Don't waste your time or mine

https://www.tumblr.com/zuko-always-lies/766526980525080576/i-really-think-more-fics-with-polygamy-would-be

What do you think about ships like Mai/Azula/Zuko, Ty Maiko, Ty Lee/Azula/Zuko, Maizulee, and Mai/Azula/Zuko/Ty Lee in the context of Fire Nation Royalty engaging in polyamory?

Also, if you have read fics dealing with each of the previously described ships, what are your thoughts on them? Are they anywhere near historically accurate, or they just smut fics?

Furthermore, how would you write the ships to be historically accurate?

Warning: I will be talking about incest here a bit.

Let's start with Azula/Mai/Ty Lee. There are a good number of good fics for that ship (for instance), but generally the social, cultural, and political implications are not a focus. The best way to make the ship a little more grounded is to present it as something that is going on in addition to fulfilling their cultural responsibilities for their families, not as a replacement for "conventional family life." As long as Azula and Mai (Ty Lee burned her bridges with her family long ago) are marrying the right men (thus making family alliances) and producing heirs, no one cares about them being involved with each other.

Another realistic way to approach this is to have Mai, Azula, and Ty Lee all be wives/secondary wives/concubines of the same man. I suppose that's where the other part of your ask comes in.

So, I'm actually beta-ing for a Azula/Mai/Ty Lee/Zuko fic right now. However, in general you are correct, most fics of this type are just smut. That's fine, of course, but not what you are looking for.

Let's deal with the incest aspect of this first. As far as I'm aware, this is not something any historical East Asian or Southeast Asian royal dynasty engaged in, but there have been many royal dynasties who have.

Any sort of Azula/Zuko relationship, at least an official one, only makes sense if the Fire Nation royal family has a tradition incest. Otherwise it's not going to be culturally normal enough for a marriage to happen. However, if there is such a tradition, then suddenly the marriage makes a tremendous degree of sense as a way to submerge and eliminate Azula's claim to the throne. As I'll discuss below, there is ultimately only one primary wife on top of the household hierarchy, and if this status is denied to Azula in favor of someone else, it would be as a deliberate slight or humiliation against Azula.

OK, now there are three or four purposes to the artifice of polygamy in East Asia:

As a babymaking machine, to ensure plentiful heirs (and the status of women inside the "harem" tends to be influenced over whether they've given birth to children).

As a status symbol; having many women marks you as wealthy and powerful.

As a source of pleasure and love.

As a way to establish connections and alliances.

The same trends can be seen up and down the social scale, with households of more modest means being smaller, but of course households needed to be of some means to support more than one woman, much less many.

Harems were also structured as a hierarchy, with the primary wife on top (although she would be below her mother-in-law), and then secondary wives/concubines and so below that. Imperial harems in particular had a ton of ranks and titles to them.

By the late Imperial period (Song/Ming/Qing, but not Yuan) the women of elite households were very cloistered and confined (although arguably in the Ming Dynasty that's also true of even the Emperor), but things were less like that in earlier dynasties and other East Asian societies, to a variable degree, and in the Shang Dynasty (which was more or less the dawn of Chinese history) palace women even seem to have regularly led armies in the field. I think that's a bit closer to how the Fire Nation would understand the institution, to say the least.

There are also some other things I should bring up:

For the Emperor, monogamy really wasn't possible, even if he wanted it. There's entire systems pushing him toward polygamy.

There's a huge reputation for vicious infighting between women over status in Chinese harems.

For many women, concubinage was a ticket toward upward social mobility.

Harems can be large, particularly for the emperor. Japan and Korea generally seems to have had smaller households, though.

A common trend (far from universal) is to have children born of concubines adopted by the primary wife.

A lot about this system might sound very depressing (and it was) but I just want to present one counterexample from the famous memoir Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu. Shen Fu was an intellectual of extremely modest (or worst means), and, beyond the struggle to keep going the book is largely about his very happy marriage with his wife Chen Yun and his grief over her untimely death. At a certain point, despite the couple having very little money, Chen Yu gets obsessed with finding a beautiful and charming concubine for her husband, an idea Shen Fu is cautious at best about. She eventually finds a younger girl, Hanyüan, that meets her standards, and basically seems to fall in love with her and become obsessed with her, a feeling that Hanyüan reciprocates (this is a 19th century Chinese text that I'm reading in translation, but what's going on between them seems very homoerotic). Chen Yun tries very hard to add Hanyüan to their household, but eventually Hanyüan was forcibly married to someone else, and Shen Fu blamed the grief over losing Hanyüan for Chen Yun's death.

Anyways, enough prattling. I know what you really want to know is my opinions on Zuko and polygamy. These are the points I think are worth hitting:

For FN society, Zuko's polygamy would primarily be seen as a babymaking machine (and perhaps as a reaction to the disadvantages shown by the monogamy of Ozai and Azulon).

The lack of heirs in the royal family might play into things.

Zuko's consorts would not have the same rank. Only one can be his primary wife.

The high-ranking consorts would have very high social status in the Fire Nation. And in turn (to a much lesser degree) Zuko might gain status by having high-ranking women in his harem.

There would be no reason that people would expect that Zuko would stop at two or three consorts. Especially if Zuko's "harem" was small, people would shopping their eligible daughters to him, and so on.

Attractions between women within the harem would be none of anyone else's business.

Zuko is already a reformer upending 100+ years of fire nation culture and the Fire Lord is already an Absolute Monarch on a level that's a mix of Louis the 14th and a Mandala God-King from the South East Asian islands. Just changing how his own wives are handled is a side quest in comparison.

And it's not like Zuko just grew up sheltered, never knowing anything outside the palace that would make him not even think about changing stuff like any IRL Emperor who didn't particularly like how their harems worked. His dad and grandad even practiced monogamy so Zuko going for a harem would come with no pre-conceived notion of what a harem even is (and even if Ozai had an offscreen harem, Zuko hate him and would very much change how the women in it were treated by the time he came to power.). He, just like Azula, Mai and Ty Lee are very knowledgeable and well traveled people who have the knowledge and agency to do things their own way if they want given Zuko's authority as Fire Lord.

Also attraction between the girls would very much get people talking if they notice Zuko isn't active / centered enough to it all, it could easily be taken as an insult against him just like you said Azula not being the lead wife could be taken as an insult against her (which isn't the case by default, as I said, there can be no lead wife or the lead wife can just be an administrative position with no further prestige or it can be Azula being spared the pressure of an official post).

But like seriously, nobody is even gonna try to tell the Fire Lord 'no' if he decide to change the rules of his harem and even if they did, do you really think someone as bullheaded as Zuko is even gonna hesitate if someone try to tell him how to take care of his women and the mothers of his children? Especially with how much of a Momma's Boy he is?

He Azula's pathological need to be perfect and the best, and how it can override her common sense and make her put herself in danger. He heard Ty Lee open up about how she felt she had no choice but to make herself stand out in order to be thought of at all. He heard Mai say she grew up being expected to just shut up and blend into the background. And he knows these three had an AWFUL falling out due to Azula wanting way too much control over the lives of the other two.

Making them part of a hierarchy in which they're not equal to one another would be him wrecking not only their relationships with each other, but their self-esteem, which would inevitably also deteriorate their relationship with him. It's in his best interest, both personally and politically, to not do that.

Also: the wives competing with each other might mean the kids competing with each other, and the last thing Zuko wants is to be the kind of father Ozai was, creating a dysfunctional family in which his kids feel his love is conditional and a limited resource they need to fight each other for.

There. All better.

I mean, it's their right to take down people trying to make money off their game, I just think it's a dumb and annoying idea that waste money, especially when it result on the game going on a hiatus.

I don't see what's two-faced about it or 'like the haters', we're not talking about false DMCA or fair use stuff here.