Fanfic / The Worst Prisoner

The Worst Prisoner series is an Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfiction by emletish of The Stalking Zuko Series fame, detailing a What If? scenario on the events of The Storm: What if Sokka and the Fisherman had been captured by Zuko and his crew? Shenanigans occur, Zuko somehow ends up taken prisoner by the Gaang instead, and everything afterwards drastically changes.

The first book, The Element of Change, can be found here. The second book, The Illusion of Separation, can be found here. The third book, Fire is Life, can be found here. All are on FanFiction.Net, they used to be on Archive of Our Own as well, but were eventually deleted along with chapters 10 and 11 of Fire is Life. Fortunately, these two chapters can still be read through the Wayback Machine.

---

Tropes:

• Abduction Is Love: Aang's only knowledge about dealing with hostages is seeing a play where this occurs between a princess and her pirate kidnappers. The start of said play just happens to be very similar to the mess that Zuko and the Gaang currently find themselves in, which prompts Zuko and Katara to retort that there's absolutely no chance of them falling in love with the other.
• Abandon the Disabled: The Air Nomad nation stayed entirely comprised of benders because they left children who could not bend by the age of ten in the care of families from other nations. This was seen by the Nomads as a mercy because it would be too difficult to live in the temples without being able to airbend. Historically this practice was apparently a major point of contention between the detachment-idealising Air Nomads and the family-oriented Water Tribes, which is why Aang says Air Nomads usually left nonbenders to live in the Fire Nation or occasionally the Earth Kingdoms, but never the Water Tribes.
• Adaptational Sexuality: Jet is Armoured Closet Bi; Smellerbee expresses some interest in Katara.
• Annoying Arrows: Averted. When Zuko is shot by the Yu Yan, there is worry that pulling it out would lead to him dying of blood loss. He winds up passing out when it is pulled out.
• Bad Boss: Ozai's psychopathy and sadism means he isn't actually good at managing the needs of the people he rules and only does things for them when it somehow benefits himself. When Zuko returns to the Fire Nation in Book 3, he plays on Ozai's vanity and selfishness to get him to agree to policies that will hopefully actually help their increasingly impoverished average citizens.
• Brick Joke:
  • Fairly early in Book 1, when Katara refuses to let Sokka tie up Zuko due to the latter's injuries, Sokka cries out "Zuko, look over there! Is that admiral Zhao in a sequinned tutu?" Zuko actually looks, and Sokka takes the opportunity to handcuff Zuko to him. At the beginning of Book 2, when Azula shows up to arrest Iroh on Ozai's orders and manages to get Ty Lee to successfully chi block him, Zuko gets the drop on them and yells "Hey, Azula, is that our dad wearing a sequinned tutu over there?" Azula also actually looks, and Zuko uses the distraction to handcuff the two girls to each other.
    • It returns again in Book 3 when Mai and Ty Lee are following Zuko everywhere, except this time it's Azula allegedly in the tutu. The diversion still works.
  • In Book 1, Sokka has the tendency to bar Zuko from access to everyday objects and defending this by coming up with extremely creative ways these objects could be used as weapons. At one point in Makapu, he bars Zuko from access to pineapples, and explains in detail the various ridiculous ways that he imagines pineapples could be used as a weapon. In Book 2, Zuko gets in a fight with Jet in a Ba Sing Se marketplace and uses pineapples exactly as Sokka described.
  • In Book 2, Smellerbee explains to "Lee" her perspective on Jet's history with Katara, describing the latter as "hot. Really hot. But so damn bossy. She could order me around all day, every day, then spank me when I was naughty, you know what I mean." Later in the book, when Katara re-encoutners Jet and Smellerbee offhandedly mentions that Jet had tried to prove his sexuality by claiming to have slept with Katara, Katara begins hitting Jet with water whips. Smellerbee is noted to have stopped talking and instead begun "gazing at Katara slapping Jet in a very distracted fashion and sighing wistfully."
• Broken Pedestal: Kuzon for Aang. For most of the series Aang had held up Kuzon as an example of why the Fire Nation can't be inherently evil; however, in Book 3 Aang learns that Kuzon became a famous Fire Nation war "hero" for using his insider knowledge of Air Nomad culture to hunt down survivors of the genocide. This becomes Aang's first real taste of betryal, hatred, and a desire for vengeance. There are hints in the story that Kuzon may have actually used his military mission as an excuse to actually help the surivors hide, but Aang is so upset by the point this is brought up that he refuses to entertain the possibility.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Sokka refusing to believe that Zuko has purehearted reasons for saving someone quickly becomes a running gag, to Zuko's consternation.
  • Thanks to Sokka being such a terrible captive, Zuko doesn't believe that Sokka's claims of being sick are true until Sokka collapses at his feet.
• Chained Heat: Sokka handcuffs himself to Zuko to thwart the latter's nefarious, Avatar snatching plans.
• A Child Shall Lead Them: Implied to have been invoked by Iroh from the beginning. It's implied through Iroh's thoughts regarding Zuko's friendships with the Gaang that Iroh intended to use Zuko's exile to raise Zuko to be a superior replacement to his father, but in the aftermath of Zuko's traumatic scarring and banishment, hadn't known exactly how to overcome his nephew's emotional fragility and single-mindedness enough to get Zuko to open himself up to change earlier. Because Iroh would know about the potential time limit instilled onto Ozai's reign by Sozin's comet, this implies that from the moment the Avatar was known to have returned, Iroh explicitly had this trope in mind for the Fire Nation and his teenage nephew.
• Cosmic Plaything: It is generally accepted by the cast that Zuko has terrible luck and the universe loves to mess with him. Ironically, some of the crazy stuff that happens to him is actually because the Powers That Be like him. In a meta-sense, Word of God admits they love putting him in embarrassing and ridiculous circumstances.
• Culture Clash: Aang and Katara have a big one when she discovers the way airbenders deal with family and non-benders. Their fight is enough to make Aang start earth-bending.
• Decoy Protagonist: Initially, Sokka is the one taken prisoner by Zuko, and he even proclaims that if Zuko insists on keeping him prisoner, Sokka will make himself the worst prisoner to make him regret it. Then roles reverse and it becomes clear that Zuko is both the main protagonist and the prisoner to which the title refers.
• Enemy Mine: Zuko and Sokka are forced to team up in order to liberate Aang from Zhao's clutches. The team up turns out to be far less antagonistic than either of them expected.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Ozai and Azula make Zuko Home Guardian (basically the manager of domestic affairs) because they believe the work will be dull, tedious, and degrading, and then they'll be able to blame and discredit Zuko's mismanagement for all of the people's problems and make themselves look good in comparison. In actuality, Zuko genuinely appreciates the chance to help his people and his attempts to circumvent his father's callous incompetence and actually improve things for the average citizen makes him more respected by the public.
• Evil Chancellor: Once Zuko returns home to the Fire Nation and is made Home Guardian by his father, he is very specifically not just The Good Chancellor, but an inverted example of this trope. Zuko is responsible and efficient in managing domestic matters to care for his people, while Firelord Ozai is cruel, petulant, vain, and self-serving. Zuko has to, in turn, learn to manipulate and modulate how he presents information to Ozai so that Ozai won't take too much of an interest in the subject matter and Zuko can act without his interference. By using deception, mischaracterization, and misinformation to manipulate his ruler, Zuko's actually taking pages out of the Evil Chancellor's playbook but is doing so to help his people endure the reign of a genuinely evil man.
• Flowery Insults:
  • While Zuko's insults aren't precisely poetic, he's certainly... creative with them.
    Zuko: [To Hahn] I hope you get smacked with an iceberg and eaten by an ice-wolf, you slimy, sour-faced, lying, cowardly, whining, arrogant, shit-for-brains, pansy-arsed, hedgehog-buggering...
  • When Zuko returns to the Firenation in Book 3, he and Azula bond over throwing the most ridiculous and old-fashioned insults they can at each other, competing over who can get the last word in the flowery insult exchange every time they interact without Ozai around. Azula gets so invested in this that she has servants create a list of flowery insults from old melodramatic plays for her to throw at Zuko.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: Downplayed. Katara and Sokka would have had this dynamic while Zuko was their captive if Katara had maintained seeing Zuko as an enemy. To Sokka's frustration, however, Katara's kind heart causes her to abandon Sokka's paranoia and quickly begin sympathizing with and caring for Zuko, even insisting he not be tied up due to his injuries.
• Good Is Not Dumb: Katara, despite her kindness to Zuko, is aware that he still intends to kidnap Aang throughout most of Book 1, having realized that he was exaggerating the pain of his injuries for the purposes of being underestimated as a threat. Katara confronts him on this, but eventually decides not to do anything yet because she's come to know him enough to trust that he'll make the correct choice when the moment comes.
• Healing Hands: Katara's first taste of bloodbending is when she stops Zuko from bleeding out from his arrow wound by bending his blood back into his body.
• His Story Repeats Itself: Pakku's chauvinism driving Katara to leave the Northern Water Tribe mirrors her grandmother doing the same decades earlier.
• I'll Take That as a Compliment: When Zuko returns to the Fire Nation and wishes to make changes to actually improve his people's quality of life, Azula helps him realize he needs to give Ozai "bastard" reasons to do things that are actually good for people or Ozai will discard the suggested changes as worthless. Zuko knows he's too earnest to come up with these sorts of manipulations, so he turns to former Lieutenant Jee of his old crew on the Wani and hires him as his assistant. Zuko at one point compliments Jee by saying he's "really good at being a bastard," which Jee realizes was supposed to be a compliment.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Firenation propaganda paints the Water Tribes as this, claiming that they eat outsiders, and so a rumor starts that the Northern Water Tribe kidnapped and ate Prince Zuko. While the Water Tribes don't eat people, around the time the Firenation first began its conquest the Northern Water Tribe decided to capture and seal any foreigners that came within their waters in the Frozen Pit, an ice cave deep within the glacier, as a deterrent to any who would consider trespassing. There the captives would be left to die, with the tribe only checking to see if any were alive months later. Most of the prisoners died before the Northern Tribe decided to let them go, and the ones that survived did so by eating their fellow prisoners. The survivors were then escorted outside the Northern border and instructed to spread the word on what happens to trespassers. It seems the fact that it was the prisoners who resorted to cannibalism, and not the tribe, got lost in the retelling.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite Zuko having his Heel–Face Turn in Book 1 and effectively joining the Gaang by the end of that book, thus drastically altering the cause-and-effect circumstances surrounding the following events, Yue still sacrifices herself and dies during the Siege of the North, Zuko and Iroh still end up wandering the Earth Kingdom alone at the beginning of Book 2, everyone still ends up in Ba Sing Se only for the city to fall to Azula, and Zuko still gets the credit for killing the Avatar and returns home with honors at the beginning of Book 3.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Ozai thinks of his children as "the boy and the girl" instead of using their names.
• It Makes Sense in Context: The series' comedic bread and butter is its proclivity for ridiculous sequiturs. Prize-winning examples are: "[He felt] a wave of relief. He was going to be kidnapped after all! His luck was finally turning around" and "Jee has been such a great help to me. He’s really good at being a bastard!”
• Kick the Dog: Hahn throws into Zuko's face how his father doesn't want him after Zuko calls his plan stupid and even goes as far as suggesting they should drown him as response to the Ozai's insult.
• Kiss of Life: Zuko saves Sokka from drowning during the storm with this, and both are horrified when they realise the other's identity.
• Metaphorgotten:
  • In Book 1, Katara insists she has to eat papaya because Aunt Wu said she would grow to love it, and she thinks she has to do everything Aunt Wu says if she wants the prediction about her future husband to come true. The following exchange occurs:
    Sokka: "Wait, so if she said you'd marry Zuko, would you do it? Or would you admit that she's off her tree?"
    Zuko: "Hey, Sokka! Leave me out of this. I don't want to marry your sister."
    Katara: "I don't want to marry you either! You'd be the papaya of husbands."
    Zuko: "Are you trying to insult me? Is that meant to be bad? Because I'd love a papaya husband ... I mean wife! I'd love a papaya wife."
    Katara: "Well, your papaya wife is not going to be me!
    Zuko: "Obviously! You hate papaya!"
  • In Book 3, Zuko and Jee come across an anatomically disturbing blueprint for a statue of Ozai, and Zuko questions whether that's even... possible. Jee, concluding that it's possible Zuko was never given The Talk, attempts one using flower metaphors. Zuko first assumes Jee is part of the "Flower Friends" (White Lotus) and then, discarding this option, instead takes the flower talk literally. He ends up completely derailing the conversation by asking about terraces.
• Mistaken for Gay: Or at least Mistaken for Bi. Sokka attempts to deter Zuko's obvious attraction to Katara by telling Zuko all about how handsome and charming Jet was, with the intention of implying that Katara is unavailable. All Sokka achieves is making Zuko believe Sokka is the one with a crush on Jet. Sokka is not amused by this when he founds out.
• Oblivious to Love: Aang. Not about love directed towards himself, but he's oblivious to the tensions, both romantic and otherwise, that develop around him. In Book 2 Zuko and Katara kiss upon their reunion, forgetting that the rest of the Gaang and Jet, Smellerbee, and Longshot are in tow behind Katara. They were so obvious about their affection for each other that even Smellerbee and Longshot had figured out there was something between them, without having ever seen the two directly interact before—but Aang had no clue prior to this, and is left "aghast."
• Official Couple: Zuko and Katara. Because of Zuko's earlier Heel–Face Turn than in canon, a lot of time is afforded to developing the dynamics of their partnership.
• Oh, Crap!: The Fisherman is unhappy when he finds out who owns the ship he is on.
• Only Sane Man: Jeong-Jeong finds himself this when stuck with Pakku and Iroh.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: After the revelation about his old friend Kuzon (see Broken Pedestal), Aang questions why the Gaang should do anything to help the villagers of the polluted river just because they're there. Toph, Katara and Sokka are all equally shocked.
• Pass the Popcorn: Because the Gaang get seperated from Zuko after the Seige of the North, Toph's first introduction to Zuko outside of combat is his dramatic reunion with Katara... in front of Jet. Toph thoroughly enjoys taunting the three at the center of the subsequent drama and not only snacks on popcorn while making instagatory comments, but frequently throws the popcorn at them as well. Occasionally Sokka joins in to throw popcorn at Jet and talk about Jet like he's the bad love interest in a TV soap opera.
• Pet the Dog: When Zuko beats Sokka, he points out errors Sokka had been making and gives tips on how to improve his stance.
• Pity the Kidnapper: Sokka is such an obnoxious captive that Zuko is seriously considering just putting him on a boat to Pouhai, to spare the sanity of both him and his crew.
• Point of Divergence: Zuko captures Sokka during the events of the season one episode 'The Storm'.
• Schmuck Bait: Katara and Aang correctly deduce that Zuko's hostage exchange proposal is this and refuse to take the bait, instead choosing to ambush Zuko's ship when it docks for repairs in Pouhai. Zuko, being completely oblivious to how obvious his plan is, is rather taken aback when the Avatar passes up a chance to rescue his friend.
• Shipper on Deck: A very important one. Tui, for Katara and Zuko. During their stay in the North, Katara and Zuko would often secretly spend time in the Spirit Oasis, not knowing it was such a sacred location and favoring it instead for its seclusion. Tui, known to favor couples, came to adore them for the rare balance they represented as a couple. Because of this, when La is on his vengeful rampage, he spares Zuko out of love for Tui and a rare moment of recognition, as La himself was part of a balanced duo that had just broken. La's perceived favoritism towards Zuko comes to affect Zuko's public image in the Fire Nation deeply.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Zuko's a downplayed example. He spent his formative teenage years living isolated on a ship with a bunch of disgraced misfit sailors all twice his age or more, so Zuko has the full vocabulary of a sailor, he just doesn't often use it because he tries to maintain the dignity befitting a royal. Because of this, those who know him well can gauge how angry/on ceremony he feels in any situation based on his vocabulary; he tries to avoid swearing in front of all but his genuine friends and most infuriating aggravations, but when he does swear, prepare for a blue streak that will set nearby plants on fire.
• So Proud of You: Iroh tries to use this with Zuko after realizing how little praise he has been getting. Zuko is weirded out by this and asks him to stop doing it so much.
• Spare to the Throne: Ozai inverting this is deconstructed heavily. Ozai favors Azula, his youngest child, as his heir, and so functionally did his best to make her the heir presumptive and make Zuko this trope. However, Zuko is still firstborn, and Ozai's favoritism towards his daughter made Azula more like her father in a bad way. In Book 3, Zuko returns home a beloved hero, and it becomes clear that he is, whether he realizes it, a massive threat to Ozai politically. Zuko has set himself up very publically as a very different (and to most, a much more preferable) kind of leader, one who is responsible and dutiful where Ozai is myopically self-serving, one who is caring where Ozai is cruel, and one who is favored by the spirits where Ozai's decisions make the Fire Nation actively despised by them. Zuko being a credible heir and a seemingly much more preferable leader means that, for the first time in years, the people of the Fire Nation have something to gain if they get rid of Ozai.
• Stay in the Kitchen: Unlike in canon Pakku's lifelong beliefs about women do not disappear even after bonding with Katara and she departs from him on less than amicable terms after he dismisses her fears about Zuko. To Pakku's credit, he recognises he is repeating the same mistake that cost him Kanna and tries to improve himself.
• That Came Out Wrong: The Fisherman and Sokka choose their words poorly when explaining why Sokka was with him and not Katara and Aang.
• The Social Expert: Out of the four Fire Nation teens, Ty Lee has the best understanding of how to behave in a social situation. Book 3 has her coaching Zuko and Azula during their stay at Ember Island, to varied success.
• Trauma Conga Line: If you think canon Zuko has it bad, WorstPrisoner Zuko may just have it a little worse. It starts with getting hit by an arrow in the shoulder, then he almost gets killed by a mob, gets manhandled by Bato and when he sneaks into the North Pole with the Gaang, he is used to train the waterbenders into fighting firebenders. And that's just the first book...
• A Threesome Is Hot: Smellerbee tells Zuko that she thinks he and Katara would be Jet's ultimate fantasy threesome.
• Twisting the Words: Discussed. When Zuko returns to the Fire Nation in Book 3, he's made Home Guardian and put in charge of managing domestic affairs, because Ozai hates that job and assumes Zuko will too. While some problems Zuko has the authority to manage himself, others need Ozai's approval to act on, so Zuko and his advisor Jee discuss ways to make his public health policies, famine relief, and clean water restoration plans sound cruel and/or Ozai-flattering enough for Ozai to agree to them. This actually works!
• What Would X Do?: Demonstrating how much he's learned from his friends, Zuko manages to save his uncle and outsmart Azula by taking a page out of Sokka's book, asking himself this trope exactly.