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ljwritesChapter 19: Voices may be the most ambitious thing I've ever written in terms of sheer scope, not to mention the length. I mean, almost 20,000 words (19,629 to be exact) for what is ostensibly a single chapter? Here's to hoping I never do anything like that again.
Epigraph
The original epigraph I had in mind for this chapter was very different from what I ended up with. The quote I originally wanted to use was:
I found this on some quotation site and thought it fit, especially with Captain Ji's change of heart during the assault on Beiyang. Later, though, I started thinking this was kind of meh and didn't even fit that well since there was a bunch of other stuff going on in the chapter, and Shun's part in particular was too dark and complicated for such feel-good words.
Then I looked up vox populi, the term that the chapter title "Voices" comes from. The Wikipedia page mentioned an eighth-century reference to the term in a letter to Charlemagne. I thought it was more interesting, and it suited the content of the chapter better--including the scenes with Shun, and the general tumult of the chapter. A reviewer once asked how I find these epigraphs and I'll probably expand my answer into a separate post, but random Google searches are definitely a big part of it.
From here on, since the chapter follows three separate plots (WHAT WAS I THINKING), I will comment on them separately, referring to specific scenes as necessary.
Protest at Haishan
I'm pretty sure that when the letter at the end of Chapter 18 told Iroh that plans were underway to save Zuko, many readers were expecting an action-packed rescue. The story certainly had enough of that--and was to have still more in the aftermath of the protests and the naval sequence. Ever since the story took its present form in my mind, though, I knew I wanted Zuko to avoid Prince Sado's fate not by the sword but by the very people he was willing to do anything to protect.
If my story has a moment of eucatastrophe, the happy surprise that changes the world, it is that the relationship between Zuko and the People of Fire was never as one-sided as it seemed. His subjects are not helpless wretches just waiting around for a savior; they are slow to action, yes, but that slowness is due to might and not weakness. I don't know how many readers noticed but this passage describing the amassed protesters...
...is meant to invoke the image of a dragon.
This is another area where my background becomes Relevant to the Story. Though South Korea is a prosperous democracy now, as recently as 1987 we were still under military rule. The direct catalysts, after years of political suppression and human rights violations, were the deaths of two young university students, Jong-cheol Park by torture and Han-yeol Lee by a tear gas canister fired into the crowd.
The regime's cover-up story, if you can even call it that, for Park's death was that he had died of a heart attack when the interrogator pounded the table between them. Yeah, real plausible cause of death... if he were 122 years old instead of 22. Especially after autopsy results showed clear evidence of torture. The government must have thought Koreans were going to go along out of fear or apathy. Then a million people turned up to say they were mad as hell and weren't going to take it anymore.
June of 1987, Seoul City Hall
I've mentioned before that to me as a Korean the dragon symbolizes kingship, the quality of being a ruler. I don't think that contradicts the traditional Western conception of dragons as terrible, man-devouring beasts. Both symbols are about ultimately about power, what it should be and what happens when it is not contained. In this moment of my story the dragon humbles itself and begs where it has the power to command, because it knows the price of getting what it wants by force. Push it too far, though, and it will have no other choice.
The major characters in the Haishan sequence are, in a way, working together to contain the dragon's power and bring about a peaceful conclusion: The traumatized young boy desperate to save his parents, the military man who is willing to disgrace himself and risk his life for what he believe in, and the old shopkeeper who came up with the plan (with his "Pai Sho friends," of course) to utilize the services of sympathetic officers to protect the protesters.
Speaking of Master Shang, the whole Master Shang/Inspector Shang bit was originally an accident. I had forgotten that I'd named the White Lotus contact Shang by the time it was time to name Inspector Shang. When I realized later on I had named both of them Shang, I decided to run with it and make them related. In my Scrivener file their argument scene is labeled "Disagreement in the family," and in a way that's what this whole thing is. On one level the whole story is concerned with strife inside the royal family, and on a larger scale the family that is the nation.
The fact that the story is a family conflict means that it is both facilitated and constrained by relationships. There are rules and limits to what can happen. That doesn't mean things can't get very, very nasty--in fact the strong emotions and shared history may fuel extreme cruelty--but it means that at the end of the day you can't up and leave the consequences of your actions. It's why Azula, ruthless though she is, balks at the thought of Zuko getting killed: She will have to live with his death in some form, at the very least in the form of a precedent that makes her more vulnerable. There's also the oath to her mother, her own tangled feelings about her brother, and her own basic insecurities. Like I said, it's a mess, which to me is the essence of family.
The Firebrand's Escape
I loved writing the Earth Kingdom forces arrayed at Beiyang. I wanted to make the point that these are highly Scary People; you don't hold out against the most technologically advanced nation in the world by being wimpy buffoons. If anything, the fact that they didn't drive the Fire Nation back a long time ago is a testament to just how big a mess the Earth Kingdom is. I've written a little more about some of the Beiyang defense forces and Fire Nation prisoners in a separate short story, Flotsam.
Most of the action of this sequence, of course, occurs on sea and not land. Did I mention I watched Crimson Tide 17 times? The story of mutiny and counter-mutiny at sea, with each side accusing the other of being treasonous, is lifted straight out of that movie. What fascinated my teenaged self so much about the film (other than Denzel Washington's muscular abs and smoldering gaze) was the way these men were cut off from outside communication and were forced to fall back on mutual relationships and shared--or conflicting--beliefs. Unlike in Crimson Tide, though, the sympathy of the story here lies with the captain who disobeys his commander-in-chief, for the simple reason that the commander-in-chief in my story has become a tyrant.
I probably should have done more to develop the Firebrand and her crew in order to make Ji's change of heart totally convincing. Ji's absence from the main body of the story may have been just a little too long for readers to totally get under his skin. To me his insubordination a very "last straw" moment, and the bulk of the buildup came not from just that one battle or even the past ten years but the entirety of his career at sea. Twenty-three years of my life, as he puts it.
amanda_violet did me the favor of reading the naval scenes over for me and commenting on them, and was kind enough to tell me they were some of the best she had read. That meant a lot coming from a maritime novel buff like her, and even more coming from someone whose abilities and sensibility as a writer I respect. My wonderful beta-reader amyraine suggested the sequence would have been complete with Ji regaining control of the ship. I usually agree with her advice, but not in this. Part of the reason is my weakness for big-shebang climaxes, yes, but part of it was because I had planned the parallel symbolism of Zuko defending the reservoir at Tamalan in Chapter 6 and Yenzi defending the ship's engine, both with the catapult missile hurling toward them. (It just occurred to me that I had the king-to-be stand before a means of production for agriculture and the bourgeois girl before a machine of industry. My subconscious is always playing these tricks.)
In my mind the contrast between those two moments is more important than the similarities. Zuko, who received some of the best training in the martial application of firebending, couldn't do more than deflect the missile with his firebending. It was Yenzi with her craftsman's forge-bending who actually destroyed the threat to her and her friends' lives. In fact, the only specific application of forgebending I mentioned was Shiri's breaking a sword with it during the battle outside Haishan. My lefty librul ways are embarrassingly on display, as ever. I'm conflicted about the idea of war: On the one hand I am fascinated by the human ingenuity that supports it and the emotional intensity of it. On the other hand I hate the pointless destruction, appalling waste, and sheer immorality of the enterprise. To me the only good war is a fictional one.
The character of Lieutenant Wu--no relation to Aunt Wu that I know of--is another example of the "family fight" dynamic I discussed above. It's a major reason the fic didn't turn quite as dark as some readers expected. It was important to me that Wu be an honorable man, a professional soldier who shares an understanding with his adversary. If things were just a little different I can easily see Ji in his place.
I think much of morality is circumstantial anyway. That was my intent with the unnamed dissident marine in the enlisted men's mess who disagreed with Zanzen about whether to throw in their lot with Captain Ji. His decision to join his fellow marines came more from unit cohesion and peer pressure than any firm principle on his part, and if truth be told I'm pretty sure that's true of the majority of the marines, including Zanzen who was personally close to Ji and felt protective of Yenzi. The chaotic nature of human decision-making, I imagine, is what prompted Alcuin of York to condemn the idea of vox populi as a ruling principle.
This chaos comes to a head toward the end of the escape sequence when things are so confused, friends are getting in each others' way and Yenzi's coup de grâce actually requires the face of a well-meaning ally to be bashed in. Though I think Jiang was a little more enthusiastic than the situation strictly called for... and yes, he's a staff user. The Robin Hood fan in me simply could not make up a mountain of a character named Little Jiang and not hand him a staff. His usual weapon is a superbly balanced staff that his grandfather carved for him, but it was confiscated and sent back home because it wasn't a regulation weapon.
Also, while Azula couldn't be in the chase scene herself, I did have her symbolically participate through the Azure Inferno. Most girls dream of getting a pony (or pony-dog or whatever it is in the ATLA universe) for their birthdays; she gets a warship. The crew is composed mostly of women sailors who were rejected from postings they were qualified for or passed over too many times. They're a pretty colorful bunch, and I'd love to write more of their adventures if I get the chance.
On a related note, I've seen lots of fanfic where the Fire Nation is depicted as a gender-egalitarian society. My own headcanon FN has more gender equality than just about any other nation but still has a long way to go, not only on sexism but racism, colonialism etc. Even the partial equality between genders is far from uniform and applies mostly to urban areas; rural communities can still be pretty bad places to be a woman, as I tried to show with Sa Ye's story.
Shun Confesses to Zuko
This was the scene, or series of scenes, that was bouncing around my head for most of a year until I finally released it into writing. As I've toldvmuzic, Dragon King is really a love story between a future king and his subjects. It's a relationship that can be fraught with conflict, as in the story of Zuko and Shun--an odd choice, since Shun was never a subject of Zuko's, or even of the Earth King for that matter. He rejected those national ties even as the nations rejected him.
My beta readeramyraine lamented sometime past the middle of the fic that Shun was such a tragic character and she didn't know why. Shun's past is probably the only major revelation I've withheld from readers, since I've been free with just about every other piece of important information when it became relevant. Readers knew almost from the start (if they didn't already suspect) that Shun was Azula's spy, and they watched him help Azula in her plot against Zuko. The only missing piece was why: Why was he so bound to Azula even as he was drawn more and more to Zuko? What was the crime that was eating away at him?
I can't explain with absolute certainty why I left Shun's past dangling for so long. Film Crit Hulk's critique of the John Carter script, which Amy had recommended to me, gave me some perspective on drama and exposition. By the time I read it, though, I had already made the decision to put off talking about Shun's past and motivation. I did have an idea that his story had to come up at the thematically appropriate time, and that readers had to find out at the same time Zuko did through his eyes. That's why others who were better acquainted with Shun's history, such as Iroh, didn't do more than give some hints.
While I was thinking about these things I was finishing up Story by Robert McKee where he wrote the most compelling exposition had to be, well, compelled in some way. Reading that passage I realized Shun couldn't just sit Zuko down out of nowhere and tell his life story. It was something he would just as soon take to his grave, and it would take more than the threat of death or torture to get him to reveal it. There was really only one reason Shun might break his silence: if he thought it might save Zuko.
That gave me the timing for the revelation, which would be the night before the Agni Kai. Shun would reveal his own duplicity to warn Zuko about Azula, then be forced to tell the rest of it so Zuko would believe him. After so many lies, the truth of himself was the only weapon Shun had against a threat that he could not fight off with his sword. Canon and character demanded that his effort be a dismal failure, of course, but there was no way he wouldn't try.
This left me with a problem in timing, though. The most thematically appropriate time to tell Shun's story was after the Agni Kai, when Haishan and other cities would rise up to save Zuko's life and Ji's insubordination would save the lives of some in the 41st Division. I was left with the contradictory requirement that I had to make the reveal both before and after the Agni Kai.
That was how I ended up telling the story through flashback, a device I hardly ever use because it is seldom necessary and usually difficult to do well. After writing Chapter 19 but before posting it I toldsohawkeward, in a review criticizing her use of an extended flashback sequence, that she would get the chance to call me out on my hypocrisy. And lo and behold, Chapter 19 has two flashbacks, one during the Haishan protest scene and two entire scenes between Zuko and Shun. As if I didn't have enough potential pitfalls already! Not only had I put off revealing information that had the potential to build drama, I was also dumping a lot of information on readers at once and doing it all in flashback. I'm happy with how it turned out and didn't get any complaints so far (I welcome any criticism, of course), but I was breaking all my own rules and it was scary.
This, pretty much.
My favorite conception of hell, indeed the only way I can stomach the concept, is hell as the absence of God, the state of being severed from love. When we first met Shun, his idea of hell was being buried alive for his crimes. As he confesses to Zuko, though, Shun freely offers to undergo this very fate if Zuko wishes it of him. He didn't care what happened to him as long as Zuko decided his fate.
This is character development of a sort, but not in an obvious sense. I don't think it's about Shun becoming a braver man; it's pretty obvious that lack of physical courage was never among his many faults. Rather I think he came to realize what his true hell was. And it turned out not to be the gruesome physical suffering usually associated with the idea, but rather the loss of the connection that gave meaning to his life. Being slowly tortured to death by Zuko's command would have been far preferable, since it meant he would remain within the bounds of community and relationship if only as a man condemned by his liege.
Of course, now that Shun had discovered his true hell he was promptly sentenced to it when Zuko angrily denied even knowing him. Maybe the greatest irony is that if Zuko had given his forgiveness, he would not be the Zuko that Shun was willing to give his life, freedom, and future for. The very reasons that drew Shun to Zuko dictated that Zuko utterly reject him for his crime, condemning him to an abyss of meaninglessness that would last beyond mere death.
To Zuko, of course, the betrayal was the worst of both worlds: Both the anger and humiliation of being lied to, and the pain of losing something real. It's a cruel irony when something based on a lie causes genuine pain. That's the split I was trying to express with the transition from dream time to real time when Zuko tore at his bandages (which weren't there when he actually talked to Shun, of course), unable to bear the thought of not seeing the traitor and murderer again. And then I had Sa Ye step in, because seriously the story was in need of a tension-reliever at that point.
In the exchange between Sa Ye and Mai I milked the symbolism of the wing-kittens for all they were worth, which is a continuation of The Alternative and the new continuity introduced in Chapter 12 to further contrast Azula and Zuko. I extended this into Mai's departure scene to show the root of the tension between Azula and Mai. It's fully possible to control people with fear, as Azula knows full well, but it's impossible to make them not resent it on some level. In this scene I also tried to show the new equilibrium--show-equilibrium. at least in my head--between Azula and Zhao. It amuses me that between accompanying Zuko in his travels and now Mai, Shao Mei is becoming a very well-traveled kitty indeed.
I remember putting some thought and effort into Sa Ye's first glance of Mai, to get across an appreciation of Mai's looks without boring words like "beautiful" or "pretty." Those words mean almost nothing anyway, since there are at least as many ways for people to be appealing as there are people. I've talked before about adjectives, and I think there's a distinction to be made between abstract adjectives like "beautiful" and more physical adjectives like "red" that help strengthen a specific image. That doesn't mean abstract adjectives should never be used; they have their uses, but creating vivid imagery isn't one of them.
A Brotherly Discussion
"A brotherly discussion" was the actual scene label in my Scrivener file. There are many different ways to be brothers, of course. This is the second and last scene in the story, as I recall, in which Iroh and Ozai actually talk to each other--and indeed the last time they would speak for years (do they ever talk in the show?). Their conflict underlies the whole story, and I feared I might dilute that dynamic if I had Iroh and Ozai interact too often.
This conversation was shorter and simpler when I sketched it out in my outline, revolving mostly around Zuko and Azula and involved very little of the brothers themselves other than their mutual disdain. Here is that earlier version:
Once the other events of Chapter 19 were fully formed, though, the scene grew new layers as I rewrote it. I was surprised that, in addition to Ozai's expected inferiority complex, he felt truly justified in seizing power. A part of him even felt betrayed and unjustly burdened by Iroh's absence after Lu Ten's death, though I don't know how much of that is self-justification talking and how much is an honest sense of abandonment. I suspect it's a little of both. The story Ozai tells about himself, the unappreciated son who was obligated to take power due to his brother's irresponsibility, parallels Zuko being the bad guy of Azula's story as seen in the final chapter.
The fact that Ozai and Azula are heroes of their own stories is a key component of their characters for me. It takes a specific kind of broken person to act without any self-justification, and IMO neither Ozai nor Azula have experienced that kind of brokenness. The difference between a hero and a villain isn't that they lack justifying stories; it's that the villain's story contains either factual or moral untruths. The villain must thus spend an enormous amount of time and energy covering up the lies, often inflicting tremendous suffering in the process. That's not to say heroes never lie to themselves, something that delightfully muddles the picture.
Epigraph
The original epigraph I had in mind for this chapter was very different from what I ended up with. The quote I originally wanted to use was:
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.
- Robert Francis Kennedy
I found this on some quotation site and thought it fit, especially with Captain Ji's change of heart during the assault on Beiyang. Later, though, I started thinking this was kind of meh and didn't even fit that well since there was a bunch of other stuff going on in the chapter, and Shun's part in particular was too dark and complicated for such feel-good words.
Then I looked up vox populi, the term that the chapter title "Voices" comes from. The Wikipedia page mentioned an eighth-century reference to the term in a letter to Charlemagne. I thought it was more interesting, and it suited the content of the chapter better--including the scenes with Shun, and the general tumult of the chapter. A reviewer once asked how I find these epigraphs and I'll probably expand my answer into a separate post, but random Google searches are definitely a big part of it.
From here on, since the chapter follows three separate plots (WHAT WAS I THINKING), I will comment on them separately, referring to specific scenes as necessary.
Protest at Haishan
I'm pretty sure that when the letter at the end of Chapter 18 told Iroh that plans were underway to save Zuko, many readers were expecting an action-packed rescue. The story certainly had enough of that--and was to have still more in the aftermath of the protests and the naval sequence. Ever since the story took its present form in my mind, though, I knew I wanted Zuko to avoid Prince Sado's fate not by the sword but by the very people he was willing to do anything to protect.
If my story has a moment of eucatastrophe, the happy surprise that changes the world, it is that the relationship between Zuko and the People of Fire was never as one-sided as it seemed. His subjects are not helpless wretches just waiting around for a savior; they are slow to action, yes, but that slowness is due to might and not weakness. I don't know how many readers noticed but this passage describing the amassed protesters...
The sun shone on their backs stretched in row after sinuous row like the coils of some mythical beast.
...is meant to invoke the image of a dragon.
This is another area where my background becomes Relevant to the Story. Though South Korea is a prosperous democracy now, as recently as 1987 we were still under military rule. The direct catalysts, after years of political suppression and human rights violations, were the deaths of two young university students, Jong-cheol Park by torture and Han-yeol Lee by a tear gas canister fired into the crowd.
The regime's cover-up story, if you can even call it that, for Park's death was that he had died of a heart attack when the interrogator pounded the table between them. Yeah, real plausible cause of death... if he were 122 years old instead of 22. Especially after autopsy results showed clear evidence of torture. The government must have thought Koreans were going to go along out of fear or apathy. Then a million people turned up to say they were mad as hell and weren't going to take it anymore.
June of 1987, Seoul City Hall
I've mentioned before that to me as a Korean the dragon symbolizes kingship, the quality of being a ruler. I don't think that contradicts the traditional Western conception of dragons as terrible, man-devouring beasts. Both symbols are about ultimately about power, what it should be and what happens when it is not contained. In this moment of my story the dragon humbles itself and begs where it has the power to command, because it knows the price of getting what it wants by force. Push it too far, though, and it will have no other choice.
The major characters in the Haishan sequence are, in a way, working together to contain the dragon's power and bring about a peaceful conclusion: The traumatized young boy desperate to save his parents, the military man who is willing to disgrace himself and risk his life for what he believe in, and the old shopkeeper who came up with the plan (with his "Pai Sho friends," of course) to utilize the services of sympathetic officers to protect the protesters.
Speaking of Master Shang, the whole Master Shang/Inspector Shang bit was originally an accident. I had forgotten that I'd named the White Lotus contact Shang by the time it was time to name Inspector Shang. When I realized later on I had named both of them Shang, I decided to run with it and make them related. In my Scrivener file their argument scene is labeled "Disagreement in the family," and in a way that's what this whole thing is. On one level the whole story is concerned with strife inside the royal family, and on a larger scale the family that is the nation.
The fact that the story is a family conflict means that it is both facilitated and constrained by relationships. There are rules and limits to what can happen. That doesn't mean things can't get very, very nasty--in fact the strong emotions and shared history may fuel extreme cruelty--but it means that at the end of the day you can't up and leave the consequences of your actions. It's why Azula, ruthless though she is, balks at the thought of Zuko getting killed: She will have to live with his death in some form, at the very least in the form of a precedent that makes her more vulnerable. There's also the oath to her mother, her own tangled feelings about her brother, and her own basic insecurities. Like I said, it's a mess, which to me is the essence of family.
The Firebrand's Escape
I loved writing the Earth Kingdom forces arrayed at Beiyang. I wanted to make the point that these are highly Scary People; you don't hold out against the most technologically advanced nation in the world by being wimpy buffoons. If anything, the fact that they didn't drive the Fire Nation back a long time ago is a testament to just how big a mess the Earth Kingdom is. I've written a little more about some of the Beiyang defense forces and Fire Nation prisoners in a separate short story, Flotsam.
Most of the action of this sequence, of course, occurs on sea and not land. Did I mention I watched Crimson Tide 17 times? The story of mutiny and counter-mutiny at sea, with each side accusing the other of being treasonous, is lifted straight out of that movie. What fascinated my teenaged self so much about the film (other than Denzel Washington's muscular abs and smoldering gaze) was the way these men were cut off from outside communication and were forced to fall back on mutual relationships and shared--or conflicting--beliefs. Unlike in Crimson Tide, though, the sympathy of the story here lies with the captain who disobeys his commander-in-chief, for the simple reason that the commander-in-chief in my story has become a tyrant.
I probably should have done more to develop the Firebrand and her crew in order to make Ji's change of heart totally convincing. Ji's absence from the main body of the story may have been just a little too long for readers to totally get under his skin. To me his insubordination a very "last straw" moment, and the bulk of the buildup came not from just that one battle or even the past ten years but the entirety of his career at sea. Twenty-three years of my life, as he puts it.
amanda_violet did me the favor of reading the naval scenes over for me and commenting on them, and was kind enough to tell me they were some of the best she had read. That meant a lot coming from a maritime novel buff like her, and even more coming from someone whose abilities and sensibility as a writer I respect. My wonderful beta-reader amyraine suggested the sequence would have been complete with Ji regaining control of the ship. I usually agree with her advice, but not in this. Part of the reason is my weakness for big-shebang climaxes, yes, but part of it was because I had planned the parallel symbolism of Zuko defending the reservoir at Tamalan in Chapter 6 and Yenzi defending the ship's engine, both with the catapult missile hurling toward them. (It just occurred to me that I had the king-to-be stand before a means of production for agriculture and the bourgeois girl before a machine of industry. My subconscious is always playing these tricks.)In my mind the contrast between those two moments is more important than the similarities. Zuko, who received some of the best training in the martial application of firebending, couldn't do more than deflect the missile with his firebending. It was Yenzi with her craftsman's forge-bending who actually destroyed the threat to her and her friends' lives. In fact, the only specific application of forgebending I mentioned was Shiri's breaking a sword with it during the battle outside Haishan. My lefty librul ways are embarrassingly on display, as ever. I'm conflicted about the idea of war: On the one hand I am fascinated by the human ingenuity that supports it and the emotional intensity of it. On the other hand I hate the pointless destruction, appalling waste, and sheer immorality of the enterprise. To me the only good war is a fictional one.
The character of Lieutenant Wu--no relation to Aunt Wu that I know of--is another example of the "family fight" dynamic I discussed above. It's a major reason the fic didn't turn quite as dark as some readers expected. It was important to me that Wu be an honorable man, a professional soldier who shares an understanding with his adversary. If things were just a little different I can easily see Ji in his place.
I think much of morality is circumstantial anyway. That was my intent with the unnamed dissident marine in the enlisted men's mess who disagreed with Zanzen about whether to throw in their lot with Captain Ji. His decision to join his fellow marines came more from unit cohesion and peer pressure than any firm principle on his part, and if truth be told I'm pretty sure that's true of the majority of the marines, including Zanzen who was personally close to Ji and felt protective of Yenzi. The chaotic nature of human decision-making, I imagine, is what prompted Alcuin of York to condemn the idea of vox populi as a ruling principle.
This chaos comes to a head toward the end of the escape sequence when things are so confused, friends are getting in each others' way and Yenzi's coup de grâce actually requires the face of a well-meaning ally to be bashed in. Though I think Jiang was a little more enthusiastic than the situation strictly called for... and yes, he's a staff user. The Robin Hood fan in me simply could not make up a mountain of a character named Little Jiang and not hand him a staff. His usual weapon is a superbly balanced staff that his grandfather carved for him, but it was confiscated and sent back home because it wasn't a regulation weapon.
Also, while Azula couldn't be in the chase scene herself, I did have her symbolically participate through the Azure Inferno. Most girls dream of getting a pony (or pony-dog or whatever it is in the ATLA universe) for their birthdays; she gets a warship. The crew is composed mostly of women sailors who were rejected from postings they were qualified for or passed over too many times. They're a pretty colorful bunch, and I'd love to write more of their adventures if I get the chance.
On a related note, I've seen lots of fanfic where the Fire Nation is depicted as a gender-egalitarian society. My own headcanon FN has more gender equality than just about any other nation but still has a long way to go, not only on sexism but racism, colonialism etc. Even the partial equality between genders is far from uniform and applies mostly to urban areas; rural communities can still be pretty bad places to be a woman, as I tried to show with Sa Ye's story.
Shun Confesses to Zuko
This was the scene, or series of scenes, that was bouncing around my head for most of a year until I finally released it into writing. As I've told
vmuzic, Dragon King is really a love story between a future king and his subjects. It's a relationship that can be fraught with conflict, as in the story of Zuko and Shun--an odd choice, since Shun was never a subject of Zuko's, or even of the Earth King for that matter. He rejected those national ties even as the nations rejected him.My beta reader
amyraine lamented sometime past the middle of the fic that Shun was such a tragic character and she didn't know why. Shun's past is probably the only major revelation I've withheld from readers, since I've been free with just about every other piece of important information when it became relevant. Readers knew almost from the start (if they didn't already suspect) that Shun was Azula's spy, and they watched him help Azula in her plot against Zuko. The only missing piece was why: Why was he so bound to Azula even as he was drawn more and more to Zuko? What was the crime that was eating away at him?I can't explain with absolute certainty why I left Shun's past dangling for so long. Film Crit Hulk's critique of the John Carter script, which Amy had recommended to me, gave me some perspective on drama and exposition. By the time I read it, though, I had already made the decision to put off talking about Shun's past and motivation. I did have an idea that his story had to come up at the thematically appropriate time, and that readers had to find out at the same time Zuko did through his eyes. That's why others who were better acquainted with Shun's history, such as Iroh, didn't do more than give some hints.
While I was thinking about these things I was finishing up Story by Robert McKee where he wrote the most compelling exposition had to be, well, compelled in some way. Reading that passage I realized Shun couldn't just sit Zuko down out of nowhere and tell his life story. It was something he would just as soon take to his grave, and it would take more than the threat of death or torture to get him to reveal it. There was really only one reason Shun might break his silence: if he thought it might save Zuko.
That gave me the timing for the revelation, which would be the night before the Agni Kai. Shun would reveal his own duplicity to warn Zuko about Azula, then be forced to tell the rest of it so Zuko would believe him. After so many lies, the truth of himself was the only weapon Shun had against a threat that he could not fight off with his sword. Canon and character demanded that his effort be a dismal failure, of course, but there was no way he wouldn't try.
This left me with a problem in timing, though. The most thematically appropriate time to tell Shun's story was after the Agni Kai, when Haishan and other cities would rise up to save Zuko's life and Ji's insubordination would save the lives of some in the 41st Division. I was left with the contradictory requirement that I had to make the reveal both before and after the Agni Kai.
That was how I ended up telling the story through flashback, a device I hardly ever use because it is seldom necessary and usually difficult to do well. After writing Chapter 19 but before posting it I told
sohawkeward, in a review criticizing her use of an extended flashback sequence, that she would get the chance to call me out on my hypocrisy. And lo and behold, Chapter 19 has two flashbacks, one during the Haishan protest scene and two entire scenes between Zuko and Shun. As if I didn't have enough potential pitfalls already! Not only had I put off revealing information that had the potential to build drama, I was also dumping a lot of information on readers at once and doing it all in flashback. I'm happy with how it turned out and didn't get any complaints so far (I welcome any criticism, of course), but I was breaking all my own rules and it was scary.This, pretty much.
My favorite conception of hell, indeed the only way I can stomach the concept, is hell as the absence of God, the state of being severed from love. When we first met Shun, his idea of hell was being buried alive for his crimes. As he confesses to Zuko, though, Shun freely offers to undergo this very fate if Zuko wishes it of him. He didn't care what happened to him as long as Zuko decided his fate.
This is character development of a sort, but not in an obvious sense. I don't think it's about Shun becoming a braver man; it's pretty obvious that lack of physical courage was never among his many faults. Rather I think he came to realize what his true hell was. And it turned out not to be the gruesome physical suffering usually associated with the idea, but rather the loss of the connection that gave meaning to his life. Being slowly tortured to death by Zuko's command would have been far preferable, since it meant he would remain within the bounds of community and relationship if only as a man condemned by his liege.
Of course, now that Shun had discovered his true hell he was promptly sentenced to it when Zuko angrily denied even knowing him. Maybe the greatest irony is that if Zuko had given his forgiveness, he would not be the Zuko that Shun was willing to give his life, freedom, and future for. The very reasons that drew Shun to Zuko dictated that Zuko utterly reject him for his crime, condemning him to an abyss of meaninglessness that would last beyond mere death.
To Zuko, of course, the betrayal was the worst of both worlds: Both the anger and humiliation of being lied to, and the pain of losing something real. It's a cruel irony when something based on a lie causes genuine pain. That's the split I was trying to express with the transition from dream time to real time when Zuko tore at his bandages (which weren't there when he actually talked to Shun, of course), unable to bear the thought of not seeing the traitor and murderer again. And then I had Sa Ye step in, because seriously the story was in need of a tension-reliever at that point.
In the exchange between Sa Ye and Mai I milked the symbolism of the wing-kittens for all they were worth, which is a continuation of The Alternative and the new continuity introduced in Chapter 12 to further contrast Azula and Zuko. I extended this into Mai's departure scene to show the root of the tension between Azula and Mai. It's fully possible to control people with fear, as Azula knows full well, but it's impossible to make them not resent it on some level. In this scene I also tried to show the new equilibrium--show-equilibrium. at least in my head--between Azula and Zhao. It amuses me that between accompanying Zuko in his travels and now Mai, Shao Mei is becoming a very well-traveled kitty indeed.
I remember putting some thought and effort into Sa Ye's first glance of Mai, to get across an appreciation of Mai's looks without boring words like "beautiful" or "pretty." Those words mean almost nothing anyway, since there are at least as many ways for people to be appealing as there are people. I've talked before about adjectives, and I think there's a distinction to be made between abstract adjectives like "beautiful" and more physical adjectives like "red" that help strengthen a specific image. That doesn't mean abstract adjectives should never be used; they have their uses, but creating vivid imagery isn't one of them.
A Brotherly Discussion
"A brotherly discussion" was the actual scene label in my Scrivener file. There are many different ways to be brothers, of course. This is the second and last scene in the story, as I recall, in which Iroh and Ozai actually talk to each other--and indeed the last time they would speak for years (do they ever talk in the show?). Their conflict underlies the whole story, and I feared I might dilute that dynamic if I had Iroh and Ozai interact too often.
This conversation was shorter and simpler when I sketched it out in my outline, revolving mostly around Zuko and Azula and involved very little of the brothers themselves other than their mutual disdain. Here is that earlier version:
“It is not like you to pass up tea, brother.” Ozai sounded amused. “I promise you, you will not be having anything of this quality where you are going. Or,” his voice lowered as a smile spread over his face, “do you fear being poisoned?”
“I am certain it is a fine tea, Ozai.” Iroh kept the same distance in his face. “White tea grown on the slopes of the Zhenghan, if my nose does not lead astray, for the Firelord’s use only. Alas.” He shook his head, “I do not partake of tea, even the finest, with a man who wounds and disfigures his children.”
Ozai threw his head back to laugh. “I wonder what it is about my son that makes you so self-righteous.” His eyes were alight with mirth as they fixed on Iroh. “Is it because you have lost your own? Or because he reminds you of the failure of a firstborn you were?”
“It is not only of Zuko I speak.” Iroh’s gaze was steady on Ozai’s face. “You have done worse to Azula than you can ever do to your son.”
Ozai’s laughter followed Iroh out to the hallway after he had taken his leave. Iroh left straight-backed, his eyes on the way ahead, and he never looked back.
Once the other events of Chapter 19 were fully formed, though, the scene grew new layers as I rewrote it. I was surprised that, in addition to Ozai's expected inferiority complex, he felt truly justified in seizing power. A part of him even felt betrayed and unjustly burdened by Iroh's absence after Lu Ten's death, though I don't know how much of that is self-justification talking and how much is an honest sense of abandonment. I suspect it's a little of both. The story Ozai tells about himself, the unappreciated son who was obligated to take power due to his brother's irresponsibility, parallels Zuko being the bad guy of Azula's story as seen in the final chapter.
The fact that Ozai and Azula are heroes of their own stories is a key component of their characters for me. It takes a specific kind of broken person to act without any self-justification, and IMO neither Ozai nor Azula have experienced that kind of brokenness. The difference between a hero and a villain isn't that they lack justifying stories; it's that the villain's story contains either factual or moral untruths. The villain must thus spend an enormous amount of time and energy covering up the lies, often inflicting tremendous suffering in the process. That's not to say heroes never lie to themselves, something that delightfully muddles the picture.
