Do you mean this AU where they actually are brother and sister?: [Link]
I also have this one, where Toph is the Fire Princess instead of Azula: [Link] Wow I have a lot of five headcanon AUs.
Anyway, I’m going with the one where Zuko is a Bei Fong.
1. Zuko, Iroh, and Jet all end up on the same ferry into Ba Sing Se. Zuko is completely at loose ends, because he’s supposed to be hunting his sister and bringing her home, but he just can’t bring himself to do that to her, and he can’t go home without her, and he has never been anything but the Bei Fong heir. Without a nephew to teach and keep out of trouble, he’s spiraling into a bit of a depression at the site of the place where his son died. He’s there to offer his services to the Earth King in the fight against his brother, but sometimes it’s hard to hold onto that purpose. Jet is… Jet.
Anyway, Iroh meets Zuko when he’s passing around the food he stole with the freedom fighters, and he feels it’s his duty to provide a better influence for this kid before he gets arrested. This is how Zuko comes to be standing next to him when Iroh does his heating the tea thing. Zuko freaks. Iroh clamps his hand around the boy’s mouth, tells him who he is, and his plan, and Zuko decides to follow him to keep his eyes on him, since after all he doesn’t have anything else to do except try to keep tabs on his sister.
Iroh very quickly rethinks his plan after finding out about the Dai Li, and this is how he and Zuko end up running a tea shop together while they wait for the comet and plan to help defend the city.
2. Because there is no Prince Zuko to rescue Aang after Zhao captures him, it falls to Iroh, who has been spending his time on the front for the past two years, since court was so unpleasant with Ozai as Firelord. By the way, Zhao tries to have a rivalry with him, but Iroh just finds him amusing.
3. It’s Sokka that Azula strikes at in the abandoned village before making her getaway, something Iroh tells Zuko all about. Zuko just wants him to get back to talking about the time he talked to his sister. More Toph, less Water Tribe dude.
4. Toph has so many mixed feelings about her brother the secret rebel who hooked up with the renegade Dragon of the West. On one hand, yay! Her brother is awesome, and she loves him, on the other hand, she already has mixed feelings about the way he used to help her, and also help their parents control her, and she doesn’t know what to do with him, and also it;s kind of her fault he had to leave home, and hey Zuko, you may be a lavabender, but I can metalbend. I invented it. So nyah. She’s feeling a lot of things about him at once.
5. There was this really cool Kyoshi Warrior with a bunch of knives who came in for tea, and Zuko served her, and he almost spilled tea on her, but she came back, and then she saw Iroh and didn’t come back after that, and it turns out she wasn’t a Kyoshi Warrior after all, and Zuko’s pissed off at that, because he’s pretty sure she was spying on him. Not because he thought she was really cool and wanted to kiss her. No.
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AU where Zuko has Toph for a sister instead of Azula.
Hmm, this is a hard one, because it isn’t one I’ve actually given a whole lot of thought to. I assume you mean that Toph is the youngest child of Ozai and Ursa?
1.Toph in this verse is a prodigy firebender instead of a prodigy earthbender, but because she’s blind her father thinks she’s weak. This drives her to train harder, and to work to develop ways to “see” with her bending. This is much more limited than her earth sense, and works like Zuko’s fire sense in Quiet Shadowed Places.
2. Between Toph’s blindness and Zuko’s compassion, Ozai in this verse does not play favorites, because he is too busy believing both his children are completely useless and worthless. This right here fundamentally changes family dynamics, history, everything.
3. Ozai is constantly pressuring Ursa to have another child, meanwhile, he keeps trying to convince Azulon to let him divorce Ursa and marry a woman who won’t give him such “defective heirs.” This all comes to a head when Lu Ten dies, and Ozai ends up strangling Azulon himself after Azulon suggests that maybe it’s Ozai that’s the problem. Then, he pins the murder on Ursa and has her executed.
4. Ozai becomes Firelord, remarries, and gets with the baby making. As soon as his new wife is pregnant, he starts looking for a way to dispose of his useless older children. Meanwhile Iroh has all but adopted them. When he exiles Zuko on a pretext, he accuses Toph of plotting with her brother to dishonor the general and the Firelord, and exiles her as well.
5. Because of this changed dynamic, Zuko’s daddy issues are different from canon. He still has the intense drive to prove himself, but he does not believe daddy will ever love him, and he is extremely depressed and has low self esteem. Meanwhile, Toph’s intense need to prove herself leads to recklessness. Between the two of them, Iroh has started to go bald from pulling his hair out. Instead of looking for the Avatar, however, Iroh has convinced them to settle down in the colonies with him. This is when the Avatar finds them, or more precisely, when the Order of the White Lotus sends the Avatar to them.
5 headcanons on AU where Zuko is the Bei Fongs’ eldest child, please?
I never got an alert or a note for this, or anything. I didn’t even realize it was here until just now. I’m so sorry about that.
Anyway, I worked out a whole little thing with Zuko as the Bei Fongs’ kid, and Toph as Azula’s little sister before I realized you probably meant Zuko as Toph’s older brother with them both as Bei Fongs instead of Fire Royals.
1. This is it, this is the universe in which Zuko is the favored child. Not that the Bei Fongs don’t love Toph, far from it. It’s just that in Zuko, the Bei Fongs have the heir they want. He’s healthy, and a son, and it’s his job to someday run the estate and preserve the family’s good name, and of course, take care of his poor little blind sister. It’s so wonderful to have a son like Zuko, their parents tell each other and their children. They never have to worry about what will happen to Toph when they go, or trying to marry their poor fragile child off. She has a brother to protect her. Toph seethes with frustration and resentment.
2. Zuko isn’t an idiot. He knows how his sister feels. When she was really little, he used to teach her moves from his own earthbending lessons, but that had to stop after they got caught. (Zuko was never in that much trouble ever. Their parents were so angry. It was like they caught him holding a knife to her throat, instead of teaching her to make pebbles dance around.) After that, they got Toph her own lessons, that never went beyond the very beginning of earthbending, but he knows she’s better than that, and he knows she knows it. And there are times when he can’t find her, when she’s just completely disappeared, and he knows she has to be sneaking out.
3. Zuko feels so guilty about it. He knows he should tell somebody, because Toph could get hurt. She’s just a little kid, and she doesn’t seem to get it, because she thinks she’s so strong, and he knows she isn’t a wimp, that’s not the point, but then their parents go and treat her like she’s a glass vase, like she’s pretty and fragile, and valuable, but has no opinion of her own and they don’t expect her to ever question being shut up an hidden like this. And Zuko doesn’t know who’s right. (Maybe neither of them are right, the back of his mind whispers.)
4. When the Avatar comes, and it all comes out about Toph being a total prodigy, Zuko tells her good bye and helps her sneak out and packs her a lunch. He stays behind. Lao and Poppy are furious. How dare he? His entire job is to protect her, and instead he let her run off like that? They send him to hunt her down instead of Yu and Xin Fu. He tracks her to Ba Sing Se, gets all caught up in the fall of the city, and the Avatar almost dying, and having to flee for their lives, and also meeting up with the Firelord’s fugitive brother, and somehow along the way, he ends up joining the gaang. Their parents are not going to be happy.
5. After the war is over, Zuko, Toph, and Mai spend a lot of time comparing parents and asking if they’re really sure their parents weren’t secretly the same people.
5 headcanons Aang/Zuko role swap
Ooooh, I already have one of these AUs! I wrote a drabble about Blue Spirit Aang rescuing Avatar Zuko from the Pohuai stronghold: [link]. Yes I do have three Avatar Zuko AUs.
1. Fire Prince Aang is a lot like a young general Iroh. This is one of the reasons his father hates him so much. He projects his hated older brother who he was terribly jealous of onto Aang. Anyway, this means that he’s fairly receptive to his uncle’s less treasonous wisdom, though he’s still convinced he can win Ozai’s love if he brings him the Avatar.
2. Twelve year old Zuko is one surly little airbender. He felt all angry, lost, and alone upon finding out that he’s the Avatar, and waking up in the future with his people dead did not help at all. Sokka and Katara feel bad for him, but he can be a little trying.
3. The first time Aang captured him, Zuko very solemnly agreed to go with him and when Sokka and Katara rescued him, he agonized about breaking his word.
4. When Pakku says he won’t teach Katara, Zuko yells at him and is ready to fight until Katara’s like, “No, I got this.”
5. Aang and Zhao have a special relationship that involves cutting insults from Aang with a grin on his face.
Can you do 5 headcanons on boy Toph?
1. I once made a five headcanons post about trans girl Toph, and everything I said in there about how the Bei Fongs perceive their “son” applies here too. His blindness now is not part of how he is a delicate flower who needs to be protected. Now he is a vulnerable defective heir who needs to be protected. He does however get to have more of a public life than his counterpart. People know he exists, and girls whose families want them to marry into the Bei Fong family learn to present themselves as the kind of sweet nurturing wife who would take care of a blind husband. Toph would rather not, thanks.
2. The way he meets the gaang doesn’t really change. He is still the Blind Bandit, he still threatens to call the guards on Aang, and he still runs away to teach Aang earthbending.
3. He is significantly more bewildered by his crushes first on Sokka then on Zuko though.
4. In Ba Sing Se, Toph escorts Katara as her recent betrothed. Everybody thinks they’re adorable and adorably dutiful to their families, since it’s obviously an arranged match. They’re only children after all. Katara is seriously wigged out.
5. Katara feels even more all alone as the only girl with all these obnoxious boys. Then Zuko joins, and she’s outnumbered four to one, six to one if you count Appa and Momo. Even the animals are boys. Thank goodness Suki joins them, seriously.
au + 5 hc – Maiko if they were part of the Sun Warriors civilization
1. Canon I think points petty strongly to there being a period where Ozai favored both his children, before he decided Azula fit his idea of ideal offspring better than her brother did, but what if that wasn’t the case? What if Zuko were a sickly baby, or otherwise was imperfect in Ozai’s eyes? What if he wanted to rid himself of this flawed child? Ursa is horrified and also terrified for her baby. She goes to Iroh as the first born prince and heir, and he tells her to give the child to him for safe keeping. They smuggle in the stillborn baby of a pauper who couldn’t pay for a funeral, and tell Ozai that the baby died in the night. It’s this child, whose ashes lie in the royal crypt. Iroh intends to take Zuko to an army captain of his who he knows has been trying for a child, but then the army captain dies, and Iroh stumbles across a hidden ancient civilization, and long story short, Zuko ends up with the Sun Warriors.
Two years later, an unattended baby Mai crawls into a life raft while her family is traveling and winds up drifting onto the beach, only to be found, dehydrated and miserable by a Sun Warrior woman collecting shell fish.
2. Mai and Zuko have much much happier childhoods than canon, spending much of their time running around on the beach or in the outer edges of the jungle, climbing trees and cliff-sides, and scaring their parents half to death like many active children. They live just on the other side of the village square from each other, and they and the other Sun Warrior children grow up laughing, playing, and learning how to hunt, tend crops, fish, and weave. It’s just about idyllic, and neither of them know how lucky they are to have it.
3. At thirteen, firebenders among the Sun Warriors go to meet the firebending masters and present to them the sacred eternal flame. Zuko’s little brother has been talking non-stop about how the dragons are going to eat his brother. He’s also actually having nightmares, and he doesn’t want to watch, and Zuko is going to be sooooo glad when this is all over and Seiji can stop worrying. So when he goes with another thirteen year old to present the fire to the masters, he’s a little on edge. And then, something goes wrong. Ran accidentally burns Zuko. Everybody freaks out. Seiji is traumatized for life, Ran freaks out, and poor Zuko, screaming in pain, is picked up by a panicking giant dragon, and hidden away in her nest. He almost dies because she won’t let anybody near him.
After the worst of the fever is over, and she lets him out to shamble back home to the village, the elders put their heads together and decide that the dragons have obviously chosen him, and he’s now going to become their next high priest. Zuko is like, no, come back childhood free of responsibilities and big flying lizards who think they’re his mom, come back!
I should probably note here that dragons are not human intelligence level, they’re more like smart dogs.
4. As if the sudden invasion of a mated pair of dragons into his life, who try to parent him (and Zuko isn’t sure what he thinks about that, given that one of them burned half his face off, and then held him captive, and no seriously, he thought his brother was right, and she was going to eat him) his new teacher is Ham Ghao, and he is a bit of a… Instead of running around outside, he’s stuck tending the sacred fires and sweeping the temple floors, and the only person who keeps him sane is Mai, who shows up to sneak him out. Together, the two of them explore the jungle, gather fruit, and hunt for rabbit-dear and parrot-lizards. And as they get older, they find other things to do away from thr prying eyes of the village and Ham Ghao as well.
5. Izumi is going to be spoiled silly by her dragon grandparents, you have no idea. They’re going to keep bringing her dead animals and trying to teach her to hunt dragon style.
Uh, ah, for the five headcanons, AU where Sokka is the waterbender and Katara the non-bender?
1. Sokka is the oldest child of Chief Hakoda, only boy, and a waterbender. He grows up knowing that it’s his job, no not his job, his purpose in life to protect his family and his village, especially his sister. He also grows up knowing it’s his fault his and Katara’s mother is dead.
2. To say Sokka has mixed feelings about his waterbending is a massive understatement. It lost him his mother, but someday he could use it to help his sister and grandmother. His sister envies him for it, but he can’t do much with it, and this magic water stuff often causes way more trouble than it’s worth.
3. Meanwhile Katara grows up a typical Southern Water Tribe girl, just as in canon, fiercely determined, fiercely loving, mothering her brother, and at times deeply resenting thr amount of housework she does in proportion to her brother. This resentment all comes to a head in a colossal fight after the two of them get boat-wrecked on an iceflow, in which she yells to him about washing his dirty socks, and the way he never does anything, and he yells back about being the only boy and waterbender and how he doesn’t think he can protect everybody, and he’s really scared, and uh oh, he just cracked open an iceberg with an Avatar inside.
4. Katara nearly stays with the Kyoshi Warriors. Sokka is less inclined to learn from them in this universe, because while they beat him handily and he embarrasses himself in front of Suki, they can’t help him learn to control his bending, which is his big preoccupation. He does however make Suki a very nice apology. Katara on the other hand is enthralled. Here are a band of female warriors trusted by the village to protect them. They are respected and powerful, and clearly formidable warriors. She trains with them and is reluctant to leave. But she knows if she stays, Sokka will stay, and he needs to go to the North Pole, so they journey on.
5. Sokka is a boy, which means Pakku has no problem training him. But Katara finds herself quickly demoted, from the Avatar’s companion and a warrior in her own right, to just the sister of the Avatar’s waterbender. This grates. And it grates worse when she is dismissed as a warrior and told to keep the princess company during the seige. However, when she takes on the Prince of the Fire Nation in defense of Princess Yue and the Avatar, and wins, the Northerners start treating her, and her brother very differently. If only there wasn’t that undertone of “southern barbarian freak” to it. And then there’s the problem Sokka has trying to explain that he’s a natural healer.
Hmm, so how about 5 headcanons for the au where Zuko is Mai’s older brother and Ukano’s heir?
Yeah well shipping them is definitely out, and Zuko is so much better at repression than he is in canon. Which says a lot really.
1. The thing about all of these “Zuko is someone else’s kid or otherwise ineligible for the Fire Nation throne” AUs is that ultimately what ends up interesting the political science nerd that is yours truly isn’t actually how Zuko is different, or his new family is different, or any of those lovely character things that I’m usually interested in, because I’m too busy working out who gets the throne and how that affects everything. So for this AU, Azula is an only child. I guess that means at the end, Iroh has to take the throne. He has no other choice. This infuriates large segments of the Earth Kingdom, especially the Earth Kingdom military, because to them, he will always be the Dragon of the West and a war criminal. Also, he will need to remarry and make an heir. He’ll have to choose his wife carefully, because at his age, there’s every chance that she will become regent to their child. Unfortunately we don’t know enough about the Fire Nation aristocracy to point to a suitable candidate, but she would have to be at least tacitly anti-imperialist, from an appropriate family, and of childbearing years, and preferably in her thirties, so that she’s both relatively mature and also wouldn’t likely have difficulties conceiving. And then no matter who Iroh chose, the other noble families would be in a snit over it. There are some very tricky politics here that canon Zuko just didn’t have to deal with, not having Iroh’s history, and having a suitable potential spouse in Mai.
2. As I mentioned, Azula is an only child in this verse, and by age eight, she is the undisputed heir to the throne. Her childhood relationship with her father is different than in canon, since there is no unfavored sibling to collect all of Ozai’s scorn, which means that Ozai swung between adoring and praising her, and hating her and blaming her for being less than worthy of being his daughter. Azula in this universe is less outwardly confident in herself, though she puts up a good act in front of other people, and also much more willing to contemplating removing her father from the picture. And because she’s relatively close in age to Zuko, and they already have an in with Mai being her friend/minion, his parents keep throwing him at her as a potential husband. Zuko is terrified of her, and wants nothing to do with her, which, as far as Azula’s concerned, makes him perfect.
3. It’s not just that Zuko would make a compliant consort, there’s something about keeping him under her thumb that Azula enjoys. When he leaves with his family for the newly conquered Omashu, she is severely displeased. When she goes hunting the Avatar and her fugitive uncle after Zhao’s colossal failure, she reclaims him along with his sister. Hoping to convince Mai to follow him, and desperate to get away from Azula, Zuko ditches the group and heads to Ba Sing Se, and runs straight into Azula’s fugitive uncle on the ferry. He stays with him for a while, but when Azula offers him the chance to help take over the city with her, he accepts to protect Mai, and also Tom-Tom.
4. When he runs away to the Avatar’s gaang, it’s an act of total desperation, after Azula gloated to him about how her father had decided to implement her Earth Kingdom genocide plan. The entire time, he is terrified for his sister and baby brother. After Mai turns traitor too, at the Boiling Rock, and he’s unable to rescue her, he assumes his entire family is probably dead in retaliation. When he sees his sister again and finds out they’re okay, it’s the best feeling in the world.
5. After the war, both Mai and Zuko powerfully resent Ozai, for effectively giving them to his daughter as playthings. They don’t have especially warm feelings toward their parents, either, and when
Ukanotries to rope them into his conspiracy to put Ozai back on the throne, it goes over like a lead balloon, pretty much exactly the way it does with Mai in canon. Mai goes to the flower shop, and Zuko gets a job in a tea shop, and they share a crappy apartment, take care of Tom-Tom, and carefully don’t talk about family. Half the neighborhood thinks he got her knocked up, and they’re shotgun spouses, and Tom-Tom is theirs. Mai finds this hilarious. Zuko just finds it really awkward.
Could you do another 5 headcanons of the universe where Sokka and Azula swap places? I am kind of curious to see what would happen with Jet in this universe and I wonder how Ozai would react to siblings that are harder to pit against each other.
Continued from here: [Link] and here: [Link].
1. Ozai scorns both his children for being weak and pathetic. Much as he does in canon, he projects much of what he hates about himself onto Zuko. He also sees his hated older brother in Sozin’s attempts at cheerfulness and his flirtatiousness. While he does make some cursory attempts to set them against each other, to compete for his affection, these attempts are half-hearted at best, as he considers both his sons to be worthless.
2. Ozai instead focuses his attentions on remarrying and trying to produce an heir that way. The results are less than impressive, leading to a string of miscarriages, murders, and divorces. Yes, he is the Henry VIII of the Avatar world.
3. Meeting Jet is dicey. See Katara might be much more wary of Jet because he and Akanna’s styles of manipulation are fairly similar, or Akanna may have weakened her resistance to such manipulation. Akanna doesn’t trust him, but she also doesn’t care enough about her sister to try to protect her like Sokka does. My guess though is that Jet puts Katara’s guard up and it takes a lot more to persuade her to help. Akanna by the way doesn’t trust Jet, but she likes him, and wonders if she can use him.
4. After the fiasco at the North Pole, and with Ozai making noises about marrying again, Zuko and Sozin slip away to try their hand at capturing the Avatar themselves. They meet up with friends and make it all the way to Ba Sing Se. The four of them disguise themselves as Earth Kingdom country nobility, and run into a refugee street kid named Jet, who tries to pick their pockets. They catch him and have him arrested.
5. Look, all I’m saying is, Sozin and Zuko have a really good time conquering Ba Sing Se together with Mai and Ty Lee. It’s a bonding experience.
In the Azula/ Sokka roleswap, how DOES the meeting at the South Pole go? I remember that in Canon, Azulon and Ozai also went searching for the Avatar – so maybe it’s royal tradition? I can see both Zuko and Sokka (er, Sozin) seizing that excuse to get away from the court and their father.
There is no meeting at the South Pole is the answer. They don’t attract Fire Nation attention until the Southern Air Temple and the sages alert the Firelord that signs point to the Avatar’s return. They then don’t first encounter Fire Nation troops until the Winter Solstice, at which point Zhao begins his hunt.
Cheloneuniverse 