[FFML] [Firefly][ATLA] The Powers in the 'Verse

[Lawrence Chu]

On Jul 24, 2012, at 6:20 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 2:47 AM, Lawrence Chu <lawrence at sandwich.net> wrote:
>> everyone grew mighty weary of it all.  In the end, people stopped bending,
>> or at least they stopped showing it off.
> 
> That needs more of an explanation.  Even in a modern setting
> (or Serenity aside from terraforming uses), bending can come
> in handy, and in the long run practicality tends to win out over
> ancient politics.

It's mostly a hand wave at the moment, just a way to explain why we wouldn't have seen benders in the 'Verse. I figure the Equalist revolution doesn't end after Korra Book 1, and the class wars that amount to benders/non-benders keeps going until it gets to be too much and the non-benders win out.

>> airbenders keeping the atmosphere at bay
> 
> The wrong sort of atmo - but many of the planets seem small
> enough that their challenge would be more keeping it present.

I'll keep that in mind if I develop his further.


>> Mind, these planets were deemed outliers, and they're on the other side of
>> the Core, so we don't see them none.  But they exist.
> 
> That seems highly unusual.  The Alliance would have identified
> bending as a useful art, and co-opted it to its own purposes -
> capturing benders by force and/or engineering the right genes
> into its people, if the blood happened not to already be on the
> Core worlds.

They would, but do you think they'd let the public at large know? All we know, Alliance would have bender-powered tech in the Core, but again as slave labor.

I'm pretty sure it's established that Chinese are the lower-class working people in Alliance territory (hence our only seeing white people on Alliance ships and the use of Mandarin as the language for most expletives). I'm also imagining that for some reason it's only Asian people with the genetic predisposition towards bending. Then again, I've got all of 5k of a monologue here, so a lot of this is flexible.

>> Pretty of it all?  Legend had it Earth-That-Was anointed the Avatar.
>> 
>> And the colonies, each of them planets anointed one of their own.
> 
> Wouldn't it be more in-setting for the Alliance government to
> anoint one?  It's been long enough since Earth-That-Was that
> any avatar that boarded the colony ships there would now be
> dead.

I was thinking more a Gaia-appointed Avatar, not a council-elected one. Each planet senses the people inhabiting it and chooses one.

>> people generally want
>> Serenity crew fanfic, not fanfic that happens to be set in the 'Verse.
> 
> Make it compelling enough, and people will even read original
> setting fiction.
> 
> That said, not all the successful Star Wars & Star Trek fics
> had the main crews, especially with Star Wars.  There are
> enough setting elements to borrow.

Looks like I'll have to sketch something out, then!