#lightdancer comments on tropes

[lightdancer1]

This also applies to one of the most basic tropes separating military fiction from military reality:

Now granted, at the start, there is always the reality that a story is a story and reality is reality. Real life differs from fiction in all kinds of ways and just as it's perfectly acceptable to portray a medieval past without reliance on a historically accurate dung-filled literal shithole unless you're doing a Monty Python movie, there are good and cogent reasons why these factors of real wars tend to be left out.

Yet, and I admit to a bias here because it's how I write my own stories, I believe that aspects of this can enhance a war story told in another fashion while not bogging down the narrative.

The most obvious factor is that war stories, most often because writers do not bother to really read into how real wars are fought, neglect logistics entirely. In reality real wars are almost entirely matters of logistics, which shape what actually happens in a battle or a campaign. It is this side of real wars that is almost invisible in war stories because unless you've got a Good Soldier Svjek style approach it's rather boring to write some REMF making sure the armies are fed, equipped, clothed, or to get into the kind of detailed aspects that account for what gives higher officers their actual ranks.

In reality generalship really is an artform requiring a person to blend multiple skills at once, only some of which are military. Bullshitting and political aspects are very important aspects to a point that generals that pretend they can ignore them are forgotten and the ones that are remembered excel at them. But fiction will show you a general pulling an Albert Sidney Johnston and acting like an overranked sergeant and seldom shows you the general getting killed like the actual people who did that tended to do.

The second is the factor of friction/fog/confusion, aka Murphy's Law in military uniform. Anything that can and will go wrong always does in the most grimly hilarious ways possible, people do not have perfect information about what's happening and the misunderstandings can have a gallows humor all their very own. This factor is left out of fictional wars not because it's not dramatic, but because people like their wars with superheroic wunderkinder who always know what's on the other side of the hill, where in reality the wunderkinder was a lucky son of a bitch and the other side was taking a shit break and he timed the attack right when they were crapping.

And the third and especially blunt factor is that no matter the era war is long elements of boredom (with all the havoc that can happen with armed people trained to kill) interspersed with deadly peril. Whether or not it's face to face with the more visceral aspects or the indirect and impersonal horror of a modern battlefield, actual peril is a relatively small, if extremely memorable, part of military life. Fiction, of course, really leaves this bit out unless it's the rare (these days) military comedy where this is the primary setting.

This is by no means stating that stories should mirror reality. There are entirely cogent reasons why they don't, but this is also why it's very hard to do a truly antiwar film because films almost always leave the boring and ugly parts out, and the result makes war look ten times more glamorous than it is.

The extra factor is that almost any kind of story you can think of will have these points where they fiddle with reality for the sake of the story. The task of a good writer is to deal with this very truthful problem for all writers and make the story so good the readers never really notice all the bits fudged for the sake of the craft.

[lightdancer1]

TBH everything that goes to potentially making their personalities clash would also provide a good relationship in the right hands. You also have plentiful storytelling fodder from someone who in many ways is selfish (though where she is it tends to be for the right reasons more often than not), more vindictive than Azula at a personal level, and who had to earn her way to her power and prowess versus someone who took her power for granted and was indulged in it in many ways the wrong way to do so. Someone who'd go from a life of luxury in the Fire Nation to the more austere life of the Southern Water Tribe and to the kind of endemic intrigue and hostility between the North and South that would lead to the Korra-era war.

There are plenty of excellent tales that use this, Measure Each Step to Infinity remains my all time favorite Azutara narrative. It also sets one of the highest bars for an Azula lesbian romance.

why do ppl ship azutara ? they both have really strong personalities that would just rub each other the wrong way. i couldn't see them working out as a couple at all.,as frenemies would be better

I am probably the wrong person for this question, shipping and shipping dynamics are not my thing. @theowritesfiction and @juniperhillpatient would probably be better people to ask. But it is in my top three ships so I will try.

They are pretty similar in some regards. Both are highly skilled benders, intense, and strong willed. But Katara is someone who is much more comforting and socially skilled while Azula is awkward and irritating. The comforting nice girl breaking through the mean girls outer shell to get to know her is pretty satisfying. But also Katara can hand Azula back in meanness and spite what she gives, so that is fun to see.

Katara is also someone who is good at understanding other people and will absolutely stand her ground on her beliefs. Azula ending up in a position post war where she needs a defender is common, so Katara finds a way in. Not as a loving relationship, but merely because it is the right thing to do. So watching Katara and Azula going from people who would want nothing to do with each other to lovers is another fun thing to see.

They are also both cool characters, and having two cool characters get together is awesome.

Well there is your answer from somebody who 90% of the time ignores the ships in a story. Really asking anyone other than me about shipping is probably a better idea.

[lightdancer1]

And in particular the most common reason that a story will not mirror reality is this:

In reality events happen as they happen and it is the task of people after the fact to make sense of something that did happen. Stories, be they slice of life or driven by conflict, are written for a purpose, with a specific structure. Events are not, or at least should not, be wasted. Every word counts, regardless of a writer's style. As such fiction is and should rely on conservation of detail, regardless of style, where reality is full of little things that are either irrelevant or immaterial or straight out nonsensical.

In short, fiction will always make more sense than reality because things have to make sense in a story and reality only has to exist.

[lightdancer1]

In the case of The War of the Worlds it's really a three-fer though this article only talks about one of them.

The alien invasion genre, which took the existing invasion genre (which still exists out there in both original flavor and alternate history with examples like 1905) originated as a pure 'how would you like it if it happened to you' extension of the Tasmanian Genocide. The Martians are the British, the tripods are machine guns, and humanity is the Palawa.

Beyond this the Martians represent Wells's view of the ultimate postwar evolution of humanity as a glorified brain, hence their proto-Chulhu-ish appearance as lumpish masses with tentacles and no real face.

And beyond this, the world government at the end is deliberately an example of Wells taking his genocide flip narrative and using it for wish fulfillment.

[lightdancer1]

The biggest reason that I'm cynical about the 'Azula is innately evil types' and most portrayals of her as this in fanfic as well

Is that it shies away from showing her as actually evil. She's simultaneously smart and powerful and never bothers to use her powers to be about as big a game-breaker as Ty Lee which she would be. Sniping someone with lightning before they know she's there, for example. Or going straight up Arnaud Amalric "Kill them all for Agni will know her own" and not bothering with the Dollar Store Joker characterization from the comics.

She could be a very compelling supervillain if written that way. The canon and the fandom don't really WANT to write a Johnny Bates type with fire powers and a grudge against the person who destroyed the world they knew. Because that would involve admitting the Chuck Tingle Turtleduck and War Santa did things to provide a valid grudge to begin with and they'd rather die than admit cartoon characters can be written to make very big mistakes with lasting consequences even when they're written, at least in intention, as capital G Good Guys.

THAT would be an 'evil' Azula narrative actually worth reading. Most of the 'hurka durka ableism' and 'hurka durka calling Zuko Zuzu and Dum Dum is the most evil and heinous thing of them all' approaches aren't that. They're boring, show limited imagination, and limited capacity to approach fictional characters actually written as evil.

Meanwhile *I* created an expy of comics Azula done right who has a 1,200+ bodycount over a decade and rising and is a straight up bomb throwing anarchist who has Stalin tier bad boss status but is fearsome enough like Stalin to get away with it even as everyone around her hates and fears her. Jiren is everything the dollar store Batman villain in the post-canon stories is not.

That's why I have no patience for most fictional Azulas. She's not an impressively written supervillain and she shows people far too fragile to face up to writing the kind of evil that actually deserves a grimdark label. It also stems from the inevitable plagiarism of the show with minor differences that dogs most of the fandom, because they don't know how to write their own stories, merely rewriting the canon in a poor fashion that deserves scorn by itself.

[lightdancer1]

One of the biggest reasons why I work hard to humanize my characters, even the nastiest. It gives them angles that make the things they go and do have that much more meaning when they're affable or 'normal' seeming outside the context of those actions. It's also meant to be a mirror of real life.

It's meant to be a disturbing factor that people who are human, even likeable, can and will turn around and do horrible, or disgusting things. This is more truthful to life than the inhuman monsters.

The flip side with the cosmic horror element too is that when the inhuman monsters do show up they're literally inhuman monsters. Actual cosmic evil cracks reality apart just like cosmic good and the entities that embody it aren't remotely close to human in conception anyway, so humanity may or may not appreciate it if random multiversal entity is good or evil from the perspective of a single world in that multiverse.

And that actual Evil with the capital E is a concept that is not human, because it requires a unity of will and focus on a specific set of actions no human being can match or come close to matching.

Every person who believes that atrocities can only be committed by inhuman monsters makes it more likely that more will be committed in the future.

[lightdancer1]

To spell out an obvious plot point directly

Two of the big reasons I have Ursa as a part of Azula's issues and starting off but seldom finishing as an antagonist are, respectively:

1) Not scapegoating an abuse victim for Ozai's actions. Ozai is the prime mover of problems for the rest of his family, whether or not he lives to become the Fire Lord. Ozai's willful violence and perfectionism boosted by his mental illness and slightly delusional self-perceptions is where things start their downhill slide and get worse from there. Ozai is the villain, Ursa is the living embodiment of 'the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.'

As with Iroh her antagonistic roles are always more interesting from good intentions, both self-perceived and reality. Ozai, by contrast, works very well as a straight up villain even when given more human/'realistic' aspects of his motivations that leave the core intact and simply getting an actual human aspect attached to it.

2) Given that Azula is also an abuse victim it allows for one thing on which the two in even the nadir settings can find an understanding, if not toleration with each other. It would apply to Ozai as well, if he were the type to accept help when repeatedly offered to him and to make use of it. This happens in only one AU where it's essentially forced on him by a walking deus ex machina doing her thing.

Given how many of the pitfalls of the first ATLA storyline hinge on denying Azula a voice at the one hand and taking the voice of its main character too uncritically to fanboy perceptions with Zuko, a good Azula story should strive to do more than invert the basis of canon by switching which Fire sibling gets the unchallenged perspective and moral switching. Expecting higher standards means actually adhering to them in one's own works.

[lightdancer1]

I'm a firm believer in taking settings with magic and monsters and letting all the magic and monsters stay exactly as they are

That is 100% the point of the thing. I refuse on general principles to do stories where characters lack the powers or traits from the original show because I'm not interested in watching a high school 'comedy'. I'm interested in watching people with superpowers fighting other people with superpowers and watching giant monsters do their thing.

I do, however, like to add just enough realism by dealing with some of the factors most shows skip over, like for example the budgetary or logistics factors that go into things. Not just the war parts, developing this in the civilian form is just as much a nod to make the societies and worlds feel more 'believable' while not changing anything of the cool parts.

The goal is not to downplay the cool fantastic bits that make the series interesting, it's to ground them in a world that feels real while sacrificing nothing of the draws that made the stories interesting to begin with. Too many times people conflate realism with edgelordy stacking the grimdark on top of itself until it produces an incoherent sequence of Very Bad ThingsTM. That's not what it is, or what it should be.

[lightdancer1]

Two of my favorite examples of how sci-fi has always been the most politicized genre are from H.G. Wells. This is the first one.

Also the most obvious one. And it is a very simple demonstration of his socialist politics. Y'see the Eloi and Morlocks are humanity evolving into separate species on class lines. The Eloi, the post-human livestock species, are the descendants of the upper class.

The Morlocks, the dwarf-like furred creatures that retain humanity's residual technological prowess, are the working class.

The rich are nicely-clad and utterly useless, the proles are monstrous creatures that ultimately devour the rich but without them post-humanity would be simple fodder for any surviving carnivores. And yes, this is 100% a socialist view taken to the point of satire, as is an element of sci-fi from the very dawn of it.

[lightdancer1]

In the first series he absolutely did have a foil. Ozai. Aang is the character from and center in the storyline and grows into understanding all the elements and tapping into who he is, after vanishing into ice and having to rebuild a world that was lost. Ozai was a faceless Sauron figure who drove the plot and didn't really appear on-screen much until the third season and his motivations and personality relative to Aang's had next to no real development. Aang is a refugee, the last of his kind, who has to rebuild a world he fled from and lost. Ozai knew who he is and what he is, successfully usurped his brother, and directed the last phase of the war that killed Aang's people and left their lands empty corpse-filled ruins.

I would say that Amon is more Korra's foil than Vaatu, Korra is a Bender full of her own strength and having limited ability to function in her opening arc beyond her powers and duty as the Avatar....and is completely honest. Amon is a sneaky lying son of a bitch who hides a much more complex true goal and a true past behind a mask and poses as something he's not with a power that he doesn't actually have but simulates anyway.

Overall Vaatu and Raava are each other's foils but operate at a level beyond where the plot of Avatar and clearly the writers knew how to write at a compelling level, like Superman in the DCAU.

Does the Avatar have a foil? I think the writers tried making Kuvira a foil to the Avatar, but I don't think you can really compare anyone to the Avatar. The Avatar's allegedly the freaking messiah, has temples built to honor them, and is allegedly capable of so much except true evil. Who can compete with that?

At that level, yeah... there isn't much. And those things are very, very scary and dangerous - though some of them do not want to be. But things of that power always are.

The closest direct foil would be Vaatu, who is locked up in a tree. For probably very good reason.

[lightdancer1]

The cumulative effect of making Ozai and Ursa people outside their relationship to their kids

Is that you get a very different kind of story. it's not 'evil father archetype no 23234232342332234325325252' . Granted I like Raven and Teen Titans stories and this is Trigon's entire niche as the most absurdly over the top version down to being a version of Satan on par with Slasher Villain Angel Dude so that is SLIGHTLY related.

It's 'monomaniac with daddy issues who was encouraged to be a murderous sadist with APD from birth marries walking WMD with her own granddaddy issues and training obsessed man turns from burning animals to burning people because he has a semi-technical license to it and massive inferiority complexes to go with everything else.'

And then you give these people actual kids to raise.

And naturally it goes exactly as wrong as it would sound. Leaving Azula and Zuko to navigate their way as kids around Ozai's issues having issues on par with an encyclopedia set and Ursa hating everything about her life and deciding to forcibly prevent history repeating itself and creating the very condition she wanted to forestall without bothering to tell anyone what she does or why she does it.

Also gives Ursa the role of Azulon's spymaster, hence her ease of arranging his murder overnight and why nobody thought of anything suspicious in any of that.

So on the one hand 'Azulon's Dai Li (the Chinese secret police boss not the in-universe organization) with steel-cutting death beams' and 'Vegeta with Goku's parental instincts who bulls his way to 'success' by sheer assholery'.

And that becomes a much more complex story than 'let's make all of Ozai's dickery about how he treats his son and have his mama randomly literally call him a bastard for no good reason because her character exists only in his orbit'

[lightdancer1]

The last important aspect of having Azula have struggles with Firebending and then overcome and surpass them

Is that it's a blunt reminder that while she may have limited toon physics she really is a human being. Human beings are imperfect, human beings have limits. Human beings are not innately born with perfect mastery of skills. This 100% applies and applied to Azula as well as Zuko, but both of them are shown handling learning and practice in irreconcilably different fashions.

Her growth arc is learning to accept imperfection rather than ruthlessly squelching it as an unacceptable weakness, or in short learning to accept and love her own humanity rather than condemning herself for being well....human. IMO it's never enough for a writer to say this about a character. It must be shown, either directly or indirectly.

In giving her the struggles and then her growing beyond them, she does something the canon flat out never does and refuses to do with Zuko at multiple levels. She outright earns her mastery and then goes on to use it with the finest style.

[lightdancer1]

Now that I've started the Azula Heresy, this one also lets me lay out my idea of what makes a good villain arc

I enjoy villains that are straight up villainous and unrepentant garbage fires. I also combine this with the attitude that to be good or evil is a choice people make willingly, and that making these choices makes them no less people for making them or the reasons in making them. To me, the best villain narratives start off with someone who believes themselves fundamentally good and doing the right thing, and then gradually the very efforts they make in pursuit of what they define as good tilts them down the exact path they think themselves above.

It makes a point that a character can see themselves as fundamentally good and motivated by good reasons, that they can be multi-faceted and have individual 'positive' elements.....and then there's the other 99% of what they do and how they do it and how they rationalize it.

It also makes a point applicable well beyond fiction that people can and do lie to themselves and about the consequences of their action, that they might believe their own lies....but that this neither alters those consequences nor serves as absolution for them. Good and evil are up to a point subjective, but only up to a point and that there are lines that are non-negotiable and all the attempts to lie to themselves about this does not alter that when people lead a brass band in a ticker-tape parade over those lines there are also no ways back from where they were.

[lightdancer1]

One of the small traits that I like to use in settings that rely on war as a fundamental narrative force

Is an old standby that doesn't get enough use in modern fiction.

Propaganda.

The straight up 'war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength' kind. It's a small detail of social-cultural realism and allows for building up elements of the various worlds and settings to give them that dose of extra realism without having to do more effort than narrative simplicity requires.

Simply adding in propaganda posters or actually noting the gap between what the authorities say about a thing and what actually happened (much of the time downplaying factors, sometimes hyping things up) and how the various authorities frame it is also one of those details that can pack a lot of stuff about a setting into a relatively short description.

I'm a firm believer that narratives should rely on an economy of means to push forward rather than bloating them with filler and padding. Where I develop storylines it is always with an end goal where the idea developed boomerangs around into something entirely relevant to the plot, rather than simply bloating a storyline with sheer self indulgence.

There are multiple small details a writer can do to fill in worldbuilding in a story without having to break narrative or do infodumps.

[lightdancer1]

The way I write Iroh and Azula in the Sins of the Fathers arc is also an aspect of how I approach realism in a fantasy setting:

Realism is not a substitute for 'grimdark.' Realism is allowing moments of reality ensuing in the subtle and small ways, like how much of a chaotic mess reality actually is and how the biggest impacts can be from the smallest and most unanticipated horseshoe nails. It's also an element of allowing Murphy's Law and for people to show their intelligence not so much by flawless near-omniscient planning but being able to prepare for the possibility things can go wrong and exploiting how and in what ways they do.

Realism and reality are not some 'make it horrible or boring' thing, they're providing realistic responses in certain aspects that ground characters and humanity in worlds that have more fantastic/empirically provable supernatural aspects to give the stories a grounded feeling that anchors the fantastic aspects. The more human characters feel and act like, the greater the impact of the fantastic/supernatural aspects.

[lightdancer1]

One reason I like to use what I dub retroactive foreshadowing in my stories

Technically two reasons, but I believe in giving due credit and acknowledging influences so this is the first part. In the writings of the alternate history writer Harry Turtledove he has a habit of switching narrative perspective and tenses at points to judge characters, and that is where it started, because I liked the idea. Not least for being a somewhat unsubtle 'no, actually, the narrative does not support this' that can be neatly done without a major break in the writing.

More broadly it's one of those elements of realism in otherwise fantastic narratives. In fiction, at least as I write, and in reality there are major turning points (noted as such in outlines in big letters with triple underlines). In fiction as in reality what they are and when they are and why they are is often clear only in retrospect and there are tendencies to inflate those moments, or to make them more dramatic than they actually are or were. It does serve as foreshadowing that a character will live, to a point (the ones that die don't get these), but it also showcases both growth and the irony that characters can live through the hinging points of their lives and not see it in motion.

Here at least is also a nod to my history education and both the contingency of history and the reality that in real time history is not perceived as a narrative ,but as a random set of circumstances. I the author have the full perspective of what happens in tales and why and complete narrative control of it. The characters do not. They operate in a Rashomon-like perspective shift where everyone's information is imperfect and incomplete, even the deities in-universe/setting.

So there's this degree of realism that a character might make what's in hindsight one of the most important decisions of their lives, in one of the most important days of their lives....and it was at the time just one day among all the others and the dramatic elements are those of memory, age, and retrospective magnifying what were often (but not always) less dramatic, more prosaic events.

The goal is to make the characters feel like actual people caught in events that should feel real, like the worlds come alive and have a narrative immersion. The fog of confusion and retrospective foreshadowing are deliberate means to instill that kind of realism without simply writing non-fiction and to make characters in worlds where magic and gods and monsters are real still feel like people, fully relatable....without sacrificing any of the fantastic elements to do so.