Fridge / The Stalking Zuko Series

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy.

Fridge Brilliance

• The Earth Kingdom has different attitudes and better understanding of psychology. If the Dai Li are able to have the most sophisticated mind techinques, it implies that they have a good understanding of psychology and how the mind works.
  • Which is why in Not Stalking Firelord Zuko, Azula doesn't have a true therapist as Dr. Yang has no experience with psychology while in Jet's Troubling Obsession Smellerbee, Longshot and Zuko were able to send Jet to a psychologist.
• One that's pointed out by the author, but in Not Stalking Zuko, the scene breaks have a ? between two hyphens, rather than a !. This shows that Katara is questioning Zuko, rather than angry at him.
• Why does the Northern Water Tribe propose presenting a unified front with the South at the peace talks? They've hardly shown much care for the status of the South before, and the South is so much weaker and less populated anyways as to be currently fiscally negligible with little to no economic weight behind their politics. It appears at face value to be an uncharacteristically kind gesture from the otherwise isolationist and protectionist North, which had previously abandoned the South to raiders, since at first it doesn't seem as though the North would get much out of this. Until you realize that's precisely it: the South lost its wealth and people during the war while the North remained a powerful stronghold, but the South came out of it looking like heroes while the North now has a bad reputation internationally. If the North shows up to the peace talks under the guise of a united Water Tribe, it allows them the chance to dominate what the South gets out of the peace talks and the facade of unity would enable the South's reputation as heroes to shield the North from the repurcussions of its faithless diplomacy. Further, the chief family of the South is personal friends with the new Firelord. In all likelihood, while the North tries to frame their offer of diplomatic unity as a kind gesture sensible for the South to cooperate with, politically speaking the North now probably needs the South more than the South needs the North. This is something further legitimized when Arnook later complains about the South getting better reparations than the North.
  • Of course, putting friendlier political relations aside, it makes sense that the South receives better terms of reparations: the South was victim to a relentless genocide that decimated their population, infrastructure, society, and livelihoods, to the point of them no longer having enough people for a single city, let alone benders to help build it. The North was relatively untouched by the war and refused to send aid to their dying sister tribe for most of its duration, making the North look greedy for wanting the same reparations as the people they abandoned and further casting doubt on the idea that they wanted a united front at the peace talks for genuinely kind reasons.
  • The duplicitous nature of the North is built further by the fact that, while the North was always generally isolationist, the South had apparently historically been traders who economically prospered by welcoming other Nations, which is why they had no major defensive walls at their ports. More than likely this means the South was originally wealthier than the North, and opens up the possibility that the North refused to send aid specifically so their sister tribe would become weaker than them.
• Aang may have taken the potential threat of Ozai more seriously if Katara and Zuko hadn't sheltered him. Early on in Not Stalking Firelord Zuko, Katara's helping Aang clean his messy room when she forces open its locked closet, sees what's inside for a second, then claims what's inside is the remains of an animal and asks Aang to fetch Zuko so Zuko can help her remove it. What's inside is actually what Katara calls "Ozai's Closet of Crazy Evil," detailing not only all the ways he abused his daughter and son, but that Ozai became obsessively vengeful after he lost a duel with Iroh and Iroh spared Ozai's life, seeing it as a humiliation rather than a mercy. Katara and Zuko keep the contents of the Closet of Crazy Evil secret, with the implied reason being that Zuko doesn't feel comfortable talking about it with the rest of the Gaang. While Aang probably should have been able to tell what kind of man Ozai was from all of his other horrifying actions, it may have helped him to see evidence of a previous battle against Ozai that backfired even after Ozai lost because the person who fought Ozai showed mercy.
• Zuko is constantly plagued by the assumption that he enjoys threesomes, but Katara is never shown to suffer any reputation damage from The Boy in the Iceberg like he does. She never gets any letters propositioning her despite being considered attractive and now famous, and never has anyone assume she's sexually deviant (aside from Jet). Why? Because Stage!Katara's main trait, aside from being sexually permiscuous, was being useless, especially in combat. However, shortly after the play began running Katara defeated and subdued Azula, widely considered amongst the public to be the most powerful Firebender in the world, with relative ease—during Sozin's Comet, no less! While refuting sexual rumors is basically impossible, Katara did the thing that would most refute everything else claimed about her, so it's easy to see why no one would openly assume things from the play were true regarding her after that. And even if they did, they probably wouldn't dare say it out loud.
• Zuko being portrayed as a sexual deviant in this version of The Boy in the Iceberg makes sense when you consider the play's implied info sources. The poster in canon bragged about the writer going all over the world to interview people who'd interacted with the Avatar. Given the fact that Jet appears in this play doing things roughly similar to what he's actually done, and the fact that we know Jet survived in the Dai Li's captivity to show up again in Not Stalking Firelord Zuko, and further, that he'd been questioned and used for information during his captivity by the Fire Nation, it's not unreasonable to suspect that one of the playwright's sources was an interview with Jet, the guy who, in this universe, keeps projecting weird sexual fantasies onto Zuko! This would also explain Katara's much more sexual scene with Jet, even for the play's standards, because Jet keeps defending his heterosexuality by insisting he's slept with Katara!
• Of course Aang and Katara continue to come to clashes in regards to the idea of grudges, anger, and lack of forgiveness. Aang's easy-going and pacifistic ideology, when combined with the Avatar State, means that Aang hasn't really had experiences that expose him to the concept of productive anger—that anger, in the form of a passionate desire to right wrongs, can drive good things as well as bad. All of his most angry moments and refusals to forgive have mainly resulted in casualties and destruction, something he, as a kind person, naturally can't find good in even if the power that is shown in those moments is useful. Katara herself canonically highlights how difficult it is to watch him be in such pain and rage and warns him to avoid deliberately invoking such emotions for the sake of power. Aang's arc so far has only reinforced the idea of such intense and negative emotions as wholly bad for him. Katara's negative emotions have major drawbacks and can strain both his and her own morality, but it's Katara's anger and pain over the injustices in her life that helped to form her drive, passion, and dedication towards helping those around her; it's a fundamental and productive part of her person that drives her to challenge Pakku for the right to learn waterbending, refuse to abandon the suffering town in The Painted Lady, and even stand up to her own family in the first and second episodes and refuse to abandon Aang himself when Aang's relations with the Southern Water Tribe briefly go bad. With the arc and general character Aang has, it'd naturally be difficult to square his very justified personal issues dealing with anger and grudges with the idea that Katara's fury could ever have something good or justified come out of it.
• The world's misunderstanding of Aang post-war makes a lot of sense, especially in the Fire Nation. Consider the position Aang's most visible actions imply: Aang's side in the war is well-known, and that side is against the Fire Nation. Aang also killed Punch Clock Villains by the scores at the Siege of the North, but subsequently refused to kill the Big Bad even when he was the root cause of all the death and destruction, far more dangerous and actively malicious towards everyone than anyone else Aang killed, and despite everyone knowing that killing Ozai would end the possibility of his continued danger. After killing so many Red Shirts, Aang let the guy most responsible live. The effect of this in the Fire Nation is simultaneous deep grief among regular citizens and political chaos at the top. The world doesn't know Aang personally and doesn't know he didn't intend the Fire Nation casualties during the Siege, but does know that Aang has every reason to want the Fire Nation to suffer and that his actions appear to have contributed to that suffering even when doing so seems counterproductive for long-term peace. Of course those who don't know Aang would have trouble believing his benevolent intentions towards the aggressor nation he sent into mourning and political chaos, and become confused or frustrated at witnessing his apparent benevolent intentions towards them.

Fridge Horror

• Untrained firebenders in Sozin's comet had their powers increased to dangerous levels...
• What kind of power did Ozai to disappear a public figure like Princess Ursa?
• The author takes the Joo Dees to its logical conclusion, and explores the kind of exploitative treatment that women like them would suffer, and how difficult it would be to reverse their brainwashing. Worse, still, Ursa is confirmed to be a Joo Dee.

Fridge Logic

• "The Boy In The Iceberg" does a somewhat accurate rendition of Combustion Man's fate (blown up after getting a boomerang to the head), save for the general dramatizing of the scene, such as having Combustion Man give a Final Speech when he never talks. One has to wonder how they knew that if only the Gaang saw the final battle with him.
• If Cooler Fever comes from Firebenders expending too much energy and absorbing too much subzero temperatures, how did Zuko not know this would happen beforehand? Wouldn't he have already come down with Cooler Fever before, given the way he snuck into the North's capitol city through the subzero waters and remained exposed to the freezing elements for days?
• If Katara is unable to treat sickness with her water healing (and as demonstrated in the fic, sickness caused by toxins), how did she heal the illnesses of the town in The Painted Lady?
• If Ozai has such a history of "disappearing" even people as highly visible and influencial as members of the royal family, why did he stick Iroh in the Iron Cove prison in the first place? Why didn't he make him "disappear" into his torture dungeon in the Dragon Catacombs? As horrifying as the thought of that is, it seems like it would be in line with his serial killer characterization and he's wanted to make Iroh suffer and die for years.
• Why does Katara specify that firebending is particularly useful for heating water and drying dishes? Given that waterbending as an artform has already demonstrated the ability to manipulate the physical state, and thus thermal-molecular energy, of water (moving water from gas to liquid to frozen solid and back), theoretically Katara should be able to do both of those things with waterbending just as easily if not moreso. Not to say that another pair of competent hands wouldn't be appreciated, but why speak about these particular conveniences as if they were inaccessible before the team had a firebender when she should already have had those same conveniences through her waterbending?