Two Realizations: Extended Fanfic Notes

[ljwrites]

I have the best boyfriend in the world. How do I know? He's the one who got me hooked on Avatar: The Last Airbender. I ended up getting way, way more into it than he ever did, but he was the one who got me started by introducing me to the show.

A few months ago, I had not finished Book 2 yet when I searched for relatively spoiler-safe Avatar posts and noticed a strange word, "Zutara." I put two and two together and realized that there were people who shipped Katara and Zuko. Evidently a lot of them. I called the boyfriend and reported this amazing fact, and he burst out laughing.

 

"Yeah," he said. "There was a little something between them."

"Oooohhh..." I redoubled my Avatar-watching efforts. I liked Aang and Katara together (as I would later like Mai and Zuko), but I was curious about what happened between Katara and Zuko for the pairing to attract such a devoted following.

Some interesting things did happen, in fact. There was the scene in "The Crossroads of Destiny" when the two shared a moment of empathy, only for it to be torn away by Zuko's choice to side with his sister - a decision that led to Aang's death. After that, understandably, Katara thought Zuko was Zudas until he helped her track down her mother's killer while they pulled off the sexy-ninja look together ("The Southern Raiders"). In "The Ember Island Players" episode Katara actually seemed uncertain about the prospect of her and Aang as a couple.

I waited with bated breath to see how the relationships would resolve. I was aware there weren't that many episode left until the end, so I wondered if the romance aspect would get a proper resolution. I was still rooting for Aang and Katara and Mai and Zuko for reasons stated in the Reasons I Love Avatar essays and further reasons that deserve an essay of their own (if anyone is interested), but I wanted a satisfying resolution no matter what the outcome.

And then. The badguy was not-killed but still neutralized, the psychotic princess got her ass kicked by Katara while Zuko sort of lay there, and without warning, Mai showed up at Zuko's coronation for kissytimes while Katara seemed no longer confused about the relationship now that her bald suitor was a big damn hero. The end.

"What the expletive?" I shouted over the phone to the boyfriend, who was probably regretting the day he ever told me about Avatar. "That's it? No resolution, no explanation, just sucking face and the credits roll?"

 

"I thought it was a little sudden, too," he said. "Please don't kill me."

I stewed. I schemed. I wrote my first Avatar fanfic, The Alternative (with extended notes) to dip my toe in the water, got some positive responses, and decided my next fanfic would be about the frustration I felt at what I thought was a rushed ending, romantically speaking.

There were three main issues with the ending I wanted to deal with. First, I wanted to explore what precipitated Katara's change of heart from confusion mode to making out with the monk mode. Second, I wanted to know why Zuko hadn't seemed to know where Mai was until his coronation, despite probably being in control of the country for a few days by then. Third, I wanted to give the "dark and intriguing" (as the creators put it) possible tension between Katara and Zuko a proper resolution. 

Three questions, three chapters. Simple enough, except not really. I had a devil of a time pinpointing Zuko's exact feelings for Mai, especially. I decided not to post the story until I had some idea of what to put in all three chapters, because I didn't want the story to change too much in the middle of the telling.

 

Chapter 1: Katara's Epiphany


"Oh, crap. Move, feet, move!"

The first chapter from Katara's point of view during the siblings' Agni Kai came easily enough. It was a stylistic challenge for me, because it was perhaps the most extreme first-person present point of view I had written. I had given some thought to the importance of perspective in general when I bought and read a used book of short stories grouped by point of view. First person present was the way to go for Katara's section, I decided, because I needed to capture very subjective, very immediate impressions. I expected it to be like pulling teeth.

Surprisingly enough, the story just flowed. I had not thought very much about Katara as a character up to that point, but I realized I understood her better than I thought. I had lost my mother, too, and I know how terrifying it is to think that so great a love can be temporary. Katara suffered her loss when she was so much younger than I was, and Kya's death had been violent as opposed to peaceful. Just a few years later Katara also suffered a painful and terrifying separation from her father that gave rise to feelings of resentment that she knew was irrational but couldn't help. (As Amanda, whose father was a pilot doctor in Iraq, states, this is a perfectly realistic reaction that the military specifically prepares for with education and counseling.)

Thinking in this way, I came to see Katara's hesitation during "The Ember Island Players" as fear of getting close to Aang, not OMGITotallyWantToShagZuko. What happens if she lets herself fall for Aang and he goes away, like the two most important people in her life did? She already watched Aang die once - will she be able to bear the possibility of it happening a second time? The way I understood it, committing to a relationship at this point would just result in her falling apart from fear, and she wanted to wait until the returns were in and it was safe to love him. Or as safe as life can ever be, anyway. (The Kataang in the Second Half of S3 essay has a similar viewpoint, though we have different ideas about the ending being rushed.)

This fear angle had the further advantage of explaining why Katara froze at the sight of Azula's lightning coming at her. Katara was a battle-tested waterbending master at this point, and she had proved to be more than a match for Azula before. It's arguable that she could have prevailed in the catacombs under Ba Sing Se if Zuko had not intervened in his sister's favor. *shakes fist at him* So why stand there helpless, necessitating Zuko's rescue of her? Azula had been treacherous before when she pretended to surrender and then attacked Iroh to get away in "The Chase," so her total lack of honor couldn't have been that shocking. And only a moment later when Zuko fell after taking the bullet for her, Katara proved perfectly capable of getting the heck out of the way of lightning.

 

But if the moment of Aang's death at Azula's hand had been a lasting trauma for Katara, it's very understandable why she would have frozen at the sight of lightning that had killed Aang the last time she saw it. It represented the worst of her fears for him, her worst nightmare about a relationship with him. It wasn't the only possible explanation, obviously, but one possible explanation given the evidence.

 

Chapter 2: Katara and Zuko... in Bed! (sort of)

 

"My million-voltage hero."

So the first chapter was done, and I moved onto the second. This would be later in time, during those hours when Katara and Zuko were away from the rest of the Gaang, dealing with the aftermath of the Agni Kai in the Fire Nation palace. I wanted to assert their chemistry and the tension so that it was clear what they were walking away from when they made their final choice.

 

At first I thought I would make it Zuko's point of view, third person past in contrast to Katara's first person present. That... didn't work out well, resulting in this clunker:

 

 

In the confusion after the Agni Kai, no one seemed to know where Mai was. The palace was burning, the Princess was a raving lunatic, too many of the staff had been sent away in the throes of her madness, and communications had broken down. After several fruitless inquiries Zuko gave up, disgusted that he seemed to have inherited a nation of idiots. Some victory. And some Firelord-to-be, who couldn't even find a lover locked away by the country he was supposedly ruling.

Self-pity was familiar enough a trap that he struggled out of it by throwing himself into work. He dispatched message hawks and messengers announcing the new state of affairs to the provinces, sent out signals of fire and smoke, and ordered the news to be brought to him the instant any arrived from the Earth Kingdom.

Then there was nothing more for him to do and he was getting in everyone's way with his paranoid pacing while his wound pained him more and more. A polite suggestion from the court physician, backed with Katara's steely gaze, sent him up to his rooms - his own, not his father's, thank Agni - to have his mental breakdown in peace worrying about what might be happening in the Earth Kingdom.

The Earth Kingdom, where his Uncle would be reconquering Ba Sing Se for the Earth King, where the Avatar would be battling his father to the death. Hopefully his father's defeat, and so his death. He snorted derisivly. What was wrong with him, that he would want his own father dead? But it was either him or Aang. Katara, at least, had been absolutely sure of the Avatar's victory. He had seen that faith in her eyes. He closed his eyes.

She had moved like water.

Infinitely adaptable, infinitely flexible. Infinitely deadly. There had been grace in her violence, a cool sanity in the madness of battle with a mad princess.

 

 

Oh hells no. The "story" was essentially a summary, and the prose was static without real conflict or interaction. And let's not even go into the overdone cliche about water and the awkward repetitions of "infinitely" and "mad." This early draft was compact, I'll give it that, but brevity wasn't what I wasn't going for here. I wanted the readers to feel why Katara/Zuko might have worked out had they chosen to go that way. They might be able to know it intellectually from Zuko mind-wanking, but it would not touch them on a visceral level.

 

I decided I needed both of them on stage, and I needed a different point of view because Zuko's self-pitying mawkishness was not working for the story at all. Besides, I thought it would be better if their joint chapter had a more balanced perspective and were not all about the male gaze on Katara (I mean, "moves like water?"). So I started rewriting the chapter with the external observer point of view rather than Katara's or Zuko's. I wanted to show how they worked by describing them in action, not by telling the readers. In general, I like to use the external PoV when I can  - it forces me to show, not tell, and it gets me thinking and practicing along those lines.

 

The rejected text above had its uses because I used bits and pieces in the new, external-PoV second chapter. That's why I keep a "reject" file around for my fiction and academic writing, because you never know when you might need the snippets left on the cutting room floor. (For some reason I never save the deleted portions of my blog posts, maybe I have a greater faith when blogging that my latest draft is also my greatest.)

 

So I rewrote Chapter 2, forcing myself to get all the events out in the open and tell a story through dialogue and actions instead of infodump. I tried to put a lot of intimacy into the scene, both emotional and physical. These two had gone from being enemies to friends and comrades, and they had just won a major battle together against a dangerous enemy. Zuko had almost died for Katara. That's bound to bring people closer together.

 

I also took care to set up an atmosphere where that intimacy could unfold without interruption. The two were suspended in an in-between time away from the rest of their little group, waiting for news of the decisive final battle. In this period of enforced waiting, alone together with their hopes and fears, they had nothing to lean on but each other and little comfort but sharing the warmth of each other's presence. That was why I made it clear at the start that all the business that could be taken care of at that point had been taken care of, so the focus would be solely on the two characters and their relationship.

 

And I deliberately laid it on thick, Zuko shirtless and Katara all gentle caring in the classic wounded warrior-maiden healer juxtaposition, talking frankly with heartfelt emotions. Katara bandaging Zuko, her arms around him at some points, talking in his ear, the two of them hand-holding, gazing into each other's eyes. Everything short of playing bow chika wow wow in the background, in other words. It was a fun scene to write, both tender and tense. This was kind of my ultimate vision of what the two could have been, and I deliberately played up only the good points to raise the stakes of what they would be walking away from if they chose other mates. I also made it clear that they each really cared for Aang and Mai, setting up the choice they would have to make.

 

Then the news of Aang's victory came, with a bit of levity about the confusion over Ozai's survival. If Ozai had died the tone would have been different, but this was the best of all possible worlds, victory without the bitter aftertaste of a father's death or of Aang having compromised his principles. I was free to depict the two characters being swept away on a wave of joy, right up to the moment of their choice: (And Zuko, dork that he is, almost gives Katara a concussion in their moment of celebration.) Were they going to translate the mutual tension they felt in this scene to action, opening up the possibility of a romantic relationship? Will they or won't they, the eternal refrain.

They didn't, of course. In my story they almost kissed, buoyed on the exhilaration of victory, but drew apart at the last moment. That was the whole point of the story for me, that keeping a good thing entails controlling yourself and sacrificing some things. They might have attraction and chemistry going for each other (and I deliberately played up that angle much more than canon ever did), but that alone didn't make them right for each other.
 

Katara's reasons had been written in Chapter 1, that her confusion with Aang had been driven by too much love and not too little. Her painful experiences during the war drove her to push him away as a romantic prospect, at least temporarily. She decided, however, that she would not let her life be ruled by fear and she would take the risk of committing to the boy she loved. And now with the greatest threat to his life gone, she was ready to take the next step with him.

 

Chapter 3: The Hardest Damn Chapter to Write

 

Awww. Just, awww.

Zuko's feelings on the matter were a bit more complicated in my mind, and were a subject for the third and final chapter. That was the hardest chapter to write despite being fairly short, because I wanted to make it clear that Mai and Zuko fit each other but it wasn't a convenience thing, and that Zuko hadn't just given up on Katara out of cowardice. I began the chapter like this, then quickly discarded it:

 

3. Art of the Possible
 

Politics is the art of the possible.

- Otto von Bismark

 

In the end, of course, there was no way Katara could have been his Fire Lady.

Being royalty was a funny thing. Every thread of your life was bound inextricably into the fabric of your country, every hope, desire, and dream. It didn't matter if you detested the things done in its name, if you were an exile with little hope of ever seeing your homeland again, or if everyone there thought you a traitor. You were of it, and it was a part of you.

Zuko could no more have chosen a Lady who would give him a blank look if he mentioned the ongoing feud between the clans Vasra and Xi Feng, than he could stop thinking and worrying about his country in the years of his exile. His very soul rebelled at the idea of a wife who could not help him build an internal coalition for peace, who would be resented as a foreigner and interloper by his people, who could not, in other words, give herself fully and wholly to his Nation as he had all his life.

 

I thought there was an element of truth in this, but putting the emphasis on politics made it seem like Zuko's choice of Mai was a mere convenience and not heartfelt. That was kind of the opposite of what I was going for. In fact, I had come up with the above passage because in my mind, Zuko's feelings for Mai are so genuine precisely because she fits every part of his life, including the political. It's not like Firelord Zuko and Zuko the man are separate beings; he had been born and bred for the role. He strove with everything he had to be Firelord, and later a truly good Firelord, even in his darkest moments. That role was an integral part of who he was, his destiny, and any wife he chose would have to be part of that or it wouldn't work.
 

(I find it interesting, though, that this rejected draft seemed to hold the seeds of the later Shadow of the Dragon King--the quote at the beginning of the chapter, and reflections on the relationship between Zuko and his country. A small part of that draft will even show up in Chapter 8 of that story, which I am working on now.)

 

So I had to think of a better way to say all that without emphasizing the convenience, and I mulled over it and brainstormed for a while. Let's see... the Fire Nation was Zuko's country, his homeland that he had pined for for years. Home. Making himself at home, homecoming.

 

Of course! Homecoming. To Zuko, Mai was home. Like the Fire Nation for all its flaws was his home, the place where he belonged, he belonged with Mai. His homecoming to the Fire Nation after exile came at the expense of his self-identity, but Mai accepted him for who he was with no preconditions, no judgment. Katara, when she thought him an enemy with good reason, threatened to kill him in "The Western Air Temple". Mai, when she thought him a traitor to her nation who had dumped her, laid down her life for him on "The Boiling Rock.." Unconditional acceptance was a rare thing in his life, a warm and cherished thing like a big hug, like a hearthfire. Like home.

 

Once I had that central image in mind the rest of it came together fairly naturally. The reflection that they watched each other's backs was a much subtler allusion to the idea in the rejected first draft, and the rampant in-world Zutara shipping actually became something for Mai to smirk about at Zuko's expense. Anyone in a mature relationship knows that attraction isn't the same thing as partnership. Sexual tension and the rumor mill are passing games; an actual long-term relationship is about the much more serious game of life. In a healthy relationship, furthermore, there's humor and a bit of a thrill in thinking about your partner as someone desirable to other people. It adds zest and keeps you from getting to complacent, and of course is great fodder for teasing. Cheating and deception are in a whole 'nother universe.

 

Finally, the story ended where I wanted to end it - on the theme of choice, that Zuko might have had a relationship with Katara but what he had with Mai was something he wanted much more. Because every choice means giving up other possible choices, and giving up takes wisdom and courage. In my story he chose not to take that other path (an earlier title for this chapter, after Art of the Possible, was The Road not Traveled) because he already had what he wanted - someone who was compatible with him, who accepted him unconditionally and whom he could love and trust without reservations. That kind of bond was worth giving up other paths for, no matter how intriguing might be the paths untaken. Sometimes the road not taken is better off staying that way,
 

 

"And that's they way it should have happened," I told my long-suffering boyfriend, my best of all possible worlds. "You know, in the show."

 

"Yes, dear," said my best boyfriend in the world, and shut me the hell up by pressing a gentle kiss to my hand.