Director's cut: Caught and Punished, chapters 23, 24, 25

It’s been a while since I did my last “Director’s Cut” on Caught and Punished. I just didn’t feel like doing it for a while, but they are back. This Director’s cut will be as long as a short one-shot, so this will have a lot in it. I’ll start off with chapter 23. 

First, the show never went into why Starlight and Sunburst lost contact. Some fans think Starlight just didn’t try. Others think she did, but one thing or another got in the way.

However, a theory I first saw in a youtube comment suggested that Sunburst might have thrown Starlight’s letters out by mistake when he was throwing his mom’s away. This made perfect sense, so I went with it.

As you could guess, the first part of this chapter was much like Starlight’s and Sunburst’s reunion in the season 6 premiere. It ended up being much more emotional than how it was in canon, which was itself emotional. 

Outside of that, a bit of a tricky part was leaving the hints of Sunburst hiding how he wasn’t a great wizard, have Starlight see the signs and comment both out loud and in her narration, but also overlook them in the first-person POV.

Another thing worth noting was how Twilight told Sunburst that he can just call her “Twilight”. This might not seem like much, but Sunburst was calling Twilight “Princess Twilight”  in “The Parent Map” and she seemed to just let it happen. My headcanon is that, that deep in the series, Twilight was more comfortable with the princess title and it was why she never said to Sunburst that he can drop the titles.

But, this Twilight, save for some character development she got in the story, is around where her season 6 self was, so she would be much more likely to want Sunburst to not be formal, unless he really wanted to.

Incidentally, from a character development standpoint, the Starlight in chapter 23 is around where her mid to late-season 7 canon self was. Fun fact: this makes her close to where the Starlight in my Eric “Buggie” Reed stories is. That Starlight is in her late season 7 form, though she’s somewhat a little more mature, thanks to her acting in a “big sister” role to Eric. This helped that Starlight mature some more as she grew into the role.
 
Next, I said in my last director’s cut that, while the last couple of chapters didn’t have many big changes, but the next chapters did. Here we go with chapter 23. There was only one real change, but it was big: Chapter 23 didn’t originally end where it did. When I was writing chapter 23, it went all the way to the gang seeing Flurry Heart and ended where chapter 24 ended. I saw that, if I kept going, the chapter would have been huge, Potentially well over the 7,470 word-count of chapter 27, the longest in the story.

Thus I had chapter 23 end as it did with Twilight flying to the Crystal Castle in a hurry. On a related note, I can’t be the only one that thought it was cute how Twi was acting.

Before I get to chapters 24 & 25, I can not bring up something about when I planned Starlight and Sunburst to meet up again. When I had the major events of the story thought out, I initially planned them to see each other again before Chrysalis and the changeling attacked, like in the show. However, because I would have had to do a one-year time skip sooner, so Cadance could have Flurry, I chose to switch the order and have the Chrysalis crisis happen sooner. This probably worked out anyway, since it let the Changeling invasion be more unpredictable since it went very differently from the season 6 finale.

Okay, now for chapters 24 & 25. At first, they were one chapter. For that reason, I’ll talk about them as a single chapter. It had big changes, but we’ll get to that later.

But first, I thought it would be funny having the mares react to how long humans be in labor. I looked up how long real-life mares be in labor, and it said around the time I put in the story. I can’t remember if it was exactly what I had, but it was at least close. Having the ponies gain a little more respect to humans for having to handle 10+ hours was a nice touch, I would say. I also thought Sam feeling just a tad jealous of Starlight and Sunburst was a cute touch.

Speaking of cute, Shining Armor covered an exhausted Twilight with a blanket and told her he was proud of her was so adorable!

How Cadance explained how the Crystalling worked was one of the first bigger changes from this story to the show. The explanation itself was the same, but just who did it and where was different.

Now, for the changes to the chapter. While it wasn’t a ton and didn’t require rewrites, there were still some that changed how both chapters 24 and 25 would go.

The first change is simply something I changed my mind on as I wrote. At first, I wasn’t going to recreate most of the season 6 finale. I was really going to have everything go smoothly and not have Flurry Heart break the Crystal Heart. Starlight would have still seen the new parents and foal together, and the sight would have made her want to see her own parents at last.

Unfortunately, I had a problem: that heart-breaking crisis was what let Sunburst become Flurry’s crystaller, For this reason, since I couldn’t think of anything better, I decided to just recreate the whole season 6 premiere. 

This led to a big edit. Originally, like in canon, Celestia and Luna were there to see Flurry Heart. But, as I thought about how to handle the “part 2” part of the season 6 premiere, If I left Celestia and Luna there, chapters 24 & 25 would have basically gone the exact same way as in canon. Even worse, it would have dragged on more than I would have liked.

I wanted those two to take on the snow storm, but I had to get around my dilemma by taking out Celestia and Luna, and had Twilight and Cadance (mostly Twilight) handle the roles they did. Taking out the sisters allowed me to speed the story along, both from a writing and a narrative standpoint. Because Twilight wouldn’t be able to hold off the storm by herself as long as the Royal Sisters did, that meant the rest of the characters had even less time than in the show. This is why no one didn’t try to check the library as they did in the show: there wasn’t enough time.

I also had quite a bit of trouble getting everything to feel right. This was even the reason why I broke up the chapter into two since they were long enough, so I could buy myself more time. And even then, chapter 24 was delayed. The good news is that I was able to release chapter 25 in just three days. I just needed that little extra time to finish proofreading chapter 25.

The last thing to note about the changes was the Shining Armor & Sam scene. That was something I only thought about once I got to that part of chapter 25, so it was unplanned.

This next part about edits, but it’s a good place to mention why Starlight was so tired after the Crystalling if it wasn’t clear. In the show, she, plus THREE alicorns, cast the spells she did BY HERSELF in this story. This is why it pushed her to the limit and made her unable to stand once her crystal form ended.

One last thing. I actually forgot that Twilight’s parents didn’t know about what happened in the Crystal Empire in the show. Though, even if I did remember, I probably would have just had them learn about the crisis. Those two knowing about it didn’t change much.