Open Novella Journal 2024

Preplanning (Last Five of Nine Story Ideas)

Prompt 55 - "You're a young royal in disguise who befriends a villager with a scarred face. One day they are arrested for stealing something you gave to them."

So, as I said in the My Stories entry of this journal, I think people know where I am going with this, in that the person with the scarred face is Zuko, and since I ship Katara that would make her the royal, which within the original context of the show before Bryke decided to nix certain canon elements to favor Korra so she could be a princess of both the Northern and Southern Water tribes, Katara was the daughter of the Southern Water tribes chief., which is considered Native American's a kind of but not exactly equivalent to a prince or princess as Sokka pointed out in the first season.

More specifically, no Southern Water tribe being a colony of the Northern Water tribe, (white man's culture), no having the chief/elders voted in like a lot of modern tribes now do as they don't have the old ways of establishing chief/elders (white man's culture), or any Western architecture in building up the Southern Water tribe particularly since in this AU the Southern Water tribe never fell which, again, white man's culture. Southern Water Tribe is instead back to being the sister tribe of the Northern Water tribe, and it's the Water Tribes, as Katara says in the original, rather than the Water Tribe.

Yeah, I'm one of those not overly thrilled with Bryke's post-AtLA content such as removing the myth the Avatar was originally based off of, the Dali Lama and replacing it with something else, because it's effectively two white men taking advantage of POC culture when it is an advantage to them and tossing anything that doesn't fit their narrative when they feel like it. And no, I don't buy this idea they're allowed to change whatever they want in LoK  and the comics (which were to support LoK) and that the changes were an improvement, not when so many of them have some really negative implications when you think about them. I'll need to be careful in how I word it.

As for the story, Katara runs into a villager who is an outsider, and it would be her necklace that ends up in his hands, but I think a visit from the Northern Water tribe would be how it would be found out as it was originally Gran Gran's necklace. Zuko in turn is there in the village because the Fire Nation is hunting him down and Iroh felt this was the best place to hide him, having managed to convince his nephew that trying to please his father is useless, yet Zuko still has hopes of finding the Avatar because there is hope that this will end his father's reign, which might end up being the end game for the story. And of course, there is going to be romance between the two.

Prompt 59 - "Reincarnating into your favourite story wasn't what you had in mind when begging for a second chance."

In this sequel to Free Falling, we're following two other characters from Lyra's world who are unaware of the changes made in the first novella which should help it stand on it's own as they're going to be discovering those changes. The first is a boy who has a crush on Lyra and wants a second chance because he didn't handle his crush on her very well, while the second is the bully who was jealous that this boy had a crush on Lyra instead of her. The two are also under the impression that they're reincarnated and reincarnated as siblings because of how the ministry handles their appearance in that world, but in reality they're not, although whether this is ever something that ends up addressed I don't know, but that is one of the major conflicts in this story, but the journey of these two preteens starts prior to what would be their first year at Hogwarts.

And, I do think I should have some scenes from Lyra and Regulus' point of view on this, ones which help move the plot forward and show things from Lyra's point of view, which might help cover the fact these two aren't actually reincarnated, but one of them certainly doesn't want a second chance and is very vocal about that, because she doesn't like the idea of being her crushes twin sister and would rather be the couple that looks good together because they've similar hair and eye color to each other.