#ANYWAY I'M RAMBLING LMAO

[peony-pearl]

JKFAJSKDJSA I’ve got brainrot thinking about Iroh and Zuko making it to Ba Sing Se and Iroh has such a breath of relief about them being safe now, and now they’re going to be able to make money and support themselves and now they’re completely independent of their family (and safe from the Azula/the bounty on their heads; not to mention their wanted poster gives permission to kill them on sight), and with this money and safety, Iroh’s hoping Zuko can start assimilating into the life of a (somewhat) normal teenager. Not only does Iroh mourn his only child, but Zuko’s relationship with his father was already tenuous - thus this could be the perfect scenario in that Iroh could sidle into a true fatherhood role for Zuko.

Iroh’s so eager to see Zuko become happy, pushing him on that date with Jin, doing his hair, hoping he’ll let go of Ozai’s expectations. With the new tea shop in the upper ring, I can only imagine Iroh began planning to set aside funds so Zuko could attend Ba Sing Se University eventually, or for Zuko to get his own place one day; maybe he’ll meet a nice girl and Iroh can ensure they have a good financial start and fund the wedding; he has so many ideas and hopes that have been transplanted from his dreams for Lu Ten’s future and are now given to Zuko. It’s the life he couldn’t give Lu Ten, and he hopes his love is what Zuko needs after everything Ozai has put him through. After realizing that being part of the Fire Nation Royal Family has caused his pain (and his nephew’s) he’s more than happy to leave it all behind to discover what he wants out of the rest of his life; and he hope to encourage the same for Zuko. He can be a father again to a boy who needs one.

But Zuko... wants to go home. And Uncle is Uncle, not his father. He wants to make Ozai proud. Living in Ba Sing Se is a shadow of the life he wants.

As much as Iroh and Zuko mean to each other, the different levels they’re living on are so far away that they can’t understand why the other would want the life they want so badly. Their difference in age and experiences and traumas is so vast, and yet they’re all each other has until Azula comes to collect and offers Zuko everything he’s ever wanted.

[artist-rat]

some epilogue vibes (an excuse to draw some hugs. and my durge so many times)

[excali8ur]

Weird dream.

[babacontainsmultitudes]

RIP Will Campos the only person who was murdered this episode.

[iwantmochisoup]

- august 2024 sketch dump -

[sketchy-tour]

HELLO HI HELLO I AM!!! RECOVERING CURRENTLY!!!!

So I haven't posted in a small moment and planned to get myself going again soon but right now I am recovering from an accident (I won't get into the nitty gritty) that has left me quite shaken. FIRST OFF I AM OKAY! Minor injuries so nothing alarming I am physically fine besides being sore for a bit and some scrapes and bruises that are still healing, including my arms which is making drawing a bit difficult. I'm slowly getting better but cant really draw for long periods and honestly I might not draw much for a bit till I feel better both physically and mentally. its the mentally part that might take some time. But I'm resting, rest assured!

ANYWAY this is more just an update cause I know i've been a lil absent. ESPECIALLY after this accident. I'm not abandoning the blog by any means, def still check on tumblr but couldn't seem to muster the energy to interact with much at the moment as my brain is a little rattled up.

I hope yall are all okay! I hope your days are bright and yall are taking care of yourselves!

I promise I'm doing what I can to take care of me!

[gingermintpepper]

In my Zeus bag today so I'm just gonna put it out there that exactly none of the great Ancient Greek warrior-heroes stayed loyal and faithful and completely monogamous and yet none of them have their greatness questioned nor do we question why they had the cultural prominence that they did and still do.

Jason, the brilliant leader of the Argo, got cold feet when it came to Medea - already put off by some of her magic and then exiled from his birthland because of her political ploys, he took Creusa to bed and fully intended on marrying her despite not properly dissolving things with Medea.

Theseus was a fierce warrior and an incredibly talented king but he had a horrible temper and was almost fatally weak to women. This is the man who got imprisoned in the Underworld for trying to get a friend laid, the man who started the whole Attic War because he couldn't keep his legs closed.

And we cannot at all forget Heracles for whom a not inconsiderable amount of his joy in life was loving people then losing the people around him that he loved. Wives, children, serving boys, mentors, Heracles had a list of lovers - male and female - long enough to rival some gods and even after completing his labours and coming down to the end of his life, he did not have one wife but three.

And y'know what, just because he's a cultural darling, I'll put Achilles up here too because that man was a Theseus type where he was fantastic at the thing he was born to do (that is, fight whereas Theseus' was to rule) but that was not enough to eclipse his horrid temper and his weakness to young pretty things. This is the man that killed two of Apollo's sons because they wouldn't let him hit - Tenes because he refused to let Achilles have his sister and Troilus who refused Achilles so vehemently that he ran into Apollo's temple to avoid him and still couldn't escape.

All four of these men are still celebrated as great heroes and men. All four of these men are given the dignity of nuance, of having their flaws treated as just that, flaws which enrich their character and can be used to discuss the wider cultural point of what truly makes a hero heroic. All four of these men still have their legacies respected.

Why can that same mindset not be applied to Zeus? Zeus, who was a warrior-king raised in seclusion apart from his family. Zeus who must have learned to embrace the violence of thunder for every time he cried as a babe, the Corybantes would bang their shields to hide the sound. Zeus learned to be great because being good would not see the universe's affairs in its order.

The wonderful thing about sympathy is that we never run out of it. There's no rule stopping us from being sympathetic to multiple plights at once, there's no law that necessitate things always exist on the good-evil binary. Yes, Zeus sentenced Prometheus to sufferation in Tartarus for what (to us) seems like a cruel reason. Prometheus only wanted to help humans! But when you think about Prometheus' actions from a king's perspective, the narrative is completely different: Prometheus stole divine knowledge and gifted it to humans after Zeus explicitly told him not to. And this was after Prometheus cheated all the gods out of a huge portion of wealth by having humans keep the best part of a sacrifice's meat while the gods must delight themselves with bones, fat and skin. Yes, Zeus gave Persephone away to Hades without consulting Demeter but what king consults a woman who is not his wife about the arrangement of his daughter's marriage to another king? Yes, Zeus breaks the marriage vows he set with Hera despite his love of her but what is the Master of Fate if not its staunchest slave?

The nuance is there. Even in his most bizarre actions, the nuance and logic and reason is there. The Ancient Greeks weren't a daft people, they worshipped Zeus as their primary god for a reason and they did not associate him with half the vices modern audiences take issue with. Zeus was a father, a visitor, a protector, a fair judge of character, a guide for the lost, the arbiter of revenge for those that had been wronged, a pillar of strength for those who needed it and a shield to protect those who made their home among the biting snakes. His children were reflections of him, extensions of his will who acted both as his mercy and as his retribution, his brothers and sisters deferred to him because he was wise as well as powerful. Zeus didn't become king by accident and it is a damn shame he does not get more respect.

[vanmarkus]

i know that the 911 online fandom has always been based in a singular ship and that a lot of people clearly aren't dealing with the change very well, but i gotta say, for me, personally, it's actually refreshing to see the fandom landscape change and having more ships butting up their heads and sparking conversations and inspiring fans to create new things, thus strengthening the sense of community... i just think it's neat.

[burst-of-iridescent]

ana's meta masterlist

Pro-Zutara:

the official zutara dissertation: part 1 | part 2

zuko, aang and taking lightning for katara

zutara and romantic coding

"you rise with the moon, i rise with the sun" is a zutara line

zutara and thematic significance

zutara vs jetara

zutara parallels in the awakening

zutara's narrative culmination

zutara in the crossroads of destiny:

azula vs katara

love as resistance in the catacombs

zutara in the southern raiders:

the true source of katara's anger at zuko

katara bloodbending before zuko

the narrative relevance of zutara

zutara and bloodbending

zutara's narrative symmetry

why zuko had to betray katara in ba sing se

Anti Anti-Zutara:

the official zutara dissertation (p.3)

"zutara would face too much opposition from their countries"

"zuko and katara are a colonizer/colonized ship"

"zuko and katara would fight all the time”

"platonic zutara is better than romantic zutara"

"fire lady katara is racist"

“zuko would’ve taken lightning for anyone”

“katara is too traumatized by the fire nation”

“shipping zutara is amatonormative”

ATLA Ship Criticism:

the official zutara dissertation: part 4 | part 5 | part 6

why mai.ko was never intended to be canon

mailee is a better ship than mai.ko

how kat.aang could've been fixed

kat.aang's lack of trust in the southern raiders

emotional labour in kat.aang

kat.aang’s narrative imbalance

comparing katara and aang's parenting

the fortuneteller does not foreshadow kat.aang

ATLA/LOK:

azula/katara parallels

katara's choice in the crossroads of destiny

was zuko's betrayal in-character?

zuko's comments in the southern raiders

zuko's comments in the southern raiders (pt. 2)

zuko is not a “bad boy”

zuko’s treatment of aang in sozin’s comet

sokka didn't feel inferior to katara

did mai fear azula?

comparing mai and toph

azula vs zuko: the tragedy of narrative foils

should aang have killed ozai?

sexism in the water tribes

thoughts on the atla comics

writing a final battle: kung fu panda vs atla

gratuitous violence in the legend of korra

The Hunger Games:

zutara and everlark parallels

zutara and everlark parallels (pt. 2)

gale's arc in the hunger games trilogy

the myth of humanity's inherent evil

the ending of lucy gray

Squid Game:

individualism under capitalism

the ethics of billionaires

[maxcreatesthings]

hey jercy fans :D have a little doodle of the sillies that i made <3

The digital doodle

And the original doodle!!

[saltpepperbeard]

No because, the way Stede keeps his eyes blissfully closed well after the kiss ends, and the way he looks so fondly at Ed when his eyes finally open, and the way you can see Ed’s cheeks tilt upwards with the start of his own smile, and the way Ed keeps his hand gently on Stede’s face, and the way they stay so impossibly close together, and the way Ed’s nose brushes against Stede’s because they’re so close together, and—

[deoidesign]

please please please please please please please let me tell you about this comic I want to make it so bad please I can not wait I am losing it

If I don't make the comic then I'm not going to make it... I need other people to see what is in my brain so I'm not the only one going feral over them

[a2zillustration]

I carried this thing for MONTHS with the EXPRESS PURPOSE of putting Raphael in it (knowing full well Larian wouldn't let me do that, mechanically) and I had one major miscalculation.

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[[ All Croissant Adventures (chronological, desktop) ]]

[[ All Croissant Adventures (app) ]]

[bonetrousledbones]

who else is feeling really normal about undertale turning nine years old in ten days

[120percents]

i just think it’s so funny that zoro does not even wanna comment on the usokaya situation when usopp explicitly asks and he very pointedly looks away when they kiss and yet he proceeds to butt in every single time sanji flirts with a woman or implies he knows about romance to redirect attention back on himself like god i wonder where your interests lie…

[casual-praxis]

I know people joke about Vio being an awful liar in the infiltration arc of the manga, but honestly, it seems to me like he's oddly good at it.

I'm usually really irked when characters (who are trying) aren't able to lie their way out of a situation (because they're bad at it or stumble over the explanation), but that didn't happen with Vio. Everything he told Shadow when he got caught at the mirror made sense.

"Why did you hit him?" (Shadow is cautious, but not outright hostile. He trusts Vio enough to hear him out.)

"I was examining the mirror, and he just attacked!" (This is technically true. The hinox didn't know about Tingle being there or what Vio was actually doing, he just attacked. Vio was defending himself.) "I think he was sleep walking." (Outright lie. But not a very suspicious one. Could have been waved off as a misunderstanding had the situation been de-escalated.)

"Someone was trying to break the mirror!" (Shadow doesn't seem to be looking at Vio, he doesn't immediately suspect him. Vio notices.)

"I saw a strange little man earlier." (True.) "It might've been him." (Not accusing, just shifting focus to another suspect.)

"The last two heroes may have snuck in." (Shadow believes him, presumably, and tries to rationalize who Vio may have seen. Because who tf even is Tingle at this point.)

"Yeah..." (Vio rolls with it, attempting to widen the suspect pool. Probably the only place he really fumbled, but hindsight is 20/20, he didn't know the full scope of the mirror or why Shadow might be approaching it.) "That's probably it." (Sealed his fate here. Had he just said, "no, it was someone else," Shadow might not have tried to check their location, though he may have anyway given it was on his mind.)

From here it just falls apart, but I'd argue it had less to do with Vio's lying ability and more with dumb luck (or lack thereof). I do think Vio could have spun the situation with Green being alive had he the time to, but the mirror kinda outed him and his murderous ways before it came to that (Green's group has a fairy. Prolonged observation of the group would have revealed that eventually, Vio just had to double down on the confusion up until then and he'd probably be fine?)

Really makes you wonder what the og Link was like for Vio's acting to be so convincing.