Director's cut: The Great and Powerful Matchmaker

If you don’t know, I’m a Starburst shipper, but it rarely shows in my stories--mostly because I haven’t written many romance stories and Sunburst only appeared in a handful of my stories. I actually tease the Startrix ship more often. If Superfun didn’t request this story, I might have never written a Starlight x Sunburst story, even if this story was a bit more of a Starlight & Trixie story than a Starburst story. I was already trying to think of a good story with Trixie, so it was a plus having her in this story.

It’s pretty common for Twilight Sparkle to act so awkward in stories when she has a crush, especially comedies, but I think it fits Starlight even more. That made writing Starlight to be adorkable as hell when she tried to ask out Sunburst even more fun. 

In fact, in my opinion, Starlight’s adorkableness is a little underrated, partly because Twilight’s pretty much the posterpony of adorkableness. Even my human OC Eric Reed doesn’t really touch on how adorkable Starlight can be, despite pointing out Twilight’s adorkableness many times.

At first, Trixie wasn’t going to have an underlying reason for pushing Starlight to ask out Sunburst -- she was going to simply think Starlight should make a move on him, period. I thought it would work, but soon thought to have there be more to it. Trixie wasn’t the best friend to Starlight in the “All Bottled Up” and “To Change a Changeling” episode, but she had shown to truly care about Starlight. For that reason, it made sense that she might feel some guilt about it, making it a good underlying reason for her to want to play matchmaker for Starlight.

As for noteworthy cuts and edits, there weren’t many.

One was a cut early in the story. One of the things Starlight was wrong about was how she thought Twilight doesn’t get crushes, but Sunset (off-screen) told her about Twi’s big crush on Flash Sentry. This is the cut paragraph.

She was even wrong about Princess Twilight being incapable of forming crushes. Sunset Shimmer told Starlight about how the Princess fell so hard for Flash Sentry, she all but left a dent in the ground, but she would just NEVER admit it.

I REALLY wanted to keep that in, but part of me felt it was a tad forced, and it seemed like it would be better off cut. It also felt like I was trying to pick on Twilight a little too much with that paragraph, especially with the roast Trixie did earlier about how she should stick to friendship speeches. However, don’t be surprised if that appears in some form in a future story. I will be looking for a chance to do it.

Another edit came to a slip-up on my part. I was thinking Sunburst’s house was near Spike’s crystal statue, so this paragraph was in the second draft.

It was fitting that the huge crystal castle of Spike stood tall a short distance from the mares. Soon after Twilight made Starlight her student, Spike dragged her to Sunburst’s home to reunite with him. Due to her fear of being rejected, Starlight didn’t make it easy; Spike almost had to literally drag the newly reformed unicorn by her tail.

When I remembered that Sunburst’s house was elsewhere, I had to take that out. Shame, because I really liked the part that mentioned how Spike had to drag Starlight to Sunburst’s house in the season 6 premiere.

This isn’t an edit, but this is a good spot to mention that I got the line when Starlight asked “How you doin’?” as a pickup line from Joey Tribbiani from the “Friends” sitcom. If you never watched “Friends”, it is a line Joey often said to women he had crushes on. It felt like something Starlight might say if she was nervous enough, so the line fit her. At least, I think it does.

The last noteworthy edit was to the end. Originally, Sunburst said that only Twilight tried to get him to ask Starlight out. However, since Princess Cadance is the Princess of Love, she might be able to pick up any secret romantic feelings Starlight was hiding, so I added that she had been trying to get Sunburst to ask out Starlight too.