philosophical plot-bunny: The Last Airbender

Despite the epic casting fail that was The Last Airbender, I went to see the movie. And, wow, the casting bit was not the only failure involved. Nonetheless, I actually enjoyed the experience once I realized that it's not a movie in the traditional sense. It's sort of like a retelling of the actual movie (which would be about twelve hours long, have actors that can act, and plot development that actually works.) The plot of that movie is sort of summarized by the movie that I went to see with a combination of voice-over narration and random monologues in which characters describe their entire backstories. And the movie I saw really made me want to watch the movie that it should have been.

In the quest for the movie that should have been, I decided that I should probably actually watch some of the original animated series. I watched several episodes and confirmed that while, yes, it is a very good cartoon, I am, alas, not part of their target audience anymore. My days of being fully satisfied by cartoons aimed at the six to twelve-year-old audience.

Thus, moving on to fanfiction, I was fairly disappointed by the selection. There simply aren't that many good fanfic writers for a series with a target audience that young. Sigh. However, I did find Embers by Vathara. She's an excellent writer and I recommend pretty much all and any of her writing. Go and see what coolness she hath wrought. However, this particular story of hers goes oddly extreme in it's apologist writing for the fire nation in its later chapters. That made me think: 
 

Let us consider The Avatar (the main character of Avatar: The Last Airbender.) The current avatar is 12-years-old but he is the reincarnation of the whole line of avatars going way back. The avatar has control of all four elements (air, water, earth, and fire) unlike the other benders in this universe who can only control one each. The avatar brings balance to the world and is insanely powerful. The implication is that The Avatar is inherently good.

What if The Avatar wasn't?

Consider:

The Avatar is insanely powerful with control of all four elements. Which ever side of a war he is on, is the one that's going to win. (This is true of The Avatar, not just Aang, our current incarnation.) So, his history is always, always, always told by the victors who he helped. He's not good because he's good; he's good because the people who survive are the ones who like him and the ones who don't like him don't survive.

None of the monks who raised Aang (current Avatar) thought this through, though, and just told Aang that he was inherently good. Aang ran way before claiming his role as The Avatar because he was beginning to realize that he doesn't automatically know what's right. He's going through his teenage years trying to figure out a proper moral code to live by (and to make others live by) when all of his allies seem to think he doesn't need one. They tell him that anything he randomly decides on the spur of the moment must be right. However, he's The Avatar and has plenty of experience to say that, no, really, it's not that easy and he's perfectly capable of messing up with some fairly severe consequences to everyone else.

Consider what happens when an essentially nice sweet kid discovers that he's powerful enough to essentially lack external boundaries, either physically or socially. No one and nothing can stop him except himself. I'd like a story that develops Aang's struggle against his allies' opinions even more than against his enemies' attacks.

Plot-bunny: Stargate / Highlander

I had a thought which is that Cassandra of the Highlander universe has The Voice. It's deeper than her natural voice, with unearthly reverberations and she can command obedience when she uses it. (People like Methos or any of the other horsemen can withstand it fairly easily, but they're uber powerful and she's scared of them anyway, so.) I wanted her to come in contact with a Goa'uld and command the Goa'uld to leave its host. And it does.

The SGC is stunned.

So is the goa'uld.

Anyway, I started to think about how to set up a scenario in which this happens.

I'm thinking General O'Neill is working in the Pentagon when somehow The Trust force a goa'uld into him. He rants and raves but there is nothing he can do about it. He curses his own maverick nature because as oddly as the goa'uld behaves using him, everyone thinks that it's just O'Neill doing something crazy. Everyone on his side trusts him implicitly, everyone on the other side realizes he's been compromised, and there's nothing he can do about it.

Then there's a meeting with that one woman with the NID. (The NID is an oversight group, and is actually an important group to have. It sucks majorly that there was so much conflict with the SGC, and the rogue element is definitely bad, but having checks and balances on a military base is vital.) He doesn't like Cassandra Troy who is arrogant and demanding, smart and capable, but he does respect her. She's also beautiful enough for a goa'uld to want her as a host, and in a position of enough power that it would be a good move for the goa'uld to do so.

She comes into the meeting. The goa'uld who is controlling O'Neill reveals himself and tells her that he is a god and she should bow down to him, yadda-yadda.

O'Neill wants to scream at her to run but she doesn't even have the wits to look scared. Instead she raises an eyebrow and says that, while yes, she's willing to accept his claim of being a god, he should know that she really hates petty gods such as he. She has no intention of bowing down to him... she hasn't bowed down to a god like that since she was quite a bit younger.

Various minions of the goa'uld try to attack her but she uses The Voice to tell them to stop. They obey.

O'Neill is beginning to wonder if she should be scared of her rather than for her.

She then explains that she's been keeping tabs on the fight between the mortals and the gods in the heavens. As long as the fight remains distant, then she's willing to leave it to the mortals. But if the goa'uld ever win enough to bring the battle to the Earth, then they'll find that other gods have grown up in the ten thousand years since they were there last. And those gods will fight. And Cassandra really does not want those gods to be reawakened. Death stopped riding his white horse three millennium ago. She, Cassandra, had a vision that says if the Gods in the Heavens attack the Mortals on the Ground, then the Solstice Child will ride to war against them and Death will follow after.  And Cassandra will do her best to make damn sure that never happens.

Then she summons the goa'uld out of O'Neill, hands the wiggling thing to one of the minions who is still frozen where he stood, and tells them to leave and take her warning with them.

I think she probably leaves after that and O'Neill is stuck (a) trying to track Cassandra down, (b) trying to figure out how to duplicate whatever it was that Cassandra did in order to get the goa'uld out of him, (c) trying to track the goa'uld down, (d) trying to fix all the things that the goa'uld did while in possession of his body, and (e) wondering exactly who the Solstice Child and Death are.

I'm not sure if this is a one-shot or the start of something, but whatever it is, the main Highlander character is definitely Cassandra, because I would like more stories in which she is developed fully as a character.