Vathara has slowly going further and further off the rails into AU territory as the fic has progressed - it started out only slightly AU, and snowballed badly - most of the characterizations she makes regarding the original gang make sense given particular extrapolations she makes regarding the cultures the various nations were based on and the additions made in worldbuilding away from the normal background of Avatar.Embers as I see it is a Zuko centric story set in season 2 with some nice world building at the start but it has rather severe issues with fairly applying the au elements. Up until chapter 19 I had found very few things I didn't like and then chapter 20 really made up for the issues of chapter 19. After chapter 20 tho almost every time the original cast is brought onto the stage it seems they are there only there to make the oc cast + Zuko (who himself is more then a bit OOC, but I can forgive that due to the hammer style application of Spirit bending) seem more justified or simply better people then the shallow dangerous and stupid OCs Vathara trys to foist off as the original cast.
Aang doesn't need a leash held - what's being highlighted here is that 1) Aang is twelve, and never received the sort of cross-cultural learning that normal Avatars would have gone through at 16 - he doesn't understand other cultures, though he does have superficial knowledge of them from his travels as a nomad. Yaoren are supposed to further help in that regard. 2) the Avatar is one person, and can't be everywhere at once - the yaoren are supposed to be the Avatar's friends, advisors, and helping hands - providing aid where the Avatar can't be.1) Aang even in his own segments is consistently painted as being a stupid dangerous ignorant child of mass destruction who needs Vathara's Super benders to hold his leash at all times lest the Avatar doom the world of men in direct contradiction to Aang's canon Character.
I mean were talking epic level Flanderization, she basically blew canon Aang's moments of human weakness into a caricature of Air nomad culture more befitting an Ethnic cleansing's PR campaign and thats just the just the bits that haven't came from the mouths of Zuko and his better then everyone else super cult.
Regarding Aang, we mostly see Aang's actions judged by Zuko's viewpoint and peers. SO, we've got an unreliable narrator problem there. Secondly, no offense, but Aang IS a dangerous ignorant child. He's twelve. Not only is he twelve, he's an anachronism as much of his knowledge is 100 years out of date. Not only that but at the point in the show where Zuko is - all of his knowledge of the Aang is from S1, where Aang showed very little maturity most of the time. On top of that, he's not in control of the Avatar state as far as Zuko knows - everyone in the area is in danger when Aang rolls out his GLOWING BADASS routine.
Whut? I hadn't noticed any attempts to pair Zuko with anyone. Female OC's are there, but this doesn't seem like a Pairing fic - if romance develops as the story progresses, then fine, but Zuko seems a little busy with his personal plans for his Captain Planet nation for romance, and I hadn't noticed any females being 'thrown at his feet.'2)Making up thinly veiled excuses to cut out Mai and Zuko's relationship, then throwing 2 OCs at Zuko and Mai's feet and expecting romantic relationships to form spontaneously is just the kind of hamfisted writing that I'd expect form a 14yr Zutara fan writing for a fic challenge. I mean in 1 paragraph alone Vathara basically killed all of canon Mai character development that elevated her above Named goon status and replaced Mai with an OC who is trying to impersonate someone she doesn't know well. (Vathara later admitted this was an author tract edit.)(Checking her favorites it seems Vathara is a Zutaran )
Mai does seem kind of OOC, but frankly, I don't really feel like Mai and Zuko would really blossom into the kind of relationship they had in canon under the circumstances here - Zuko isn't hanging around with Ozai's Angels all the time, he's not confused and in need of a source of comfort, and deprived of Iroh's help, nor has he really fallen for Mai. Maybe it's just me, but I was under the impression that in canon, Mai carries a torch for Zuko from when they were kids, but Zuko doesn't entirely reciprocate - Mai grows on him after his return to the fold at the end of Season 2, and they are eventually both firmly in love with each other at the end of S3, but at this point, Mai carries a torch, but isn't in love, and that torch is extinguished when it's revealed that they are related. As has been stated, this fic's been drifting well into AU territory for some time now - this is just one of the changes.
As has been mentioned, the original plot conceit was that 'Zuko didn't steal the chocobo.' That's it. Every element since then has broken that one simple change. Fire Healing, everything we know about spirits, yaoren, dragons, bending affecting the nation soul deep, Water and Fire nations being able to emotionally manipulate people - all of it is not in line with the original concept, and frankly, I like it. I think that it's awesome worldbuilding, and I think the prime flaw you should point out here is that it's linear worldbuilding - as in it was not done wholesale and then applied to the plot, it's information only presented to us as the plot requires it, despite earlier chapters making no reference to it. For instance, in a early chapter, Zuko is called a traitor. How would he be a traitor? If he had broken loyalty, they'd expect him to be dead, by Ember-verse rules. There are plot holes in the work, but not in the spots you're pointing to.3) In chapter 22 we find out that Vathara went back in time and change the Canon time line(this breaks the original plot conceit by the way) to reflect that Avatar Kyoshi Killed Chin the Conqueror and then set up the Dai Li to play Ghost buster because in the Embersverse Antiques turn evil and try to kill you if they are older then a century. Which in turn made the 46th Earth King very unpopular so the whole war was apparently a power grab on Chin's part, due to the Earth King keeping antiques. Anyway even after Chin's death at the hands of Avatar Kyoshi his army went right on razing the Earth kingdom for a time rendering his death a pointless homicide. After which they for reasons strange and unknowable returned to the site of Chin's death and still founded a town based on hating the Avatar for killing Chin which didn't really seem to inconvenience their war effort much according to Vathara.(This was just the first of many major plot holes)
Secondly, Emberverse spirits seem internally consistent. They're a blend of the Fair Folk and Japanese style kami. So 1)Fair Folk: the spirits by-and large have alien mindsets and run on Blue and Orange Morality - hence why the vast majority of people stay the hell away from them aside from making placating offerings and worship. They also affect those they touch severely, leaving people profoundly affected mentally and/or spiritually from encounters with them. 2)Kami - spirits are present in all things, but the bigger, more impressive, or older something is, the more powerful its spirit - hence why the Dai Li's running around dealing with 99-year spirits - that appears to the minimum age in the Ember-verse at which an item develops a spirit capable of awareness and manifesting itself in a major fashion. And if such an item is not properly cared for and placated, it gets angry and may wreak havoc. In a big city with a long history, having an organization dedicated to keeping that sort of thing in line makes sense.
Okay, it looks like you're confusing a few things here - one, the taboo that Aang broke is not that a spirit caused harm to humans, it's that he let a spirit possess him for the express purpose of attacking an enemy fleet. Spirits are dangerous in the Emberverse, and weaponizing them is the taboo because they don't distinguish friend and foe the way humans do - setting one loose is akin to waging war by utilizing weapons of mass destruction and ignoring all Geneva style rules of war. Aang's use of Ocean in this context means that it was akin to opening the cage of a rabid dog - it might attack your enemies but there's not a whole lot stopping it from turning around and biting you either. And this is a rabid dog that has the capability to cause serious widespread destruction rather than just a nasty bite and lethal infection.4) The Taboo Vathara created That she claims Aang broke in The siege of the North doesn't make sense, its a plot hole. Saying its bad for spirits to visit any harm on humans is too simple. These aren't all wild dogs. They are the gods of the setting and more then capable of high level thought.They can and have been wronged in the past. They should be at least free to defend themselves. If they are not free to defend themselves and determine their own course. Then what are they to be, the human's pets? Also that would mean the AVATAR by the very act of defending itself would be breaking the taboo because it too is also a spirit. Essentially there needs to be a loop holes or this is the legal equivalent of trying to make it illegal for it rain on days that end in y.
The thing you seem to have latched onto as the taboo is that the Fire Nation fleet sunk. This in itself isn't bad, what's bad is that that's a whole lot of dead people, and without proper burials or at least some kind of memorial service, that's also a whole lot of restless ghosts seeking vengeance, right on the doorstep of the Northern Water Tribe.
I disagree. I think several of the 'plot holes' you say you've attribute to the fic are not plot holes at all (not saying the fic doesn't have any, it has plenty as a result of the worldbuilding being ongoing rather than complete before the first chapter), but you haven't pointed out any of the serious ones here.5)To put it bluntly the story at this point is reliant on the readership ignoring plot hole after plot and some of the most unjustified out of character behavior I have ever found in a work so will writing from a technical stand point.
Doesn't seem like a bashfic to me. It's harsh on the actions of the gang, and it justifies alot of the Fire Nation, villifies some of the Avatars, but on a whole the tone teems to be that EVERYTHING is screwed up, and on a much deeper level than in canon.So in closing I feel Embers could be best described as THE definitive well written AtlA bashfic as written by a recovering Zutaran fangirl who grew up and got herself a English lit degree