My miscellaneous LoK stuff is on Ao3.
The City Will Follow You
| ... ... |
Hollistic Ballistics ... |
Back in 2013, the way S1 of LoK stuck in my craw in a way that made me start writing this fic, and then I enjoyed writing the fic so much that I kept doing it for years. I’m aware that the amount of time I’ve spent on this fic is, well, mental. It’s like I’ve been playing Exquisite Corpse with past versions of myself.
I have A Lot Of Opinions on S1, but the following tickled my brain: a relatively young city with a labyrinth of tunnels beneath it, a charismatic demagogue and his betrayed sidekick, a young spiritual leader who’s been thrown in the deep end. Thematically, it had the potential to be something like Baby’s First Pulp Noir, and I have a huge soft spot for Pulp Noir due to early exposure to stuff like Batman Returns (you know, the good 90s Batman movie, with Catwoman, with the whip) and The Rocketeer (fun film, despite lack of whips) when I was younger.
And beyond LoK’s cannon, my fannish brain also wanted to clumsily roll around with the following themes: the shift from Newtonian to Quantum physics (I mean, Varrick invents a super-weapon in S4, so yikes), the nature of identity, and the power of belief. I don’t feel like I’m being too pretentious or out of touch with the source material, because AtLA did a decent job of introducing its audience to certain Taoist and Buddhist concepts.
Also, there’s the Lieutenant, a guy who doesn’t even have a sensible name and basically exists in the story to hammer it home that Amon/Noatak can’t even play nicely with other radical nutjobs. He’s a great cipher for fanfic and I strongly recommend that EVERYONE pick out a minor character from a work of fiction and write stories about them because it’s fun. I swear I ended up 1) shipping him with Amon, and 2) writing him as someone who’s genuinely marginalized just to twist the knife a bit more.
🦈Page last edited on: