Attackfish's Fandom Blog Archive

These last twelve years in fandom on tumblr have been transformative, as all fanworks should be, and while I have left fandom, it wasn't in bitterness or shame, but simply a new chapter for me. I leave this blog behind intact so that everybody who enjoyed my fanworks in the past, or who might find them in the future can still access them.

I have chosen my airbender Mai universe. Continued from: [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], and [Link].

1. Azula does not keep Mai and Ty Lee at the Boiling Rock. The Warden is Mai's uncle, after all, and her treason saved his life no less than Zuko's. The two are instead taken to the tower prison at the capital. Azula does not visit them on the journey back to the capital, spent, perversely, locked in their shared well appointed cabin. For all they have committed treason, Mai and Ty Lee are left with the trappings of their noble, privileged childhoods, locked in their room like naughty schoolgirls. It gives them time to think on what will happen to them, on the enormity of the choice they both made. It gives them time to wonder when, if, their trial will take place, whether they will be sentenced to death, what will Azula do? So they wait and they worry, and Azula doesn't come.

2. They are marched up to the prison tower, stripped, searched, Mai's less obvious knives are finally taken from her, and they are handed the prison rags which will serve as their uniforms. Mai's brain is buzzing and spinning with a thousand thoughts, a thousand ways she could break out, shove themselves to the forefront of her mind, nearly all of which would involve airbending. The prison feels like it's made out of paper. But she can't airbend. She doesn't know what is happening to her family. She can't risk them. But she doesn't know what Azula is doing to them. This whole time she has traveled with Azula, the threat that she would hurt them, kill them, if Mai stepped out of line, has hung over her, and now, well, she sure stepped out of line. But she can't escape, because what if they're fine? The prison is made of paper, and Mai has to be careful not to tear it.

3. They are locked in their cell, together, which feels like an oversight. Wouldn't it be better to keep them alone and isolated? But no, they are together. And one room over, that Ty Lee can hear through the window at the back of their cell, are the Kyoshi Warriors. Predictably, Ty Lee starts trying to make friends. With the people who they helped Azula capture and imprison. Of course she does. And because she's Ty Lee, she succeeds. She weathers their anger, and self-righteous well-what-did-you-think-would-happens, and smiles and laughs until they soften to her. She's a wonder, honestly. Mai has no idea how she does it, only that she never would be able to pull it off, not in a million years.

4. Through it all, Azula doesn't come. She stays away, and Mai is glad for it. But she also isn't. It scares her. She didn't expect it. It leaves her on edge. She paces their little cell long into the night. Then, one evening, Azula turns up like a bad coin, disheveled, hair ragged, looking like neither of them have ever seen her, her air of untouchable perfection nowhere to be seen. She yells at them and blames them for everything that happened since she put them in there, her voice more and more... out of control. Her tone, her volume, the pitch, are as wild as her hair and her eyes, and as she rants, she lets more and more slip about the world outside the prison, and Ty Lee tries to soothe her, practically on instinct, and Mai doesn't. She tries to stay quiet and in the back. It's also on instinct. But Azula never mentions their families, and Mai starts to hope that Azula forgot their families exist. Either way, after Azula leaves, Mai feels even more on edge than before. That night, she whispers her secret to Ty Lee. When Ty Lee gasps in the darkness, that soft little sound is as loud as a thunderclap. And then Ty Lee squeezes her, and Mai tries to push her away and tell her she doesn't like hugs, but just this once, Ty Lee holds her, and tells her she will never tell.

That describes more than one AU of mine, so I have chosen the one where Zuko is brainwashed by the Dai Li, and while under Lake Laogai, finds his cousin. Continued from: [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], and [Link].

Aang wakes up, with, what must be said, is perfect, and perfectly awful, timing. Lu Ten is just about to make his escape, when the Avatar opens his eyes and starts having a freak out about being on a Fire Nation ship, and about how he failed to save Ba Sing Se from being conquered by Azula (Azula? His little cousin, Azula? That Azula? Conquered Ba Sing Se?) So of course Lu Ten does what all good little Fire Princes do, and tries to follow him, because that's the Avatar! He should capture him and take him home to the Fire Nation, and come out of his captivity covered in glory! His father and grandfather will be so proud.

So of course when Aang ends up stuck on some driftwood and washed ashore by the kindly Moon Spirit, Lu Ten ends up washed up, half drowned, on the beach with him. And he's still half drowned and wondering if he really saw the Moon Spirit, or just hallucinated that bit, when the Avatar's friends show up. After the hugs and reassurances, the question quickly becomes what to do with Lu Ten. The problem of course is several fold. 1) he is a danger, because he just tried to pull a Zuko and kidnap Aang. 2) He was pretty useless about it. Zuko could have done better in his sleep. This shows that Lu Ten is still kind if not fully with it, and kind of needs to be taken care of. 3) And Lu Ten's dad is in prison for helping them-

Wait what? His dad is in prison for helping the Avatar and a bunch of teenage enemies of the Fire Nation? His cousin Azula, who last he checked was eight, conquered Ba Sing Se? His cousin Zuko, who is ten, which is, he supposes, not much younger than the twelve year old Avatar, but still ("I'm pretty sure I'm thirteen now, actually, I mean dates are weird with the whole being frozen for a hundred years thing, but...") is not only trying to kidnap the Avatar on the regular, but is apparently doing pretty well at it ("uh, we wouldn't go that far... Also Zuko's sixteen, and Azula's like, fourteen, we think? It's not like she told us.") Oh okay, Zuko is sixteen. He was captive for six years? Six years? Oh. Oh okay. Okay. Wait, who had his dad imprisoned? What do you mean Firelord Ozai? How did Uncle Ozai become firelord if his dad is still alive?

What the Avatar and his companions tell him is confused and disjointed, but what what explaination he does get paints a bleak picture, especially when they tell him that both his father and his cousin said that Ozai, and/or Azula would probably kill him if they found out he was alive. Lu Ten has no idea what to do, and finds himself trailing along after a bunch of teenagers ("Toph's twelve") by default. And when one of those teenagers ends up being dragged off to school, and then getting in trouble at said school, and having to have a parent teacher conference, Lu Ten is the only adult in reach. He works out in his head how much older he would be than his supposed son. If the Avatar is thirteen, and Zuko is sixteen, and Zuko was born when LunTen was ten, he would have been a father at thirteen himself.

Fortunately for everyone involved, six (it's six, right? Wow.) years of captivity have aged Lu Ten beyond what is expected, and he looks far beyond his twenty-six years, old enough to pass as Aang's father. He does his best with stolen clothes and his reflection in a pool of water in the cave they've been hiding in. The Dai Li kept his head shaved, and it's only had a little time to grow out into a spiky fuzz all over his head. He looks like a disgrace, his topknot shorn, the delinquent father of a delinquent son. But it's the best he can do. He isn't exactly surprised when the principal threatens his "son" with being sent to the coal mines. He also doesn't believe a word of it.

After Aang holds his little dance party, amd they all have to run out of town, he finds himself on the road with a pack of children, and is baffled by how many "adventures they find themselves in, impersonating spirits (a Fire Nation town shouldn't be in this kind of squallor!), getting taught by Piandao (who Lu Ten stays well away from, since Piandao could recognize him), dodging assassins, and running into secret waterbending blood witches. That last one was horrifying in so many different ways. She wanted... She tried to kill him. She tried to force the others to kill him. She... Was, at least on some level, a captive like him.

And at the end of it all, when they meet up with the ragtag "army" heading to storm the Fire Nation capital, he hears about the eclipse. And he decides that while the rest of them are trying to take on Ozai, he's going to spring his father. So, he slips away during the fighting and heads for the capital prison tower. Hopefully that's where his father is being kept. And Lu Ten might not have Zuko's ability to break into and out of almost anything, but it hardly matters, because he has barely made it inside when his father, having broken himself out, runs into him, and they leave together.

Continued from: [Link], [Link], [Link], and [Link].

I presume you mean when Aang is found?

1. When Ursa leaves, her son is a babe in arms. When Aang is found, that same boy is a six year old, learning his first lessons in firebending, and learning to write his first characters. But something is already apparent. He isn't leaping ahead with the lightning speed of his sister at that same age. And that might not have been remarked upon, if not for something else. Little Zuko is... soft. He gets angry and upset when birds of prey kill turtle-crabs on the beach. He tries to sneek abandoned owl cat chicks under his bed, and is distraught when they don't make it, because they were too young. He puts himself on the side of the weak and vulnerable, and tries to protect them from the powerful and from the uncaring universe. And in doing so, he earns his father's scorn.

2. Azula couldn't tell you if it happened gradually or suddenly. She remembers both a sense of sudden dislocation, and change to a new reality, with new rules, and also a gradual creeping dread, as the world, their father's world, shifted around them. All she knows for sure is that one of her very woest fears has come to pass. Zuko is no longer a little ball of potential that she is being measured against at all times. Now he is weak, and pathetic, and she promised. She promised she would protect him, and teach him what he needed to know, and how can she, when their father is so big, and so powerful, and Zuko doesn't even understand what she's trying to teach him, and it makea her so angry, when he just doesn't get it... And she feels like he must have, the day on the beach, with the turtle-crab and the hawk, and she can't help worry that someday her dad will realize she's pathetic and weak too.

3. When the Avatar is first found, he is Zhao's problem. Azula never thought much of Zhao, but by all reports, the Avatar is a twelve year old child with training in only one element. It doesn't occur to her that Zhao will fail to capture him. But he does. Again and again. And after the debacle at the North Pole, Azula finds herself kneeling at her father's feet, telling her it is her turn. She must find and capture the Avatar.

4. And she must capture, or preferably, in her father's eyes, kill, her uncle. Because her uncle disappeared a less than a month ago, and showed right back up, at the North Pole, helping the Avatar and opposing Zhao. Her father is of course outraged at his brother's treason. Azula's thoughts are more tangled. And more wounded. He would leave to help the Avatar, a stranger and an enemy to her people, when he barely deigned to notice his own niece and nephew. And that's the thing, isn't it? Azula's whole life has been marked by the presence of so many people, so many adults, who either didn't notice what her father did to his children, or just let it happen. Her uncle is just one more. Only her mother ever tried to protect her.

More stuff for the au where Zuko accidentally kills Ozai on the day of the black sun?🥹 I'm especially curious about his shaky relationship with the gaang.

Continued from [Link], [Link], [Link], [Link], and [Link].

Okay, so I talked this a little bit in previous posts, but what's going on is that Zuko killed his father and then took the throne without ever joining up with the Gaang. So he never had the chance to form individual positive relationships with them, they never became friends, they never built trust, and the gaang never came to see Zuko as one of their own.

Cast your mind back to the Book Two finale. This is where Zuko's relationship with the gaang ended. Katara still smarts from what she views as a profound betrayel, when Zuko sided with his sister, after sharing a moment of understanding and commiseration over the losses of theit mothers. She views him as untrustworthy, and a danger to the people she cares about, and consequentally, to the fragile peace Zuko himself helped bring about. And Zuko does not exactly have a ready way to build trust with her. Or, as Zuko would think of it, get her not to hate him.

Sokka and Zuko likewise have a lot of baggage, not least of which is the fact that Sokka killed Zuko's sister, something both Zuko and Sokka feel differently about moment by moment. And of course, Zuko also killed his father, and if you think he doesn't have large and complicated emotions about this that he struggles to process or understand, well he does.

Aang wants to think the best of Zuko, and to trust him, and he's working on it, but that trust is still fragile, built as it is on a foundation of Aang's deliberate and self-chosen optimism. And Toph never really had to deal with Zuko at his worst, and she likes his uncle, so she's more or less willing to play nice. And Suki only knows him as the guy who burned down her village and released her from prison, so she's willing to see where this goes.