#RESPECT THAT STATUS

[savrenim]

watched the first 30 minutes of the new live action ATLA bc I was Curious and they have already committed three different mortal sins that I can't Not Rant about, spoilers for the first 30 minutes below the cut

1. They rearranged the order of storytelling to open with the Fire Nation attacking the Air Nomads.

And I'm not.... totally sure why? Like, my guess is either "we need to make an immediate dramatic hook for the people who have never seen ATLA before!" or "we need to explain the background for the people who have never seen ATLA before!" But the truth is, people never saw ATLA before it came out, and they were perfectly fine catching on to learning about what happened to the Air Nomads and the geopolitical state of the world in media res!! That is not an excuse!

By opening with The Attack On The Air Nomads, not only do they rob the audience of getting to do my favorite thing throughout, which is the ability to piece together backstory via being told details as the story goes on, but it also..... vastly undermines the impact that That Attack Happening is going to have later in the story. Instead of piecing together tragedy from 100-year-old ruins and getting the moment of "oh god" and imagining it, we're shown it directly upfront onscreen, which not only to me comes across as unnecessary and gratuitous violence, but it means that every time in the story that The Air Nomads Are All Dead is going to come up, instead of it being this weighty thing that we can only imagine that each small detail adds even more to that weight, the payoff was all upfront. We've seen it, there's nothing to imagine, any detail they give us is not adding to our understanding of the tragedy and increasing the tragedy to us at all, it's just a reference to the opening scene.

2. STATUS!!!!!

So 'Status' is a concept that I rant about a lot and am highly sensitive to in writing, probably bc in the gay theater camp day camps the first thing you need to teach your 8-year-olds in improv workshop is How To Respect Status if you want to have at all a reasonable adventure game; otherwise you have kids interrupting the king's big dramatic speech and hence Undermining The King's Authority and the adventure game falls apart but also so you don't get trapped in scenes where you've got two characters yelling back and forth "well I'm [this thing] so you should respect me!!" and the complete lack of respect between them totally undermines what both of them are saying and the fiction falls apart. I kind of joke but not really that I stopped watching Supernatural in like. season 8?? 9?? because there was some episode with Greek Gods and you got to the finale of the episode and Zeus was going "dO YOU KNOW WHO I AM??? I'M ZEUS. I'M A GOD. PUNY MORTAL" and Sam and Dean went "dO YOU KNOW WHO WE ARE??? WE'RE THE WINCHESTERS. WE TOOK DOWN SATAN AND ALSO SATAN'S MORE EVIL OLDER COUSIN. PUNY MONSTER OF THE WEEK" and I went "by day three of camp my nightmare 8-year-olds can do Status better than this. Why am I even watching this?"

In the first scene, the live-action ATLA severely undermines the status of the Fire Nation and Fire Lord and then continuous to do so throughout the entire opening.

The initial scene is some random Earth Kingdom spy running away with Fire Nation plans to attack the Earth Kingdom and getting captured and dragged before Fire Lord Sozin (to be?? monologued at by Fire Lord Sozin of 'HAH you fell into my TRAP, those plans were FAKE, we're attacking the AIR NOMADS' which is just. dumb. kill the spy, don't monologue at him and kill him, but also why the fuck are you letting an Earthbender spy into your presence in the first place???????) which besides the aforementioned letting?? an earthbender spy??? into his presence in the first place????? He:

is not wearing particularly fancier clothes than the other people around him; like, they're okay, but the 'total desaturation of all colors including/especially in the clothing' aesthetic that Netflix has going makes it not look very royal. that shit should have been BRIGHT red or 10x fancier to make up for the fact that it wasn't Bright Red

they are STANDING IN THE THRONE ROOM and INSTEAD OF BEING BEHIND THE CURTAIN OF FLAMES he's just STANDING DOWN THERE on the SAME LEVEL AS EVERYONE ELSE????? WHY ARE YOU EVEN IN THE THRONE ROOM IF THE FIRE LORD IS???? NOT ON THE THRONE?????? JUST STANDING AROUND???? THE FIRE LORD DOES NOT JUST STAND AROUND WHERE IS THE POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE OF THE OFFICE????????????

and then beyond the absolute idiocy and letting a nobody no-name spy into his presence like that and dramatically revealing battle plans fucking idiot deserves to be assassinated for letting a spy earthbender get within three feet of him that's just extremely bad royal security, Sozin personally Murders this Random Spy. with his own firebending hands.

One of the whole things that makes ~the Fire Lord~ so terrifying is the sheer amount of weight around The Institution Of The Fire Lord, the courts and the backstabbing nobles of the fire nation, both the extreme imperial politics and complications there but also the almost deification of the office itself. The Fire Lord is untouchable, I forget if it's fanon or canon that they've got a 'descended directly from Agni / divine right' thing going but if it's fanon at least canon has those vibes, and one of the biggest aspects of the finale of the whole show is the combination of Azula's meltdown making it so that even though she was 'Fire Lady' she.... wasn't particularly scarier because in panicking and banishing everyone she'd totally undermined her own power structure, but also realizing that Ozai was Actually Just Some Dude Who Sure Was Pretty Good At Firebending And A Really Shit Person And Terrifying For What He'd Done With His Power but he wasn't a god, he wasn't impossible to defeat, when push came to shove he was just a firebender and as such his power could be stripped.

Fire Lord Sozin standing on the same level as his advisors and a random earthbender spy, and then doing things with his own hands, instead of, you know, sitting on that throne behind that wall of fire while this scene was happening if this scene really needed to happen in the first place, totally undermines that sort of deification level of status that the Fire Lord is supposed to have. Sozin becomes an Evil Scary Murderer Villain, sure, but what proceeds to be established about his character is. Nothing to set him apart from "a particularly skilled Firebender." Hell not even that, as nothing ever demonstrates that he's substantially more skilled than the firebending soldiers around him!!!!!!!

And it undermines the severity of the threat of the whole Fire Nation to undermine the status of the Fire Lord and hence the Thing That Makes The Next Fire Lord So Scary. hnnnnnnnnnng.

3. Every single character keeps giving extremely stilted monologues about how they're feeling?

It just feels like Bad Writing. And it also kind of feels like incorrect characterizatons? Big "he would NOT say that" mood but also just, like. Aang giving a three minute monologue purely to Appa about how he never asked for the responsibility of being the Avatar, he just wants to be like other kids, that just feels. So Cookie Cutter. So "gotta check off our refusing the call so our protagonist is Relatable!" and also just he would not say that.

This doesn't quite bother me as much as the other ones because it doesn't feel like a fundamental undermining of the narrative and/or the setting but it is Highly Annoying.

anyways defs not worth the watch. 30 minutes of my life Wasted. some of the costumes are kind of nice tho so might go back for the costume refs.

[kurgy]

what do you mean a random guy hired by elon musk with no credentials told democrats they werent allowed to enter a government building they have legal access to and they just kicked their feet in the sand about it and said drat foiled again

i mean this 100% when i say this but we should kill these people and start over because "call your representatives" doesnt work when these useless cowards are my representatives. like what do you fucking mean you just complied with the orders of some random dick with absolutely no authority or power over you hired by an unelected bureaucrate to not enter a government building to do the one job we gave you to do. break down the damn door or quit your fucking job. goddamn

[mercurymoths]

Dressing up these three up like dolls

Got really into ancient Irish clothing and fashion a few months back and wanted to take a crack at redesigning Wars, Sky, and Twi’s outfits in the style !

[saturnniidae]

Big fan of the idea of Hiccup not being Berk's only hiccup/runt, he's just the only one that survived to adulthood.

Maybe even that's why people disliked him so much, because the other kids while sickly and weak, were ultimately harmless.

Meanwhile Hiccup was actively–albeit unintentionally–causing destruction and wasting resources, but being the chiefs son was probably not getting as severe punishment for it compared to the repercussions anyone else would face for, like, blowing up a building.

Like imagine these scrawny little kids are essentially dropping like flies every devastating winter, food shortage, or particularly bad dragon raid. People are constantly mourning their children, but this little fuck always causing problems and never experiencing real consequences for it (at least in the eyes of most), always somehow pulls through (sheer spite, probably). It's unfair to blame him, but then again experiencing loss always seems deceptively easier when you have something to direct your anger at and irrational things like that are just human nature

[madnessofmen]

Been toying around with the idea of pronouns as a minor game mechanic in a social manipulation game. Where there aren't any relationship meters and you have to gauge NPC opinion of you based on pronoun use and other social cues. Then I imagined getting the notification "pronoun unlocked! you can now use the informal you" and started laughing

[peaceandlove26]

the skunk of (or from) my dreams

pose + outfit from here! partially traced LOL.

and here’s melissa. DON’T FORGET HER ORIGINS.

[hustlebonezzz]

Continuation from this post

Stoli is a funny little tarnished mailwoman until a man with mommy issues and red hair enters the chat ✨👐😗

[mariocki]

RIP Clive Revill (18.4.1930 - 11.3.2025)

"It was quite an experience, and I had my doubts at one point when I thought, 'I can't do it. I can't do this. I can't find it within myself.' I had a marvelous talk with a woman who was, well, she was in charge of movement in school and she took me aside and said, 'You've got to go back to within yourself and find the truth within yourself, and if you can find that truth, never, never, never lose it because it's more than a ring on a finger. It's the absolute, innermost line within your life and your spirit.'"

[deathandnonexistentialdread]

did Kaiba use the Dimension Duel System to enter the Egyptian Afterlife so that he can duel Atem???

[julijbee]

girlbossing too close to the sun.

[muzsmocsing]

Quan Yizhen, watching Xie Lian make out with a ghost: What an effective way to exchange power, did you see how he got super strong sooo fast?? :D

Mu Qing: Oh for-

Pei Ming, uncle extraordinaire: That's right bud. Very efficient! But see, when two people love each other very much-

[too-many-rooks]

There’s something so jarring about how Hanush turns up at the end of KC2 and, whilst being friendly and complimentary to Henry, immediately puts him in his place as only a blacksmith - but it’s like, the appropriate way to speak to someone in what is meant to be Henry’s role as a squire; he sets him a menial task and reminds him of his duty to obey him, and his responsibility of looking after Hans.

It just contrasts so much to all the class differences Henry and Hans have overcome over the course of the game to get to this point in the romance where they view each other as equals and then in rolls Hanush with a fucked up sword being like. Not equals! Don’t forget he’s a servant!

[unhetalia]

everyone can always tell which of Alfred's things he bought himself and which were bought by Arthur because Arthur WILL be buying him exorbitantly priced bespoke pieces and brands God himself couldn't afford while Alfred has a backpack older than a Gen Z that he bought from a street vendor who handmade it from an old pillowcase.

[thesummerstorms]

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Noa de Acutis + Being Intimidating

[irenespring]

Look at my evil princess. I love her so much. She's an unstoppable force of chaos that is simultaneously bent on assimilation. She is the worst person ever yet I am always rooting for her. Companies rise and fall based on who she wants to invite to dinner. I want her to destroy the world.

[fairsweetlonging]

the thing that sets apart hua cheng from most other devotee/worshipper-type relationships in other media is that hua cheng would actually throw himself on his knees and crawl across the floor if xie lian wanted to, he would demean himself without shame because shame comes from the perception that you have done something wrong or foolish in another's eyes, and hua cheng would never see his god's will as either, nor care for anyone's else's opinion