Here's Toph's bit. The idea for this came from the guy on American Idol a few years back whose name escapes me at the moment, but I remember he was blind and played piano, and I could see Toph's parents wanting her to do the same thing.
Toph was sick of it. She was sick of being her parents' little porcelain baby doll to dress up and play with and show off. "Look at our accomplished daughter! She's blind and she can play piano like a master! Did we mention she's only seven?" They had started her on her lessons from the time she could toddle, all Mozart and Bach and other classical music.
The first chance she got she had one of the maids go out and buy her a book of real songs (and use a pen to raise the notes up so she could actually read them), the kind of stuff her parents didn't know she listened to. Barlowgirl, Casting Crowns. Nothing too wild.
It wasn't until she was around thirteen and started listening to bands like Flyleaf and Skillet that her parents fired the maid who had been getting the music for her, leaving Toph music-less. So she learned to listen to a song, pick out the piano, and teach herself to play by ear. It took a while to do, and then she went to her parents to ask for a keyboard instead of a baby grand like she currently had in her room.
She used her most diplomatic arguments, because of course they said no right away. No way was any daughter of theirs going to play keyboard.That was a mockery of the almost-sacred music that was piano.
But it would be more portable, she said. Easier to take with her if they ever had to travel somewhere. Her parents didn't want her to fall out of practice, did they? And think of what she could learn from playing a different style of piano!
They could refuse their baby girl nothing - except freedom, of course, but that was another matter entirely. Toph was blind and Toph was delicateand Toph was playing heavy metal in her bedroom late at night. She didn't need the lights on to play, and she had memorized the feel of the keyboard - the finest money could buy - so that her parents never knew, as long as she kept the volume down.
Seventeen years old and entering Atla Music College with her trusty old keyboard in her hand and a backpack on her back - she had refused anything else her parents had tried to give her, stating that she wanted to be Toph not the-heir-to-the-Bei-Fong-fortune - any and every promise she had ever made to her parents concerning her music flew out of her head, never to be heard from again.
At least, never to be heard from until five years later, when Aang led her to her keyboard and the fans screamed her name and she rolled her eyes at them and played the melody for thier newest hit. None of the crazy stuff she had taught herself years ago; no, she used the techniques her parents had absolutely forced her to learn and that she had hated for so long.
And now?
She loved it.