Discussion History FanFic / Embers

This needs to be moved to [=Creator/JosephHaydn=]

I\\\'ve only skimmed this thread and obviously have no other context to judge things by, but so far it looks like you\\\'ve repeatedly mocked and insulted Kalaong for having the opinion that Zuko is a Black Hole Sue, among other things. And you\\\'ve apparently redefined \\\"trolling\\\" as \\\"repeatedly presenting an opinion other people don\\\'t agree with\\\". You go, guys. You go.

I\\\'ll tell you what: I\\\'ve been following the fic since the most recent chapter was number 45, then around chapter 70 I took a break from it for a while, and now when I remembered about it, I went back and finished it. I wanted to know how it ended, and I liked the worldbuilding, and I liked the way Katara\\\'s and Aang\\\'s black and white and often immature worldviews in particular are challenged, I liked the way the mostly black and white depiction of war in canon is challenged. And I really like Zuko, too.

But Embers likes Zuko too much. I fully agree with the assessment of him being a Black Hole Sue. It\\\'s sad, but to me it\\\'s true. It got bad enough that I could\\\'ve made a drinking game out of every time a separate character talked about Zuko or how scary it was or how hard it must be to be him or what a miracle it is that he\\\'s survived. And that is without getting into the fact that the narrative just so coincides to pile special power after special power after him, to the point where even utterly inane qualities like him getting lost for words when he\\\'s angry are glorified and elevated to the status of having something to do with his dragon origins. My dad goes silent in arguments. A lot of people do. Does that make him a dragonchild too?

And I find the arguments presented against it so far - \\\"it\\\'s normal for a high fantasy character to be like this, it\\\'s normal for a MAIN character to be like this, it\\\'s normal because most of the POV characters are Zuko or people who like Zuko\\\" - to be entirely unconvincing and invalid. No, no it\\\'s not. If you think 1 and 2, you need to read more. And 3 is irrelevant given that we have no indication that we have unreliable narrators in the story. Their narratives can be warped by their biases, yes, but they\\\'re not \\\'\\\'outright knowingly lying\\\'\\\' about what\\\'s happening, and at any rate it\\\'s an unconvincing argument when the sum of it still adds up to \\\"Zuko is right, he\\\'s scary!!! also it was an accident but Aang almost killed him, have you heard, if you\\\'ve heard don\\\'t worry, you\\\'re about to hear every single character reference this at length and think on Zuko\\\'s behalf how horrible that must have been for him even if they have no reason to be emotionally invested in him\\\".

I\\\'ve seen people reference \\\'the author\\\'s explanations\\\', too. Bogus. Of course the author is going to be able to defend her choice of writing things the way she did; if she wasn\\\'t, she wouldn\\\'t have writtten it in the first place. And just because she has explanations doesn\\\'t mean the issue is settled. In one of the chapter notes, I\\\'ve seen Vathara respond to the criticism of Zuko allegedly never making mistakes, by claiming that fighting Katara in the sea serpent possession bit was a mistake he nearly died from. That is bogus. A mistake it may have been, but a) not one character commented on it, never mind chewed Zuko out on it at length, for chapters and chapters on end, b) the scene turned into a chapters-long Zuko Apologia in which any hint of (justified!) resentment the Gaang might have had for him was drowned out by being forced to feel sorry and guilty, being told by others to feel sorry and guilty, Zuko using an AIR NOMAD thing on Aang despite not being an Air Nomad, and a RANDOM spirit that barely appears intelligent going after the Gaang because Aang \\\"offended Fire\\\", quite literally as a way of the cosmos punishing him for daring to hurt Zuko. And then their guilt and shame is further mixed with now gratitude as Zuko shows up to rescue them and shout the spirit into submission. Long story short, the fact that Zuko fighting Katara was a mistake is made completely irrelevant by the way the narrative used that mistake, which was to further universal sympathy for Zuko, not to make him more complex and realistically flawed.

The narrative spins completely out of control, which events upon events piling up to generate new ways of forcing characters to empathise with Zuko or reasons to feel sorry for him or, failing that, reasons Zuko is suddenly important, like Asagitatsu or the loyalty thing.

This doesn\\\'t mean Vathara is a bad author. Many authors fall into the trap of \\\'Author\\\'s favourite\\\', and it\\\'s particularly drastic when it happens to a main character. I admire Vathara greatly for the complexity of the story and the discipline it took to write it and finish it, but I do see legitimate flaws. A lot of them, were this a published story, could have been solved by a good editor, so since it\\\'s not a published story, we have to evaluate it accordingly. Vathara published a chapter every three weeks, that\\\'s a long time to take for a chapter, long enough to forget the nuances of the one before it. A lot of the annoyances as the story goes on become more obvious when reading through it in one or several sittings. As a writer and more recently a roleplayer myself, I can understand it, I\\\'ve often gone editing compiled RP threads only to be horrified at stylistic or plot repetitions within pages of each other that I hadn\\\'t been aware of at the time because we\\\'d written the story at the rate of several paragraphs a day.

I\\\'m not a hater of the fic, or of the author. I\\\'m here because I got hooked on it and plowed through all of it, but toward the end it DID get difficult to even make it through the chapters. I sincerely hope you don\\\'t judge me relegated to \\\"troll\\\" status because of this, but if you do, it\\\'s certainly no skin off my nose even if I feel a little sorry for you.

Also, what Deadpan29 said above:
\\\'\\\'\\\"As a result, Zuko now has all sorts of things piled onto him to make him extra-special. Most of them are interesting ideas that haven\\\'t been explored to their full potential in this story becasue they are competing with each other and the plot for screen time. Some of them, like Zuko\\\'s past life, have become pretty much irrelevent along the way.

Beyond that, whenever an argument about honor, ethics, morals, or cross-cultural values comes up, Zuko or whoever is arguing on Zuko\\\'s behalf is right. Having the main character be the one with the most trustworthy moral compass and insighful understanding of others isn\\\'t that unusual, but this is a story supposedly about grey-on-grey morality and how everyone is partially in the wrong. Except for Zuko apparently. \\\" \\\'\\\'

This, yes. I feel like I should also direct you guys to the page of CursedWithAwesome to reread it a bit, because 99% of the alterations Zuko as a character experiences in this fic are the very picture of it. He\\\'s a yaoren because he got drowned and it\\\'s soul-rending and horrible and he\\\'s caught between the human and spirit world, but it also means he can bend two elements (in a world where, in canon, literally one person at any given time could ever bend more than one element), combine their bending in all sorts of improvisational ways, and dip into the spirit world in the heat of battle with more speed and ease than Aang and then face down a dragon there. He\\\'s a dragonchild and this means he\\\'s cursed and somehow crazy and can\\\'t lie (made irrelevant by the fact that the Fire Nation is adept at political talk and white lies anyway, for example, his lack of promise to Hakoda regarding not punishing Aang), but he\\\'s also RIDICULOUSLY hard to kill, has granite-hard nails, has the support of a relative who\\\'s a literal dragon, is, again, very spiritual, to the point where he\\\'s so important that it is seriously argued at one point that he probably isn\\\'t dead, because if he died, everyone would know it. And him being the reincarnation of Kuzon started out interesting but became an excuse for him to have better insight into history and politics and *Air Nomads* than any other character, to the point of, again, feeling like he has the right to apply a culture-specific Banishing ritual to Aang.

There is so so much that started out promising and kept me reading, but in the end it was just skewed and pushed out of balance. Now excuse me, I need to go rewatch some ATLA eps with a friend as a palate cleanser and a reminder that Zuko is actually dorky and genuinely rude and petty and stupid at times and complex as a result of his choices and not the templates slapped on him.

I\\\'ve only skimmed this thread and obviously have no other context to judge things by, but so far it looks like you\\\'ve repeatedly mocked and insulted Kalaong for having the opinion that Zuko is a Black Hole Sue, among other things. And you\\\'ve apparently redefined \\\"trolling\\\" as \\\"repeatedly presenting an opinion other people don\\\'t agree with\\\". You go, guys. You go.

I\\\'ll tell you what: I\\\'ve been following the fic since the most recent chapter was number 45, then around chapter 70 I took a break from it for a while, and now when I remembered about it, I went back and finished it. I wanted to know how it ended, and I liked the worldbuilding, and I liked the way Katara\\\'s and Aang\\\'s black and white and often immature worldviews in particular are challenged, I liked the way the mostly black and white depiction of war in canon is challenged. And I really like Zuko, too.

But Embers likes Zuko too much. I fully agree with the assessment of him being a Black Hole Sue. It\\\'s sad, but to me it\\\'s true. It got bad enough that I could\\\'ve made a drinking game out of every time a separate character talked about Zuko or how scary it was or how hard it must be to be him or what a miracle it is that he\\\'s survived. And that is without getting into the fact that the narrative just so coincides to pile special power after special power after him, to the point where even utterly inane qualities like him getting lost for words when he\\\'s angry are glorified and elevated to the status of having something to do with his dragon origins. My dad goes silent in arguments. A lot of people do. Does that make him a dragonchild too?

And I find the arguments presented against it so far - \\\"it\\\'s normal for a high fantasy character to be like this, it\\\'s normal for a MAIN character to be like this, it\\\'s normal because most of the POV characters are Zuko or people who like Zuko\\\" - to be entirely unconvincing and invalid. No, no it\\\'s not. If you think 1 and 2, you need to read more. And 3 is irrelevant given that we have no indication that we have unreliable narrators in the story. Their narratives can be warped by their biases, yes, but they\\\'re not \\\'\\\'outright knowingly lying\\\'\\\' about what\\\'s happening, and at any rate it\\\'s an unconvincing argument when the sum of it still adds up to \\\"Zuko is right, he\\\'s scary!!! also it was an accident but Aang almost killed him, have you heard, if you\\\'ve heard don\\\'t worry, you\\\'re about to hear every single character reference this at length and think on Zuko\\\'s behalf how horrible that must have been for him even if they have no reason to be emotionally invested in him\\\".

I\\\'ve seen people reference \\\'the author\\\'s explanations\\\', too. Bogus. Of course the author is going to be able to defend her choice of writing things the way she did; if she wasn\\\'t, she wouldn\\\'t have writtten it in the first place. And just because she has explanations doesn\\\'t mean the issue is settled. In one of the chapter notes, I\\\'ve seen Vathara respond to the criticism of Zuko allegedly never making mistakes, by claiming that fighting Katara in the sea serpent possession bit was a mistake he nearly died from. That is bogus. A mistake it may have been, but a) not one character commented on it, never mind chewed Zuko out on it at length, for chapters and chapters on end, b) the scene turned into a chapters-long Zuko Apologia in which any hint of (justified!) resentment the Gaang might have had for him was drowned out by being forced to feel sorry and guilty, being told by others to feel sorry and guilty, Zuko using an AIR NOMAD thing on Aang despite not being an Air Nomad, and a RANDOM spirit that barely appears intelligent going after the Gaang because Aang \\\"offended Fire\\\", quite literally as a way of the cosmos punishing him for daring to hurt Zuko. And then their guilt and shame is further mixed with now gratitude as Zuko shows up to rescue them and shout the spirit into submission. Long story short, the fact that Zuko fighting Katara was a mistake is made completely irrelevant by the way the narrative used that mistake, which was to further universal sympathy for Zuko, not to make him more complex and realistically flawed.

The narrative spins completely out of control, which events upon events piling up to generate new ways of forcing characters to empathise with Zuko or reasons to feel sorry for him or, failing that, reasons Zuko is suddenly important, like Asagitatsu or the loyalty thing.

This doesn\\\'t mean Vathara is a bad author. Many authors fall into the trap of \\\'Author\\\'s favourite\\\', and it\\\'s particularly drastic when it happens to a main character. I admire Vathara greatly for the complexity of the story and the discipline it took to write it and finish it, but I do see legitimate flaws. A lot of them, were this a published story, could have been solved by a good editor, so since it\\\'s not a published story, we have to evaluate it accordingly. Vathara published a chapter every three weeks, that\\\'s a long time to take for a chapter, long enough to forget the nuances of the one before it. A lot of the annoyances as the story goes on become more obvious when reading through it in one or several sittings. As a writer and more recently a roleplayer myself, I can understand it, I\\\'ve often gone editing compiled RP threads only to be horrified at stylistic or plot repetitions within pages of each other that I hadn\\\'t been aware of at the time because we\\\'d written the story at the rate of several paragraphs a day.

I\\\'m not a hater of the fic, or of the author. I\\\'m here because I got hooked on it and plowed through all of it, but toward the end it DID get difficult to even make it through the chapters. I sincerely hope you don\\\'t judge me relegated to \\\"troll\\\" status because of this, but if you do, it\\\'s certainly no skin off my nose even if I feel a little sorry for you.

Also, what Deadpan29 said above:
\\\"As a result, Zuko now has all sorts of things piled onto him to make him extra-special. Most of them are interesting ideas that haven\\\'t been explored to their full potential in this story becasue they are competing with each other and the plot for screen time. Some of them, like Zuko\\\'s past life, have become pretty much irrelevent along the way.

Beyond that, whenever an argument about honor, ethics, morals, or cross-cultural values comes up, Zuko or whoever is arguing on Zuko\\\'s behalf is right. Having the main character be the one with the most trustworthy moral compass and insighful understanding of others isn\\\'t that unusual, but this is a story supposedly about grey-on-grey morality and how everyone is partially in the wrong. Except for Zuko apparently. \\\"

This, yes. I feel like I should also direct you guys to the page of CursedWithAwesome to reread it a bit, because 99% of the alterations Zuko as a character experiences in this fic are the very picture of it. He\\\'s a yaoren because he got drowned and it\\\'s soul-rending and horrible and he\\\'s caught between the human and spirit world, but it also means he can bend two elements (in a world where, in canon, literally one person at any given time could ever bend more than one element), combine their bending in all sorts of improvisational ways, and dip into the spirit world in the heat of battle with more speed and ease than Aang and then face down a dragon there. He\\\'s a dragonchild and this means he\\\'s cursed and somehow crazy and can\\\'t lie (made irrelevant by the fact that the Fire Nation is adept at political talk and white lies anyway, for example, his lack of promise to Hakoda regarding not punishing Aang), but he\\\'s also RIDICULOUSLY hard to kill, has granite-hard nails, has the support of a relative who\\\'s a literal dragon, is, again, very spiritual, to the point where he\\\'s so important that it is seriously argued at one point that he probably isn\\\'t dead, because if he died, everyone would know it. And him being the reincarnation of Kuzon started out interesting but became an excuse for him to have better insight into history and politics and *Air Nomads* than any other character, to the point of, again, feeling like he has the right to apply a culture-specific Banishing ritual to Aang.

There is so so much that started out promising and kept me reading, but in the end it was just skewed and pushed out of balance. Now excuse me, I need to go rewatch some ATLA eps with a friend as a palate cleanser and a reminder that Zuko is actually dorky and genuinely rude and petty and stupid at times and complex as a result of his choices and not the templates slapped on him.

I\\\'ve only skimmed this thread and obviously have no other context to judge things by, but so far it looks like you\\\'ve repeatedly mocked and insulted Kalaong for having the opinion that Zuko is a Black Hole Sue, among other things. And you\\\'ve apparently redefined \\\"trolling\\\" as \\\"repeatedly presenting an opinion other people don\\\'t agree with\\\". You go, guys. You go.

I\\\'ll tell you what: I\\\'ve been following the fic since the most recent chapter was number 45, then around chapter 70 I took a break from it for a while, and now when I remembered about it, I went back and finished it. I wanted to know how it ended, and I liked the worldbuilding, and I liked the way Katara\\\'s and Aang\\\'s black and white and often immature worldviews in particular are challenged, I liked the way the mostly black and white depiction of war in canon is challenged. And I really like Zuko, too.

But Embers likes Zuko too much. I fully agree with the assessment of him being a Black Hole Sue. It\\\'s sad, but to me it\\\'s true. It got bad enough that I could\\\'ve made a drinking game out of every time a separate character talked about Zuko or how scary it was or how hard it must be to be him or what a miracle it is that he\\\'s survived. And that is without getting into the fact that the narrative just so coincides to pile special power after special power after him, to the point where even utterly inane qualities like him getting lost for words when he\\\'s angry are glorified and elevated to the status of having something to do with his dragon origins. My dad goes silent in arguments. A lot of people do. Does that make him a dragonchild too?

And I find the arguments presented against it so far - \\\"it\\\'s normal for a high fantasy character to be like this, it\\\'s normal for a MAIN character to be like this, it\\\'s normal because most of the POV characters are Zuko or people who like Zuko\\\" - to be entirely unconvincing and invalid. No, no it\\\'s not. If you think 1 and 2, you need to read more. And 3 is irrelevant given that we have no indication that we have unreliable narrators in the story. Their narratives can be warped by their biases, yes, but they\\\'re not \\\'\\\'outright knowingly lying\\\'\\\' about what\\\'s happening, and at any rate it\\\'s an unconvincing argument when the sum of it still adds up to \\\"Zuko is right, he\\\'s scary!!! also it was an accident but Aang almost killed him, have you heard, if you\\\'ve heard don\\\'t worry, you\\\'re about to hear every single character reference this at length and think on Zuko\\\'s behalf how horrible that must have been for him even if they have no reason to be emotionally invested in him\\\".

I\\\'ve seen people reference \\\'the author\\\'s explanations\\\', too. Bogus. Of course the author is going to be able to defend her choice of writing things the way she did; if she wasn\\\'t, she wouldn\\\'t have writtten it in the first place. And just because she has explanations doesn\\\'t mean the issue is settled. In one of the chapter notes, I\\\'ve seen Vathara respond to the criticism of Zuko allegedly never making mistakes, by claiming that fighting Katara in the sea serpent possession bit was a mistake he nearly died from. That is bogus. A mistake it may have been, but a) not one character commented on it, never mind chewed Zuko out on it at length, for chapters and chapters on end, b) the scene turned into a chapters-long Zuko Apologia in which any hint of (justified!) resentment the Gaang might have had for him was drowned out by being forced to feel sorry and guilty, being told by others to feel sorry and guilty, Zuko using an AIR NOMAD thing on Aang despite not being an Air Nomad, and a RANDOM spirit that barely appears intelligent going after the Gaang because Aang \\\"offended Fire\\\", quite literally as a way of the cosmos punishing him for daring to hurt Zuko. And then their guilt and shame is further mixed with now gratitude as Zuko shows up to rescue them and shout the spirit into submission. Long story short, the fact that Zuko fighting Katara was a mistake is made completely irrelevant by the way the narrative used that mistake, which was to further universal sympathy for Zuko, not to make him more complex and realistically flawed.

The narrative spins completely out of control, which events upon events piling up to generate new ways of forcing characters to empathise with Zuko or reasons to feel sorry for him or, failing that, reasons Zuko is suddenly important, like Asagitatsu or the loyalty thing.

This doesn\\\'t mean Vathara is a bad author. Many authors fall into the trap of \\\'Author\\\'s favourite\\\', and it\\\'s particularly drastic when it happens to a main character. I admire Vathara greatly for the complexity of the story and the discipline it took to write it and finish it, but I do see legitimate flaws. A lot of them, were this a published story, could have been solved by a good editor, so since it\\\'s not a published story, we have to evaluate it accordingly. Vathara published a chapter every three weeks, that\\\'s a long time to take for a chapter, long enough to forget the nuances of the one before it. A lot of the annoyances as the story goes on become more obvious when reading through it in one or several sittings. As a writer and more recently a roleplayer myself, I can understand it, I\\\'ve often gone editing compiled RP threads only to be horrified at stylistic or plot repetitions within pages of each other that I hadn\\\'t been aware of at the time because we\\\'d written the story at the rate of several paragraphs a day.

I\\\'m not a hater of the fic, or of the author. I\\\'m here because I got hooked on it and plowed through all of it, but toward the end it DID get difficult to even make it through the chapters. I sincerely hope you don\\\'t judge me relegated to \\\"troll\\\" status because of this, but if you do, it\\\'s certainly no skin off my nose even if I feel a little sorry for you.

Also, what Deadpan29 said above:
\\\"As a result, Zuko now has all sorts of things piled onto him to make him extra-special. Most of them are interesting ideas that haven\\\'t been explored to their full potential in this story becasue they are competing with each other and the plot for screen time. Some of them, like Zuko\\\'s past life, have become pretty much irrelevent along the way.

Beyond that, whenever an argument about honor, ethics, morals, or cross-cultural values comes up, Zuko or whoever is arguing on Zuko\\\'s behalf is right. Having the main character be the one with the most trustworthy moral compass and insighful understanding of others isn\\\'t that unusual, but this is a story supposedly about grey-on-grey morality and how everyone is partially in the wrong. Except for Zuko apparently. \\\"

This, yes.