#Ayaka and the Hikawas come from a much older post-war piece I wrote with a friend of mine who sometimes betas for me

[dawnsiren]

Im interested to know how you came up with the idea to write the Dragon!Azula au

Well, the Dragon!Azula thought in general started from me reading Scaled Over by MuffinLance and going ‘okay sure but What If Azula’

As Empires Fall specifically is a bit more complicated. In that what y’all’ve read from me is not actually the original story I had in mind. The original plan I had was for Azula, Zuko, and Iroh to go to the Southern Water Tribe and from there…. Well quite honestly I didn’t have a plan after that, which is why this version of the story doesn’t exist. Because I lost any motivation and abandoned it. This version of the story, iirc, lacked dragon!Ursa and had Magic Shenanigans resulting in Azula being in an actual egg that Ursa was pregnant with. As you might know, I cut this. This was just kind of a thing I was writing for the heck of it, without much real planning.

And then I read @ultranos’s dragon!Azula fic ‘I don’t want to set the world on fire’ which like…. Rebooted me and resurrected As Empires Fall in the form you’re familiar with. The first part of the prologue is genuinely a near-direct copy/paste from the forgotten draft, with only a few edits to line up with the place they go being the Sun Warriors instead of the South. And then the idea just kind of…. Grew prolifically until I had a full outline, complex plot, and 51 planned chapters.