Aesir began as a very simple idea in 2017, but maybe not one you'd expect:

"Avatar in Game of Thrones."

Cleary we've come a long way from that, but I'll tell you how we got here.

Let's Start With Maps

All I knew at that point was that I wanted some "War of the Roses" type of conflict with badass martial arts magic. I dusted off a hardcopy of A Feast for Crows and cracked open the bindings to reveal the map of Westeros. I hadn't seen these pages since blazing through it at its release and maybe that's why I didn't realize I was holding it upside down... at least that's the excuse I'm going with right now. Anyway, there I was, starting at Westeros and that's the day I realized it's just a map of Britain but sort of backwards and upside down... or maybe just taken apart and put back together by a 6-year old who doesn't understand puzzles. Either way, that was definitely jolly old England.

Without bothering to figure out the scale of it all, I just assumed Essos was Ireland on its side and put on the wrong coast, and closed the book. Was The Wall just... Hadrian's Wall? The Children of the Forest were clearly Elves. Maybe I always knew this on some level but it forced me to reckon with what I actually liked about the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, and what I actually wanted from it.

I liked the various cultures in such close proximity, almost forced on top of each other where conflict was inevitable. I plucked this truth and pivoted to a broader notion. 

Permission

The second decision came a bit from the first: Hadrian's Wall. What a beautiful symbol of the sorts of nonsense people thought they could get away with. A wall? I didn't know much of the Roman history of Britain and that rabbit hole brought me to the first instance of the Aesir you see today: The Romans would be my Fire Nation. Of course they would. And who would the Air nomads be? The Picts, of course. 

The Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes were harder to fit. The Gaels, the most obvious choice for the green-colored peoples, were not ethnically distinct enough in my mind to stand apart from the Picts. The most obvious choice for a water people, the raiders who went a-viking, didn't come onto the scene until centuries later. 

Then I looked back at AtLA and was reminded that those cultures, while similar to historical touchpoints of Asian cultures, were not truly representative of any one group. That was the permission I needed to break out of historical simulationism and follow my intuition. The Saxons felt distinct enough from the others to be an Earth people, and the Water people could be an ethnic amalgamation of Scandinavian cultures. All of these people felt at one time or another that they could hold the isles for themselves, and that was enough to solidify the idea in my head for good.

Now I just needed to flesh it out and give it some rules.