Research? HAHAHAHAHAHA. No research here, friend. Everything pulled straight out of my ass, unless you count checking to see which Spirits have already been named in canon and which spirit is Tui and which one La.
The fic came out of a starting image...of the finale, actually. I worked backwards from there. I decided right away that I would have two interweaving plot threads: One telling the tale of how Koh became like he is, and another telling the tale of him returning to the world, stealing Katara's face, and forcing a conflict with Aang. From there, it just...expanded.
I decided that Avatar-verse would have ten "Great Spirits", each of them with an opposing one in a sort of cosmic balance. I knew there would be the spirits of Light(avatar spirit), Dark(Koh), Moon, Ocean, Earth, Fire, and Air right off the bat. Light and dark balanced each other, and so did Earth and ocean(because the more there is of one, the less of the other, see?). Following that logic, there should also be a Spirit of Sun to match the spirit of Moon. That's eight of them.
I also wanted to include Wan Shi Tong in there, so I made him the Great Spirit of Knowledge. Now, however, I was SOL. Air and Flame don't really balance in the same way sun and moon do, and neither of THEM balanced with knowledge. It took me damn near a week to come up with a Great Spirit of the Wild(who was initially going to be Hei-Bai, until i decided that everybody's favorite panda bears is too small-scale) to balance Wan Shi Tong, and I decided to go with Flame and Air balancing each other, even though it is by FAR the weakest of the pairings.
The fic's still not COMPLETELY finalized. Just today I came up with a modification for the epilogue that will make it even better. Same basic idea, but tweaked so it ties into something earlier in the fic. And like I said int he comments for another chapter, when you see what happens to Tysha in the last installment of Avatar History Lesson, you'll shit bricks.
I decided to alternate between Italics and non-italics, with three chunks per chapter, just because I like the format.
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The fic came out of a starting image...of the finale, actually. I worked backwards from there. I decided right away that I would have two interweaving plot threads: One telling the tale of how Koh became like he is, and another telling the tale of him returning to the world, stealing Katara's face, and forcing a conflict with Aang. From there, it just...expanded.
I decided that Avatar-verse would have ten "Great Spirits", each of them with an opposing one in a sort of cosmic balance. I knew there would be the spirits of Light(avatar spirit), Dark(Koh), Moon, Ocean, Earth, Fire, and Air right off the bat. Light and dark balanced each other, and so did Earth and ocean(because the more there is of one, the less of the other, see?). Following that logic, there should also be a Spirit of Sun to match the spirit of Moon. That's eight of them.
I also wanted to include Wan Shi Tong in there, so I made him the Great Spirit of Knowledge. Now, however, I was SOL. Air and Flame don't really balance in the same way sun and moon do, and neither of THEM balanced with knowledge. It took me damn near a week to come up with a Great Spirit of the Wild(who was initially going to be Hei-Bai, until i decided that everybody's favorite panda bears is too small-scale) to balance Wan Shi Tong, and I decided to go with Flame and Air balancing each other, even though it is by FAR the weakest of the pairings.
The fic's still not COMPLETELY finalized. Just today I came up with a modification for the epilogue that will make it even better. Same basic idea, but tweaked so it ties into something earlier in the fic. And like I said int he comments for another chapter, when you see what happens to Tysha in the last installment of Avatar History Lesson, you'll shit bricks.
I decided to alternate between Italics and non-italics, with three chunks per chapter, just because I like the format.
Any other questions?