sokkathebluewolf

[sokkathebluewolf]

Gladiator 400th Chapter Celebration

It‘s unbelievable, but Gladiator reaches the 400th chapter on July 18th, 2025.

In order to celebrate it, I'm holding a small event. Everyone is welcome to take part. The event will run from July 18th to July 20th. More information will follow soon. Mark your calendars for the weekend!=))

[sokkathebluewolf]

Preview: Gladiator Chapter 398

As the Barge and the northern vessels set sail to Ba Sing Se, Azula and Sokka test the effectiveness of the northern healing through their first sparring session since before Azula's injury against Rhone. By nighttime, their attempts to tire out Hotaru, to ensure the three of them get proper rest, take an unexpected turn...

More thorough conversations about Ursa prepare Azula for what lies ahead: in a matter of ten days, the Barge reaches Ba Sing Se, and Sokka's old master Piandao, the temporary regent of the city, will welcome them and meet Azula for the first time since Sokka's third fight in the Gladiator League...

Read Gladiator HERE or HERE

For a snippet of the new chapter, support me on Patreon!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Preview: Gladiator Chapter 397

Sokka struggles to stay calm as Azula undergoes a procedure to cleanse her body from the lingering corruption. Aang and Yue accompany him, but even holding Hotaru won't appease his worries as he awaits the result of the northern healing on Azula.

Inside the healers' clinic, Katara offers her support to Azula. A difficult first intervention on her shoulder already makes the two women anxious: the worse challenge shall be the corruption breathed in. Yagoda has no choice but to resort to the oasis water as the final hope to cure Fire Lord Azula...

Read Gladiator HERE or HERE

For a snippet of the new chapter, support me on Patreon!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Preview: Gladiator Chapter 396

Azula is caught off-guard by Sokka's sudden proposal, but her reaction, in turn, surprises him: the Fire Lord will set a clear boundary, a goal to be reached, before Sokka makes any formal petitions to use the Oasis water to heal her lingering chi corruption.

Negotiations begin by the next morning, with a discussion of the terms of the Fire Nation's surrender in the war. Azula and Sokka's vision of the world's future, and how to truly restore its balance, are finally coming close to fruition as Chief Arnook weighs each proposal and makes the right choices for his people's sake...

Read Gladiator HERE or HERE

For a snippet of the new chapter, support me on Patreon!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Preview: Gladiator Chapter 395

In the Northern Water Tribe, Pakku and Arnook are ready to receive the Barge and its retinue, as is Princess Yue, who eagerly awaits the opportunity to meet Fire Lord Azula at last. Apprehensive, but determined, Azula faces the first of her diplomatic encounters with Sokka by her side.

After delivering a significant criminal to the Chief of the Northern Water Tribe, Azula finally enters a Water Tribe for the first time. The grand meeting between the two nations is honored by a feast. Azula will bond with Yue as they sit together, but the flaring of the Fire Lord's current health condition alarms the Princess...

Read Gladiator HERE or HERE

For a snippet of the new chapter, support me on Patreon!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Preview: Gladiator Chapter 394

After indulging in a day of intimacy, Sokka and Azula reconvene by the Barge's deck and indulge in one of their many careless arguments, this time centered around Sokka's singing voice, as well as Hotaru's reaction to it...

But the Gladiator quickly concocts a plan intended to resolve the lingering tension between his lover and one of their traveling companions. Upon finding the perfect excuse for it, Sokka leaves Azula and Katara to themselves, confident that the two women will soon overcome the troubled beginnings of their own relationship...

Read Gladiator HERE or HERE

For a snippet of the new chapter, support me on Patreon!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Hello, you didn't update your story on Friday, are you alright ? I have been following this for a long time ( 4 years now ig) and i got worried :( pls be safe

Well, this is quite late but I'll just take this chance to let you know that Gladiator's switching back to a biweekly update system because I... have been stretched a bit thin with real life obligations. I actually spent over a month without finishing a single Gladiator chapter, in fact, without TYPING a single word for one until this week... because that's how busy I've been :'DDD so yeah, I've had to slow down a little and I think this was the best point at which to do so, we're not that far from the story's big conclusion anyhow. Sorry for worrying you, but all's good and we'll get Gladiator to its deserved (hopefully!) conclusion ASAP!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Hi, Seyari! First of all, I really want to compliment you for all your work with Gladiator. It is incredible to find, for free, such a long, good written, immersive story. Few are the novels (for I think Gladiator can only be regarded as such) that have moved me as this one has, due to the way you portray the characters and their feelings and make them evolve. How have you planned the whole story? It really must be difficult to lay out a plot that large from the beggining. How did you do it?

Hello there! Thanks for the ask and the compliment! :D So glad you've been so moved by the story and the characters <3 it's really flattering and delightful to learn that Gladiator has touched people's hearts.

Honestly... I would like to pretend that I had all the answers all along but Gladiator has been a labor of love for 13 years now. Yeah. Labor is the big word there, haha.

The truth is, I didn't fully know where we were going within the first year of writing Gladiator. I had some ideas and I put them down in an old document that I still keep around, some ideas were discarded, others were systematically implemented wherever I found the right place for them. Some people who were here from the start may remember the early days when I would receive lots of asks suggesting gladiators or general ideas. For instance, some magical anon out there (never knew who it was!) ought to be very proud to this day for having been the one who proposed the Pairs Tournament concept to me. A pretty popular and beloved arc, and no kidding, it really came from a random asker!

But those were the early days, and as I progressed with my writing, I knew I had to start building up a destination. While Gladiator sounded like the most fun project of all time, where I could make basically all my ATLA dreams come true, I had to think about what I really was going for with the story altogether.

I think I've mentioned in the past that I developed three specific story beats REALLY early on: I wanted Sokka and Toph to be rivals so that Azula and Iroh, as sponsors, would also be rivals.

First beat? They'd have one fight (in this configuration) where Sokka would be defeated, discouraged, and it would result in the consumation of our leads' dorks relationship!

Second beat was that they'd defeat Toph and Iroh eventually, and this most likely would cause Iroh to reveal their relationship to Ozai after being a peeping tom :'D the most infamous of his worst deeds, yes...

And the third beat was that Sokka would defeat Combustion Man with his incendiary bombs. Yes, this I knew since the start, which is why the very early chapter 2 dialogue between Azula and Sokka featured Azula saying that he would only beat her if he could break a firebender's control over their flames :'DDDD a very blatant foreshadowing of Sokka's defeat of Combustion Man, PROBABLY too in your face while simultaneously too early on to do the job? xD Either way, it serves me as evidence that I did plan that nowadays, so there you go! xD

But I was pretty much adrift as to what would happen afterwards. And I spent around a year throwing ideas at the wall, many of which were TERRIBLE and utterly underwhelming, until my friend @jordanalane, no longer active on Tumblr, managed to push her Zuki agenda so far that it actually reconfigured my entire view of where the story would go next. Something I will always thank her for, of course!

In short, she wanted Zuko and Suki to go off on their own and I was fine with that. I had wanted Zuko to go south, though, because I wanted him to meet Aang and train him (and of course have the whole "do I turn him in or do I rebel fully against my father?!?!" dilemma). She came up with some ways to do it, I eventually reframed it, she wanted Suki to get knocked up, not so hard to arrange xD and when Kino as well turned up as an OC that could dynamize the Southern Water Tribe gang? Things felt a lot better! So, at that point... it just seemed logical/natural that, eventually, Sokka would end up there, too... which, of course, resulted in the train of thought that led me to the horrible, no good, terrible, depressing Part 2 finale! :'D

Sokka and Azula, torn apart! It's unfortunately a VERY common trope of mine, I blame Philip Pullman because this guy ruined my childhood with His Dark Materials, where basically every important romantic pairing is not allowed to be together and either broke up or circumstance tore them apart. I don't know how long it took me to realize that I keep doing this with my main couples in stories and... I do blame him xD taught me the worst kind of romantic angst when I was very young.

So from there, it was a slow but steady climb towards getting our characters to a place where I could bring them back together. Sokka's journey was a lot more obvious: he'd become a leader, take charge of a rebel army and slowly but surely unravel Fire Nation control over the Earth Kingdom until he was ready to hit the Fire Nation and rescue Azula. As for her, at first I didn't know how active Azula would be, which meant her story would be INSANELY boring if she was just waiting to be rescued. This caused me to include a character like Renkai, introduced midway through Part 2 EXCLUSIVELY so he could have a major role in Part 3 as Azula's new protector, once Rui Shi was out of the picture. Rei was a bit of a wild card too, because I did introduce her as a character early on and considered making her Zhao's daughter all along... for a while I backtracked on it, thinking it'd be an unnecessary complication. And then I pondered what her role would be in Part 3, should she be Zhao's daughter... and the world kind of expanded for me by then, of course, and I clung to her like there was no tomorrow.

Along with this? Hotaru was always meant to be a thing, of course. The moment of conception was always a bit of an evil twisted joke for me, yes, the darkest, lowest point of Part 2, Sokka in prison... worst possible place for a dignified princess to make a baby xD but yeah, the idea was always that at that point Azula would wind up pregnant and that, too, was going to slow things down for our main girl once they were apart. But as Sokka's story came together (I was TERRIFIED of all the big battles I had to write :'DDD you have no idea how much I researched and how much brainstorming I had to do to draft the logic of each of those battles...), Azula's did as well as I started to ponder that they could become enemies anew, even if very unwillingly, even if just because her circumstances forced her into that role. Somehow, their two stories ended up complementing each other really, really well and it became a lot easier to write Part 3 because of that.

And of course, there was Ozai. I always wanted to explore his past, particularly his marriage to Ursa, and more than anything, I wanted to EXPLAIN what the hell happened during the blanks left behind by canon in Zuko Alone. We aren't quite there yet... but we're like 10 chapters away from the big, final flashback :'D I had to build up Ozai as a complex villain too, not so hard to do when Azula is your main character, considering how Ozai very clearly favors her while also being a fundamentally shitty human being. It was very interesting to draft what I'd do with this bastard in theory, because honestly? If I hadn't had a set course for him, I might have been even more vidinctive after he did every awful thing he did in Part 2's finale. I never imagined that writing those moments would make me hate him as much as I did :'D but he pulled that off, for sure. Afterwards, developing him throughout Part 3 so he could actually have a compelling conclusion was one of my biggest challenges and while I'm sure some people were rejoicing in his death, I also have seen that others were quite affected by it, especially as he had finally accepted the very obvious truth that MAYBE he was wrong. You know. About all the things ever :'D But of course, Ozai's process throughout Part 3 complemented Azula's, his story is weaved into hers, so that dynamized the whole structure quite some more.

At any rate, I think the bulk of crafting Gladiator's plot ended up centered around these characters and their physical or emotional journeys: Sokka, Azula and Ozai. Everything that sprung around them was gradually woven in to complement and bolster their stories, as well as, of course, tying any remaining loose ends and not neglecting the arcs of other characters who may have been on journeys of their own. But the structure of the story, as well as the plot itself, was absolutely centered around those three and their clashes, their connections, and the unique dynamics between all three of them. With those things in mind, the plotting and scheming towards the ultimate outcome (Fire Lord Azula, General-Gladiator Sokka, a world finally on its way to peace) became clearer to me!

The ultimate secret to building all this, of course, is time. Sometimes things just weren't working. Sometimes I had ideas that were very cool in my head for like 5 minutes and then I realized they looked like a trash heap. It's not easy to tell what's worth keeping and what needs to be disposed of, and of course, definitely not easy keeping track of everything you need to address in your story. I had a big document where I used to put the main things I didn't want to forget, as well as the core arcs... but when Part 3 came around, I legitimately had to build an entire, 100+ pages long document split in two columns detailing Azula and Sokka's stories per arcs so that I could keep up with them, more or less organize who comes first, what goes where, which chapter features each element I needed to write about...! It was complicated, but that document absolutely made things a lot smoother when it came to writing the last chunk of the story. Oh! And I can't forget the OTHER helpful addition: the TIMELINE DOCUMENT! :'D I only started doing this in Part 3 for the very unexpected reason of... keeping track of Azula's pregnancy. Literally kept track of which pregnancy week she was on so I could find what symptoms she should be facing and write them out whenever possible or reasonable :'D Also to keep in mind how active or inactive she could be, depending on how far along she was.

Sooooo... yeah. If you wanna write a story this big one day? Plot it across 8-ish years, and work on it continuously all along! Totally feasible, I'm sure XD ngl, if I ever write anything as big as Gladiator again, I will be shocked. The experience has been invaluable, but it's not easy to come up with a story concept, let alone setting and characters, that sustain such a long-term, dynamic tale. I'm very, very lucky that Gladiator held up, against all odds that I would falter halfway through, and really happy that people like you appreciate what I've woven with this story <3

Thank you for the ask!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Preview: Gladiator Chapter 393

The Barge's latest voyage at sea is off to a successful start, in which Sokka and Azula can finally relax aboard the vessel instead of worrying over who might see them together. Their carelessness results in an embarrassing moment after they're caught by Aang and Katara.

While the waterbender is as friendly as can be, Sokka picks up on Azula's insecurities when she interacts with his sister. But while he's more than willing to help build bridges between the two women, the opportunity to bask in intimacy with Azula, after Aang and Katara offer to watch over Hotaru, is too tempting to refuse...

Read Gladiator HERE or HERE

For a snippet of the new chapter, support me on Patreon!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Preview: Gladiator Chapter 392

Azula and Sokka prepare for their upcoming journey throughout the Four Nations. A moment of clarity for Sokka, upon remembering a promise he made to Yue, results in a new quest for Rui Shi: the sleazy Hahn will provide the Fire Lord with a grand opportunity to begin making amends to the Northern Water Tribe.

Meanwhile, Renkai and his group seek out Koshing, carrying out an operation to paralyze the man and his assets well before he can flee the Fire Nation. As everything comes together slowly, the Gladiator and the new Fire Lord are ready to venture out into the sea, to build bridges between the nations in their reborn world...

Read Gladiator HERE or HERE

For a snippet of the new chapter, support me on Patreon!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Preview: Gladiator Chapter 391

The reconstruction of the Palace begins in the Fire Nation's Capital City, but the new Fire Lord's duties spread far beyond rebuilding the fallen seat of power: Azula holds multiple meetings across the day in order to resolve the latent struggles of the Fire Nation now that the war has ended.

With Renkai finally free to pursue his leads on Shaofeng, Azula sends him on a mission to undo the General's corruption network with his current companions. She also reactivates the Enforcers to help her compose the laws that will finally outlaw slavery, news that Sokka hopes to share with Jeong Jeong, to unexpected results...

Read Gladiator HERE or HERE

For a snippet of the new chapter, support me on Patreon!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Preview: Gladiator Chapter 390

As the sun rises on the beginning of a new era of peace, Zuko is determined to return to his family: he shares his intent with Mai as well as with Azula, who has barely begun preparations to tackle her immediate responsibilities in her new role as Fire Lord.

Aang offers a generous solution for Zuko's intent to travel all the way back home: that afternoon, everyone gathers by the Fire Nation's bay, where the Northern Water Tribe ships intend to return home as well, and where the South Pole's group will split up, for the days to come...

Read Gladiator HERE or HERE

For a snippet of the new chapter, support me on Patreon!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Preview: Gladiator Chapter 389

Azula and Zuko take their places as the Agni Kai begins: the Fire Nation is at a standstill, and tension swirls in the air once the Prince and Princess rise, and their fateful duel finally begins.

Azula remains withdrawn across the combat, reacting instinctively to Zuko's attacks while her thoughts rampage: burdened by the weight of the past and the fragility of the future, each move helps her understand what the true nature of the next Fire Lord should be. But as her determination rises, Zuko prepares to strike her with lightning, his last gambit to win the Agni Kai...

Read Gladiator HERE or HERE

For a snippet of the new chapter, support me on Patreon!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Preview: Gladiator Chapter 388

Zuko and Azula wake up on the day of their fateful Agni Kai: while Zuko gathers his courage and inner strength by himself at Mai's house, Azula prepares for the grand event anxiously with Sokka's faithful support, as well as that of the guards and the friends who will watch the fight.

Xin Long carries Azula to the Coronation Temple and Plaza, where a massive crowd gathers, eager for the Agni Kai's outcome. As the sages clear away the multitude to make room for the fight, Sokka and Azula wait within the temple, where she seeks the resolve she needs for the battle to come...

Read Gladiator HERE or HERE

For a snippet of the new chapter, support me on Patreon!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Fic-to-Art #49: Sokka and Azula's kiss in Piandao's mansion

I have to admit, this is a scene I've always wanted to depict properly and for once I may have done it justice. This is very much Rui Shi's glorious POV when he innoncently hoped to let Azula know they were ready to leave Shu Jing... only to wind up confirming the Princess he serves is indeed involved in a very complicated illicit relationship with the least convenient guy :'D Quite the sight to witness, that's for sure...

This is very much the moment where these two commit to each other for good in Gladiator, and one of my favorite scenes to revisit and write, back in the day. I got several references for this to make it as good as I possibly could... and I think I'm pretty satisfied with the result! Definitely my best version of this scene up to date, if nothing else, haha.

Hope you guys liked it! If you'd like to be part of the creative process behind these pieces, a $1 Patreon pledge makes you eligible for suggesting and voting for prompts, as well as reading Gladiator snippets 6 days before the new chapter releases!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Snippet: Gladiator Chapter 387

Sokka and Azula return to the Gladiator's house. Azula finds Sokka sharing some of Wentai and Jing's stories with their daughter, and he surprises her upon returning her most treasured belonging, in a moment that will brighten his lover's spirits for the rest of the night.

By the next day, however, Princess Azula must face a harrowing farewell. Accompanied by Sokka and Rei, as well as some of her closest friends and family, Azula steels herself as best as she can upon facing the funerary pyre upon which rests Fire Lord Ozai...

Read Gladiator HERE or HERE

For a snippet of the new chapter, support me on Patreon!

[sokkathebluewolf]

Preview: Gladiator Chapter 386

By the time Azula wakes up, it's well into the afternoon: after heading downstairs, hoping for someone to watch over Hotaru briefly, she comes across Zuko. The siblings will have an earnest conversation about their impending Agni Kai, which they've both decided to see through to the end.

Once Sokka wakes up too, the three of them seek out Jeong Jeong to share their decision, although Azula has one request from the Head Sage that she intends to fulfill before any Fire Lord is crowned: holding funerary rites for those lost to the final battle, including her own father.

Read Gladiator HERE or HERE

For a snippet of the new chapter, support me on Patreon!