#i wont go into specific plotlines as i am actually writing this into a fic that will most likely become. very long

[lazyveran]

ask about your arranged marriage au you say >:) :evil_hand_rub:

So. to begin with. Why and How is this what happened? is it a postwar diplomatic treaty thing, and Zuko is already too married to Mai to be the one wed? How much Hell did Azula and Katara put whoever suggested it through, and how did it end up happening anyways? What were each of the girls up to prior to the engagement? how do they feel about it? What does the world look like at the time of this AU, both in terms of the big worldwide stuff and the roles and relationships between the Gaang, whatever side characters are around, and their political positions? Be warned: highly likely that I will continue to enquire

you have unleashed the most self indulgent lore dump. thank you so much for asking. my long winded rambles under the cut

the setting of this au has two major changes; aang is never discovered (im so sorry my baby boy) and iroh is a much more active player within the fire nation. essentially, iroh begins consolidating the white lotus almost immediately after azulon's murder. as such, the fire siblings become terribly co-dependant in both ursa and iroh's absence as he's constantly away scheming against ozai. zuko doesnt get burned at 14. he gets burned at 19! and azula kills ozai for it, setting off a domino effect that lands an underprepared iroh on the throne trying to end the 100 years war as per his agreement with the white lotus members (before azula jumped the gun)

the azutara marriage occurs for like 2000 reasons but the main one is that iroh is forced to make several concessions in order to end the war as his ministers are terribly pro-ozai, thanks to ozai's scheming before azula prematurely offed him, and that the northern water tribe refuses to sign and end the war with the FN, unlike the other nations. azula, having been the princess-general ravaging the earth kingdoms in a five-year long campaign, therefore didnt get to show her face in the water tribes, gets chosen as the one to marry into the southern water tribe. as both a savvy diplomatic move to solidify the peace and to work with said wife towards peace with their sister tribe. iroh has no choice but to agree, and azula as a loyal princess with duty to the throne, also has to agree. (she is terribly, extremely unhappy with this due to ursa-parallel related reasons. and its azula.)

katara is chosen both for her position as the daughter of the chief, and for her prowess as a master bender (to match azula's known reputation). katara herself has been working as a sort of renegade freedom fighter away from the south pole, mostly working against the admiral-prince zuko and his three year campaign against the water tribes. sokka and herself work with an elite team, the black tail wolf pack (extremely indulgent name please forgive me) as guerilla fighters against the fire nation essentially. katara is EXTREMELY unhappy about the marriage alliance that her father has signed her off to, but like azula, her duty to her people and to peace overrides her extreme dislike of the situation.

zuko is the admiral-prince, heir to the throne, burned and shamed by the late firelord ozai, and... marrying toph bei fong. NOW PLEASE hear me out on this. stay with me. as part of the peace agreed by iroh, and the fire nation's precarious position now that expansion and pillaging cant fund their economy, an agreement is made with the earth kingdoms to marry into the wealthiest family in the world. its purely an economic marriage, but since the bei fongs are essentially the only homogenous earth territory ''royals'' that aren't strictly attatched to one kingdom but all of them, and have a daughter to spare, well. their relationship is the funniest to me, they're very much a platonic-married-besties situation. zuko himself is conducting a dreadfully obvious affair with mai, and his siege-weapon of a wife does not care in the slighest. in fact she actively encourages it, as being wife to the heir to the fire nation throne gives her freedom away from her family to be herself. there will be rising tensions between the bei fongs and the fire royals, naturally, as well as toph's own character clashing with the 'no fun allowed' fire nation.

azutara's relationship is an EXTREME slow burn, enemies to enemy-wives to friends to lovers. they're both 20 at the time they're married, but both have been child soldiers for years. azula spends a week acting like an arrogant prat and treating her wife like a peasant through politicking power plays before katara just kicks her ass three times over and azula realises theres actually no power imbalance to play off of. she promptly begins acting like mr darcy. katara has to grapple with the very alien culture of the fire nation and stumbles through all the subtlties of both court and royal life, as well as having to deal with her enemy turned wife and the absolute paradox of a woman that azula is. AND negotiating with her hostile sister tribe into trying to broker peace after a generation of war. i think marrying azula is harder than the whole 'world peace' affair really. they're both miserable and angry and cant understand each other but still see each other

sokka will be an intermitten character, as he becomes a diplomat for the southern water tribe as well as a member of the three nations peace council set up in the wake of the war. im trying to add in suki but im unsure on how, perhaps as another representative or something. ursa will have a plotline and azula will NOT be happy about it at all. iroh is frankly wracked with guilt that in order for peace he has to make the last of his family utterly miserable. all their relationships are complicated and messy and everyone's a little awful

i think a really fun aspect of this au is my odd ideas about azula and gender. azula is, in the eyes of the fire nation, both male AND female. female as a princess, a woman who's royal duties involve marriage and so on. but her status as a master fire bender legally classifies her as male. honestly the fire nation cannot afford to disregard azula on gender lines, since she's the most powerful fire bender on the planet at this point. she's a general in the military too, a traditionally male held role, and so azula herself becomes a grey area in terms of legal gender. as such, azula is technically kataras HUSBAND, not wife. and with that comes all the expectations of a husband over a wife in a royal imperial court. very very indulgent of me i fear

i hope this lore dump/word vomit makes some sort of sense. please feel free to ask more abt this au!!!! i have many many worldbuilding hcs for the fire nation and this au <3333

#political marriage au #im just gna make that its own tag now #azutara #azula #katara #veran speaks #ask #starrdio #i wont go into specific plotlines as i am actually writing this into a fic that will most likely become. very long #but i love to talk abt it. please let me talk abt it

[demigirljoycebyers]

Then again he was on drugs I'm cackling very true guess we'll have to wait and see what it all leads to but frankly after season 3 and how they wrote my favorite characters and now these spoilers I am going to be very cautious about my expectations. That's the problem with getting so invested in these characters and relationships. We come to love them and know them and care for them and understand them sometimes even better than their own creators do because we latch onto specific characters and spend so much time creating for them and thinking about and talking about them whereas the writers are concerned with like 20 characters and plotlines so it's heartbreaking when you see things happening to them that will hurt them or the writing doesn't feel like authentically them.

yeah!!!

personally, I do kin will so if they did something weird with his character i would feel a bit off about it. Like the idea of making him allo/het would have thrown me off so badly. So even if they dont do much with him, frankly im relieved to know that they actually committed and made him gay :)

I am invested in these characters, but frankly at this point im used to disappointment so more than anything, i guess im more calm about these kinds of things simply because ive made my peace with it. i would be over the moon if byler became canon, but if they didnt, it wouldnt change much for me. I would still continue to write and read my gay little fics and live happily in my gay little section of tumblr askdksd

it can be hard juggling so many characters so i really hope they do them all justice! as you can see by my pfp i deeply love joyce so if they did something weird with her it would throw me off too askdksd shes kind of like a comfort character for me, i think.

i have faith that they wont do any of the characters an injustice though! that said, sometimes stuff is happening below the surface that we dont properly pick up on first! Like, when I first watched s3 i hated it because i was like wtf is wrong with everyone XD but upon rewatch i have a better understanding of what was happening everyone and now i actually really love that season... like i think even more than s2 which is everyone favourite, i think asdkskd

so yeah! even if they do something like season three again, I'm sure theyll explain the character motivations in due time so we can properly understand what has propelled those characters to act in that way. People can change and grow, after all, so doing something we wouldnt expect of them doesn't necessarily mean how they are represented isnt authentic - except when it does (im looking at you and your repressed ass mike)

#stranger things spoilers #anon <33 #be gay make byler canon #im getting tired so i might not be making much sense now askdksad k #its 10pm so im probably gonna go to bed soon #if you do send me another ask then thats why! ill be happy to answer int he morning if you do =^-^= #in case i dont speak to you again good night! =^-^=

[cescalr]

hey bestie! <3 for the ask game:

8. What project(s) are you currently working on?

14. If you could see one of your fics adapted into a visual medium, such as comic or film, which fan fic would you pick?

16. At what point in the process do you come up with titles?

22. Do you know how your fic will end before you start writing?

hey a! <3 Okay, so;

8. .... too many. Anything that's not marked as complete on Ao3 (or, er, abandoned. shhh) is a current WIP. I just kind of... wander between them at the leisure of my motivation.

So there's... 40. Of Them. Yeah. Also, not on ao3; your prompts!! which i am definitely writing!!! I promise bestie i really am <3. Just. Slowly. Like a snail. Or a tortoise trying to win a race <3.

14. Oooh hmmmmmmm Ginny Time Travel AU.... ooh! or!!!!! Claysmond anthology!!!!!!!! Yeah. Yeah I'd be happy with either of those. Esp because the GTTAU adaptation could tidy up some of the issues and integrate The Riddle Problem into the main continuity (and... maybe give a better ending than Miles To Go whichhhhh.... sorry about that one). Claysmond anthology is a favourite of mine, though. Would love to see that one, like with my eyeballs, fully visualised. I don't. I don't know why i put it like that. That's how - that's how vision works. You know what? Let's move on.

16. Whenever. Sometimes I have the title first, like with The Things That Bind Us - And The Ties That Blind Us. You know. Because of the saying? The ties that bind us. I was playing on that before I had a single word written down for it. And the same with For What It's Worth, because that's like... the entire thematic underpinning of that story. Heaven Sent. too! I just thought that pun was funny. It didn't have much to do with the actual story other than as a sort of... apt reference to how John even got kids with Mary. Ah, cupid plotline. awful shit. Anyway. But other times it's just kind of like... A good turn of phrase I use, or once I've written something there's a thematic throughline I can apply, like all the poetry references in the GTTAU; Miles To Go is from a robert frost poem. The Want Of Gold To Stay is in reference both to a thing that became kind of a motif of the story which would be sort of a spoiler so I wont say, but also specifically to the poem (also robert frost) Nothing Gold Can Stay. There's - lol there's more than just Mr. Frost's poems in those fics, lol. But yeah. Later was named for what ended up being a motif in the story - that things would all have to be addressed later because the world was ending now so important things were being put off for the sake of survival. So sometimes it's based on something from the story, or I have an idea for a title first. Like, I didn't have a name for Kneel and Disconnect before I posted it, it had a working title for ages, but I ended up using The Incident album lyrics for the chapter titles because Kneel and Disconnect (have a listen, if you like!) happened to start playing when I was working through the metadata portion of posting a fic, so I just used that, you know? It actually kind of fits, which is lucky. (Some, like the Shield Agent!Stiles AU, never lose their working titles. I'm a professional I promise.) Also some of my fics get the Not-Fic: prefix because I like to let people know when it's more an outline than a properly written out fic, like Not-Fic; Inverted Relativity Falls. or my nat time travel fic i... 'wrote' forever ago and never like, extrapolated into. actual fic. oops. I put it into a series and everything! I meant to! I just never did! I'm very reliable. I promise. I swear your marriage prompt is getting written bestie. Promise <3 (genuinely. I'm just... slow.)

Anyway, I think too much about fic titles. And when I can't think any harder about the title or my head will explode, I give up and use latin. Ab Epistulis, In Inceptum Finis Est, Veni, Vidi, Conatus Sum, etc... that's me not knowing what to name something and not actually having had a working title to just leave applied, lol. Sometimes the working title is just 'f'. First key I press on the keyboard as a touchtypist just to fill the required box in the ao3 input screen because, as a perfectly sane and sensible woman, I write all my fic directly into Ao3. :). I don't recommend it. I lose a lot of writing. Often.

22. All improv babeyyyy actually the only one I knew how it would end first was the claysmond anthology (because the 5 + 1 nature of it meant that in the + 1, claysmond needed to end tragically and never happen, so I knew the ending needed to be some kind of sad or bittersweet) and your prompted fics because you wanted fluff... from me, which. I mean. I managed! A bit!! Kind of!!! They ended happy, anyway. Don't - Don't think about the fact itc and it's sequel were set during the camping trip of doom so all the bad that happens after still. happens after. don't think about that. :) All was well :) :).

so anyway! Yeah!!! Thanks bestie <3 <3.

#ask game #<3