(This is long overdue. Apologies for the delay; these reviews and commentaries are not especially time consuming in and of themselves compared to the amount of time it must take to produce the source materiel, but they do require me to have several hours free in which I'm not dog tired and/or buried under work.)

So. Desolation Angel comes to a close with the publishing of the Omnibus. It's been a pretty enjoyable trip! Let's see what the final act has in store.

>It wasn't the secret some of the more waggish opportunists in her father's
>court thought she had; that was arrant nonsense. The idea that her unusually
>dusky skin tone could be traced back to some sort of shenanigans involving one
>of her post-War ancestors and the Water Tribe was an attractive one to a
>certain stripe of Fire Nation political animal, but it didn't hold up to
>scrutiny.

I am very disappointed in the smearing prowess of the revanchist faction of Fire Nation politics. The Fire Nation has lots of people with really dark skin. Katara and Sokka pass for natives there. Piandao is a native and he could reverse it and pass for a Tribesman.

When you're making the guys who claimed that Warren Harding was secretly black look grounded, it is maybe time to give up.

>"Yes," she repeated. "It's... it's a good room. It has the best view of the
>gardens."
>
>The mysterious woman's smile broadened. "I'm so glad," she said. "I always
>thought that was the best thing about it too. This used to be my room, when I
>was a little girl myself,"

Hmm. Quibble; given her... complicated relationship with her mother, and her mothers affections for said gardens, it seems like Azula would have regarded her rooms having a good view of said gardens as a drawback rather than a plus back when she was inhabiting them.

This installment is really not what I was expecting thus far, and I mean that in absolutely the best possible way. Future Fire Princess' being mentored by Magical Mirror Princess Azula? Yes please, I would like to go to there.

>As one of the few and proud mortal veterans of the Ragnarök, Azula possessed
>the vanishingly rare privilege of returning to the Hall of Heroes whenever she
>liked, in order to visit her friends and relations who dwelt there in
>celestial glory. It was a privilege she exercised, as a general rule, three or
>four times a year.

... oh man, I'd totally forgotten about that privilege. That is awesome.

Now I really wish we had more information about Zuko's kids so they could be worked into this. Because Azula, once convinced Zuko actually managed to reproduce, would regard that as just a prime opportunity for meddling.

Also too: I bet she just scares the fuck out of Tenzin.

>After nine AM, they belonged to the nation, but before then, they were just
>her parents.

I'd drop the AM, which is a latin construction native to a time and place far, far removed from this setting. Just go with nine; it is obvious from the context you mean 'in the morning.'

(For full immersion, it would be something like 'the Hour of the Dragon', but one imagines they've adopted uniform systems of timekeeping that don't vary with the seasons in the Fire Nation by now. For bureaucratic reasons if nothing else.)

>"... Er, not that I know of," Fire Lord Qinzon replied after a moment's >reflection. "Why do you ask?"

:wince:

Not your fault, but I'm pronouncing that "Shinzon" and... well. My mind went to weird places, as the last character with that name I encountered was in a very, very bad Star Trek movie.

>Apart from a couple of very discreet security personnel (so discreet, in fact,
>that Katara never actually saw them),

Well, the bodyguards to the Fire Lords are elite warriors who train for many years in the art of stealth.

>"Only you would call your own imaginary friend's bluff," she said.
>
>"Yeah, keep laughing, you'll see," Katara said, and then thought, I hope...

Aww, these two are adorable. Maybe not as adorable as Shinzen is, but pretty adorable.

>One, standing to the right of and a little behind the one who knocked, was a
>cheerful-looking girl with dark brown hair drawn back in a long braid, dressed
>in a pale pink sundress and low red shoes.

Awwww.

There needs to be more art of Ty Lee is loose, flowy dresses.

>The trousers in particular, decked with a narrow red stripe down the outseams,

Ha!

Thanks for that one, Ben. :)

>from the quarian fueling techs at Scandia-1 to that cheerful Rigellian weapons
>merchant who was the only reliable source for the obsolescent missiles the
>Phoenix Queen's launchers required.

While there are undoubtedly many Rigellian weapons merchants in Known Space, I choose to believe that this is Tavonseck, the cheerful Rigellian space pirate whom Gryphon encountered at an auction way back when.

(What? He stuck with me. Come to think of it, so has Lefty Szoroda. I don't know, I like bit players.)

>She bore no particular resemblance to Aang, though, in person or manner. Azula
>chalked that up as evidence that the whole "they're all really the same
>person" thing was just as much bunk as she'd always assumed it was.

That's one of the fun things about Avatars; they're simultaneous completely different people and all the same person, both at once.

I do love that Azula regards it as so much bunk, tho. Azula has a very specific kind of orderly mind that, I think, wouldn't take kindly to the kind of quantum uncertainty you find in a lot of eastern mysticism. I imagine she didn't have a hell of a lot of time for the Fire Sages growing up.

>"That sounds like a fine idea," Azula agreed. "I haven't taken a good
>old-fashioned road trip in a long time."

Ty Lee wisely refrains from pointing out that Azula's whole life is a road trip. She really hasn't stopped moving since the day Daddy told her to go call her brother for dinner. :)

>"Well, that's not supposed to be here," Azula remarked; for the vehicle pacing
>the train, a dark-clad figure astride it, was a repulsorlift swoop.

Man, has the appearance of people on swoop bikes where they aren't supposed to be ever not been bad?

>The locomotive was derailed as well, lying over on its right side next to the
>tracks with a fire burning in its engine compartment, but No. 1 sleeper car
>was miraculously still upright, rolling gently to a stop some distance beyond
>the wrecked engine.

Say what you will about these idiots, this hit was well-executed and planned.

>Azula never tired of seeing this bit of kit in action, and she wondered what
>the swoop rider was making of it as the sleeves and leggings of Ty Lee's
>Experts of Justice smartsuit

... oh man, Ty Lee is an Expert of Justice?

I wonder how her Dim Mak fighting style stacks up against the rest of those crazies. I bet the whole "I punch your arm and it stops working thing" is considered deeply annoying. :)

>It was a metal badge, about the size of a policeman's shield, silver-backed
>and richly enameled in the same azure color, and its shape was curiously
>familiar - like an even-more-stylized version of the Fire Nation's triple
>flame crest.

I had a pretty good idea where this was going at this point (those of us who read a lot of Avatar fanfiction have a pretty solid idea of what's going on when guys with a blue triflame show up), but very briefly I somehow thought that the Psi Corps was involved; their insignia doesn't need to morph a whole lot to turn into the triflame.

>These were appearing - rising from the desert floor as if by their own will
>a short distance in front of the speeding train, then sinking away again in
>its wake, leaving few traces that the vehicle had ever passed that way.

Now that is a hell of a trick.

I bet the Earth Army Corps of Engineers has used that one more than a few times. During relief operations if nothing else.

>She was only shown from the shoulders up, the same pose as all the official
>court portraits of the past Fire Lords that hung in the great reception hall
>of the Royal Palace,

I'm not sure this is right; the official portraiture we see in the series itself ("The Avatar and the Fire Lord") are all full-body pieces.

>She was a merchant's daughter from Ba Sing Se, not a member of a royal family
>with more than its share of trouble in its history.

Ahahahahahaha.

>Katara considered asking him why, if they were a "brotherhood", at least a >third of the members she'd seen so far were women,

Given that Katara is going to be Fire Lord one day, I don't think she's one to talk about misgendering women. :)

I suspect that in the tongue they're actually speaking, "Brotherhood," like "Lord," is a gender-neutral word. Chinese can be like that. I recall reading commentary to that effect in one of my copies of Romance of the Three Kingdoms re: the Brotherhood of the Peach Orchard, but I'll be damned if I can find that right this second.

>Zhu startled her by spitting - actually spitting - on the floor of the chamber
>in response to her mention of her ancestor's name. She hadn't realized anyone
>still did that kind of thing outside of old movers.

This is the point where I started becoming real suspicious of Zhu and his Brotherhood. That move was a little bit to pat. Are there people that dramatic and showy? Sure, especially in front of an audience. But still.

>"Have no fear on that account, Your Highness. The present holder of that
>office is accounted for; by the time we move on Ba Sing Se, she will no longer
>be in play. As for her replacement, well - he or she will be born in the Earth
>Kingdom... " He smiled slightly, which did not appreciaby help her unease, and
>went on, "... your subject."

Or they could be born in the United Republic. Bet sparky here didn't think of that outcome. Although even given that scenario, he's still buying a couple decades of time.

>This man was actually, genuinely, really-out-loud talking about murdering
>Avatar Korra to secure an open field for the rest of this organization's
>plan... and however unlikely a feat she considered that to be, the look of
>complete confidence he wore as he discussed it led her to the chilling
>realization that he at least thought they could pull it off.

Worked for Sozin!

(Seriously, I bet these guys have a motivational picture in here somewhere that says exactly that.)

>"I'm afraid I simply can't have you broadcasting my return to the public at >large, so I shall have to have my associate Ty Lee erase your memory with a >secret technique she learned in Ryo Zan Paku. Be a dear and stand still. I'm >assured it's mostly painless.

You know, until I read the annotations, I actually thought that Azula was in no way joking.

Not sure if that says more about me or about these stories in general.

Hmmm.

A secret conspiracy amongst those whose political leanings cause them to be... receptive to such things whose aim is to restore Azula or an Azula-equivalent to the throne? Relatively common story to tell. But in the case of this particular group... I'm deeply suspicious. It's all a little bit too convenient. It's entirely possible for batshit insane political separatists to hand their grievances down generation after generation (I'm an American, I sort of take it for granted there are tons of people who really don't acknowledge we had a Civil War that ended in a certain way a century and a half ago) but these guys really waited an awful long time... didn't they.

And they're suspiciously well-backed. Zhu did not strike me as the kind of guy who would be able to make contact with the wider universe and smuggle stuff in on his own recognizance.

No, my money is firmly on "these guys are a front of some kind." I think they might, in fact, exist purely to poison Diqiu against Azula. They might or might not be an infernal front (I have a tendency to see demons behind every bush), but Azula has made certain enemies there, hasn't she, and they certainly have the lifting capacity to throw something like this together. I'm not even fully convinced this Brotherhood actually existed until rather recently.

So that was Royal Progress. It was pretty good! Choppy in places. I'm not sure if it wouldn't have worked better as the start of a new series of stories than the capstone of Desolation Angel. But I did really, really like seeing Katara in action. She's somewhat awesome. Not Azana awesome, but pretty awesome. Definitely one of the better class of princesses.

Going back and reading all of Desolation Angel itself as a single, holistic work... I've read a lot of "Let's rebuild Azula into a functioning human being!" stories. (I'm actually considering pulling together a compendium of links over in General.) This isn't the best one of them. But it's up there. I'd say... top ten? Somewhere in there. It's much stronger as a piece of UF work than it is as a piece of Avatar work, which is to be expected.

Of particular note, at least to me: Blue Harvest, Agreement in Principle, and Nothing That Is In Between.

Blue Harvest is simply good. It goes down smooth. Like vodka! It's full of neat little bits of tech and storytelling and some nice subtly and interesting supporting players. It's just... good.

The latter two... I have some bias showing here, since I was about as involved as it is possible for a forum dweller to be in the evolution of both pieces. But good goddamn, those two had some of your strongest writing of the past year in it, right up there with A Bride to Far. And it was all the more notable for the fact that it wasn't in a style I'm used to coming out of your pen at all. It was like Mike Mignola was giving you script pointers. The revised ending of Agreement and very especially the first third of Nothing were just... just wonderful.

You may have an undiscovered talent for making the genre leap from "pulp" to straight-up "urban fantasy." You've gone in that direction before, with some of your BPRD pieces and Blood Ties, but you really upped your game there. If your instincts ever draw you in such directions again, I would encourage you to listen to them.

I look forward to the further and ongoing adventures of Princess Azula. You guys, you done right by the girl.

-Murc
Keep Rat

That's true - in fact, it's even mentioned in the course of the actual explanation for why Katara the Younger is rather brown. It's fairly unusual for the royal family, though (and, indeed, came into the family line through marriage).

It's still a dippy theory, but like many dippy theories, it's still plausible enough for dippy people to believe it. :)

>Hmm. Quibble; given her... complicated relationship with her mother,
>and her mothers affections for said gardens, it seems like Azula would
>have regarded her rooms having a good view of said gardens as a
>drawback rather than a plus back when she was inhabiting them.

Surprisingly not, at least when she looks back. Admittedly, she had a complicated relationship with the gardens too, inasmuch as she would occasionally attempt to "improve" them by setting bits of them on fire, but then, that was Li'l Azula's preferred method for "improving" anything. It doesn't necessarily mean she didn't like them.

>Now I really wish we had more information about Zuko's kids so they
>could be worked into this. Because Azula, once convinced Zuko actually
>managed to reproduce, would regard that as just a prime opportunity
>for meddling.

One of the things I was amused by while constructing Royal Progress, and a bit disappointed that nobody noticed, is that at one point, Azula makes reference to having nothing to do on her current visit to Valhalla but "push [her] sister-in-law's buttons", without ever specifying who she's actually talking about. (It's plain from context that Princess Katara knows, or at least thinks she does, so they've evidently discussed the matter off-screen before that point.)

>Also too: I bet she just scares the fuck out of Tenzin.

In fairness to Azula, many things frighten Tenzin, not all of them actually scary, and he isn't scared of many things he should be. He's inherited his father's complete inability to gauge risk realistically.

>>"... Er, not that I know of," Fire Lord Qinzon replied after a moment's >reflection. "Why do you ask?"
>
>:wince:
>
>Not your fault, but I'm pronouncing that "Shinzon" and... well. My
>mind went to weird places, as the last character with that name I
>encountered was in a very, very bad Star Trek movie.

... Oddly, you don't seem to have had this problem with the other Fire Nation royal named Shinzen. :)

(Also, I must not have seen that movie, as I don't recognize the name, which presumably means it's Nemesis, as I think I've seen all the others.)

>Aww, these two are adorable. Maybe not as adorable as Shinzen is, but
>pretty adorable.

They were fun to design, mainly because it was entertaining to devise a couple of characters who don't really set out to buck the stereotypes, and thereby, in a meta-UF kind of way, buck the stereotypes. I like the idea that they just are who they are, and they're not particularly concerned about expectations - regardless of whether they happen to be meeting them anyway. :)

(Jing, in particular, is kind of a hoot that way, because as it turns out, she's basically undercover as herself. She's a princess with a commoner's pragmatic heart pretending to be a commoner who isn't intimidated by royalty. There's just something I really love about that.)

>I do love that Azula regards it as so much bunk, tho. Azula has a very
>specific kind of orderly mind that, I think, wouldn't take kindly to
>the kind of quantum uncertainty you find in a lot of eastern
>mysticism. I imagine she didn't have a hell of a lot of time for the
>Fire Sages growing up.

One of the things that I wasn't really able to explore as much as I might've liked in Royal Progress as it turned out, but may return to at some later point, is that Azula maintains that sort of mental order on purpose; it requires a certain degree of deliberate effort on her part that other people may not necessarily have to put in for the same effect, because, well... on some level, she still is and probably always will be mentally ill. She's not a sociopath - she's capable of genuine empathy and passionate emotion - but she'll always have that tendency toward paranoia and needless cruelty, and always have to be vigilant against it. Her mind is like a cable-stayed structure: it only works properly under moderate but constant tension. Take that tension away and it just collapses, at which point it is a mofo of a job to stand it back up again.

That's why being a professional spacer suits her so well: it builds that tension directly into the structure of her life, so that she doesn't have to go out of her way to induce it. If you let your guard down in space, if you let the details start getting away from you, if you're sloppy or lax about maintenance or procedure, space will kill you. Azula needs the stakes to be that high in order to function. She's not completely incapable of relaxing, obviously - under the right conditions she can be a positive sybarite - but she has have some kind of overarching structure to refer back to or she'll lose her bearings, and that simply cannot end well.

25th-century Azula stays sane through a constant low-grade application of will, the same way I have days when I can only perform mundane physical tasks by applying the kind of deliberate concentration ordinarily associated with defusing a bomb. Fortunately, she's become quite good at maintaining. If she were suffering from some physical ailment, like a neurological problem or an endocrine disorder, people would say she's "managing her condition well," but mental illness still doesn't invite the same sort of clinical interpretation in everyday life.

(As a bonus, in the modern day she has one thing that she never had in the bad old days: people around her who understand how all that works and care enough to help her stay on top of it.)

Like I say, I couldn't get into that much, though it peeks out around the corners of her interactions with Ty Lee a few times, and there's a moment in RP when she comes extremely close to falling off the wagon a bit. For the most part, though, she's breezy and unflappable because that's the way she has to be. Which is not to say it's an act - she really is pleasant, polite, rather sarcastic but generally fun to be around. It's just that if she wasn't, it'd be back to burning down the whole damn world just for being too loud. Like she said to Katara the Elder in Armistice Day, "You've seen what happens when I take life too seriously."

>Say what you will about these idiots, this hit was well-executed and
>planned.

It's almost like they had help.

>>Azula never tired of seeing this bit of kit in action, and she wondered what
>>the swoop rider was making of it as the sleeves and leggings of Ty Lee's
>>Experts of Justice smartsuit
>
>... oh man, Ty Lee is an Expert of Justice?

That, or she stolesomebody gave her one of their special jumpsuits. Either one is entirely possible. :)

>I wonder how her Dim Mak fighting style stacks up against the rest of
>those crazies. I bet the whole "I punch your arm and it stops working
>thing" is considered deeply annoying. :)

She found it useful discovering situations in which it isn't helpful. One hates to be a one-trick poodlepony, after all. There are those around IPO Headquarters who still fondly remember the time she tried it on Ben Grimm.*

>I bet the Earth Army Corps of Engineers has used that one more than a
>few times. During relief operations if nothing else.

It's a pretty handy way of getting a lot of stuff to a place where the proper roads a/o rail lines have got all screwed up. In those situations the usual procedure is to leave them there until they're no longer needed, not clean them up after each train, but still.

>>She was only shown from the shoulders up, the same pose as all the official
>>court portraits of the past Fire Lords that hung in the great reception hall
>>of the Royal Palace,
>
>I'm not sure this is right; the official portraiture we see in the
>series itself ("The Avatar and the Fire Lord") are all full-body
>pieces.

That was a long time ago; they may have redecorated.

>>She was a merchant's daughter from Ba Sing Se, not a member of a royal family
>>with more than its share of trouble in its history.
>
>Ahahahahahaha.

I found it a little odd that nobody seemed interested in remarking on that.

>>Zhu startled her by spitting - actually spitting - on the floor of the chamber
>>in response to her mention of her ancestor's name. She hadn't realized anyone
>>still did that kind of thing outside of old movers.
>
>This is the point where I started becoming real suspicious of Zhu and
>his Brotherhood. That move was a little bit to pat. Are there people
>that dramatic and showy? Sure, especially in front of an audience. But
>still.

It's meant to come across as one of those automatic/atavistic behaviors exhibited by people who have been steeped in their personal mythology for a long time, like Eastern European peasants warding off the evil eye. A demonstration of how deeply embedded the Brotherhood's disdain for Zuko is, and how long it's been that way, that their current Speaker engages in this preposteously anachronistic tic when he's mentioned.

>Or they could be born in the United Republic. Bet sparky here didn't
>think of that outcome.

By that point in Admiral Zhu's timetable, there is no United Republic.

>You know, until I read the annotations, I actually thought that Azula
>was in no way joking.

Well, even if Ty Lee knew a way to erase people's memories (learned in Ryo Zan Paku or elsewhere), Azula would not have been seriously suggesting that she was about to have her use it on Korra in order to keep her own return to Dìqiú a secret.

... if she had been intending on that, she wouldn't have mentioned it out loud. :)

>I'm not even fully convinced this
>Brotherhood actually existed until rather recently.

Well, I'm not saying you're right and I'm not saying you're wrong, but I will point out that if you're right, that would involve the construction and installation of a complicated false family history stretching back nearly 200 years in the minds of quite a large number of people.

And that the part of it that's a Dai Li remnant was probably real anyway. (Man, how embarrassing would it be for your genuinely real 200-year-old secret revenge conspiracy to just be swept up and converted into an adjunct module for a fake 200-year-old secret revenge conspiracy? Pretty embarrassing, I should think. :)

>I'm not sure if it wouldn't have worked better as the start of
>a new series of stories than the capstone of Desolation Angel.

That could be. It's definitely a hinge point, either way. There are several things to be followed up from it: the Brotherhood and where their extraplanar backing came from; the Fire Nation succession; the Earth Kingdom succession (one thing we don't know based on RP alone is whether Jing is the heir or the spare); whether Azula's back to stay and how, given the above musings about her career's importance to her equilibrium, she'd deal with that; how, if at all, any of this interacts with the S5 Dìqiú Suite, which is happening less than a year later...

On the other hand, if RP had been configured as the first episode of a second Travels with the Phoenix Queen series, that would still leave Desolation Angel in search of an ending, and wherever it ended would still be a transition point to the next part.

>It's much stronger as a piece of UF work than it is as a piece
>of Avatar work, which is to be expected.

Indeed, there was no particular intent there for it to be anything else. If I were going to do a straight-up ATLA-universe Azula follow-up, it would naturally have to go in a very different direction. I even have a few suspicions as to what that direction would be. But it would be hardly anything like Desolation Angel, in any event.

--G.
* Turned out it was, in fact, clobberin' time.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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