fic post: Korra fic

[psocoptera]

i could make you new legs (but you wouldn't walk back to me). 2150 words, Asami/Korra, Asami/Korra/Mako.

"For the first month after Korra leaves, Asami doodles wheelchairs."

This is basically "Asami Alone"; it's a Korrasami-centered take on what Asami is doing during "Korra Alone".

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

haven't yet read the whole thing. so far am thinking it's awesome. especially like that you touch on the issue of how hard it must be to actually keep Zaheer incarcerated. worry a bit about how this connects up with the controversial status of exoskeletons in the real world.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Oh god I hope I did a decent job with the disability issues. It's hard because it's so entirely in Asami's head, and Asami is a technologist, Asami believes very fundamentally in technological solutions to social problems. Someone like Pema would probably have *really different ideas* about what to do when an Avatar's body has these new limitations.

[q10.livejournal.com]

I'm totally the wrong person to offer you insight on this, but...

In general, my observation of the rhetoric of disability rights is that it really doesn't distinguish between the intrinsic properties of technologies and the idiosyncratic social facts that have led to their development and promotion, and of who is and isn't pushing them, and why. All of which is to say that on a different planet with a different social and political order and an inherently more complex baseline concept of ‘normal’ ability, it's not clear that the same technologies should be regarded as problematic as are regarded as problematic in our world. And, as you say this being very Asami-centric, and it being natural that Asami would have a certain idiosyncratic outlook, by all rights ought to buy you some leeway.

As best I understand it, which is not well, the objection to exoskeletons is that they come across as being more about the general populations preference for dealing with walking people, rather than any perceived need on the part of the main consumer base (which mostly just wants a set of construction norms that is more wheelchair-compatible). There's a sense, reinforced by exoskeleton-promotion rhetoric, that the point is that folks who can't walk (or can't walk well or for long durations) on their own are supposed to be so happy at the prospect of walking rather than using a wheelchair, because walking is just magically better, and a lot of the negative reaction seems to be a pushback against this.

My reaction is always some combination of ‘isn't this just like a wheelchair that's worse for hallways and better for uneven natural terrain? isn't having different technologies for different situations a good thing?’ and ‘but doesn't every technology become better when you make it wearable?’ like I said, I'm not the person to explain this. But maybe it's worth flagging as something you should google.

Unrelated: I wasn't clear on whether Zaheer was canonically coordinating with others in the spirit world pre-escape. Recall that P'li didn't give any sign of realizing Zaheer was coming until Zuko and Tonraq showed up, and with the others it seemed less like they were specifically prepared and more like they just were sharp enough to know what to do when somebody threw some bendables their way. Recall that Ming-Hua, on being broken out, expressed surprise that Zaheer hadn't sprung P'li first, which presumably wouldn't have surprised her if they'd been conspiring in the spirit world all along. Hell, do we even get any clear evidence that anybody with the Red Lotus except Zaheer and Aiwei is especially able to project themselves into the spirit world?

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

Regarding Zaheer: I don't think they ever explicitly confirm or deny whether any of the other Red Lotus people can project into the spirit world. (Except we're pretty sure ex-band-member Unalaq could.) Your interpretation, that the others could not, is probably correct. Part of where this fic came from in the first place though was an earlier story idea I was kicking around after the end of the previous season, in which Zaheer is used to having his friends to talk to in the spirit world and so he keeps showing up to pester Korra whenever she tries to go into the spirit world. I couldn't ever get the idea to hang together character-wise but then it totally made sense to me as something Asami was thinking about in the context of being separated from your band. Heck, for all I know Asami is wrong in-story.

Regarding wheelchairs/exoskeletons: I'm sure I still have a lot left to learn but I do read some disability-related stuff and, yeah, am not unaware of the problems with walking as holy grail, wheelchair as some sort of horrid contraption in which one is "bound". (One of the Hugo novellas this year had a related problem, actually, where the POV character is very pitying/disapproving of this alien race using hoverchairs, but keeps bitching about how he doesn't have any shoes.) I guess I was hoping to imply in this story that most of the reasons people might prefer exoskeletons are social/cultural rather than a matter of natural law? Like, for whatever reason, for Mako's colleague it's actually more possible to have Asami-the-exoskeleton-fairy show up than to get his environment changed so that he doesn't have to deal with stairs and high shelves and narrow doorways (but for everyone else that adaptation is now commodified and for-profit). And I wanted to try to show that Asami's initial impulse is totally "stair-climbing robot! with a cupholder! this thing is going to be awesome and tricked out!" and then she realizes that some people are totally going to try to use "sitting" and "standing" as social dominance signals, and there's the fear that Korra won't be taken seriously as the Avatar, or won't feel as confident as the Avatar, if she's in a sitting posture and they can stand and look down on her. And, no, the "right" answer to that isn't really "so she has to stand" any more than the right answer if people were looking down on Korra's darker skin would be for her to lighten it, but, hm, there's maybe a component there of Asami (and Korra, and everyone) expecting a certain amount of sacrifice-of-self on Korra's part to fill the role of Avatar? I mean, not to take my fanfic writing too seriously here but the exoskeleton means several different things over the course of this story, in terms of why Asami thinks she's working on it, whether it's for the Avatar, for Korra personally, or for Asami, to get Korra to come back to her sooner even if that's not what's best for the Avatar or for Korra. (And Korra never uses, or even knows about, the exoskeleton, much as she will never know about or use Asami's airship-for-two designs at the end; it's a blind alley, except that Asami pretty ruthlessly utilizes every tech she handles, so she finds something to do with it after all, but is not particularly sentimental about it.) Blah blah blah, sorry, I often try to write somewhat spare but pack it pretty densely, and then end up all "ooh I will unpack!" at the slightest sign of interest.

[q10.livejournal.com]

neat! thanks for elaborating.

[cereph.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed that, especially liked how the passage of time is shown through her projects, and that it expands on ideas/things in the show that they don't really get into.

(btw, I'm not sure if you are caught up on season 4, so I won't say anything specific, but I am really liking it)

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen 4.04 yet, did see 4.03. As a rule of thumb, I can be safely assumed to be at least one episode behind except on Thursdays. Glad you liked the story!