#Shoto is basically a guardian spirit

[izukumidoriyaofficial]

Random thought! Whenever you get the chance Zuzu, watch Rise Of The Guardians with Shoto and the rest of your Dekusquad! It’s about a winter spirit joining forces with legendary spirits to defeat nightmares! Trust me, you’ll like Jack Frost cuz he basically has half of Shoto’s ice powers X3

I haven't watched it yet, but it's on my list! I have a bunch of stuff on my list at the moment!

This includes...

Rise of the Guardians

The Nun

Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Mean Girls

Avatar The Last Airbender

Ouran High School Host Club (for the rewatch)

The Hills Have Eyes

[somniumoflight]

Crossover Idea #10 – My Hero Academia/Avatar: The Last Airbender

The Fire Nation’s royal family is haunted by two spirits that appear under very specific circumstances – these spirits are Todoroki Shoto and Dabi.

So, I’ve been reading a lot of Avatar fanfictions lately, and amongst the ones I’ve read is this really good BNHA crossover fanfic where Zuko and Todoroki keep accidentally switching places with each other in their respective worlds.  The fanfic itself isn’t too long yet (only 4 chapters so far) but there’s a very long bnha atla swap au tag on @captainkirkk’s tumblr page (might have gotten the acronyms in the wrong order, be forewarned) where people have drawn many, many comparisons between the Todoroki family and the Fire Nation royal family, and that kind of inspired this idea.

So, here’s the rundown of this crossover au.  The first divergence happened a hell of a long time ago, only a couple generations after the first Fire Lord was properly crowned.  The grandson of the first Fire Lord (aka the third Fire Lord, aka guess who this is?) sought the power to surpass his generation’s Avatar, at first with his own flames but eventually by finding a spiritually powerful firebender of mixed blood to force into a marriage, in the hopes that having more than Fire Nation in their blood would make his children strong enough to challenge the Avatar.  This, and that Lord’s abusive “training” of his two sons, backfired on him magnificently when the eldest son first ran away, then tried to lead a rebellion against his father and in the process convinced his youngest sibling to help said rebellion. When the two boys were executed for treason after the rebellion failed, their ghosts lingered, haunting their family so that they could continue trying to bring their father down after death.

Except after their father finally died, they continued to linger in the living world rather than moving on.  So now they haunt the royal family and have been doing so for generations, and slowly over the centuries have become proper spirits rather than just human ghosts – one, a guardian spirit for those betrayed by those of their blood (Shoto) and the other an avenger who lingers as long as the one betrayed wants vengeance but has yet to take it (Dabi.)

Fast forward to when Zuko is alive.  For as long as his father’s been treating him poorly in favor of Azula (so, like, as soon as Azula started bending before him), he’s been catching glimpses of a strange teenager with mismatched eyes and a streak of white in his hair around the palace, usually when something nasty is about to happen to him and then some weird incident happens that stops that something nasty in its tracks.  Nobody but Zuko seems to realize he’s there until after his Uncle comes back from Ba Sing Se, sees the spirit as well, and realizes just how screwed up the royal family’s become.  And then little differences start stacking up, influencing canon as they go and blowing everything off the rails one wheel at a time.

Details of this crossover:

Endeavor was the grandson of the first Fire Lord in the Fire Nation’s history, and the third Fire Lord to be crowned.  He was, according to legend, one of the most powerful Fire Lords to ever rule, and was said to be friends with his generation’s Avatar (who, come on, has to be All Might. Who else could it be?)

However, jealous of the power that that Avatar had, Endeavor forced a woman of mixed Fire Nation and Water Tribe blood (there were probably Water Tribe pirates, let’s say that her mother was fire nation… let’s leave it at that) and great spiritual and (water)bending power to marry him, in the hopes that the mixed blood would make his children powerful enough to contend with the Avatar.

Technically he sort of got what he wanted – his eldest son found it remarkably easy to use the more powerful blue flames that he had such trouble with, and his youngest son figured out how to imitate waterbending by basically pulling a Zuko from Vathara’s Embers – he could put heat into water and manipulate it that way

However, both of these powerful children hated his guts for how he treated them while “training,” and so when the eldest son (Dabi) ran away and eventually returned as the leader of a rebellion against him, and the youngest (Shoto) was convinced to help his oldest brother in order to protect his family, he was “forced” to hunt them down and kill them before they could topple his regime.

The two sons, however, lingered after death as ghosts in order to protect their remaining family from their father (Shoto) and keep trying to kill him as revenge (Dabi).  They lingered for so long waiting for their old man to die that some of the servants in the palace started praying to them as if they were spirits, and as such when Endeavor finally died (Dabi managed to destroy the ceiling in his room somehow and crushed him under the beams) the two ghosts ended up lingering as… guardian spirits of sorts, for their siblings’ descendants.

They only appear when similar circumstances to their own life – one of the royal family trying to hurt (physically or emotionally) one of their siblings, parents, children, etcetera – and otherwise do not interact with the family.

Fast forward thousands of years, Shoto and Dabi have grown in power, and their origins have faded from the annuls of Fire Nation history. Zuko is born to Ozai, and it soon becomes clear that Ozai is not happy with his perfectly good son, and could care less whether he lives or dies. He starts seriously considering hurting the boy when Azula starts bending before him, which is when Shoto first starts appearing.

He mostly protects Zuko from attempts on his life or accidents that could end up hurting him. This includes everything from assassination attempts from people within or without the Fire Nation to, I dunno, random branches falling out of trees that could squash him.  On one memorable occasion Shoto saves Zuko from drowning, which draws the attention of the palace staff and Ozai, since it was so very clearly a spirit that saved him – what else could make water boil and then surge to shore carrying the drowning boy?

Zuko basically ends up growing up in the palace with a spiritual bodyguard hovering over his shoulder that he’s at first barely aware of and knows next to nothing about, save that the spirit is apparently Fire Nation yet controls water somehow, and he seems to grow stronger as the years go on.

Technically, Shoto is getting stronger, but not because more time is passing – it’s because Ozai starts betraying Zuko as a father more and more, and Shoto’s starting to be reminded of his own father, and he DOES NOT APPRECIATE THE SIMILARITIES THANK YOU.

Then the Agni Kai happens – and the entire room of people watching the Agni Kai against Zuko’s father are right there to see Shoto suddenly appear before all of them, extremely pissed off at Ozai.  While most of the people in the room don’t know what his appearance means, Ozai does – he knows what makes this particular spirit appear, and if anyone else in the room knew then he’d be screwed.

So instead of killing Zuko after the Agni Kai, like he was seriously considering, he banishes his son.

Shoto ends up sticking with Zuko throughout all his years searching for the Avatar and throughout the course of the canon story.  His presence doesn’t overly change much, except Aang and eventually Katara and Sokka (after the North Pole) can see him due to their various spirit shenanigans across the nations, and seeing a spirit with the same scar as Zuko throws them through a loop a bit.

Things do make a major change after Azula arrives to take Zuko and Iroh back to the Fire Nation as prisoners.  See, while most people don’t know the true nature of Shoto and Dabi as spirits, one of the few people (other than Ozai) that does is Iroh, mostly thanks to that pilgrimage he took following Ba Sing Se.  And during one particularly bad day when Zuko is basically cursing Shoto’s existence because he doesn’t need help, why is this spirit even here, Iroh decides to tell him exactly why that spirit is there.

Finding out why Shoto is protecting him – because his father has betrayed him, and wants to harm him – shakes Zuko’s faith in Ozai WAY earlier than canon.  It also plants a budding seed of resentment against his father and Azula (who has also betrayed him, if to a lesser extent than his father), which eventually leads to Zuko actually taking Aang and Katara’s side against Azula in Ba Sing Se, instead of later.

This is where Dabi comes into play, because unlike Shoto, who appears whenever Zuko needs to be protected from one of his own blood, Dabi appears whenever Zuko feels resentment and, even if only for a moment, seriously wants to hurt one of his own blood.  Even normal siblings will occasionally want to strangle each other – there’s no way Zuko didn’t seriously want to hurt Azula at some point, even in canon.

So during the fight with Azula, Zuko feels just enough resentment of how perfect an heir to Ozai Azula is that Dabi appears and literally turns Azula’s own flames against her, burning her.  It leaves a nasty scar similar to Dabi’s own across Azula’s face – a scar she cannot hide, a scar that makes her less than perfect, and Zuko is more than a little horrified, especially when he later finds out it was his own anger against her that technically let Dabi hurt her.  He may have seriously wanted to hurt her, but he didn’t actually want to put her in danger from their father, and those scars are very recognizable.

Dabi doesn’t hurt anybody again for a long time, but Zuko keeps seeing him out of the corner of his eye or in reflections, or in dreams of his and Shoto’s past that he starts having following being attacked by another spirit while traveling with the Gaang out of Ba Sing Se or something.

Those dreams eventually lead to Zuko discovering just who Shoto and Dabi were in the past, with help from Iroh and the Gaang, and Zuko decides that not only is he going to help take down Ozai and keep his sister off the throne, but he’s going to do everything in his power to make certain that nobody in the royal family is ever hurt by their family again, at least not like THAT.

After that most things are more or less canon in terms of actual events during the show, and the last bit of canon divergence before the end of the show’s timeline is, when Aang turns up with Ozai after getting rid of his firebending, Ozai tries to convince him to take revenge against him, to burn him, kill him – and Zuko decides that he’s already had his revenge against him.  That’s the last time Dabi appears, when he ends up burning a mark of shame into Ozai’s face and then vanishes and is never seen by any of the Gaang again.

Shoto, on the other hand, lingers for a long time, and Zuko still sees him out of the corner of his eyes as he becomes Fire Lord and works towards a better future for himself and his nation.

Cracky alternative title for this crossover: “Fuck Endeavor and Ozai: Shitty Parents Need to Burn”