Embers Review, Part Three
May. 31st, 2025 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
masterghandalfEmbers Review: Part III
To begin our third and final segment of my review of Vathara’s Embers, I once again must apologize to anyone still reading this for how I’ve let time get away from me! In my defense, I’ve had a lot on my plate lately both IRL and online, but that still can’t help but feel like I’m making excuses for myself. Sigh. In any case, it is now, at long last, finally time to wrap this baby up and render our final verdict on this famous – or infamous – fic. In the first part of my review, we gave a basic overview of the fic, discussed what I liked about it, discussed whether it’s really Fire Nation apologia or not (the answer… depends on how you mean that) and looked at some of the fic’s much-vaunted worldbuilding. In the second part, we ran through the fic’s vast cast of characters, both canon characters and OCs (you can also check out my chapter-by-chapter commentary here). Today, it’s time to finally take a look at the fic’s plot (or plots), its relationship to the canon show, its themes, and render my final verdict on it. Fair warning, this part of the review will once again be pretty negative, though not quite to the extent of my take on Vathara’s characters; still, this is where a lot of my criticisms of what I see as the fic’s deeper issues will come in, so if that still interests you, strap in!
Plot
In case you need reminding (because it’s been more than two years since I started this review series, I’m so sorry it’s taken this long!) Embers is a long fic. To restate my original comparisons, it’s longer than the entirety of The Lord of the Rings even if you include The Hobbit too, longer than War and Peace, and roughly comparable to the entire original Mistborn trilogy. Needless to say, at that length, the fic has a lot going on. You can describe its premise in a couple of different ways – as a retelling of A:TLA where Zuko is the protagonist and Aang the deuteragonist and foil, rather than the other way around; as a for-want-of-a-nail AU that spins off from the original show early in Book II when Zuko learns how to do fire-healing; A:TLA reimagined as a gritty adult epic fantasy rather than a (mostly) light kids-and-families epic fantasy; I’ve even seen it described as a version of A:TLA as if it actually was a shonen anime (instead of merely being sometimes mistaken for one) with Zuko as the protagonist. And none of those are wrong, per se… but because, again, the fic has a lot going on, none of them quite hit the whole truth, either.
Internally, Embers itself has no explicit organization beyond its chapters; because of its length, however, it’s sometimes divided into a series of story-arcs; I first ran across this format on TVTropes (though I don’t know if it originated there) and generally find it the easiest way to think about the fic’s structure. By this standard, the first arc is the Walking the Earth Kingdom arc (“Theft Absolute” – Chapter 7) which focuses on Zuko and Iroh traveling together through the Earth Kingdom, largely retracing their steps from the show’s Book II but with various changes brought on by the fic’s initial divergences. Second is the first part of the Ba Sing Se arc (Chapters 8-18) which focuses on Zuko and Iroh building a life in Ba Sing Se, meeting and bonding with a number of Vathara’s OCs (including Amaya, Huojin, Shirong and the Wens), learning more about Zuko’s powers and ultimately fighting a spirit. Third is the second part of the Ba Sing Se arc (Chapters 19-24) focusing on Azula’s arrival in Ba Sing Se, the conflict with Long Feng coming to a head, and the fic’s version of the climax of Book II playing out. Fourth is the Beach Arc (Chapters 25-30), focusing on the truce between the Gaang (and the Water Tribes) and Team Zuko (and Suzuran’s crew) as Aang and Zuko recover from the battle and everyone has lots of revelations about each other’s motivations, cultures and the true history of the world. Fifth is the Shipboard Arc (Chapters 31-36) following Zuko’s journey on Suzuran and Aang’s journey with the Water Tribes, culminating in Zuko liberating a large segment of Ba Sing Se’s population from the occupied city.
Seventh is the Exodus from Ba Sing Se arc (Chapters 37-46) following Zuko as he travels with the refugees towards Asagitatsu and what he hopes will be safety, and along the ways meets his grandfather Shidan and learns more about his own heritage and the true nature of the threat facing the world. Eighth is the Fire Nation arc (Chapters 47-55) as the Gaang enters the Fire Nation and retraces their own steps from Book III while Zuko continues his journey. Ninth is the Shelter of Dragons’ Wings arc (Chapters 56 – 64) as the Gaang continues their journey and Zuko successfully lays claim to Asagitatsu, creating the colony of Dragons’ Wings. Ninth is the Invasion arc (Chapters 65-69) following the Gaang’s invasion of the Fire Nation on the Day of Black Sun, followed closely by the tenth arc, the Siege of Dragons’ Wings (Chapters 70-74) which focuses on General Fong’s attack on Zuko’s colony and its aftermath. Eleventh is the Search for the Fire Sage arc (Chapters 75-80) as Zuko and the Gaang reluctantly team up to find and rescue Shyu the Fire Sage so he can become Aang’s firebending teacher. The fic comes to a conclusion with the twelfth arc, Sozin’s Comet (Chapters 81-91) as all the bubbling conflicts come to a head and we have the final battles with Ozai, Makoto and Koh, and the ultimate fulfilment of Zuko’s and Aang’s destinies.
Overall, if the fic’s premise could be summed up succinctly, it would probably be to say that once there were beings called yaoren, special two-element benders who existed to guide and support the Avatar and help them maintain balance in the world. Unfortunately, the yaoren have largely died out, with few surviving coming into their powers in recent centuries, with the result that the Avatars haven’t been able to do their jobs properly and the world is falling into chaos. This breakdown has been helped along by a conspiracy of spirits and dragons led by Koh the Face-Stealer, who seeks to destroy humanity for cryptic reasons, and Makoto, an ancient dragon who was also Sozin’s wife and Ozai’s grandmother. Because also dragons are extremely important, wise and powerful in a way that the majority of humans are completely unaware of and are the ancestors of the firebenders and most of the Fire Nation. Added to that, we have lots of things going on involving the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom, their histories, politics and cultures, as well as Aang and Zuko’s personal journeys and, to a lesser extent, the individual arcs of a lot of supporting characters, including both canon characters and Vathara’s OCs. Whew!
In my initial review, I complimented the fic for keeping all those balls in the air as well as it does. Unfortunately, after doing my close read of the whole fic, I have to retract this statement somewhat. Because I hadn’t noticed, or processed, before just how many roads to nowhere this fic has; it is absolutely littered with characters and plot points that are introduced with much fanfare only to amount to nothing and/or be dropped unceremoniously. Ursa has some spiritual trauma that keeps her from wanting to see her children? Never resolved, she shows up in one scene at the very end and barely speaks, and that’s it. Shidan is on some personal mission of his own? He wanders out of the story after his adventure with the Gaang and never shows up again. Tao shows up to be Aang’s spiritual teacher? Aang runs away from him after a few lessons and Tao himself is quietly dropped from the story. Two sandbenders (technically a sandbender and an airbender) want to marry the Earth King? The subplot gets dropped a few chapters later and the characters only get a brief cameo at the end of the fic. The Gaang goes to great lengths to find and rescue Shyu so he can teach Aang firebending? He vanishes after a couple of chapters and, ironically, I don’t think Aang learns any meaningful firebending in the whole fic. There’s a conspiracy among the Fire Sages to kill Ozai’s children? Never amounts to anything. Jet and the Freedom Fighters? Unceremoniously vanish from the story en route to Dragons’ Wings, and we never learn their fate. Sokka gets “adopted” into the Fire Nation by Temul and is terrified of what this means for him and how he’ll explain it to his dad? As far as we can tell, Hakoda seems weirdly okay with it. The implications that the Avatar Spirit is a separate being from Aang and may not have humanity’s best interests at heart? Never amounts to anything. Shidan’s lore dump about dragons and the Avatarverse’s ancient history? Cuts off after a dragon and a human have a meet cute moment, and we never learn anything more about it. The implication that humans aren’t native to the Avatarverse in the first place? Aside from a brief gag in the final chapter that turns the fic into an unlabeled Stargate crossover, never matters. The Wens turn out to have royal blood and be relatively close in line to the throne? Nothing ever comes of it, and the Wens themselves get demoted to extra after the fic arrives at Asagitatsu. And there’s probably more in this vein that I’m forgetting. On a related note, there are also some important plotlines that feel rather underdeveloped (Azula’s in particular; while the narrative assures us she’s totally changed for the better by the end of the fic, most of the actual development feels skimmed over so that at most she comes across as slightly more pragmatic and less cruel than her old self, and her falling out with her father also feels rushed and poorly explained) and some plot elements (including the existence of the drowned, and of the effects of “element sickness” in benders other than firebenders) get introduced without feeling properly foreshadowed or set up.
My point being here, I think that Vathara tried to do too much with the story, taking an already complicated AU premise and then filling it with characters and subplots that seemed designed to explore every aspect of her version of the Avatarverse (I honestly don’t think the comparison to War and Peace is unwarranted, in this particular way!) on top of that. And, to be fair, some of her ANs indicate that the fic grew rather far beyond her original intentions for it, and I sympathize with that. However, I do think at some point Vathara lost control of the fic, and a lot of the story’s branches ended up having to be cut off so the actual main plot could be resolved in a satisfactory manner. And the fic does do that… mostly (though I think the ending is rushed and there are several aspects, such as how Aang deals with Koh, that should have been set up better) but it can’t escape being littered with dead ends along the way, to its ultimate detriment. There’s also the strange case that, while I’d consider Vathara’s handling of the Zuko-Iroh dynamic is one of the fic’s strengths in its first half, Iroh gets increasingly sidelined in the back half, giving the unfortunate implication that Zuko has “upgraded” to better mentors (Shidan in particular) and then the last couple of arcs have a running subplot of the two of them locking horns that mostly just serves as a source of cheap drama, is intensely uncomfortable to read, and gets resolved rather offhandedly in the last chapter, making the whole thing feel rather pointless. As I’ve said before, I really do have to applaud Vathara’s ambitions with this fic – Embers is a fandom titan for a reason, after all – but I do think her ambition ended up reaching beyond her ability to actually execute it.
Relationship to Canon
One of the most common defenses I’ve run into for Embers, particularly its wildly AU elements and characterization of various canon characters, is that its nature as an AU means that you shouldn’t judge it against canon and should, instead, try to enjoy it first and foremost as its own thing. And while on principle I think that’s a perfectly fine argument to make, in practice… for this fic, in particular, I think that this argument simply doesn’t hold up at all. The biggest reason being that Embers simply doesn’t stand on its own; I can only imagine that someone trying to read it as if it was an original epic fantasy saga without any connections to A:TLA would find it completely incomprehensible, and there are large chunks of it that simply don’t make sense if you don’t keep the canon show in mind while you’re reading.
What do I mean by this? Well, the biggest part is that Embers, for a reminder, only diverges from canon in “Theft Absolute,” which is an alternate ending for Zuko’s subplot in “The Cave of Two Lovers” – ie, the second episode of Book II. In other words, all of Book I is Embers!canon, as is a good chunk of Book II (mostly the Gaang’s storyline until the season finale arc) and even a few bits of Book III (we’ll get to that in a minute). In other words, we’re supposed to expect that all of those episodes happened exactly as they did in canon in Embers!verse, with the characters and setting as depicted therein being consistent with how the fic portrays them. And, frankly… it doesn’t work. Clearly plenty of people are capable of squaring this circle, or the fic wouldn’t be as popular as it is, but for me… this is something I really can’t let go. In some cases, we have issues that are minor in the context of the fic but still pretty headscratching (like how Gyatso is characterized pretty much exactly as he is in canon, with zero indication given of how a society like Vathara’s take on the Air Nomads could have produced him) to other issues that are more serious. In particular, Vathara has a tendency to wield her AU elements like a club, retroactively reading them into canon episodes where they clearly weren’t present in order to make characters she doesn’t like look bad or like they made the wrong decision. The biggest is probably Koizilla leading to the creation of the drowned in Embers!canon, something that Aang is repeatedly and consistently raked over the coals for not knowing about despite there being no reason he would in the original show, because it simply wasn’t an issue; another is the extended explanations for how Aang totally should have known Zuko was honorable all along and what a dire insult him trying to escape Zuko’s ship in “The Avatar Returns” was (notably, in the original episode Zuko is angry, but neither surprised nor betrayed by that turn of events), or Amaya calling out the Gaang for daring to think the Dai Li are evil (when the Dai Li’s behavior around them has given them no reason to think otherwise) or the Dai Li disparaging Aang for missing the spirit that was attacking Ba Sing Se (when it was only there because Vathara included it and wasn’t in the original show, and both the spirit and the Dai Li themselves were working to prevent knowledge of the thing from becoming public). And in all these cases I use mistakes the fic gives Aang as examples, because he’s the worst victim of this habit of Vathara’s, with her “proving” he’s unfit to be the Avatar by having him be ignorant of (or deliberately flouting) things he couldn’t possibly have known in the original canon because these elements are unique to Embers. Zuko, notably, never seems to have this problem; indeed, Embers is more likely to go out of its way to include new layers of revelations to justify, or at least explain, his behavior instead (and sometimes the AU elements are explicitly used to correct elements of Zuko’s canon behavior that Vathara clearly doesn’t approve of, such as stealing the ostrich-horse, trusting Jet to a certain degree, or being willing to befriend and teach Aang). The double standard is pretty obvious. The fic also has something of a running theme of sneering at what seem to be elements of canon Vathara doesn’t like, including canon’s take on dragons (people only think that because they’re racist), Katara being the Team Mom (she was mind-controlling everyone else into it) or Zuko becoming Aang’s friend (which various characters repeatedly and emphatically say will never happen).
On the other hand, despite the massive changes in the AU the fic also stays fairly strictly on the Stations of the Canon for Aang’s storyline (and sometimes for Zuko’s, though less often after he leaves Ba Sing Se). And when the fic does this, it often assumes that the reader knows the original show and skips over key events – most egregiously, the events of “The Earth King” (where Long Feng goes from being de facto dictator of the Earth Kingdom in one scene to in prison the next time we see him with no explanation, and also Azula is there now) but during the Gaang’s journey through the Fire Nation we also have several scenes that are skipped over (including Aang in the Fire Nation school, which somehow still happened in Embers despite Embers!Aang – in contrast to his canon self, whose knowledge was woefully out of date but still accurate enough he could pass himself off as an ignorant colonial bumpkin and have people buy it – clearly knowing nothing about the Fire Nation) or dropped on us in media res. I think this also hurts the villains and their level of menace, too, since Koh’s conspiracy is responsible for a lot of things (Chin’s conquests, the Air Nomad genocide, pulling Ozai’s strings and even the Misty Palms Oasis drying up) that humans did to themselves just fine (or were even natural phenomena) in canon, which makes it feel kind of like the villains’ actions just never actually amounted to much. That’s not even getting into how the fic’s Fire Nation is supposed to be the same as canon’s Fire Nation, despite having a completely different culture, history and organizational values from what the show depicts. And, again, this wouldn’t be a huge problem – it is a fanfic, after all, and can safely assume 99% of readers will have at least a basic knowledge of the source material – but it does mean that on its own, Embers doesn’t always flow very well and absolutely requires the original show to plug in the gaps and make sense of it. But for a fic that never shakes being dependent on the original canon, it’s also a fic that goes out of its way to refute load-bearing elements of the show’s plot, characters and worldbuilding – and IMO, the more you keep the original canon in mind, the more the seams between it and Embers show. And again, clearly this is something that plenty of people are able to make peace with or the fic wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it is – but it bugs me, badly. If Embers really was a ground up AU reimagining of Avatar, Ultimate Universe style… I’d still have issues with some of Vathara’s choices, but I’d be much more willing to let the fic be its own thing. As it is, I don’t think Embers leaves us that option.
Themes
Hooo, boy. This is the big one. Embers is a fic that quite clearly prides itself on being smart – some of the chapters include literal scholarly citations, even – and Vathara is clearly not just trying to tell a story here, she has things to say. But I think a problem with Embers is that a lot of what’s it’s ostensibly trying to say on the surface… is not particularly consistent with what it actually depicts. And there are also some running ideas in the fic that are kind of… unpleasant, some of which I’ve seen discussed elsewhere more than others. So, I’d like to pick some of this apart and try and get at what messages I feel Embers is trying to send, what messages it actually sends, and the root of some of my deeper problems with the fic.
First off, Embers is very clearly a story that is deeply concerned about cultures, cultural differences, and communication across cultural divides, and it goes to great lengths to flesh out all its major cultures to a greater degree than we see in canon (as we’ve previously discussed in my section on Vathara’s worldbuilding in the first post). Ultimately, I think that Embers wants to be a story about the importance of multiculturalism, of seeing other people’s points of view, and bringing people from diverse backgrounds together to bridge divides and fight common enemies. And in theory, that’s a pretty great theme! Unfortunately, I think it falls pretty hard into the brick wall that is the author’s personal biases… because it’s pretty clear which of the cultures Vathara has created she likes the most and, surprise, it’s the Fire Nation. I’m not going to spend too much time here talking about them, because I already covered this topic in some detail back in my section on whether the fic is Fire Nation apologism or not, but I’ll summarize in brief. Embers doesn’t, IMO, go full Last Ringbearer in its characterization of the Fire Nation – there’s no doubt that Ozai is still evil and his regime is a bad thing – but Vathara really likes her Fire Nation culture and its values. Any time we have a conversation or argument between a Fire National and someone from another culture, the Fire Nation perspective gets prioritized. The other person is expected to go out of their way to understand the Fire Nation position, while the Fire National isn’t really expected to extend the same courtesy. Characters who strongly oppose the Fire Nation are often depicted as not only opposed to the Fire Nation state but actively racist against Fire Nation people, and canon characters who are strongly anti-Fire Nation are presented extremely negatively (Katara) or if already antagonistic are made actively worse (Jet or General Fong). Vathara doesn’t seem to understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be Fire Nation, given the opportunity, while Roku considering himself the Avatar first and Fire Nation second is presented as a heinous betrayal. Trying to change the Fire Nation’s culture from outside is depicted as a gross violation (and Kyoshi doing it by instituting the Fire Lord is depicted as what got the world into this mess), while on the other hand the Air Nomad temple system being destroyed is depicted as being probably for the best (though I’ll stress, again, that Embers does not actually approve of the Air Nomad genocide – though with Vathara’s obvious distaste for the Air Nomads dripping off the page whenever they’re discussed the vibe tends to come off as “the Air Nomads, as annoying as they were, didn’t actually deserve to die for it” which… isn’t great, for a supposedly anti-genocide moral) The Fire Nation ultimately serves as the focus for the bad guys’ schemes and the linchpin for much of the conflict; its’ the Fire Nation’s world, everyone else is just living in it. The Earth Kingdom also gets a more-or-less positive portrayal, with some caveats (but is probably closest to its canon version overall) while the Water Tribes and Air Nomads get hit much more negatively (the Air Nomads are basically the inverse of how the fic handles the Fire Nation, with Aang barely being able to get a word in edgewise when he tries to defend them, and seemingly every time they come up some new dark secret is revealed about them).
I think a bigger problem the fic has with its handling of cultures is that they’re all very… planet of hats-y, for lack of a better term. By which I mean, people from a particular culture tend to behave in very specific ways, which are directly attributed to their culture, sometimes even if they weren’t raised in it (ie, of the Wen kids, Suyin and Jinhai are depicted as taking very strongly after their Fire Nation heritage despite only recently having learned about it; Ty Lee acts like an airbender despite being raised in the Fire Nation, etc.).This may be tied more to the elements than cultures, per se (ie, the colony at the Northern Air Temple start acting like Air Nomads despite having no real reason to, seemingly because some of them are becoming airbenders) but the two are pretty closely aligned anyway. In any case, to echo one criticism of the fic I saw elsewhere, Vathara’s characters can sometimes come off less as people and more as automatons programmed by their culture to think and behave in certain ways; on the one hand, actively exploring and engaging with values dissonance and culture clash is an interesting and important topic to explore… but I think Vathara sometimes takes it too far, with characters from different cultures sometimes feeling less like different groups of humans and more like aliens to each other, not helped that even after a hundred years of war, everyone else seems completely ignorant of even basic facts about the Fire Nation.
Another theme the fic explicitly brings up is a deconstruction of the idea of the Chosen One and the kid hero – essentially, that it’s unfair and ridiculous to put that kind of pressure on the shoulders of a single kid who can’t possibly deal with that kind of responsibility. And again, that’s a worthwhile theme to explore! Unfortunately, it can’t help but feel like Vathara’s real problem is less that we shouldn’t have to count on one kid to save us, and more that the world is looking to the wrong kid hero to save them, with Aang being constantly denigrated in favor of Zuko, the one who actually knows more about what’s really at stake, has an actual sense of responsibility, and a whole suite of special abilities of his own (even Zuko’s bad luck is made a sign that he’s been rejected by the spirits, and is therefore below their influence). So, I can’t help but feel like this whole plot thread ends up being less about the problems of chosen ones and kid heroes, and more about the author’s personal biases – that Zuko is a better character and a better person than Aang and should have been the hero instead of him. And I’ve seen it noted by even fans of the fic that a flaw of Vathara’s writing is that she wears her biases on her sleeve – when she likes or dislikes a character, you can really tell. And between Aang and Zuko… you can really tell which she likes, and which she doesn’t.
Another important theme in the fic is the idea that actions have consequences, along with Vathara’s repeated mantra that there are reasons, but no excuses. Again, a perfectly valid theme, and again, marred by the biased execution. In particular, while actions do have consequences, Aang’s and Katara’s actions are gone over with a fine-toothed comb for anything that could have gone wrong from them (and inevitably, it did) while Zuko mostly gets a free pass; even when his actions do have unforeseen consequences (like when he ended up inadvertently binding people across Ba Sing Se to him with loyalty) it never really seems to matter much. A good illustration is that we’re repeatedly and emphatically told that Koizilla’s slaughter of the Fire Navy, by being a force that overwhelmed the sailors and left them dying in pain and rage against something they couldn’t fight, spawned an army of vengeful undead… but when Zuko wipes out General Fong’s army with a fire trap, killing similar numbers of people in similar circumstances… the issue isn’t even raised, and it never becomes a problem. Furthermore, while there may be no excuses, the fic goes to great lengths to make sure we understand the Fire Nation’s reasons, and Zuko’s reasons more specifically, and why they do what they do and why it’s wrong to judge them if you don’t know the whole story, while Aang’s and Katara’s backstories are never really extended the same courtesy and more often used to make them look bad than not. Again, the authorial double-standard is extremely obvious. A final theme that Vathara raises is the idea that you should never explain by malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity… when the fic then immediately turns around and reveals that all the problems of the last thousand years have been caused by Koh (and Makoto and Wan Shih Tong) pulling strings. An ancient conspiracy of immortals out to ruin the world is… essentially the definition of malice.
The fic also has a number of running themes that are less explicit, but also very present, nonetheless. The first is the importance of royalty and nobility. Embers just loves aristocrats. Fire Nation Great Names (a system they don’t have in canon, but that Vathara created for the fic) get it particularly hard – it’s clear that we’re meant to see Great Names as being wonderful, amazing, powerful leaders, unmatched in either the Fire Nation proper or the world at large. Huojin is nearly overwhelmed upon realizing that Zuko is probably a great name’s son, and the assumption that a person is a great name or related to one is treated as confirmation they’ll be a force to be reckoned with. They’re also presented as being inherently wise and pragmatic leaders, never taking more territory than they can hold or abandoning their people (even Ozai is bound by these standards, though this is presented more as incredibly strong social conventions than a redeeming quality for Ozai personally). Notably, despite all the hype about great names being just Built Different, it’s also noted that the Fire Nation is the only nation where a commoner can rise to high rank – but frankly, this just comes off as Vathara trying to have her cake and eat it too. Beyond the Fire Nation, while we get some sneering at off-page lazy Earth Kingdom nobles, in practice Earth Kingdom nobles who actually appear tend to get similar, if less extreme, treatment. The Earth King is presented as being incredibly spiritually powerful and getting literal superpowers from his position, including the ability to singlehandedly banish Wan Shih Tong and his minions from the Earth Kingdom (when Long Feng compared the Earth King to a god in canon, I don’t think this is what he meant!) and is depicted as needing an equally spiritually strong wife to carry on the bloodline. Toph, meanwhile, is presented as the only knowledgeable and level-headed one of the Gaang, which comes from listening in on her father’s business meetings – this somehow makes her more wise and worldly than people for whom the war has been their life. I can’t help but think that in any other story, Toph would be the one forced to learn that the polite world of her dad’s business empire has real consequences that hurt real people… but instead, Vathara’s Toph is the only member of the Gaang to consistently have a good head on her shoulders and to be the voice of reason compared to the people who’ve already been traveling the world for months before they ever met her. Beyond that, Vathara stacks the cast heavily with nobles in general. Even the Wens turn out to be related to the Fire royal family, through Meixiang! Piandao is made a lord, despite there being no indication he was lord of anything in canon. Even Sokka gets (forcibly) adopted into the Fire nobility. It’s not hard to also notice that the two characters who bear the brunt of Vathara’s ire, Katara and Aang, are a commoner (and I agree with Vathara’s take that, from what we see of the Southern Water Tribe, Katara and Sokka’s dad being the village chief doesn’t make them nobility in any way) and a monk, respectively. It does make some of the sneering at Katara for being an “entitled chief’s daughter” come across as rather hypocritical, though. In any case, this is a through-line throughout the whole fic, which is really hard to escape.
Another aspect of the fic, which bugs me a lot the more I think about it, is the importance of bloodlines. Most obviously, you have the whole “firebenders are descended from dragons” thing, and “dragon children” with a lot of dragon ancestry are described as inevitably having certain abilities or behaving in certain ways (and, honestly, some dragon-child traits – their tendency to shut down when overwhelmed, their difficulty dealing with dishonesty and social complexities) come across as heavily autistic-coded to me, which as a person on the spectrum myself, I’m… deeply ambivalent about. Nor am I a particular fan of “this character’s nonhumanness is used to excuse their assholish behavior” in any context, though at least Vathara, despite the plot hinging heavily on dragons screwing humans being a reasonably common occurrence, doesn’t explicitly sexualize it the way a lot of werewolf stuff does (Embers is weirdly chaste in general by fanfic standards, tbh, possibly because Vathara sinks almost all of canon’s major ships and never really replaces them with anything; there’s Iroh/Amaya and that’s about it). But beyond that you have repeated talk about how people’s heredity influences their abilities and behavior, from everyone constantly waxing poetic about how powerful members of Sozin’s bloodline are to the eyebrow-raising AN containing The Saga of Fred the Cannibal, how Aang is presented as being inherently disadvantaged in dealing with ghosts because he wasn’t raised to know his family tree, etc. Hells, it’s kind of hard to escape the implication that the root of Vathara’s antipathy towards the Air Nomads is that they dare to raise their children in a way that doesn’t involve nuclear families (while the Fire Nation, Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes are depicted as having different understandings of family, they’re all depicted as setting great store by bloodlines). This one is pervasive enough to kind of creep me out, tbh, and when taken together with the previous point about nobility just makes me think of Bradley and her constant harping about the ‘royal blood of Avalon’ and such.
Another recurring theme in the fic is militarism, and romanticizing of the military, military life, military values, and Hard Men (and sometimes Hard Women) making Hard Choices. It’s obviously pretty inextricable from Vathara’s love for the Fire Nation (which the fic depicts as proud warrior race guys even more than canon does) and how the Fire Nation’s warlike nature is depicted as being completely inseparable from their culture, to the extent that any attempt to stamp it out is depicted as being a terrible crime. Beyond that, almost all her Fire Nation characters are nobility, military or both (and this is a society where there’s a lot of overlap between those categories, to be clear) and this is obviously a perspective the fic heavily favors; even Iroh and Zuko’s relationship is explicitly framed at times as an old general mentoring a young officer in a way it never really is in canon. Beyond the Fire Nation, you have other elements of this, including the Water Tribe’s warriors being treated rather more sympathetically than their benders, and the Air Nomads having had their powers crippled (including losing their healing, for some reason?) when Xiangchen and his followers imposed (and that’s indeed how it happened in Embers!verse) pacifism on them (and whenever Aang talks about wanting everyone to live in peace, everyone reacts to him like he’s come down with the plague, even his friends); even though Aang ultimately defeats Koh nonviolently, after all of this I didn’t really feel like the fic earned the moment. And then… we have the Dai Li, who get almost completely reimagined from creepy secret police into an order of badass exorcists who are absolutely necessary to Ba Sing Se’s functioning, who selflessly serve their city despite the trauma of their job and the rejection they often get from ordinary people… honestly, Vathara’s whitewashing of the Dai Li bugs me at least as much, if not more, than her whitewashing of the Fire Nation, who at least have the excuse of being an entire civilization. Canon’s Dai Li never come across, at least by the present, as anything but a thoroughly rotten organization (and the idea that most people join the Dai Li because of a genuine, selfless desire to serve the city strikes me as… naïve at best, considering what sorts of people actually tend to work for similar organizations IRL) but Vathara reimagines them from the ground up to be awesome and badass Hard Men who happen to be led by the bad apple Long Feng (and even he gets a shiny new war hero backstory). It’s just… another place where the author’s biases show very strongly (and based on some of the ANs, Vathara does seem to have fallen for the Myth of Rommel, and possibly the Clean Wehrmacht myth more generally, since they tend to go hand in hand; on an unrelated note, one of the historians she cites in her footnotes, it must be noted is VD Hanson, who in my experience is rather infamous in Classical circles for putting genuine historical expertise in the service of shallow jingoistic crankery).
Related to this theme, and another one that bothers me, is how Embers handles imperialism. The topic is kind of unavoidable, considering both the premise of the original show, which centers around a militaristic empire trying to conquer the world, and the fact that said empire becomes the author’s favorite culture that’s heavily centered in the narrative in Embers. And, again, while I want to stress that Embers presents both the original Air Nomad genocide and subsequent Hundred-Year War as being in the wrong… her difficulty with sincerely criticizing the Fire Nation still infests how she portrays this issue. Vathara’s view of the war is heavily Fire Nation-centric, focusing more on what prosecuting the war has done to the Fire Nation and its culture than what it’s like to be on the receiving end. Even then, the fic presents the Fire Nation as striving to rule its territories peacefully and justly and treating its conquered peoples as no different from other Fire Nation citizens (at least ideally, but there’s shown to be some truth to it) which is not how the Fire Nation operates in the show or how imperialism functions in real life. This is further underscored by elements like Iroh’s prayer early in the fic where he talks about how while peace will likely require the Fire Nation to give up its colonies, doing so will break their hearts, or by Vathara’s refusal in the ANs to allow for the possibility that Zhao’s armada was genocidal or that it was a valid target for Koizilla’s wrath. That’s not even getting into the thorny issue where the concept of “loyalty” basically means that, for the Fire Nation, the Nuremberg Defense is essentially legitimate in-universe. Again, Vathara doesn’t try to depict the Fire Nation’s war as justified, and Ozai himself remains a villain and a tyrant who must be defeated for the greater good… but even so, its’s hard to escape the feeling that she’s going out of her way to soften the blow.
Adding this here because I’m not sure where else to put it, but Vathara has a tendency to make her characters in some way persecuted or outcast by the world in ways that feel… very shallow. The Fire Nation live in constant fear of other nations finding out about their dragon heritage and considering them subhuman because of it, but, well… they’re literally part dragon, it’s hard to not make that sound cool, and whenever a dragon-child’s more… dragony traits inconvenience them, it often feels like it’s being presented as a problem on everyone else’s end for failing to understand them more than it is for them. Similarly, the fic goes to great lengths about how traumatic becoming a yaoren is, how they’re no longer really human, how their powers work differently from other benders and how they’ll die after the transformation without proper treatment… but in the grand scheme of the fic, these traits mostly seem to exist for us to sympathize with the yaoren for their “sacrifice” and what they must endure, rather than as something that actually meaningfully shapes their day-to-day lives. Similarly, while we’re told repeatedly how deadly loyalty sickness is… literally every character we see on-page who breaks loyalty survives doing it, so it makes it kind of hard to take seriously. It really feels like Vathara wants her characters to suffer enough to merit sympathy… but not so much that said suffering is actually a meaningful problem.
The fic also has a weird tendency to incorporate Western elements into the Avatarverse, which wouldn’t jump out to me as much (despite its Asian-inspired setting, A:TLA is, after all, an American franchise by origins) if it wasn’t for the fic’s reputation for detailed research. The initial law cited against Zuko stealing the ostrich-horse in “Theft Absolute” is Welsh, rather than anything from Asia; the spirit that stalks Ba Sing Se and serves as the arc villain for the first part of the Ba Sing Se arc is also based on a Celtic concept. Koh, the fic’s big bad… is basically turned into an expy of Satan. This is not something I say lightly. I study depictions of evil forces in religion IRL, and it is an enormous pet peeve of mine when people take any big, scary supernatural entity in fiction and call it Satan, a specific figure from a specific tradition (well, a specific group of traditions, but American pop culture Satan is the Christian Satan, specifically a Protestant take on Satan; Jewish and Muslim versions of Satan in particular are usually quite different). Vaatu, in canon… I consider to mostly be an expy of the Zoroastrian Ahriman, with a bit of Typhon and Apep in there for good measure; you can rightly criticize that none of those figures are of East Asian origin and argue whether they’re appropriate for the setting, but that’s still not the Christian Satan (who Vaatu does not, IMO, resemble in history, goals, methods or iconography beyond a generic “he’s bad’). But Embers!Koh… he’s the Avatar Spirit’s estranged, rebellious, child, who seeks to destroy humanity out of a complicated love/hate relationship with his “parent,” he uses humans and dragons as his pawns, tempting them with promises of power he has no intention of delivering or visions promising false enlightenment, he even commands an army of damned souls… he resembles Satan much more than he resembles his canon self (he doesn’t, IMO, resemble either of the mythological figures Vathara cites as inspiring him – Nidhogg and Jormungand, who once again are from a European tradition rather than an Asian one – either). I don’t know to what extent this was deliberate and to what extent it just happened unintentionally, but I do think it’s worth noting.
There are more themes and motifs than these in the fic, of course, though I don’t have a lot to say on some of them (and this section has run long already…) they still feel worth mentioning. There’s the idea that comes up several times of all medicines also being poisons. There’s the idea that the Avatar can themselves be a danger to the world and needs their yaoren (ie, Vathara’s creation) not to become unbalanced (though this is also an issue of Vathara prioritizing her own worldbuilding over the show’s). There’s the idea of dragons and their relationship with humanity and role in human society (which I think mostly comes down to author appeal). There’s an odd bit of ableism where Azula seems to only be able to grow and become a better person after Amaya heals her mind, which as a neurodivergent person myself IRL is just… ick. And there’s a weird, repeated idea of water, especially deep water, being associated with dark and dangerous things that comes up often enough you have to wonder if it’s a genuine phobia of Vathara’s (since reading the fic, I’ve heard this extends to some of her other works as well). Overall, I feel like I’ve been very harsh on the fic in this section, and… honestly, there’s a reason for that. Embers is not a stupid story, and it clearly wrestles with some significant and weighty topics. But I also don’t think it’s as smart as story as it tries to present itself as, or is taken to be, and I often find its treatment of those topics to be lacking at best and sometimes disturbing at worst. Even more than my issues with how the fic handles its characterization and worldbuilding, I think it’s the thematic issues that really bother me and get at the core of my problems with Embers. In purporting to offer a more serious and mature take on the Avatarverse, it raises some ideas it’s not really capable of effectively dealing with and presents some ideas that have very troubling real-world implications. And that, despite the fic’s positive qualities, is why so much of it ends up making me uncomfortable and leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
Conclusion
Embers is not a bad fic in the way that, say Partially Kissed Hero is bad; nor does it take the same sort of outright hatchet job to its source material as The Last Ringbearer does (as low a bar to clear as that is…). In fact, there’s quite a lot to admire about the fic as an accomplishment; bringing a story that long to a successful conclusion (albeit with some noticeable bumps along the way) is no mean feat, and Embers contains some genuinely interesting plot points and worldbuilding. But, in my opinion – and again, clearly what is a dealbreaker for me isn’t a dealbreaker for everyone – its issues with characterization, plot, and themes are severe enough I can’t bring myself to embrace the fic. Embers has problems, and some of those problems, IMO, are severe enough to rot through the whole edifice and taint the whole experience of reading it. So why do I spend so much time talking about a fic I don’t even particularly like? Well, several reasons. One, because like I’ve said I do like some of it in execution and more of it in theory, so there’s definitely some disappointment in how the fic ended up at play. And there’s also the fact that Embers is (or was in its heyday) a very popular, very well-known fic – that means it’s come to a lot of people’s attention over the course of its existence (mine included) and has also gotten some very effusive praise. I’ve seen reviews of Embers praising it not only as the greatest fic in the A:TLA fandom, but as the greatest piece of literature the reviewer had ever read… ever. And, honestly, if people are going to treat Embers as serious literature, I feel like it ought to be able to stand up to serious analysis (as for it being the greatest piece of literature ever… I can recommend a bunch of epic fantasy novels that I think do the things Embers does as well or better; some of them have enough similarities they may have been actual influences on Vathara, though I couldn’t say for sure). And, well, while I think Embers goes wrong in a lot of ways, I think it goes wrong in ways that are interesting and worth talking about – I don’t think Embers is bad in ways that should be mocked so much as ways that should be discussed and from which we can genuinely learn some things about both fanfic and fantasy writing.
Well, at long last, we bring this review to a close. Whew! Everyone, I am so very, very sorry this took so long. Thank you again to everyone who’s stuck with me on this; I really do appreciate it! If you want to check out some much snarkier takedowns of some more overtly awful stories, feel free to check out my ongoing sporkings, here or on Das_Sporking2. I also have another review series (well, more of a reread/recap) planned for later in the summer… and though this review is at long last complete, we may not have seen the last of Embers yet, either. Thank you again, and I hope to see you all soon!
To begin our third and final segment of my review of Vathara’s Embers, I once again must apologize to anyone still reading this for how I’ve let time get away from me! In my defense, I’ve had a lot on my plate lately both IRL and online, but that still can’t help but feel like I’m making excuses for myself. Sigh. In any case, it is now, at long last, finally time to wrap this baby up and render our final verdict on this famous – or infamous – fic. In the first part of my review, we gave a basic overview of the fic, discussed what I liked about it, discussed whether it’s really Fire Nation apologia or not (the answer… depends on how you mean that) and looked at some of the fic’s much-vaunted worldbuilding. In the second part, we ran through the fic’s vast cast of characters, both canon characters and OCs (you can also check out my chapter-by-chapter commentary here). Today, it’s time to finally take a look at the fic’s plot (or plots), its relationship to the canon show, its themes, and render my final verdict on it. Fair warning, this part of the review will once again be pretty negative, though not quite to the extent of my take on Vathara’s characters; still, this is where a lot of my criticisms of what I see as the fic’s deeper issues will come in, so if that still interests you, strap in!
Plot
In case you need reminding (because it’s been more than two years since I started this review series, I’m so sorry it’s taken this long!) Embers is a long fic. To restate my original comparisons, it’s longer than the entirety of The Lord of the Rings even if you include The Hobbit too, longer than War and Peace, and roughly comparable to the entire original Mistborn trilogy. Needless to say, at that length, the fic has a lot going on. You can describe its premise in a couple of different ways – as a retelling of A:TLA where Zuko is the protagonist and Aang the deuteragonist and foil, rather than the other way around; as a for-want-of-a-nail AU that spins off from the original show early in Book II when Zuko learns how to do fire-healing; A:TLA reimagined as a gritty adult epic fantasy rather than a (mostly) light kids-and-families epic fantasy; I’ve even seen it described as a version of A:TLA as if it actually was a shonen anime (instead of merely being sometimes mistaken for one) with Zuko as the protagonist. And none of those are wrong, per se… but because, again, the fic has a lot going on, none of them quite hit the whole truth, either.
Internally, Embers itself has no explicit organization beyond its chapters; because of its length, however, it’s sometimes divided into a series of story-arcs; I first ran across this format on TVTropes (though I don’t know if it originated there) and generally find it the easiest way to think about the fic’s structure. By this standard, the first arc is the Walking the Earth Kingdom arc (“Theft Absolute” – Chapter 7) which focuses on Zuko and Iroh traveling together through the Earth Kingdom, largely retracing their steps from the show’s Book II but with various changes brought on by the fic’s initial divergences. Second is the first part of the Ba Sing Se arc (Chapters 8-18) which focuses on Zuko and Iroh building a life in Ba Sing Se, meeting and bonding with a number of Vathara’s OCs (including Amaya, Huojin, Shirong and the Wens), learning more about Zuko’s powers and ultimately fighting a spirit. Third is the second part of the Ba Sing Se arc (Chapters 19-24) focusing on Azula’s arrival in Ba Sing Se, the conflict with Long Feng coming to a head, and the fic’s version of the climax of Book II playing out. Fourth is the Beach Arc (Chapters 25-30), focusing on the truce between the Gaang (and the Water Tribes) and Team Zuko (and Suzuran’s crew) as Aang and Zuko recover from the battle and everyone has lots of revelations about each other’s motivations, cultures and the true history of the world. Fifth is the Shipboard Arc (Chapters 31-36) following Zuko’s journey on Suzuran and Aang’s journey with the Water Tribes, culminating in Zuko liberating a large segment of Ba Sing Se’s population from the occupied city.
Seventh is the Exodus from Ba Sing Se arc (Chapters 37-46) following Zuko as he travels with the refugees towards Asagitatsu and what he hopes will be safety, and along the ways meets his grandfather Shidan and learns more about his own heritage and the true nature of the threat facing the world. Eighth is the Fire Nation arc (Chapters 47-55) as the Gaang enters the Fire Nation and retraces their own steps from Book III while Zuko continues his journey. Ninth is the Shelter of Dragons’ Wings arc (Chapters 56 – 64) as the Gaang continues their journey and Zuko successfully lays claim to Asagitatsu, creating the colony of Dragons’ Wings. Ninth is the Invasion arc (Chapters 65-69) following the Gaang’s invasion of the Fire Nation on the Day of Black Sun, followed closely by the tenth arc, the Siege of Dragons’ Wings (Chapters 70-74) which focuses on General Fong’s attack on Zuko’s colony and its aftermath. Eleventh is the Search for the Fire Sage arc (Chapters 75-80) as Zuko and the Gaang reluctantly team up to find and rescue Shyu the Fire Sage so he can become Aang’s firebending teacher. The fic comes to a conclusion with the twelfth arc, Sozin’s Comet (Chapters 81-91) as all the bubbling conflicts come to a head and we have the final battles with Ozai, Makoto and Koh, and the ultimate fulfilment of Zuko’s and Aang’s destinies.
Overall, if the fic’s premise could be summed up succinctly, it would probably be to say that once there were beings called yaoren, special two-element benders who existed to guide and support the Avatar and help them maintain balance in the world. Unfortunately, the yaoren have largely died out, with few surviving coming into their powers in recent centuries, with the result that the Avatars haven’t been able to do their jobs properly and the world is falling into chaos. This breakdown has been helped along by a conspiracy of spirits and dragons led by Koh the Face-Stealer, who seeks to destroy humanity for cryptic reasons, and Makoto, an ancient dragon who was also Sozin’s wife and Ozai’s grandmother. Because also dragons are extremely important, wise and powerful in a way that the majority of humans are completely unaware of and are the ancestors of the firebenders and most of the Fire Nation. Added to that, we have lots of things going on involving the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom, their histories, politics and cultures, as well as Aang and Zuko’s personal journeys and, to a lesser extent, the individual arcs of a lot of supporting characters, including both canon characters and Vathara’s OCs. Whew!
In my initial review, I complimented the fic for keeping all those balls in the air as well as it does. Unfortunately, after doing my close read of the whole fic, I have to retract this statement somewhat. Because I hadn’t noticed, or processed, before just how many roads to nowhere this fic has; it is absolutely littered with characters and plot points that are introduced with much fanfare only to amount to nothing and/or be dropped unceremoniously. Ursa has some spiritual trauma that keeps her from wanting to see her children? Never resolved, she shows up in one scene at the very end and barely speaks, and that’s it. Shidan is on some personal mission of his own? He wanders out of the story after his adventure with the Gaang and never shows up again. Tao shows up to be Aang’s spiritual teacher? Aang runs away from him after a few lessons and Tao himself is quietly dropped from the story. Two sandbenders (technically a sandbender and an airbender) want to marry the Earth King? The subplot gets dropped a few chapters later and the characters only get a brief cameo at the end of the fic. The Gaang goes to great lengths to find and rescue Shyu so he can teach Aang firebending? He vanishes after a couple of chapters and, ironically, I don’t think Aang learns any meaningful firebending in the whole fic. There’s a conspiracy among the Fire Sages to kill Ozai’s children? Never amounts to anything. Jet and the Freedom Fighters? Unceremoniously vanish from the story en route to Dragons’ Wings, and we never learn their fate. Sokka gets “adopted” into the Fire Nation by Temul and is terrified of what this means for him and how he’ll explain it to his dad? As far as we can tell, Hakoda seems weirdly okay with it. The implications that the Avatar Spirit is a separate being from Aang and may not have humanity’s best interests at heart? Never amounts to anything. Shidan’s lore dump about dragons and the Avatarverse’s ancient history? Cuts off after a dragon and a human have a meet cute moment, and we never learn anything more about it. The implication that humans aren’t native to the Avatarverse in the first place? Aside from a brief gag in the final chapter that turns the fic into an unlabeled Stargate crossover, never matters. The Wens turn out to have royal blood and be relatively close in line to the throne? Nothing ever comes of it, and the Wens themselves get demoted to extra after the fic arrives at Asagitatsu. And there’s probably more in this vein that I’m forgetting. On a related note, there are also some important plotlines that feel rather underdeveloped (Azula’s in particular; while the narrative assures us she’s totally changed for the better by the end of the fic, most of the actual development feels skimmed over so that at most she comes across as slightly more pragmatic and less cruel than her old self, and her falling out with her father also feels rushed and poorly explained) and some plot elements (including the existence of the drowned, and of the effects of “element sickness” in benders other than firebenders) get introduced without feeling properly foreshadowed or set up.
My point being here, I think that Vathara tried to do too much with the story, taking an already complicated AU premise and then filling it with characters and subplots that seemed designed to explore every aspect of her version of the Avatarverse (I honestly don’t think the comparison to War and Peace is unwarranted, in this particular way!) on top of that. And, to be fair, some of her ANs indicate that the fic grew rather far beyond her original intentions for it, and I sympathize with that. However, I do think at some point Vathara lost control of the fic, and a lot of the story’s branches ended up having to be cut off so the actual main plot could be resolved in a satisfactory manner. And the fic does do that… mostly (though I think the ending is rushed and there are several aspects, such as how Aang deals with Koh, that should have been set up better) but it can’t escape being littered with dead ends along the way, to its ultimate detriment. There’s also the strange case that, while I’d consider Vathara’s handling of the Zuko-Iroh dynamic is one of the fic’s strengths in its first half, Iroh gets increasingly sidelined in the back half, giving the unfortunate implication that Zuko has “upgraded” to better mentors (Shidan in particular) and then the last couple of arcs have a running subplot of the two of them locking horns that mostly just serves as a source of cheap drama, is intensely uncomfortable to read, and gets resolved rather offhandedly in the last chapter, making the whole thing feel rather pointless. As I’ve said before, I really do have to applaud Vathara’s ambitions with this fic – Embers is a fandom titan for a reason, after all – but I do think her ambition ended up reaching beyond her ability to actually execute it.
Relationship to Canon
One of the most common defenses I’ve run into for Embers, particularly its wildly AU elements and characterization of various canon characters, is that its nature as an AU means that you shouldn’t judge it against canon and should, instead, try to enjoy it first and foremost as its own thing. And while on principle I think that’s a perfectly fine argument to make, in practice… for this fic, in particular, I think that this argument simply doesn’t hold up at all. The biggest reason being that Embers simply doesn’t stand on its own; I can only imagine that someone trying to read it as if it was an original epic fantasy saga without any connections to A:TLA would find it completely incomprehensible, and there are large chunks of it that simply don’t make sense if you don’t keep the canon show in mind while you’re reading.
What do I mean by this? Well, the biggest part is that Embers, for a reminder, only diverges from canon in “Theft Absolute,” which is an alternate ending for Zuko’s subplot in “The Cave of Two Lovers” – ie, the second episode of Book II. In other words, all of Book I is Embers!canon, as is a good chunk of Book II (mostly the Gaang’s storyline until the season finale arc) and even a few bits of Book III (we’ll get to that in a minute). In other words, we’re supposed to expect that all of those episodes happened exactly as they did in canon in Embers!verse, with the characters and setting as depicted therein being consistent with how the fic portrays them. And, frankly… it doesn’t work. Clearly plenty of people are capable of squaring this circle, or the fic wouldn’t be as popular as it is, but for me… this is something I really can’t let go. In some cases, we have issues that are minor in the context of the fic but still pretty headscratching (like how Gyatso is characterized pretty much exactly as he is in canon, with zero indication given of how a society like Vathara’s take on the Air Nomads could have produced him) to other issues that are more serious. In particular, Vathara has a tendency to wield her AU elements like a club, retroactively reading them into canon episodes where they clearly weren’t present in order to make characters she doesn’t like look bad or like they made the wrong decision. The biggest is probably Koizilla leading to the creation of the drowned in Embers!canon, something that Aang is repeatedly and consistently raked over the coals for not knowing about despite there being no reason he would in the original show, because it simply wasn’t an issue; another is the extended explanations for how Aang totally should have known Zuko was honorable all along and what a dire insult him trying to escape Zuko’s ship in “The Avatar Returns” was (notably, in the original episode Zuko is angry, but neither surprised nor betrayed by that turn of events), or Amaya calling out the Gaang for daring to think the Dai Li are evil (when the Dai Li’s behavior around them has given them no reason to think otherwise) or the Dai Li disparaging Aang for missing the spirit that was attacking Ba Sing Se (when it was only there because Vathara included it and wasn’t in the original show, and both the spirit and the Dai Li themselves were working to prevent knowledge of the thing from becoming public). And in all these cases I use mistakes the fic gives Aang as examples, because he’s the worst victim of this habit of Vathara’s, with her “proving” he’s unfit to be the Avatar by having him be ignorant of (or deliberately flouting) things he couldn’t possibly have known in the original canon because these elements are unique to Embers. Zuko, notably, never seems to have this problem; indeed, Embers is more likely to go out of its way to include new layers of revelations to justify, or at least explain, his behavior instead (and sometimes the AU elements are explicitly used to correct elements of Zuko’s canon behavior that Vathara clearly doesn’t approve of, such as stealing the ostrich-horse, trusting Jet to a certain degree, or being willing to befriend and teach Aang). The double standard is pretty obvious. The fic also has something of a running theme of sneering at what seem to be elements of canon Vathara doesn’t like, including canon’s take on dragons (people only think that because they’re racist), Katara being the Team Mom (she was mind-controlling everyone else into it) or Zuko becoming Aang’s friend (which various characters repeatedly and emphatically say will never happen).
On the other hand, despite the massive changes in the AU the fic also stays fairly strictly on the Stations of the Canon for Aang’s storyline (and sometimes for Zuko’s, though less often after he leaves Ba Sing Se). And when the fic does this, it often assumes that the reader knows the original show and skips over key events – most egregiously, the events of “The Earth King” (where Long Feng goes from being de facto dictator of the Earth Kingdom in one scene to in prison the next time we see him with no explanation, and also Azula is there now) but during the Gaang’s journey through the Fire Nation we also have several scenes that are skipped over (including Aang in the Fire Nation school, which somehow still happened in Embers despite Embers!Aang – in contrast to his canon self, whose knowledge was woefully out of date but still accurate enough he could pass himself off as an ignorant colonial bumpkin and have people buy it – clearly knowing nothing about the Fire Nation) or dropped on us in media res. I think this also hurts the villains and their level of menace, too, since Koh’s conspiracy is responsible for a lot of things (Chin’s conquests, the Air Nomad genocide, pulling Ozai’s strings and even the Misty Palms Oasis drying up) that humans did to themselves just fine (or were even natural phenomena) in canon, which makes it feel kind of like the villains’ actions just never actually amounted to much. That’s not even getting into how the fic’s Fire Nation is supposed to be the same as canon’s Fire Nation, despite having a completely different culture, history and organizational values from what the show depicts. And, again, this wouldn’t be a huge problem – it is a fanfic, after all, and can safely assume 99% of readers will have at least a basic knowledge of the source material – but it does mean that on its own, Embers doesn’t always flow very well and absolutely requires the original show to plug in the gaps and make sense of it. But for a fic that never shakes being dependent on the original canon, it’s also a fic that goes out of its way to refute load-bearing elements of the show’s plot, characters and worldbuilding – and IMO, the more you keep the original canon in mind, the more the seams between it and Embers show. And again, clearly this is something that plenty of people are able to make peace with or the fic wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it is – but it bugs me, badly. If Embers really was a ground up AU reimagining of Avatar, Ultimate Universe style… I’d still have issues with some of Vathara’s choices, but I’d be much more willing to let the fic be its own thing. As it is, I don’t think Embers leaves us that option.
Themes
Hooo, boy. This is the big one. Embers is a fic that quite clearly prides itself on being smart – some of the chapters include literal scholarly citations, even – and Vathara is clearly not just trying to tell a story here, she has things to say. But I think a problem with Embers is that a lot of what’s it’s ostensibly trying to say on the surface… is not particularly consistent with what it actually depicts. And there are also some running ideas in the fic that are kind of… unpleasant, some of which I’ve seen discussed elsewhere more than others. So, I’d like to pick some of this apart and try and get at what messages I feel Embers is trying to send, what messages it actually sends, and the root of some of my deeper problems with the fic.
First off, Embers is very clearly a story that is deeply concerned about cultures, cultural differences, and communication across cultural divides, and it goes to great lengths to flesh out all its major cultures to a greater degree than we see in canon (as we’ve previously discussed in my section on Vathara’s worldbuilding in the first post). Ultimately, I think that Embers wants to be a story about the importance of multiculturalism, of seeing other people’s points of view, and bringing people from diverse backgrounds together to bridge divides and fight common enemies. And in theory, that’s a pretty great theme! Unfortunately, I think it falls pretty hard into the brick wall that is the author’s personal biases… because it’s pretty clear which of the cultures Vathara has created she likes the most and, surprise, it’s the Fire Nation. I’m not going to spend too much time here talking about them, because I already covered this topic in some detail back in my section on whether the fic is Fire Nation apologism or not, but I’ll summarize in brief. Embers doesn’t, IMO, go full Last Ringbearer in its characterization of the Fire Nation – there’s no doubt that Ozai is still evil and his regime is a bad thing – but Vathara really likes her Fire Nation culture and its values. Any time we have a conversation or argument between a Fire National and someone from another culture, the Fire Nation perspective gets prioritized. The other person is expected to go out of their way to understand the Fire Nation position, while the Fire National isn’t really expected to extend the same courtesy. Characters who strongly oppose the Fire Nation are often depicted as not only opposed to the Fire Nation state but actively racist against Fire Nation people, and canon characters who are strongly anti-Fire Nation are presented extremely negatively (Katara) or if already antagonistic are made actively worse (Jet or General Fong). Vathara doesn’t seem to understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be Fire Nation, given the opportunity, while Roku considering himself the Avatar first and Fire Nation second is presented as a heinous betrayal. Trying to change the Fire Nation’s culture from outside is depicted as a gross violation (and Kyoshi doing it by instituting the Fire Lord is depicted as what got the world into this mess), while on the other hand the Air Nomad temple system being destroyed is depicted as being probably for the best (though I’ll stress, again, that Embers does not actually approve of the Air Nomad genocide – though with Vathara’s obvious distaste for the Air Nomads dripping off the page whenever they’re discussed the vibe tends to come off as “the Air Nomads, as annoying as they were, didn’t actually deserve to die for it” which… isn’t great, for a supposedly anti-genocide moral) The Fire Nation ultimately serves as the focus for the bad guys’ schemes and the linchpin for much of the conflict; its’ the Fire Nation’s world, everyone else is just living in it. The Earth Kingdom also gets a more-or-less positive portrayal, with some caveats (but is probably closest to its canon version overall) while the Water Tribes and Air Nomads get hit much more negatively (the Air Nomads are basically the inverse of how the fic handles the Fire Nation, with Aang barely being able to get a word in edgewise when he tries to defend them, and seemingly every time they come up some new dark secret is revealed about them).
I think a bigger problem the fic has with its handling of cultures is that they’re all very… planet of hats-y, for lack of a better term. By which I mean, people from a particular culture tend to behave in very specific ways, which are directly attributed to their culture, sometimes even if they weren’t raised in it (ie, of the Wen kids, Suyin and Jinhai are depicted as taking very strongly after their Fire Nation heritage despite only recently having learned about it; Ty Lee acts like an airbender despite being raised in the Fire Nation, etc.).This may be tied more to the elements than cultures, per se (ie, the colony at the Northern Air Temple start acting like Air Nomads despite having no real reason to, seemingly because some of them are becoming airbenders) but the two are pretty closely aligned anyway. In any case, to echo one criticism of the fic I saw elsewhere, Vathara’s characters can sometimes come off less as people and more as automatons programmed by their culture to think and behave in certain ways; on the one hand, actively exploring and engaging with values dissonance and culture clash is an interesting and important topic to explore… but I think Vathara sometimes takes it too far, with characters from different cultures sometimes feeling less like different groups of humans and more like aliens to each other, not helped that even after a hundred years of war, everyone else seems completely ignorant of even basic facts about the Fire Nation.
Another theme the fic explicitly brings up is a deconstruction of the idea of the Chosen One and the kid hero – essentially, that it’s unfair and ridiculous to put that kind of pressure on the shoulders of a single kid who can’t possibly deal with that kind of responsibility. And again, that’s a worthwhile theme to explore! Unfortunately, it can’t help but feel like Vathara’s real problem is less that we shouldn’t have to count on one kid to save us, and more that the world is looking to the wrong kid hero to save them, with Aang being constantly denigrated in favor of Zuko, the one who actually knows more about what’s really at stake, has an actual sense of responsibility, and a whole suite of special abilities of his own (even Zuko’s bad luck is made a sign that he’s been rejected by the spirits, and is therefore below their influence). So, I can’t help but feel like this whole plot thread ends up being less about the problems of chosen ones and kid heroes, and more about the author’s personal biases – that Zuko is a better character and a better person than Aang and should have been the hero instead of him. And I’ve seen it noted by even fans of the fic that a flaw of Vathara’s writing is that she wears her biases on her sleeve – when she likes or dislikes a character, you can really tell. And between Aang and Zuko… you can really tell which she likes, and which she doesn’t.
Another important theme in the fic is the idea that actions have consequences, along with Vathara’s repeated mantra that there are reasons, but no excuses. Again, a perfectly valid theme, and again, marred by the biased execution. In particular, while actions do have consequences, Aang’s and Katara’s actions are gone over with a fine-toothed comb for anything that could have gone wrong from them (and inevitably, it did) while Zuko mostly gets a free pass; even when his actions do have unforeseen consequences (like when he ended up inadvertently binding people across Ba Sing Se to him with loyalty) it never really seems to matter much. A good illustration is that we’re repeatedly and emphatically told that Koizilla’s slaughter of the Fire Navy, by being a force that overwhelmed the sailors and left them dying in pain and rage against something they couldn’t fight, spawned an army of vengeful undead… but when Zuko wipes out General Fong’s army with a fire trap, killing similar numbers of people in similar circumstances… the issue isn’t even raised, and it never becomes a problem. Furthermore, while there may be no excuses, the fic goes to great lengths to make sure we understand the Fire Nation’s reasons, and Zuko’s reasons more specifically, and why they do what they do and why it’s wrong to judge them if you don’t know the whole story, while Aang’s and Katara’s backstories are never really extended the same courtesy and more often used to make them look bad than not. Again, the authorial double-standard is extremely obvious. A final theme that Vathara raises is the idea that you should never explain by malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity… when the fic then immediately turns around and reveals that all the problems of the last thousand years have been caused by Koh (and Makoto and Wan Shih Tong) pulling strings. An ancient conspiracy of immortals out to ruin the world is… essentially the definition of malice.
The fic also has a number of running themes that are less explicit, but also very present, nonetheless. The first is the importance of royalty and nobility. Embers just loves aristocrats. Fire Nation Great Names (a system they don’t have in canon, but that Vathara created for the fic) get it particularly hard – it’s clear that we’re meant to see Great Names as being wonderful, amazing, powerful leaders, unmatched in either the Fire Nation proper or the world at large. Huojin is nearly overwhelmed upon realizing that Zuko is probably a great name’s son, and the assumption that a person is a great name or related to one is treated as confirmation they’ll be a force to be reckoned with. They’re also presented as being inherently wise and pragmatic leaders, never taking more territory than they can hold or abandoning their people (even Ozai is bound by these standards, though this is presented more as incredibly strong social conventions than a redeeming quality for Ozai personally). Notably, despite all the hype about great names being just Built Different, it’s also noted that the Fire Nation is the only nation where a commoner can rise to high rank – but frankly, this just comes off as Vathara trying to have her cake and eat it too. Beyond the Fire Nation, while we get some sneering at off-page lazy Earth Kingdom nobles, in practice Earth Kingdom nobles who actually appear tend to get similar, if less extreme, treatment. The Earth King is presented as being incredibly spiritually powerful and getting literal superpowers from his position, including the ability to singlehandedly banish Wan Shih Tong and his minions from the Earth Kingdom (when Long Feng compared the Earth King to a god in canon, I don’t think this is what he meant!) and is depicted as needing an equally spiritually strong wife to carry on the bloodline. Toph, meanwhile, is presented as the only knowledgeable and level-headed one of the Gaang, which comes from listening in on her father’s business meetings – this somehow makes her more wise and worldly than people for whom the war has been their life. I can’t help but think that in any other story, Toph would be the one forced to learn that the polite world of her dad’s business empire has real consequences that hurt real people… but instead, Vathara’s Toph is the only member of the Gaang to consistently have a good head on her shoulders and to be the voice of reason compared to the people who’ve already been traveling the world for months before they ever met her. Beyond that, Vathara stacks the cast heavily with nobles in general. Even the Wens turn out to be related to the Fire royal family, through Meixiang! Piandao is made a lord, despite there being no indication he was lord of anything in canon. Even Sokka gets (forcibly) adopted into the Fire nobility. It’s not hard to also notice that the two characters who bear the brunt of Vathara’s ire, Katara and Aang, are a commoner (and I agree with Vathara’s take that, from what we see of the Southern Water Tribe, Katara and Sokka’s dad being the village chief doesn’t make them nobility in any way) and a monk, respectively. It does make some of the sneering at Katara for being an “entitled chief’s daughter” come across as rather hypocritical, though. In any case, this is a through-line throughout the whole fic, which is really hard to escape.
Another aspect of the fic, which bugs me a lot the more I think about it, is the importance of bloodlines. Most obviously, you have the whole “firebenders are descended from dragons” thing, and “dragon children” with a lot of dragon ancestry are described as inevitably having certain abilities or behaving in certain ways (and, honestly, some dragon-child traits – their tendency to shut down when overwhelmed, their difficulty dealing with dishonesty and social complexities) come across as heavily autistic-coded to me, which as a person on the spectrum myself, I’m… deeply ambivalent about. Nor am I a particular fan of “this character’s nonhumanness is used to excuse their assholish behavior” in any context, though at least Vathara, despite the plot hinging heavily on dragons screwing humans being a reasonably common occurrence, doesn’t explicitly sexualize it the way a lot of werewolf stuff does (Embers is weirdly chaste in general by fanfic standards, tbh, possibly because Vathara sinks almost all of canon’s major ships and never really replaces them with anything; there’s Iroh/Amaya and that’s about it). But beyond that you have repeated talk about how people’s heredity influences their abilities and behavior, from everyone constantly waxing poetic about how powerful members of Sozin’s bloodline are to the eyebrow-raising AN containing The Saga of Fred the Cannibal, how Aang is presented as being inherently disadvantaged in dealing with ghosts because he wasn’t raised to know his family tree, etc. Hells, it’s kind of hard to escape the implication that the root of Vathara’s antipathy towards the Air Nomads is that they dare to raise their children in a way that doesn’t involve nuclear families (while the Fire Nation, Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes are depicted as having different understandings of family, they’re all depicted as setting great store by bloodlines). This one is pervasive enough to kind of creep me out, tbh, and when taken together with the previous point about nobility just makes me think of Bradley and her constant harping about the ‘royal blood of Avalon’ and such.
Another recurring theme in the fic is militarism, and romanticizing of the military, military life, military values, and Hard Men (and sometimes Hard Women) making Hard Choices. It’s obviously pretty inextricable from Vathara’s love for the Fire Nation (which the fic depicts as proud warrior race guys even more than canon does) and how the Fire Nation’s warlike nature is depicted as being completely inseparable from their culture, to the extent that any attempt to stamp it out is depicted as being a terrible crime. Beyond that, almost all her Fire Nation characters are nobility, military or both (and this is a society where there’s a lot of overlap between those categories, to be clear) and this is obviously a perspective the fic heavily favors; even Iroh and Zuko’s relationship is explicitly framed at times as an old general mentoring a young officer in a way it never really is in canon. Beyond the Fire Nation, you have other elements of this, including the Water Tribe’s warriors being treated rather more sympathetically than their benders, and the Air Nomads having had their powers crippled (including losing their healing, for some reason?) when Xiangchen and his followers imposed (and that’s indeed how it happened in Embers!verse) pacifism on them (and whenever Aang talks about wanting everyone to live in peace, everyone reacts to him like he’s come down with the plague, even his friends); even though Aang ultimately defeats Koh nonviolently, after all of this I didn’t really feel like the fic earned the moment. And then… we have the Dai Li, who get almost completely reimagined from creepy secret police into an order of badass exorcists who are absolutely necessary to Ba Sing Se’s functioning, who selflessly serve their city despite the trauma of their job and the rejection they often get from ordinary people… honestly, Vathara’s whitewashing of the Dai Li bugs me at least as much, if not more, than her whitewashing of the Fire Nation, who at least have the excuse of being an entire civilization. Canon’s Dai Li never come across, at least by the present, as anything but a thoroughly rotten organization (and the idea that most people join the Dai Li because of a genuine, selfless desire to serve the city strikes me as… naïve at best, considering what sorts of people actually tend to work for similar organizations IRL) but Vathara reimagines them from the ground up to be awesome and badass Hard Men who happen to be led by the bad apple Long Feng (and even he gets a shiny new war hero backstory). It’s just… another place where the author’s biases show very strongly (and based on some of the ANs, Vathara does seem to have fallen for the Myth of Rommel, and possibly the Clean Wehrmacht myth more generally, since they tend to go hand in hand; on an unrelated note, one of the historians she cites in her footnotes, it must be noted is VD Hanson, who in my experience is rather infamous in Classical circles for putting genuine historical expertise in the service of shallow jingoistic crankery).
Related to this theme, and another one that bothers me, is how Embers handles imperialism. The topic is kind of unavoidable, considering both the premise of the original show, which centers around a militaristic empire trying to conquer the world, and the fact that said empire becomes the author’s favorite culture that’s heavily centered in the narrative in Embers. And, again, while I want to stress that Embers presents both the original Air Nomad genocide and subsequent Hundred-Year War as being in the wrong… her difficulty with sincerely criticizing the Fire Nation still infests how she portrays this issue. Vathara’s view of the war is heavily Fire Nation-centric, focusing more on what prosecuting the war has done to the Fire Nation and its culture than what it’s like to be on the receiving end. Even then, the fic presents the Fire Nation as striving to rule its territories peacefully and justly and treating its conquered peoples as no different from other Fire Nation citizens (at least ideally, but there’s shown to be some truth to it) which is not how the Fire Nation operates in the show or how imperialism functions in real life. This is further underscored by elements like Iroh’s prayer early in the fic where he talks about how while peace will likely require the Fire Nation to give up its colonies, doing so will break their hearts, or by Vathara’s refusal in the ANs to allow for the possibility that Zhao’s armada was genocidal or that it was a valid target for Koizilla’s wrath. That’s not even getting into the thorny issue where the concept of “loyalty” basically means that, for the Fire Nation, the Nuremberg Defense is essentially legitimate in-universe. Again, Vathara doesn’t try to depict the Fire Nation’s war as justified, and Ozai himself remains a villain and a tyrant who must be defeated for the greater good… but even so, its’s hard to escape the feeling that she’s going out of her way to soften the blow.
Adding this here because I’m not sure where else to put it, but Vathara has a tendency to make her characters in some way persecuted or outcast by the world in ways that feel… very shallow. The Fire Nation live in constant fear of other nations finding out about their dragon heritage and considering them subhuman because of it, but, well… they’re literally part dragon, it’s hard to not make that sound cool, and whenever a dragon-child’s more… dragony traits inconvenience them, it often feels like it’s being presented as a problem on everyone else’s end for failing to understand them more than it is for them. Similarly, the fic goes to great lengths about how traumatic becoming a yaoren is, how they’re no longer really human, how their powers work differently from other benders and how they’ll die after the transformation without proper treatment… but in the grand scheme of the fic, these traits mostly seem to exist for us to sympathize with the yaoren for their “sacrifice” and what they must endure, rather than as something that actually meaningfully shapes their day-to-day lives. Similarly, while we’re told repeatedly how deadly loyalty sickness is… literally every character we see on-page who breaks loyalty survives doing it, so it makes it kind of hard to take seriously. It really feels like Vathara wants her characters to suffer enough to merit sympathy… but not so much that said suffering is actually a meaningful problem.
The fic also has a weird tendency to incorporate Western elements into the Avatarverse, which wouldn’t jump out to me as much (despite its Asian-inspired setting, A:TLA is, after all, an American franchise by origins) if it wasn’t for the fic’s reputation for detailed research. The initial law cited against Zuko stealing the ostrich-horse in “Theft Absolute” is Welsh, rather than anything from Asia; the spirit that stalks Ba Sing Se and serves as the arc villain for the first part of the Ba Sing Se arc is also based on a Celtic concept. Koh, the fic’s big bad… is basically turned into an expy of Satan. This is not something I say lightly. I study depictions of evil forces in religion IRL, and it is an enormous pet peeve of mine when people take any big, scary supernatural entity in fiction and call it Satan, a specific figure from a specific tradition (well, a specific group of traditions, but American pop culture Satan is the Christian Satan, specifically a Protestant take on Satan; Jewish and Muslim versions of Satan in particular are usually quite different). Vaatu, in canon… I consider to mostly be an expy of the Zoroastrian Ahriman, with a bit of Typhon and Apep in there for good measure; you can rightly criticize that none of those figures are of East Asian origin and argue whether they’re appropriate for the setting, but that’s still not the Christian Satan (who Vaatu does not, IMO, resemble in history, goals, methods or iconography beyond a generic “he’s bad’). But Embers!Koh… he’s the Avatar Spirit’s estranged, rebellious, child, who seeks to destroy humanity out of a complicated love/hate relationship with his “parent,” he uses humans and dragons as his pawns, tempting them with promises of power he has no intention of delivering or visions promising false enlightenment, he even commands an army of damned souls… he resembles Satan much more than he resembles his canon self (he doesn’t, IMO, resemble either of the mythological figures Vathara cites as inspiring him – Nidhogg and Jormungand, who once again are from a European tradition rather than an Asian one – either). I don’t know to what extent this was deliberate and to what extent it just happened unintentionally, but I do think it’s worth noting.
There are more themes and motifs than these in the fic, of course, though I don’t have a lot to say on some of them (and this section has run long already…) they still feel worth mentioning. There’s the idea that comes up several times of all medicines also being poisons. There’s the idea that the Avatar can themselves be a danger to the world and needs their yaoren (ie, Vathara’s creation) not to become unbalanced (though this is also an issue of Vathara prioritizing her own worldbuilding over the show’s). There’s the idea of dragons and their relationship with humanity and role in human society (which I think mostly comes down to author appeal). There’s an odd bit of ableism where Azula seems to only be able to grow and become a better person after Amaya heals her mind, which as a neurodivergent person myself IRL is just… ick. And there’s a weird, repeated idea of water, especially deep water, being associated with dark and dangerous things that comes up often enough you have to wonder if it’s a genuine phobia of Vathara’s (since reading the fic, I’ve heard this extends to some of her other works as well). Overall, I feel like I’ve been very harsh on the fic in this section, and… honestly, there’s a reason for that. Embers is not a stupid story, and it clearly wrestles with some significant and weighty topics. But I also don’t think it’s as smart as story as it tries to present itself as, or is taken to be, and I often find its treatment of those topics to be lacking at best and sometimes disturbing at worst. Even more than my issues with how the fic handles its characterization and worldbuilding, I think it’s the thematic issues that really bother me and get at the core of my problems with Embers. In purporting to offer a more serious and mature take on the Avatarverse, it raises some ideas it’s not really capable of effectively dealing with and presents some ideas that have very troubling real-world implications. And that, despite the fic’s positive qualities, is why so much of it ends up making me uncomfortable and leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
Conclusion
Embers is not a bad fic in the way that, say Partially Kissed Hero is bad; nor does it take the same sort of outright hatchet job to its source material as The Last Ringbearer does (as low a bar to clear as that is…). In fact, there’s quite a lot to admire about the fic as an accomplishment; bringing a story that long to a successful conclusion (albeit with some noticeable bumps along the way) is no mean feat, and Embers contains some genuinely interesting plot points and worldbuilding. But, in my opinion – and again, clearly what is a dealbreaker for me isn’t a dealbreaker for everyone – its issues with characterization, plot, and themes are severe enough I can’t bring myself to embrace the fic. Embers has problems, and some of those problems, IMO, are severe enough to rot through the whole edifice and taint the whole experience of reading it. So why do I spend so much time talking about a fic I don’t even particularly like? Well, several reasons. One, because like I’ve said I do like some of it in execution and more of it in theory, so there’s definitely some disappointment in how the fic ended up at play. And there’s also the fact that Embers is (or was in its heyday) a very popular, very well-known fic – that means it’s come to a lot of people’s attention over the course of its existence (mine included) and has also gotten some very effusive praise. I’ve seen reviews of Embers praising it not only as the greatest fic in the A:TLA fandom, but as the greatest piece of literature the reviewer had ever read… ever. And, honestly, if people are going to treat Embers as serious literature, I feel like it ought to be able to stand up to serious analysis (as for it being the greatest piece of literature ever… I can recommend a bunch of epic fantasy novels that I think do the things Embers does as well or better; some of them have enough similarities they may have been actual influences on Vathara, though I couldn’t say for sure). And, well, while I think Embers goes wrong in a lot of ways, I think it goes wrong in ways that are interesting and worth talking about – I don’t think Embers is bad in ways that should be mocked so much as ways that should be discussed and from which we can genuinely learn some things about both fanfic and fantasy writing.
Well, at long last, we bring this review to a close. Whew! Everyone, I am so very, very sorry this took so long. Thank you again to everyone who’s stuck with me on this; I really do appreciate it! If you want to check out some much snarkier takedowns of some more overtly awful stories, feel free to check out my ongoing sporkings, here or on Das_Sporking2. I also have another review series (well, more of a reread/recap) planned for later in the summer… and though this review is at long last complete, we may not have seen the last of Embers yet, either. Thank you again, and I hope to see you all soon!
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Date: 2025-06-01 04:13 pm (UTC)Also, due to joining a ATLA-inspired RP that's set just after the war with Fire Lord Ozai, I now have an OC who might not do well in the Embersverse.
Mainly because she's a Waterbender born in the Fire Nation. Though, that's more because one of her ancestors got tangled up with a member of that Swampbending tribe, and the water bending didn't show up until Lu Xia was born. Her family ran an inn at the colony she grew up in, and she usually helped out by tending to the hot spring that made that inn a local landmark.
Well, until an incident happened late one night involving a Fire Nation Soldier, a patch of ice she accidentally made, and a very pissed off spirit that happened to just be there enjoying the hot spring. That incident led to Lu Xia leaving home in a gray outfit (which was considered a sign of grieving in that Colony as she was seen as being garbed in "Ashes left behind by a lost fire"), and wandered the world and decided to start making art to get by.
And also use that art to practice her bending, leading to her creating "Inkbending" as a result.
Anywho, she *also* has a bit of bad luck as she tends to get mistaken for a spirit in her travels. Either due to the ink smudges she has on her skin and clothes, or the fact her giant backpack she carries around ended up getting covered in moss at one point.
...With that bit of OC gushing aside, I just realized that I don't think the Swampbenders were ever brought up in Embers, were they? If they were, I probably forgot about how they were portrayed there.
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Date: 2025-06-02 04:53 am (UTC)I think it's great that you're still writing, though! Just as I was reading, I was comparing and contrasting it with a story idea I've had for a long while...that I've only written one, very bad, page of.
If anything, it's very comforting to know that one can finish things, even after such a long time.
Which, it seems to me, it fails at being, because this Zuko doesn't really feel like Zuko, especially in the second half.
Which, I would say, it also fails at being, for the same reason.
I would even go as far as to say it fails at this, too, because some moments are just copied from the original with very little change, some moments are actually softened compared to the original, and some moments are dark, but also so different from the original that they don't really count as "reimagining." To be clear, I'm not saying any of these interpretations of the premise are wrong, just that it doesn't deliver on any of them. I don't think it delivers on much of anything.
I don't know much about shonen as a genre, though it strikes me as kind of a fuzzy category anyway. But are they really this pro-authority? I don't think shonen protagonists typically take this much pride in being part of a rigid hierarchy.
That's something I've never understood about any fanfiction, of this kind. If I'm reading fanfiction of a story, I probably like the story, and if I like the story, I probably like most of the characters in it. So why would I want to read people making up excuses to bash the characters in it?
Well, okay, that's a lie - I can guess at why she does it. She doesn't like the characters, and she's venting about it. Possibly, trying to get other people to dislike them too, even if she has to effectively lie to do it. Or, maybe she's so convinced that they really are this flawed, that she thinks these kinds of mistakes are a natural and reasonable extrapolation of their characters. Or maybe she's just trying to be contrary again. Hard to say exactly.
Yeah, about that - I don't like the worldbuilding in this thing, either. There's only so much original worldbuilding you can pile onto AtLAB before it stops feeling like AtLAB. Especially when it comes to bending - bending on the show is very clearly defined. Sometimes characters discover new things about it, but they're always natural extensions of what we already know. That's what makes it interesting. Loosening the rules - like adding people who can bend two things, adding "hot sand," adding mind control - makes it less interesting. It makes it lazier, more generic. Restrictions often lead to greater creativity - finding interesting things to do while staying within the rules is trickier and more satisfying. But the cultural stuff doesn't work, either. It's taking broad, general cultural trends that we saw on the show, and trying to force them into very specific molds, regardless of how they actually come across in the show or the fanfic, and in spite of how breaking the molds, or using them creatively, should be the interesting part.
I also just think that if any of this stuff was actually important or appropriate for the story, it would have been in the story. Maybe this is just me, but this kind of fanfiction worldbuilding sometimes feels like a insult - implying that the writers would have included these details themselves, if only they were as smart as this fanfiction author!
Something which the show already does, much better than this thing.
And from cultures that put much less stock in aristocracy and hierarchy in general. Vathara seems to have a weird fixation on hierarchy, as if she thinks hierarchy in any form is inherently good, to the point that cultures that have less of it are depicted as either evil cults, or ignorant savages. Even in an abstract sense, vertical bonds, as they're sometimes called, are valued above all else, but horizontal bonds are downright evil, as seen with the different types of mind control.
It reeks of colonial attitudes, honestly. And that's just in an abstract sense; practically, it's much worse. I mean, really, this is a story where most of what we are told about Water Tribe culture comes from the people who have been brutalizing them for a century, and yet we're supposed to think it's reliable and right. We constantly get scenes where lighter-skinned aristocrats from a society of brutal imperialists lecture darker-skinned tribespeople on their ignorance and savagery, and this is supposed to be a good thing. Just...think about that! At that point, calling the writing clueless and insensitive is the most generous interpretation.
Although, I might honestly like this version of Katara, if she was an original character, and if she wasn't a shrill harpy and also a primitive savage who needs to be lectured by her lighter-skinned superiors. A girl from a remote tribe, who's actually, indirectly, an eldritch sea serpent, with the power to artificially manipulate emotions? That could make for a really cool character, perhaps a villain, but I might enjoy her more as a hero, learning to use her power for good.
For me, at least, my instinctive response would be "neither are the four elements."
Honestly, while I agree that the Satan theming is dumb, I'm less confused/disgusted by it than I am by the fact that none of that stuff has anything to do with stealing faces.
I think, fundamentally, it's trying to add "moral grayness" to the setting, which is something a lot of fanfiction tries and fails to do...except here, it's especially weird, because AtLAB already does moral grayness, a lot better than most stories. From the beginning, it's been praised for how sympathetic its bad guys are, for how it acknowledges that there are good and bad people on every side. You have people like Zuko, and people like Jet. You have most of the Fire Nation's population, who aren't directly involved in the war, or if they are, it's out of ignorance or fear. Vathara seems to think she's done something bold and insightful by showing that the villains actually aren't all bad, when the show already did that.
Although, I suppose that's still more of a surface level reading. It thinks it's fundamentally about moral grayness, but what it's really about is being contrary. Bluntly, I think Vathara's main reason for trying to make the Fire Nation more like the good guys, and the Air Nomads more like the bad guys, is that she thinks switching things around is clever. Which is also nothing new. People often think they can outsmart everyone else, just by doing things differently than everyone else. You see it in Star Wars with people who make excuses for the Empire, you see it in Lord of the Rings with people who make excuses for Sauron (even besides Yeskov), and Vathara has given us a fine example of it here. Never mind that the show already goes out of its way to humanize the Fire Nation, and to show that not everyone fighting them is automatically good - she needs to "outsmart" the show, and that means finding ways to say the show is too black and white - even if she removes the actual gray in the process. The canon Dai Li were, in their own way, an example of moral complexity - they were an organization of monsters, despite being supposedly on the side of good. But she had to undo that, to make them actual good guys, because contrarianism takes priority.
This is also why I'm not sure it really could work as original fiction. Stripping away its AtLAB origins wouldn't solve all its problems - the main character, and a few others, would still be at least borderline gary stus, and there would still be the theme that some people have an inherent need to dominate others, and this is a good thing, which I hope we can all agree is creepy as heck. And she might still struggle with writing a sympathetic imperialist aggressor without being horribly insensitive (though, admittedly, I also have that problem). But also, it's hard to strip away it's Avatar elements without defeating what I think is the purpose. That is, to "get one over" on AtLAB by "graying" it's supposed "black and white morality." Maybe not all of it exists for that purpose, but a lot of it does.
Except, some things are black and white. You cannot take a genocide and say "Sure, it was bad, but you can see where they were coming from, right?" No. No I cannot. I am not interested in sympathizing with people who do those kinds of things, nor in appreciating their motives, except insofar as it helps prevent such things from happening again in real life. "Muddying the waters" in that way does not make you insightful or empathetic. Quite the opposite.
In short, having now learned roughly what this story contains. I have come to the conclusion that I do not care for it. Good analysis, though. Always a pleasure.