Because I'm not very good at thinking about this stuff, and I need to do it more

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Name a character I've written about, and I will tell you three (or five) things that I think are essential to keep in mind when writing that character.

*cough* Characters I may have been thinking about writing are also fine.

Comments

[annotated_em]

Zuko!

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Somehow I knew this would be the first one. :D

1. Zuko is awkward. He's really smooth at some things, like breaking into strongholds no-one would have thought he'd go within twenty li of, or learning ancient firebending forms in like an hour. But put him in a room with someone (with the possible exceptions of Mai and Azula), and there will be ENORMOUS AMOUNTS OF AWKWARD. If you ever needed an industrial-strength generator of the stuff, you could just attach a wire! And sometimes this is funny, and sometimes it really isn't. (See: giant painful possibly vision-impairing burn.)

Either he's really really bad at reading social cues (which is very likely) or he's working off a slightly different set of rules and can't adjust. If the latter is true, he must have gotten those rules from somewhere.

2. He grew up in an abusive situation. Zuko really, really wants to please his father (at least for the earlier part of the series); that's the most important thing to him, and it informs everything he does for a long time. Since what his father did was right, his crew will be angry and disappointed if they know the cause of his scarring and banishment -- won't they?

And even if Azula always lies, even if she wants to get rid of him so she can have the throne, Zuko is her big brother and he doesn't want her to die. And he doesn't want his father to die, either. Maybe they're cruel, maybe they messed him up big time, but they're his family and he loves them.

3. He doesn't give up. If there's something he really cares about, he will not stop until he's either achieved that goal or been convinced there are more important things to do. (Azula's like this, too.)

4. HONOURRRRRRR. Zuko is kind of a traditionalist at heart; his country, his people, his culture are all very, very important to him. But if he needs to break one to save the others, he will sacrifice everything else before his people. In this if nothing else, he is a good prince.

5. He's young. He may be royalty with a good education, he may be living in wartime. But he's a good one or two years younger than even me, and while three or four of those years spent running around the world looking for the Avatar may have helped that in some ways, he definitely hasn't had the time (except perhaps in Ba Sing Se) to settle down and learn the kinds of things a ruler should know. And the kind of things he thinks a ruler should know aren't necessarily going to be the ones he needs to know. (And if it's AU!Zuko, going for a non-princely life, he knows even less.)

[quadruplify]

Keeping with the theme: Azula!

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1. Azula is strong. She's not a rising star, she's a rising sun, burning hot with anger and power. And fear, too, because if someone is better than her then she has failed. (Thanks a bunch, Ozai.) But her goal isn't to win fights; she wants to live, to flourish, to burn bright and strong. She is a great person, who knows that if she wants to stay great she needs to do great things.

2. Like Zuko, she's not very good at understanding other people's rules. Unlike Zuko, she knows what levers to push on people to make them do what she wants, so she's never needed to learn what goes on underneath that. That's why Mai and Ty Lee betrayed her in the end; Azula did what she'd always done, but to Mai and Ty Lee there were more important things than fearing Azula. Pushing people's levers always does something, but if you don't stop to consider that it won't do the same thing every time, you're going to mess up badly at some point.

And she never had to think about it, so she didn't.

3. She is fire, more so than any of the other firebenders we see. She is bright and blazing and hungry for the world; I would love to see her when she's learned how to burn low and quiet as well as leaping and brilliant.

I've always been a little sad that it was Zuko and Aang who learned the Ancient Sekrit Meso-American Firebending Art, because I want to see what Ran and Xiao (Shao?) would have thought of her. If anyone is a child of Agni, a dragons' daughter, then it is Azula.