![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Extended Fanfic Notes: Shadow of the Dragon King Part 3, Chapter 20 & Final Interlude
This post is about Chapter 20: Letters and Final Interlude: Making Up. I'll go scene by scene, using the labels I used in Scrivener.
Chapter 20: Letters
Hey, no more 10,000-word chapters for me. Since we had entered the phase of falling action after the climax of Chapter 19, I decided to go with a quieter and shorter format. And since I had scattered the characters all across the map, what better form than the epistolary one?
I found Milada Horáková's letter by googling "famous last letters" or something like that. I can't pull up the exact page I found at the time, but her letter is still included in the first website the search turns up. Coincidentally Dr. Horáková's daughter, the recipient of the letter, is named "Jana" like one of my LJ friends.
Letter of Assignment
This bit of headcanon had been percolating for a while because of something I had noticed about Lieutenant Jee in the show--he seemed to be one of the few Fire Nation men with short hair. (Zuko's hair is similarly short in Book 2, but it was part of his disguise.) In "The Boiling Rock" episodes I realized that the only other Fire Nation men who regularly wore their hair short were prisoners. Jee's hair quite that short, of course, but he still stood out with his distinctive hairstyle that looked for all the world like slightly grown-out prisoner's buzz-cut. It also seemed fishy to me that a man with the rank of Lieutenant had the experience and skill to captain a ship. Those and the many other things about Jee that implied he was a good but disgraced man--the bum posting, his temper and bitterness, and concern for his men--became the basis for his story in Shadow.
Letter to a Daughter
This is the first and only time we hear from the Lady of Clan Si Feng, and hopefully she comes across as absolutely awful. She's judgmental and prejudiced, and so self-absorbed she complains about her children not comforting her even though at least one of them is visibly suffering. She dismisses her children's emotions, whether pain or passion, because obviously Everything Is About Her. She places conditions on the affection she gives her kids so that the sullen child who's going through a bad time or the exuberant one who wants the wrong things are disregarded in favor of the "dependable and dutiful" daughter. It's classic narcissist thinking that everything in the world has value in direct proportion to its utility to her.
Because Lady Si Feng's world is so full of herself she seems to have difficulty seeing other people, including the daughters she can't tell apart at times. This, in my mind, would explain so much about Ty Lee's fear in "The Beach" of not being her own person. If she had moments where she wondered if her own parents knew her name, what would that do to her sense of individuality and self-worth?
It's not a coincidence that I matched both Azula's henchwomen-in-waiting/victims with authoritarian and controlling parents. Not only was this outright shown and discussed (for Mai) or implied (Ty Lee) in canon, it seems natural to me that children raised in such households become vulnerable to control outside the home as well. I have the hardest time saying "no" to anything because when I was growing up saying "no" meant a parental emotional explosion during which I was told again and again how worthless and ungrateful I was.
Of course, the above is not to say that all people who are vulnerable to control grew up in controlling homes, or even that all people who grew up in controlling homes fall prey to such relationships outside the home. All circumstances are different Nevertheless I think Mai and Ty Lee are representative of how authoritarianism in the Fire Nation starts at home, and being silenced and devalued in the family transitions into becoming cogs in the war machine of the state.
By the way, there's some cultural stuff going on here because in Korean referring to someone by their birth order--"eldest," "youngest," "third" etc.--actually has inclusive and warm connotations. In English, though, it comes across as cold and uncaring, an interesting difference.
Letter from a Daughter
This is pretty much a reprise of the family's first appearance in Interlude 2, the kitchen-table politics that American politicians are so fond of talking about. The family went through a lot between their first and last appearances in the story, suffering danger and heartbreak. All of them, especially the children, have lost their innocence. They've all become what the authorities would call subversive, not because they wanted to but because they learned their own government could be the enemy.
Yet they're still a family and their bonds are stronger than ever, even across distance and danger. The parents support their children, even when--especially when--they're doing something potentially dangerous. Their shared love is like a fire on a cold night--in draws them together and warms them, keeps them safe. This to me is the element of fire as it should be, as Zuko and Aang discovered in "The Firebending Masters" that the essence of fire is life. What is love but the force of life's yearning to be lived to the fullest in togetherness and caring?
I suppose I'm stacking the deck by showing this ideal family suffering from and objecting to the war, while all the pro-war families from the royal family down are messed up in some way. (Ty Lee's mother was against escalating the war, but she's still profiting from her holdings in the Colonies and her motivations are established to be venal.) Someday I should write about genuinely good people whose political stance I strongly disagree with, it should be an interesting challenge.
In one respect the Tien family isn't perfectly ideal, at least under the "children being raised by their two biological parents" ideal. I've made passing mentions a couple of times, but Yenzi's mother remarried Tien Shou when Yenzi was young. That makes him Yenzi's stepfather, though he has adopted her so he's legally her dad, and Yenzi and Lijin are technically half-siblings. Shiri is politely referred to as a "war widow," but what really happened was that her first husband drifted away from her during his time in the Army and eventually decided to settle in the Colonies rather than return to his wife and daughter. Tien was Shiri's father's apprentice who fell in love with his boss's daughter--and her little girl.
In my ridiculously detailed headcanon, the law that allowed stepchildren to take their stepfathers' surnames was one of the reforms undertaken during the time of Azulon, not because Azulon was particularly progressive but because of mounting war deaths and because of the increasing assertiveness of the middle class and their importance to the war effort. In that sense, Tien Yenzi's very name encapsulates the developments that led to the central political conflict in the story.
Letter to a Father
The deception in this scene is personal for me on both an emotional and intellectual level. When my mother was died of cancer during my stay in the States, I didn't find out for months because both my mom before her death and dad were adamant that I not be told about it for fear it would interfere with my studies or my health. In Shadow I reversed the dynamic with a daughter-in-law fearing for her father-in-law's health, though I have to wonder if Sa Ye isn't just having a hard time saying good-bye and wanted to keep Khoujin alive somewhere. It's my way of forgiving, in a way, to think of reasons to justify this kind of lie and tying it into the human need for story, my own driving passion.
As Loopy pointed out, Sa Ye's appeal to Master Lu for a hopeful story is a meta moment. On a more personal level, I've said before that Master Lu is one of my stand-in characters--a lawyer and scholar who finds his learning useless to correct injustice in real life. In a way, the only good Master Lu did in the story was by being deceitful. The times he was shown applying his knowledge for its intended uses (his legal memo to Zuko on Azhoran, his petition to Ozai to stop the the invasion on Beiyang), the products of his efforts were burned unread. Lu's two main achievements--contacting the White Lotus about Zuko's whereabouts and drawing up a posthumous marriage certificate for Khoujin and Sa Ye--were the products of falsehood and subterfuge.
That goes to my own ambivalence about a legal practitioner and a storyteller: Sa Ye is telling me I won't ever cease to be the latter because everyone makes sense of the world through stories. And if she's trying to assuage her own guilt I can sympathize with her reasons.
Incidentally Lu and Sa Ye were another example of my own characters refusing to follow my plans for them, much as Yenzi's sexuality left my control. You see, I had a vague idea that Master Lu and Sa Ye could become a couple; maybe she could become his junior wife since he was already married. Or I could arrange for something ho happen to Nanhua.
The idea did not go over well. I can no longer find the dialogue I wrote where Lu and Sa Ye both yelled at me, but I do remember Sa Ye threatening to claw through the fourth wall to scratch my eyes out. (I think she's still sore about Khoujin.) In retrospect the whole thing was a terrible idea anyway, so I'm glad the characters balked so hard.
Letter to a Captain
This didn't occur to me until after I'd written both scenes, but there's a definite contrast between Yenzi's letter to Ji and Mai's to Iroh. Mai in her scene writes three separate drafts, burning the first two that did not meet her requirements and being very, very careful to write everything perfectly, her body remembering the punishment for every little mistake. It's also worth noting that Mai in the final draft leaves out all her actual feelings and thoughts to stick to the facts.
Yenzi in contrast shows all her awkwardness and vulnerability in what is genuinely an uncomfortable situation, and is heartfelt in her feelings even though she can't say everything because she knows her letters will be censored. (She probably knows there's a good chance it might be withheld from the recipient. I'm not sure she'll bother rewriting it.)
Part of the difference might be due to the difference in social stations, i.e. Iroh is a prince while Ji is a military man, but arguably the gap between Mai's and Iroh's status isn't that much larger than Yenzi's and Ji's. And we've seen Yenzi isn't afraid to go up against princes, at least where her family is concerned. No, I think the larger difference is one of upbringing: Yenzi is unafraid to express herself--for better or for worse--because she's been taught through constant affirmation that she has something valuable to offer and can learn from her mistakes, while Mai was taught that anything less than perfect is unacceptable and mistakes mean there is something wrong with her.
In the first draft of the scene, the boy who interrupts Yenzi was Random Fire Nation Boy #19682 who seemed to have a flair for fixing up bets. Then I thought a little more about it and decided, why not add some local flavor? Hence the decision to cast him as a Colonial, and just to relate it back to the rest of the story, one named Shun. Shun Quan is a distant relative of the "real" Shun Li, though Quan belongs to a more mercantile branch of the family that looks down on its poorer cousins. Though Quan's family professes loyalty to the Fire Nation, they have far more regard for money than politics. Quan himself joined the Fire Nation Army as part of a plea bargain after being caught smuggling weapons to people who turned out to be part of the pro-Earth Kingdom resistance. Oops?
Besides, having another Shun take bets on Rang Han's face just solidified Rang's Butt Monkey status. I really have no sense of nuance when it came to dealing with the villainous nobility in this story, which is one of its failings.
I also got a kick out of writing about Yenzi's prejudices toward Colonials and how she'd taken a "sensitivity training class" to deal with the locals. I'm sure sensitivity did wonders against bigotry and injustice in the middle of an occupation. From what I've seen, occupying armies are mostly composed of good, ordinary kids whose individual goodness is no defense to the overwhelming immorality of the system they're forced to uphold. Yenzi is going to come out of the war a very different person. She may end up wishing she'd taken that shipyard job, after all.
Final Interlude: Making Up
It's funny how the act of writing transforms the ideas and images in your head. Originally Cheng and Shun were going to exchange a lot more banter, but once I started writing I realized the situation was more serious than that. On an external level they had to avoid detection, and internally they had issues to resolve in a very short time. So the original light-hearted exchange became much more furtive and earnest in nature, which I think is an improvement.
References to pedophilia, stalking, homosexuality, homophobia, prostitution, and rape follow. Hey, it's Shun's story after all.
It was a huge relief to have Cheng, an officer of the law, call out Shun's behavior which is really all sorts of creeptastic. Here is a grown man stalking a child who has said in no uncertain terms he never wants to see said man again. And the messed-up parts don't stop with what Cheng says in the scene or what she knows. Throughout the latter half of the story Shun arguably wormed his way into Zuko's confidence by systematically isolating him from his other friends: His betrayal caused Khoujin's death and Lu's incarceration, and he explicitly told Sa Ye to make herself scarce from Zuko's side. At least he never tried to isolate Zuko from Iroh.
So that undying devotion bit can get pretty creepy in practice, particularly when it comes from a place of damage and deception like Shun's does. It goes to show that his loyalty is more about himself than Zuko, as discussed in the notes for Chapter 19--he's effectively using Zuko to find meaning in his own life. It's why I've never been impressed with fanaticism whether for a person or an idea. It seems to me that unreasoning devotion is often an attempt to make up for some deficit, no matter who pays the price.
Shun's allusion to having sex with men was meant to fill a gap in his confession from Chapter 19. In his life as the Earth Kingdom soldier Kuo Min he was no stranger to sexual contact with women, procured through transaction or violence. Emotional intimacy was another matter--having no ties outside his very tightly-knit and isolated military brotherhood, the only people Kuo could relate to were his comrades in the regiment. Some of his relationships with them were sexual in nature. It was something the Flowering Trees were known for: the insulting names for his regiment that Shun wouldn't repeat to Zuko were homophobic in nature, the "Flowering Faggots" and so on.
Not that Shun and his comrades were liberal humanitarians or anything. They probably shared their peers' prejudices, but being outside normal society they didn't feel bound by the rules other men lived by. This sense of being both below contempt and above the rules was a big part of what made them such ruthless soldiers without any moral grounding. This is not, of course, to say that homosexual behavior led to the atrocities these men committed or that homosexuality is on par with war crimes--far from it. Rather I think the sense of being set apart facilitated both aberrant (for the place and time they lived in, in the case of homosexuality) behaviors.
When Shun asked Jien to leave with him, or rather asked whether she would leave with him if he left, was one of his more selfish moments and that's saying something. For one thing it was posed as a conditional, making it essentially meaningless: Even if she'd said yes, he could have canceled it by voiding the condition. For another he knew it would be an unmitigated disaster if they did go off together. Maybe it wouldn't have been quite the heartsick mess of his brief marriage back in the Earth Kingdom, but it would have been close. Yet by posing the proposal he put the onus of rejecting it on her, not to mention the shadow of responsibility for what followed.
I think Jien answered as she did partly because she is a mature person, and partly because she saw the part of him that wanted to be serious: He was not and could not be genuinely asking to spend his life with her, but he did want to be the kind of man who could offer a real life together. Maybe she was even tempted for one mad moment, who knows. If nothing else he was her friend, and if he needed a little self-delusion she could give him that as she had given him so much else. It was close to the end for them anyway, whatever "they" were.
Wrapping up the OCs' stories in "Letters" was the wind-up for the final chapter, when the action would rise a little again and finally tie up the long-running thread between Azula and Zuko--for a while, that is, until their paths crossed again in the show.
Chapter 20: Letters
Hey, no more 10,000-word chapters for me. Since we had entered the phase of falling action after the climax of Chapter 19, I decided to go with a quieter and shorter format. And since I had scattered the characters all across the map, what better form than the epistolary one?
I found Milada Horáková's letter by googling "famous last letters" or something like that. I can't pull up the exact page I found at the time, but her letter is still included in the first website the search turns up. Coincidentally Dr. Horáková's daughter, the recipient of the letter, is named "Jana" like one of my LJ friends.
Letter of Assignment
This bit of headcanon had been percolating for a while because of something I had noticed about Lieutenant Jee in the show--he seemed to be one of the few Fire Nation men with short hair. (Zuko's hair is similarly short in Book 2, but it was part of his disguise.) In "The Boiling Rock" episodes I realized that the only other Fire Nation men who regularly wore their hair short were prisoners. Jee's hair quite that short, of course, but he still stood out with his distinctive hairstyle that looked for all the world like slightly grown-out prisoner's buzz-cut. It also seemed fishy to me that a man with the rank of Lieutenant had the experience and skill to captain a ship. Those and the many other things about Jee that implied he was a good but disgraced man--the bum posting, his temper and bitterness, and concern for his men--became the basis for his story in Shadow.
Letter to a Daughter
This is the first and only time we hear from the Lady of Clan Si Feng, and hopefully she comes across as absolutely awful. She's judgmental and prejudiced, and so self-absorbed she complains about her children not comforting her even though at least one of them is visibly suffering. She dismisses her children's emotions, whether pain or passion, because obviously Everything Is About Her. She places conditions on the affection she gives her kids so that the sullen child who's going through a bad time or the exuberant one who wants the wrong things are disregarded in favor of the "dependable and dutiful" daughter. It's classic narcissist thinking that everything in the world has value in direct proportion to its utility to her.
Because Lady Si Feng's world is so full of herself she seems to have difficulty seeing other people, including the daughters she can't tell apart at times. This, in my mind, would explain so much about Ty Lee's fear in "The Beach" of not being her own person. If she had moments where she wondered if her own parents knew her name, what would that do to her sense of individuality and self-worth?
It's not a coincidence that I matched both Azula's henchwomen-in-waiting/victims with authoritarian and controlling parents. Not only was this outright shown and discussed (for Mai) or implied (Ty Lee) in canon, it seems natural to me that children raised in such households become vulnerable to control outside the home as well. I have the hardest time saying "no" to anything because when I was growing up saying "no" meant a parental emotional explosion during which I was told again and again how worthless and ungrateful I was.
Of course, the above is not to say that all people who are vulnerable to control grew up in controlling homes, or even that all people who grew up in controlling homes fall prey to such relationships outside the home. All circumstances are different Nevertheless I think Mai and Ty Lee are representative of how authoritarianism in the Fire Nation starts at home, and being silenced and devalued in the family transitions into becoming cogs in the war machine of the state.
By the way, there's some cultural stuff going on here because in Korean referring to someone by their birth order--"eldest," "youngest," "third" etc.--actually has inclusive and warm connotations. In English, though, it comes across as cold and uncaring, an interesting difference.
Letter from a Daughter
This is pretty much a reprise of the family's first appearance in Interlude 2, the kitchen-table politics that American politicians are so fond of talking about. The family went through a lot between their first and last appearances in the story, suffering danger and heartbreak. All of them, especially the children, have lost their innocence. They've all become what the authorities would call subversive, not because they wanted to but because they learned their own government could be the enemy.
Yet they're still a family and their bonds are stronger than ever, even across distance and danger. The parents support their children, even when--especially when--they're doing something potentially dangerous. Their shared love is like a fire on a cold night--in draws them together and warms them, keeps them safe. This to me is the element of fire as it should be, as Zuko and Aang discovered in "The Firebending Masters" that the essence of fire is life. What is love but the force of life's yearning to be lived to the fullest in togetherness and caring?
I suppose I'm stacking the deck by showing this ideal family suffering from and objecting to the war, while all the pro-war families from the royal family down are messed up in some way. (Ty Lee's mother was against escalating the war, but she's still profiting from her holdings in the Colonies and her motivations are established to be venal.) Someday I should write about genuinely good people whose political stance I strongly disagree with, it should be an interesting challenge.
In one respect the Tien family isn't perfectly ideal, at least under the "children being raised by their two biological parents" ideal. I've made passing mentions a couple of times, but Yenzi's mother remarried Tien Shou when Yenzi was young. That makes him Yenzi's stepfather, though he has adopted her so he's legally her dad, and Yenzi and Lijin are technically half-siblings. Shiri is politely referred to as a "war widow," but what really happened was that her first husband drifted away from her during his time in the Army and eventually decided to settle in the Colonies rather than return to his wife and daughter. Tien was Shiri's father's apprentice who fell in love with his boss's daughter--and her little girl.
In my ridiculously detailed headcanon, the law that allowed stepchildren to take their stepfathers' surnames was one of the reforms undertaken during the time of Azulon, not because Azulon was particularly progressive but because of mounting war deaths and because of the increasing assertiveness of the middle class and their importance to the war effort. In that sense, Tien Yenzi's very name encapsulates the developments that led to the central political conflict in the story.
Letter to a Father
The deception in this scene is personal for me on both an emotional and intellectual level. When my mother was died of cancer during my stay in the States, I didn't find out for months because both my mom before her death and dad were adamant that I not be told about it for fear it would interfere with my studies or my health. In Shadow I reversed the dynamic with a daughter-in-law fearing for her father-in-law's health, though I have to wonder if Sa Ye isn't just having a hard time saying good-bye and wanted to keep Khoujin alive somewhere. It's my way of forgiving, in a way, to think of reasons to justify this kind of lie and tying it into the human need for story, my own driving passion.
As Loopy pointed out, Sa Ye's appeal to Master Lu for a hopeful story is a meta moment. On a more personal level, I've said before that Master Lu is one of my stand-in characters--a lawyer and scholar who finds his learning useless to correct injustice in real life. In a way, the only good Master Lu did in the story was by being deceitful. The times he was shown applying his knowledge for its intended uses (his legal memo to Zuko on Azhoran, his petition to Ozai to stop the the invasion on Beiyang), the products of his efforts were burned unread. Lu's two main achievements--contacting the White Lotus about Zuko's whereabouts and drawing up a posthumous marriage certificate for Khoujin and Sa Ye--were the products of falsehood and subterfuge.
That goes to my own ambivalence about a legal practitioner and a storyteller: Sa Ye is telling me I won't ever cease to be the latter because everyone makes sense of the world through stories. And if she's trying to assuage her own guilt I can sympathize with her reasons.
Incidentally Lu and Sa Ye were another example of my own characters refusing to follow my plans for them, much as Yenzi's sexuality left my control. You see, I had a vague idea that Master Lu and Sa Ye could become a couple; maybe she could become his junior wife since he was already married. Or I could arrange for something ho happen to Nanhua.
The idea did not go over well. I can no longer find the dialogue I wrote where Lu and Sa Ye both yelled at me, but I do remember Sa Ye threatening to claw through the fourth wall to scratch my eyes out. (I think she's still sore about Khoujin.) In retrospect the whole thing was a terrible idea anyway, so I'm glad the characters balked so hard.
Letter to a Captain
This didn't occur to me until after I'd written both scenes, but there's a definite contrast between Yenzi's letter to Ji and Mai's to Iroh. Mai in her scene writes three separate drafts, burning the first two that did not meet her requirements and being very, very careful to write everything perfectly, her body remembering the punishment for every little mistake. It's also worth noting that Mai in the final draft leaves out all her actual feelings and thoughts to stick to the facts.
Yenzi in contrast shows all her awkwardness and vulnerability in what is genuinely an uncomfortable situation, and is heartfelt in her feelings even though she can't say everything because she knows her letters will be censored. (She probably knows there's a good chance it might be withheld from the recipient. I'm not sure she'll bother rewriting it.)
Part of the difference might be due to the difference in social stations, i.e. Iroh is a prince while Ji is a military man, but arguably the gap between Mai's and Iroh's status isn't that much larger than Yenzi's and Ji's. And we've seen Yenzi isn't afraid to go up against princes, at least where her family is concerned. No, I think the larger difference is one of upbringing: Yenzi is unafraid to express herself--for better or for worse--because she's been taught through constant affirmation that she has something valuable to offer and can learn from her mistakes, while Mai was taught that anything less than perfect is unacceptable and mistakes mean there is something wrong with her.
In the first draft of the scene, the boy who interrupts Yenzi was Random Fire Nation Boy #19682 who seemed to have a flair for fixing up bets. Then I thought a little more about it and decided, why not add some local flavor? Hence the decision to cast him as a Colonial, and just to relate it back to the rest of the story, one named Shun. Shun Quan is a distant relative of the "real" Shun Li, though Quan belongs to a more mercantile branch of the family that looks down on its poorer cousins. Though Quan's family professes loyalty to the Fire Nation, they have far more regard for money than politics. Quan himself joined the Fire Nation Army as part of a plea bargain after being caught smuggling weapons to people who turned out to be part of the pro-Earth Kingdom resistance. Oops?
Besides, having another Shun take bets on Rang Han's face just solidified Rang's Butt Monkey status. I really have no sense of nuance when it came to dealing with the villainous nobility in this story, which is one of its failings.
I also got a kick out of writing about Yenzi's prejudices toward Colonials and how she'd taken a "sensitivity training class" to deal with the locals. I'm sure sensitivity did wonders against bigotry and injustice in the middle of an occupation. From what I've seen, occupying armies are mostly composed of good, ordinary kids whose individual goodness is no defense to the overwhelming immorality of the system they're forced to uphold. Yenzi is going to come out of the war a very different person. She may end up wishing she'd taken that shipyard job, after all.
Final Interlude: Making Up
It's funny how the act of writing transforms the ideas and images in your head. Originally Cheng and Shun were going to exchange a lot more banter, but once I started writing I realized the situation was more serious than that. On an external level they had to avoid detection, and internally they had issues to resolve in a very short time. So the original light-hearted exchange became much more furtive and earnest in nature, which I think is an improvement.
References to pedophilia, stalking, homosexuality, homophobia, prostitution, and rape follow. Hey, it's Shun's story after all.
It was a huge relief to have Cheng, an officer of the law, call out Shun's behavior which is really all sorts of creeptastic. Here is a grown man stalking a child who has said in no uncertain terms he never wants to see said man again. And the messed-up parts don't stop with what Cheng says in the scene or what she knows. Throughout the latter half of the story Shun arguably wormed his way into Zuko's confidence by systematically isolating him from his other friends: His betrayal caused Khoujin's death and Lu's incarceration, and he explicitly told Sa Ye to make herself scarce from Zuko's side. At least he never tried to isolate Zuko from Iroh.
So that undying devotion bit can get pretty creepy in practice, particularly when it comes from a place of damage and deception like Shun's does. It goes to show that his loyalty is more about himself than Zuko, as discussed in the notes for Chapter 19--he's effectively using Zuko to find meaning in his own life. It's why I've never been impressed with fanaticism whether for a person or an idea. It seems to me that unreasoning devotion is often an attempt to make up for some deficit, no matter who pays the price.
Shun's allusion to having sex with men was meant to fill a gap in his confession from Chapter 19. In his life as the Earth Kingdom soldier Kuo Min he was no stranger to sexual contact with women, procured through transaction or violence. Emotional intimacy was another matter--having no ties outside his very tightly-knit and isolated military brotherhood, the only people Kuo could relate to were his comrades in the regiment. Some of his relationships with them were sexual in nature. It was something the Flowering Trees were known for: the insulting names for his regiment that Shun wouldn't repeat to Zuko were homophobic in nature, the "Flowering Faggots" and so on.
Not that Shun and his comrades were liberal humanitarians or anything. They probably shared their peers' prejudices, but being outside normal society they didn't feel bound by the rules other men lived by. This sense of being both below contempt and above the rules was a big part of what made them such ruthless soldiers without any moral grounding. This is not, of course, to say that homosexual behavior led to the atrocities these men committed or that homosexuality is on par with war crimes--far from it. Rather I think the sense of being set apart facilitated both aberrant (for the place and time they lived in, in the case of homosexuality) behaviors.
When Shun asked Jien to leave with him, or rather asked whether she would leave with him if he left, was one of his more selfish moments and that's saying something. For one thing it was posed as a conditional, making it essentially meaningless: Even if she'd said yes, he could have canceled it by voiding the condition. For another he knew it would be an unmitigated disaster if they did go off together. Maybe it wouldn't have been quite the heartsick mess of his brief marriage back in the Earth Kingdom, but it would have been close. Yet by posing the proposal he put the onus of rejecting it on her, not to mention the shadow of responsibility for what followed.
I think Jien answered as she did partly because she is a mature person, and partly because she saw the part of him that wanted to be serious: He was not and could not be genuinely asking to spend his life with her, but he did want to be the kind of man who could offer a real life together. Maybe she was even tempted for one mad moment, who knows. If nothing else he was her friend, and if he needed a little self-delusion she could give him that as she had given him so much else. It was close to the end for them anyway, whatever "they" were.
Wrapping up the OCs' stories in "Letters" was the wind-up for the final chapter, when the action would rise a little again and finally tie up the long-running thread between Azula and Zuko--for a while, that is, until their paths crossed again in the show.