Cool seeing someone else in a similar situation here, but yeah that sounds like a tough balance with the canon and wanting an actual story. I’ve been making sure that future me has to do a lot of work to “justify” the changes in the character. Choosing the more sticking to canon options in my story has definitely made me fire up the darlingkiller5000. I had ideas of her having more cycles than is currently on the outline and her joining the protagonists but I can’t really justify that to myself when I try to get it onto the outline. There was a whole OC (like tough, surrogate parent figure that actually cares about her that she finds in a random time cycle) that I thought of but now I’m like 70% sure I’m not gonna use her. It’s sad seeing the things that made me originally think of the story getting axed but I do think it’s a lot more unique and logical than if I crammed those things in.

I’m planning on building this as I go. So that this becomes a massive information hub of everything I discuss/know about writing productivity wise. It’s nice seeing plans that’s been in my mind for weeks coming to reality.

I’ve also been playing around with the idea of a YouTube channel critiquing fanfics/writing in general as a means to an end to get to see how good writing ticks so to speak. If that happens, I’ll make a videos section in the doc and put my YT videos in it too.

When I first started this fanfic, I rewatched the whole series because it had been a while since I’ve seen the show. But after that and I’m sure I got the general idea of everything, I sort of just start planning and only really rewatch the very important parts in my story. I feel that rewatching parts is a commitment that’s not fully necessary because it’s like the difference of a 90% and a 93%, like they’re both still passing but I find in writing that taking the more tedious/harder road is worth it (usually)

I do agree with it all being practice and up to interpretations, it’s infact one of the pro’s of it. There’s interpretation of characters that I wouldn’t have ever thought of but that make sense (there’s a fic where it takes Azula being a good liar to mean she doesn’t have anything really important to lie about and when she does, she’s bad at it.) and there’s fun stories with parts of their canon personalities but not all of it (idk if I explained it that well). It’s an aspect of fanfic that I haven’t thought about but it’s cool now that I fully have.