L.J. Writes

I've written a new update for Legends of the Dragon King, my retelling of ATLA as Zuko's story. This particular update is adapted from S1E03 "The Southern Air Temple," the one where Zuko duels Zhao. I've put in a few things that I fancy are clever, which probably means it's confusing to anyone who is not me. Basically a "read over and see if it makes any sense" job, though all comments are welcome. I promise it's not Zuko or Fire Nation apologia--and I'd like to know if it comes across that way--but Zuko is obviously an unreliable narrator at this point. The update clocks in at 4,041 words.

The other planned update is more specific to Legend's prequel Shadow of the Dragon King and will be posted to Stories from the Shadows, the OC-centric short story collection. I've written a post-Shadow dialogue between Azula and my OC Cheng as a follow-up to Azula's "slut" scene and the investigative and intrigue plots in Shadow. It's probably not unduly confusing, but I'd like to know if it has the desired emotional effect. It doubles as a sneaky sequel announcement (I believe I also discussed this project with attackfish, the one with disabled lead characters) so I've been holding off on posting, but between being asked about a sequel and restarting work on Legends I feel ready. The dialogue is 1,105 words long.

I'd been forgetting just how much fun fanfic is. Once I got started I wrote literally through the night, and the sheer joy of it was incredible after my long dry spell. I used my personal anxieties and Important Real World Responsibilities as an excuse to keep myself from just playing around, and I didn't even know how much I needed to. And then I followed this urge to get started and it was like ahhhh. It felt right.

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.

( Letters )

( Making Up )

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.

My 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

( Scene-by-Scene Breakdown )

There's always a sense of completeness and a sense of strangeness when things come back to the beginning, right where they were supposed to end up in the first place. There's fulfillment, sure, but at the same time it's different from what you imagined, and the familiar is no longer familiar.

( On the tragedy of Sado and the triumph of his son )

Zuko's story as I depict it in Shadow is a composite of Sado's and Jeongjo's stories--both the disgraced prince and the resilient boy, and ultimately the strong king who overcame a legacy of violence and trauma to create his own legacy of forgiveness and compassion. Maybe it's naive of me, a political fairy tale, but I've never been averse to creating my own comfort when I need it. Besides, Jeongjo the Twenty-Second King of Choson, Lee San the son of a murdered father and grandson of his father's killer, already showed us that it's possible. He showed it in the most eloquent way possible, through the course of his life as both a man and a king.

In Chapter 17 of Shadow of the Dragon King, as well as the side story A Night's Work, I used the era name Ji Lian for the Era of Avatar Aang. I got the idea from the Avatar Wiki page on the History of the World of Avatar, which claims that the mechanical calendar in Wan Shi Tong's library shows the Avatar Cycle. According to the wiki (and the ATLA Annotations Tumblr), the current era of Avatar Aang is Yang Wu/Ri Wu (氜武) and the previous era of Roku was Zhuo Guang (焯光), while the next era of Avatar Korra will be Chun Tai (淳泰). The first letter of each era name uses the radical corresponding to the "home" element of each Avatar.

( I totally disagree with that theory, and here's why. )

Conclusion: While the letters on the third ring of Wan Shi Tong's calendar probably stand for years rather than eras, I still liked the idea of era names for the different Avatars and came up with Ji Lian (刏連, severed continuity) for Avatar Aang. "Ji" has the air radical qi (气) so it fits the Air Nomad Avatar, while "severed continuity" symbolizes the disturbed continuities that characterize the reign of this Avatar: The genocide of the Air Nomads, the long absence of the Avatar, and the century of war that wrought irreversible changes on the world.