(no subject)

[esmenet]

Okay, this looks like a meme that's fun and something I might actually finish:

Give me a character I'm familiar with and I'll either write you a ficlet (~100 words) or the equivalent amount of personal canon. (Academic!Zuko is totally a separate character from canon!Zuko, btw.)

Maybe this will help with the writer's block? (fma_ladyfest deadline on the eighth. Eep!)


EDIT: An explanation as to why I haven't written the aca!Zuko fic yet, in response to the question when, where and how you see him diverge from canon!Zuko?

I'm actually not sure about that yet! It's probably either a slight difference in him, when he was young, or a difference in the Fire Nation as a whole. Because I have it in my head that the Fire Nation, and parts of the now-Earth Kingdom, used to speak a very different language than the fairly unified one they do in canon, but I haven't figured out how late they would have given that up as the official language. People would still speak it for a while after it was made un-official, at home if nothing else, but even if Aang's slang was outdated it was still understandable. Which would mean either that it was made un-official more than a hundred years ago, or that people in the Fire Nation still understand a fair amount of it even if it sounds outdated and awkward. (Which might mean that Zuko and Azula learned some of it from Ursa? Or maybe Zuko was a tiny child-academic who studied it on his own?) 

And of course I've no idea at all when the Earth Kingdom was unified and made to speak a single language, since it was probably a bunch of different ones for a very very long time. ^_^

So pretty much the difference between academic!Zuko and canon!zuko is all wrapped up in regional and linguistic differences in the A:TLA world and the things he learned/was taught before he got banished. Canon!Zuko, for instance, can probably compose some acceptable poems, but academic!Zuko would have learned enough classical court poetry to spot references to it in everyday speech. (Which could lead to all sorts of fun in Ba Sing Se, when he has a moment of thinking "oh, they're referencing that famous poem that compares alcohol to politics -- wait, no, crap. wrong language, wrong country. no, wait again, are they taking International Poetry at the university? Are they the kind of people who would make cross-language references about plotting against the government? Or is there an Earth Kingdom thing they're referencing here that I'm missing entirely? ARGH.")

So basically my writing of academic!Zuko is stalled by my ignorance of Asian literary traditions and linguistic differences, which are the kind of thing that I could easily spend the rest of my life researching. And it would be AWESOME. And this is why I can't really answer your question, because if I knew enough to answer it completely I could start the damn thing. XD

Comments

[ojuzu.livejournal.com]

I imagined MEK as being the dominant language, because Earth Kingdom seems to = China, usually, although that comparison doesn't really work language-wise because written Chinese was what dominated, and people generally spoke however they wanted to. There are really only two or so ways in which I could see the unified language of A:TLA coming about: a) fast communications world-wide, which they don't quite have yet though they might have had something like it in the past -- messenger hawks are expensive although we don't know what happened to the air bison, we don't know if the dragons were similarly used to traveling long distances quickly, and we don't know if the Earth Kingdom had anything like that at all -- or b) something imposed, which itself would not be sustainable without fast, reliable communications between all points. Either messenger hawks are a lot cheaper than I thought they were (which isn't too unlikely, though that brings up the problem of written language =/= spoken) or they still have very fast transport. Which, thinking about it -- they do. Remember Azula's mongoose-dragons, and Jun's shirshu?

Mmm, teas and tea-making! :D Your fic sounds a lot less ouch-my-brain-too-much-research than mine, and absolutely fabulous.