what made u start writing zukka fics?

hmm i think it was b/c when i finished my Chonky teen wolf fanfic, i was v satisfied with it and wanted to write more but felt kind of done with the tw characters (for the time being, i guess? i took a six year break from tw and then came back, so who's to say). this was only a few months into the ~parabola~ so i was lowkey hunting for something else to get really into, and preferably something that had an active fandom (b/c i v much am inspired by other ppl's content), and lo and behold—the atla renaissance was just getting going

and i think i've talked abt this somewhere else before, but i was really interested in ppl's interest in zukka b/c it wasn't, like, an ~obvious~ ship the way that most popular ships seem to be. i think this is in part b/c atla's character development is so well done for such a large main group (and the secondary characters are also v well done), whereas the other fandoms i've gotten into had these very big, obvious dynamics in their popular sips: merlin/arthur as opposite personalities but two fated sides of the same coin, derek/stiles as the stoic jacked one + the talkative twink, bittle/jack as the robot + the ray of sunshine, deancas as the-everything-that-is-destiel.

z and s, on the other hand, are … just some dudes. yeah, z has his whole flashy destiny/i'm-the-avatar's-progeny thing going, but s isn't z's counterpart in that way. katara is water where z is fire, yue is moon where z is sun, aang was shaped by peace and z was shaped by war—i feel like you can't even boil it down to, say, z is grumpy and s is sunshine, b/c both of their characters are so much more complex than that.

so, as a writer, i became interested in this question of how do two ppl fall in ordinary love against this great big dramatic backdrop of world saving and world rebuilding? i'm intrigued by the dynamic of z seeing "ordinary dude" s as this larger-than-life, world-changing figure, and s seeing "destiny-driven fire lord" z as this inspiring but ultimately very human fallible and therefore understandable person, not a figure. so like the sun inside was born.

boo chronicles, then, was a different kind of engaging challenge—i became interested in how can i replicate this "ordinary" love in a mundane setting? how can z still be authentically z when he's not an honor-and-destiny-driven firebender? how can s still be authentically s when he isn't the only nonbender lowkey playing babysitter to a bunch of kids with god-like levels of unbelievable power? and then, on top of that, how would culture/race/nationality inflect z and s's experiences in our world as opposed to how they inflected in canon?

tl;dr atla is a very rich and fascinating canon to work off of, yet zukka is so refreshingly ordinary, and that juxtaposition felt like a fun writing challenge