#but Ozai is just such a weirdo ffs

[seyaryminamoto]

On the other hand, Sokka’s family dynamic is adorable and it’s very nice to see Kya alive and very much in love with her husband, being excited about Christmas and embarrassing Katara. I feel for Azula when she couldn’t help but compare it to her own family. Ozai would really be the kind of parent that is cold and emotionally distant to his children and tries to compensate it with material things, huh?

Haha, I talked about it in the other ask but anyway, yep, I absolutely agree that keeping Kya alive, and letting her be a perfectly wholesome wife to her very wholesome husband, is a wonderful highlight of this AU. Writing that whole scene with Hakoda being ridiculously cute with the mistletoe, as well as their dancing... Katara's second-hand embarrassment was very relatable, but those two being the happiest married couple is just everything I could want for them. Any setting where I can get away with keeping Kya alive is a good setting xD

And yeah, that's 100% how I was trying to write Ozai here. He focused so much on business and ensuring to build a successful economic foundation for his family that he purposefully neglected his wife and kids. Which drives the wife to do some reeeeally stupid things, which then causes serious rifts in the marriage and the family life altogether. There's a lot of wrong on both sides in terms of how they act, it's very difficult to argue that Ursa's choice is justified even when Ozai isn't 100% blameless either... even she doesn't think she's justified xD hence why she acts as she does, constantly riddled by guilt and bleakness, virtually unable to talk to her daughter (who of course doesn't want to talk to her either) or her husband. The guilt really has been consuming her for many years: this sudden opportunity to rebuild this family is a wake-up call of a sort for her.

Meanwhile, Ozai is a lot more stable now and he's succeeded at his business ventures... which means it's about time he's more available and ready to be part of the family. But it also means he has spent about 15-ish years being pretty distant, increasingly distant even, to the point where narrowing that distance between himself and his family is just not easy. There's a lot of damage on all sides, even in what I do consider a pretty positive AU, but Ozai and Ursa would start making efforts to change things for the better... and that's basically the plot of the sequel x'D Oh, I really should get to it...