marginal-notes

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Was going through the post drafts attached to this account and found these excerpts from “War: How Conflict Shaped Us” by Margaret MacMillan that I bookmarked years ago for the Yue & Zuko WIP. Their vibes are also decently relevant for “no heaven” and ghost!Zuko.

Chapter 5:

“The Duke of Wellington called his soldiers, who even after the French Revolution were recruited in the old way, ‘the scum of the earth.’ And to the earth they returned, their graves unmarked. When the peace came, many British proudly wore dentures made of ‘Waterloo teeth,’ taken by scavengers from the dead on the battlefield. In 1822 a London newspaper carried an item about how the battlefields from the Napoleonic Wars had been scored for their bones, men’s and animals’ alike. Millions of bushels had been shipped to Hull and then sent on to the bone grinders in Yorkshire, where powerful steam-powered machines had reduced them to powder. ‘In this condition they are sold to farmers to manure their lands.’”

Chapter 8: 

“We show ourselves,” said a Japanese diplomat, “at least your equals in scientific butchery and at once are admitted to your council tables as civilized men.” 

#smashed your bones #war really is the best and worst of humanity #anyways between the famines and the war crimes #the Yue & Zuko fic really secures its mature rating (:

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Not really spoilers since this was a dynamic that was already present in the earlier parts of “no such thing as heaven,” but at the rate these chapters in “little vision” are going, I might end up needing to tag Lu Ten as a character. Despite the guy being dead the whole time and only coming up in memories.

Like, sure, there’s barely any basis for what his relationship might have been like with Zuko in canon, but in the “no heaven” verse the cousins had a decently close bond. Zuko didn’t have many male figures to look up to as a kid, with Iroh preoccupied with being crown prince and the Dragon of the West and Ozai being… Ozai, so he latched onto his older cousin who treated him fairly when few people did. Especially since Zuko also had so much trouble forming friends on his own too.

Then Lu Ten dies, Ozai seizes the throne, and Zuko’s suddenly flung into the position of crown prince before he has time to process all these changes. Iroh tries to reach out during all the chaos, but he’s still weighed down by grief and mired in the royal politics. And as much as Ozai holds little regard for his son, he’s absolutely not going to allow his brother to undermine his rule by proxy of Zuko.

Then the Agni Kai happens. And the banishment.

In Zuko’s mind, his father threw him away to die. His mother had long disappeared. His uncle was either powerless or didn’t care to try finding him. All these adults kept failing him, and his journey trying to survive in the Earth Kingdom and deal with the spirits’ trickery only further damages his ability to trust authority. Instead, he makes due with the version of Lu Ten he remembers.

It’s a version, though. There are plenty of other facets to Lu Ten that the other Fire Nation characters saw that Zuko was never aware of.

So, yeah, tl;dr: Lu Ten keeps coming up and I have a lot of thoughts about this character that’s basically a vessel for whatever the hell I want to express through him.

#no such thing as heaven #more Navi rambling thoughts on my phone #Zuko really admires his cousin #and let’s just say that uuuuhhh #that was kind of purposefully encouraged #also still highly relevant to the series #that no heaven Zuko doesn’t have nearly as close a bond with Iroh versus in canon #they didn’t spend three years on a creaky old ship together

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This is sort of related to trying to work on the ghost!Zuko and Yue & Zuko fics again, but it’s always super awkward when I do research and I’m viscerally reminded of why my entire family hates the Japanese. Why is humanity so terrible. War is horrible enough, why did you people have to make everything so much worse.

#delete later #yeah no it feels super fucking awkward now #trying to think about the ghost Zuko fic #because it’s just straight up war crimes nonstop #and murder #horrible war crimes are all key to the yue and Zuko fic #ugh #this is why I never want to live in Japan #and to be fair they don’t want me living their either

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Over the years, several readers have noted the use of details in my fics - which, thank you all again, it means a lot. I mostly attribute my continued experimentation and refinement of that aspect of my writing to one specific blog post you can find reposted across many places:

Chuck Palahniuk’s essay on “thought” verbs.

Until some time around Christmas, you can’t write: Kenny wondered if Monica didn’t like him going out at night…”

Instead, you’ll have to Un-pack that to something like: “The mornings after Kenny had stayed out, beyond the last bus, until he’d had to bum a ride or pay for a cab and got home to find Monica faking sleep, faking because she never slept that quiet, those mornings, she’d only put her own cup of coffee in the microwave. Never his.”

#it’s a short essay #but it has good points #and it has helped #random Navi bored thoughts this morning I guess

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HEY KIDS WOULD YOU LIKE TO EXPERIENCE SOME INEXPLICABLE DREAM TERROR

#no such thing as heaven

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well, i hope y'all aren't able to find your way to the slew of private posts i made through these new image urls. also hoping these dozens of images don't break on me again.

have a scrapped zuko that i originally planned for chapter 1 of "a little vision"

#no such thing as heaven

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Rotten apples, rotten foxes.

#no such thing as heaven #still trying to fix the discord img url issues

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And another thing, I love your worldbuilding so much. You only give a tiny glimpse of how things work. it gives me the sense that the rest of the world is that detailed(I know you are desperately holding yourself back from including more), and it makes it seem so vast. You include lots of things that just aren’t for Zuko. Like the kid that got so worked up because he didn’t know what an earth rumble was. It makes the world seem alive on its own. I love all the little side quests Zuko goes on to try and regain his name. Because oftentimes life is meandering and you stumble out of your own quest into other people’s story for a bit. Makes it feel realistic. I think it’s funny how you made the Gaang feel like a side quest. On that note I love all the ocs you include, no matter how small their role is. I am a firm believer part of the magic of life is interacting and getting to know strangers. I keep coming back to this fic it is so interesting and beautiful to me. I feel like a zoo crow with an intricate puzzle.

Huauauauaghghgh you’re too niiiceeeee

The first time I read Watchmen in high school, I didn’t fully get all the themes and nuance in the story, but one thing still stands out from that reading to this day years and years later. In one of the chapter commentaries from the artists, one of them mentions that towards the end of the comic series, they stopped being as interested in the main characters and started caring much more about the background characters inhabiting the world.

What were their lives like? What mundane dramas were they dealing with, divorced from all these superheroes messing things up? What were their hobbies, their dislikes, their family squabbles, their friend hangouts? How were they dealing with the rippling consequences inflicted on their worlds by the main characters’ actions?

It’s a sentiment I’ve carried with me since.

This is also something I appreciate ATLA for doing well. I love the charm of the Aang impersonators trying to get into Ba Sing Se. I love the kids of the Southern Water Tribe. I love Omashu’s deranged mail system. And the swamp waterbenders and the community suffering from the Fire Nation’s war factory dumping waste into the river and the uniqueness of each Air Temple and - this is a very good show and I love it a lot.

So yes, I love working on all the little side things that contribute to the world that Zuko and the Gaang live in but might not notice. I love contemplating where the hell Ba Sing Se gets its food from and how the war impacts the diets of the inhabitants in the different rings. I love musing about what a mess continental trade must be on the Earth Kingdom when the Fire Nation navy overwhelmingly dominate the sea routes and the safe zones for travel by land keep shifting. I love pulling on real world fun facts and finding ways to embed them into the story, like Doctor Mihuang sharpening her needles because she can’t afford to replace them and the dumb thing about a food’s nature being too hot.

#the blah blahs #no such thing as heaven #take some FUCKING NOTES BnHA #you are as ever way too fucking nice to this dumbass #💜💜💜💜💜💜

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Hi, me again. I want to gush about No Such Thing as Heaven. I’m really interested to see what you do with Zuko’s current crisis with his name. In the show Zuko’s sense of self also changed, but it was still incredibly connected to who he was before. But in your story, since revealing his history would get him killed, and because his status changed so quickly and definitively, and he couldn’t speak of or think about his name, “Zuko” Prince of the Fire Nation was completely divorced from who he became while in exile. They might as well be different people. I can see why the Gaang using it would him him the ick. I wonder how he would react to Azula or Mai using it? Will becoming fire Lord even be a consideration like in the show? wonder how this will be resolved…

Aaauuuggh see, this is why I always feel bad about how my hate feud with BnHA has me in such a strong chokehold. I swear to god there is so much I still want to do with ATLA when I’m not being distracted by trashy men. Or raving about terrible unintended consequences from public policy law enforcement decisions that have proven disastrous in real life and should have similarly horrible impacts on BnHA’s society and characters. I really want to finish the “no heaven” series within the decade - yes, I’m starting to get alarmed about this possibility given how slow I’m writing - along with the bonkers ghost!zuko and the Yue & Zuko fic I’ve hinted at here on the blog.

Something that I hope I articulate in the “no heaven” series is that even if Zuko hadn’t been tricked into losing his name to the spirits, the identity of Prince Zuko couldn’t and wouldn’t have survived this version of his exile. Without Iroh to protect him from the worst of the war and its consequences, with how Ozai threw him out to die without any hope of redemption in the Fire Nation’s eyes, the things Zuko witnesses and experiences in the Earth Kingdom would have ground his old identity to dust. Even from the very first scene, where Zuko observes a child half his age receiving a limb amputation, the experiences he’s put through wouldn’t have let him hold onto who he used to be.

The Zuko of now, after the spirits and after being forced into the Blue Spirit’s name, is completely different from the Zuko of then.

Not that the kid fully realizes that fact at the current moment of what’s been published, which partially feeds into his issues around his name. Partially. There’s, uuuhhh, other nefarious things going on that you’ll see soon in the next few chapters.

And as for the Fire Lord thing… you’ll see lol

#the blah blahs #no such thing as heaven #seriously I wish I had better control over my writing muse #it’s getting egregious #also hoping I don’t have a lot of typos and misspellings in these responses lol #I’m writing it all on my phone

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Merry Christmas!! I give you a present of No Heaven Spirit doodles 🎁

oh my gooOOOODD AHAKSKKFLR THANK YOU, THEY’RE PERFECT

#finally checking my fucking tumblr app after weeks of irl insanity #no such thing as heaven #the blah blahs #YES THESE ARE SO GOOD #THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

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If I don’t post a new chapter to either the “no heaven” or “hellfire” series by the end of this year, I WILL lose it. At the very least, “no heaven” deserves to reach its conclusion because I wrote most of part 4 literally years ago and I like it a lot. And “hellfire,” on principle, terrifies me because I’ve been thinking about it nearly nonstop all year, there are so many parts coming to that series, the outline/written content for everything after part 1 is over 80 pages, and I also have the final scene of it already written and really want to reach it.

To tide us all over in the meanwhile, here’s some stuff I had to chop out of “little vision” because it doesn’t work anymore.

~~~~~

It takes Toph joining and her refusal to even pretend to look directly at people when she talks to them for him to realize that he’s been getting steadily wound up tighter and tighter with a desperate need for people to stop staring at him in every conversation. Staring at him, the way Katara and Sokka and, to an extent, Aang do increasingly in recent days. They don’t force him to look back, but he feels how their eyes chase his, and he finds himself bracing for a confrontation even over something as stupid as what they should make for lunch that day or whether Appa found enough greens to eat. The worst part is, everything else about their tone and their posture would still be so carefree or peaceful or happy, and it makes everything in him feel all the more scraped raw.

Everything feels scraped raw ever since the mask was torn from him.

Which is, in its own way, also stupid and agitating because the mask wasn’t torn away from him, the mask was forced on him and he gave it back, he threw it off himself, he wasn’t that mask and he isn’t that mask and he doesn’t need that mask and that mask can stay away, he has a name, it is Zuko, the mask can STAY—

The banked fires of his discomfort finally leap to life one afternoon, when he and Sokka have a moment to sit in the shade of a scraggly tree, watching Toph harangue Aang with a mini-dust storm she gained mastery over frighteningly quickly. Neither of them are choking on the dirt, given the loud shouting, so Sokka and he leave them alone. Instead, Zuko bursts out, “Why do you and Katara keep looking at me.”

In the corner of his eye, he catches Sokka turning his head and looking at him. Before Sokka can speak, he hisses, “Like that, why do you and Katara keep looking at me like that when we talk. What do you want?”

“What are you talking about?” asks Sokka with complete bafflement.

“Is there something on my face?”

“Well—”

“Beyond the obvious.”

#naviwrites #no such thing as heaven #was trying to have fun over different cultural approaches to eye contact #but the tone and content is all off now #so victim of the editing hatchet it is #one day I’ll go back to the ghost Zuko fic too #because that plot is still bonkers fun #but I can only handle two massive fic projects at a time

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Restraint is desperately wanting to talk about all the engineering and infrastructure fuckery people have done all over the place over the years to manage the flow of water and build livable urban spaces, but not dumping thousands of words of this nonsense on readers.

Not to say there aren’t ways to create opportunities to go nuts. But then I’m usually also busy ranting about …. corruption and embezzlement in municipal politics, and teenager characters usually aren’t in the thick of those situations.

#sometimes after smacking out several dozen thousands of words running around the canon plot in an AU #you just want to treat yourself to city politics nonsense #why the fuck is my brain like this #idk it’s just fascinating to see how humanity has gone #these rivers are too twisty and straighten them out as they go through cities #flood management. hot. #you can totally makes floods and the crisis response and the human impact key parts of plot! #I just. am not really in my main fic projects right now and it’s a little disappointing

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Part of the issue with soulmates, is that if you’re going to do the vanilla one-for-one pairing version, you inevitably need to talk about infant mortality. It’s going to be embedded in your culture and society one way or the other that there are dead babies and those dead babies had soulmates. Same with small children.

So the question remains, how do cultural groups deal with that? How does this phenomenon evolve as medicine gets better and life expectancies grow longer?

Also, at some point you’re going to need to deal with psychopaths and remorseless killers. Magically fixing horrible people through romance isn’t the solution, it’s cheap and feels unrealistic. The possibilities for exploiting soulmate relationships in abuse is alarmingly present. Also, what a “fun” avenue to scam people and ruin their lives.

Anyways—

#child death tw #infant death tw #must I always dunk on soulmates as a trope? #absolutely #the ongoing saga of navi's niche interests

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Sometimes I really wonder what would it be like if “no heaven” Zuko and canon Zuko were forced to interact with each other. Or were swapped for like. A week.

#no such thing as heaven

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“Navi, where’s the rest of ‘little vision’?”

I fucking played myself, I swear my thought process made sense, but I fucking played myself and now I’m scrambling to figure out the geographic distribution of mines, rivers, and farmland across the entire freaking Earth Kingdom - yes, all this is highly plot relevant.

Why do I do this to myself.

Why do I keep-

Aaauuuuugh what is ATLA technology, why can they have blimps - and thus industrialized factories with standardized machinery??? and the ability to get all that gas???? - but then they’re still using STONE CATAPULTS. THEY HAVE EXPLOSIVES. THEY HAVE GYROSCOPES AND STEAM POWERED WARSHIP FLEETS. WHY ARE THERE NO CANNONS.

Please, I just want more detailed maps of economic and military resources, I just want to know how the social economic politics of this place works.

The spirit shenanigans are the easy part aughughugh

#delete later #Navi do you really need to figure out the entire fiber/textile industry for this fic #no??? maybe???? yes??????? #navi do you really need to figure out the entire system of producing food around the atla world? #YES BECAUSE THIS IS THE FOOD FIC SERIES AND IM TRYING TO HAVE AN ARMY REVOLT #no such thing as heaven

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Weird fun today of listening to the news announce that Korea has adopted the western age reconciliation system (0 years old at birth and increment on birthday instead of 1 year old at birth and everyone increment together on a set date in the year). Because yes, this shenanigans is still relevant for “pine soot and incense,” that soulmate fic, and across all my other atla fics.

It’s funny to think of Zuko considering himself 16 years old, but depending on the time of year, he’s 15 or 14 years old going by water tribe traditions.

#the ongoing saga of navi's niche interests #also side note #no idea how many people realized #but pine soot and incense are potential ingredients for making ink #hence the title

[marginal-notes]

It’s another day and I’m still confusing the hell out of myself over the development of mathematical symbols in the world of ATLA. Like there isn’t a great reason for why Arabic numerals should exist in ATLA, so what the hell is used instead? The old Chinese system?

#hnnnghhhh yes I’m thinking about supply chains #that’s the driving motivation for this screaming #there are so many measurement systems and symbolic languages that…. #honestly might not exist in atla #ughughughugh #like straight up #how many days are in their weeks #it does NOT need to be seven #the ongoing saga of navi's niche interests