>- I was afraid at first when you introduced Shinzen that he'd turn out
>to be the long-running Designated Villain type; I'm glad to see that
>reversed.

(nod) The thing is that I wasn't really doing a normal "school adventures" type of story here. Not only has it been done, it's been done here - Symphony No. 1 started out that way, and DSM Panic is our take on a particularly psychotic variant of the genre in the first place. We didn't really need another one; so A Fire to be Lighted becomes more about Azana and Karana becoming, well, Azana-and-Karana, and involves things that happened to them while they were at school, but not necessarily having much to do with school.

So I didn't have any particular need or desire to have an inside-the-cast antagonist, like you tend to get in those kinds of stories; but it amused me to hint for a moment that there might be one. Turns out Prince Shinzen was just having a stressful day and hadn't learned better manners yet. It's hard out there for a prince, even if you're not likely to end up Fire Lord.

>- Ye gods but Karana's good cheer is infectious. I like her! I
>assume she's an original?

Yep. Physically, as an adult, she's based on one of the preliminary designs they didn't use for Korra that appear in the first-season artbook, but her personality, background and whatnot (the latter of which we will be seeing more of in the other half of A Fire to be Lighted) are original.

>- Speaking as someone who has seen this a couple times before (here, I
>think), but who has not watched (and probably won't watch) TLoK... is
>the Air Nomads Are Fun At Parties thing a canon bit?

Kind of. I mean, it's mentioned a few times in Avatar: The Last Airbender and its supplementary materials that the ancient Air Nomads were not opposed to a bit of zany R&R. Aang didn't develop his whimsical side in a vacuum, after all, and there are certain indications scattered around (the airball court in that one episode; there's a comic in which Aang discovers some ancient Air Nomad musical instruments and game paraphernalia) that he might not have been much of a cultural outlier in that regard.

After his lifetime, well, they're all descended from him...

As for canonical references within The Legend of Korra itself, well, not really; all the airbenders on the show are children, apart from Tenzin, who is not fun at parties (or anywhere else). There are signs, however, that at least two of them are going to grow up to be fun at parties, so... I extrapolated. :)

I was a huge
>fan of AtLA, but tried watching one (I'm told, the first) episode of
>TLoK and didn't get hooked; rather the opposite, I came away feeling
>mightily bleh about it. Everything I've seen since then just
>sounds... frustrating.

I have explored my own feelings on this topic at length elsewhere on these boards; suffice it to say I agree that, to my sensibilities at least, it is colossally frustrating. I promised I wouldn't bang on about that again, though, and this is not the place for it, so I refer you to the relevant threads over in Source Material.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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