The Monsters We Create Journal Entry #1
Hey. I figured that as I wrote my fic, I'd try something a bit new. I wanted to log my thoughts into journal entries, mainly because there's a LOT I want to talk about that really can't be restricted in the author's notes alone (so I don't necessarily have to clog those up). Those I consider tidbits or the most immediate "here's why I wrote this here" that sort of thing. This is going to be a more in-depth look. Maybe I'll explore some of the inspirations. Maybe I'll deep dive into some character arcs I have cooked up. Who knows?
So, for those who aren't in the know, my fic The Monsters We Create is a crossover fic between Avatar: The Last Airbender and the Godzilla franchise. There were two predominant thoughts going into this fic. One was that I really wanted to do something with Azula and Godzilla (there was one other fic that had Azula involved in with kaiju, but I didn't quite enjoy as much) since those two are basically my favorite characters of all time. The autistic urge to have your faves interact and all that.
The other thought was getting on my knees and praying to God this doesn't turn into a Hate Fic. Because I have a rather...intense hate/love relationship with ATLA. On the one hand, I really do appreciate the themes and a good amount of the characters. On the other, as time has gone on, I've kind of soured a bit on more than a few elements that keeps me from enjoying it as much as others. Especially with the release of the comics, which, to me, have exposed a lot of these flaws up front. So I knew I had to address them for this fic because there was no way I could just ignore them. A lot of the problems are deeply personal for me (especially the ableist treatment of Azula) that I could not just ignore.
On the other hand, I didn't want this to turn into a bash fest. Cause ultimately I wanted the core themes of forgiveness, reconciliation, peace is better than violence, and deprogramming to win out in the end. All of which are elements of the original story. Even if I feel they weren't handled well all the time, I still feel those are values that should be done justice. So my thought process was I deconstructed the elements that didn't work before reconstructing them with the stuff that truly resonated with myself and a lot of others. Need to tear something down before building it back up, you know what I mean?
To that end, I had to define what a Hate Fic is. To me, a Hate Fic is a narrative that sets out to utterly wreck and destroy the entire original source material. All of it. The characters, the setting, the themes. Think of it as scorched earth. Now, this is not me clowning on Hate Fics in general since they do have a right to exist after all. Sometimes one DOES get fed up with canon that they need to lash out. And that's perfectly fair. Often, the writing does indeed reach that level. Besides, if it's done right, it can be a fairly interesting deconstruction of what simply didn't work in the series.
What I wanted to avoid was the kind of fic that completely and utterly demonizes the heroes and basically invalidates any sympathetic motivations or developments they had. A good example of this would be Embers which completely villifies the Air Nomads and basically all the heroes but leaves Zuko and the Fire Nation unscathed. I didn't want that for my fic. I wanted things to be as evenhanded as possible. Give everyone a chance to speak for themselves.
Did I succeed? Eh. I DID try to give everyone a chance to speak. And having the blame falling on one party was not the intent. I do know my readers were a bit divided on who was right. Which is to be expected, obviously. Though I did get some comments saying it was a Hate Fic through and through (whether those are genuine or bots, I haven't been able to tell).
However, I can most assuredly say that my fic WASN'T written with hate in mind. If it were, I could've had Azula talk down everyone around her without pushback. I could've taken her side of the story for granted and not give anyone else issues of their own which played into how things played out. I could've focused on Zuko's inexperienced entirely instead of pointing out that there was a concentrated effort to depose him and portion out responsibility to the war council who came up with those suicidal battle plans.
But I didn't. Because that's not what my fic was about. One could argue that perhaps my writing wasn't up to snuff and gave off that intention. Which, I do agree with. I often worry about my writing myself. What I can say was completely demolishing ATLA was never my intent. And hopefully as we move past those chapters, I can start building the original up again instead of tearing it down.
