Birthday AU Commentfic Meme!

[attackfish]

It’s my birth month, and to celebrate, I’m hosting a commentfic meme!  I’m in the mood to write some AU fics, so that’s the theme of the meme.  I’m open to both Avatar: the Last Airbender and Harry Potter requests, and I’m also taking requests in any of my existing AUs (Except Children of Mars), including the ones I established im my last commentfic meme, as well as new ones.  Comment with up to five requests, and I’ll guarantee you at least one commentfic.  I’ll probably answer with more, knowing me.  weirdlet , beboots , and floranna  get seven requests and a guarantee of two fics, because beboots  and floranna  are the best betas ever, and weirdlet  has a truly bizarre AU I inflicted on her rattling around in her head.  Also, anyone who wants me to write anything from my AU of Sun Child needs to ask weirdlet  and floranna , because it’s theirs.

*Closed and Finished*

Given that this meme has spawned a fair few universes, sorting the fics by requester would be clunky, so instead, I'm sorting them by universe this time.

One Shot Universes:

Another Wacky Day: Sokka3PO and KataraD2 (Star Wars/A:tLA fusion)  requested by avocado_love 
Oh Come On, Of Course Zuko’s a HufflePuff (Harry Potter/A:tLA crossover) requested by avocado_love 
Zuko muses on his fellow ruler, his sister, and the big universal questions of morality NOTE-not actually AU, requested by beboots
Dwarf!Toph (D&D fusion, sort of) requested by weirdlet 
Don’t even ask- I don’t even- What is wrong with you, woman? (Kyoshi Warrior Ozai) NOTE- Not AU, just crack, requested by weirdlet 
Suki's a Firebender requested by clockwerkchaos 
Toph is the one who finds Aang requested by panaili 
Ozai doesn’t allow the Dragon of the West to join Zuko in exile: Parts One, Two, and Three requested by lavanyasix 

Mirrorverse (The Avatar is an evil spirit):

Meetings requested by clockwerkchaos 
Aang's Little Crush requested by gamiel 
In This Verse, Azula Totes Rescues Puppies requested by avocado_love 

Lightning Strike (from this commentfic on a previous meme):

Sneaking out of Bed requested by lavanyasix 
Zuko and Kuei, chillin’ together requested by beboots 

AU of Ice Flows Through:

Mai, taking Azula's plan down from the inside: Parts One, Two, Three, and Four requested by beboots 

Quiet Shadowed Places verse (from this shortfic):

Zuko Finds Out He’s Blind requested by floranna 
Zuko Can’t Get Any Respect requested by beboots 
Fire Bending Masters requested by Hillary (anonymous user)
Agni Kai During Sozin’s Comet requested by Hillary
Toph and Zuko bonding NOTE- crack, and absolutely not universe canon, requested by beboots 

Iroh Dies in S2 (from these three commentfics in a previous meme):

Crossroads of Destiny Parts One, Two Three, Four, and Five requested by beboots 
The Throne Room requested by beboots 
Royalty Lessons requested by beboots 

Fail!Incubus Zuko:

Attempted Seduction *warning for sexual coercion and slavery* requested by weirdlet 
Courting Mai requested by gamiel 

Life Spirit:

Toph Bei Fong requested by clockwerkchaos 
Winter When He Goes requested by weirdlet 
Zuko and Iroh requested by clockwerkchaos 
Sokka and Katara requested by clockwerkchaos 

Koizilla Destroys the Fire Nation (from this commentfic from a previous meme):

Song requested by clockwerkchaos 

Modern Day:

Toph and Aang Meet requested by panaili 
Sleepover requested by panaili 

AU of Sun Child:

NOTE- Sun Child belongs to weirdlet and an index of fics in that verse can be found here.  This AU of the Sun Child AU began in these two commentfics from a previous meme *Warning for heavily implied Rape by Coercion and Sexually Abusive Dialogue*

Zhao and Zura's Child is Born requested by floranna 

Zuko Hurt His Leg on the Run and it Won’t Heal (from this commentfic on a previous meme):

Teo and Zuko Bonding Parts One and Two requested by Hillary
Assistive Technology is a Beautiful Thing requested by Hillary

Comments

Re: Banished Princess, Sun-Touched Prince: Universe Notes

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Sorry it took so long to reply. I was in the middle of finishing and posting my help_pakistan fic, and it took way longer than I thought.

Lol, and thus my reasons for Zuko not dying his hair in "Ice Flows Through" go out the window. Or he could be emo boy and wear the hood again. *starts thinking about how I can restructure this into a trilogy of novel length fics with maybe some illustration, shut up mind* That would definitely be in book two.

But the blond hair is so much harder to hide, and that makes me sadistically happy. And it makes him a much more noticeable symbol.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, look what I found! Someone drew Fire Nation Suki! (not based on my fic, mind) http://shibamura-prime.deviantart.com/art/Fire-Nation-Suki-61178696?qj=1&q=favby%3Achaos2112%2F5615626&qo=473

Re: Oh Come On, Of Course Zuko’s a HufflePuff

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

Oh, oh, I love this so much it kills me. *falls to the ground dead, comes back to life and retakes her seat* Wonderful story. Your imagination astounds me. I would kill, literally kill for more of this *bows down to master and awaits instructions* :-P

Re: Oh Come On, Of Course Zuko’s a HufflePuff

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

wait for the next request meme?

*sighs to self* I may need to convince this AU to give me a plot.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

I don't get it, why doesn't Katara or the Gaang help him? *pouts* loved it so much it hurts.

Re: Oh Come On, Of Course Zuko’s a HufflePuff

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

It happens. Sometimes ideas come, and sometimes they don't. I do love this idea, but you have so many that any of them would be worth the wait!

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Because A) he's a prickly prideful bastard who won't admit he needs help, and B) they're busy dealing with the catastrophic effects of a 100 year long world war too? And medically, Katara has done all she could. One of these days I'm going to write her trying with more spirit water, and having it fail.

Re: Oh Come On, Of Course Zuko’s a HufflePuff

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Oh, I have ideas for this, just none that involve actual plot, lol. For example, I will eventually write the drabble about how Zuko's a hard core theater geek in this verse.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

O.O Sad, sad AU, I like it! :-P

Re: Oh Come On, Of Course Zuko’s a HufflePuff

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

O.O Niiiiccccccccccccceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Heh, forget plot, this sounds awesome!

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

He lives a ridiculously long time in this AU, though, proves all the docs wrong, and reforms his country, and has a truly absurd number of children, and living with a chronic illness is not so bad. *Pets him* Not as sad as it could be, even if it rankles.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's hard but once you get used to it, have a routine, it gets better. That's why I like this AU so much, because living with it isn't something we see a lot in fiction. Or in modern society.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

That's because our culture (mine anyway, don't know what your culture is, and I shouldn't make assumptions) tells us chronically ill and disabled people that we should hide ourselves and our disability, and our living with it away. *shrugs* I like to write characters just dealing.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

Well, where I grew up not where I was born don't have a lot of patience for the disabled. Most restrooms don't have wheelchair access, the disabled parking is never enforced and most buildings are adapted for wheelchair access. So yeah, it's the whole out of sight out of mind mentality. It's weird because where I was born, they have all these laws about helping disabled people and anti-discrimination but yet they seemed so obsessed with "fixing" people.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Most people don't get that you can have a disability and still have a happy ending. Your disability and your flawed state should always be the first thing you're thinking about, not the history test, or the lunch date with your girlfriend, or the fact that your high school best friend called last week. No, it should be the disability, pricking you into discontentment. As if there is nothing to you bet the disability. And so you have to be fixed, before you can be a person like them.

So I write people with disabilities who live their lives anyway. Petty revenge, and an attempt at cultural change. Maybe it'll sink in with someone.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have a disability and I honestly don't think about it much. It's more of a that is, and not a what it could be. You adapt, work around it, with it when you can. It really annoys me when I end up telling people about it because they're all like: oh that's horrible. It's not, it just is. It's like someone having a darker color of eye and then people being, oh, that's horrible, how do you ever deal with it. Sigh. Anyway, your Zuko is wonderful and I love when he has problems that can't and sometimes don't need to be solved.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Plus, A:tLA fandom's really good about it. I get the most obnoxious comments and reviews in the Harry Potter fandom with regards to disability, but A:tLA has Toph and Teo, and the fandom picks up on that.

He angsts so much more about being a waterbender in Ice Flows Through than he does about having a disability in any of my fics. *feels an utterly inappropriate joke using the phrase "differently-abled" coming on*

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

Lol! Indeed. The difference being that losing his sight, or his leg are just parts of himself, becoming a waterbender and losing his firebending is more about identity. He is a firebender, a prince. The whole heir to the thrown didn't really get thrown in until after Azulon was dead and his father assumed the thrown. So even that wasn't really him, but being a firebender, it's like someone losing their ethnicity, who they are. I always thought he was an incredibly resilient person after everything that he went through.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Exactly. if I had more courage, I could have written some fascinating things about racial and ethnic politics in that fic. The thing about disability, is my fics are about how the identity is a small piece of you. Ice Flows Through is about Zuko realizing just what a huge part of him it is.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

That's one of the things I love about "Embers" and "Enslaved" is that they delves into this uncomfortable arena. My ethnic background is mixed, and I have found that the cultural differences between races is startling, considering how mixed it is in certain places. My brother and his wife are a perfect example of this. You don't realize it until it's staring you smack in the face. And not only race, but economic status. It's interesting when authors delve into this and do it well.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I'm ethnically but not racially mixed, being the daughter of an Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch Jew and an ex-Mormon, and I go around forgetting I'm a relatively religious Jew who speaks Hebrew and wears a Star of David every day, until something like Christmas or Easter comes around and everybody is swept up in the rituals of a world that just really isn't mine, and I keep forgetting that, or until someone says something that makes perfect sense from a culturally Christian perspective (It kills me most when Atheists do it, and then deny it) and assume I think the same way. Then it just hits me sideways, and I realize what it had to be like for people who were forced to convert, or go into hiding, and the kind of mask they not only had to build but remember they were wearing and how everyone around them was trying to rip a part of them to pieces. And I feel so lucky, because my faith and ethnicity isn't the target off the worst of it anymore.

And where I live is majority Hispanic, and most of my friends are Hispanic, and every time I say the word Anglo, I get told I'm not, I'm Jewish, get that through your head. It's another weird reminder, that I keep forgetting I can't assimilate all the way, and I'm the only one forgetting.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

Pff, my grandfather was an anglo jew, he married a black puerto rican (consider the times), my dad is bi racial, he married my mom who is mexican with a lot of spanish blood, and here I am. I can pass for white. I grew up in Mexico even though I was born in the US, so culturally I'm Mexican. Protestant too in a country and family primarily catholic. Now that's fun. It's funny because for a long time I didn't think of myself as white, hispanic, black. When I went to school in the States I had initially put white in my forms. :-P

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

My red-headed Cuban friend's the same. She takes so much shit from other Hispanics because her ancestors were probably mostly pure going back to Spain. And then all the white people around treat her like she's a liar for being pale and Cuban.

I'm blond and green eyed and look like the Swedish on my dad's side, but I have the nose and bones of the Ashkenazim, and once, when I dressed up as Tzeitel for a production of Fiddler, I gave my Egyptian best friend heart failure with just how Arab I looked when the hair was taken out of the equation. And I absolutely do not look out of place in a Synagogue. I'm caught between the occasional random person coming up to me to tell me I look Jewish (really? Are these people devoid of manners and social sense? It still makes my brain hurt) and other people telling me I don't look like a real Jew, because I don't have dark curly hair and olive skin. At least no one places my ancestors on the wrong continent.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[water-soter.livejournal.com]

My problem stems more from cultural (since I grew up watching US television and adapted a lot of their customs to my own) and religion. My family was the only protestant with my aunts and uncles and grandmother catholic.

Sigh, I haven't had that problem, quite the opposite. I have dark brown wavy hair, white, and green eyes. I'm also very tall. Most people thought I was Russian or German because I have a mild speech problem which gave me an accent even in spanish. Let me give you a little background so you can understand the mexican culture in Mexico. Way back when the spanish colonized Mexico, the had to deal with the natives. So they adapted the Catholic religion to fit their own. It was also a matter of race that mattered and color of skin. If you were spanish that came over, you were practically royalty, born in the colony, still high up but snubbed by other spanish born in spain, mixed race still had rights but were considered at the low end. Native, you were a slave. So even now lighter skin is treated better, though it's not as bad as it was in the US. Mostly, though, it's about money and social status.

For me the main problem was my ideology. I thought differently than most of my peers. My interests were different and thus I was different. I didn't treat people like they were lower than me because of the color of their skin or social economic background. That set me apart. We lived in a nice neighborhood but weren't rich or anything like that. But here in Mexico, it would be upper middle class or lower upper class. People expect things from you. How you are, your interests. It may not seem like much, but we were social outcasts and they let us know it. People were nice enough, but when the teacher has to threaten the class with doing a lottery for who got to take me in their group, well . . . you can imagine.

Re: Continuation: Azula’s lightning strike on Zuko has something far more serious consequences

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I'm from New Mexico, where the Mexican and Spanish history has left very similar marks. Old Spanish families still try to lord it over, and part of the reason why the old New Mexican Hispanics and recent Mexican immigrants come into conflict is that usually the Mexican immigrants are definite peasant class, and darker skinned. Hell, we still have a functioning Patron system in the North and the Llano. The Pueblo Indians were actually treated pretty well here, because they were seen as almost civilized and were amenable to being ruled by the Spanish, certainly better than American Indians were treated in the rest of the Spanish Americas, and we have a truly huge population of crypto-Jews, and of course, there was the influx of Anglos, but other than that, we have a lot of the same dynamics up here.

I had the last part, but that was for my disability. My small town treated me like a pariah for it. Really big on the victim blaming there.