let your character fuck up. please. let them fuck up on a scale so massive that this particular thing cannot be salvaged. let their fuck up have permanent consequences. and stoooooooooooooooop having them being the smartest person in the room who always has a sharp comeback to put their enemies down, and who always handles their enemies with grace or at least an air of superiority that s justified because they’re so cool and smart and clever™ let them bleed for their mistakes, let them MAKE those mistakes, and let that bleeding be ugly and disgraceful. let them suffer for their own mistakes, and let them suffer in knowing that they cannot fix. and let other people hate them for the shit they’ve done, and for once let the haters not be ‘petty bad people’. Let the haters be right.
@muffinlance i just want to say i just read through towards the sun and you are a master of doing this, i love how well you write characters doing things and the consequences of those things. iroh fucking up so incredibly bad with his relationship with zuko, as well zuko starting a goddamn civil war??? aang condemning people to a fate worse than death on accident, breaking the trust of the people of the fire nation and striking fear into their hearts??? chefs kiss. everyone is wrong and everyone is also right and everyone has their own reasons for doing things and everything feels so real.
in salvage as well, that fractured relationship between katara and hakoda is just so devastating and tentative and sad in the way that they’re still family and they still love each other so so much, but katara probably wont necessarily see him in the same way as she did before he left ever again (which he had a REASON but he still broke her heart and its heartbreaking that they both make complete sense in why they had to do and why they felt the things they did)!
you make characters feel SO human it’s genuinely incredible 💕