#Hoelun is Eddie Blake from the Fire Nation's POV

[lightdancer1]

My rule with the Azula/Hoelun relationship is that it is in its own way a mirror of how far on the grimdark scale any given AU is

The Continuation-verse, the Sins-verse, and the Dragon-verse are all pretty high on that list. So that means with the Omashu-verse and the Azula Heresy that there will be versions of the relationship that emerge in each, though each one will be a path that evolves down a line of actually evolving and getting to a point where it's earned by both. Hoelun as a child soldier recruited early on and surviving in an equivalent of the Dirlewanger Brigade in the Fire Nation does not happen in the relatively lighter and softer AUs.

The only grimdark AU she doesn't show up in is the Fire and Water and Earth and Air AU but there Azula and Toph are married, so... *shrugs*

For the lighter and softer Fire Sage AU there will be a new character Azula falls in love with there, reflecting that it's a best-case scenario and that AU Fire Nation never raises the mass of child soldiers to begin with, so Hoelun's particular arc is avoided due to her being too young for military service.

I admit to using different iterations of the relationship not least because Hoelun as a bit of a mirror to Azula and someone much more like the Comedian to her Captain America works very well as a foil to her, and it basically offers an established brand of queer visibility and centering a butch lesbian when butch characters are not that frequent in media.

Hoelun also serves as a 'lower deck' protagonist showcasing the effects of the various grimdark Fire Nations and how they affect rank and file people. I will say that in the Azula Heresy AU she gets one of the most blatant 40K shout-outs as she becomes the equivalent of a Commissar/Politruk and at least initially starts off the most directly villainous of any of her AU versions by virtue of also embodying the older iteration of 40K where she's entirely aware the God-Empress thing is a scam but it gives her power over people who hurt her and she *enjoys* it. And then she gets given the order to hunt down the arch-heretic....

In the Omashu AU Hoelun's arc is intended to be something of a surprise element when it does show up so I intend to have that one held close to the chest until that moment happens in the specific chapter there.

[lightdancer1]

I do admit to some relative pleasure:

In that my two main OCs I've come up with my various Avatar AUs, Hoelun and Hino, actually get a positive reception. It's always a gamble to try that and Hino at least fits into a canon niche that *still* has no actual name or backstory so there's a lot of room to flex with Iroh's wife. Having her written out like the wife in a Mel Gibson movie is IMO lazy sexist tropes.

Having Hino in a variety of forms as a snarky seer who takes a wee bit of a nod to Sailor Moon is.....well, I do admit that I like writing her because in a sense her fire-sight is almost fourth wall observance. She sees the events of each timeline like a person watching a movie, though she can't comment on it directly (which gives a nifty means to avoid the Cassandra trope while giving her something of a Delphic role she can use or not use for manipulative purposes at times).

Hoelun is the rougher side of imperialistic war and meant to be a blend of Eddie Blake from Watchmen and expanding on the side of the Fire Nation's war shown by the Rough Rhinos. She exists so the reader can't look away from the uglier sides of the Fire Nation's imperialism on the one hand and also to provide a sympathetic POV that showcases that a unit otherwise reliably slotted for the villain role (given it's based on a blend of the Dirlewanger and Murder Waffen-SS battalions it comes by that very honestly) as a means to note even the vilest people in the setting were and are people. And that the ones that chose to stay down that path CHOSE to stay down it.

And also she ends up as Azula's love interest in a few ATLs because she's a butch softie at heart who wears her intimidating Comedian-like nihilism as a mask and who gets thrown into Hell and survives it. That all by itself is where the two connect and it deepens from there over time.

I did not anticipate that they'd get the kind of positive reception they did and do, as I'm aware that introducing major OCs into a story is a bit of an art form as much miss as hit, but I'm glad that it's working out.