Fanfic / Songs of Surrender

Songs of Surrender by rhodanum is a crossover fanfic between Ōban Star-Racers and The Legend of Korra/Avatar: The Last Airbender, a blend of the two universes, that has the characters of Oban Star-Racers being born in and existing within the world of ATLA, approximately a century after the events of The Legend of Korra Season 1.

Both a Fusion Fic and an Alternate Universe Fic, Songs of Surrender follows fifteen year-old Eva Wei, an untrained Firebender, as she desperately works to be reunited with her estranged father - Don Wei, Waterbending Master, pro-bending manager and Republic City's most ruthless businessman. Eva is joined in her effort by Avatar Jordan, still in-training and seeking out a Waterbending teacher and Prince Aikka of the Northern Water-Tribe, on a worldwide pilgrimage to learn as much as he can from skilled masters.

One of the key elements of the story is the fact that Harmonic Convergence ends up taking place nearly a century later than it did within The Legend of Korra. This means that the events of seasons 2, 3 and 4 of that series never occurred / occurred very differently than they did in canon and the task of handling Harmonic Convergence falls upon Jordan's shoulders, the Earthending Avatar and Korra's successor.

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This fic provides examples of the following:

• Above the Influence: Maya's first attempt to seduce Don, as she seduced all her previous lovers, fails when he resists. Not out of a lack of initial attraction (there's plenty of it) but rather because things are moving far too quickly for his tastes. Don's unwillingness to jump into her bed at the first opportunity results in Maya becoming even more interested in him and finally falling in love with him.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • Rick Thunderbolt becomes Rick "the Thunderbolt", with an explicit acknowledgment that the second part of his name is an affectionate moniker given to him by his many fans.
  • Earth Coalition President McMullen becomes United Republic President Zheng, to better fit the ATLA setting.
  • Vaatu becomes Canaletto, a fusion/amalgam of the character from LOK and the one from OSR.
• Adaptational Villainy: Don Wei, a very flawed man in the original Oban Star-Racers,, has a much, much darker and far more complicated arc in this story. Born with a Blessed with Suck ability in the form of innate Bloodbending and its many side-effects on the mind after prolonged use. Deeply scarred by the murder of his mentor and surrogate mother, Avatar Korra and later on thrown into a complete tail-spin when his wife dies as well, Don jumps head-first into the business of vengeance. Even if it means temporarily working with the Big Bad and committing several reprehensible acts to ensure he is trusted and in a position to strike when aforementioned Big Bad shows any sign of vulnerability.
• Arranged Marriage: Averted. Maya's father, Lord Tozen, attempts to marry her to the Crown Prince of the Fire Nation. The whole thing falls apart when Maya herself not only objects, but reveals that she has already pledged her troth to another - a lowborn man from the Earth Kingdom, named Don Wei.
• Blood Magic: Bloodbending, the specialization of Waterbending that allows a bender to control the fluids in another person's body. A skilled Bloodbender can control another person like a puppet, kill them in ways that seem an accident (heart-attack, stroke), torture them from the inside-out, seal their chi-pathways and even turn their internal organs to a bloody pulp and make their bodies burst open by causing the bodily-fluids to boil. Used to particularly efficient and horrifying effect by Don Wei, in his Roaring Rampageof Revenge against Canaletto and the Red Lotus.
• Break the Cutie:
  • Canaletto's entire plan for Eva Wei, to the point of having orchestrated events in her family going back several generations. In Eva's case, it directly resulted in the horrible death of her mother and the decade-long disappearance of her father from her life. All with the purpose of leaving Eva isolated, desperately lonely and utterly traumatized, and thus, coupled with her strength and her nature as the child of an innate Bloodbender, without being one herself, making her a perfect vessel for Canaletto to possess and form the Dark Avatar.
  • Her father, Don Wei, goes through a similar process, also due to Canaletto's machinations. A shy, serious and introverted child, he loses both of his parents at a very young age and grows up as a social pariah due to the blood in his veins. The deepest, most emotionally fulfilling relationships in his life (surrogate mother and son with Avatar Korra and husband and wife with Maya) both end in disaster, with Korra murdered in a terrorist attack and Maya dying during a pro-bending match. All of this breaks Don to the point where he becomes a cold, merciless wreck of his former self.
• Broken Ace: Don Wei. Waterbending Master with a unique and unusual style, Avatar Korra's last and most successful disciple, the world's top pro-bending manager who brought many innovations to the sport and Republic City's most (in)famous businessman. Behind all the fame, the skill and the power, he hides a terrible, writhing mass of hatred, self-loathing, grief and pain.
• The Alcoholic: Don Wei. After the death of his wife, he takes to the bottle. His drinking problem spirals completely out-of-control after he enrolls Eva in Ba Sing Se's Royal Academy. By the time he and Rick first meet, on the edge of the Si Wong Desert, Rick remarks that Don's hands often shake when his rice-wine skein is empty for too long.
• Anti-Hero: Don Wei straddles the line, in the dark, murky place between this and Anti-Villain and shifts across it, over the course of the story. As an Anti Hero, he embodies the Unscrupulous Hero archetype - fundamentally dedicated to the safety of the protagonists and always on the same side as them even when he's tricking the Red Lotus that he's a loyal member. All while using utterly lethal methods against his targets.
• Anti-Villain - Don Wei at his darkest, during his work for the Red Lotus. Of the Well-Intentioned Extremist variety, he does the bidding of Canaletto and the Red Lotus solely to climb through the ranks and then begin destroying the organization right from within.
• Battle Couple:
  • Eva, Aikka and Jordan end up being this. Particularly in the later chapters of the fic, where the stakes rise higher and the relatively safe environment of pro-bending gives way to real bending combat, where they have to be constantly on their toes, safeguard each other from harm and flatten their foes.
• Blue Blood:
  • Aikka is the Prince of the Northern Water Tribe, son of King Lao and Queen Nori, almost a century after the ruling family of the North replaced the title of Chief with that of King.
  • Maya is the daughter and only child of a Lord of the Fire Nation, member of a cadet-branch of the royal family and distantly related to the ruling Fire Lord.
• Caged Bird: Maya's life as the child of a Fire Nation noble with very conservative views about a daughter's place and role. She quietly and gleefully defies the restrictions imposed upon her by secretly taking lovers into her bed and slipping out of the estate to mingle with the common-people of the Fire Nation and take part in illegal, underground bending matches.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Satis, at times. It's always something meant to make him seem utterly harmless and inoffensiveness and get those around him to lower their guard and open up.
• Cool Old Guy:
  • Satis, when he's not behaving like a Cloudcuckoolander (and even when he is). A generally playful person, with a fun-loving personality, he's widely appreciated by his students both within the White Lotus and outside of it.
  • Old man Adanook, Don's first Waterbending teacher and also the person who first taught him control over his innate Bloodbending. A stern disciplinarian, of the Badass Old Guy variety.
• Cruel to Be Kind:
  • Don's reasoning when it comes to the harsh and merciless methods of training he imposes upon Jordan. If he is to both survive Harmonic Convergence in one piece and be a worthwhile Avatar for the world, then Jordan must be strong, skilled, knowledgeable and unerring. Something which, as far as Don is concerned, can only be achieved through a comprehensive and grueling training and educational regimen. Ultimately, his goal is for Jordan to be the best he can possibly be.
  • Don himself learned this unforgiving teaching style from Adanook, his first Waterbending teacher, who also taught him how to properly control his Bloodbending, for both his safety and that of those around him. One particular lesson involved Adanook beating Don black-and-blue when he angrily lashed out with his Waterbending, then conversationally pointing out that if Don had attacked with his Bloodbending instead, his teacher would have killed him for it.
• Crusading Widow: Don Wei, to a T. Unlike the original canon, where Maya's seemingly accidental death breaks him to the point where he even suppresses the memories of his past, witnessing Korra's very clear murder during a terrorist attack sets him on what later becomes a Roaring Rampageof Revenge. His fixation on avenging Korra's death, no matter what horrific acts he has to commit, is the reason why he doesn't seek his own daughter out, for her own safety. And then he finds out that, on top of Korra's murder, his wife certainly didn't die in an accident either...
• Crush Blush:
  • Don spends the better part of his first interactions with Maya with his face a luminous shade of bright-red. Particularly when they both end up soaked to the skin due to a mishap and she teases him ruthlessly for it.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: One of Don's favorite methods of teaching. He administers one to "Molly" (Eva), with the goal of crushing her spirit and making her give up all dreams of ever becoming a pro-bender. The curb-stomping results in Eva being thrown out of the bending arena over forty times and barely standing on her feet by the end... but stand she does, forcing Don to accept her as a team-trainee.
  • Employed once more by Don against Jordan, when the young Avatar makes the mistake of complaining about his training regimen. Keen to impress upon his disciple that he cannot hesitate or complain when an opponent is genuinely trying to kill him, Don goes all-out. To the point of almost-drowning Jordan in a pool of water, to force the young man into the Avatar State for the first time.
  • Don himself is on the receiving end of one as a teenager, when he angrily lashes out with his Waterbending at his mentor, Adanook. The old man uses water-whips and chunks of ice to beat Don almost into unconsciousness for it.
  • Maya gets in a spectacular one, when she challenges and then utterly crushes and humiliates her own father, Lord Tozen, in an Agni Kai. All because Lord Tozen spat in Don Wei's face, when Maya's fiance came to her father bearing gifts and formally asking for his daughter's hand in marriage.
• Dark and Troubled Past: a fair number of the cast:
  • Don Wei lost his parents when he was a young child. He grew up largely an outcast in his father's village, with the villagers believing that he carried his sire's 'curse' in his veins (the ability to Bloodbend without the full moon). Don fled the South Pole as a teenager and built a new life for himself in the Earth Kingdom, but misfortune still dogged his heels. Avatar Korra, his mentor, closest friend and effectively a mother-figure for Don, was killed during a terrorist attack by the Red Lotus, with Don and others only surviving due to her actions. Six years after this, Don's beloved wife, Maya, died from injuries sustained during pro-bending accident. All of the grief and misery in Don's life was predicted by Canaletto, who claimed that Don would suffer three harrowing losses and each would bring him closer to serving Canaletto himself.
  • Rick Thunderbolt was born the illegitimate son of a Lord of the Fire Nation. His mother, a washer-woman, was thrown out of the noble's house and she ended up giving birth to and raising Rick in the slums of Caldera City. He and his mother had a very poor relationship, due to her bitterness toward her son, so Rick left home very early and got involved with street-gangs and then various criminal organizations. Becoming a pro-bending star was both a dream for Rick and a genuine attempt to pull himself out of his criminal past.
  • Stan was born in crushing poverty, the son of miners in the Earth Kingdom, in a community where the mining dried up. He dragged himself out of his terrible circumstances through a combination of intuitive understanding of hardware and industrial design and his prodigious skill with the Earthbending sub-art of Metalbending.
  • Though not as difficult a life as those of the others above, Eva Wei nevertheless had her own share of misery. She lost her mother at just five years old, in a highly traumatic incident that both she and her father directly witnessed. Then she was enrolled in a top boarding-school in Ba Sing Se and abandoned by her father, who vanished off the face of the earth for almost half a decade. Lonely and friendless, Eva also had to deal with seeing her father on holoscreens when he made his triumphant return to pro-bending, yet showed no signs of trying to contact her again.
• Death Seeker: A subtle example in Don Wei's case. He's not actively trying to get himself killed, nor is he prone to suicidal ideation, after he pulls himself out of that spiral of alcoholism and vagabondage. But he still engages in very self-destructive behavior (obsessive and exhausting amounts of work, refusal to let anyone underneath his ice-armor, acting as The Mole in the middle of an apocalyptic death-cult) and even at the start of the story, is wholly resigned to the notion that he will either die by the time everything is over or spend the remainder of his natural life behind bars.
• Defector from Decadence: Maya's view of her escape from her former life as a noble Lady of the Fire Nation. She's actively disdainful of the wasteful way in which many nobles live, reason why she and her husband have a relatively modest life, for their status as pro-bending superstar and very successful team-owner. They own an apartment in Ba Sing Se and a small estate in the southern Earth Kingdom, with much of Maya's earnings going instead toward charitable causes that she wishes to support.
• Defrosting Ice King: Both a romantic and non-romantic example in the same character. Don Wei slowly opens up and cracks start forming in the thick ice-walls he's surrounded himself with, due to the developing relationships with Rick Thunderbolt, his former protege and Eva Wei, his own daughter, back in his life after a decade of separation due to his own actions.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • Don Wei, after the death of his wife Maya in a horrible accident during a pro-bending match. Korra's murder hurt him deeply and it was Maya who helped him pull himself back together. Losing her as well and blaming himself for the accident, Don falls into a death-spiral of alcoholism, self-loathing and vagabondage all over the Earth Kingdom. He only climbs out of the spiral after meeting Rick and being given a chance to avenge Korra's murder, but the whole thing still leaves deep marks on him.
  • Rick has a smaller one when he realizes that his injuries mean we will never be able to return to his pro-bending career ever again. He pulls himself out of it by focusing on "Molly", her training and his investigation into the accident that gravely injured him. Something he believes wasn't an 'accident' at all.
• The Dragon: Don Wei's role as 'Canaletto's wolf', the dark spirit's most trusted enforcer over several important cells of the Red Lotus. Don actively worked to climb his way into this privileged position of trust, because...
• Dragon with an Agenda: ...he intends to destroy Canaletto at the first feasible opportunity and is actively working to dismantle the Red Lotus as a whole right from the inside, by thwarting the secret society's plans and murdering its agents before they can act.
• The Dreaded: Canaletto. Thematically merged with Vaatu for the purpose of this Fusion Fic, he is the spirit of darkness and chaos and deeply feared as such, by most of who know of his existence. Even those who acknowledge that Canaletto and Raava are two faces of the same coin and one cannot exist without at least a fraction of the other, are wary of him and ready to act should he break the balance and try to plunge the world into darkness.
  • Don Wei within the Red Lotus. As Canaletto's top enforcer and the person they will most often see, rather than Canaletto himself, he's regarded with a mixture of respect and fear by most members of the secret order.
• Eccentric Mentor:
  • Avatar Korra, with her irreverent attitude toward the notion of being an Old Master and her highly unusual and often ludicrous tasks, from carrying water around in cupped palms, while running and not spilling a drop of it (and without the aid of any Airbending) all the way to waking her disciple every morning by dumping a bucket of ice-cold water all over him. In many ways, her teaching style reflects what she learned from her own masters, such as Tpoh Beifong's School of Hard Knocks.
  • Satis, Airbending Master and the Grand Lotus of the Order of the White Lotus. A highly eccentric, cheerful and talkative old man, who often leaves outsiders utterly flummoxed at the notion that this is the wise and trusted leader of the White Lotus.
• The Exile:
  • Maya ends up in this position, after she refuses to go through with her father's arranged-marriage plan and then humiliates her father by curb-stomping him in Agni Kai. Shamed and enraged, Lord Tozen petitions the Fire Lord to have Maya permanently banished from the Fire Nation. While the Fire Lord refuses to go that far, he does quietly advise Maya that it would be better if she were to relocate to the Earth Kingdom with her new fiance, given that the royal family cannot afford to directly antagonize Lord Tozen, one of its strongest supporters. Maya acquiesces and the only times she ever comes back to the Fire Nation are very shorts stints, for the sake of pro-bending matches.
  • Don's father, Turak, is formally exiled by the council of elders in his Southern Water Tribe village, after he uses his innate Bloodbending to murder two other villagers. Turak's wife, Huiyin, refuses to forsake her husband and after the birth of their son, both are sent to the frozen wastes right at the magnetic Pole.
• Fallen Princess: Played with. Maya is the closest thing the Fire Nation has to a Princess, with no woman born into the main branch of the royal family for two generations. Particularly given her Arranged Marriage to the Crown Prince. She loses everything from her status to almost all of her belongings, when she marries Don Wei. Where she differs from other characters this trope applies to is that Maya, right from the beginning, openly chooses to give up all her privilege, rather than it being something taken from her against her will. She goes so far as to challenge and defeat her own father in an Agni Kai, after he insults and mocks her commoner fiance, just to drive her point home.
• Fusion Fic: Between Ōban Star-Racers and The Legend of Korra/Avatar: The Last Airbender. The characters of OSR are born in and exist within the world of ATLA.
• Good is Not Nice: Don Wei. Even at his darkest point, he's still 100% on Avatar Jordan's side and committed to protecting the young Avatar and teaching him all the necessary skills for survival and strength, no matter how harsh or unforgiving he has to be in his methods. All while also working toward the destruction of the entity responsible for everyone's suffering in this story.
• Graceful Ladies Like Purple: Maya is a very elegant, graceful (aside for when she's trying to dance) and feminine woman, who enjoys wearing various shades of purple and mauve, to the point where even her official pro-bending uniform is a shade of dark purple, the same as her racing suit in the canon universe.
• Ignore The Fan Service: Don's initial stance toward Maya's flirtatious advances, which makes her even more determined to chase him.
• Intergenerational Friendship: the relationship between Don Wei and Avatar Korra is a cross between this and Parental Substitute. They meet when Don is 25 years old and Korra 88 years old and manage to hit it off, in spite of initial frictions caused by Korra's teaching style and Don's stubbornness. The polar winter forces Don to live with the Avatar for almost seven months and by the end of this period, the two of them get along so well that they keep in touch via frequent letters and Don returns to the South Pole as often as he can, to visit Korra and continue to learn Waterbending under her tutelage.
• The Lost Lenore: Maya Wei for her husband, Don. Unlike canon, in which she only appears in a few flashbacks, Maya's role is greatly expanded in this story and her love-story with Don is detailed in several chapters that take place in the past.
• Love Triangle: Averted. Aikka and Jordan initially don't get along, given their conflicting personalities and their crushes on "Molly" (Eva). Nevertheless, they're both just as attracted to each other as they are to Eva and take the first steps toward a polyamorous triad when Eva herself makes it very clear that she wants both of them.
• Marry for Love: Maya defies her father and his plans for her both by choosing the 'vulgar' career of a pro-bending sportswoman and by marrying a lowborn man from the Earth Kingdom (Don Wei) for honest and genuine love.
• My Greatest Failure: Don Wei's stance toward the death of his wife, Maya. He completely blames himself for the accident that claimed her life, given that he was both her pro-bending manager and the owner of the team she was a member of. Therefore, as far as he's concerned, it was his responsibility to ensure that nothing harmful could happen to her during a pro-bending match. Don is brutally forced to reassess this view, when he finds out that Maya's death wasn't an accident at all and that it was orchestrated by Canaletto and the Red Lotus.
• No Guy Wants an Amazon: Averted hard.
  • Both Jordan and Aikka are immensely attracted to "Molly" (Eva), a young, rough-and-tumble tomboy, who can kick both of their asses during a direct bending match, once she learns to properly control and channel her Firebending.
  • Don starts falling for Maya when he first sees her wiping the floor with her opponents in an underground bending competition. As Maya herself observes, "that is the face of a man who just had something like a religious experience."
• Odd Friendship: Don Wei and Avatar Korra. He's a serious, meticulous, rather uptight young man with a high-powered career, who fled from the frozen wastes of the South Pole as early as he could. She's nearly ninety, a known eccentric, very lackadaisical with formalities, a bit of a Troll and someone who willingly chose to permanently go back to the South Pole, after the death of her wife. In spite of these differences (or perhaps because of them) the two end up with one of the strongest friendships in the entire story, one that transcends lifetimes twice.
• Ojou: Played with. Maya has all the proper breeding and upbringing of a noble Lady of the Fire Nation and she can play the part very well, when necessary. However, this isn't truly her and she's far happier and much more fulfilled when pummeling an opponent in the bending ring, going out to a bar to drink and laugh with friends and generally being able to live like a normal, ordinary person.
• Parental Substitute: the relationship between Don Wei and Avatar Korra is a cross between this and Intergenerational Friendship. The two meet when Don is already an adult, but Korra still starts to treat him as if he were one of her own grown-up children. Something that Don, orphaned at a young age, is deeply touched by. He returns Korra's maternal affection with filial piety and this is one of the reasons why her murder ends up scarring him just as deeply as Maya's death.
  • Eva initially attempts to look at Rick as a kind of substitute paternal figure, but they end up slotting more into an older sibling-younger sibling kind of dynamic.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Don's entire philosophy toward Canaletto and the Red Lotus and the reason he doesn't hesitate to murder the secret society's members, in order to foil its plans.
• Polyamory: Eva, Aikka and Jordan resolve the Love Triangle present within canon by choosing to have a relationship in which all three of them are involved with each other.
• Rebellious Princess: Maya falls this, with her distaste for the future her father envisions for her, a Caged Bird to be used in power-brokering and securing dynasties, given comfort and luxury, but with no ability to truly live her life on her own terms. Unlike most examples of the trope, however, she's clever and pragmatic and doesn't defy her father openly until she has an exit-route and a new life well planned-out.
• Single-Target Sexuality: Don toward Maya. He falls so deeply in love with her that not only does her death completely shatter him, it also results in Don feeling absolutely no sexual or romantic attraction for anyone else, for a decade after her passing.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: Don Wei, Don Wei, Don Wei. Conceals his crippling self-hatred, depression and fear of losing or harming those he loves behind layers of harshness and open cruelty. His abrasive and mean-spirited demeanor is specifically designed to keep others from getting close to him and potentially coming to grief due to his close association with Canaletto and the Red Lotus.
• Spoiled Sweet: Maya has some shades of this, given her privileged upbringing. She's a high-ranking noble lady who is generally kind and sweet toward the people around her and can be unaware of things that lie well outside her sphere. However, unlike many of the other characters who fall under this trope, she was never spoiled in any way by her father and in fact had a cold, distant relationship with him.
• The Mole: Essentially Don's true position within the Red Lotus secret society. He joins up in order to gather intelligence, actively sabotage the organization from the inside and ultimately try to destroy Canaletto himself.
• The Tease: Maya's tactic toward young men she finds attractive and wishes to entice into her bed. Unlike variations of the trope where screwing around with someone is the sole goal, Maya is genuine in her seduction attempts. Which isn't to say that she doesn't enjoy the various flustered reactions and intense blushing she causes, particularly on Don's end.
• Trickster Mentor: Korra's entire shtick as Don's teacher. She proceeds to force him into all sorts of silly-sounding and often ridiculous tasks, such as transferring water from one bucket to another solely with his pinky-finger and no bending or blowing him off a cliff with Airbending and making him climb his way right up a vertical wall of ice, also without the use of any bending. Korra's unusual methods are meant to both teach him focus and patience and to also test his self-control. Don initially seethes at her lessons, but comes to understand their purpose in time and even incorporates some of them into his own "sink-or-swim" personal style of teaching.
• Undying Loyalty: Don toward Avatar Korra and Maya. His abiding loyalty to Maya resulted in him not even contemplating a relationship with anyone else for over a decade after her passing. As for his devotion to Korra, it resulted in Don swearing to avenge her murder, no matter the cost to himself.
• Vigilante Man: Don Wei. His entire reason for joining the Red Lotus is to foil their planned terror-attacks by making use of insider information. Then hunting down and murdering key members with his Bloodbending. His ultimate goal is the destruction of Canaletto himself.
• Warrior Therapist:
  • Rick is a particularly noteworthy one, learning many things about Eva's worries, fears and anxieties solely from watching her go through her katas and from paying attention to what she isn't saying. A perceptive and broad-minded person, he's the first member of The White Wolves to figure out exactly how much baggage their youngest member is dragging after her and what wounds she's hiding under her prickly exterior. In true Warrior Therapist fashion, Rick is also the first person to start properly helping Eva in dealing with her issue, as part of their daily training sessions.
  • Korra isn't a slouch in this department either. Old and highly experienced by the time she takes Don as a disciple, she's able to read him like an open book and guess exactly what he fears and why he came to her in the first place. Just as she's able to guess exactly what he needs from her and provide it, offering Don stability and a path toward self-actualization. In a painful irony, Korra's traumatic murder is precisely what spurs Don to act in complete opposition to her teachings and give himself over to hatred and vengeance.