I kinda forgot how you came up with fractures, i know for a fact that you said it started as an au of another fic but I want to know it's origins
I mean, I started writing Fractures back in summer of 2019 (which is insane, let me say), when I was 14.
It is now 2023, I have just turned 18, I've gone through an entire pandemic and started college, and have written over 270,000 more words for this story.
It's kinda hard to remember where it initially came from, and the best thing I have to really go off of is the author's note on Chapter 1 and notes that I wrote for myself when I first started this story.
So, from what I can gather from those and what little I remember:
Most of the idea for Fractures came from the idea I had about what ATLA would be like if Zuko hadn't been there in the first place, but had been off doing something else. The first big problem that came up for me was the fact that Aang would still need a firebending teacher, and if Zuko wasn't there, Iroh was likely off with him, and therefore not available.
So, I started trying to figure out what I could do to separate Zuko from Iroh for pretty much the entire length of the show without making it too weird. From there, I realized the easiest thing would be if Zuko had never been sent to capture Aang in the first place. I decided that the easiest thing would be to simply throw Zuko into prison since the Agni Kai, make sure that Iroh hadn't been there at the Agni Kai, and go from there.
At that point, my interest had shifted from how the Gaang's adventures changed to instead being solely Zuko-focused. I wrote and published a one-shot of the start of the AU I'd made, but I kinda left it at that. There were people who commented wanting more, but I didn't really believe in my abilities to actually write a story of a larger scale. I also didn't know if there was any interest left in ATLA in the middle of 2019. The idea of writing it interested me, but if I was going to do that, I was going to go all in on it, and I didn't know how I felt about that.
The thing that really tipped it for me, if I'm being honest, was reading Towards the Sun by @muffinlance. Seeing an ATLA author succeeding and holding an audience, specifically in the times before the ATLA Renaissance because of Netflix, inspired me a shocking amount. It was the kinda thought of "well, if Muffin can do it, then so can I!" Which, to be fair, totally ignored the fact that she was a fully grown adult at the time, while I, 3.5 years later, have just now reached 'adult' status.
Still, it was enough for me, and so I wrote the next chapter in one night, published it, and we were off.