![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Just kick me out of my first real fandom now
[Vague Avatar: The Last Airbender spoilers are vague, but possibly not vague enough]
My love of women with disabilities being awesome and interdependent together is officially out of the realm of all that is good and holy. Because, Internet, I have seen Avatar: The Last Airbender, and I want the impossible: something post-canon in which Toph and Azula have a scam-tastic
After 24 hours of thinking, I could see this working if and only if all these conditions (and those I haven't thought of) are met:
1) They're both under MAJOR threat from (probably) the same ableist asshat(s)--like someone/a group of someones who will bring them back to where they can be looked after 24/7. Which would mean that Zuko is a jerkass and the fangirls will cry Toph's parents have learned nothing. They're clueless, but not that clueless.
2) Azula doesn't/can't just fix #1 by killing it (and Toph) with fire.
3) Each of them has skills the other doesn't, which are necessary for dealing with #1.
4) Each of them realizes (and admits) the other has skills that she doesn't and that those skills are necessary for dealing with #1 in a "Without them I am screwed" sort of way.
5) Both of them can put aside their do-it-myselfness long enough to do #4 at all, let alone think of team-uppery. (Toph has a hard enough time doing that with people who haven't tried to kill her for two seasons).
6) They would need to see each other as equals. And Azula...well, no.
7) Before 3-6 can happen, they would need lots of time to ignore each other/do horrible things to each other/ try to sell each other out to #1.
8) It doesn't end up looking like a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
9) It has a plot.
Which is, of course, beyond ridiculous. (Doing blasphemous things to canon? I've never done that.) And yet, I will probably definitely keep thinking about this because I want it WITH ALL MY HEART. Sigh.
Re: Not an intrusion at all!
They didn't just betray her at the Boiling Rock--they betrayed her AS CHILDREN and she has miscalculated her whole relationship with them.
Oh, man, yes. And the fact that Mai articulates it in terms Azula can, despite herself, understand - as a matter of calculation, of weighing up the options and making an informed decision - must just add insult to injury. Because Azula is the best, the best, at making decisions like that. But this one is informed by love, and that's a factor she doesn't know how to weigh.
And ... I realised I was just about to quote your entire last paragraph? But, yes, you're so right: aiming for Katara is entirely an attempt to use this power. But while, when she used it to manipulate Zuko under Ba Sing Se or Sokka on the Day of Black Sun ('my favourite prisoner'), she was triangulating her target from the outside in, here she doesn't have the luxury of that detachment. She's smashed the glass between herself and that part of the world, she's let her mother come back in. But she has no idea how to handle it, no idea at all. And she ends up not so much through the looking glass as caught in it, trapped in Katara's ice.
But unlike lightning, redirection makes it multiply
Man.
And Katara would try, of course, at least, as Azula kneels there.
Re: Not an intrusion at all!
*nods a lot*
I hadn't clicked on that, but it's completely right. And it's the only way she can understand that power -- she gets "X cares about Y", but she can only comprehend it as a way to hurt or bribe someone -- e.g. with Sokka, or by setting up Zuko and Mai. She can only see it as weakening people, making them stupid and easy to manipulate.
Re: Not an intrusion at all!
And the way her perfect-party-planning skills are straight out of a schmoopy romance novel is also telling - she's playing it entirely by the book, because she sees this kind of thing from the outside. Though she does know Mai wouldn't appreciate a pink tablecloth!