Avatar fic, Monster

So, besides watching a few Monster episodes, I am brooding over the fact that I don't have any new Katara/Zuko fic to read. I've already read all the ones I have on author alert, and I suppose I could go browse the latest two days in FF.net... which I probably will do anyway... but that rarely yeilds fruitful results. And the comm is slow the last few days too.

::pout:: Fic, fic, where are you? I really need some season2 K/Z fic. I've only found a few so far.

Also, I'm getting a strange desire to make dirty joke Aang/Katara icons. Specifically, using the river scene from episode 2.2, to these lyrics. Such an icon would sure get one sent to the Special Hell. I can't decide which would be better with these pics in the third row:

"You do one for Mama / She'll do one for you"

"Don't you know that this hand / Washes that one too"

"When you're strokin' Mama / Mama's strokin' you"


....Yeah, the Special Hell.


In other A:TLAB news, I'm really jealous that iTunes has the new episode out already, a week early. That's cruel and unusual punishment to the rest of us.



Now onto Monster episode 20...

random Avatar amusement

I was looking over an older fanfiction post of my Salience & Synergy fic because that was niggling in the back of my mind, and I ended up looking at a different ficlet I'd done, and I found this conversation that retad and I had that amused me quite a bit at the time. So here you go, transcribed.


[on the topic of Zuko being OOC mellow in my future AU fluff ficlet]


retad: Of course, we have to assume Zuko has spent this time mellowing out considerably, assuming the persona of "just one more obnoxious sibling". Nice job.

rashaka: Yeah, he mellowed out considerably after Sokka started lacing his soup with Antarctic weed.

retad: And Antarctic weed doesn't bake up well in brownies.

rashaka: But in soup it looks just like bay leaves! At first Aang and Katara quibbled over "the morality of it" and "what if he sucks at fighting now", but the attitude change was so wonderful they eventually congratulated Sokka on it being the best idea he ever had.

retad: The only problem was maintaining his supply. The stuff wasn't cheap, after all, but it had certainly been worth it. Of course, Sokka had thought that with the war's end he could stop altogether, since Zuko wouldn't be their problem anymore.

rashaka: However, Sokka felt a little sorry for the poor citizens of the Fire Nation to whom he was condemning a life with sober Zuko as king, so before he left he made sure to sell his remaining stash to General Iroh, and give him tips on where to buy more.

retad: Given that, in fact, Iroh had been financing this little project all along, he was well prepared to take over. Indeed, what Sokka couldn't have known was that Iroh had been masking his own "indulgence" under the guise of tea for years. Well, perhaps Sokka shouldn't have known. But he had been wondering where Iroh got off insisting he had served them all Jasmine that first afternoon when Sokka knew damn well that his own tea cup's flavor was highly suspicious and it had all come from the same pot! And poor Aang had been buzzing around even more than usual afterwards. No. Sokka was confident the Fire Nation was in good hands with Iroh, er, um, Zuko in charge.

New fanfiction journal-comm

I've decided I want to keep some other place to put my in-progress fanfiction. I'm tired of doing it on my main journal because it means that I have to make entries private all the time, so it clutters up my journal pages. And also I want to add tags for specific stories, but too many tags is annoying too.

I thought about making a private journal, but then I realized I'd have to sign in and out of LJ to work on it. So I cheated and made a community that only I can post to. However, it's open for membership in case anyone wants to read my writing drafts as I work on them. (I don't expect this to be the case, but I have no reason not to allow open membership.)

The community is rashaka_fiction. I will be posting WIPs, final drafts, chapters, drabbles, one-sentence fic ideas, outlines, etc. I will sometimes have very long posts, and will rarely use an LJ cut.

SPOILER WARNING #1: posts in this community may contain spoilers for current episodes of any series/fandoms I may write for. I rarely ever get spoiled for episodes before they air (and those would probably come with a warning), but if it's an anime series you haven't seen but I've already seen all of, like FMA, you will mostly likely get spoiled by my fanfiction.

SPOILER WARNING #2: my fanfiction will be spoiled for you. Since I intend to use this as a place to keep my work-in-progress fics, and seeing as I often write outlines and then work on fics totally out of order, don't put this on your friends list if you don't want to be spoiled for my various fanfictions. Especially my Avatar:TLAB stuff, since that's the fandom I'm writing for the most at the moment. Of course, not everything that you might read here will be in the final draft, and not absolutely everything I write will be put up here, but the majority will so you'll probably find out how fics like "Our Cartography" are going to end, and other stuff.

Sometimes I will enable comments on posts, sometimes I won't. Depends on my mood and the fic bit in question.

Some stuff will only be posted here, and will never get turned into anything substantial.

Some posts will just be nonsensical notes to myself about various fic stuff.

First drafts of things will often be a mixture of actual prose and just outline format, and will sometimes repeat themselves, or have multiple technical errors. When I post a final draft or something close to it, that's when I'm more likely to allow comments on posts.


Fandoms I fic for, or might in the future: ( Read more... )

Fruits Basket, chapter 108 -- non spoilery

Chapter 108 of Furuba is up at stoptazmo.com.

I liked it, but reading highlighted one of the things that's been bugging me about the last few volumes in scanlations-- they're hard to understand. I can barely ever tell who's saying which thought bubble, and the sentences often aren't complete sentences or whole thoughts. Nearly every sentence is fragmented or jumps around. It's getting so bad that I'm almost certain it's a translation problem, not a writing problem. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be this bad if read in native Japanese.

It's making me consider going back to the purchased volumes again, because at least the translators would attempt to use complete English statements. Although I've mostly read the scanlations for the last five volumes because of timeliness, it takes so long for a chapter to come out these days, and I already avoid ff.net spoilers like the plague, so what do I care? While there might be infintessimal differences in how dialogue makes a scene read in English or Japanese, I have no guarantee that the scanlation gives any more accurate a translation than the professional translation done by Tokyopop.

I've put up with the fragmentation of dialogue for a long time now, but this chapter is almost breaking point for me. I think there was one statement from Shigure's speech bubbles that was a complete sentence in the conversation with Tohru. I reread it a few times and it still doesn't make sense to me. I get the gist of the conversation, but if I wanted to settle for "the gist" of what's going on I'd read the fucking chapter summaries. The only reason I wait so dilligently for the chapter scanlations is the promise of details. But it's getting downright annoying and I'm about ready to throw my hands in the air and say "fuck it" and buy them.

If the kind of grammar used in these scanlations were to be in a fanfic, I would've pitched that fic in the trash bin four volumes ago.