(If you're on the alert list, make sure you read chapter 28 before you read this! I uploaded them at the same time and I personally got the e-mail about this "chapter" before I got the alert for Chapter 28.)

FINAL AUTHOR'S NOTES:

Well, it's finally finished.

I started writing this fic a couple days after the finale aired. I always loved Avatar: The Last Airbender and I've watched it probably 4 or 5 times in its entirety, but I have to admit I didn't love The Legend of Korra right off the bat. I stopped watching it after the Book One finale. I'd always intended to watch the rest at some point but I'm not a very big TV watcher so I just didn't get around to it.

That being said, I did keep /r/thelastairbender on my front page of Reddit and I kind of casually kept up with the show without actually keeping up with it. Spoilers have never been a big problem for me—in fact I often actively seek them out. So when my front page exploded that this crack ship korrasami had become canon, you bet your ass I watched that last scene on youtube without having seen anything else since Book One. After that, I binged the entire show in like 2 days. Then I sat down and started writing this fic. While writing it, I watched the show over and over so that I could get all of the characters' voices right.

Lesbian media has always been a particular interest of mine, as well as government and politics. Those interests are why I suddenly developed an intense fanaticism about LoK. There were three things that I saw in that finale that really grabbed my attention: The first was korrasami. The second was that Wu said he was turning the Earth Kingdom in to a republic with each state having elected leaders, and that Korra said she would help him. And the third was that there was suddenly a freaking spirit portal right in the goddam middle of a totally destroyed Republic City.

I wrote the first three chapters just as kind of fluffy feel-good stuff because that's what I felt like writing and I didn't think I'd end up sharing this fic with anyone. Writing is a fun hobby and I do it all the time but I never share what I write. In addition, I hadn't written a fanfic in years. I mean seriously, it's probably been at least 7 years since I wrote anything other than original fiction. But the Avatar universe spoke to me. It's so detailed and interesting that writing a story in that universe was entertaining and easy.

Eventually I decided I wanted to take Korra to Ba Sing Se. I invented the Ai brothers because I thought I might try and address the issues of wealth and sexual orientation, you know, for funsies. At first I wasn't sure what to do with Haku, but I kept him in there just in case.

Then I came up with the idea of creating some bad guys so that I could create conflict having to do with the fact that it had become ridiculously easy for humans to physically enter the spirit world. From there I decided on cars being the thing because it's something I could link to Asami.

As I wrote the path revealed itself to me step by step. Sometimes I would come up with ideas and be like, "Oh, here's an opportunity to drive the plot forward." Before I knew it I had this big, intricate plot. I had a real story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

To those of you who felt that the Sen Inc/Cah-Bage Corp plotline was unrealistic: Well, I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on that one. I'm old and I've been involved with politics for a long time. In the real world, I have little doubt that a big company would see the merging of the two worlds as an opportunity to exploit for material gain. Money is a powerful motivator and just like the destruction of beautiful places like the rain forest or the arctic tundra or any place where they're fracking, these people just don't care about what kind of long-term consequences there may be. Even in the Avatar world, Kuvira destroyed the banyan-tree grove and didn't even have a single reservation about it. So I wish I could be optimistic and say that Sen Inc would never go so far as to do something like this, but I just don't see it that way. Sorry.

Either way, I wrote this story with a plot, a mystery, and some fun fights. And now, it's finished. Let me repeat that: It's finished. I have never finished a story this long before. Never. Not even once. This is literally the first thing I've ever written that I actually finished.

Gotta admit, I'm in mourning. It's been a crazy couple of weeks. This fic has been completely consuming my life ever since that finale. It's been over a month of rushing home from work to write, waking up a little early to write, spending entire days hunched over my keyboard, re-reading what I wrote on my phone during breaks so that I could edit it the minute I got back to my computer. Once I even woke up in the middle of the night with an epiphany about to how to advance the storyline so I got up to jot it down with pen and paper. I'm not kidding; this fic has been everything. I spent every possible moment on it. And now I have no freaking idea what I'm going to do with all my free time. I guess I'll just have to go back to reading books like a loser. I'm really going to miss this fic.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the creators of Avatar for giving us such a cool, progressive show. Thanks to everyone who read this fic, and thanks to those of you who've been following along as I posted it. Thanks to my friends and family (especially the ones I blew off so I could write all night), who will never see this because I would never tell them about this fic, not in a million years.

Once again, thanks for reading "Chosen's Chosen." I hope you all enjoyed it.

-AudacityofHuge