>(Yes, I know I should donate them or sell them to a used bookstore.
>Very occasionally I end up with dreck in my possession that overrides
>my natural visceral distaste for destroying the written word.)

Heh. I have at least two books in my library that are there solely because I'm protecting everybody else from them. I found them in the charity book bin at my local supermarket, and I can't bring myself to destroy them. So I'm like the CDC keeping that sample of smallpox in the fridge, hoarding copies of hideous advice books in the hope that by doing so, I'm preventing other people from being subjected to their ill-advised contents.

(Seriously. Two of them are books on child-rearing by people plainly unqualified to undertake such a task, much less tell anyone else how to do it; the other is entitled Beloved Unbeliever: Loving Your Husband Into the Faith, and is tragically not pornographic. If my sacrifice prevents even one hapless, unsuspecting person from being lifesculpted by some numpty who's read and bought into any of that, my life has not been in vain.)

>My train of thought was that anyone but Katara with some knowledge of
>the situation (assuming it wasn't just some faceless Einherjar
>commander who got stuck with this particular part of the theater)
>might have hesitated before ordering Boone to put one between Azula's
>eyes. Katara? No remorse. :)

In fairness, whoever is giving Boone his instructions there (and I am inclined to believe now that it's Katara) knew full well what he was planning to do, and that it wasn't simply to shoot her in the head.

>Something I've thought a lot about over the years, actually. I
>eventually came to the conclusion that one of the big things Katara
>and Zuko understand about each other that Aang doesn't get about
>either of them (or people in general) is the way they both have ugly
>dark sides.

Upon review, I think it's entirely possible that - at least in his adult life - he did eventually get that, he simply preferred not to engage with it...

>It's like a sickness or a disease
>in people in his eyes, something wrong that he doesn't
>understand and doesn't want to understand; he will shy away from it
>and avoid confronting it.

... thus.

>Katara and Zuko (Zuko especially) don't have that problem. When Katara
>wanted to go hunt down an old man and maybe murder the hell out of
>him, for Aang that was like Katara's head had started spinning around
>and she began speaking in tongues. Zuko didn't have that issue.

I'm sort of vaguely reminded of the little conversation between Skuld and Gryphon in Weapon of Choice:

"That's a very direct way of dealing with evil."

"'Get your murder on' was my default response to people like him at the time. To be brutally honest, it was in many ways a lot more satisfying than due process."

"Hey, I didn't say it disapprovingly. Remember who you're talking to here."

>It's another thing I suspect neither Zuko or Katara ever brought up; Aang
>thinks that Katara's confrontation with Yon Rha was about Katara
>denying that part of herself. Zuko knows that it was actually about
>her accepting that part of herself.

"It's just easier to leave him his illusions, I find."

"Mm. Sometimes you just want to pet him on the head and say, 'Oh, bless.'"

"Well, maybe you do. It'd just be weird if I did that."

>I find it somehow fitting that, once again, Zuko the stubborn bastard
>is the last one to arrive. :) At his welcome party, Toph probably made
>Sokka make a banner that just said 'FINALLY'.

"What? I had some stuff I had to finish."

>Narratively speaking, it seems like for Azula to end up in hell, the
>smoothest flow is either for Beria to outright win, or for Azula's
>hubris to land her in hot water and for us to see that happening.

They probably got her in her sleep. It wouldn't have been any too exciting.

>Hmm. Fair enough. I just... don't quite think it works, is all. It's
>hard for me to tell, I can't erase my memory and go back and try it
>another way and see how it hits me. I respect what you were trying to
>do, it's not like this is one those "your writing is bad and you
>should feel bad" situations, I just feel like it doesn't quite come
>off.

Well... they don't always.

--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
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.