#like azula having a genuine familial dynamic with her Villain Boss was explicitly part of the reason i did it like that

[paragonrobits]

a long, long time ago i was doing a mega-crossover fic where Azula was the protégé and beloved top agent of the villain lady who was the apparent big villain of the entire work (or at least the intent was that her big plan to build a mega empire with eldritch monsters was obfuscation, and eventually they would be unable to control their monsters as the true antagonist would reveal itself as a cosmic horror beyond mortal control)

at the time, part of it was that the idea was Azula had a mother-daughter dynamic with the villain lady. they genuiinely cared for each other in their own way, at one point i was later going to have Ozai reintroduced as another agent, having had his limbs removed with cyborg super-limbs keyed to the Elemental Plane of Fire to substitute firebending, done as a favor for Azula.

like i leaned WAY in on the ‘do ho ho Azula is super EEEEEEEVIL’ that was a really common thread in the fandom, to the point that I think an Azula redemption arc-focused fanfic or redemptive romance sort of angle would have been extremely novel and unusual specifically because no one ever really did anything like that at the time. So Azula was at the top of pecking order in the antagonists threat level, so here’s the kicker:

at one point she was supposed to wind up finding a way into the setting of Exalted.

That, on its own, isn’t the funny bit, though it may be interesting to note how Bending can come off as a nerfed equivalent to being one of the Dragon-Blooded/Terrestial Exalted.

The funny bit is that I absolutely SHOULD HAVE, if i ever got around to it, playing Mnemon and Azula off one another. The reason that’s funny (and tragic that i both never got around to that, and that I didn’t actually know about this bit of fandom joke) is that Mnemon acts almost exactly like Azula, to the point that a lot of people just call her Exalted Azula, I think. just, with Earth (crystals, specifically) instead of fire, and the big twist is that none of her character is really changed that much, its just that in the more morally gray world of Exalted, where political intrigue and the cost of power and heavy story emphasis on what the consequences are of using force as a solution to everything, Mnemon is NOT the antagonistic character like Azula is used as, but instead the heroine of her own story.

(It’s a dark story with a lot of child sacrifice and demon consorting, but the latter is not morally iffy since demons are more like weird aliens, but the point is that due to differing tones, Mnemon is significantly more gray. Also if you think the child sacrifice is screwed up you should see what her mom got up to. Actually, maybe not, it ties to the first few chapters of the Infernal Exalted splatbook and the fandom as a whole disowned it for a reason.

You don’t want to know. NO SERIOUSLY YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW.)