Welcome to Lake Laogai

This is exactly what happened with everything Kohimori-related, actually. I had vague headcanons on Ty Lee that were basically "I think she grew up climbing trees and doing acrobatics in the canopy", and that was it. I had no further plans, and while I was sure Ty Lee's family could become interesting, they were on the back burner. Fun fact: Their original clan name was tentatively Matsumori, an actual Japanese surname that means something like "pine forest", and I think I only chose it because she was jumping around pine trees in The Chase.

And then one day when I wasn't thinking about Ty Lee at all my boss at my campus coffee shop says to me "Caelum they're doing an open presentation on coffee tomorrow and we've been volunteered to provide the refreshments, also it sounds cool and is relevant to your job and might get you extra credit in that Drugs and Health class you're taking so you should definitely check it out, you might learn something useful!"

What I learned:

Coffee does, technically, grow on trees

I'd always thought it was a bush. To be fair, it's a very small tree. But like, it's a tree, technically.

Coffee trees produce fruit

The fruit is called a coffee cherry

Wait, I realized. Wait, cherry trees are, like, a big thing in Japan and China, right? Sure this isn't an ACTUAL cherry tree but like....the Avatarverse has hybrid plants, so like... And sure coffee flowers are white but cherry blossoms are pink, and...well...

You can make juice from coffee cherries

Waaaaaaait there's a whole other PRODUCT that comes from this plant?? Cherry juice? That sounds DELIGHTFUL and ADORABLE. Which reminds me a lot of Ty Lee...

Medium and light coffee roasts should be paired with light, buttery pastries

Dark roasts should be paired with rich desserts, like chocolate

Oh, wow, I thought after I'd helped hand out the free refreshments for the tasting and had some myself, the coffee really does play off well with the properly-paired foods, it's amazing how the flavor palette changes from sip to bite when you don't add cream or sugar, waaaaaaaaait this means there are ways for people to get really snobby or particular about coffee, this opens up so many fun avenues...

And seriously, coffee grows on TREES, and Ty Lee is so adorably energetic that it just fits.

So basically I left that little presentation with a head full of ideas that were all basically I Think I'm Gonna Have To Make Ty Lee's Family Important Because Even Though I Don't Like Coffee It's Pretty Cool And I Can Do Something With This. Probably not what my boss thought I'd get out of it, but it gave me so much more than I was expecting. XD

ANYWAY, once I have the idea it's pretty much just a research rabbit hole for a while. Lots of googling and wikipedia, following the wikipedia sources, checking out other websites and then making sure that the info I find is also present in other places as well, which may just mean everyone's copy/pasting each other but also can mean it's accurate, lol. Back in college I also used to just go hang out in the library and flip through books when I was bored and I found some stuff that way, but I don't have a library that massive anymore nor do I have space/time for books, so it's mostly the internet these days. And then sometimes that research rabbit hole branches off into multiple tunnels as I find OTHER things that are useful/intriguing and figure out how to drag them into the fun as well.

World building? Hmm. I was just learning how to use my worldbuilding muscles back then. I seem to remember reading up a lot on how brainwashing actually works in the real world and going “I don’t think this is compatible with what we have in ATLA” and just kinda tossing that whole thing out. XD I also recall looking up a lot of stuff for the bits about Jouin, some of which - kalua pig! - has since shown up again in WFFD. I also recall someone on FFdotnet at the time saying “All this chapter did was tell us more about a dead character than the living one” and I was just kinda like -_- yes because he is DEAD and this is your chance to feel sorry about that, we’ll get plenty more of the living one later on account of him still being, y’know, alive. XD

Oh, and Shirong’s personal side projects. I finally got into that a bit in A Meeting of Minds, but the dude DOES have his own stuff going on, which Delun so rudely interrupted to drag him off to see Long Feng about brainwashing a Firebender.

I also did a bunch of research for the birthday party interlude, I think. Mostly appropriate alcohol for such an occasion? And....okay, this’ll sound funny, but.....food containers. I wanted Fen to pack up leftovers for Suyin and Shirong. That’s what my Italian family does after get-togethers, and I assumed that a Chinese family/friend group would do the same! But I also had, like, zero exposure to everyday Chinese life, let alone everyday Chinese life in the 1800s, and I just didn’t have the...idk, cultural osmosis? to figure it out. Like, if you asked me how Victorians would transfer food I’d probably come up with “Idk, wrap it in cloth and stuff it in a basket?” and I assumed people living in modern China would also be able to explain what their people did for food storage/transport 150 years ago but I didn’t have that cultural background, now, did I??? Also this was 10-12 years ago I was looking this up, mind you, the internet was still very different, there was plenty of information on Chinese historical events but not on everyday life objects, CDramas weren’t easy to find if they were translated at all and I certainly didn’t know they existed, and no one was posting beautiful aesthetic videos of life in a rural Chinese mountain village to youtube yet. Eventually I learned that bamboo baskets were a thing, but there wasn’t much info on THOSE either and I wasn’t sure how to describe them, so I just tentatively typed “basket” and called it a day. XD

YOU CANNOT ASK ME TO CHOOSE MY FAVORITE CHARACTER THAT’S LIKE ASKING ME TO CHOOSE BETWEEN MY CHILDREN!!! *shoves Yong off a cliff*

I’m very fond of the Dai family, along with the Trungs and Sais. I’m very proud of how Tuan turned out. I adore Yuan, who you’ve barely met, and Xun, who you haven’t. Huang and Wu Sheng are also definite faves and I can’t wait for y’all to get to know them better.

Characters do usually behave for me in terms of personality development. They surprise me, but they never really turn out to be the complete OPPOSITE of what I was expecting? They just kinda develop organically. Huang and Wu Sheng surprised me, tho, those boys got deep. I knew they had the potential, but developing their backstory actually caused Stingrae and I to develop Ba Sing Se’s socio-political backstory and Long Feng’s rise to power, all because of an inkling I had. That was a very satisfying few years of worldbuilding and story development.

Um, favorite part of the fic....idk, I’m very fond of the final scene, with Azula and her wall chunk from Lu Ten. I’m doubly fond of it because of how it always resonates with readers. Heck, during Azula week last year, I used that chunk of rock as an ongoing theme in Sandstone, and someone commented like “I DIDN’T REALIZE YOU’RE THE ONE WHO WROTE GILDED GREEN” and that made me really happy!

Lu Ten’s time stuck underground - I used the seven stages of grief to get through that one and it was very helpful in structuring that part of the story, and I figured it was deep or something because PSYCHOLOGY.

I’m also proud of myself for getting through the dark brainwashing scenes. So, like, FYI, fanfiction could get...very dark, back in the 00s. People love to play purity police these days and complain about how nasty people get can, but listen. Listen. Do you have any idea how dark FFdotnet got back in the day? Legolas And Aragorn Get Captured By Orcs And Brutally Tortured was an entire genre. I feel like torture fic was actually a lot more common back then, and darkfic in general - I’m sure someone could write a whole thesis on why it’s not so prevalent anymore, I’m gonna guess the fact that fandom is less-insulated and more public now could be part of it, maybe also the fact that the internet is more social media/influencer culture based so people care about their image, and also the purity police which is its own kettle of worms, but I also think that the Bush Administration had something to do with it? You have all these kids who were pre-teens when 9/11 happened, growing up during the Iraq War with an awful presidential administration while everyone was scared and conservative Christianity started to realize that their control over the nation’s “morality” might be slipping and reacted accordingly......yeah there was a lot of darkfic back then.

And I read a lot of darkfic too, but, uh....well, statistically speaking, a lot of writing is bad, okay? A lot of those fics were just weird; you could see where the writer had this idea, and also where they failed to execute it in a way that resonated or made sense. And whatever, writers were young and just wanted to pound out some catharsis, it’s cool, but it still just felt narratively awkward when you could tell how the writer was more focused on LET’S MAKE THIS AS DARK AS POSSIBLE instead of “Let’s tell this as well as possible.”

So the first several attempts at writing the brainwashing scenes, I was nervous because I didn’t want to get TOO dark, and when I finally decided “eff it” and said to Stingrae “I think I need to let this be as dark as it needs to be” I was still nervous because I didn’t want it to end up WEIRD. Idk if that makes sense, but anyway I seem to have done a decent job at it!

As for parts I dislike the most, uhhhhh Iroh’s retreat (I didn’t care, I just wanted to get it over with), Enlai might’ve been promoted too fast? idk, the fact that I came up with Nanyue AFTER I finished publishing GG so I couldn’t work that into the Quy bits, the fact that I was young and innocent and didn’t understand sexual slang or innuendo and randomly chose Dong as the name of the court physician which could lead to some awful puns except no one ever seemed to pick up on that and maybe I’ll regret pointing it out but the man IS going to appear again so I might as well get the first shot in myself. XD

I might have GG2 stuff to talk about but not sure, if I do I’ll make another post on that!

Some basic themes - Reeducation tends to lean towards Mind, obviously, and Preservation tends to lean towards Time, obviously.

Long Feng - Heir of Light He had to work for it, but everything DID pretty much just land in his lap after he managed to get all the pieces in place.

Shirong Zongzheng - Mage of Mind - Land of Silk and Lanterns Kinda iffy because we don't actually know how Mages operate, but one speculation is that they benefit themselves by arming themselves with knowledge pertaining to their aspect. Another is that they create their aspect.

Yong Diao - Thief of Blood or Heart Tuan Teng - Page of Heart or Blood I've never been able to make up my mind on these two, but whichever of them is Blood, the other is Heart. Yong is obviously a thief because he literally steals Tuan's subordinates and takes what he wants for himself in life, whereas Tuan is a Page because he...has a lot of potential but nowhere near as much self-confidence and this is kind of a Vriska/Tavros situation, unfortunately. :/ Blood is bonds and community, and Yong takes that from Tuan in a lot of different ways, but Tuan also needs to develop that for himself. Heart is soul and the self, and Yong definitely captures other people's attention and takes things for himself, while Tuan really needs to grow more comfortable and confident in himself. Either one works, really. I might be leaning towards Tuan being Page of Heart, tho, and Yong being Thief of Blood.

Delun Jing - Seer of Time - Land of Dust and Artifacts Listen. You can't tell me you're surprised.

Quy Dai - Seer of Heart Again with Heart and souls and stuff. I could probably rethink this one, I'm not overly attached to it, but it can definitely make sense. Quy is a very observant person, and he can see a lot of different things in each of his family members - many of which he then purposefully ignores or refuses to acknowledge, either because it'd cause trouble or it'd be awkward. Also, Seers and Knights tend to work well together, and, well...

Roulan Li - Knight of Blood She challenged Long Feng to a duel because of what he was doing to the Dai Li and she continues to work to make sure that their ACTUAL JOB isn't COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN over here.

Sunan Dai - Maid of Breath - Land of [IDK] and Poetry I don't care about gendered terms. :P Maids maintain, right? And Breath is individuality and freedom. Sunan suffers from a chronic illness that may or may not be sickle cell anemia, which can cause shortness of breath, and despite that he still does his best to create the life he wants.

Zan Dai - Witch of Time Look she's gonna turn out better than Damara ever did okay? Okay.

Wenli Dai - Sylph of Time I probably went for the Sylph title because her husband, y'know, has a chronic illness, and Sylphs are healers, and yeah. She can't literally heal him, but she can make sure that the time they have together is healthy and wonderful.

Mu Li - Heir or Mage of Time - Land of Thread and Stories I literally just came up with the classpect, lol, I only had the land ready to go. Either class would work for him, I think, but if he's an heir then he matches...

Peizhi Li - Heir of Blood - Land of Strings and Irises This is Roulan's mom and Mu's older sister, in case you forgot.

Antoan Nan - Thief of Mind or Heir of Rage Could go either way on this one. He's in Reeducation and he's a Nanyuese war child.

Now that I think about it tho, Heir of Rage could actually be a good class for Hoang Trung...she didn't exist when I first came up with these, lol, so she's not included unfortunately. I'll have to think about it!

Huo Bai - Sylph of Mind Shirong's most trusted subordinate, and definitely a healer.

Fen Bai - Maid of Space - Land of Sugar and Frogs Huo's wife.

Enlai Tong - Bard or Page of Light Enlai reminds Long Feng a lot of himself, I think, so I have them share an aspect to reflect that. Bard would fit because he kind of did use luck/fate to destroy Iroh's Siege by passing on the intel that got Lu Ten "killed." Page would also fit because he's another one with potential that he has to learn how to use.

Huang Xu - Knight of Life or Rage - Land of Pumas and [IDK] We haven't gotten to know Huang very well yet, but he is...definitely a protector, and also has a lot to be angry about.

Wu Sheng Shi - Rogue of Breath - Land of [IDK] and Laughter Rogues redistribute their aspect and Breath is, again, freedom and individuality, and trust me this fits.

~~~

The fact that I am STILL loving this story and very devoted to it even after years, many of which were just radio silence. I knew that I was the slow and steady type, but it’s nice to have confirmation. XD

The fact that when I started writing this fic I was younger than Lu Ten is at the beginning, and now I am older than he’ll be at the end. Jk that’s not a favorite thing it’s just a pathetically hilarious thing forgive me lol. XD

I think I was one of the first people to say “actually Lu Ten would kind of be an imperialist jerk” long before I knew the term “imperialist”

ALL THE HISTORY AND CULTURAL THINGS I’VE LEARNED FROM RESEARCHING FOR MY FICS. I learned a lot of history as a kid but good curriculums on Chinese history just didn’t EXIST back then, or at least didn’t exist in the homeschooling catalogs my mother was able to access, so it’s really nice to have a hobby that also helps me learn stuff.

Huang and Wu Sheng. I love them so much and I’m very proud of them and how they always catch new readers’ attention because they are NOT what you’d expect of Dai Li agents. I can’t wait to expand upon them and their backstories in upcoming fics.

Shirong, and how people can’t decide if they love him or hate him or relate to him or all of them at once. XD

The fact that, ten years later, people have FINALLY STOPPED ASKING ME if I took Shirong from a certain other fic, because the idea of different writers looking at the same baby name lists is a foreign concept :P

Literally everything about the Preservation Branch, I’m so proud of my dumb museum guards

The fact that it’s been so long since I first wrote GG and I’ve written so much other stuff since then that a lot of things people REALLY wanted elaboration on back in the day (Enlai, Huang and Wu Sheng) have kinda fallen to the wayside. I get a lot more questions about Nanyue and the Dai family now. The passage of time sure is funny!

Just the fact that I was actually able to write Gilded Green at all. Like. It’s hard to explain. But I had to grow into my writing. Or my writing style, or approach to writing...idk what to call it. But this thing I do? With the worldubilding? And the OCs? And just the careful web of....stuff? I always wanted to do that, even as a kid, I grew up on massive stories like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings with crazy worldbuilding backgrounds and deep meanings and elaborate politics and I could not figure out how to tell stories like that myself. I remember being 12 years old staring at a bunch of concepts for an original fantasy idea I had and realizing that I had no idea how to make them work because I was too young to understand how the world worked. I remember deciding to shelve that whole story because I realized I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. Tolkien and Star Wars didn’t really explain how the worldbuilding happened, it was just THERE and I couldn’t figure out how to make it appear for myself, it wasn’t exactly easy for a child to figure out. Sometimes I envy kids these days who’re growing up with, like, Elena of Avalor, that show lays out some FANTASTIC political responsibility concepts in ways kids can understand, I could’ve used that as a kid. I was also crap at understanding how people actually interact with each other and just....had all these issues with figuring out how to make a story work, not at the writing level, but on a my-understanding-of-the-universe level, which was kinda humbling and also kinda scary. And some of that was youth, and some of that was undiagnosed ADD making it so that I just didn’t Get Things, but either way when I tentatively started writing GG and realized that wait, I think it’s making sense, and the characters are interacting and it’s not weird, and I think I’m GETTING it, omg, AM I GETTING IT??? That was a great feeling, even if it did feel like I was balancing on a tightrope.

ALSO the way in which you can KINDA track me slowly going from raised-in-a-conservative-Christian-environment to WELP-I’m-queer-and-pretty-progressive-now over the course of my writing, tho that may be hard to see if you don’t know what you’re looking at. I can see it tho, lol. I was fortunate in that my upbringing was just kinda incidental because my mother was too tired to consider any other approach to life, and as time went on my family all actually grew into very different, much better people. I was kind of the trailblazer in that regard tho (not fun) and frankly it was fanfiction that helped me get over my queerphobia and internalized misogyny, and it was the racebending protests that cropped up around The Movie That Shall Not Be Named that made me start to realize how racism actually worked and what cultural misappropriation was. If you squint you MIGHT be able to make out where in my stories I started getting excited over my newfound beliefs and started frantically shaking more sexualities over my characters like “I have GOT to de-heteronormative-ize this” XD But yeah this fic has been a big part of my life and you can see me changing as a person if you know where to look.

MY OCs. The fact that my OCs win people over so well! I had a very volatile relationship with OCs in my youth - self-inserts were A Thing Of The Devil in fandom back then and were to be mocked. I was, I’m semi-sorry to say, part of that crowd - never flamed anyone directly, because I was raised to Not Be Mean, but I joined in on the mocking on private message boards. These days I look back on my youthful indiscretions with eye-rolling fondness, because I can now see how much internalized misogyny I was dealing with and I’m very much over the whole idea of Mary-Sues. But the community I was with did actually have a lot of GOOD writing advice as well, and it was a fun group of people, so I can’t fully regret my time there. When fandom drift eventually caused me to float away, I took those lessons on what made an OC annoying and useless with me, and when I started writing OCs of my own, I made sure to go in the opposite direction. It really seems to have paid off!

The fact that I’ve managed to collect a small but loyal following and see the same names popping up after I post something. I don’t think I could handle being a BNF, but knowing that I’ve got a dozen people who consistently read and enjoy my stuff? That’s so cool. <3

See I have this thing where I’m not super fond of villains having to be awful in literally all aspects. I don’t like it when creators decide “Well that’s the bad guy so we can use them as a dumping ground for every awful character trait possible.” It’s annoying and uninspired and lazy and pretty much my only exception is Ozai because Ozai is just Bad At Everything, except also I do still headcanon he and Ursa did actually have a romantic relationship and The Search never changed that so never mind Ozai isn’t as much of an exception as I thought.

Anyway, Yong is neither a terrible husband nor a terrible father.

He’s not exactly a great father, either, but like. He’s a dad. It’s part of his identity, which he has carefully built for himself. And sure, in some ways, he sees his wife and daughter as tools and stepping stones to get where he wants, but uhhhhhh....that’s how it works in his society. That’s pretty normal.

Normal to the point that he uses his wife as much as she uses him. They met, had a whirlwind romance, he realized this upper-middle class young woman and her family could definitely help him in his career, she realized this up-and-coming regular-middle class young man was going places and it’d be beneficial to hitch a wagon to his shining star, and they formalized the whole arrangement with a marriage. And welp, that sure did turn out to be a good investment for the both of them! He became one of the highest officials in the government, she gets to be the wife of someone super important, and they both get to live in the Upper Ring and chill with nobility despite being Middle Ring commoners. Also her family gets all sorts of business deals thanks to their brilliant son-in-law’s connections. So everyone’s gotten what they want, and Yong’s wife probably doesn’t know the details of what he does at work, and she probably doesn’t care to, and if she did know about the torture, she’d probably shrug like “Well sometimes that’s just how it goes, isn’t it? How else is my husband supposed to keep the city safe?”

She’s not affected by it, and more importantly she doesn’t want to be affected by it. If you try to bring her attention to the torture, she is not going to be shocked or aghast or even teary over how you’ve opened her eyes to her husband’s horrible practices. She’s going to be very annoyed at you for attempting to throw a wrench into the gears of the privilege machine that is her life. And then she’s going to complain to Yong about you, because she knows her powerful husband will fix it.

She probably knows about his extra-marital activities, too, and she also probably doesn’t care so long as everyone knows she’s his wife and no other partners matter. It’s a small price to pay for the life she’s leading. Plenty of powerful people in Ba Sing Se have lovers on the side! Heck she might too, who knows?

As for their daughter, well, having a kid was part and parcel of the whole enterprise. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Get married, have a kid, pass on the family lineage? Also they just kinda liked the idea of it. So they had a kid, and Thi is growing up to be another privileged little lady. Her father is very powerful and her life is very nice and she wants for nothing and she doesn’t know what her dad does all day but she does know he’s a hero who protects the city.

Yong may not be winning Father of the Year anytime soon, but he’s not a bad dad. If anything he’s kinda like the stereotypical Victorian father who provides for his family and is loved and respected but maybe not necessarily close to his kid, and then proceeds to go to the office where he continues to subjugate the empire’s colonies using the power of coal mined by impoverished children. The main difference is that Yong is a bit more hands-on, but eh. *handwave* Storytelling. Whatever.

There are lots of people out there who got raised by loving parents who were also just...not great people. There are lots of people out there who were raised by their loving parents to be just as not-great. And they don’t even realize it, because to them their privilege is normal, and they aren’t going to be very bothered with changing things. Or they won’t want to because it’ll mean they’ll have to confront the fact that they might not be great people. Or their parents weren’t great people, and the way they were raised was wrong. That can be a scary and hard and upsetting process to go through.