Just to clarify, Zuko is NOT a very powerful bender.

Sorry, to all you fans of Zutara. He's not. To tell the truth, I'm getting rather fed up with all the stories out there where Zuko is portrayed as some kind of ultra-strong firebender who develops all sorts of previously-unseen techniques for firebending because he's just that powerful. In the flashbacks to his childhood, we see Zuko struggling with firebending moves that his sister, two years his junior, has already mastered. (This might simply be because he's competing against a prodigy, but his father's disappointment in him and his mother's borderline-condescending encoragement would indicate otherwise.) Furthermore, in the first season we see him beaten many times by Katara and Aang, who are, by the way, almost entirely untrained benders at this point in the series.

Admittedly, Zuko more than makes up for it: he's killer with those dual swords (as demonstrated against Jet, those Earth Kingdom soliders, and a few dozen of Zhao's guards) and thanks to his uncle he's learned to improvise and develop his own style of bending that incorporates moves such as the flame daggers, fire sleeves, and that odd spin-kick that we never see anyone else use, moves that he can use to unsettle and even defeat stronger opponents, as demonstrated in his Agni Kai against Zhou. However, it's extremely rare that we see him firebending at all without visible effort, whereas many other firebenders just seem to do it without even trying, and he doesn't have Katara's or Toph's casual grace when it comes to bending. So, basically, Zuko's far from useless in a fight under any circumstances (and is actually frequently someone to have on your side), but will he be developing the power to bend lightening or do any of Iroh's other ultrapowerful tricks any time soon? Sorry, no. He just doesn't have it in him.

About my fics:

A Last Goodbye: When I came up with this one I had no intention of fooling the reader; I just wanted to do a character study of Peter because I assumed that he blames Sirius for everything he's done so that he can go on feeling sorry for himself. However, my beta (AKA Kilroy) read it and immediately assumed it was Remus speaking because I (quite accidentally) didn't use a single proper noun throughout. So I rewrote it, making it a bit more Remus-like but for the twist at the end, and there you are.

Memoir of a Map: This entire fic grew out of the single (to me) pressing idea that there was no way the great awesome marauders lost the map to Filch by accident. From there I just grabbed a handful other little scenes I had in mind and wrote them down.

Goodbye and Good Luck: Wrote this one ages ago (long before the movie with the similar title) and still like it enough that it remains after all these years. Actually it's a ballad, complete with tune and all, but I'm not about to start singing it at parties.

Cinderella: I was inspired to write this one after learning about the origin of the story of Sleeping Beauty and then later the original myth about Cinderella, because yes, the stories I reference do exist and did for several hundred years before Walt Disney was ever born.

Whatever: Wrote this while halfway through Specials, when I really began to think that David is a massively repressive character. Then I read the rest of the book, discovered that it was AU because Zane had his brain eaten by micro-lesions, and all I could think was "Thank goodness."

Stockholm Syndrome: Just to clarify: I do not dislike Zutara. (In fact, I frequently enjoy reading Zutara as I am eternally fascinated by the ways two people who quite obviously hate each other can be made to interact, fall in love, and actually end up in a relationship...) What I have a problem with, however, are the fics that seem to be rampant in this particular shipping: the ones where one character kidnaps the other, often serious injury is caused to one of them (Katara especially) and, just to top it all off, the victim of the story decides to respond to their ill-treatment by falling in love with their abuser. This angers me more than anything else that exists in the world of fandoms because it is disgustingly immature, not to mention simply wrong to treat lightly in fan fiction, and I decided to protest it through satire, by making the whole scenario one step more disgusting and rediculous by adding the factor of one character being forty years older than the other...

Thou Bitter Sky: A while back, I decided I'd attempt to write one of those drabble things I'd read about (and yes, every single chapter is a true drabble with exactly one hundred words) and so I tried one from Zuko's point of view. Though it was hard to get the word count exactly right, I discovered that it was actually kind of fun being so incredibly concise and learning so much about a single character. Fifteen drabbles later, I figured I'd start a collection online. So I posted those fifteen... And the drabbles kept coming. Another ten drabbles later, each time swearing to myself that this would be the last, I finally dried up that idea, and switched the status of my fic to "complete." And so it will remain. Though I have gotten inspiration a handful of times since then, and have each time upped the drabble as soon as I thought of it, if anyone out there is still holding their breath for me to start this up again... Don't. I probably have not finished with this little collection entirely just yet, but the frequent updates are gone for good.

Quotes from my quote-mistress, the amazing mangafangirl (R&R her stories!):

"I'm sewing this quilt/ every patch has a moment in time/ when I'd wilt, I'm as weak as/ a flower drowned in the sea/ And I wish that you'd just take a good look at me/ and realize the soul in these eyes."

"The world's not lost/ but you're alone/ forced to stagger on your own/ this hardened heart needs love to thrive/ but there's no chance that it'll survive/ this heart is mine."

"If you see my conscience, please tell it to come home. It's missed."

"I may rush right in and get it done fast, but she slowly poisons you from within until there's nothing left to kill."

A Brief Comment on Books into Movies

I am a fan of a great many books and books series that have, unfortunately, been adopted for the silver screen, much to my sadness. While I am not opposed to books becoming movies on principle, it angers me when genuinely brilliant, original works have been tortured into hackneyed, poorly constructed echoes of previously existing stories in the hope of leeching all originality from the books in order to give them, in theory, greater appeal.

Examples of this happening are far from rare. I site Ella Enchanted's far deviation from all that made the book enjoyable and its reformation into another of the Cinderella stories it tried so hard to oppose, and the book's powerful main character another Disney princess, making it unpleasant and boring to watch, or Blood and Chocolate's transformation from a story of misunderstandings and growing up into a badly written Romeo and Juliet that has been seen literally thousands of times before, or even the Harry Potter movies' blatant ignorance of the books' themes and shoddy, cheap thrill-writing, leaving the viewer with badly paced films that are difficult to follow, or A Series of Unfortunate Events's pitiful, weak comedy is so lacking for Lemony Snicket's subtle wit and subtler mystery element it's become two hours of a big-name actor cavorting around on screen doing pathetic slapstick. These adaptations aren't just unpleasant for fans of the books to watch; they are not that enjoyable as movies in general, because they are so cliche that people are sick of watching them.

However, I do not believe that all book-into-movies have to be this way. If a director and screenwriter who genuinely loves the books enough to leave as much as possible about the themes, motifs, and symbols of the book intact as they can - even if parts of the plot have to be altered or taken out, though rarely added - then an adaptation of the book that retains almost all the greatness of the original work can be achieved.

It is not the modern, sappy, dramatized movie version of Pride and Prejudice that has acheived lasting popularity, but the older version, the one that retains all the original plot and recognizes that the book was not written to be a romance story, but rather a satire of the very genre it has become. The movies of The Lord of the Rings, though often changing the plot for greater cinematic effect or to cut down on some of the long periods of walking around, nonetheless retain the themes of the original works and are therefore excellent. Yet notice that one of the greatest deviations from the plot of the books - the absence of the scourging of the Shire - leads to one of the most criticized areas of the trilogy: the "eleven endings" to The Return of the King. Holes, another book-into-movie that retains most of the story of the book, is a favorite even among non-Lewis Sachar fans because it contains all that makes the book original.

So, what I'm really trying to say is, in terms of the new Narnia movies, it could have been worse.

Just look at the BBC version of the films.