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ljwritesMy long Zuko-centric fic Shadow of the Dragon King was posted in its entirety some months ago, almost exactly two years since I posted the first chapter. I'll be posting belated notes for the third and final part, chapter-by-chapter this time because I kind of lost control of my word count. I'll be using the scene labels that I used when writing the fic in Scrivener.
Chapter 18: Respect
Epigraph
I have already discussed the epigraph at the head of this chapter by providing a fuller translation of the historical record I used, and by talking about the historical background. The story of Crown Prince Sado was the seed from which this entire fic grew, so it was a strange feeling to be finally posting this epigraph. The story had changed and grown from its initial conception to a longer and more complex story that implicated the political situation of the Fire Nation and the strife between members of its royal family.
Still, this epigraph stayed intact from the beginning. In fact I had edited and translated the historical record before I even started the story, and that was pretty much the translation that went into the final draft, other than some minor edits. For instance I'd originally left out the part about the king accusing the Crown Prince on the words of a palace woman, then put it back in when Azula ended up playing a prominent role in the story and in Zuko's downfall.
Azula watches the Agni Kai
I have also discussed the opening scene of this chapter, Azula's one and only PoV scene in the story, in another post. I'm still thankful toamyraine and vmuzic for their honest comments on the first draft, and I think the revision led to a much better opening for Part 3. It certainly gave Azula some much-needed humanity, and I think it painted a fuller picture of the character along with her other scenes in Part 3.
In many ways, as the mention of Ursa implies, Azula's story in Shadow is the story of a girl who is still hurting from her mother's abandonment. She may be incredibly intelligent and powerful, but she is still an eleven-year-old girl and what's more, a human being. I find it almost inconceivable that she could be indifferent to this loss, or that she wouldn't find Zuko a convenient outlet for her pain. In my headcanon this poisonous dynamic interacted fatally with the political unrest in the Fire Nation. Though Ursa doesn't come up a lot in the story, she's the driving force behind many of Azula's and Zuko's choices.
I also meant to depict the bystander effect of abuse here. While Ozai might not have physically harmed Azula, it's impossible that his treatment of Zuko didn't leave an indelible impression on her--this is what happens when you step out of line. In that respect, the change from the first draft of the scene to the second, where the burning came as a shock to Azula, worked very well for my purposes. I've heard it's fairly common for specific siblings to be targeted for abuse,* but no one remains unaffected. There's an earlier unused draft of the Ozai-Iroh conversation in Chapter 19 where Iroh tells Ozai that what he did to Azula was worse than what he could ever do to Zuko, and that's kind of how I see it, too.
* A powerful and painful account I read of such a situation was A Child Called It, where the author as a boy suffered severe abuse from the same mother who provided normal care to his siblings. Or as normal as anything can be when your mother is humiliating, injuring, and starving your brother on a regular basis anyway. The really shocking part for me was that the siblings largely ignored their targeted brother and even seemed disgusted by him. Even his father wanted him to go along with the mother so as not to set her off. God, I'm getting upset just thinking about it.
Iroh watches the Agni Kai
I was really happy to finally use Lao Tai's letter from all the way back in Chapter 7, the letter Sa Ye risked her life and her baby's to bring to Iroh. (I'll talk more about Sa Ye as a character and a mother in the notes for Chapter 21.) From the first I knew the Agni Kai scene was the only appropriate place to reveal the contents of the letter to the readers, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. I have a weakness for archaic courtly style--my two favorite books as a teenager were Ivandoe and Lord of the Rings--and I could really turn that tendency loose when it came to emulating the writing of Elder Lao, a rural intellectual who is not only an Old but was cut off from much of the modern developments in style.
No one commented on the Tamalan-Ta Min connection in the letter, maybe because they were distracted by Zuko getting his face burned off in the same scene. The Taminlan-Tamalan change was something I came up with when I decided to tie the village to Roku in response to reader speculations. I mentioned "Taminlan" as an old name for the place in Chapter 10. I used the letter lan (缆), a literary way of saying "dock a ship," so basically "Taminlan" was "Ta Min Lan," meaning "Ta Min anchors," as in Ta Min wife of Roku. This morphed into Tamalan over time.
This was an expansion of that scene from the show where the inhabitants of Roku's home island escaped on boats while he held back the volcanic eruption. The headcanon was that Ta Min had led her folk, including children, to settle on another island, and they became a rural folk over time. The descendants of Roku in particular modified the letter Dao (道, road), the family name I gave Roku, into Shou (首, head) in order to conceal their origins from the authorities. So the official full names of Khoujin and Sanwai were Shou Khoujin and Shou Sanwai. Their true names were Dao Khoujin and Dao Sanwai. Not that it was a closely-kept secret that had to be protected at all costs or anything, but after the Fire Nation went to war the family preferred not to draw unnecessary attention to itself.
Obviously the above has been shot to hell by the franchise canon now, though at least I took care not to mention Ursa or imply that she came from Tamalan. I wanted to leave myself room to say she was from a different branch of the family, for instance one with more noble chops, if and when Nick finally came out with Ursa's background. The whole Tamalan setup still conflicts with canon due to the Ta Min connection, though.
As for the actual Iroh scene, I wanted to depict the immediate, raw consequences of Ozai's burning Zuko, and am happy with how it came out. The grief over Lu Ten's death was a big part of what made Iroh tick for me, and his traumatic breakdown, asloopy777 called it, where for a moment he was holding Lu Ten in his arms made the scene work for me. I'm ashamed to admit that I had tears in my eyes when I reread this scene to refresh my memory--guh, it's such a dorky thing to do, crying over your own writing. Then again I've never pretended to be anything but a huge dork.
Shipboard brawl
Good old Zanzen, he really grew on me with his decency and good intentions. His crush on Yenzi was something I'd planned from early on. I had a headcanon going (well, "canon," given that these are my original characters) that they would later have a relationship, or rather a series of turbulent on-and-off relationships, that would eventually peter out. Then I "discovered" her sexual orientation, which threw a spanner in the works. Of course Yenzi's being a lesbian doesn't preclude their dating for a while, though I think she'll eventually settle down with a woman (who is not Ming).
A side note on Zanzen is that he is one of the few characters in the story without a surname. He has a surname (Qian) officially on the books, which was just filled in from the name of his home village (Qiannai) because it was necessary to complete his papers. So officially he's Corporal Qian, though no one who knows his story calls him that. That's why he's always "Zanzen" or "Corporal" in Ji's PoV scenes. In my headcanon this was the way of the matrilineal tribes of the islands before the Earth Kingdom influence overwhelmed them. The only other characters in the story without surnames are Ty Lee and her mother and sisters, who belong to one of the few aforementioned tribes that lasted into the era of the story with some of their old ways intact. I've given them the clan name Si Feng, meaning "West Wind," hinting at a possible Air Nomad connection. This is all strictly headcanon, of course.
In the scene itself, the interaction between the irritable Ji and the two main young characters was really fun to write. For all her rough-edged ways I like that Yenzi is the voice of decency in this scene, pointing out the wrongness of spreading rumors about a child's sex life. Of course she's the only character in the scene who's met Zuko and Sa Ye, not to mention Sa Ye's husband. Lijin's being around Zuko's age probably played a role, too, and then there's the general pissed-off-ness at her situation. I wonder if she was telling the truth about not throwing Choi overboard--personally I chalk it down to differing perceptions, and both were probably telling the truth as they saw it.
The "Corporal Lout" bit was something I came up with fairly early in the story. Considering the number of lines, scenes, and entire chapters that never made it to the final cut, the preservation of that quip felt like something of a victory. Yenzi's "maybe I saw a dragon" line was similarly planned pretty early on, at least from the time when the story took its current form. I agonized from the time I came up with the line how to make it plausible, and I'm not sure how well I succeeded.
I think I might have written the sexual harassment policy of the Fire Navy in these scene: Act like a dick, and an irate Ji will throw you overboard. I found out later that in the real-life U.S. military, and no doubt in other settings, the chain of command's tolerance of misconduct such as verbal harassment is correlated with higher occurrences of sexual crimes such as rape. Harassment isn't rape, but an environment where women can be demeaned with impunity is also an environment conducive to sexual violence. So Ji is being very smart here in making it clear that harassment is Not Okay on his ship. The specific method he used is debatable, of course. :) I think he resorted to that dunking because the code of conduct doesn't deal with the kind of "harmless" act Ensign Choi engaged in. I don't think Ji was necessarily thinking that far ahead, though, and was probably acting out of disgust at Choi's behavior and a current of understandable class resentment, not to mention his own ornery temper. And yes, the name Choi and the tossing-overboard bit are meant to pay homage to the episode "Siege on the North."
For canon purposes, this was the part where I added the training accident rumor in addition to the pregnancy rumor. Taken together they sure paint a terrible picture of Zuko. "At least the Firelord hadn't packed his own idiot son out to sea. Yet." was a late addition to the scene while I was editing it. Captain Ji, casualty of irony.
Waiting for the storm
The return of Ming! Here's another scene, in addition to the Agni Kai, where the inspiration from Prince Sado's death creeps into the story. The specter of falling victim to factional strife was an increasingly likely outcome for Zuko at this point until the developments of Chapter 19 took place. I wanted Ming to be the face of the men and women who were loyal even in the shadow of death. As I implied in this scene and later in Chapter 19, Sa Ye begged to be there but Iroh forbade it because of her pregnancy. At least that was the pretext, anyway. Pregnant or no, I doubt he would have allowed a non-combatant young woman anywhere near a situation that could turn very bloody very fast. Old-fashioned guy that he is, he didn't even like it for Ming. I inserted the "heed an old man's warning" and "next time" lines as a nod to canon events during "The Day of Black Sun."
Zhao's defiance
This scene was a late addition to the chapter, one I inserted for the same reason as I inserted Azula's scene with Li and Lo in Chapter 16, when Azula refused to act on the rumor that Zuko had impregnated a serving girl. Amy Raine had pointed out that it was implausible that Azula would simply ignore the rumor, and I realized the same was true of the threat of death against Zuko.
As with the scene in Chapter 16, Azula actually made the "right" choice, though again not for the right reasons. I'd like to think a part of her was genuinely upset at the idea of Zuko dying, but her conscious reasons involved a healthy dose of self-interest. Much like the fear she felt at the beginning of the chapter when Ozai burned Zuko's face, she knew that what happened to Zuko could happen to her, much as she might want to deny it. With Ozai, at least, she could rationalize that he would never treat her like Zuko (famous last words), but with people outside the family she didn't have even that fig leaf of protection.
Asfairladyz2005 pointed out Zhao is making the transition to his canon self, and the alliance of convenience between him and Azula is starting to unravel as the Great Houses come out of the events of the story with new assertiveness and power. Azula was really being too clever for her own good in building them up and in imagining that Zhao would be at her beck and call forever. It shows how young she is for all her formidable qualities, so overall I was satisfied with the developments in this scene.
Suspicion
In preparation for Ji's development in Chapter 19 I decided to take an entire scene establishing the fishy circumstances and rumors surrounding the deployment of the Forty-First. I think Ji is, the only character who consistently gets a PoV scene almost every time he makes an appearance, and I really like his understated integrity underneath the scratchy exterior. It was a purposeful choice on my part for Ji to think of Iroh rather than Zuko when he remembered Yenzi's "dragon" line. After all, military men didn't know Zuko at this point like they did Iroh, and what Ji does know of Zuko at this point are outright fabrications. It wasn't until the events of "The Storm" that Ji would recognize Zuko as a leader he could admire, and it made sense to me that the admiration that Ji and others like him held for Iroh would transfer to Zuko, Iroh's spiritual heir.
White Lotus letter
This may be as close to a cliffhanger as I got in SDK. I really liked Loopy's speculation in the review to this chapter about Shun getting involved in the final push to save Zuko's life, maybe killing Zhao's father with Azula's tacit approval. That would have been an awesome action-adventure climax, the kind of turn I really enjoy from Loopy. In my own tale, of course, Shun doesn't end up doing much of anything other than destroy himself, which is more or less reflective of how I see violence in general. My dirty liberal ways are inadvertently on display in this fic, which in the end turned out to be very pacifistic.
Chapter 18: Respect
Epigraph
I have already discussed the epigraph at the head of this chapter by providing a fuller translation of the historical record I used, and by talking about the historical background. The story of Crown Prince Sado was the seed from which this entire fic grew, so it was a strange feeling to be finally posting this epigraph. The story had changed and grown from its initial conception to a longer and more complex story that implicated the political situation of the Fire Nation and the strife between members of its royal family.
Still, this epigraph stayed intact from the beginning. In fact I had edited and translated the historical record before I even started the story, and that was pretty much the translation that went into the final draft, other than some minor edits. For instance I'd originally left out the part about the king accusing the Crown Prince on the words of a palace woman, then put it back in when Azula ended up playing a prominent role in the story and in Zuko's downfall.
Azula watches the Agni Kai
I have also discussed the opening scene of this chapter, Azula's one and only PoV scene in the story, in another post. I'm still thankful to
amyraine and vmuzic for their honest comments on the first draft, and I think the revision led to a much better opening for Part 3. It certainly gave Azula some much-needed humanity, and I think it painted a fuller picture of the character along with her other scenes in Part 3.In many ways, as the mention of Ursa implies, Azula's story in Shadow is the story of a girl who is still hurting from her mother's abandonment. She may be incredibly intelligent and powerful, but she is still an eleven-year-old girl and what's more, a human being. I find it almost inconceivable that she could be indifferent to this loss, or that she wouldn't find Zuko a convenient outlet for her pain. In my headcanon this poisonous dynamic interacted fatally with the political unrest in the Fire Nation. Though Ursa doesn't come up a lot in the story, she's the driving force behind many of Azula's and Zuko's choices.
I also meant to depict the bystander effect of abuse here. While Ozai might not have physically harmed Azula, it's impossible that his treatment of Zuko didn't leave an indelible impression on her--this is what happens when you step out of line. In that respect, the change from the first draft of the scene to the second, where the burning came as a shock to Azula, worked very well for my purposes. I've heard it's fairly common for specific siblings to be targeted for abuse,* but no one remains unaffected. There's an earlier unused draft of the Ozai-Iroh conversation in Chapter 19 where Iroh tells Ozai that what he did to Azula was worse than what he could ever do to Zuko, and that's kind of how I see it, too.
* A powerful and painful account I read of such a situation was A Child Called It, where the author as a boy suffered severe abuse from the same mother who provided normal care to his siblings. Or as normal as anything can be when your mother is humiliating, injuring, and starving your brother on a regular basis anyway. The really shocking part for me was that the siblings largely ignored their targeted brother and even seemed disgusted by him. Even his father wanted him to go along with the mother so as not to set her off. God, I'm getting upset just thinking about it.
Iroh watches the Agni Kai
I was really happy to finally use Lao Tai's letter from all the way back in Chapter 7, the letter Sa Ye risked her life and her baby's to bring to Iroh. (I'll talk more about Sa Ye as a character and a mother in the notes for Chapter 21.) From the first I knew the Agni Kai scene was the only appropriate place to reveal the contents of the letter to the readers, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. I have a weakness for archaic courtly style--my two favorite books as a teenager were Ivandoe and Lord of the Rings--and I could really turn that tendency loose when it came to emulating the writing of Elder Lao, a rural intellectual who is not only an Old but was cut off from much of the modern developments in style.
No one commented on the Tamalan-Ta Min connection in the letter, maybe because they were distracted by Zuko getting his face burned off in the same scene. The Taminlan-Tamalan change was something I came up with when I decided to tie the village to Roku in response to reader speculations. I mentioned "Taminlan" as an old name for the place in Chapter 10. I used the letter lan (缆), a literary way of saying "dock a ship," so basically "Taminlan" was "Ta Min Lan," meaning "Ta Min anchors," as in Ta Min wife of Roku. This morphed into Tamalan over time.
This was an expansion of that scene from the show where the inhabitants of Roku's home island escaped on boats while he held back the volcanic eruption. The headcanon was that Ta Min had led her folk, including children, to settle on another island, and they became a rural folk over time. The descendants of Roku in particular modified the letter Dao (道, road), the family name I gave Roku, into Shou (首, head) in order to conceal their origins from the authorities. So the official full names of Khoujin and Sanwai were Shou Khoujin and Shou Sanwai. Their true names were Dao Khoujin and Dao Sanwai. Not that it was a closely-kept secret that had to be protected at all costs or anything, but after the Fire Nation went to war the family preferred not to draw unnecessary attention to itself.
Obviously the above has been shot to hell by the franchise canon now, though at least I took care not to mention Ursa or imply that she came from Tamalan. I wanted to leave myself room to say she was from a different branch of the family, for instance one with more noble chops, if and when Nick finally came out with Ursa's background. The whole Tamalan setup still conflicts with canon due to the Ta Min connection, though.
As for the actual Iroh scene, I wanted to depict the immediate, raw consequences of Ozai's burning Zuko, and am happy with how it came out. The grief over Lu Ten's death was a big part of what made Iroh tick for me, and his traumatic breakdown, as
loopy777 called it, where for a moment he was holding Lu Ten in his arms made the scene work for me. I'm ashamed to admit that I had tears in my eyes when I reread this scene to refresh my memory--guh, it's such a dorky thing to do, crying over your own writing. Then again I've never pretended to be anything but a huge dork.Shipboard brawl
Good old Zanzen, he really grew on me with his decency and good intentions. His crush on Yenzi was something I'd planned from early on. I had a headcanon going (well, "canon," given that these are my original characters) that they would later have a relationship, or rather a series of turbulent on-and-off relationships, that would eventually peter out. Then I "discovered" her sexual orientation, which threw a spanner in the works. Of course Yenzi's being a lesbian doesn't preclude their dating for a while, though I think she'll eventually settle down with a woman (who is not Ming).
A side note on Zanzen is that he is one of the few characters in the story without a surname. He has a surname (Qian) officially on the books, which was just filled in from the name of his home village (Qiannai) because it was necessary to complete his papers. So officially he's Corporal Qian, though no one who knows his story calls him that. That's why he's always "Zanzen" or "Corporal" in Ji's PoV scenes. In my headcanon this was the way of the matrilineal tribes of the islands before the Earth Kingdom influence overwhelmed them. The only other characters in the story without surnames are Ty Lee and her mother and sisters, who belong to one of the few aforementioned tribes that lasted into the era of the story with some of their old ways intact. I've given them the clan name Si Feng, meaning "West Wind," hinting at a possible Air Nomad connection. This is all strictly headcanon, of course.
In the scene itself, the interaction between the irritable Ji and the two main young characters was really fun to write. For all her rough-edged ways I like that Yenzi is the voice of decency in this scene, pointing out the wrongness of spreading rumors about a child's sex life. Of course she's the only character in the scene who's met Zuko and Sa Ye, not to mention Sa Ye's husband. Lijin's being around Zuko's age probably played a role, too, and then there's the general pissed-off-ness at her situation. I wonder if she was telling the truth about not throwing Choi overboard--personally I chalk it down to differing perceptions, and both were probably telling the truth as they saw it.
The "Corporal Lout" bit was something I came up with fairly early in the story. Considering the number of lines, scenes, and entire chapters that never made it to the final cut, the preservation of that quip felt like something of a victory. Yenzi's "maybe I saw a dragon" line was similarly planned pretty early on, at least from the time when the story took its current form. I agonized from the time I came up with the line how to make it plausible, and I'm not sure how well I succeeded.
I think I might have written the sexual harassment policy of the Fire Navy in these scene: Act like a dick, and an irate Ji will throw you overboard. I found out later that in the real-life U.S. military, and no doubt in other settings, the chain of command's tolerance of misconduct such as verbal harassment is correlated with higher occurrences of sexual crimes such as rape. Harassment isn't rape, but an environment where women can be demeaned with impunity is also an environment conducive to sexual violence. So Ji is being very smart here in making it clear that harassment is Not Okay on his ship. The specific method he used is debatable, of course. :) I think he resorted to that dunking because the code of conduct doesn't deal with the kind of "harmless" act Ensign Choi engaged in. I don't think Ji was necessarily thinking that far ahead, though, and was probably acting out of disgust at Choi's behavior and a current of understandable class resentment, not to mention his own ornery temper. And yes, the name Choi and the tossing-overboard bit are meant to pay homage to the episode "Siege on the North."
For canon purposes, this was the part where I added the training accident rumor in addition to the pregnancy rumor. Taken together they sure paint a terrible picture of Zuko. "At least the Firelord hadn't packed his own idiot son out to sea. Yet." was a late addition to the scene while I was editing it. Captain Ji, casualty of irony.
Waiting for the storm
The return of Ming! Here's another scene, in addition to the Agni Kai, where the inspiration from Prince Sado's death creeps into the story. The specter of falling victim to factional strife was an increasingly likely outcome for Zuko at this point until the developments of Chapter 19 took place. I wanted Ming to be the face of the men and women who were loyal even in the shadow of death. As I implied in this scene and later in Chapter 19, Sa Ye begged to be there but Iroh forbade it because of her pregnancy. At least that was the pretext, anyway. Pregnant or no, I doubt he would have allowed a non-combatant young woman anywhere near a situation that could turn very bloody very fast. Old-fashioned guy that he is, he didn't even like it for Ming. I inserted the "heed an old man's warning" and "next time" lines as a nod to canon events during "The Day of Black Sun."
Zhao's defiance
This scene was a late addition to the chapter, one I inserted for the same reason as I inserted Azula's scene with Li and Lo in Chapter 16, when Azula refused to act on the rumor that Zuko had impregnated a serving girl. Amy Raine had pointed out that it was implausible that Azula would simply ignore the rumor, and I realized the same was true of the threat of death against Zuko.
As with the scene in Chapter 16, Azula actually made the "right" choice, though again not for the right reasons. I'd like to think a part of her was genuinely upset at the idea of Zuko dying, but her conscious reasons involved a healthy dose of self-interest. Much like the fear she felt at the beginning of the chapter when Ozai burned Zuko's face, she knew that what happened to Zuko could happen to her, much as she might want to deny it. With Ozai, at least, she could rationalize that he would never treat her like Zuko (famous last words), but with people outside the family she didn't have even that fig leaf of protection.
As
fairladyz2005 pointed out Zhao is making the transition to his canon self, and the alliance of convenience between him and Azula is starting to unravel as the Great Houses come out of the events of the story with new assertiveness and power. Azula was really being too clever for her own good in building them up and in imagining that Zhao would be at her beck and call forever. It shows how young she is for all her formidable qualities, so overall I was satisfied with the developments in this scene.Suspicion
In preparation for Ji's development in Chapter 19 I decided to take an entire scene establishing the fishy circumstances and rumors surrounding the deployment of the Forty-First. I think Ji is, the only character who consistently gets a PoV scene almost every time he makes an appearance, and I really like his understated integrity underneath the scratchy exterior. It was a purposeful choice on my part for Ji to think of Iroh rather than Zuko when he remembered Yenzi's "dragon" line. After all, military men didn't know Zuko at this point like they did Iroh, and what Ji does know of Zuko at this point are outright fabrications. It wasn't until the events of "The Storm" that Ji would recognize Zuko as a leader he could admire, and it made sense to me that the admiration that Ji and others like him held for Iroh would transfer to Zuko, Iroh's spiritual heir.
White Lotus letter
This may be as close to a cliffhanger as I got in SDK. I really liked Loopy's speculation in the review to this chapter about Shun getting involved in the final push to save Zuko's life, maybe killing Zhao's father with Azula's tacit approval. That would have been an awesome action-adventure climax, the kind of turn I really enjoy from Loopy. In my own tale, of course, Shun doesn't end up doing much of anything other than destroy himself, which is more or less reflective of how I see violence in general. My dirty liberal ways are inadvertently on display in this fic, which in the end turned out to be very pacifistic.
