ryu-slayer

[ryu-slayer]

Antis: Zutara shippers don’t like Maiko because it stands in the way of their ship, and they ship Taang to get Aang out of the way for Zuko.

Nah, I don’t like Maiko because it feels forced, toxic and got me confused during my first watch (ntm that my ship started with The Southern Raiders, so after their break-up, anyway), and I ship Aang with Toph because of the swamp vision, the challenging of each other and the chemistry.

I neither consider Mai nor Aang to stand in the way of Zutara, since I don’t think it would happen or at least last, realistically. For the same reason, I don’t think Mai or Aang would be a danger, which needs to get out of the way if Zutara would happen.

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Spy x family is very very good because there's a bit where a far right terrorist group says that they want to start a war and a main character responds by saying to them "have any of you ever killed anyone before? Have you ever been killed before? Have you ever had a limb torn off by an artillery shell? Have you ever heard the sound of bones shattering? Have you ever smelled the reek of rotting flesh? Have you ever found the crushed bodies of your parents and siblings in a pile of rubble that used to be your home? Have you ever discovered a blown-off piece of your lover stuck to a wall? Have you ever been so hungry that you tried to eat tree bark? Or stewed a pot of human flesh? Have you ever convinced yourself that your enemy was subhuman so you could...slaughter them like animals? Have you ever been so haunted by shame and regret afterwards that you cried until you vomited? Have you ever had friends who did the same, and then took their own lives? Did you learn nothing about war at your university?!"

and that's the same volume where they adopt a dog that can see into the future

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I can’t get over the fact that Bryke decided Katara should believe she deserves no thanks in The Promise. I mean, they literally made her feel guilty for being uncomfortable spending the night with her bfs groupies fangirls.

I’ve seen people claim that Aang was oblivious to this. Don’t they get what this is about? His obliviousness doesn’t even matter. Katara's feelings are valid no matter what, and talking about it would have been the only healthy thing to do.

And don’t get me started on those who insist that this shows how both of them had grown since Book 1... This is no growth to me. It seems like Katara, who has always been vocal about her feelings, learned in this one year of her relationship to repress them instead. Either to avoid conflict altogether or because she's been told to 'control herself'. And unfortunately, this is the reality for so many women in RL.

If this is Bryke’s idea of a healthy relationship, I’m actually so glad that Zutara isn’t canon. They could’ve easily made up for the forced K@taang endgame in ATLA by showing a relationship where both sides are validated equally, but instead we got this bs.

If this wasn’t already a bad enough example for girls and young women of what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like, Bryke took it even further: They made the very girls who openly flirted with Aang in front of his girlfriend the official Air Acolytes. In other words, unless Katara and Aang are off on their next adventure, they are surrounded by them almost 24/7.

Yeah, that’s right. Just keep smiling, Master Katara Avatar’s girl.

I mean, what does her life look like surrounded by those Aang-worshiping girls and her boyfriend, who remains oblivious? Constantly smiling, acting as though she doesn't hear the obvious advances happening right in front of her? Ignoring the catty comments directed at her by some of them? And, in general, adjusting to her boyfriend's—later, husband's—life while forgetting her own ambitions? Now, we could argue that she wouldn't stay with Aang if she eventually realizes that she has put up with too much and lost herself. But, I think, we all know that lifelong relationships like this exist in RL.

[ryu-slayer]

Oklahoma is attempting to pass a bill that would ban explicit romance novels. Authors, narrators, and sellers could all face fines of up to $100,000 and up to 10 years in jail for each instance.

If you live in OK, call your representative and tell them this bill should not be allowed to pass.

This is likely a test case. Republicans will try to pass it in OK and if it passes other states will likely try to pass similar laws.

In the meantime, get physical copies of books you like. Download those pdfs. Archive your AO3 stories and keep them on a physical hard drive. (Storing those files in the cloud could be problematic in the future as the company managing the cloud service can see what your files are)

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I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of brain dead takes regarding Kataang and Zutara, but I recently came across a new one for me: that Katara was at fault for Aangs fear of fire and unwillingness to learn firebending because she couldn’t keep her cool when he burned her during the Deserter, and that Sokka was in the wrong for tackling him.

…..Like how the hell else is anyone supposed to react?! Blaming Katara for crying because she was badly hurt? If Katara didn’t magically learn water healing, who’s to say that she could’ve been able to use her hands afterwards? And then Sokka bad for having big brother instincts and protecting his injured sister? If anything Aangs lucky that Sokka had the restraint and didn’t flat out deck Aang. How willfully blind does one have to be to ignore that the whole situation was entirely on Aangs shoulders for screwing around with a naturally dangerous element when he was told not to?

But of course we can’t have Aang be anywhere in the wrong anytime because he’s the Herowic Uwu Baby. Some people.

I've seen this take before, unfortunately.

Aaaand, that's why it's a problem that the show frames this the way it does, with the whole thing being a device to give Aang some hangups about firebending. The show even frames Katara's pain as really being about Aang's pain and then justifies that by having Katara discover healing and then it being never brought up again.

And this isn't even the first time in this same episode that Katara is threatened with fire so that she can be damseled for Aang.

Like let's think for a second about how scary this must be for Katara, whose mother was burned to death to protect her. How scary it must be for Sokka, who was suspicious of Aang from the get go because bending represents the war and the raids and his mother being killed and the threat that the same thing could happen to his sister.

It also goes back to The Southern Raiders and Aang absolutely hating it when Katara doesn't push aside her pain to sooth other people for once.

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Do you think some parts of the world would have been unhappy in Aang's decision to spare Ozai? That people would be so bitter - this madman gets to live, while their friends and loved ones died? Why is that? Oh - because the Avatar didn't want to compromise his own morals, to kill someone? Tough, it's a war. People die.

The thing I don't like about the way the show frames it is that the narrative doesn't really give Aang a choice, either.

I think people who frame this as Aang respecting Air Nomad culture are trying to give the show too much credit, because the show doesn't act like Aang gets to choose a moral high ground, they act like he has no choice. Aang seems to believe that the only way he can honor his Air Nomad heritage is by not killing, and...what about all the Air Nomads who didn't have that luxury? What about Gyatso, who was faced with the choice of kill or die, and killed, and died?

I think a lot of people would see Aang's choice as a slap in the face. Every person who had to do things they considered against their personal morals to survive. People like Jet who sincerely wished to stop leading a violent life, but couldn't, because that life was chosen for him the moment his parents were murdered. People like Hakoda who felt deeply ashamed of having to leave his own children to go to war. Are these people just inherently less moral or more bloodthirsty than Aang? No, they simply didn't have the power Aang had at his disposal that allowed him to avoid the kind of violent lives that many people, children included, were forced to lead during the war.

That's also why the "Aang reminds Katara/Zuko that they are kids" thing annoys me. What Aang does is remind them that HE has the luxury of thinking of himself as a kid while they don't. The reason Katara hadn't been penguin sledding in so long isn't because she's a buzzkill who hates fun or she "forgot" that she's a kid, it's because she was forced into a role where she had to take care of her family in her mother's absence, and that doesn't go away with the introduction of another kid she has to parent. As for Zuko, that "well you're just a teenager" line is funny and it's easy to think of Zuko as someone who takes himself too seriously (and part of why it's funny is that teenagers in general do view themselves as so much older than younger children), but Zuko was kicked out of his home at thirteen and expected to be fighting a fully-realized adult Avatar. Even when he was Aang's age, he never had the luxury of thinking of himself that way. You can see this also in the way Zuko interacts with adults early in the series, notably Zhao and his crew. He is desperate to be seen as a hardened adult because he has had to act like one to survive.

These people don't act this way because they've lost their morals or sense of fun or because they don't value peace enough. They act this way because this is what they were forced to do to survive. I think people would rightly be offended by the idea that wanting to see Ozai dead for his crimes makes them just as violent as a genocidal tyrant, and they would be right to feel resentful that Ozai gets to live when he was responsible for so much violence. This is also why Zuko tells Ozai that he's lucky that Aang spared his life. Because in the end, Aang has NO moral obligation to spare Ozai whatsoever, not because of his culture or any reason. Pacifism has never meant that you aren't allowed to use necessary force to stop violence from happening. And anyone who uses the argument that Aang has to spare Ozai because of his culture or that this is his only way to honor his people is LYING.

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🩵🌌🩵

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if i heard that a woman aborted a fetus because prenatal screening had revealed a disability that i shared, i would simply not shame her

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The two that found they were actually one. Good night ever. I love you.

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me: I'm going to write a fic to my own entertainment

also me, writing said fic:

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Little girl in pink regalia does a Blackfoot & Plains Cree dance celebrating the Prairie Chicken, Source unknown.

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Quietly losing my mind over the fact that Elon Musk has straight up orchestrated a coup of our executive branch and like....I don't even know what, if any, system we have in place to fix this. Like... He's just taken control of the money and locked out the actual appointed officials. What the fuck.

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[ryu-slayer]

𝒴𝑜𝓊 𝓇𝒾𝓈𝑒 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓂𝑜𝑜𝓃, 𝐼 𝓇𝒾𝓈𝑒 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓈𝓊𝓃

[ryu-slayer]

"Eww...Zuko and Katara are like siblings. Why would you ship them?"

Yeah...because siblings are often used for ship baiting

Meanwhile Kataang...

But Zuko and Katara are supposed to be the ones with the siblings vibes?

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Republican deregulation is a bullshit solution in search of a problem.

Regulations were put there for a reason.

Republicans want to pretend the original problem never existed. It's perverse.

Ex: Deregulation of media ownership has created a massive problem. Had we kept ownership regulations, we would have diverse opinions and exceptional local news.

[ryu-slayer]

"In case anyone missed it, the tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas has now spread to Ohio.

[The Republican Administration] has ordered the CDC to not report on this"