Reviews Fanfic / Embers Vathara

Has some interesting parts, and many bad ones

This fanfic is an AU fic of the Atl A verse. An AN says it came about to make a world where the Ocean killing the Fire Navy was a VERY BAD THING.

This gives us an AU where the spirit world and spirit interaction is much more important and is expanded to a truly impressive degree.

The writing is also full of good action scenes and small moments of humour, compassion and awesome. This is the good parts.

The bad part comes mainly from the failure to have the AU knowledge be taken into account, from bad characterization and from a focus on the Fire Nation that seems to say it is not their fault they turned evil. There were good reasons for it.

The ocean spirit part is bad. Only Zuko and the people he talks to seem to know why this was a bad idea. Not even the Water tribes knows what is bad about having a spirit drown people (but Earth kingdom people do?). This despite that one of the most important duties of a shaman in a warrior culture is to keep away enemy spirits/ghosts and the the story says that the water tribes were raiders. By the logic of the story NWT shamans should know how to deal with "enemy" ghosts.

But even worse than this is how the author treats Katara. The Gaang does not get to have any of the new knowledge implicit in the AU, but Katara also gets her character changed to a disturbing degree. In this story she treats all Fire Nation the same way she treats Zuko after he betrays her in Ba Sing Se and helps kill Aang. The rage she has in canon after Zuko takes her offer of kindness and friendship and spits on it, she now feels all the time, even though this never happened in this AU.

Katara also does not get to defeat Hama. The canon episode with Hama is one that shows Katara's nature and how she recognizes the diference between justice, revenge and cruelty. In this AU the focus is on the cool new OC that deals with Hama after Katara holds her off from killing Sokka and Aang off-screen.

The worst thing about the story is what it does to Zuko. It takes an awesome and conflicted character who grows and turns him into a superbender that always knows best. Very soon every growth and revelation the Gaang have is "turns out Zuko was right".

The author claims unreliable narrator, but uses 3rd person omniscient narration. 3rd person Omni is the closest we have to author is the narrator. So the author is unreliable. Trollfic?