So The Drama: A Bit Of A Mess (Redux)

Constantly Torn Between...

Not wanting to reveal spoilers for my AU series and wanting people to ask about it so I can answer questions.

Wanting to make my AU a comic and knowing I don't have the time, skill, or energy to make it look like I want.

Wanting to read fanfiction for inspiration and feeling bad for not coming up with completely original ideas.

Wanting people to enjoy my content and not wanting to care about the approval of others.

Will Du: Can't, or Can? (Redux)

Starting off with a fun fact: Will's original concept was Ken Du, who was just as capable as Kim. They had a rivalry with each other, but also a bit of a romance. Concept art had him looking just like Hirotaka.

So, honestly, the idea of Kim having an actual rival in saving the world is so interesting. Unfortunately, Will doesn't measure up to Kim.

Or, he's not supposed to.

But he's the top agent at Global Justice for a reason, so there's probably more to his mistakes on the mission than being incompetent.

Let's review:

The first thing we learn about Will is that he doesn't want to work with an amateur. He finds it insulting that he's being asked.

Instead of it being snobbery or an insult to Kim's abilities, it could just as easily be that he wanted to get the job done without having to teach someone else to do it, and was insulted that they wanted to waste his time by making him teach someone to do the job.

I mean, I don't know how it works in the world of espionage, but in every job I had, if someone of high rank was being asked to work with a new recruit or potential recruit, it's because they were expected to teach them or determine if they'd be good for the job.

(Also, Kim needs to not take being called an amateur so personally. She never even fought an actual bad guy until "Tick-Tick-Tick", which was less than two months ago at this point. She is definitely skilled, but she is technically an amateur.)

And Kim is someone who said, to Dr. Director's face, that she's wrong about why someone would kidnap Professor Green because "you can learn everything he knows at the library."

(Honestly, odds are that wasn't true. This is the era where computers were still boxes, Wikileaks didn't exist yet, and only nerds spent a lot of time online anyways. There were still projects from WWII that were classified, so it's doubtful that everything Professor Green worked on was declassified.)

Will Du and Global Justice assume Professor Green had been kidnapped for his weapons knowledge. Even if that wasn't why he was kidnapped, they still have an interest in making sure none of his weapons knowledge got out anyways.

But Kim keeps insisting that the trained professionals who do this for a living are wrong.

It must be really frustrating for Will.

(Just because Kim was right doesn't mean she has to be a know-it-all.)

There's also the fact that Global Justice had only asked Kim on the mission, but she brought Ron and Rufus along anyways, meaning in addition to ensuring Kim's safety, Will also has to ensure the safety of a civilian and his pet, who should not have been there in the first place.

Despite Will having an entire database of verified information on his wrist, Kim insists on going to a den of criminal activity to talk to some crime boss for information, despite being unable to prove the information would be correct or helpful.

(And does not tell Will ahead of time where they're going, denying him any ability to refuse to go or offer an alternative.)

Sure, it got the job done, but Will no doubt has procedures, rules, and regulations to follow, along with a list of things that he shouldn't do, and using unverified, known-criminal sources for information is probably one of them.

In summary:

Will has to ensure the safety of an amateur that charges into things without talking to others, and the civilian and rodent she dragged along who shouldn't be there.

Will has to follow rules and procedures that Kim doesn't think about and likely wouldn't respect anyways.

Will has a database of useful and verified information, but Kim insists on using sources like Big Daddy Brotherson.

Kim went into the mission with an "I know better" attitude, already believing she was better than the professionals who do this for a living.

So, while Will is probably actually extremely competent, he was also off of his game because his style doesn’t mesh well with Kim’s at all.

And he would have been an interesting recurring character, but the creators decided not to give Kim an actual rival in saving the world, for some reason, so we never see Will again.

(I like to imagine he specifically requested to never work with Kim again, so Global Justice only contacts Kim for things that Kim would be better suited for, or when they were studying The Ron Factor.)

So, Will could have been a very interesting character, someone to serve as an actual rival to Kim when it comes to saving the world.

Sadly, his potential was wasted by turning him into a seemingly incompetent agent.

And that's just sad.

Bonus Thoughts:

Will doesn't seem to be very experienced with combat. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it just leads me to a certain conclusion about him:

He wasn't trained for combat.

Global Justice's top agent would be very skilled at whatever they needed him to be good at, but combat doesn't seem to be one of his skills.

So it's very likely Global Justice probably didn't need him for combat. His skills probably lie more in intelligence gathering and espionage, which requires more stealth and diplomacy than fighting

And it certainly never involved fighting villains like Kim's.

Thus, Will is not incompetent, he's just not suited for combat against supervillains with gimmicks.

I agree with all of this, and I'm adding I complaint I have:

Lila has no goals or motivation.

After her introductory episode, it was easy to defend her lying with Lila being new and struggling to make friends.

And, honestly, that would have been good enough.

But then, Lila appears again and, despite being caught in her lies, she doubles down and keeps lying, for seemingly no reason other than manipulating everyone around her.

Revenge against Ladybug might be a goal, but it seems a bit drastic for getting called out for lying. Especially when she was offered forgiveness by Ladybug and Adrien.

Lila's behavior then escalates from lying to allying with a super villain.

And she apparently has multiple families who know her under different identities, one of whom is a student at another school.

Again, no reason known for Lila to do this, and it has nothing to do with her revenge against Ladybug.

So, Lila manipulates everyone around her, for no known reason.

And since Lila's been around since the end of season 1, she should have a little more backstory by now.

Especially with the latest special, where Lila makes a wish that almost destroys the universe.

What did Lila wish for? What is her goal? Why is she doing this?

No one knows. Hopefully we'll get answers in season 6, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

I guess my biggest complaint is that Lila is a plot device, not a character.

And that's just terrible writing.

Miraculous Ladybug Analysis: Why Lila Fails

So for those of you who aren’t new to my blog or fanfics, it should come as no surprise that I despise Lila Rossi from Miraculous Ladybug canon.

I despise her as a person. I despise her as a character. And I despise the very idea that she is in any way supposed to be a credible villain or that her choosing to be an antagonist is supposed to be anyone’s fault but her own. She annoys me in every possible way except for the reasons canon would probably have intended.

But ultimately, if I had to explain my specific issues with her and her character, it’d boil down to four main things:

One, Lila is a plot device.

From the moment she first appears in the story and well into any of her subsequent appearances, Lila’s purpose is to further a plot.

Not THE plot, mind you. Not the central story of the entire series about a supervillain attacking the city which has been dragged out for five seasons now or even the B plot of the love square that is so far removed from a slow burn by this point that the candle has long been extinguished from lack of oxygen.

No, it’s just A plot. And not even a good one. Outside of that specific plot of the day, Lila doesn’t really do anything, even when she arguably should be given the character that canon has presented her as.

And canon proves this is the case because Lila almost literally disappeared off the face of the earth with no explanation for nearly the entirety of season 2 until the finale when they suddenly need her again and say “oh yeah, by the way, she was just hiding out at home the whole time until Hawk Moth was ready to start this specific plan that is reliant on her to be there”. Sure, Gabriel has no way of knowing that Lila would even still be in Paris at that time, but that's the nature of a plot device in that it just works.

Lila appears. She manipulates and it works out. Then once her scheme is completed, she disappears into the ether again with little to no follow up or mention of her in the meantime.

Lila is a plot device and only exists as the plot demands. Which is even more problematic because of the next point.

Two, there is nothing that Lila does that couldn’t have been accomplished by an already established character.

Lila is supposed to be another rival over Adrien and another antagonist character for Marinette on both sides of the mask, which should be fine and even expected in a story.

The problem with that is that Marinette already HAS a rival and antagonist in Chloe, who seems to have everything needed to be a better antagonist. She has the power of wealth and nepotism to use against anyone she doesn’t like and to protect herself from consequences. Even better, she has a direct connection to the male lead that can at least give cause for her to appear to have a chance as a romantic rival as well as a reason for the female lead to not act against her if it would risk upsetting him. In addition, fans have been pegging her as a helper to Hawk Moth since season one, which would have been a potential route for her character—and what ended up happening ANYWAY given the events of Miracle Queen and season 4.

So why even have Lila then? There is nothing Lila brings to the table that is new or unique. She does nothing that couldn’t be accomplished by already existing characters who could fill whatever role she’s supposed to serve and they could do it WITHOUT the plot having to literally turn on its head to make thing work out.

She’s basically like Chloe—there’s no other way to put it. She is a sneakier and less obviously evil Chloe. They both are antagonistic towards the female lead while crushing on the male lead. They both do bad things and get away with it. They both act incredibly juvenile in their expectations and show no real understanding of either accountability or cause and effect. And they both agree to help the big bad just to get back at Ladybug for not letting them have something they feel entitled to with no real concern as to the fallout that would occur even if it should directly affect them.

The only difference is that Chloe at least has an in-universe reason for why she is never stopped. A frustrating reason, mind you, but still A reason.

Chloe gets away with things because she’s rich and her father is the guy running the city. Horrible? Yes. True to life? Arguably. But it’s something confirmed in canon and something we as the audience can see and understand the reason behind.

Lila doesn’t have that. What does she have then? Well, not much, actually.

Three, Lila‘s actions are not intelligent or reasonable.

This one is especially important because canon has been trying to paint it that Lila is some sort of mastermind and supposed to be a credible threat.

But as the writers don’t seem to understand “show, don’t tell”, Lila’s actions don’t really fit with that narrative. She either does things that a master manipulator wouldn’t do, or doesn’t take the obvious actions that one would.

A lot of her actions are poorly thought out:

Claiming to be the best friend of a superhero she know exists to someone she should know follows the exploits of and has had interviews with said hero, and just assumes that the claim will never be brought up if the two should meet again.

Claiming on a major news source to be the best friend of a superhero who is constantly under attack and may thus make Lila a potential target of anyone seeking to harm said hero.

Stealing what is clearly a very old possibly one of a kind book and going so far as to throw it away and just assume that the owner won’t notice or care that it’s missing.

NOT accepting Ladybug’s offer of friendship when the hero is clearly feeling guilty and would put Lila in a prime position to manipulate said hero out of that guilt and make at least one of her lies true.

And that’s just in Volpina. After that, Lila hid away at home for months on end just to sulk in her room over being caught. Which is really pathetic in and of itself, especially when there was no valid in character reason for her to do that instead of anything else, like maybe trying to do damage control.

Let’s remember that only two people knew Lila was lying—the hero she lied about and the crush the hero outted her in front of. Since Lila was clearly still in contact with the classmates during her self-imposed exile, she would have to have known that nobody else was aware of her lies, meaning those two people never told anyone about what she had been doing. Everyone else still believed her.

And of the two who knew, one apologized to LILA after Lila had selfishly lied about and insulted her while the other was still clearly trying to be on good terms with her even if he was disappointed in her for lying. Adrien actually offered to be her friend and only asked her to stop lying.

And Lila doesn’t use that to her advantage. A truly good manipulator can manipulate someone even if that person knows she’s a manipulator. She could have just accepted Adrien’s offer and it would have been a relatively small loss on her part in comparison to what she would have gained. She could have spun a sob story about why she lies and make herself look sympathetic to him so he would more willingly support her—and give her more of a chance to win him over because he would believe that they have a connection that way.

Instead, the master manipulator that Lila supposedly is chose to double down on her earlier lies and pout about how Ladybug is the liar even when it’s obvious that Ladybug wasn’t and even more obvious that Adrien wouldn’t believe her. Before stealing an akuma for herself and using it to frame ADRIEN for nicely asking her to stop lying to him instead of trying to frame Ladybug to him to give her lies more credence.

So each of Lila’s choices don’t make sense with the character that we are told Lila is supposed to be.

If I’m being charitable, I would say she just isn’t a master manipulator.

If I’m being blunt, I would say she’s stupid.

Now, it could be argued that she’s a teenager and doesn’t think things through, except that none of this is ever acknowledged as a mistake by either Lila herself or the narrative.

Lila keeps letting her emotions cloud her judgement. Which is interesting because Marinette is noted to have that as her main character flaw. Except for Marinette, this is actually portrayed as a flaw and something she has to correct and make up for while for Lila, it just somehow always works out in her favor.

Which leads to my next point…

Four, Lila is overly reliant on the plot to function as an antagonist.

If we're looking at things objectively, Lila isn’t smart and her plans aren’t that great. Whatever she schemes only seems to work because the plot requires them to rather than because of any real capability on Lila’s part. It becomes increasingly evident that Lila gets away with things because apparently plot demands that no one is allowed to so much as doubt what she says. They are forced to blindly believe her and follow whatever trail she wants them to, even when they arguably shouldn’t. So no one is able to figure out that she’s a liar aside from the female lead she’s a rival to and the big bad, and the latter of the two has reason to not do something about the giant red flag Lila presents.

This ultimately does less to show how clever Lila is and more to further emphasize the major problem of the series itself that too much of the show is reliant on nobody but Marinette doing anything. Lila’s character especially highlights that issue in that people who SHOULD have noticed Lila’s blatant lies or SHOULD have reason to respond in some way to her actions…don’t. And even in the relatively rare instance when they do, nothing comes of it.

We clearly see Damocles trying and failing to reach Lila’s mom about her unexplained extended absence in the Heroes Day finale, but this is never brought up again when she returns. Damocles himself seems to forget about it when he reappears to interact with Lila in the “Ladybug” episode. It also shows a giant disconnect between the Principal and the teachers in that we clearly see Bustier setting up a video call with Lila—so apparently Damocles isn’t aware that Bustier has direct contact with Lila and may know why she’s supposedly missing school and Bustier isn’t aware that Lila has been skipping school and that the administration hasn’t been able to make contact with her student’s family? Maybe Lila is “just that good”, but that speaks more of a level of ineptness in the school that we as the audience aren’t supposed to be seeing.

Most of Lila’s plots work out this way. She can outright manipulate people and have evidence of that manipulation be present for all to see, but nobody reacts. We don’t see Nino respond to the mass text of that picture Lila took of herself kissing Adrien after she told Nino she wasn’t interested in him. We don’t see Alya at any point connect the dots that if Marinette is Ladybug, then Lila would have to have been lying. They just seem to forget the clearly suspicious things they’ve witnessed and immediately jump to defend Lila as the plot requires. This makes no sense for these characters and it makes no sense for the plot.

As such, given the combination of these issues, I dislike Lila in Miraculous Ladybug not because she’s “evil”, but because she acts stupidly and is entirely reliant on plot armor. It’s even worse that the narrative is trying to TELL me that she is smart and an evil mastermind when it’s only SHOWING me otherwise. And the biggest problem is that for all her obvious objective failings, she doesn’t actually face any real loss because the narrative bends over backwards to ensure she somehow attains victory in any episode she appears.

As it stands, I would say that Lila’s only real ability is her apparent power to dumb down anyone she comes in contact with if the show didn’t already do that without her.

This is probably small in the grand scheme of things, but how did Emilie being noble play any impact in the story at all?

I mean, I'd get it if it was just a small detail to help deepen Emilie's character, but why nobility of all things? I don't know, from what I'm seeing so far, the whole "Emilie renounced her noble title" shtick just feels worthless if it's not going to impact the story or add depth to Emilie's character (like maybe upbringing or personal values?).

I don't know. Like everything else, the noble part just feels shallow and means nothing to the story, especially for a character like Emilie, who is the plot device for the whole show. Any detail about her, like her personality and life story, is supposed to influence the story and characters one way or another, namely Hawkmoth since she's his driving force.

So what was the point?

For context, this ask is about Félix's play which says that Emilie gave up her title to be with Gabriel. I'm gonna give a slightly larger section of the transcript of the play for full context, but the relevant but is at the end of the last paragraph:

Félix: The king and queen's twins grew up, each day as different in heart as they were similar in body. The firstborn, curious and brazen, despised life at court and escaped at every opportunity. The younger daughter, well-behaved and respectful, did everything she could to please her parents, and stayed quietly in the castle. Félix: (as Mr. Graham de Vanily) Oh, my queen. Did we entrust our legacy to the right princess? Kagami: (as Mrs. Graham de Vanily) She will fall in line, eventually. Félix: Confident that she would settle down as she matured, the king and queen allowed the curious princess to leave to study beyond the sea in another kingdom. There, she immediately found true love in a humble tailor. Félix: The tailor was making clothes so magnificent that they revealed the beauty of the soul of anyone who wore them. Although it made her parents furious, the curious princess gave up her rank, her wealth and her kingdom to live a bohemian life with the tailor.

Story wise, I have no idea why any of this was added since it adds nothing to canon. It's not like this finally explains why Gabriel and Emilie are poor while Amelie is wealthy. Along similar lines, it's not like Amelie's title has ever mattered. Prior to this play, I don't think that we even knew that she had a title or that she was the younger sister. The play is all about explaining things that we never had reasons to question in the first place.

My best guess as to why the writers wrote this pointless backstory is that they wanted to make Emilie seem even more pure and perfect so they went with the tired old trope of a rich girl giving up material things for the sake of love and art because good pure women don't care about material things! Only nasty, shallow women care about money. (Way to play into sexist tropes, guys.)

There may also be cultural elements at play here given that France doesn't have the greatest history with nobility, so giving up a noble title may be seen as good and pure to a French writer, but I don't know enough about French culture to say that with any certainty. If anyone who reads this blog is French and would like to chime in, then feel free!

While we're on the topic of the play, I wanted to point out that the above quoted passage is why I say that the Graham de Vanily parents can be as kind or as abusive as you'd like to make them. It's incredibly vague and you can read into it whatever you want to read into it. Were they good loving parents who were just upset about their daughter living in poverty or were they miserable controlling classist who Emilie fled England to get away from? It's up to you because you can get both reads from this. The play commits to almost nothing of value. Politicians could take lessons from this impressive level of noncommittal writing.

A better version of the play would have focused on things that actually matter to canon like the details of finding the miraculous and/or Emilie learning she's sick, but you could only have those details if they were coming from Nathalie or Gabriel. Félix is a terrible choice for a character to tell us the show's backstory because he knows so little of it, thus the play focusing on his largely pointless backstory.

Reblogging to add an idea for season 4.

In "Homecoming Upset" Ron, after being stuck with the job of finding Bonnie a boyfriend, a job he did not want, realizes his relationship with Kim is still very unequal. When he attempts to talk to Kim about it, it results in an argument and them breaking up.

Whether Ron dates Bonnie or not after this is up to interpretation.

Possible AUs

While I love the idea of Ron deciding to end things with Kim after "Crush", there are definitely other times when Ron could've ended his friendship with Kim, and if you're interested in that trope in fanfiction, I think you might find this list helpful.

After being forced into a haircut in "The New Ron", Ron decides Kim's controlling behavior is too much for him. He ends his friendship with Kim and calls her out for her behavior.

After using mind control on her brothers at the end of "The Twin Factor", Kim is grounded for a long time, leaving Ron to handle missions alone. This would cause Ron to realize his own skills, and put a strain on his relationship with Kim as she can't stand to watch him succeed on missions without her. Kim also finds herself with fewer babysitting jobs once word of her using mind control on her brothers gets around.

Kim finds herself getting fewer missions after word of her negligence and reckless endangerment in "October 31st" gets out. She also finds herself banned from Monique's house since she destroyed the garage door.

Upset over GJ thinking Ron is the secret to her success in "The Ron Factor", Kim tries the solo hero thing, and fails. Unfortunately, her parting had left Ron hurt and upset, and he's not interested in coming back to Kim.

After "Adventures in Rufus-Sitting", Rufus manages to communicate to Ron what happened while he was away, and Ron gets angry that Kim not only neglected and endangered Rufus, but lied to him about it. Ron ends things with Kim as he doesn't know how he can keep being friends with someone who cares so little about Rufus.

Ron comes back from his trip in "Exchange" with new skills, new confidence, and an unwillingness to put up with Kim's controlling behavior. So he takes a break from Kim when she gets to be too much for him.

After constantly being ignored about Gil in "Return to Wannaweep", Ron decides to end things with Kim and look for someone more supportive. Kim finds herself booted from the squad after they learn about how she intentionally sabotaged her own teammate to succeed.

Team Impossible from "Team Impossible" uses legal actions to keep Kim out of the save the world business, at least until she's 18, due to the reasons mentioned in my post about them. They offer to train Kim and Ron in how to be better heroes, but Ron is the only one who accepts.

Feeling abandoned in "So The Drama", Ron decides to confront Drakken alone. He succeeds, and it starts a new chain of events where Ron realizes how little Kim cares for him and decides he deserves better.

There might be episodes in Season 4 that could have Ron end things with Kim, but I feel like at that point it would take a lot, and Kim didn't do anything truly heinous to Ron so he wouldn't.

If anyone can think of any other episode where they think it would make sense for Ron to end things with Kim, please feel free to comment!

Would you say Kim was better in the last season? How much did she grew as a person?

Hmm...tough question. My answer may not be the most popular, but...

On the one hand, Kim's competitiveness seems to have died down, so I'll give her that.

On the other hand, I mentioned that it was a bit unfair of Kim to keep expecting Ron to pay for nice dates to expensive restaurants without coupons and not offer to pay for them herself, or how annoying it is that she not only had the job handed to her, but Monique literally begged her to take it. ("The Big Job")

And, while I can somewhat understand her jealousy of Yori, she shouldn't have let that interfere with a mission. Nor was she sympathetic towards Ron about being forced out of his room for a baby sister he didn't even know he was getting. ("Big Bother")

It wasn't cool of her to be hassling Monique to break an NDA when Kim herself likely already knew what the consequences would be for Monique if she did, nor was it cool to have Wade look over the contract for loopholes. ("Fashion Victim")

And she's still rude and judgmental about Larry's interests, which happen to be interests that Kim knows Ron shares. ("Larry's Birthday")

So, while Kim's competitiveness seems to have died down, her need to control everything is still an issue, and she's still unnecessarily judgmental about other peoples' harmless interests.

So I guess Kim improved a bit, but still has some issues to work on that aren't fully addressed.

Sorry if that's not the answer you were looking for.

The only moment of the whole show where Kim looks distressful (almost about to cry) in the whole show is when she thinks Ron died in the Christmas episode.

when she tells Ron she loves her in Clean state and when she confesses to Ron she is scared too. Those are amazing emotional moments that strength Kim and Ron’s relationship, but again they are so few and far in-between.

Again, all of this was because Kim was never allowed to ponder about her feelings, or have flaws nor be vulnerable

And I think this is part of the reason why some people in the fandom (I’ve seen a few, even though I disagree with them I get where they are coming from) dislike Kim and tend to pair up Ron with almost any other character (Tara, Bonnie, Yori or sometimes even Shego ) instead of Kim.

Kim is almost a non-character in the fandom, even on Kigo stories (Once I tried giving Kigo a chance, but I disliked almost everything about it, finding about the age-gap didn’t help) Kim is a non-character only being there to act as a prop towards Shego.

In the majority of the stories (even in KimRon stories) Kim acts more like a self-insert or as a prop to either Ron or Shego. 4_5

Yeah, Kim actually having realistic, relatable emotions is so rare in the show, it makes it feel like she's not even a character in her own show.

This is probably why she often feels like a non-character in fanfiction - she was never given enough emotional depth in the show to use in fanfiction.

She definitely had flaws, but they were so rarely acknowledged, and even more rarely corrected.

The only person to regularly acknowledge Kim's flaws is Ron, but he's usually not taken seriously. So Kim never feels a need to try and improve herself.

I know I prefer to ship Ron with other people because Tara and Yori were nice to him when Kim wasn't, and Bonnie was unequivocally supportive when they were dating in "Ron Millionaire" and really nice and kind to him in "Homecoming Upset" when she was trying to date him. Tara and Yori treated Ron better than Kim did at times, and Bonnie definitely had the potential for that kind of relationship with Ron.

I don't ship Ron with Shego for the same reason I don't ship Kim with Shego - the age difference makes me uncomfortable. It's pedophilia, even if nothing happens until Ron or Kim is eighteen.

I know it's an old show, but my sister proposed one of the craziest possible AUs for Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Background info: We're both convinced that the Ty sisters are descended from air nomads. They're all good at acrobatics, and their faces look just like Aang.

So, for the AU:

Firstly, Kuzon never claims to be from the colonies, just that his family does things a bit differently

When Kuzon gets into trouble, the school doesn't ask to meet his parents, they say they've already contacted his parents.

See, a free-spirited kid who disrespects the teachers, dances, gets into fights, and "does things differently" has got to be from the Ty family.

They assume no one ever mentioned Kuzon because, compared to his sisters, he is quiet and respectful, so he must get overlooked quite often.

Mr. and Mrs. Ty did show up. They were planning to just clear up the misunderstanding, but then they see a young boy who looks just like their daughters, and is on the verge of a panic attack, and just roll with it.

"You know why we know that the history book is wrong. We're not going to punish him for being right."

"He didn't start that fight, so we're not going to punish him for defending himself."

"Kuzon, sweetie, you can't dance while playing the tsungi horn, you'll hit the other students."

The Ty family might not show it often, but they are nobility, so it's not exactly the best idea to get them upset.

Mrs. Ty has air nomad heritage, and she and her husband disagree with most of the current Fire Nation policies. They've hoped to make good changes, but it's not easy.

Aang tells them he's the avatar after he finds out about their heritage.

The promise not to sell him out, and ask for air bending lessons.

Not much else planned here, but Ozai does get defeated quicker.

I can't change the names and sell my fanfic because it was written under the premise that people already have the requisite background knowledge to enjoy it.

They already know who everyone is and how they're all connected to each other, what the plot is, what all the locations are, etc.

If I changed the names and tried to sell it, I'd have to also write the backstory.

The summary of my first story is this:

I wish I could say that my breakup with Kim was sudden. Or that it was entirely my fault. Or that it was completely my decision, un-influenced by anything or anyone else. But none of that is true. But like all good stories, we start at the beginning…

Which gets people interested because they know who Kim and Ron are and that they dated, and want to know what caused them to breakup.

However, if I changed the names:

I wish I could say that my breakup with Katie was sudden. Or that it was entirely my fault. Or that it was completely my decision, un-influenced by anything or anyone else. But none of that is true. But like all good stories, we start at the beginning…

You get a terrible romance with a lot of drama that no one wants to read, due in no small part to them not knowing who these characters are and why they should care about their breakup.

Even if your fanfic is an AU like mine, it's still entwined with canon.

And simply changing the names wouldn't be enough to fix that.

And, of course, the insistence on monetizing every hobby someone has is toxic, too.

Hobbies are meant to be fun. Not work.

It really is crazy how if you mention you write fanfiction with people outside fandom, they're always like "you should change the names and try to sell it." It misses the point (fun), but more importantly to me, I get slightly (and I know irrationally) insulted on a craft level. Excuse me, my fanfic is entwined with the canon, thank you very much. I wish sometimes less entwined. You wouldn't believe the stupid bullshit some of my fics have to include because of canon.