#bcuz for an AU s8 to work it has to.... actually stay on track till s8

[felikatze]

hello hi! please ramble about lloyd-harumi roleswap au. how does harumi get along with the other ninja. what about her relationship with wu. my only knowledge of ninjago (aside from watching the first two seasons when they came out and then dropping the show) is through your posts about it so i am very curious to hear how you're constructing this au. it seems fun

yes another opportunity to ramble

gotta admit harumi and the ninja are like less developed than the harumi-lloyd-garmadon shebang but.

so in my previous posts about this AU i stated that harumi spends more time with pythor than lloyd does and the ninja only take her in when pythor ditches her after she finds all the serpentine with him.

as per her canon reaction to bad events she ends up being incredibly silent. she's just generally existing alongside the others without interacting at first and not saying a word. the ninja are frustrated by this for juvenile "cmon we saved you" reasons as they're all goobers but!! they're also concerned about her cuz dang the saw pythor turning on her Live They Were There and that must've stung.

they turn it into a kind of competition to see who can get her to open up first. kai shows her video games. jay shows her comics. cole tries to get her to go mountain climbing with him. zane bakes her a cake.

imagine instead of the episode where lloyd pranks everybody it's just everyone trying to win the friendship of this 11yr old girl pretending they dont exist

the competition doesn't last long until, because oh no, she got kidnapped after kai dropped her off at an arcade. i already said in the first post that curiosity was a big factor in harumi finding the serpentine in the first place, and that hasn't waned. she wants to know what they're up to! and whatever it is, she wants to stop them!

harumi per canon is i think incredibly petty. maybe her disguise and acting skills are better than lloyd's and she doesn't even get found out immediatly. who knows i'm vague on this so far.

the gist of it is that harumi does eventually speak to the ninja but only after kai rescues her from the volcano, because only when she sees kai choose her over the fangblade does she see that these people aren't going to use her.

she's not anyone's relative nor do they know she's the green ninja yet, so that does mean a lot to random orphan girl harumi.

overall i think she actually likes zane the most. zane knows best what it's like to be an outsider and he's really good about respecting her boundaries, and respecting her silence. he waits for her to talk first and she appreciates that!

this means zane's death in s3 hits her Hard. it dredges up the grief she still has for her parents and gives a whole "why does everything bad always happen to me" sort of vibe. she's frustrated she can never keep anything good in her life and everything has a catch. i think in whatever the s4 for this is she's ready to throttle chen flat out.

(chen is the s4 bad guy who kidnapped zane for blackmail reasons when everyone still thought zane was dead so fair tbh)

kai gets to come in second because he's a Bro. and also the whole volcano thing. he's smug that she talked to him first so she likes antagonizing him sometimes. keep him on his toes.

she knows jay means well but he talks too much in her opinion. meanwhile cole stole one of her candy bars once and she's never forgiving him /lh

i know you said you havent't watched past s2 but consider for me harumi morro parallels and how this affects wu.

basic gist for you: morro is a season 5 character and wu's first student. he was a Random Orphan (like harumi!) whom wu took in bcuz he thought morro was the green ninja (he wasnt). morro got upset at not being the green ninja so he ran away and Frickin Died.

and then he came back as a vengeful ghost in season 5 hellbent on destroying the actual green ninja and also wu, which is fun.

so wu is SUPER cautious around harumi, basically. later seasons tend to emphasize guilt in wu's character a lot and here it just shines earlier. he's afraid to let harumi near the golden weapons, he's not telling anybody about the green ninja prophecy, he's afraid of history repeating itself.

he's vry distant to her, so much so that still evil garmadon strikes up more camraderie than wu does.

but things still go according to canon and kai figures she's the green ninja, like actually. wu is. conflicted about this! because he doesn't want this 11yr old girl to have to fight his super evil warlord brother. and maybe die. because he already let one kid die, remember.

i'd imagine that after the cat's out of the bag, he doubles down on training her, hard. harumi, in return, dislikes him to a reasonable degree. wu still refuses to talk abt morro because wu has Problems (thank u s5 and s7 and s11 and literally every season for establishing this). it's not till the AU s5 that harumi finally understands why wu is Like That and that he's acting mainly out of concern

doesn't mean she automatically likes wu though. the girl's petty. wu got a long way to go till he lands in her good graces!

you can probably tell that for the main seasons this AU doesnt change much plot wise except for the specifics of character dynamcis and this is because i love character dynamics and i hate plot.