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ljwritesMy Ridiculously Long pastfic, Shadow of the Dragon King, is about 75% posted with the recent upload of Chapter 17: Games. That concludes Part 2 of 3, so it's time for another extended fanfic note. Since I talked about the overall conception and planning in the extended notes for Part 1, I'll stick to chapter-by-chapter commentary here, centering around the stuff that won't be obvious to readers. Spoilers for Part 2 abound, naturally.
Chapter 11: Meetings
Since things ended on a pretty heavy note in the previous chapter, I wanted to shift the pace for the start of this chapter. I also wanted to build up the rapport between Shun and Zuko in preparation for ripping Zuko's heart out later on, so following through on Shun's promise to teach Zuko the dao seemed the logical result.
Of course, once I set the characters loose they turned out to be uncooperative. They weren't about to be all sugar sweet with each other. Zuko was eager to learn but still a teenager, constantly testing the boundaries of what he can get away with, while Shun wouldn't take no crap. It made for a noisier dynamic than the one I planned, but it still seemed to work.
Shun actually did go easy, for him: The royal guards would have fried him to a crisp if he'd treated Zuko the way he himself was trained back in the Earth Kingdom. I think I succeeded in keeping him strict yet principled, if the positive reader comments were any indication. That's a bit of a feat for a man so used to giving and getting brutality, but I'll talk more about Shun's backstory after the ending.
The third form, second form etc. were made up, but I did watch real-life double dao moves to help my descriptions. Here's the one I referenced:
One thing about Zuko that always struck me as odd in "The Firebending Masters" was how he seemed fairly calm about losing his bending but how the death of the dragons, which took place long before he was born, seemed such a sore point for him. So in Chapter 11, and even more in Chapter 13, I set up conflict between Zuko and Iroh over the dragons. It helped my plot for Zuko not to trust Iroh completely, though they do enter into an uneasy partnership because Zuko needs him and Iroh is a friggin' saint.
Chapter 11 is also the part that kicks off the central plot of Part 2, the connection between the war and the attempt on Zuko's life. I so enjoyed writing Ozai in the throne room scene, and borrowed liberally from my favorite Harry Potter character Professor Snape's child-bullying moments.
Chapter 12: Stories
I think this is my favorite chapter from Part 2. I really dug writing the tension of Azula's conversation with Shun and the moment he snapped. Sa Ye's scene with Lan and Zhuling (familiar faces from The Alternative, though only Lan was named in that story) was a nice tension reliever, and the ins and outs of the palace maid life were enjoyable to write.
Chapter 12 also marked the real debut of Cheng Jien, who showed up briefly at the end of Chapter 10. I actually retrofitted her into Chapter 10; by this time I was writing several chapters ahead of posting, and after Cheng showed up in Chapter 12 I decided to insert her in Chapter 10 instead of another, younger female guard who was originally talking to Iroh while he waited for Zuko..
In my mind Cheng is the female incarnation of Shun, what Shun would have been like if I'd chosen to make him a woman character. I enjoyed writing her police brutality scene and subsequent rehabilitation, making it clear she did bad stuff while also showing her doing good.
See, I don't believe there's a clear line between a good cop who'd give her life on the job and a cop gone bad who hurts the very people she's sworn to protect. It seems to me they are very often the same person, because it's so easy to let the ends justify the means when you think you're one of the good guys. Every good guy is capable of going over the line, and every baddie has a justification.
A fellow cop getting killed is probably the number one Berserk Button of police everywhere. Cheng, along with every guard in Royal City, was reeling from so many of their own dying and hurting from one night. (I should probably do a story about the impact of that night on the royal guard community.) The moment they thought Sa Ye might be involved... well, let's just say she was lucky as hell Iroh was there.
Iroh's rage at the guardsmen was as much disappointment as anything, because he knew these people. He had worked with them, drunk tea with them, cried with them and hugged them in the aftermath of the slaughter. He'd watched them walk lost old ladies home, work extra nights for no pay to square a case away, risk their lives to bring dangerous criminals to justice. And then he witnessed them brutalizing a sixteen-year-old girl. He's seen worse in wartime, of course, and he understands where these baser impulses come from; but that doesn't mean he'd ever condone it or let friends dishonor themselves. Also, it probably didn't help his temper that he started out not knowing that the worst of Sa Ye's injuries were self-inflicted. Ah, context.
Of course, because every journey needs its irony, the Big Deal Moment of Roku's crown reaching Iroh was overwhelmed by his concern that this peasant girl he didn't know might be having a miscarriage. I think his reaction would have been the same even if he'd known the contents of the package Sa Ye handed him.
The OC names in this chapter are actually color-coded. I only had the name Lan to start with, and came up with Zhuling's name by calling her "crimson" (zhu ling 朱鈴, "crimson bell") to Lan's "indigo." (lan 藍) I used the same convention for the guards, Cheng is blue (靑 is 'cheong' in Korean and 'qing' in Chenese) and Hong is red (hong 紅). Later on in the tackling sequence, Crimson ended up taking out Red and Indigo took Blue.
Patching Up
It was after writing the first draft of Chapter 12 and wondering how Shun made himself presentable again that I "realized" he was in a sexual relationship with Cheng. I set out writing a short story about that, and quickly realized I couldn't archive it on FFN due to the rating policy. I know there's racier stuff there, but I still wanted to respect the site rules.
I didn't want to leave out the sex scene, either, because while it's only a few paragraphs I felt the story would be incomplete without it. Sex is a big part of how Shun and Cheng work, and the scene revealed parts of Shun's character he was normally too guarded to show. (Psychological parts, I mean, though physically, too. Yeah.) Though I don't usually like reading or writing explicit sex, it felt necessary in this case. So I ended up archiving it to LJ instead, and might put it up on AO3 later on. Right now I'm holding off on uploading Dragon King to my AO3 account because my God that thing is huge.
I wonder if I got it through that Shun and Cheng aren't a committed couple but friends with benefits. Shun would be insane to consider inflicting a relationship on anyone at this point, and he's way too messed up about women anyway. As for Cheng, she doesn't do monogamy. I thought her mention of "callers" and the presence of another man's shirt in her room were enough to clue readers in, but at least one reviewer seemed to think they were boyfriend/girlfriend. Stingmon got the nature of the relationship right away, though.
Nakas, another of Cheng's lovers, was just a throwaway name at this point. I thought I'd give whomever-he-is a vaguely Indian name, since my linguistic influences were predominantly Chinese up to this point. He unexpectedly became a bigger part of the story, though, and will play an even bigger (though still supporting) role if I ever write the sequels. Incidentally he was a bit miffed that Cheng gave his shirt away but got over it. He's a laid-back kind of guy, much nicer than Shun.
Chapter 13: Questions
Zuko's scene with Master Lu, where Lu called him a dragon, is one of those instances where I was oblivious to my own cultural biases. See, in Korean culture the dragon has stood for kingship for a long time. Traditionally we called the king's face "the dragon's face," the throne was "the dragon seat," etc. So when Lu saw a dragon in Zuko the connotation was very clear to me, and it caught me by surprise when readers asked me what he'd meant by that. D'oh! That was a good reminder that I should be aware of my background and that I should clarify things better for readers who didn't share my culture.
I enjoyed writing Yenzi's forge-bending practice in this one. It's not quite the throwaway scene it seems, though, and will have a role later on. I got totally lazy with naming the carpenter's line. The carpenter is Old Jiang, his son the city guardsman Young Jiang, and, his son is... well, you'll meet him later.
Interlude: Rumors
I decided the ugly rumor about Sa Ye and Zuko needed enough setup that this interlude was necessary. I liked writing more about the lives of palace maids. Also, it amuses me that in my version of the Fire Nation you evidently don't have much of a social life unless you're threatened with torture and mutilation every once in a while.
Chapter 14: Confrontations
Shun strikes again! It's got to be some kind of record, a commoner attacking both the Firelord's children under his roof and still in possession of his freedom and his life. Considering how deeply broken a guy Shun is, it's actually kind of remarkable how sane he looks most of the time. (He does let out much of the crazy in his private life. Ask the woman who once woke up to him choking her in his sleep.) The fight was structured to be a classic Zuko moment, where he starts out as an underdog but pulls through with quick thinking and sheer bloody-minded determination. This scene was rewritten after Legend of Korra Book 1 to include mentions of bender privilege, though class privilege is definitely part of it.
I enjoyed writing some more Cheng into this chapter. Yes, she was borderline sexually harassing a minor in the first scene of this chapter, but in this particular case I'm totally willing to blame the victim. When you ask about the private lives of grownups, be prepared for the consequences. Some of them will TMI you.
Speaking of minors and sex, part of the point of Cheng's character was getting Azula to say "slut" without the foggiest idea of what she's talking about. Which is a very kid thing to do, in my opinion. My betaamyraine loved it, and reader chibi heishi left a totally gratifying review saying her reaction to that sequence was: "monster, monster... oh. kid."
In a way Azula is all the crueler and more terrifying, I think, because she's a kid. Her natural lack of empathy hasn't been tempered by real-life experience, or even any desire to pretend to care about morality. Her amorality and intelligence combine in a scary way with her youth.
I paid for my lazy naming of Cheng during one scene in this chapter. When the time came to make up her given name in Patching Up, I decided to call her Jien for the jian, the double-bladed straight blade, she wields. And then in this chapter Shun mentioned how Cheng Jien is an expert with the... oops. I ended up having to use the full description instead of the shorter name. It's really too bad she has no scene where she wields the jian, which is partly due to her philosophy. She sees a drawn weapon as a failure of security and prefers to use only use the minimum force necessary, something that shows up in A Night's Work.
A Night's Work
In this plebian-blueblood couple beatdown, the plebs win the night hands down. Rang had pretty much conceded when he realized the game was up, and Ty Jin (the third eldest of Ty Lee's sisters and twins with Ty Min, the fourth eldest) was sadly outclassed. I had way too much fun describing Jien and Ty Jin struggle for the knife and then tussle on the bed, and I could understand why the guys were sort of incapacitated despite the seriousness of the situation.
Chapter 15: Bargains
In this chapter justice is served, then not, and then sort of is. It felt wrong to let Rang get entirely away with what he did, but of course killing him went against Zuko's grain and wouldn't serve his purpose of getting Master Lu released. It's a testament to the dark reality of the Fire Nation, I think, that it took another wrong to make a sort-of right.
It was also a good way to show how messed-up a guy Shun is. There are of course a lot of things behind his act of mangling Rang's face--righteous anger, sympathy for Zuko, his own guilt in the matter--but the part in A Night's Work where Cheng flaunted her attraction to Rang and Shun didn't like it was very deliberate. I hoped there would at least be a shadow of doubt that Shun hurt Rang partly out of jealousy, and that Cheng provoked Shun to punish him for what he did. My favorite OCs are just wonderful people.
The Nakas/Shun exchange was very entertaining for me. Nakas might have just helped Shun out and they might both be accepting of the fact that they're (or were, in Shun's case) sleeping with the same woman, but that doesn't mean they can't have a good old-fashioned pissing contest. Here's how the conversation reads in my mind, translated from the Polite:
Who says straight guys can't be catty? XD I don't know how readers envision Shun, but to me he's a small guy by partly-industrialized Fire Nation standards, and average by Earth Kingdom starving-peasant standards. He's about the same height as Cheng, who is on the tall side. Nakas is a much more impressive physical specimen, tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome, though kind of an indifferent lover. We have a saying in Korea, "the little pepper is the spicy one." Considering that "pepper" in Korea is the common colloquial term for penis, make of that saying what you will.
Guess which is spicier, the red or the green?
Because Azula is funny about everything not going perfectly her way, I gave her a mini-breakdown in this chapter. Mental illness often has some warning signs (except when it doesn't, of course), and I figured this would be a good chance to show her fragile psychological core. If a caring adult had seen the signs and made sure she got the appropriate care and support, things could have changed for her. It was her misfortune that Ozai just encouraged her instability by puffing up her sense of grandeur and making her play these games against Zuko for his favor. As Zuko said, going into exile and out of this toxic environment during his adolescence was probably the best thing that happened to him.
Chapter 16: Opinions
The (in)famous War Council chapter.loopy777 made a great point about how I kind of danced around "The Storm," skimming over the parts that were detailed in the episode and detailing the parts that the episode just summarized. That's exactly right, and I think it's the kind of thing fanfic should do--I get very bored with fic that repeats lines from the show, unless there's some new twist or take on the canon.
I had a bit of trouble with getting the diction to match up in the war council scene. I realized too late that the characters spoke a good deal more formally for much of my story than the characters in the show did. I have a weakness for archaic and fancy language, and it shows. It helped that I was skipping over most of the show's dialogue, but there were some I couldn't skip. I just patched in Zuko's climactic line and prayed it worked. I also used the informality of the general's line to portray his diction as a deliberate provocation of Zuko, which worked for the plot I was cooking up.
I deliberately added the part about Iroh thinking Azula should start dressing like a girl and stop playing at politics. It's my headcanon (that no oen else seems to share) that Azula dresses like a boy to be taken more seriously, though she certainly doesn't disguise her femininity. I think Iroh would disapprove of both the way she presents herself and the role she plays at court. I love Iroh to bits and pieces, but it seems obvious to me that he doesn't know Azula at all, nor does he seem to care about her ambitions and aspirations. Kaigou in Deconstructing Azula used the doll incident to make the point that Azula was afraid of being forced into a circumscribed existence under Firelord Iroh, and I can see that point of view. Besides, it's fun to give the good guy a flaw and the villain a point.
Also, Jee makes a long-awaited (by me, at least) reappearance. So far no one has guessed what I'm going to do with his character, other than the obvious fact that he's going to meet up with Zuko. He will, in the end, but there are still a few chapters between here and there. Mwahaha.
Chapter 17: Games
This is the chapter where everything is set up for the final showdown, or rather showdowns. Shun confesses the truth to Zuko, Mai chooses not to betray Azula, Yenzi is assigned to the Forty-First Division, and Azula, of course, persuades her father to fight the Agni Kai himself. The pieces are in place, let the game begin.
The War Ministry official who assigned Yenzi to the 41st was given a modified version of my own name, and some of my personality. I wanted to give myself the reminder that it's not just the obvious monsters who hurt people in a corrupt system, but rather everyday people like me do the dirty work. The major inspiration for the character was Hannah Arendt's characterization of Adolf Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem as a totally boring technocrat, though others challenge her account as being too selective because there is also ample evidence that Eichmann was in fact a racist psycho dickwad. Whatever the truth of Eichmann, it seems indisputable that ordinary people do much of the work of immoral regimes.
I put in some work to make Yenzi as sympathetic as possible before I marked her for death. That included showing more of her relationships with her family, the kind of person she was, and also her crush, that rite of teen passage. And lest you accuse me of pushing the gay agenda, I'll have you know I mightily resisted her attraction to Ming. My original plan was for Yenzi to have a crush on Khoujin and dislike Sa Ye for that reason. I wanted to see how I could handle a cliched situation like that, but again the character was uncooperative. This is sort of how it went in my demented mind:
Reader, I lost the argument. I let it go--the original plan was really too hackneyed (so hackneyed it turned her gay, evidently), and even if Yenzi had felt attracted to Khoujin I couldn't do much with vague feelings for a dead day-old crush, especially when she had so many bigger problems on her mind.
Yenzi isn't the first gay character to show up in the story, by the way. Maybe I was too subtle about it, but Lao Tai and Khoujin's great-uncle Yan were in love and shared a life until Yan died. It's why Khoujin considered the Elder "more family than blood," and why Sanwai takes care of him in his old age. The whole village knew, though everyone is very discreet about it, talking about their great friendship and how they were like family and so on. They have reason to be cautious, because Yan's death wasn't entirely an accident. I think the modern term would be "hate crime," by family members no less, though I think there were a lot of other issues involved. I could probably discover the background if I thought about it hard enough.
Lijin grew on my after fairladyz2005 took an interest in him. Strangely enough, I found him developing into an archer character as though tracking her interests. His archery is going to play a role in Part 3--more than that I won't say at the moment.
So those are some of the things that were going on in my head when I wrote these chapters. Just four chapters more and the whole story will be done, yay!
Chapter 11: Meetings
Since things ended on a pretty heavy note in the previous chapter, I wanted to shift the pace for the start of this chapter. I also wanted to build up the rapport between Shun and Zuko in preparation for ripping Zuko's heart out later on, so following through on Shun's promise to teach Zuko the dao seemed the logical result.
Of course, once I set the characters loose they turned out to be uncooperative. They weren't about to be all sugar sweet with each other. Zuko was eager to learn but still a teenager, constantly testing the boundaries of what he can get away with, while Shun wouldn't take no crap. It made for a noisier dynamic than the one I planned, but it still seemed to work.
Shun actually did go easy, for him: The royal guards would have fried him to a crisp if he'd treated Zuko the way he himself was trained back in the Earth Kingdom. I think I succeeded in keeping him strict yet principled, if the positive reader comments were any indication. That's a bit of a feat for a man so used to giving and getting brutality, but I'll talk more about Shun's backstory after the ending.
The third form, second form etc. were made up, but I did watch real-life double dao moves to help my descriptions. Here's the one I referenced:
One thing about Zuko that always struck me as odd in "The Firebending Masters" was how he seemed fairly calm about losing his bending but how the death of the dragons, which took place long before he was born, seemed such a sore point for him. So in Chapter 11, and even more in Chapter 13, I set up conflict between Zuko and Iroh over the dragons. It helped my plot for Zuko not to trust Iroh completely, though they do enter into an uneasy partnership because Zuko needs him and Iroh is a friggin' saint.
Chapter 11 is also the part that kicks off the central plot of Part 2, the connection between the war and the attempt on Zuko's life. I so enjoyed writing Ozai in the throne room scene, and borrowed liberally from my favorite Harry Potter character Professor Snape's child-bullying moments.
Chapter 12: Stories
I think this is my favorite chapter from Part 2. I really dug writing the tension of Azula's conversation with Shun and the moment he snapped. Sa Ye's scene with Lan and Zhuling (familiar faces from The Alternative, though only Lan was named in that story) was a nice tension reliever, and the ins and outs of the palace maid life were enjoyable to write.
Chapter 12 also marked the real debut of Cheng Jien, who showed up briefly at the end of Chapter 10. I actually retrofitted her into Chapter 10; by this time I was writing several chapters ahead of posting, and after Cheng showed up in Chapter 12 I decided to insert her in Chapter 10 instead of another, younger female guard who was originally talking to Iroh while he waited for Zuko..
In my mind Cheng is the female incarnation of Shun, what Shun would have been like if I'd chosen to make him a woman character. I enjoyed writing her police brutality scene and subsequent rehabilitation, making it clear she did bad stuff while also showing her doing good.
See, I don't believe there's a clear line between a good cop who'd give her life on the job and a cop gone bad who hurts the very people she's sworn to protect. It seems to me they are very often the same person, because it's so easy to let the ends justify the means when you think you're one of the good guys. Every good guy is capable of going over the line, and every baddie has a justification.
A fellow cop getting killed is probably the number one Berserk Button of police everywhere. Cheng, along with every guard in Royal City, was reeling from so many of their own dying and hurting from one night. (I should probably do a story about the impact of that night on the royal guard community.) The moment they thought Sa Ye might be involved... well, let's just say she was lucky as hell Iroh was there.
Iroh's rage at the guardsmen was as much disappointment as anything, because he knew these people. He had worked with them, drunk tea with them, cried with them and hugged them in the aftermath of the slaughter. He'd watched them walk lost old ladies home, work extra nights for no pay to square a case away, risk their lives to bring dangerous criminals to justice. And then he witnessed them brutalizing a sixteen-year-old girl. He's seen worse in wartime, of course, and he understands where these baser impulses come from; but that doesn't mean he'd ever condone it or let friends dishonor themselves. Also, it probably didn't help his temper that he started out not knowing that the worst of Sa Ye's injuries were self-inflicted. Ah, context.
Of course, because every journey needs its irony, the Big Deal Moment of Roku's crown reaching Iroh was overwhelmed by his concern that this peasant girl he didn't know might be having a miscarriage. I think his reaction would have been the same even if he'd known the contents of the package Sa Ye handed him.
The OC names in this chapter are actually color-coded. I only had the name Lan to start with, and came up with Zhuling's name by calling her "crimson" (zhu ling 朱鈴, "crimson bell") to Lan's "indigo." (lan 藍) I used the same convention for the guards, Cheng is blue (靑 is 'cheong' in Korean and 'qing' in Chenese) and Hong is red (hong 紅). Later on in the tackling sequence, Crimson ended up taking out Red and Indigo took Blue.
Patching Up
It was after writing the first draft of Chapter 12 and wondering how Shun made himself presentable again that I "realized" he was in a sexual relationship with Cheng. I set out writing a short story about that, and quickly realized I couldn't archive it on FFN due to the rating policy. I know there's racier stuff there, but I still wanted to respect the site rules.
I didn't want to leave out the sex scene, either, because while it's only a few paragraphs I felt the story would be incomplete without it. Sex is a big part of how Shun and Cheng work, and the scene revealed parts of Shun's character he was normally too guarded to show. (Psychological parts, I mean, though physically, too. Yeah.) Though I don't usually like reading or writing explicit sex, it felt necessary in this case. So I ended up archiving it to LJ instead, and might put it up on AO3 later on. Right now I'm holding off on uploading Dragon King to my AO3 account because my God that thing is huge.
I wonder if I got it through that Shun and Cheng aren't a committed couple but friends with benefits. Shun would be insane to consider inflicting a relationship on anyone at this point, and he's way too messed up about women anyway. As for Cheng, she doesn't do monogamy. I thought her mention of "callers" and the presence of another man's shirt in her room were enough to clue readers in, but at least one reviewer seemed to think they were boyfriend/girlfriend. Stingmon got the nature of the relationship right away, though.
Nakas, another of Cheng's lovers, was just a throwaway name at this point. I thought I'd give whomever-he-is a vaguely Indian name, since my linguistic influences were predominantly Chinese up to this point. He unexpectedly became a bigger part of the story, though, and will play an even bigger (though still supporting) role if I ever write the sequels. Incidentally he was a bit miffed that Cheng gave his shirt away but got over it. He's a laid-back kind of guy, much nicer than Shun.
Chapter 13: Questions
Zuko's scene with Master Lu, where Lu called him a dragon, is one of those instances where I was oblivious to my own cultural biases. See, in Korean culture the dragon has stood for kingship for a long time. Traditionally we called the king's face "the dragon's face," the throne was "the dragon seat," etc. So when Lu saw a dragon in Zuko the connotation was very clear to me, and it caught me by surprise when readers asked me what he'd meant by that. D'oh! That was a good reminder that I should be aware of my background and that I should clarify things better for readers who didn't share my culture.
I enjoyed writing Yenzi's forge-bending practice in this one. It's not quite the throwaway scene it seems, though, and will have a role later on. I got totally lazy with naming the carpenter's line. The carpenter is Old Jiang, his son the city guardsman Young Jiang, and, his son is... well, you'll meet him later.
Interlude: Rumors
I decided the ugly rumor about Sa Ye and Zuko needed enough setup that this interlude was necessary. I liked writing more about the lives of palace maids. Also, it amuses me that in my version of the Fire Nation you evidently don't have much of a social life unless you're threatened with torture and mutilation every once in a while.
Chapter 14: Confrontations
Shun strikes again! It's got to be some kind of record, a commoner attacking both the Firelord's children under his roof and still in possession of his freedom and his life. Considering how deeply broken a guy Shun is, it's actually kind of remarkable how sane he looks most of the time. (He does let out much of the crazy in his private life. Ask the woman who once woke up to him choking her in his sleep.) The fight was structured to be a classic Zuko moment, where he starts out as an underdog but pulls through with quick thinking and sheer bloody-minded determination. This scene was rewritten after Legend of Korra Book 1 to include mentions of bender privilege, though class privilege is definitely part of it.
I enjoyed writing some more Cheng into this chapter. Yes, she was borderline sexually harassing a minor in the first scene of this chapter, but in this particular case I'm totally willing to blame the victim. When you ask about the private lives of grownups, be prepared for the consequences. Some of them will TMI you.
Speaking of minors and sex, part of the point of Cheng's character was getting Azula to say "slut" without the foggiest idea of what she's talking about. Which is a very kid thing to do, in my opinion. My beta
amyraine loved it, and reader chibi heishi left a totally gratifying review saying her reaction to that sequence was: "monster, monster... oh. kid."In a way Azula is all the crueler and more terrifying, I think, because she's a kid. Her natural lack of empathy hasn't been tempered by real-life experience, or even any desire to pretend to care about morality. Her amorality and intelligence combine in a scary way with her youth.
I paid for my lazy naming of Cheng during one scene in this chapter. When the time came to make up her given name in Patching Up, I decided to call her Jien for the jian, the double-bladed straight blade, she wields. And then in this chapter Shun mentioned how Cheng Jien is an expert with the... oops. I ended up having to use the full description instead of the shorter name. It's really too bad she has no scene where she wields the jian, which is partly due to her philosophy. She sees a drawn weapon as a failure of security and prefers to use only use the minimum force necessary, something that shows up in A Night's Work.
A Night's Work
In this plebian-blueblood couple beatdown, the plebs win the night hands down. Rang had pretty much conceded when he realized the game was up, and Ty Jin (the third eldest of Ty Lee's sisters and twins with Ty Min, the fourth eldest) was sadly outclassed. I had way too much fun describing Jien and Ty Jin struggle for the knife and then tussle on the bed, and I could understand why the guys were sort of incapacitated despite the seriousness of the situation.
Chapter 15: Bargains
In this chapter justice is served, then not, and then sort of is. It felt wrong to let Rang get entirely away with what he did, but of course killing him went against Zuko's grain and wouldn't serve his purpose of getting Master Lu released. It's a testament to the dark reality of the Fire Nation, I think, that it took another wrong to make a sort-of right.
It was also a good way to show how messed-up a guy Shun is. There are of course a lot of things behind his act of mangling Rang's face--righteous anger, sympathy for Zuko, his own guilt in the matter--but the part in A Night's Work where Cheng flaunted her attraction to Rang and Shun didn't like it was very deliberate. I hoped there would at least be a shadow of doubt that Shun hurt Rang partly out of jealousy, and that Cheng provoked Shun to punish him for what he did. My favorite OCs are just wonderful people.
The Nakas/Shun exchange was very entertaining for me. Nakas might have just helped Shun out and they might both be accepting of the fact that they're (or were, in Shun's case) sleeping with the same woman, but that doesn't mean they can't have a good old-fashioned pissing contest. Here's how the conversation reads in my mind, translated from the Polite:
Nakas: So you're that guy. (Looks him over) Why's she bother with a midget like you?
Shun: I'm the midget she gave the shirt off your back, jerkass. After we made earth-shattering love, of course. Jerkass.
Nakas: *snerk* You know, I kind of like you.
Who says straight guys can't be catty? XD I don't know how readers envision Shun, but to me he's a small guy by partly-industrialized Fire Nation standards, and average by Earth Kingdom starving-peasant standards. He's about the same height as Cheng, who is on the tall side. Nakas is a much more impressive physical specimen, tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome, though kind of an indifferent lover. We have a saying in Korea, "the little pepper is the spicy one." Considering that "pepper" in Korea is the common colloquial term for penis, make of that saying what you will.
Guess which is spicier, the red or the green?
Because Azula is funny about everything not going perfectly her way, I gave her a mini-breakdown in this chapter. Mental illness often has some warning signs (except when it doesn't, of course), and I figured this would be a good chance to show her fragile psychological core. If a caring adult had seen the signs and made sure she got the appropriate care and support, things could have changed for her. It was her misfortune that Ozai just encouraged her instability by puffing up her sense of grandeur and making her play these games against Zuko for his favor. As Zuko said, going into exile and out of this toxic environment during his adolescence was probably the best thing that happened to him.
Chapter 16: Opinions
The (in)famous War Council chapter.
loopy777 made a great point about how I kind of danced around "The Storm," skimming over the parts that were detailed in the episode and detailing the parts that the episode just summarized. That's exactly right, and I think it's the kind of thing fanfic should do--I get very bored with fic that repeats lines from the show, unless there's some new twist or take on the canon.I had a bit of trouble with getting the diction to match up in the war council scene. I realized too late that the characters spoke a good deal more formally for much of my story than the characters in the show did. I have a weakness for archaic and fancy language, and it shows. It helped that I was skipping over most of the show's dialogue, but there were some I couldn't skip. I just patched in Zuko's climactic line and prayed it worked. I also used the informality of the general's line to portray his diction as a deliberate provocation of Zuko, which worked for the plot I was cooking up.
I deliberately added the part about Iroh thinking Azula should start dressing like a girl and stop playing at politics. It's my headcanon (that no oen else seems to share) that Azula dresses like a boy to be taken more seriously, though she certainly doesn't disguise her femininity. I think Iroh would disapprove of both the way she presents herself and the role she plays at court. I love Iroh to bits and pieces, but it seems obvious to me that he doesn't know Azula at all, nor does he seem to care about her ambitions and aspirations. Kaigou in Deconstructing Azula used the doll incident to make the point that Azula was afraid of being forced into a circumscribed existence under Firelord Iroh, and I can see that point of view. Besides, it's fun to give the good guy a flaw and the villain a point.
Also, Jee makes a long-awaited (by me, at least) reappearance. So far no one has guessed what I'm going to do with his character, other than the obvious fact that he's going to meet up with Zuko. He will, in the end, but there are still a few chapters between here and there. Mwahaha.
Chapter 17: Games
This is the chapter where everything is set up for the final showdown, or rather showdowns. Shun confesses the truth to Zuko, Mai chooses not to betray Azula, Yenzi is assigned to the Forty-First Division, and Azula, of course, persuades her father to fight the Agni Kai himself. The pieces are in place, let the game begin.
The War Ministry official who assigned Yenzi to the 41st was given a modified version of my own name, and some of my personality. I wanted to give myself the reminder that it's not just the obvious monsters who hurt people in a corrupt system, but rather everyday people like me do the dirty work. The major inspiration for the character was Hannah Arendt's characterization of Adolf Eichmann in Eichmann in Jerusalem as a totally boring technocrat, though others challenge her account as being too selective because there is also ample evidence that Eichmann was in fact a racist psycho dickwad. Whatever the truth of Eichmann, it seems indisputable that ordinary people do much of the work of immoral regimes.
I put in some work to make Yenzi as sympathetic as possible before I marked her for death. That included showing more of her relationships with her family, the kind of person she was, and also her crush, that rite of teen passage. And lest you accuse me of pushing the gay agenda, I'll have you know I mightily resisted her attraction to Ming. My original plan was for Yenzi to have a crush on Khoujin and dislike Sa Ye for that reason. I wanted to see how I could handle a cliched situation like that, but again the character was uncooperative. This is sort of how it went in my demented mind:
Luna: Heyyy Yenziiii! Lookit this fine slab of beefcake right here. (dangles Khoujin) That bitch Sa Ye's got him wrapped around her finger, isn't that unfair?
Yenzi: I guess he's okay if you like your men to look like oxen. But what about that Sa Ye, huh? She's so annoying and I don't know why. I just wish I could look away from her. Bitch.
Luna: ??
Yenzi: Oh, and Ming is amazing. You know she saved my brother's life, right? And that voice! (sighs) She's everything I want in a woman. I mean, everything I want to be as a woman. That's it.
Luna: Uh-oh.
Yenzi: Anyway, I'm not sure what to feel about Prince Zuko. He's a good guy and he means well, but isn't standing up to the status quo going to do more harm than good? People could get hurt in the-
Luna: Yenzi, you can't be into girls! You want to be an engineer, and we really shouldn't play into the idea that the only women with a sense of humor are the ones who love the boob.
Yenzi: (Staring at Ming) Mmm, boobs. Wait, did I just say something?
Luna: Yenzi... I would not even dream of speaking this way in real life, and not just because it would make me a flaming hypocrite. But you're a figment of my imagination and I will say whatever I damned please. I forbid you to be a lesbian. I refuse to write stereotypes!
Yenzi: What's a lesbian?
Reader, I lost the argument. I let it go--the original plan was really too hackneyed (so hackneyed it turned her gay, evidently), and even if Yenzi had felt attracted to Khoujin I couldn't do much with vague feelings for a dead day-old crush, especially when she had so many bigger problems on her mind.
Yenzi isn't the first gay character to show up in the story, by the way. Maybe I was too subtle about it, but Lao Tai and Khoujin's great-uncle Yan were in love and shared a life until Yan died. It's why Khoujin considered the Elder "more family than blood," and why Sanwai takes care of him in his old age. The whole village knew, though everyone is very discreet about it, talking about their great friendship and how they were like family and so on. They have reason to be cautious, because Yan's death wasn't entirely an accident. I think the modern term would be "hate crime," by family members no less, though I think there were a lot of other issues involved. I could probably discover the background if I thought about it hard enough.
Lijin grew on my after fairladyz2005 took an interest in him. Strangely enough, I found him developing into an archer character as though tracking her interests. His archery is going to play a role in Part 3--more than that I won't say at the moment.
So those are some of the things that were going on in my head when I wrote these chapters. Just four chapters more and the whole story will be done, yay!
