#dumbledore shows up and gives harry a trophy and a million dollars

[osdove]

What got you into Azulaang?

A long post on my personal history with ATLA, the fandom and Azulaang in particular. It's a bit less on the ship itself and more on how I got into it. If you wanna hear my thoughts on why I adore it from a narrative viewpoint lemme know.

also. wait. i just realised. your url. 5ds reference?

With Azulaang (and most atla ships for me, with some exceptions), I didn't really get into the ship traditionally. When ATLA was coming out, I watched it and tuned in every week, but I didn't interact with the fandom at all. The most I'd do is visit the old nick site, maybe look up art on deviantart (but these were mainly just funny comic strips and gags, maybe a dress up game), but our family had the one computer and most of the time my older brother used it to play runescape, and I wasn't savvy with the internet at ALL.

Come 2009, a bit over a year after the show ended, I got my first laptop as part of my school's program in year 5/6 (end of primary school). I still didn't have wifi at home, so I couldn't use the internet on the laptop there, and the school's internet was heavily blocked. We weren't allowed google back then iirc, and even when the ban on that was lifted a year later, we still weren't allowed to go on google images. But, there were sites that they hadn't blocked. Sites we could go on for fun. And that same year I discovered fanfiction dot net on the family computer.

So, I'd have a system. FF wasn't blocked at school. I'd open up internet explorer, go on fanfiction dot net, go to the atla tag, and - cause like, I had amazing taste as a kid, and Azula was my fave and the character I decided to latch onto for fanfiction content - open every Azula fic i could find. If it was a one-shot I would open it in the same window. If it was a multichapter, I would open a new window, and then open every chapter individually in its own tab. I'd have easily 300 tabs open just on fanfiction alone. Then when I went home I'd just CONSUME all the fics I could read. And, being young, I didn't have any preference for ships or content. As long as it involved Azula, I was happy to read. Even better, if it involved post-canon Azula stuff - I wanted to read about her recovery and a redemption arc!

While tyzula was definitely the big ship at that time (and zucest) for azula, I remember there being a few fics based on pairings I hadn't considered before; sokkla and azulaang. Granted I didn't think about ships at all, because I was 10, and shipping wasn't a thing in my brain except for me shipping myself with OOT Link. The azulaang ones, in particular, exactly fit my interests of post-canon recovery stories. So it had a good start.

Now that I'm older and I've been in and out of the fandom since, yknow, it started, I've always liked Azulaang. But I think with age I've come to appreciate just how nuanced the pair can be, it's wonderfully complicated and sometimes messy but I think they'd be a good fit.

But. yknow. ill save that for another time.