#faith in atla fandom restored?

[prying-pandora666]

“The Search” Rewrites, Book 4: Air, Leaks, and A Call for Help from the Fandom

I’ve talked a little about the Book 4: Air restoration project @book4air. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out! Three full episodes are already out and episode 4 is going to cover Zuko’s early days right after his banishment, exploring his relationship with Iroh and the world as Zuko understands it as a lost boy rapidly coming into manhood.

Wait until you hear the VA’s performance with music and everything! It’ll break your heart.

But I want to talk a little bit about what comes after these next few episodes: our adaptation of “The Search”.

If you’ve seen our adaptation of “The Promise”, you’ll know it was quite faithful. This won’t be the case for “The Search”. For the purposes of the overarching story we are telling, this story is getting overhauled. (Please still support the original release if you’d like to see the canon version).

The biggest change that’s been announced is the addition of Toph. The team felt that a story about family, identity, and faces could benefit from including Toph’s perspective as she comes from a unique but toxic family situation, has a strong conflict between the performance expected of her versus who she really is, and is completely blind and so faces don’t even register for her.

Here is the sample scene we released:

But I want to talk a little bit about what we are changing about Zuko and Azula’s roles in the story. While the set up is virtually unchanged, there is one small alteration that makes a big difference.

(Sorry for the poor quality, this is technically unreleased content and I’m being kinda risky leaking it.)

Ursa’s letters are now a diary. This means that rather than get random flashbacks, the narrative framing now becomes Zuko and Azula reading these entries together. As a result, they get to discuss their discoveries about their family, and even share each other’s perspectives.

What that means is that when things like Zuko dangling Azula over the cliff happen, now we actually are forced to address it. The characters have to talk about how they treat each other and the reasons why. They have to confront the toxic family dynamic they’ve been forced and groomed into since childhood. Zuko has to realize his mentally ill little sister isn’t the monster here and in fact he’s the one with all the power now, and Azula has to realize that Zuko can be trusted if she can let go of her fear long enough to talk to him about her vulnerabilities.

We also address issues like this:

Many people criticize this for being OOC, but I think there’s a way this could easily not be. Sokka has been known to be juvenile and reactionary as a first response, the difference is that he always eventually apologizes and learns from his mistakes. Without even needing to be asked.

Threatening a mentally ill person who has just been removed from an asylum—even as a joke—is not okay. It would be questionable even if they’d been friends before this, but considering their prior relationship it really does seem like an boneheaded lack of awareness or compassion for how triggering this could be.

So rather than remove this interaction, we addressed it. And I am really taking a risk posting this here, but here is a brand new script page:

Sokka isn’t just comic relief. Sokka is smart, Sokka is compassionate, Sokka is brave, and Sokka knows when it’s time to apologize and reach out versus when it’s time to fight.

Safe to say, there are several things that stay the same and we tried to keep faithful to the spirit of the story, but there’s a lot we wanted to do for the Gaang and for the Fire Sibs, and I hope you’ll join us on this adventure, whether you’re a diehard fan of the comics and just looking for a fun AU, or you hate the comics and would like a rewrite, or even if you’ve never read them and would just love to return to the world of ATLA.

The only trouble is, we can’t do it alone. The project is very expensive and time consuming to produce. Our team pays for everything out of pocket and some of us don’t even have reliable housing, so it’s been a hard time.

If you can help in any way, even only by spreading the word so YouTube will stop burying us in the algorithm, that would be huge!

If you can afford to help, we have a Patreon where you can get all sorts of early goodies.

Reblogs and comments greatly appreciated! As the head writer and voice of Azula, this project is very near and dear to me. Avatar was my first pro-writing gig when I was just a homeless 19 year old, and it’s here for me again as I struggle to rebuild my life and health that COVID destroyed.

I love this series and the community that has helped me through the hardest times in my life. I can’t wait to make something beautiful with you all!

[justoceanmyth]

sorry if this is too personal but i noticed quite a few of ur atla fics are labeled as mystery works and are not able to be read?? if i may ask, what happened??

Hi there! No worries, it's not super personal at all - mainly I'm just tired of the atla fandom at-large, and feeling burned out on it. I split my reply into two sections, so that you can see the reasoning, if that's what you're interested in, or you can see how I did it (as it's a method I recommend as a third option that's neither deleting a work on ao3 nor orphaning it). Why: The latest stuff with kataang week has just solidified my feeling burnt out and alienated from the atla fandom at large. With the live action, and the influx of fans, it feels like the fandom is spinning its wheels in the same attitudes I saw in 2020 - ship wars, accusative toxicity of the "I saw Goody Proctor with the devil!" type, and a general lack of maturity in the responses and discussion of the canon. The actions surrounding the kataang week drama have been filled with bad-faith unwillingness to accept responsibility for actions which have resulted in a ton of harassment, and accusations of gatekeeping flying around, so I wanted to create some distance for myself. It's not an environment I want to engage with any longer. At the same time however, I was already considering this move to just allow myself a fresh-er start in writing other things that I feel passionate about. While I know you're asking from a genuine place, I want it out there in writing that the latest events were just the straw that broke the camel's back on a move that I've been considering for a while. How: Now, the works are mystery and unable to be read because they've been put in a collection type that's typically used for exchanges - the label is "unrevealed" and it's in collection settings, along with the little box that marks the works in the collection as anonymous (which hides the works from your works list on your profile but not your stats page). I didn't want to delete my works, since this is just about me wanting to be distanced from the fandom for a while, and I didn't want to orphan anything either, since I still like a lot of what I've written for the fandom. I didn't hide (I'm pretty sure), any works that I wrote with the intent of being a gift for someone else, or anything f/f that I wrote. Doing it this way prevented it from breaking any bookmarks (though they obviously show up at the moment as "mystery work by anon"), and assuming the site doesn't glitch, that will be restored when I take the works out of the collection. In the time before that happens, if you, or anyone else wants to read a particular work - shoot me a dm or ask off anon and I'll either pull it out of the collection for a little while, or I'd be happy to directly send a copy of the downloaded fic. I don't want to "punish" or upset anyone who enjoys my work, but I need a little space at the moment.

[hishoukoku]

Hey fellow zutarian here.

I find it so f*cking funny how heated zk antis get when they find one of us. Like frothing at the mouth, keyboard smashing while typing their rant Angry. It's sad and pathetic how mad they get over a ship. It's ironic how much time they will spend going after zks, compared to how much time they spend actually shipping the ship they support. Those asks you've been getting about antis realizing you are a zk are a prime example.

Coulve easily unfollowed or just filtered the zk tag so they can still follow you for your other content aside from zk. But noooOooOoo they had to go on fiery fueled tantrum in your asks about zk. I could practiclly feel the froth dripping from your ask box (sorry for the nasty imagery). They even had the time to find something you said about zk a while ago and quote it. Like wow.

Anyway just wanted to say you're awesome and I love your blog and ZUTARA FOREVER suck that up antis!

Hey <33

Exactly that's the biggest problem with them. They are soo overly obsessed with zk that they forget to chill and enjoy their own ship(s) and look through their own tags maybe?

That one anon's realization of what I ship was too hilarious to even get angry over it. Idk how they even found that quote given it wasn't a reblog it was a Reply to a post. Like how obsessively are they searching what zk's say including scrolling through replies? It's astonishing to me.

And naaah as soon as they learn I ship zk too, no other fandoms on my blog matter. It's as you said the anger fuelled tantrum takes over and they only see the ask button xD.

Thank you so much for your words, you're awesome too <333 ZUTARA FOREVER indeed !!