anyway.

As for the Super Unicorn thing itself, this was something I put in during editing. I wasn't planning on actually calling that form Starlight used anything, but later thought of calling it a Super Unicorn and is a remnant to the meta lines I mentioned above; this also meant the part with Twilight excited about trying to become a Super Unicorn or beyond herself was something I added during editing.

Another thing I wasn't planning on was the part with the Legion of Cozy in Tartarus. It was something I only thought about once I was about to start writing the story. I was originally planning on ending the story after Twilight made Starlight the Princess of Friendship and Equestria's ruler, whether Starlight liked it or not!

Also, the user Donnnnn had a laugh at some of the still-unedited lines, and was dying to let other users know about it so they could have one too. Here they are, if you didn't see his comment in the story's comment section.

Trixie stood close to Starlight and had to fight the urge to run away. She thought to herself that it was a good thing she used the bedroom an hour ago, or the situation would have become far more embarrassing for her.

“If I’m going down today, I’m going out with a bang.”

In case you're wondering what the second line is about, after Trixie said "The Great and Powerful Trixie" and her number one assistant would stop the LoC, Starlight originally said to Trixie that she's never seen her so brave, and Trixie would respond in a line like that, though the line above was unedited and would've been slightly different.

But, Starlight did see Trixie so brave. It was during the season 6 finale, when Trixie let herself be captured to buy Starlight and Thorax time to get to the throne room in the Changeling hive. Thus, Starlight's line about never seeing Trixie so brave had to go during editing and by extension, the line in the quote that immediately followed.

Lastly, I picked an awful time to submit this story. Soon after I did, three users with a 1,000+ follower count submitted a story of their own. Not only that, the competition from other stories was tough, so this story got buried. I don't think I've ever picked a worse time to submit a story before.