My muse is a'snoozin'

And that’s not untrue. Zuko has to run a government that was, a few months ago, ready and willing to burn the rest of the world to ash, and that’s a serious burden to bear, but it’s not hopeless. This is a new time of peace. A new dawn. Where are all my pieces that focus on peace and growth? About Zuko fostering friendly alliances? About Zuko leading by example?

A servant accidentally drops a serving platter of roast duck during a ball. The juice splatters a noble woman’s gown. She backhands the servant across the face and her husband is calling for punishment and people are watching as though it’s some kind of show, because this is the way it is in the palace. Until, that is, the Firelord steps forward and helps the servant to his feet. Zuko asks the shaking man if he is alright. He calls for another servant to help clean up the mess. He tells the noblewoman in a tight voice that she, nor anyone else in these walls, will not raise a violent hand to anyone under his care

Zuko is walking through a city courtyard as he speaks with the Mayor when a young child waddles up and tugs at Zuko’s golden-hemmed robes, curious at the way they catch the light. The guards rush forward and the boy’s parents fall over themselves to offer apologies and beg for forgiveness, and Zuko bends down and picks the child up under the arms, and settles him on his hip. The child reaches for his gold crown settled in his topknot and Zuko laughs and gently pushes his hands away. He gives the boy back to his parents, and says, “There’s no need to apologise. Curiosity is a valuable trait in a young boy. You should encourage his curiosity for life.” And then he sweeps away with the Mayor in tow, as though nothing is amiss, as though his gentle smile and understanding words didn’t rattle these two townspeople more than a reprimand every would

Zuko shifting the nation’s priority away from militarisation, while trying to create new jobs for displaced people, jobs that will help his nation recover. Zuko implementing a new curriculum in schools. Zuko consulting with all kinds of people, like Iroh and Aang, yes, but also other nobles, and common people, and foreign dignitaries, and historical and cultural experts. Zuko bringing culture back to the Fire Nation.

Zuko struggling with his famous temper, but working every single day to be the kind of leader his people can put their trust in. A Firelord that doesn’t strike fear into his people, the people he’s dedicated to protecting. A Firelord that’s very different to his forefathers, who decimated entire cultures, who burned the faces of their sons and cast them out for speaking out of turn.

Because it was trained on pirated work—including freely accessible online writing (like fanfic, academic texts)—ChatGPT picked up patterns and quirks native to human writing.

Including (sigh) the em dash.

There are other victims here (RIP tapestry and delve 🫠), but the appropriation of the em dash—a punctuation mark beloved by writers everywhere—feels especially personal.

A kind of low-grade panic is ensuing. Writers who once memed their own em dash overuse—the greatest punctuation mark ever to grace the control-freak’s lexicon, frankly—are suddenly backing away to avoid accusations.

No. More. We have centuries of dash-abusing writers behind us. We will not sit quietly while AI repurposes our beloved stilted aside—or the just-one-more clarification the sentence demands—or the dramatic pause your comma could never—etc.

You don’t write like AI—AI writes like you.

Defend the em dash.

(Feel free to download/share/stick it where it matters!)

'my first girlfriend turned into the moon'

The only taxidermied blue whale in the world, 1865 CE, now housed at the Natural History Museum in Sweden. The public was allowed to enter it up until a couple was found having sex inside it; now its jaws are opened only for special occasions like Swedish election days

omg huanhuan hiiiii thank u for the ask!!!!!!!!

ok the weilan boyfriend service fic is my present to myself, hahaha. i was tired of writing something emotionally difficult and serious all the time so i was like ok! what if i set myself a challenge to write something i'd basically 100% of the time have fun with and enjoy. my most hijinsksful fic, basically. i wanted everything i like: identity porn, both of weilan pretending, stupid shenanigans, da qing & zhao yunlan's relationship emphasized, and shen wei having to lie stupidly a lot.

basically the premise is it's an alternate first meeting au -- zhao yunlan's dad zhao xinci refuses to give up control of the sid, so instead of taking on that mantle, zhao yunlan ends up running this kind of on-the-books kind of off-the-books boyfriend (or whatever else) service. he's got a binder of headshots of him in all his different personas (i'm planning to base them off of random bai yu roles in different things) that clients can pick out of. and he doesn't do overnights.

enter shen wei! he's at the sid doing heipaoshi stuff one day, zhao yunlan comes out of the chief's office after getting yelled at by his dad about how he should get a real job, and shen wei goes oh my fucking god kunlun is right. there?

and then proceeds to book zhao yunlan as every persona he can on a series of increasingly stupid (hopefully funny) dates!

i don't have an unposted snippet for it alas (previous ones are here!) but i did figure out recently that the core of this fic is presentation of self! ways that you see yourself, ways that others see you, versions of yourself you think you can become, versions of yourself you can't ever envision yourself becoming, that kind of thing. thrilled by this bc this will make some of the plot decision-making easier when i next get the chance to sit down with it!!!

omg hiiii thank u for the ask!!!!!!

ok so i put some details here about the premise but another thing i can say is that this fic, as most of my longer weilan fics do, has slowly but surely turned into a casefic. what is the case? who knows!

what i do know is that i want the kind of stupid lying investigation from the drama dialed up because both shen wei and zhao yunlan aren't officially allowed to be investigating shit! i'm excited to play with zhao yunlan convinced his dad is overlooking something (bonus points for me if i can get zyl to overcome his dixing prejudice via i told you so to his dad lol) and goes off on his own to try and figure out The Truth. cue shen wei booking more and more dates with zhao yunlan for stupider and stupider reasons while trying to keep them at case-relevant places in the hopes that zhao yunlan will do case things while shen wei is there to keep an eye on him and protect him from harm.

it'll be a pov-switching fic, so another thing i'm interested in juggling (tho this might kill me lol just thinking about it i'm already like ohhh ... this is going to be so complicated ...) is the layers of information each character knows in each persona versus what they can show versus what the reader knows. like, heipaoshi!shen wei is privy to basically everything the official sid investigation knows, but professor!shen wei doesn't even know the sid exists. boyfriend!zhao yunlan is busy charming and smarming at his day job but inner detective!zhao yunlan is busy Seeking Justice Being More Right Than His Dad To Feel Something!! and the reader will probably get to know everything and just sit back and laugh at all the lying and foolish deception hehehe