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loopy777 · 1 year ago

Note

First, to answer Caelum's request: Yes, "Mai's Ramblings" still exists! It's on FF.net, but of course that's just the text. The only remaining complete version with the little header pictures is on deviantArt. (And wow, how have they managed to make that place worse to navigate?) I started uploading a slightly updated (fixing some typos and polishing the stuff that now reads awkwardly) version to AO3, with the pictures, and should really get back to that.

I can't add much to Caelum's response as far as fandom spaces go; that FanLore list has everything I remember. I only joined the fandom six months before the finale aired, so I missed the earliest spaces and trends. I do know that AvatarSpirit.net spun off of a Teen Titans fansite called TitansGo.net and had the same admins. AtLA apparently became very popular in TitansGo's message board community when it premiered and the earliest Avatar Spirit forum members were migrants.

As far as some impactful fics to add to the list (and I warn that these are not recommendations, just what I recall being trendsetters right before and after the finale):

Wren_Sharpbeak's season 3 series seemed to me to be the most popular continuation fic while everyone was waiting for the real third season.

Zuko/Jet was one of the most popular pairings, but I don't know which fics were considered big there. (Zuko's true "yaoi" love, as far as I was concerned, was Aang. XD) Zuko/Sokka also had a following. I recall AliWildgoose's name often being tossed around for Zuko ships that weren't Zutara, so probably her stuff was popular for Zuko/Jet and Zuko/Sokka.

Shipping Sokka with the Fire Teen Girls was also popular, and "Cog in the Machine" was popular as both a response to most of that genre and an example of the genre itself.

'Blutara' was a popular sub-genre of Zutara fic, and "Bringing Out the Blue" seemed to be the most prominent.

Back before we knew anything about Ursa, it was hugely popular to ship her with Hakoda, both being attractive single-parents at loose ends after the finale. Easily the biggest of those fics was "Guide Me Home."

Similar to the Zuko shipping scene, it was also massively popular to ship Azula with either Ty Lee or both Ty Lee and Mai. (Moreso all three when Season 2 was airing, based on my impression, with Ty Zula specifically winning out as Season 3 aired and Mai became more associated with Zuko's shipping scene.) Unfortunately, that was also not a scene I really paid attention to, so I can't comment on what the iconic fics might have been. I know "Broken Dragon" was a popular one amongst the small "yuri" groups on ASN, but it seems like that fic was deleted, and I'm not sure what the wider impact might have been.

Hello! I’m trying to collect seminal fanworks for different fandoms, and figured that it would be a good idea to ask you for any for atla since you said that you’ve been involved in writing fanfic for the show for so long. Basically, I’m hoping to find any fics that are widely popular within the fandom and/or have laid the groundwork for certain aspects of fanon. I’ve already got Embers by Vathara down for this since I’ve seen influence from it pop up pretty often, but I’m a bit new to the fic side of the fandom so I wanted to know which other ones were out there. Thank you!

Hmmm. Well, I can probably point you in the right direction, BUT there's a few things about me you'll want to take into account.

I have always had incredibly niche tastes. Even back in 2009 I was way more interested in reading about minor characters than I was reading about the main cast, and I preferred genfic over shipping. So the fics I read didn't tend to get popular, and the fics that did get popular were usually shipfic and thus I didn't read them and wouldn't be able to track their effects on the fandom. I also haven't regularly read ATLA fic in years; I write it, but I'm way more interested in my own OCs and worldbuilding and headcanon sandbox than most fic these days, so I'm not sure what the current trends are or where they came from. Most of the things I point you towards are going to be very old and possibly forgotten.

That said, I think your best bet is going to be figuring out where the hangout spaces were and who the major players were in old ATLA fandom and going from there. @loopy777 and @piandaoist may be able to help us out here too, especially since I only joined the fandom after the finale aired; they were around long before that.

So, where did the original ATLA fandom and its fic live? Well, for the fic, mostly on FanFiction.Net. You're lucky in this regard--I don't think there were any big independent fanfic archives for ATLA. Harry Potter was around at the same time and had several big fic sites, but HP was older than ATLA, so places like Sugar Quill and FictionAlley were founded around 2001. FFdotnet was founded in 1998, but back then it was pretty commonplace to build your own personal place on the internet. By the time ATLA aired, though, I think FFdotnet was becoming the go-to fic place. And old ATLA fandom never seemed to have much of a slash fandom; if it had that would've been more incentive to start up a separate slash-focused archive, since m/m would be especially vulnerable to purges. So as far as I know, no one felt a need to establish an ATLA-focused fic website, and if they did it never got very big. You'll probably have some good luck seeing what was popular if you just go to the FFdotnet ATLA section and sort by number of reviews and check the dates on what you find.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are going to go looking for this stuff, you need to keep in mind that you are looking at a past internet that is very different from what you might be used to today. For all that purity culture wankers like to complain, AO3 is a dream compared to the olden days. Now, you can see a fic's tags and warnings (or that the author chose NOT to warn) before you even open it. That was not possible or expected on many other fic archives. FFdotnet only gave you so many characters to write your fic summary, that was precious real estate. Sometimes people warned for things in author's notes, sometimes they did not. The culture and etiquette around warnings was different; in many fandoms back then, failing to warn for character death was seen as way more upsetting than failing to warn for rape. Check the rating, the summary, the author's notes--and then understand that you might still run into a completely random sex scene halfway through the fic. Was every fic like this? No, of course not. Most of them weren't. But you have to understand that this is an unavoidable risk. If you can't handle the idea of stumbling across some underage Zutara smut, this might not be the project for you.

Oh, and mind the citrus scale--lemons mean sex, limes mean the characters don't go as far as having sex.

And FYI, it's been ages since I've read anything I'm about to go over and I can't remember the details, so yes, this warning applies to anything I recommend here, too.

Other places to check...well, fandom lived on LiveJournal back then. I'm not sure if ATLA fandom was very affected by Strikethrough and Boldthrough; like I said, there didn't seem to be a lot of slash fans back then. But you could probably go trawling through old journals and communities and see if you find anything interesting... Oh, and back then all fanart would've been posted on DeviantArt, that was pretty much where fanart lived back then. LJ didn't have native image hosting, you had to use Photobucket if you wanted to post any images on there, and why do that when DeviantArt was RIGHT THERE for your fanart.

Ooooh, here you go, FanLore has some lists of ATLA fan spaces, lots of which are on LJ and DA!

There was also AvatarSpirit.Net, but they shut down ages ago. I archived a lot of the threads before it went, but I basically skipped the whole fanfic forum--everything in there was probably on FFdotnet, and no one really left comments on the fic threads, so it seemed pointless since I was pressed for time.

I think that pretty much covers the places. So what about the people?

Well, off the top of my head, I think one fan you might find useful is AvocadoLove (haha your names match). She wrote a lot of fic, but her most popular by far was Another Brother, which I believe was the original Zuko Joins The Water Tribe story, so that trope can be traced back to her. AvocadoLove also kept what might've been the fandom's most prestigious fic reclist, which you can still see on both her LiveJournal and her DreamWidth:

LJ 1 | LJ 2 ||| DW 1 | DW 2

There's a lot of popular fics on this list. Be warned, though, that a lot of them have disappeared, especially if they were posted on someone's LJ instead of on FFdotnet. A few years back I went down this list archiving everything I could, and the number of error pages I hit was saddening. It's possible some have been reposted to AO3 so you can go check there.

Going off this list...

Enslaved by sharkflip--This was a popular Zutara fic, Zuko's the one who got enslaved lol. Extremely different worldbuilding from canon, I gave it a read once and it was interesting.

Mai's Ramblings by @loopy777--Oh my GOD I forgot this existed but it's great. Unfortunately ASN is gone and I have no idea if they're posted anywhere else, LOOPY TELL US, but these were just hilariously stupid rambles by Mai on every ATLA ship imaginable. Did they have a big effect on fanon? Unsure. Were they beloved by the ASN community? YES.

Stormbenders by Fandomme--Another super-popular Zutara fic, people loved it, so it's possible it might've affected Zutara fanon?

Water Tribe by Rufftoon on NoSelfControl--Okay, so this is a long webcomic about "what if Zhao survived the Siege of the North, got amnesia, and the NWT begrudgingly took him in?" Very popular with Zhao fans back in the day. The really cool thing about this is that Rufftoon was actually an ATLA storyboard artist, so her artwork looks a LOT like the show. I believe she made Water Tribe as a sort of personal practice for long-term visual storytelling or something. She did lots of other ATLA art too, you should check her out.

Oh, speaking of webcomics...

Plight of the Freedom Fighters by SioUte and PFFbySIO--The first webcomic was a "how to make Jet survive" story, the second followed the Freedom Fighters after the war as adults. SioUte was the Freedom Fighters BNF back in the day.

And while I'm thinking of it, not a webcomic, but sylvacoer had this whole not-really-Zutara story going on that was literally Blue Spirit/Painted Lady.

*thinks* Look, when it comes right down to it, unless there's stuff going on in the shipping subfandoms that I'm not aware of, I don't think you're going to find anything that directly established as much fanon as Embers did. There were plenty of other super-popular fics, sure, but most of them focused on shipping, and worldbuilding wasn't quite as important. Embers put worldbuilding first and foremost, and therefore it was easier for the fandom to pull from as a whole.

Uhhh let's see what else...at this point I'm basically just throwing whatever I can remember being interesting at you, lol, idk how much of an effect any of this really had.

DJNS wrote a bunch of fic with interesting premises, some shippy, some not. The Zuko/Aang roleswap AU was pretty cool.

For me personally, the biggest influences on my writing were Dark Puck and Rebecca Hb, specifically their Dai Li fics. They had a circle of friends on LJ who put out some good stuff.

*thinks* Yeah, I think that's all I've got for now. Hope that gives you a starting point! I'd also recommend, as you trawl through FFdotnet, checking out the authors' favorited fics in their profiles, you could probably find more interesting stuff that way.

Idk, I'll add more later if I think of anything. But if you start with AvocadoLove, I think that's an excellent starting point.

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