Going to be traveling and bored meme

[attackfish]

This looks like I can answer with my cell phone keyboard!  (On a side note, please forgive my more numerous than usual spelling mistakes in this.  I don't have spellcheck on my phone, and my spelling is lamentable at the best of times.)

Ganked fromsholio

Give me a character and I'll tell you a piece of my personal headcanon. Any fandom is welcome here, provided that I am reasonably familiar with it.

Comments

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

*snerk*

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

It's so nice not to be alone.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed. It's not the best thing she ever wrote, but it's fun.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Same here. Why try to paint the Fire Nation, which gave us the Dangerous Ladies, especially Azula, who were explicitly not rebelling against against the established gender norms of their nation, sexist, when it's already incredibly racist and ethnocentric? Also, parents can be absolutely rotten to their daughter without sexism even being involved, the same way they can with sons.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I have so much more headcanon for Iroh the elder (I have spent far too much time figuring out the ins and outs of the Fire Nation Royal family from Sozin to Zuko) but I have fair amounts for Iroh the younger as well.

It used to be my headcanon before Bryke confirmed that he's Zuko's grandson, that he was the youngest of a huge family that bemused Mai and Zuko more than anything, and when Mai got pregnant with him at like, sixty, she stared up at the sky for a long long time wondering why menopause wasn't coming (please please please let it come). I still like to think Zuko and Mai had a lot of kids, and that Iroh is not the son of their oldest, the Firelord, because if he's that high up in the succession, he would be at home, preparing to become Firelord himself someday.

[somariel]

And it's entirely possible for Mai's parents to be sexist without the entire Fire Nation being so.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

That's true, but sexism is usually a societal issue, which is to say society teaches it to its members. Some members may be more or less eager to embrace it, but nobody was naturally made to have any specific prejudice (or to not have any specific prejudice for that matter) and I didn't see any evidence of sexism in her parents, just a lot of evidence for being really bad parents. Seriously! They left a toddler unattended for long enough for him to make his way out of a palace, and most of the way out of Omashu!

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

But you're right, almost every fic I've seen with mai's parents being sexist either implies or states that they are not unusual in this regard. If they are sexist, it's possible to make it because they're old fashioned, or idealogically regressive, or something like that, instead of trying to recast the whole Fire Nation as sexist.

[wolfs-lament.livejournal.com]

I kinda liked that the creators just gave us little hints about Iroh the elder's past, so we could fill in the gaps ourselves. I'd definitely be interested to know about your headcanon for him.

I figured General Iroh had to be a grandson because of how young he looked, but I love your initial headcanon! I can imagine either they stuck with one (which I imagine the Fire Nation people would have protested about in case they had another Lu Ten) or went with more than two. Zuko would be way too paranoid that two kids would somehow turn into his relationship with Azula. I agree about Iroh though. I don't think anyone would approve the Crown Prince taking over the equivalent of the UN military.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Does it count if I entertained myself with thoughts of little Iroh having nieces and nephews older than he was?

Oh this. It is an international relations nightmare in so many ways. Here's hoping the writers never try to make him heir to the throne.

ZUKO: *wakes up in the middle of the night with Mai seven months along* Oh Spirits, no! Our children will be siblings, there will be royal siblings again!
MAI: *whacks him on the head* there have been plenty of happy sets of royal Fire Nation siblings throughout history. Your family was warped. My family was warped. We will not be warped, and if any of our children try to kill each other, they will answer to me, understand?
ZUKO: *nods very quickly while backing away and making soothing gestures*

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

As for Iroh the elder, after he was born, Ilah and Azulon tried for a long, long time to have another child to shore up the succession, but after a string of miscarriages, and difficulty even conceiving, they ha given up trying. It was only after they had thought Ilah was too old to have children that she conceived accidentally, and Ozai was born. At first, Azulon was delighted with his son, but really, he was expecting to be having grand children by now, not another son, and Ilah died from complications from the birth, and so Iroh ended up being the one who acted as a parent to Ozai. Because of this, Iroh always feels he failed Ozai, who after all, he raised while his nationalistic sentiments were at their peak, and that he also failed Lu Ten, letting him die in an unjust war. He is terrified that he will fail Zuko, his third chance, and he isn't sure what would be worse, seeing him turn out like Ozai, or seeing him die like Lu Ten. (After much consideration, he feels dying would be worse, because Zuko could always reform himself if he turned evil).

I also think when he was younger, he was heavily influenced by Sozin's writings and believed in the nobility of the Fire Nation's conquest for similar reasons, and though as he grew older he had doubts, Lu Ten's death gave him the impetus to say "No, I have been wrong, deeply deeply wrong for years" and become the Iroh we love. Giving Sozin's writings to Zuko was hard for him, because part of him was afraid that Zuko would see in them what he had seen as a young man, instead of what he saw as a wise old man. (Of course, Zuko had been hearing propaganda of Sozin's ideology since he was little, and since his sojourn in the Earth Kingdom, he was already having doubts, so Iroh had nothing to be worried about).

[luunyscarlet.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with you about Ilah having a string of miscarriages after Iroh was born and that she died due to birth complications. And that Iroh believes that he failed Ozai. Though my headcanon holds that he and Ozai were never very close as he was off to war during most of Ozai's childhood and that when he was back in the Fire Nation, his duties as Crown Prince and to his own family were more of a priority so he never spent much time with Ozai.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think there was distance there, and that Iroh was gone all the time, I just think that Iroh was the closest it came to a parental figure to poor unfavorite Ozai (like Zuko, but with more inborn sociopathy and a less dedicated Iroh) I also wonder how close in age Ozai and Lu Ten were...

[luunyscarlet.livejournal.com]

True, true. That picture we see of Lu Ten in "Tales of Ba Sing Se" looks like he's in his twenties. So at the least...10 years difference?

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Probably. In one of my fics, Ozai's forty, and Lu Ten's twenty-six in the canon time frame, which means there's the same gap between the as between me and my brother.

[wolfs-lament.livejournal.com]

I'm warming up to your idea more and more.

I'd like to give Bryke the benefit of the doubt and assume they've thought through this. I've doubted them before and it's turned out alright, but I guess now that they've got a whole other season to stretch something like this out. Besides, I have a feeling he's not going to turn into much more than a once-off character (I hope I'm proven wrong, but in the end I'd prefer more time spent on the main cast).

I sometimes feel sorry for Mai. She has to knock him back down every time he gets like this (which I can imagine is often).

[luunyscarlet.livejournal.com]

And this is with the SECOND child. When Mai was pregnant with their first child, he was probably freaking out over the fear that he might be like Ozai.
Mai: Zuko, calm down. You are NOT going to turn out like Ozai.
Zuko: But Mai, what if I DO?
Mai: Fine, I'll castrate you if you even THINK about setting our kid's face on fire. Does that make you feel better?
Zuko:...No, not really.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

It's adorable, isn't it?

It's not that I doubt them, it's that I constantly think of every way a story could go wrong, and then worry, because I always worry, whether I trust the writers or not. (I would like to see a little more of him too, mostly because I want to meet his aunt/mother, and at least know what her name is.

*snerk* She knew what she was getting into.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

*cackles* Though I'm sure when his children hit their teenage years, he begins to see the appeal of exile...

Yes, that's exactly how it would go. Mai finds it annoying that the fact that he adores the ground his children walk on doesn't reassure him.

[wolfs-lament.livejournal.com]

Admittedly it's me trying to reassure myself as well. I think when you get such a great show you do worry that it won't live up to your expectations. I holding out hope that they'll go on a holiday to the Fire Nation for season 2 so we find out those kind of things.

That's the only reason I don't feel sorry for her.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

This. Plus A:tLA is so brilliant that they have me terrified that I'm seeing what isn't there or something.

Part of my headcanon for her is that most of the time, she enjoys smacking him in the back of the head for being Zuko.

Please feel free to ignore this if you've had enough

[luunyscarlet.livejournal.com]

I'm actually stuck between Azulon and Ursa *feels a bit embarrassed for being so greedy*. You can choose either or both or just plain neither if you're fed up.

Ursa 1/2

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Wow, this ended up really long.

I don't have all that much of a headcanon for Ursa, surprisingly. I have a lot of theories, but many of them are mutually exclusive. For example, one theory of mine is that she is an enormously powerful firebender, and that this is why Azulon was willing to overlook her heritage and betroth her to his son. Or he could have betrothed her to Ozai as a way to curb his younger son's ambitions to the throne. If his line were tainted with the Avatar's blood, he would be in less of a position to make a play for the throne, not that it stopped him. It also could have been a combination. I want this powerful firebender in my family, and I want to co-opt the power of her line for mine, but she's the Avatar's granddaughter, so I'll have her married to my less favored child. These could have made very different early dynamics in their marriage. Ozai would have prized her for the first and resented her for the second and third, and it might have meant that getting rid of Ursa when he took the throne (and thus any reminder that his children were descended from the Avatar, or even just more than his, might have been a nice side benefit to him.) Or she could be a nonbender, and accomplished with the dual swords (Which would make them superficially similar to Zuko and Mai. Both are are arranged matches according to Bryke, In both, she's a nonbending weapon's expert and he's a royal firebender, disfavored by the current monarch, his father.) She could be a young officer in training, raised to take part in the Fire Nation conquest, after Roku's decedents were brought to court following his death. She could have been in hiding with her family, and have only confided the secret of her heritage to Iroh... Oh the possibilities. I don't actually have a lot of theories as to what happened to her after she offed her father-in-law. I have no clue.

Ursa 2/2

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

The actual headcanon I have for her comes in after she's married to Ozai and has Zuko and Azula, but before she kills Azulon, and to it, I'm bringing a lot of what I saw as a child interacting with the family of my first stalker, which was a lot like how I imagine Ozai, Ursa, Zuko, and Azula. In her family, her father, looking back on it, was cold and at the very least emotionally abusive to her mother and the oldest son. He favored my stalker, the middle child and one of two daughters heavily, and ignored the existence of his youngest, the other daughter. Her brother had Tourette's, and I think undiagnosed Aspergers, which not only made him the family's "problem child" but also made him much more vulnerable to his little sister's constant lying. He was also very angry, defensive, and resentful, which I now realize was because of the abuse he suffered, but at the time scared me, because he was so much bigger than I was, and also because his sister lied to me constantly about how dangerous he was. These were also blamed on him by the rest of the family, and seen as one more way he just wasn't good enough. Good children didn't get angry. Her mother was extremely sweet and kind, but unlike Ursa, also saw her son as a problem, ignored her youngest daughter, and thought her middle child, a budding sociopath, could do no wrong. This is why I tend to get very angry at Azula apologists who think that Ursa was somehow evil for thinking there was something wrong with her child, or that she must have been favoring Zuko as much as Ozai favored Azula. It certainly never did my stalker any good to have her mother unable to see what she was doing, and it left her siblings utterly without protection. I had my parents. They had no one.


I don't think Ursa was the perfect mother, as Zuko clearly saw her. He lost her when he was ten, and with her, the only parent who loved him or defend him. My headcanon for Iroh is that he was so sunk into grief when he came home, that he didn't really snap out of it until the Agni Kai, and so Zuko was left for three years to fend for himself, which understandably colors his memories of his mother. I do however, think that she was married into an already deeply unhappy and deeply unhealthy family, and had to find a way to survive and raise her children within it with very little power and no support. I'm not sure she ever realized what a monster Ozai was, or she might have tried to kidnap Zuko and Azula, and anyway, younger sociopaths don't usually have the experience to hide it as well. I think she was afraid for and of Azula, and had nobody to turn for help, and I don't think there was anything she could have done.

Azulon

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Oh the Fire Nation royal family. So much headcanon, so little time.

According to Bryke, Azulon was born the same time as the Air Nomad Genocide, and that he led troops into battle. I imagine that he was a sort of Alexander the Great (or better still, the Russian scholar in me wants to say Ivan the Terrible) who took a very personal role in the conquest, like Iroh. I don't think he understood Ozai at all, and that Ozai was always more of a politician than Azulon. Iroh had a political side, but Azulon could connect to him through their shared military experiences, and I think he was less of a politician when he was younger. In some ways, Azulon had a temperament more like Zuko's, though much crueler. He was quick to anger, quick to punishment, not prone to reflection, and his plans and tactics tend to be short term affairs.