#chronicles of the avatar analysis

[sillyfudgemonkeys]

Kirima vs Gyatso: The tale of the Hot(wo)man

As cute and as much as I like Gyatso making up Flameo Hotman and it looping back to ATLA (cause hey! makes sense!):

Kirima technically did it first. TT0TT (the hotman/woman part at least).

So it begs the question........... Was Hotman/woman a term before? (and just fell out of fashion 200 years later?) Was it just another annoying nickname that Kirima chose? (most likely) or BOTH? (aka it IS a term, it means "ma'am/miss/madam" but she's using it a mocking tone/not using it right).

We don't get to see Rangi's reaction so hard to say if she's as annoyed by it than the hair related ones.

Anyway. While it COULD just be another nickname, because they called Rangi "Hairpin" before they seemed to settle on "Topknot". They only use this (once), and it's AFTER they've established Topknot for a good bit. So it's a big weird (not really but eh) for them to fling out a new possible nickname when they finally established one, AND it's one they know they can get a rise out of Rangi with (literally just happened).....

So like....what if it's NOT a nickname, but she's just insulting Rangi with a word from her country and using it in a mocking manner. Like what if it translates to:

Kirima: You're not setting a very good example for the baby Avatar, Topknot. Too much rage will stunt her growth. Rangi: Stop calling me that! Kirima, bows: As you wish, madam.

Which, if read like that would make sense. But it'd mean it's not a nickname made up by Kirima with the sole purpose to piss off Rangi. It means that there is a cultural/linguistical significance to Rangi and her Nation. Which means it's a word that DID exist.

BUT....then again.... "Hotwoman" is capitalized like how Rangi's other nicknames are.....so maybe it IS a nickname? Or maybe it's just a writing stylization choice that differs between Yee and RR?

"Ok what's the post about then?" Other than demanding we give Kirima her due😤 And reminding people they already made this joke before Roku's novel 😤

Ok ok, but for real, here are my theories:

Theory 1:

It was a nickname made by Kirima just to piss Rangi off. Maybe Kirima got reincarnated as an Air Nomad named Gyatso (that'd be so fucking funny) and decided to bring that oldie but a goodie back to annoy Roku with. OR, maybe Gyatso read a diary of Kirima's and that's how he got the hotman/hotwoman idea. And made the flameo thing up himself.

Theory 2:

Hotman/woman WAS a normal word back in Kyoshi's era, but had since fallen out of use by Roku's (maybe Rangi/Kyoshi had a hand in that? jfkdlasjfd). So far out of use, Roku is just ????? confused???? (that or the Flameo part is what's confusing him, not the hotman/woman). Gyatso found some old scrolls/history books that mention the hotman/woman part and decided to bring it back (with his own spin).

Theory 3:

Either part of Theory 1/2 are right (it's either made up, or just such old slang). BUT....Gyatso didn't know about it, and thought he was inventing the wheel. Great minds think alike kinda mentality going on here.

(of course maybe they do still say hotman/woman, or even flameo hotman/woman......but they don't say it as a greeting fjksldjf)

I dunno I had some thoughts on the matter and the implications. Maybe RR and the ATLA team forgot Yee already made the joke. Maybe they remembered and didn't care/have a reasoning behind it that I don't know about jfklsajfdl I just thought it was an interesting thing to chew on.

[creampuffqueen]

Avatar Yangchen & The Elements

Alright, here we go. I’m writing the essay. Make sure to take notes; this will be on the exam.

Every Avatar has an element that they struggle with. An element that they struggle to master, an element that just isn’t as powerful compared to the others they use. Aang’s was earthbending. Roku’s was waterbending. Korra’s was airbending.

This is my case for Yangchen’s ‘struggle’ element being water.

(Note: This will contain major spoilers for both Yangchen novels. Her appearance in The Rift comic is also mentioned, but less spoiler-y)

For starters, I decided to compare how often Yangchen uses each of the four elements throughout the material we have of her. (Because I definitely don’t have anything better I could be doing with my free time lol).

This, obviously, being air, water, earth, and fire. I also decided to include a separate category specifically for healing. I know that healing is a sub-bending form of waterbending, but I felt the need to compare how often she uses water for healing versus other purposes.

[ain’t my table so nifty? i look like a real professional!]

Behold! The bending table!

You can pretty quickly notice a pattern. Air is obviously her preferred element, which tracks, as she’s an airbender. Her second most preferred element is earth. I actually think it’s a fun little opposite to Aang! Yangchen’s second-favorite element is earth, and she struggles the most with water, whereas Aang’s second-favorite element is water, and he struggles the most with earth. 

Fire and water is where things get a bit blurry. She technically uses fire less than water, even less so considering the amount of waterbending healing she does. Also note how she uses waterbending healing just slightly less than waterbending for other reasons.

However, this has a pretty simple explanation that still fits with my point: Firebending is just… not convenient. Firebending certainly has many uses, but throughout the canon universe of ATLA, a vast majority of firebending is used for combat. Even in instances where the Fire Nation is not the enemy! Think about TLOK, think about all of the novels. How often is firebending used outside of combat? 

Yangchen just doesn’t encounter many situations where fire is the best element to use. And yet, despite this, she still manages to use fire only a bit less than water. Whenever there is an opportunity for her to use fire, she takes it.

Another strike against fire as the contender for her weakest element: Yangchen is confident about her firebending skills. At one point in Dawn, she considers challenging a Fire National to an Agni Kai. And, quote, “She was pretty sure she’d win, too.”

Outside of some of her thoughts while in the Avatar State, this is the only instance of her having this level of confidence in her own bending abilities. I don’t think someone who’s weakest element was fire would be like ‘nah, i’d win’ while they thought about an Agni Kai.

Okay, okay, so she doesn’t use waterbending a ton. We get it. What’s the point?

The other point I wanted to talk about was specifically how Yangchen uses waterbending. When she’s not using water for healing, her other instances of using waterbending are… pretty simple moves, actually.

Some examples: Freezing small amounts of water. Forcing a jet of water straight up into the air. Adding a ‘sparkling twirl’ to a waterbending performance she attends. Melting a patch of snow in her path.

Compare that to some of her other bending moves: Creating literal air vacuums. Heating an entire room with firebending. Holding back a rockslide, by herself, with earthbending. (She also has some talent for sandbending, which, from the info we have in canon, seems somewhat difficult).

The most complicated thing that Yangchen does with water? Healing.

Now, she does have a couple impressive waterbending moves in the novels. She pushes aside an entire hillside of snow during Dawn, and bends a massive section of the ocean floor dry during Legacy.

The difference with these two instances versus her other waterbending? She has to power herself up with the Avatar State to achieve them. And for parting the sea during Legacy? She actually first powers herself up with the Avatar State, uses airbending to create a giant vacuum to initially part the ocean, and only starts using waterbending once the water has been parted. She doesn’t actually use waterbending to part the sea, just to hold it at bay.

Compare that to the rest of her bending. Yangchen is walking around doing some crazy feats with air and earth, no Avatar State needed. But when it comes to waterbending? She needs that boost to achieve something similar.

Furthermore, Yangchen just… doesn’t instinctively use water.

This can be seen a few times. I’ll bring up the comic The Rift first. Yeah, I know, we’re not huge fans of the comics, but they are canon material and therefore I can use them as a reference.

I skimmed the comic just to see what kind of bending she was using, and just like in the novels, it was largely air and earth. She actually only uses waterbending once in the comic: When she enters the Avatar State and does the iconic all-four-elements-bubble. She is literally fighting a spirit that came up from the ocean… with mostly earth and fire.

Also, at the end of Legacy, Yangchen takes Feishan out on a boat ride, to, you know, relax (or to make him piss his pants in fear). In the scene, she mentions not using waterbending to sail, instead sailing completely without bending. Then, when she calls on Yingsu to make some warning shots (2 of the 6 waterbending moments in the book are right here) she keeps the boat from capsizing, not with waterbending, but with… sailing skills. Quote: “A sailor’s instinct as opposed to a bender’s, but it did the job.”

Even in a place surrounded by water, Yangchen chooses a different route instead of waterbending. Not even intentionally! She just doesn’t have an instinct to use it.

Alright, so we’ve established that Yangchen doesn’t use waterbending all that often, and doesn’t seem to have much instinct to use it over other elements.

Why is this?

Now it’s time to take a dive into the philosophy of waterbending, and why the element of water specifically would be difficult for Yangchen to master.

Every element has a philosophy behind it, some kind of method of thinking that needs to be had in order to be successful at bending it. Air is the element of freedom, earth is the element of substance, fire is the element of strength. Water is the element of change.

More specifically, the philosophy of waterbending is the concept of “go with the flow”, the concept of push and pull, the concept of being adaptable.

These concepts all have something in common - a lack of control.

I’m going to pivot ever so slightly here to talk about Korra. Specifically, Korra’s struggles with airbending.

As mentioned before, air is the element of freedom, and is an element connected to a person’s spirituality. These are some of the reasons Korra struggled so badly with learning airbending: she wasn’t raised with any kind of freedom, she wasn’t given any reason to hone her spiritual side. Of course airbending was hard for her; the entire philosophy behind it was completely foreign to her because of her upbringing!

What does this have to do with Yangchen?

(note to self: write Yangchen & Korra parallels meta next. why is nobody talking about how similar they are…)

Just like how the idea of freedom was foreign to Korra, the idea of losing control goes against Yangchen’s entire personality.

Yangchen’s life is almost completely out of her own control at the best of times. The Platinum Affair was started when she was a child, too young to do anything to stop it. And yet, the event shifted the entire trajectory of her life, forcing her to work to repair the world from an international affair she had no control over. She blames her lack of control for her sister’s death. She doesn’t even have control over her own mind. 

To put it into even more simple words: Yangchen is a control freak, and for understandable reasons.

So imagine getting your newest waterbending student: an eager young airbender who does everything in her power to hold onto the little control she has over her own life.

And then you tell her, “In order for you to bend this element, you have to just go with the flow.”

Of course she would struggle with it over the other elements she has to learn! Earth? That’s about being stubborn, determined. Yangchen has no problems with their of those. Fire? It’s about power, decisiveness. Not an issue for her either.

Water? Letting go of control? Accepting change? Now those concepts are going to take some effort to get the hang of.

This reasoning also connects pretty seamlessly as to why Yangchen is such a phenomenal healer, why she uses waterbending to heal almost the same amount of times she uses it for other purposes.

When she’s healing, she’s in control. When she’s healing, she’s making a notable change. When she’s healing, she’s actually making a difference to somebody’s life, something she struggles profoundly to achieve outside the hospital. Healing is a type of waterbending that Yangchen can truly control, so it’s no wonder that she’s drawn to it so strongly.

To round things out, this isn’t to say that Yangchen is a weak waterbender. At the end of the day, she is a waterbending master. She’s certainly a better waterbender than your average Joe Schmoe.

But when you compare water to her other elements, it’s clear to me that she isn’t called as strongly to it as, say, earth. It’s clear that water, and the philosophy behind its bending, would be something she would struggle with.

Water is Avatar Yangchen’s weakest element.

[showmethesnowplz]

Credit to @totallytranstazertoastedtatortot because this is so well put and I love it.

I get how Z and their ideology is just a really fucked up way of running away from your problems, but the passage of time displeases me and the endless now sounds quite appealing at the moment.

[found-family-tournament]

Best Found Family Tournament

Submissions are closed.

Give me as much propaganda and images as possible. It gives your fams a higher chance of winning.

Every piece of propaganda and every picture or gif I get. In the submissions and in my asks will be added to the poll post every round.

Please inform me if any of the images or information are wrong. Or if you have a better image that I could use.

If there are any questions or requests of any sort. Askbox.

I try to reblog all the propaganda I get in my reblogs, but if you want to make sure I don't accidentally overlook yours, please tag me.

Inspired by other cool blogs like @bluehairandpronouns-tournament @gender-swag-bracket @bestsiblingstournament @musicalcharactertournament @dead-character-showdown @t4tswagbracket @thegreatbigdetectivepolll @trafficlighttriobracket @thebestcartoontournament @noncanongayestbitchestournament @animatedfightthrowdown @bestcharacterwithfirepowers

Links under the cut

Round 1:

Part 1:

The Runaways (Marvel's Runaways) vs The Knights of Camelot (BBC Merlin)

The Wayward Children (The Wayward Children / Every Heart a Doorway) vs Gekkagumi (A3!)

The Faraway Friends (OMORI) vs The Spring Troupe (A3!)

Bee Happy (Matilda) vs The Night at the Museum Gang (Night at the Museum)

Winter Troupe (A3!) vs Gwendolyn, The Will, Lying Cat and Sophie (Saga (Comic))

Part 2:

The SHIELD Team (Agents of SHIELD) vs Hershel Layton, Luke Triton & Flora Reinhold (Professor Layton Games)

The Band of Boobs (Not Another D&D Podcast) vs Saiki and his friends (The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.)

The Third Mates/The Choo Choo Crew (Not Another D&D Podcast) vs The Crystal Gems (Steven Universe)

Team Dark (Sonic the Hedgehog) vs Kipo & Wolf (Kipo)

Dethklok (Metalocalypse) vs The Robinsons (Meet the Robinsons)

Part 3:

Interview with the Vampire Vampires (Interview with the Vampire) vs The Forgers (Spy x Family)

The Mechanisms (The Mechanisms) vs The Scooby Gang (Scooby Doo)

Izumi & Sig Curtis & Edward & Alphonse Elric (Fullmetal Alchemist) vs The Clump (Don't Hug Me I'm Scared)

The Hamato Clan/Mad Dogz (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (rottmnt)) vs Team Victor (Vicious)

The Black Bulls (Black Clover) vs The Leverage Crew (Leverage)

Part 4:

MASH team (M*A*S*H) vs The Behavioural Analysis Unit (Criminal Minds)

Spider Crew (So I'm A Spider So What?) vs The Joestar Group (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure)

RTDL Quarted (Kirby) vs The Avengers (MCU Fanfiction)

Brave Vesperia (Tales of Vesperia) vs The Animorphs (Animorphs)

The Dolls (The Sandman) vs Team Rocket (Pokémon)

Part 5:

The Love Trio (Welcome to Demon School Iruma-Kun) vs Maka, Soul, Tsubaki, Black Star, Death the Kid, Crona, Patty, Liz (Soul Eater)

The Gaang (Avatar the Last Airbender) vs Die Wilden Kerle (Die Wilden Kerle)

Alex & Jonas (Oxenfree) vs The Gluttony Crew (The Evillious Chronicles)

Watari & L Lawliet (Death Note) vs The Cat's Whiskers (Paradox Live)

The Rowdy 3 (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency) vs Mae, Greg, Angus & Bea (Night in the Woods)

Part 6:

The Crew of the Serenity (Firefly & Serenity) vs The Crew of the Iris (The Strange Case of Starship Iris)

Lucifam (Lucifer) vs Team Bleck/Bleck Squad (Super Paper Mario)

The Ericson Kids (The Walking Dead Game) vs Accelerator, Last Order, Aiho Yomikawa, Kikyou Yoshikawa & Misaka Worst (A Certain Magical Index)

Squad 312 (the Aurora Cycle series) vs The Fatui Harbingers (Genshin Impact)

13 and the Gang (Doctor Who) vs Franchouchou (Zombie Land Saga)

Part 7:

Dadvid & Momgwen (Camp Camp) vs Bucci Gang/Team Bucciarati (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure)

Akanyatsura (Paradox Live) vs 11s Fam (Doctor Who)

Team Red (Carmen Sandiego) vs The Ghosts (BBC Ghosts)

Firefam (9-1-1) vs Murder Family (Hannibal)

The Golden Deer (Fire Emblem) vs Mikazuki Villa (Magia Record)

Part 8:

NYPD Major Crimes (Prodigal Son) vs Diasomnia Fam (Twisted Wonderland)

Warden Ingo, Akari, Rei & Professor Laventon (Pokemon Legends Arceus) vs New Who Crew (Doctor Who)

Nahida & Scaramouche/Wanderer (Genshin Impact) vs The Circle Kids (Tamora Pierce's Emelan Universe (The Circle of Magic Quartet))

The Shazamily (Shazam!) vs The Clawthorne-Nocedas (The Owl House)

The Losers Club (It) vs The Mondstadt Crew (Genshin Impact)

Part 9:

The Entire Your Turn to Die Cast (Your Turn to Die) vs Funn Funerals & Eric (Wooden Overcoats)

Because You Made Me Smile (or Extended Tenma Household) (Project SEKAI) vs The Aurinko Crime Family (The Penumbra Podcast (Juno Steel))

Silco & Jinx (Arcane) vs The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (& Associates) (GLOW)

Dark Dragon and the Happy Hungry Bunch (Akatsuki no Yona/Yona of the Dawn) vs MSR (The X-Files)

Ash & Pikachu (Pokémon) vs The Thief Gang/House of Orphans (The Thief Lord)

Part 10:

Powder, Vi, Vander, Mylo & Claggor (Arcane) vs Space Runaways (Saga (Comic))

The Victors of District 12 (The Hunger Games) vs The Killjoys (Killjoys)

The St Cassians Chamber Choir (Ride The Cyclone) vs Six of Crows/The Crows (Six of Crows)

The Gangsey (The Raven Cycle) vs Paper Girls (Paper Girls)

The Bad Kids (Dimension 20 - Fantasy High) vs The Drawtectives (Drawtectives (Drawfee))

Part 11:

Team Natsu (Fairy Tail) vs Yutaka, Minoru & Tane (Our Dining Table)

The Scions of the Seventh Dawn (Final Fantasy XIV) vs Neal Caffrey, Peter & Elizabeth Burke & Mozzie (White Collar)

Scoobies (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) vs Sypha Belnades, Trevor Belmont & Alucard (Castlevania)

I.M.P. (Helluva Boss) vs The New Mutants (X-Men Comics)

The Bad Batch (The Bad Batch) vs Leorio, Kurapika, Gon & Killua (Hunter X Hunter)

Part 12:

Date-Sagan Family (AI: The Somnium Files) vs God Kids (Trials of Apollo)

Crew of the Per Aspera (Rolling with Difficulty) vs Reyna Ramirez & Nico Di Angelo (Riordanverse)

The Crew of the Revenge (Our Flag Means Death) vs The Crisis Management Team (Tomorrow)

Joel Miller & Ellie Williams (The Last of Us) vs Hotel OJ (Inanimate Insanity)

Wangxian + Junior Quartet (Mo Dao Zu Shi/Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation/The Untamed) vs Phoenix (MacGyver)

Part 13:

Nightchord25 (Project SEKAI) vs The Wayfarer's Crew (The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet)

Jessica, Aaron & Erica Slaughter (Something Is Killing the Children) vs Color Gang (Animation vs Minecraft/Animator vs Animation)

Sk8 Fam (Sk8 the Infinity) vs The Pilot Program (Misfits and Magic (Dimension 20))

Killing School Trip Survivors (Danganronpa 2) vs Sea Salt Family (Kingdom Hearts)

The Ten Companions of the Dragonmark (How To Train Your Dragon (Books)) vs Cohen-Atwood Family (The OC)

Part 14:

Arya Stark, Gendry Waters, Hot Pie (& Lommy Greenhands & Jaqen H'Gar) (A Song of Ice & Fire/Game of Thrones) vs Old World Group (Everworld)

Lightning Thief Trio (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) vs California Bureau of Investigation (The Mentalist)

Adora, Glimmer & Bow (She-Ra) vs Disaster Trio/The Clone Wars Trio (Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008))

Kim Dokja's Company (Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint) vs 13 Flame Chasers (Honkai Impact 3rd)

Ren Amamiya, Futaba Sakura & Sojiro Sakura (Persona 5) vs Batfam (Batman Media (Wayne Family Adventures))

Part 15:

The Soul Squad (The Good Place) vs The Paladins of Voltron (Voltron: Legendary Defenders)

Inheritance Gang (Eragon/the Inheritance Cycle) vs Strawhat Pirates (One Piece)

10's Crew (Doctor Who) vs Clementine & Lee Everett (The Walking Dead Game)

Wendy, Soos, Stanford, Stanley, Dipper, Mabel & Waddles (Gravity Falls) vs The Local Group (Rain World)

Five Eccentrics/Five Oddballs (Ensemble Stars) vs The Luminary, Erik, Serena, Veronica, Sylvando, Jade, Rab & Hendrik (Dragon Quest XI)

Part 16:

The Meta Knights (Kirby) vs The Queens from the Musical Six (Six)

Shroud Bros (Twisted Wonderland) vs Natsume's Protection Squad (Natsume's Book of Friends)

The Long Island Vampires & Guillermo (What We Do In The Shadows) vs The Octotrio (Twisted Wonderland)

The Lupin Gang (Lupin III) vs The Fellowship of the Ring (Lord of the Rings)

The Gang (It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia) vs Regina Mills, Emma Swan & Henry Mills (Once Upon a Time)

Part 17:

Torchwood Team (Torchwood) vs MANKAI Company (A3!)

Julie and the Phantoms (Julie and the Phantoms) vs Yeo Joon, Kim So-Bin & Nam Soo-Hyun (At a Distance Spring is Green)

Second Nonary Game Group (Zero Escape: 9 Hours 9 Persons 9 Doors) vs Chosen Siblings (Pokespe/Pokemon Adventures)

The Seven Birds/IPRE/Starblaster Crew (The Adventure Zone: Balance) vs Boys from the Dwarf (Red Dwarf)

The Tiny Giant Duo (The BFG) vs The Greendale 7/The Study Group (Community)

[airspeedprime]

Chapter 13 Analysis video is up now.

Check out the Playlist for all previous chapter analysis videos

[tamras-shieldmaiden]

Crackpot theory # 257:

Things that make you go hmmm...

This quote is from An Avatar's Chronicle, page 42.

"The Spirit World is influenced by the will of those who enter it. As the bridge between the spiritual and physical planes, Avatars have even more power to change the energy of the Spirit World landscape and the spirits that inhabit it.

You, future Avatar, have the power to make it a beautiful place, with fields of flowers and mountains with nesting fire dragon birds...or you can make it a spooky forest full of dark, angry spirits. It's truly up to you (scary, I know)."

So, if the appearance of the Spirit World landscape is up to the Avatar, does it mean that this was intentional?

Notice the color scheme of the field of flowers *cough bisexual lighting cough*

In Korra's defense though, she couldn't help it. Kuvira was just too damned hot.

[renegadewangs]

Van Zieks - the Examination, part 12

Warnings: SPOILERS for The Great Ace Attorney: Chronicles. Additional warning for racist sentiments uttered by fictional characters (and screencaps to show these sentiments).

Disclaimer: (see Part 1 for the more detailed disclaimer.) - These posts are not meant to be taken as fact. Everything I’m outlining stems from my own views and experiences. If you believe that I’ve missed or misinterpreted something, please let me know so I can edit the post accordingly. -The purpose of these posts is an analysis, nothing more. Please do not come into these posts expecting me to either defend Barok van Zieks from haters, nor expecting me to encourage the hatred. - I’m using the Western release of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles for these posts, but may refer to the original Japanese dialogue of Dai Gyakuten Saiban if needed to compare what’s said. This also means I’m using the localized names and localized romanization of the names to stay consistent. -It doesn’t matter one bit to me whether you like Barok van Zieks or dislike him. However, I will ask that everyone who comments refrains from attacking real, actual people.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11

Let's bring this thing home! It's time for the conclusion of the essay series!

Conclusion With a stupidly long essay series behind us, it's time to look at what we've learned! Let's go back to Part 1 and review what we needed from Van Zieks's character development for a fully rounded redemption arc, shall we?

1) Present an antagonistic (possibly immoral) force who personifies Ryunosuke’s biggest personal obstacle/weakness, in this case racial prejudice. 2) Humanizing traits begin to show. OPTIONAL: A backstory to justify any immorality he has. 3) Over time, Barok has his realization and sees the error of his ways. 4) Barok atones for his immorality, not simply through apology but by taking decisive steps. 5) The cast around him acknowledges his efforts and forgives him.

And looking at the main game (plus additional dialogue), we have...

1) Antagonistic force:

Etc. etc. I have many of these. We can all agree that as an antagonistic force, he does his job quite well. CEO of Racism and White Privilege in the flesh. It works, since we as the audience get very frustrated and want to see him defeated.

2) Humanization:

Giving him an old friend to be a defendant was a brilliant move, really. Albert's reflection on the friendship and the person Van Zieks used to be really helped flesh him out and make him appear more like a human being with, y'know, emotions and weaknesses. The little snippets of dialogue in his office really help too. Presenting evidence can also lead to fun tidbits. All in all, considering how gruff and distant Van Zieks is, they really did their very best to humanize him. The writers were given very little to work with but they exploited every opportunity to come their way.

OPTIONAL backstory:

Again, I don't think we needed a tragic backstory to have a well-rounded, redeemable character. Still, it ties in very expertly to the game's plot and the motivations of quite a few other characters. The story of Klint van Zieks and his death isn't necessarily Barok van Zieks's backstory, it's the center of an intricate web which also holds Kazuma, Stronghart, Gregson, Jigoku, (S)Holmes, Mikotoba, Sithe, Drebber- I could go on. A LOT. So because of how very integrated it is into the main narrative's recurring themes and characters, I'll give it props for being relevant and well thought out. The bigger question is: Does it justify his immorality? Not entirely. I think the game could have gotten more out of this if they'd involved the other two exchange students in this tale just a bit more. They could have given more attention to how Jigoku's aggressive behavior in the trial impacted Van Zieks, and explained whether he might've suspected Mikotoba of sabotaging (S)Holmes's investigation. If the narrative had done that, all three Japanese people to come to London would have been ‘the bad guy’ in Van Zieks's eyes and it would have given more credence to his racial generalization. They could have also given more attention to how the people around him reacted to Genshin being the Professor, because I'm sure Stronghart and Gregson stoked the fire in terms of xenophobia. As it stands, there isn't really enough there to justify hatred of an entire race as opposed to just one person.

3) Realization/Redemption

We see him already start to realize the error of his ways around the end of 1-5, which is technically only about halfway into the full narrative. Unfortunately, thanks to 2-2 being played afterwards (but chronologically set before 1-5), any progress made in 1-5 can become invalidated in the player's eyes. Growth works best when it's done linear. Don't get me wrong, flashbacking to earlier times when a character is still more morally tainted can work well, but it needs to be executed properly. Barok's behavior in 2-2 is downright insulting towards the audience itself and therefore, it causes emotional friction when relaying the narrative endgoal of redemption. It also makes it extra jarring when we hit 2-3, and suddenly Van Zieks is meant to be relying on the protagonist's desire to expose the truth. How on earth can we as the audience trust that Van Zieks believes in Ryu's abilities when we just came fresh out of a case where this man actively sabotages Ryu's efforts?

Still, the line of redemption continues from 2-3 into 2-4 well enough. He admits that he was wrong- that his hatred was illogical and that he needs to change. This is the very definition of redemption. I need to stress once more this is not to be confused with atonement, which comes next.

4) Atonement

Here it is. It's not enough to simply acknowledge mistakes; one needs to work hard to fix them. Since Van Zieks is the defendant for two whole episodes, equaling roughly 20% of the full narrative and 67% of the time following his first true realization (chronologically), there isn't much that he can actively do to atone. Because remember, not only do these actions need to fit the situation he's currently in, they need to fit his personality. These two limitations ensure the atonement mostly takes the form of dialogue. Of apologies.

One might want to point out that he never apologizes specifically for his racism, but there's a reason for that. If you pay close attention, you'll notice that there isn't a single character who ever uses a word like “racism”, “xenophobia” or even “racial prejudice” in this game. It's for the same reason you'll never see an Ace Attorney character utter words like “alcoholism”, “drug abuse” or “depression”. These things may be implied very strongly, to the point where you'll know for certain a character is suffering from it, but it's never given these exact labels. It has to do with the tone of the game. In Great Ace Attorney's dialogue, Barok van Zieks is only ever described as holding “a deep hatred for Japanese”, which is then the only thing he could apologize for. And he does, so long as you aren't looking for a literal phrasing of “I apologize for my deep hatred of your people”.

Regardless, he can't take more active, decisive action until he's freed from prison and two scenes with Van Zieks later, the game has ended. He still manages to take two actions, though! The first is to publicize the truth of the Professor, taking the blame of the mass murders off Genshin's shoulders (and losing his own privilege in the process). The second is to take Kazuma under his wing as his disciple. I'm not certain there's anything else the narrative could have had him do. What is decisively missing, however, is the following:

5) Acknowledgment

The above aren't good examples of cast acknowledgment that Van Zieks is taking part in a redemption arc, rather, they're the best I could find. Characters are acknowledging that he's changing- that he's being kinder to them and they can get along with him now, but they're not acknowledging that he caused hurt in the first place. This, in my opinion, is the Great Ace Attorney's biggest narrative flaw. I've talked before about how Ryu's reaction to Van Zieks's racism is 'indirect communication', a typically Japanese manner of dealing with negativity. I've also talked about how Ryu is not in a position to speak up, as he's a literal minority who is there to represent his country in an official capacity and can’t afford to make enemies. However, characters like Susato and Kazuma are far more outspoken in their opinions, as is Soseki. The only one who ever calls Van Zieks out on his racism is the British judge, and even that is done very meekly. When an old crusty white guy is the one who condemns white privilege in a cast full of minorities, you've got a problem. The Japanese cast's refusal to acknowledge that Van Zieks's words were harmful is like Team Avatar telling Zuko that sure, he can join since he's a good guy now, but never once acknowledging that he burned down villages or betrayed everyone's trust in Ba Sing Se. There's something very vital missing, see? If indeed the cast had called Van Zieks out more actively on his harmful ways and how necessary it was for him to change, he in turn could have taken more atonement steps in response.

So, for the conclusion: Does Barok van Zieks tick all the necessary boxes for a complete redemption arc? Yes. In a very technical sense, all the requirements are there. But does that mean it's a successful arc? Not necessarily. The game has a few slip-ups, a few things not executed as well as they could have been. For that reason, whether the audience is satisfied with the arc is entirely up to them. Taking into consideration that they had to cram a whole lot of story into just two games- the second game in particular, I can acknowledge they did their very best with the limitations that were there.

And there we have it! That’s all I could think to say on the matter. I hope everyone who read this till the very end enjoyed it, maybe even learned a thing or two. I’m always open to questions, input and constructive criticism!

[when-wax-wings-melt]

I’m Summer!! (previously @summer-waves9764, @the-whispers-of-moonlight, and @if-only-wishes-were-answered) Hi, nice to see you!! talk to me and send me asks <33

cis, she/they, bi, jewish, american (dm me for my discord!)

Links:

Writing sideblog (@/dreaming-of-the-end)!

My Writing Masterpost (includes kotlc, rrverse, spop, amphibia)!

My keefitz longfic: A lesson in running away (the art of returning)

Roisin’s reading Rumble: Fitz and Alvar Dynamic Manifesto || Keefe Playlist || Dex Fanon vs Canon Essay || Broken Minds & Guilt Explanation || OC: Orson Riggs

The @kotlclittlemeowmeowtournament!

Keefitz Week 2023 Masterpost

Stina analysis

KOTLC analysis (Sophie, queer-coding, beauty standards) + accompanying presentation

Wattpad: Summer_waves9764

ao3: summer_waves9764!

Posts that should be pinned: top kotlc dynamics || my FAVORITE Fitz scene || haters || characters tragedy || characters || characters || characters || writing || ass || media || stupid girl summer || alvar canon vs fanon || tragic siblings || he's just like me except || yet another Fitz and Alvar tragic siblings post

Tell me if I should tag a tw or spoiler or anything; you can send an ask or dm me if you want, and I’ll try my best to tag anything.

Trigger tags will be formatted with #[trigger] tw

Main Tags: #summer gets an ask #summer rambles (for my original posts) #anon asks #[mutual] asks and the occasional #of wishes and dreams and queue

Things to tag me in: quotes, anything icarus/orpheus and eurydice, night sky things, content for any of my fandoms (including art, writing, gifmaking, etc), writing tips, etc. Feel free to tag me in any works you make! I love to see other people’s creations!

Fandoms I Post the Most for:

Keeper of the lost cities (primarily)

The owl house

The raven cycle

Grishaverse

Riordanverse

Miraculous ladybug

Other assorted fandoms you might see stuff about:

The folk of the air

Arc of a scythe

Star wars

The ever afters series (of giants and ice, etc)

The lunar chronicles

Willow (the show)

Avatar: the last airbender/Legend of korra

She-ra: princesses of power

The dragon prince

Hunger games

The witcher

Aru Shah

And also more

My favorite dynamics are the unhealthy/complex ones! Keefe and Fitz, Fitz and Alvar, Brant and Jolie, Jolie and Vertina, etc, as well as non-kotlc ones.

bigots, exclusionists, pro-lifers, anti-vaxxers, jerks, etc, this is not the place for you! Fuck off! Also, hp fans don’t interact! this includes marauders fans. that’s still hp and is an instant block.

So yeah that’s me

Talk to me and send me asks, please!!

[apple-bottom-jeansx]

Welcome to my blog!

My name is JJ, I’m 20, and ace. I use mainly she/her pronouns, but literally anything besides he/him is fine. I post mainly about TSC, Grishaverse, and THG(TBOSAS), also sometimes Psych and ATLA/LOK

My other blogs are @the-thegrinch and @sage-winnebago

I sometimes make tiktoks, theories, and playlists

Tiktok Masterlist

Theories I made for CHOI that i have yet to comment on

Great Expectations quote analysis

Jesse’s Last Breath

Chapter 18 Goblin Market

Prince of Hell

Ariadne as Proserpine/Persephone

Sleeping Beauty

CHOT theories

Ghostwriter - R&J

Jordelia but make it sad

My playlists. You’re welcome to go through my Spotify to see what all my playlists are, but I don’t post a link until the playlist is at least an hour

The Hunger Games

The Shadowhunters Chronicles

Avatar the Last Airbender

Six of Crows

I also play the violin

and i dabble in writing

[diverse-writing]

I have a character who’s a black girl with purple eyes. In the place the story is set, in one kingdom (the one she’s from) everyone has eyes like that. In other kingdoms in the world, other people have normal color eyes. I have other characters who are black women/girls who have normal eye colors. The other characters from that kingdom also have purple eyes. I’ve been told that portraying women of color with crazy colored eyes and specifically purple or pink can be offensive. Should I change it?

In my opinion? Yes, you should change this.

Let’s break this trope down a little bit. We often see the “women of color with improbably rainbow eyes” trope commonly surface in two situations:

In magical fantasy, unusual eye colors are often a physical representation of the WOC’s magical powers. The trope is especially common in media aimed at kids and young adults, though it’s occasionally found in adult demographic fiction as well. Think Piper and Hazel from Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus series, Katara from Avatar: The Last Airbender, Kida from Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Fire from Kristin Cashore’s Graceling series, Storm from Marvel Comics, Starfire from DC Comics, Arya from The Inheritance Cycle, Yennefer from The Witcher, Ada Wallace from Red Queen, Allura from Voltron: Defender of the Universe, Zèlie in Children of Blood and Bone, and so on.

Alternatively, brown and black women are given quote-unquote “interesting” eye colors to make them stand out from their fellow WOC or to make them ~exotic~ and interesting to look at.  Missandei from A Song of Ice and Fire books, Esmerelda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Winter from The Lunar Chronicles series, Nadia from The Arcana video game, etc. (I can’t come up with more examples of this one off the top of my head but rest assured, they exist.)

Within the context of your book, which category do unusual colored eyes fall into? Are unusual eyes a signifier of a character’s magic? Or are they simply a rare physical feature designed to enhance your character’s “interesting” appearance? If its option 1 where eye color correlates with magic, your narrative setup would indicate that only one country has citizens with magic, which inherently creates a power imbalance that would desperately need to be addressed. If its option 2 where eye colors are just added for interest, unless the one kingdom is physically secluded, rare eye colors would spread across the kingdoms as people migrated. Either way, it doesn’t make sense for only one kingdom to have purple eyes. 

Moving beyond the semantics of this particular book, I want to talk about why giving POC--and particularly WOC--“crazy colored eyes” is often seen as offensive. The truth of the matter is that brown in statistically the most common eye color in the world without even breaking down racial demographics; the percent of the population with brown eyes only increases once you remove white demographics from your analysis (i.e. when you’re only looking at POC). Now obviously, this doesn’t apply to all POC, but in general most of us tend to have eyes in various shades of brown. The problem arrises when light-eyed (and light-skinned) characters of color are overrepresented in comparison to actual brown-eyed POC who’s “normal” eyes aren’t as praised within general media. This impulse to give WOC “interesting” colored eyes often stems from the imposition of the white gaze or, in cases where the author is a POC, internalization of the white gaze. The end result is often the uncomfortable exotification of WOC based on how closely they adhere to Eurocentric beauty standards.

Even if you’ve created a narrative explanation for your character’s purple eyes, an in-story explanation doesn’t justify the real world implications of exoticizing women of color, especially a teenage black girl. Just because Rick Riordan had an explanation for Native American Piper McLean’s “kaleidoscope eyes” doesn’t mean that it’s a good explanation or that it has to be accepted as good representation. Ultimately, when it comes down to it, representation in literature (particularly kids and YA literature, which this particular asker seems to be writing for) is meant to show developing minds positive examples of characters like them in the media. And when the only women of color are shown with multicolored “interesting” eyes, you’re doing the opposite of showing people representations of themselves within fiction. This excerpt from a post on the Piper McLean debacle summarizes the point nicely:

Brown eyes aren’t boring. They aren’t ugly or plain or anything else like that. They’re gorgeous in absolutely every way. But when you only use blue or green or “multicolored” eyes to express that someone is beautiful, when you only ever describe brown and black eyes as “flinty” or “gleaming” or “intense”, you are saying that brown eyes are not beautiful. And when you use other eye colors for brown girls to show that they’re beautiful, you are saying that a brown person’s beauty is conditional on how many white features they have.

TL;DR: Women of color don’t need rainbow colored eyes in order to be magical or beautiful. Making POC “interesting” or magical only when they comply with Eurocentric beauty standards is gross. Brown eyes are BEAUTIFUL and fiction needs to reflect that.

[woeismyhoe]

Spill the tea, what's the deal with you and the BSG group (avatar-chang and her squad in particular)?

Ok anon, sorry for taking so long! I wanted to get everything right and honestly collecting the posts took a longass time xD

Anyways, the only ones I have a problem there are avatar-chang, hexful/dykesia/bizukos, catrademption, cardboardseagulls (never seen interacted b4) and bizulas (also never interacted b4).

I’m going to be really transparent about this whole thing so it’s gonna be long as there’s gonna be several links and I’ve included the dates so it’ll be easier to understand. Since I’ll be fully transparent about this, i’ll probably get hate or whatever. Honestly, I just want to put everything out there without being biased or hiding anything. I’m going to disclose everything here.

So, the whole thing between me and avatar-chang started off with this post I made last year on 10 March 2019. Afterwards, she PMed me on the same day and this was the conversation:

After that, I thought the argument was over because she blocked me lmao. The only ones I spoke to about this was nbw and my real life friends (who had nothing to do with ATLA lmao I just ranted to them).

And then the next incident I think was on 16 March 2019 when I made this post about Azula’s abuse of her friends. I was new and 16. I genuinely wanted to know why people labeled Azula as an abuser. It was dykesia who responded to me at the time.

Now, unlike avatar-chang, I had a few conversations with dykesia (who was bizukos then) that was generally civil. I first interacted with her when she made a post calling out Zucest shippers or something?? I was very new. Like fresh newbie baby ATLA tumblr fan new lmao so I thought what she said was too aggressive. I didn’t realize that there were actual Zucest shippers until after some time. And then she PMed me on 13 March 2019, saying that she doesn’t always agree on characters with me but I do write some interesting pieces on Azula— that she’s a huge fan of Azula but she just tends to stay away from her fandom. I apologized about the previous incident of the Zucest thing and it was fine after then. We talked about zuko, the fandom, the comics, Mai etc etc. I thought we were on fine terms.

And then I made a post about the cliff scene in the comics on 16 March 2019. Avatar-Chang made a post that was pretty directed at the post but it seems like she’s deleted it.

On 17 March 2019, I received an anon mail telling me that avatar-chang was talking shit about me behind my back. I censored her name then because I didn’t want to believe without any evidence. No one sent me any screenshots about it so I just dismissed it.

On the same day, avatar-chang answered an anon and talked about the 13 child post theory I made on 9 March.

On 23 April 2019, I received another anon mail about avatar-chang, asking if I’d seen the post she made about Azula. I censored her name again cuz I didn’t want to start any shit over having differing opinions. I’m assuming this is the post the anon was referring to.

On 28 April 2019, dykesia/hexful/bizukos PMed me to ask if I was talking shit about other people behind their backs, and her. I denied this because I hadn’t. This was how the conversation went:

Yes, I didn’t censor any name because as I said, full transparency. I have afp blocked because we’ve clashed several times and he’d still come for my posts last year despite already being blocked. If you’ve followed me long enough, you probably would’ve rmbered that time lmao

Anyways during then, I don’t think I realized that dykesia was actually being passive aggressive. It’d been barely a year since I started the blog and I just didn’t want to full out make enemies. Reading the messages now tho lmao she really was passive aggressive. But yeah then she said this in bsg so I don’t even know why she bothered to ask me if she wasn’t even going to consider believing me.

The 9th of June 2019 was the last time she messaged and it was to ask if I mind her discoursing this Zuko post while ‘hard and drunk’. It was the first time she could apparently agree with me so it was I quote a ‘Yay??’. Afterwards I don’t know when she did it but she blocked me lmao

On 17 July 2019, I received another anon mail telling me that avatar-chang publicly called me a bitch when she was answering an anon about me posting the scans of the EK Chronicles. She mentioned this in bsg again on 19 April 2020 lmao (she’s that petty) it seems:

On November 8 2019, an anon (one of avatar-chang’s friends actually) asked about my thoughts towards the allegations against Aaron Ehasz. I still believe in the system of ‘Innocent before proven guilty’, so I didn’t side with anyone. I tried to be as objective as possible. When I said that I hoped men would also come forward, I said that because I don’t want men to just sit on the sidelines and let the women get the heat if they were telling the truth. At the end of this whole thing, I concluded that Ehasz was a dick of a boss to the girls. Being called an abuser carries more weight than just being a dick. Everyone has been a dick at one point, but being an abuser is something else. Just because Ehasz was a dick doesn’t mean I’m going to stop watching TDP or dismiss his involvement in ATLA.

The next day, BSG brought the issue up despite both avatar-chang having already blocked me by then lmao

On 5 February 2020, after Legacy of the Fire Nation came out, I made a post calling out Iroh’s bs to Azula (guy literally blames Azula for everything that happened to Zuko (something which avatar-chang agrees with apparently, and Iroh even sees Ozai in a better light).

That’s so far what I’ve remembered that involved avatar-chang and dykesia.

Moving on to the next three attackers: catrademption, cardboardseagulls and bizulas.

I’ve seen catrademption around, but I don’t remember if we’ve clashed before. We must have though cuz she’s got me blocked lmao and I mostly only debate back to people when they reply to my posts. For cardboardseagulls and bizulas, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them them before but obviously they’ve seen my blog and misinterpreted everything I’ve written.

But according to them, I’m apparently a Azula apologist, extremist, irrational, toxic, coddles and woobifies Azula, justifies everything she does and invalidates abuse victims.

You can see the posts I’ve made to judge whether I actually am an irrational Azula apologist who blames everything on Zuko. One of the most recent posts I made about Azula’s character is this, and there’s still several more posts like that. Just search #meta or #analysis in my blog search and all of them will just pop up. I can assure you, I have never acted as if Azula has done nothing wrong or did everything right or whatever lies these people are spewing.

If anyone has proof that I’ve talked shit about people in the fandom to other people before, please, present your evidence. I highly think this is impossible because I actually don’t have many friends on Tumblr, nor do I usually initiate conversation because I’m awkward af.

I’ve also tried approaching those I recognized in bsg to find out more about the situation (and at least give my side of the story). Most of them have chosen not to speak to me LMAO but one of them who’s chosen to remain anonymous for their privacy, admitted that dykesia (hexful) forced them to block a blog before (after realizing they were interacting with said blog) and if not, they would be blocked themselves. I can’t post the conversation publicly because they’re afraid their speech mannerism will give away their identity. @space-sword has also shared his experience with avatar-chang on his blog and was pressured to cut off ties with ppb21 just to join the oh so magnificent Ba Sing Gay.

There’s absolutely no reason to judge someone based on their sexual orientation, race, color or age either. They rant about being discriminated against or being generalized or stereotypes but they’re the ones hypocritically committing these actions, and then justify their actions by saying ‘we’re oppressed, they’re not, so it’s not racism or discrimination’. And yet people still wonder why discrimination is still rampant LMAO

I can’t speak for the blogs they victimized in bsg, but I personally don’t agree with talking shit about them on a public server and then criminalizing them as if they’re actually predators. I also don’t agree with involving the blogs’ friends simply because of their association. I also don’t agree with demanding people to block blogs they don’t like because that’s just pure manipulation. That’s wrong and marginalizing people. Unless someone has actually been harassing or literally preying on people, then there’s no reason to actually go around warning blogs about them unless they’re asked about it.

If they feel uncomfortable about something? Then avoid that blog, filter their tags or even block that blog if they’re that uncomfortable—BUT they shouldn’t demand others to do the same just for their own benefit. It’s not up to them to decide what a person can or cannot see or who they can or cannot interact with. They’re not their parents, and they obviously have no right to pressure people into doing things they don’t want to. If they think it tactless that I shared the conversations? Oh honestly, a line was crossed when they spread shit about me so idc. If they actually feel terrible for being called out? GOOD. That’s what they should feel, because in no way was any of what they were doing right or justified. If they’re going to shit on me then expect to be burned because I’m not someone who’ll just shrivel in fear because they have a bigger following.

[sillyfudgemonkeys]

Kyoshi has a knack for making her past selves feel like like shit TT0TT

Kyoshi with Kuruk, first meeting:

Kyoshi with Yangchen, first meeting:

I NEED to see Kyoshi interacting with the other Avatar's that came before Yangchen. Because like, she's 2 for 2 acting like the other is just a scourge on her life. TT0TT (she turns it around by the end of it but still).

But like, I got to the Yangchen thing again and OHHHHH MY GOD FKLDJASLKFJAFJ I know I focus on the "Mommy Yangchen" and how sweet the moment is that she comforts Kyoshi...... and how she's usually ripping into Kuruk but........jaskldfj;akf

Just....Kyoshi's reaction at the beginning is like????? Yangchen HAD to have thought Kyoshi hated her. The way she was acting was about as bad as Kuruk, even if it was said in fewer words. She literally didn't want to be near them! TT0TT

Like Yangchen pops into existence and Kyoshi's first reaction to seeing her was:

Like I just KNOW Yangchen was going through it. She must've been like "My actions lead to Kuruk's early death, and now Kyoshi hates me too???? Oh fucking christ I know I deserve this but please tell me what I did wrong first TT0TT I know she hated Kuruk but she seemed to hold me in high regard, did something happen? Is that it? What is it child what?"

UGH I need to know how she reacts to Szeto. Is it just "Oh? Kyoshi? Yeah it was a fine meeting why?" djksaljfajf Kuruk and YC would be SO LIVID PLEASE!

Oh fuck, what if she freaks when she sees Roku and is like "Rangi???????????????????" Oh please let their meeting be a disaster actually that would be SUCH a blessing you have no idea TT0TT

[animebw]

One Year Anniversary: The Birth of The Anime Binge-Watcher

I have no idea what I’m doing.

Well, that’s not entirely true. As of today, I’ve been writing for The Anime Binge-Watcher for a full year, you’d better hope I’d at least have some idea how this whole thing works. And truth be told, I’m incredibly proud of how much I’ve grown into this little niche I’ve carved out for myself. Just look back at my early days, at how I wrote about Higurashi, the first anime I ever tackled for this blog, and you can see how much I’ve improved over the months. I mean, I didn’t even divide my work into sections at the beginning, what the hell was wrong with me? But if you asked me exactly what possessed me to start devoting so much of my free time to such a limited hobby as long-form anime analysis on Tumblr, I don’t think I could answer you, at least not easily. Looking back, this may well have been the single most bizarre decision I’ve ever made in a life full of bizarre decisions. And now that I’ve reached the one-year anniversary of this grand experiment, I think it’s worth taking a look back at the bizarre sequence of events in my life that lead me to this point.

Why? Because the story of how I got here isn’t just the story of this blog. It’s my story. Perhaps the most important story I’ve ever told. It informs the person I’ve become, the way I see the world, and the reasons why this project has come to mean so much to me. And it is long as shit. So prepare for a novel under the cut, because in case hanging out with me for the past year hasn’t taught you this already, I will ramble on and on as long as I’m goddamn able. Besides, every hero needs a good origin story. And this is mine.

This is the birth... of The Anime Binge-Watcher.

Part 1: The Prehistoric Era

It may surprise you to learn this, but the old me didn’t consume much media at all.

I mean, I read a lot as a kid. I devoured books like there was no tomorrow. All the classic YA series that came to define our generation- Harry Potter, Hunger Games, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Warrior Cats, Percy Jackson, The Underland Chronicles, Thirteen Reasons Why- they were my jam. I would go to all the big movie events, the blockbuster action flicks, the Disney/Dreamworks/Pixar animation teams (ask me about the Kung Fu Panda movies one of these days), all that jazz. And I watched the first season and change of Avatar the Last Airbender wherever I could find it. But as I grew older, I found my tastes growing more and more… limited. I barely even touched books anymore unless it was for school. I still went out and saw movies, but at this point, it was pretty much only the Marvel movies and the occasional animated film that everyone was raving about. More and more, I just wasn’t inspired by what was becoming the global popular culture. I never so much as tried an episode of Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, The Sopranos, or any other massive entertainment property that everyone else seemed utterly enamored by. Perhaps I would’ve enjoyed them if I gave them a chance, but I couldn’t work up the effort to crest that hill.

The fact of the matter was, I couldn’t help but look at the landscape of supposedly “adult” entertainment- the big, prestigious properties that made up the lexicon of “serious” popular culture- and just end up utterly bored by it all. It all felt like the same thing over and over again, the same serious-faced actors standing around serious places and saying serious things in very serious ways and serious serious serious. It felt like pop culture was undergoing a collective experiment in self-gaslighting to convince itself that the more color and fun it stripped away from itself, the more important it would be. It was all so stuffy and artificial and so far away from what I understood the world to be. Only the Marvel movies, with their commitment to remaining stupid, silly, completely unpretentious affairs, even at their darkest, felt like they were worth my continued time. Yes, in the world I saw, this multi-billion dollar arm of the most corporate entertainment company on the planet felt consistently like the fresh, genuine alternative to the world of fakes surrounding me. That’s how disconnected I felt from pop culture at large.

And the worst part was, I couldn’t even pin down why I felt that way. I couldn’t tell you why the endless talk of Lannister dynasties left me so numb. I couldn’t tell you why the school life of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, the love-torn crises of Katniss Everdeen, the conflicted spirituality of Fireheart’s relationship to StarClan, and the finale to Gregor’s story left such massive impacts on me as a kid while this supposedly grown-up entertainment left me cold. At times, I felt like there was something wrong with me, like everyone else was in on some secret that I could never be privy to. And all I could think of was, why wasn’t there more stuff like the stuff I liked as a kid? Why wasn’t there more stuff like Avatar and Korra, which I finally finished watching some time after the series ended? Why was it so hard for me to enjoy what everyone else was enjoying as opposed to these silly stories for kids that I was supposed to have grown out of? At the time, I just accepted that I would never know the answer. I would just buckle down and be content with the few fictional properties that still spoke to me without ever understanding why.

And then I went to college.

And as is often the case with college, it was all downhill from there.

Part 2: Steven Universe

I owe the entirety of my time here to A Capella.

For those of you who don’t know, I have always been greatly invested in creative arts. I sing, I act, I direct, I write (obviously), I’ve even started learning guitar and composing my own songs. I got accepted into a capella group my first semester in college, one I’m still singing with to this day (Go Broken Legs!) I distinctly remember my first-ever meeting with them, as we all recommended songs to sing for our concert at the end of the semester. And I remember one suggestion above all others: Here Comes a Thought, from Steven Universe. If the person who suggested that song is reading this- and you know who you are- just know that I blame this all on you. Because that one suggestion, quite literally, changed my life.

I had heard about Steven Universe in passing before. I was marginally aware that we were supposedly in a new golden age of kid’s cartoons, with names like Gravity Falls and Adventure Time getting tossed around as well. But the very first thing I ever saw of it was that song, Here Comes a Thought, which I watched along with the rest of the suggestions we were mulling over in order to pick which ones were my favorite. And it entranced me. It was music and imagery the likes of which I’d never seen before, simultaneously colorful and whimsical, yet also dark and haunting, but also soft and soothing, all at the same time. It was a window into another world I had never seen anything like. And in that moment, I knew I wanted to see what this song meant. I wanted to know how it fit into this property, what kind of world could produce such an unfathomable piece of atmosphere. So I elected to start watching this weird Steven Universe thing, at least up until where this song showed up, and see what all the fuss was about. I went in with little to no knowledge about the show or what it was about. All I knew is that I needed to know about this universe I had only ever scratched the surface of before.

For context, my family doesn’t have cable, so I almost never got to watch cartoons as a kid. So imagine what it must have been like for my uncultured ass, who was still processing pop culture through the lens of Breaking Bad, to step into Gem Glow for the first time. I had no idea what to make of this show. It was operating on such an alien wavelength that I might as well have been watching unsubbed anime for how much sense it made. It was goofy, but not the comfortable goofy of the MCU, a weirder goofy that somehow made even less sense than the serious media I refused to engage with… and yet, also made perfect sense at the same time. It was nothing like anything I’d ever seen before, not even the more traditionally-structured Avatar. By the time the episode was over, I was left saying, “The fuck did I just watch?”, but also, “How soon can I finish this whole thing?” I had discovered an entirely new rulebook, and even thought I had literally no idea how to process it, I wanted to see how deeply it would be able to confuse me.

So I kept watching, and honestly, for the first big chunk of episodes, I wasn’t really enjoying it all that much. I didn’t have the tools to process how different it was from everything pop culture had taught me to accept as given. Where are the serious growly men saying serious growly things? Where are the handsome actors and important-sounding things and obligatory romances that always happen? Sure, those things were boring as sin to me, but they were rules I understood, at least. These new rules confused me to the point of frustration too many times to count. And yet, I always was eager to get to the next episode. Because as frustrating as it was wandering blind through this unexplored territory, it was also exciting. I had no idea what to expect, and I had every reason to think it would disappoint me like all the rest, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of grasping at something just beyond my fingertips. And as the show went on, it started showing signs of being able to reach parts of me I never expected. Episodes like Lars and the Cool Kids, Lion 2, Rose’s Room, An Indirect Kiss, Mirror Gem and Ocean Gem, all challenged what I knew cartoons to be capable of, using these childish, simple stories to ask difficult, complex questions that I couldn’t answer immediately. They were like scraps of catnip keeping me invested, making me increasingly eager to see this show get to where it was going.

And then, three episodes happened in quick succession that turned everything upside-down. First came Lion 3, which spent its entire runtime focusing on Steven and his relationship with his dead mother. There was no monster, no conflict, just a boy and his thoughts, and it was easily the best episode up until that point. The way it ended, with a sweet caress of love, struck a chord with me I never even knew was there. How was this animated kid’s show doing what so many big blockbusters couldn’t, and make me feel like a piece of media… actually understood me? And then came Warp Tour, which was mind-blowing in a completely different way. Suddenly, this relatively self-contained story exploded out from its confines and revealed itself to be a full-on epic, complete with mythos, backstory, and a rich legacy to unravel and explore. This show started out like any other run-of-the-mill cartoon and then abruptly transformed into Avatar without me even realizing it was building to that point all this time. That should be illegal. You’re supposed to just be one thing as a piece of fiction. That’s what the rest of pop culture looked like from the outside, so it must be true… right?

And then, there was Alone Together.

Alone Together changed everything. Alone Together broke my understanding of storytelling on such a fundamental level that it forced me to start re-shaping my entire outlook on how I approached media. Alone Together blew my mind more completely in ten minutes than anything I’d experienced up until that point. It showed me that storytelling was capable of so much more than I ever dreamed of, that it could completely change the way I looked at the world and processed information, that it didn’t need to be constrained by any boundaries at all. What is there even to say about this episode that hasn’t been said by everyone else already? A ten-minute-long metaphor for everything from gender transitioning to exploring sex to questioning identity to social anxiety to existentialism, all in a package not just that kids could understand, but that I, Eighteen-Year-Old ball of stress and Asperger’s that I was, could feel more clearly than I’d felt any story in a very, very long time.

Alone Together showed me that there were no rules. It showed me that everything that had been drilled into my head by Grim Scowly Men was wrong. You didn’t need desaturated colors and long, ponderous conversations to be real. You didn’t need grit and sweat and adherence to some arbitrary understanding of “authenticity” to be authentic. You could be whatever you wanted to be; the possibilities were truly endless. And as I kept watching with that new insight in main, Steven Universe just got better and better. The Test challenged the status quo, On The Run let its characters be flawed, Maximum Capacity rocked me to my core with the level of darkness it was willing to permit, Rose’s Scabbard broke a years-long spell of me not being able to cry at fiction, Jailbreak just kicked ass, and by the time we reached the second season the hits were so big and so consistent that I was truly, completely on board. I didn’t even reach that goddamn song until I came to the end of what was currently released at the moment, and it was even better in context with the weight of the show behind it.

But reaching the end of the road and having to wait for more episodes (this was the Fall 2016 hiatus before Gem Harvest came out, so Onion Gang was the last episode I saw during this binge watch) wasn’t the end. It was only the beginning. Steven Universe had awakened a hunger in me, a hunger I was only just beginning to understand. I didn’t yet fully comprehend the secrets it had revealed to me. All I knew was that for the first time in, well, a while, I had found a story that ignited a fire under me. For the first time in a while, I was hungry for more, more, more, just as I’d been as a kid tearing through Percy Jackson’s misadventures with a medusa running a snack bar. I had remembered what it was like to get excited about fiction again, to get lost in worlds that spoke to me in ways only fiction could. I had just traded books for animation. And thus, I decided I was going to explore this new world I’d found. I was going to become an animation nerd, and see how else this medium could blow my mind.

Part 3: The SU Fallout

The next four months of my story, up until around the turn of the new year 2017, are pretty straightforward. I tore my way through the backlog of modern kid’s show that everyone was talking about, continuing to gain appreciation for why everyone has been raving about them for so long. It wasn’t all sunshine; I dropped Adventure Time after four and a bit seasons, never really jiving with its way of going about things. Remember, I was still new to this wild world, and as bizarre as Steven Universe could get, Adventure Time was out there on a level I’m still not sure I’m capable of handling. Maybe I’ll come back to it at some point and see if I “get it” now that I’ve had more time to process how I approach it. But besides that, I was rolling pretty in exciting new discoveries. I tore through Gravity Falls and cried at the ending. I stuck through the uneven first season of Star vs the Forces of Evil and watched it grow just as impressively as Steven Universe did. I also kept up with Steven Universe, and it continued to awe me on the regular (still does!). I re-watched parts of Avatar and Korra and appreciated them all the more. I become mildly fond of the Voltron reboot, though the less said about the direction that show went in, the better. I became absolutely obsessed with Bojack Horseman, a show that proved even in the cringe-y “adult” arena of South Park and Family Guy, animation was capable of stunning me and shaking me to my core. Seriously, there are moments from Bojack that will stick with me till the day I die. That show alone proved how powerful animation could be.

As the new year began, I reached two critical points on my journey. First, I finally got around to watching RWBY, Rooster Teeth’s quasi-anime passion project that had grown into its own franchise juggernaut just as powerful as any of its contemporaries I mentioned. I had actually seen the first trailer for it way back when I was still watching Red vs Blue, but I’d since fallen off that particular train with no real desire to return to it, and I never got around to seeing this new project they’d cooked up. Thankfully, in what had this point become a regular occurrence for me, it was worth sitting through the growing pains of the first couple seasons to watch this property come into its own and become a fully realized production. This was the closest thing to *actual* anime I’d watched, and it began to give me context into this… other side of the animation world that was starting to become more prevalent in my periphery.

Second, I finally got around to getting invested in Undertale, a game steeped in that same kind of emotion-based storytelling I’d come to appreciate from animation. Funnily enough, I never actually played the game myself, just watched a lot of Let’s Plays. But that was honestly enough; even just experiencing this thing secondhand was electrifying. I mean, Undertale basically is an anime in game form, full of quirky, personality-driven characters who are allowed to be utterly ridiculous in ways that most mainstream properties are too “serious” to even consider. I fell in love with Undyne, Papyrus, and all the rest because of how unbound they were from the expectation to be anything other than themselves. And the way it challenged storytelling norms became an essential step in my understanding of the meta of fiction.

But there’s another reason why Undertale matters so much to this story. I loved the game so deeply that I would browse Youtube regularly looking for interesting content on it. And it just so happened that one of the first reviews I came across belonged to a certain channel that was seriously growing in popularity at the moment: Geoff Thew, A.K.A. Mother’s Basement.

Part 4: Anitube

It’s a funny quirk of my anime journey that I got invested in Anime Youtube long before I started watching anime in earnest. If I’m being honest, though, that genuinely might have been the best path forward for me. Through exploring Mother’s Basement, I became aware of an entirely new culture that existed alongside the one I’d recently become obsessed with, a culture with its own unique rules and customs similar to those I’d become familiar with, but also completely their own. Through him, I became introduced to Digibro, Gigguk, and The Pedantic Romantic, all names I still regularly watch to this day. I became obsessed with this other side of animation, this parallel world to American cartoons that seemed to open up even more possibilities that were ever present before. I learned the lexicon, the culture, the terms, the outlook, the way anime was looked at by the people who loved it and how it was approached in every context from jokingly to analytical. Hell, I got indoctrinated into the Sword Art Online hate fandom without ever seeing so much as a scene from that show, just thanks to the prevalence of videos from those creators pointing out its myriad flaws. That was how deeply ingrained I became in the anime culture through these guys, despite only really having experience with Attack on Titan once its second season finally brought the franchise roaring back to life.

But it’s Digibro who deserves my true attention here, because it’s through his work that I truly became convinced that anime was a path worth pursuing. There’s a lot that could be said about him as a person and a creator, not all of it positive. But I think it’s indisputable that the unique perspective he takes on anime is one of the most vital voices in the community today, unafraid to buck and all common opinions to speak for his own likes and dislikes with clarity and precision that allows you to completely understand his process, even if you disagree with his conclusion. Through his videos, I gained an appreciation for the countless different ways one could approach anime, the countless different avenues of exploration it allowed. His critical lexicon has influenced the way I look at anime more than any other creator I can think of, even if I often disagree drastically with his tastes. Through him I learned about animation, story structure, techniques of emotional manipulation and how one could work while another might fail, how the unique way you react to a work can give you more perspective on yourself and the way you perceive fiction and the world at large.

In the end, though, it was his series The Asterisk War Sucks that finally sealed the deal for me. Over the course of thirteen episodes, totaling over three hours of content, he breaks down what turns out to be his least favorite anime of all time from every conceivable angle, tearing apart its writing, construction, intentions, presentation, production, and creative bankruptcy, engaging with new and interesting ideas every step of the way. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is my Mr. Plinkett Star Wars review, not just a negative rant on something he doesn’t like, but a fully comprehensive breakdown of all the different considerations that can go into thinking about anime, and how this one show’s failures highlight the importance of each and every one of them. Through tearing The Asterisk War apart, Digibro highlights the power that anime can have when the things that show fails at are done right, how complex and rewarding exploring those avenues of thought can be. And to close it all off, he compares the show to Chivalry of a Failed Knight, another show that’s so similar in construction to The Asterisk War it’s kind of terrifying, yet pointing out how differences in that second show’s execution allow it a degree of success. The message is clear: any story can be good. Any story can have value. All you need is the confidence and skill to tell that story as it deserves to be told.

Two completely similar shows, two completely different outcomes. Not even American cartoons had allowed me that level of specificity in my reactions to fiction. I became so obsessed with this idea that I started constructing an entirely new anime in my head playing off the same tropes as those two shows, thinking how I could re-arrange these fundamental components to make something not just good, but genuinely great. I’ve been writing and re-writing this imaginary anime in my head over the past two goddamn years, refining and reshaping as I take in more and more context and considerations (and if you’re really eager to hear me spend even more time talking about anime, I might even share it with you if you ask). More than anything, it’s that ethos that drives my fundamental approach to storytelling. Any story, no matter what genre or tropes it uses, has the potential to be good. It just needs to be executed well, with an understanding of where its potential comes from. And through this video essay, I saw that same potential in anime. Here was a resource of storytelling where none of the old rules applied, where any tale I could imagine could find form and shape. The possibilities were truly endless.

And so, in the tail end of the summer of 2017, as I began my sophomore year of college, I finally make the fateful decision to stop just being into Anitube and get into anime. I understood the culture, I had a sense of what I was getting into, and I was ready to see what this new world had in store.

I have never made a better decision in my entire life.

Part 5: I Become Weebified

It’s worth noting that I didn’t dive headfirst into anime and begin devouring it at the rate I do today. I was stepping into an unfamiliar world, and much like with American cartoons, I figured the wisest thing to do was dip my toe in the water slowly and get a feel for what kind of new rules I would have to adjust to. And as I’m certain I’ve mentioned before, that first dip in the water was Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, pretty much the perfect starter anime for anyone interested in learning what this medium’s all about. From that experience, I was instantly convinced I had made the right choice to explore anime, because it was easily one of my new favorite fictional experiences ever, doing pretty much everything right in every conceivable way, from action to adventure to mystery to plot progression to comedy to drama to political and philosophical undertones and even to romance, which used to be such a big sticking point for me in American media. And it accomplished all that with what is still my favorite anime dub, providing the perfect entry point for noobs like me still getting used to the rhythms of Japanese voice acting. Yeah, it sucks that Vic Mignogna turned out to be such a creepy fuckstick, but if you can divorce his stellar work as Ed Elric from his real-life self, it still remains one of the all-time great dub performances, and it’s not even the best performance of the lot (seriously, just read my re-watch if you want more Brotherhood opinions from me, I could gush about this show all day).

From there, I began working my way through all the classics. Death Note, Madoka Magica, Code Geass, Haruhi Suzumiya, Toradora, My Hero Academia, Gurren Lagann, K-On, Evangelion, Stein’s Gate, all the shows that every anime fan agreed you had to watch. Not all of them were winners, and only one of them reached the same glorious heights of Brotherhood, but they were all experiences that left massive impressions on me, further coloring my perception of what anime could be. I mean, Death Note was pretty much the closest to a serious, grown-up American show among the lot, and even it proved that with a real sense of creativity and unhinged imagination that wasn’t bound by stuffy, arcane storytelling traditions, even a simple cop thriller could be just as exhilarating as the genre fare I’d grown up with. Normal police procedurals? Boring. Police procedurals featuring supernatural shenanigans, outsized, mythic clashes of ego and the most kinetic potato chip eating scene ever? Awesome. And don’t even get me started on Evangelion, which was so far above my head that I barely processed half of it my first time through, yet stuck its images and ideas so firmly in my brain that I knew it had to be something special. It was also in this early period that I watched Chuunibyou and began developing my love for Kyoto Animation, so that’s not nothing.

And yet, it still wasn’t complete. As far as I’d come since I was first introduced to Steven Universe, I hadn’t yet cracked the code on why animation was able to touch me the way it did. Why where these juvenile experiences, steeped in unreality and surreality, so much more real to me than a million “realistic” exercises in human misery and apathy? Why did anime, and animation in general, strike such a chord with me in a way that most media didn’t? I was still one step away from the answer, one lock away from opening the box. All I needed was the right key.

That key came to me in the opening days of 2018, mere weeks after I officially created a MyAnimeList account.

That key changed everything as completely as Alone Together did over a year prior.

That key’s name… was Angel Beats.

Part 6: Angel Beats

I knew virtually nothing about Angel Beats going into it. I knew it only as the mysterious fifth most popular anime on MAL at the time, a show with over a million people interested in it yet no one seemingly talking about it anymore. I had no idea what to expect, no preconceived notions of what I was getting myself into. In a lot of ways, it was the same position I found myself in with Steven Universe, uncertain of where this journey was going to lead but confident there would be something worthwhile along the way. But once I actually started watching it, I realized it wasn’t like Steven Universe at all. That show took time to grow on me, building my trust through unfamiliar language piece by piece until it was finally able to reach me on its own terms.

Angel Beats, in contrast, seized my attention from the very beginning, and proceeded to obliterate everything I thought I knew about storytelling at every conceivable moment.

I’ll try not to reiterate what I’ve already discussed at length over the course of re-watching what was once my favorite show of all time, but suffice to say, the way Angel Beats upended my perception of fiction was so immediate and so overwhelming that it honestly gave me whiplash. There is no universe in which a show like Angel Beats should have worked. There is no earthly way Jun Maeda’s seminal masterpiece should have been able to fuse together so many disparate tones, breaking every narrative convention and upending every fundamental consideration of pacing and spacing out moments and moods. But not only did it work, it soared like a goddamn supernova, fusing comedy and tragedy, intimacy and melodrama, laughter and tears as all part of the same collective whole, often at the same moment, pulling out not just many emotions, but every emotion at the same time. It’s a show that makes you feel the entirety of life’s emotional spectrum over the course of thirteen far-too-short episodes, tearing down your ability to distance yourself from its emotional truth with some of the most impeccably written dialogue and story construction I’ve ever seen. And by the time it reaches the end, the collective weight of everything you’ve experienced hits so hard, so profoundly, that the final episode still makes me tear up harder than any other single piece of media ever.

I cannot overstate how monumental this show was to me. When I first reached the end of that final episode, I spent a good long time just staring at the screen in utter shock at what I had just experienced. I felt like I had been laid bare, stripped of every piece of baggage I carried with me, soaked in holy water and lifted up to the sky reborn. I felt like I had just seen the light of God, and that’s hardly even an exaggeration. For the first time in so long, everything suddenly made sense. I had traveled through the crucible of Angel Beats and purged my sins away in the countless tears I shed in the finale, and now, for the first time, I could see clearly the path I’d been traveling on. I could see what sucked me in to Steven Universe, what kept me coming back to Gravity Falls and RWBY, what entranced me about Undertale and made me embrace anime. At long last, I understood why, when so much of Western media left me cold, this vibrant new avenue has re-awakened my passion for storytelling with a vengeance. Finally, I understood what made this world special to me.

What I had been missing… was sincerity.

Think about Western popular culture for a moment. Thank about Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, all the rest of that block of prestige TV, all the copy-paste blockbusters that come out every year (especially the beginnings of the DCEU), all of it. Think of how cynical those works all are, how convinced they are that man’s natural state is evil, that it’s not worth giving a damn about anything because we’re all damned anyway and there’s nothing we can do about it. Think of how unquestioningly all these works accept accept cruelty and indifference as gospel truths, how hope and optimism are childish fantasies that can only be squashed by the cold boot of reality. Think of how utterly serious-minded media tries to divorce itself from any source of light, steeping itself in darker and darker shadows until you can’t even make the people out anymore (literally and figuratively). This is what the American mainstream presents as “normal”. This is what our popular media says life is like. Cruel, savage, driven by pettiness and selfishness, by human frailty and mania, in worlds where the potential for something better doesn’t exist. This is what our pop culture holds up as the true, adult understanding of life.

This is complete and utter bullshit.

Yes, life can be awful at times. Yes, people have the capacity for so much evil. But you know what? We spend far too much time looking for reasons to point out each other’s weaknesses and not enough time building up each other’s strengths. We spend too much time pretending that our failures, rather than our successes are the only things that matter. We spend too much time dismissing the power of hope, pretending that better doesn’t actually exist. But better does exist. I have seen better pretty much every day of my life, even the ones that suck overall. I have seen better in my peers and classmates who each have their own unique talents to give to the world. I have seen better in my friends and peers that took me in and gave me a place to be myself when I was still crippled by social anxiety and uncertain that I could ever connect with people. I’ve seen better in the adults who’ve guided me along the way and given me the tools I need to improve the parts of myself I know I can be stronger than. I’ve seen better in the countless people across the world defying acts of violence and cruelty every single day, in ways big and small. I’ve seen better in the strength of people against the worst of evils, resisting the most crushing attempts by this world (and this presidential administration) to grind them into the dirt, only rising higher with voices chanting louder and louder, because they refuse to be silenced. Better. Is. Real.

And media that wallows in human misery pretending that somehow makes it “true” is the shallowest, most agonizingly juvenile way of looking at the world. It is not “adult” to give up on what makes us human. It is not “serious” to accept failure as a natural state of being and not try to make things better. It is not “real” to refuse to acknowledge humanity’s better angels. You know what’s real to me? Hope. Compassion. People who care for each other. People who try to do right by each other. People who see the darkness the world is capable of and refuse to give in, because the capacity for hate does not erase the capacity for love. That is real. That is the way I see the world. That is far truer than a million Batman v Superman slogs could be.

And that is what Angel Beats made me realize on that fateful January day. That’s the truth it imparted to me, the reason it was able to shift the way I saw media so profoundly. Angel Beats taught me that it was okay to feel. It was okay to refuse what I knew to be wrong and accept what I knew to be right. It was okay to be as silly and stupid and ridiculous and raw as I truly was, without compromising for anyone and anything. And it was okay- and possible- for media to reflect that reality. It was possible for fiction to inspire hope instead of leaden despair. It was possible for stories to embrace optimism and sentimentality, to refuse to fit into some mold forged by generations of miserable white dudes who wouldn’t know real suffering if it bit them in their privileged balls. It was possible for fiction to reflect truths from all sides of the emotional spectrum, to take whatever path best suited it, no matter how outside the realm of “normal” it was made out to be. That was what drew me to animation, and later to anime.

Because this medium- this incredible, wonderful medium- is the single most sincere form of storytelling I’ve ever encountered. It has allowed me, for the first time since I was a kid, to experience a spectrum of storytelling stepped in an understanding of the world that actually makes sense to me. It isn’t afraid to be direct with its emotional appeals, to be heartfelt and earnest in parsing humanity, to showcase all we can accomplish instead of just all the ways we fall short. It rejects the cheap angst of so many western properties in favor of something genuine and important. It seeks to empower our best angels, to provide us a roadmap to becoming the best possible versions of ourselves and maybe even changing the world in the process. And it does all that without sacrificing a scrap of the depth and nuance of serious-minded American properties.

This is why storytelling matters to me. This is why I’ve come to embrace the power of fiction as completely as I did in my childhood. The way anime tells stories inspires and challenges me just as completely as the tales I devoured in my youth, now in even more honest and varied ways. Asuka from Evangelion inspires me to be better every single day. Rikka from Chuunibyou helps me process the power of my own imagination. Sawako from Kimi ni Todoke reflects the truth of my high school experience better than any fictional property past or present. Senjougahara from the Monogatari franchise shapes my understanding of the way love can inspire genuine growth and evolution side by side with the people you care about. The lessons anime has taught me have become the most enduring lessons of my life. They speak to me on a fundamental level that nothing else has reached. They are important. They deserve to be heard.

And perhaps that’s why I thought it might be a worthwhile investment of my time to share those insights with all of you.

Part 7: Starting This Blog

It was Angel Beats that truly broke the floodgates open on my anime-watching experience. Before, I was just puttering around the most talked-about properties, getting a taste for what this medium has to offer. But once Angel Beats finally helped me crack the code on why I placed so much value in these wacky Chinese cartoons, I knew I was a goner. I was going to devote myself to anime, explore the deepest and darkest reaches of this medium, because I wanted to see everything it had to offer, good and bad alike. I drew up a huge list of anime that interested me, drawing from the most popular shows I’d heard of and a handful of interesting-looking uncertainties from MAL. You can still see the remnants of that list on my blog, shows that I still need to get to when all is said and done. But those days will have to wait a little longer, because dear lord, that list was huge. It was going to be a massive undertaking, requiring a lot of time and effort to get through. Thankfully, as my sophomore year started winding down, I found myself with ample free time to tear through my backlog, working my way through even more classics like Cowboy Bebop, Clannad, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Fate/Zero, Rakugo, and Kill la Kill. I was living the high life, that’s for sure.

And then a thought occurred to me. I had reached a point where I was pretty comfortable thinking about anime. I really loved thinking about anime. And I so desperately wanted to talk about it in the presence of people who might be interested in hearing what I had to say. I am nothing if not an attention hog, after all. But of course, anime is still rather niche, and I had a sense that few of my friends would have any real interest in the medium. That said, though, ever since I got into Steven Universe, I had also gotten into Steven Universe livebloggers, watching people across Tumblr experience the show in real time and share their thoughts, further deepening my appreciation for what the show was able to accomplish. I always admired their commitment to their work, and it’s always been a dream of mine to be able to share my thoughts in the same way. The only problem was, I knew from watching them work that liveblogging even just ten minutes of content was a mammoth endeavor, and I wasn’t patient enough to limit my anime-watching pace to maybe an episode every two days. I wanted every last scrap of moeblob mush in my face as fast as possible. There was no way I could survive being a liveblogger.

But perhaps I could be something different. After all, there were already plenty of livebloggers on the scene, I would just be cluttering the field even more. Perhaps there was a space for another kind of media reaction on Tumblr, perhaps something that wouldn’t require so much time that it completely crippled my ability to consume anime at the pace I desired.

Perhaps… I could create something entirely new.

And so, exactly one year ago on May 1,, 2018, eight days before my 20th birthday, barely a week before the end of my sophomore year of college, I began the craziest experiment of my very crazy life and introduced myself to Tumblr as The Anime Binge-Watcher.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Part 8: How Far We’ve Come

When I started this project, I legitimately had no idea how it was going to work. I had never seen anyone do anything quite like this, at least not on a platform like Tumblr. I had no idea if I would be able to properly contextualize the way I viewed media in a way that was entertaining and engaging enough to capture people’s attention. I had no idea if I’d be able to maintain the energy for it; I have a nasty habit of committing to projects outside my weight class and bailing once I realize how unprepared I really was for the responsibility. For all I knew, this would be some stupid waste of time that would last for a couple weeks not attracting any real attention before I got bored and wandered off to other pursuits. But hell, I was young, excited, and itching at the prospect to try my hand at something entirely new. So the day after I introduced myself, I officially began my first ever binge project: Higurashi. I watched a bunch of episodes in a chunk and then talked about them in long posts, slowly getting a feel for how I wanted to structure my ramblings in ways that made sense.

I got my first two followers shortly after my first ever episode reflection.

My adventure had officially begun.

It is no exaggeration to say that when I look back at where I was when I started this whole thing, I am flabbergasted as how far I’ve come since then. My writing had improved with every show, constantly pushing myself to find new angles of thought to explore. My projects have grown more ambitious, incorporating multiple ongoing binges, short reflections, massive re-watches, and more into my schedule. My voice has grown stronger and stronger as I’ve become more and more confident with the thoughts I’ve had to share. And, of course, my followers have only grown more and more incredible. I can’t tell you what a burst of energy it gives me to wake up in the morning, log onto Tumblr, and see how my latest post has connected with you all. I started this experiment for my own sake, to see if it would be rewarding enough to continue long-term; now, I know for sure the answer is yes. The fact that my writing has actually touched a chord with people across cyberspace from all walks of life means more to me than I can ever tell you. As good as my writing’s gotten over the past year, you all are the one marvel I still can’t properly express. But know this much; you have made this past year one of the most rewarding, enriching, inspiring, wonderful years of my life.

And what a goddamn year it’s been. From the maddening depths of Higurashi to the incredible shonen storytelling of Yu Yu Hakusho, from the agonizing immolation of Guilty Crown to the revealing duality of Pet Girl of Sakurasou, from overwhelming beauty of Carcaptor Sakura to the simple joys of Seraph of the End, from the dystopian powerhouse of Psycho-Pass to the slapstick perfection of Nichijou, from the comforting embrace of Kimi ni Todoke to the utter chaos of Elfen Lied, from the fabled majesty of Mushishi to the never-ending roller coaster ride of Zero no Tsukaima, from the soaring triumph of Wolf’s Rain to the crushing failure of Future Diary, from finally working my way through the Ghibli canon to the blistering inspiration of Symphogear, and, of course, returning to old favorites like Evangelion, Brotherhood, Chuunibyou, and Angel Beats to fall in love all over again. This year has stunned me, overwhelmed me, and helped me fall in love with anime all over again, deeper and more personally than ever. Analyzing these pieces of art has helped me truly come to terms with how much this medium means to me, how much positive impact it’s had on my life. Anime has restored my faith in the power of storytelling, its capacity to inspire and heal, to encourage and enlighten. This is what fiction is capable of at its best, the kind of raw, visceral honesty that connects people across boundaries and forges something real and enduring in its wake.

And nowhere is that clearer than with the show that’s come to define my anime experience, and likely will for countless years to come: Gintama.

If Steven Universe was my introduction to the capabilities of animation to affect me, and Angel Beats officially codified my love and appreciation for the medium, then Gintama is the zenith all those experiences have been building towards. A show of staggering quality and unfathomable potential, this masterwork exists as testament to everything that storytelling is capable of, every single way it can bring out the best of us and leave the worst behind. It takes all the ways I’ve come to love anime and presents them at their absolute strongest, telling every conceivable story under the sun and telling them better than they’ve ever been told, with the greatest understanding possible of the reasons these stories matter so much to us, and how they can be drawn out into their best selves to continue inspiring change for eons to come. Gintama is my favorite fictional property of all time, and I legitimately don’t know if that will ever change. This show truly defines every single reason why anime is so special to me, all the passion, all the unpredictability, all the hope, all the courage, all the lunacy, and above all else, all the sincerity. From now on, whenever someone asks me why I love anime, all I have to do is point them at Gintama and say, “That’s why.”

Because the way Gintama inspires me is the way anime inspires me. It inspires me to make the best of myself, to never settle for anything less than everything I can be. It inspires me to never give up on the things that matter to me, to never let hatred and suffering beat me down. It inspires me to reach for the future, arms outstretched, and leave something better behind as I go. And I wouldn’t have had that experience- or at least, it wouldn’t have been nearly as rewarding- if I hadn’t been analyzing it every step of the way, breaking down every moment that stuck with me, every piece of the gargantuan puzzle that somehow all fit perfectly together. It wouldn’t have happened without your enthusiasm in sharing your love for it right alongside me, bringing me into this wonderful, loving community. Writing for this blog, sharing my love for anime, has made my life better. It’s made me more hopeful, more loving, more courageous, more determined. I am proud of The Anime Binge-Watcher like I’m proud of few other achievements in my life. And if the impact I have on you is even a fraction of that, if my ramblings make your lives even a little better in their wake in the same way this blog has done for me, then this crazy experiment was worth every last ounce of investment I’ve poured into it over the past year.

Part 9: Looking Ahead

So, at long last, we reach the conclusion. God, what is there even left to say? I’ve been writing this mammoth essay out for four hours straight in the wee hours of the morning, and I somehow still have enough energy to bring it to a close. That’s the level of mania this blog inspires in me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If I’m being honest, I’m not sure what the future holds. I’ve got one more year of college before I graduate, and then I’ll have to find an actual job, and I’ll have to readjust my entire life to figure out what kind of adult I want to be. Perhaps life will grow too complicated to keep this up, and I’ll have to bid The Anime Binge-Watcher goodbye. Perhaps I’ll grow bored of it in time and call it quits, moving on to the next big thing. Or perhaps I’ll continue it far into the future, letting it become an essential part of my life. The possibilities are, quite frankly, endless, and like I said at the outset of this mess, I have no idea what I’m doing. I started this project on a whim, and now I’m staying up through the witching hour writing 12+ pages on how much that whim has come to mean to me. If anime’s taught me anything, it’s that sometimes, you just gotta let life not make sense.

All I know for sure is that for the time being, I have no intention of letting this project die. Not when I still have so much zest for it, not while I still feel like I have so much left to share, and not while my love for anime has never been stronger. This has been one of the most rewarding years of my life, and as long at that fire continues burning, I’ll still be here, finding meaning in the most unexpected of places. And I hope you’ll still be here as well, joining me on whatever new adventures I embark upon.

Thank you all for one year of The Anime Binge-Watcher. Here’s to many happy futures to come.

Love and Peace,

TABW

[sakuraswordly]

Announce5

※※ Read from left to right, top to bottom

言語：日本語(Pixiv)(以下のコンテンツは Pixiv で Google 翻訳を使用しており、情報はありません。)

(Fra nå av skal jeg slutte å oversette norsk fordi jeg tror du allerede har hatt noen til å oversette Tsubasa of Phantasia for meg nå. Har jeg rett?)

(Héðan í frá ætla ég að hætta að þýða íslensku því ég held að þú hafir nú þegar fengið einhvern til að þýða Tsubasa of Phantasia fyrir mig. Hef ég rétt fyrir mér?)

Check more in  @PunchSakura(Don’t have much)

The picture with only Syaoran, Chester and Punch has a knowledge picture, they came from this link: I handbook schlumberger.This i-Handbook is an electronic version of the Field Data Handbook, displays data that helps compute results fast. This eliminates the time-consuming and error-prone practice of first assimilating data and obtaining results using a separate calculator.

The i-Handbook was designed with three objectives:

retain the book format of the Field Data Handbook

present data without additional training

focus on the needs of a varied audience, from onsite personnel to design and planning engineers in offices.

Around early January, we won't have much free time because there will be a lot of work in the field. Therefore, the Comic will be postponed to early January. Today I will bring some information that connects to Tsubasa of Phantasia.

The Master of Masters(From Kingdom Hearts χ) was very similar to King Gilgamesh's action in Tsofph. They both set the game like a chess game, but King Gilgamesh be able to see the end of the world or the future or the end of time without the Book of Prophecies unlike the Master of Masters, he first bestows Luxu the Gazing Eye and instructs him to pass it on to others so that the Gazing Eye can relay future events to him and he can write the Book of Prophecies successfully. Even so, both goals are the same and firmly stand against the Darkness. Hint: These Light and Darkness information did connect to Tsubasa of Phantasia.

This original picture from: tsukinoura.wordpress.com This is the only context that describes how clever King Gilgamesh was, even though the characters had been adopted.

These two pictures have come from Tsubasa chronicle Vol.1 Chapter 3. These are the concept ideal for making Tsubasa of Phantasia(Not a first-time idea). Because I believe that parallel worlds exist, but how could I write to make the big pictures that how parallel worlds were. I still want to know too. That's why I study and analysis science knowledge.The first concept of non-human or spirit was from xxxHolic and Tales of Phantasia and from this movie(Below).

Avatar, considered to be one of the most revolutionary films in the science fiction industry (of our time), is known for its breathtaking quality, advanced plot, and numerous elements of science. Avatar focuses on the significance and preservation of nature on a distant planet known as Pandora. Pandora is populated with human-like creatures known as the Na’vi. Through worshipping holy insects that resemble glowworms, the Na’vi pay their thanks and respect while saying prayers after killing an animal for food or safety. The film gives nature an explicitly positive connotation as it puts emphasis on the idolization of nature. Avatar works to focus on the relationship between the environment and the Na’vi, and why that bond is so important to the continuation of Na’vi existence. Read more in: Link

And that’s for today for an analysis of my Tsofph comic! See you in the next Announce!(About explain Watanuki will be next Announce.)

Characters in comic: Punch Whalen(My own character), Chester Burklight, Peter Pan in((Link botw)’s Body), Mokona Modoki, Homura Akemi, the 3 protagonists and 3 main characters(Already introduced) 

[itsbambrr]

Rules: Answer questions about yourself and tag 20 people.

I was tagged by @talerano​. I don’t like to tag people, but if you’d like to get to know more about me (within reason), feel free to tag me and I’ll probably tell you.

Name: Amber

Age: 23

Gender: Female

Orientation: Gray-asexual (bisexual + gray-ace)

Height: 5’6

Favorite color: Navy and Tiffany Blue

Book recommendations: 

Nursing Against the Odds -- Suzanne Gordon // A slightly dated but very compelling sociology and macro-level commentary and analysis of the institution of nursing in the early to mid 2000s. A lot of the commentary prompted reorganization and the overarching work is used in nursing scholarship today. It also gives the reader a much deeper understanding of what nurses do today. This work went on to expand into a few volumes that evaluate nursing in the contemporary western world, of which has largely influenced my academic career as a medical sociologist, aspiring nurse educator, and future doctor of nursing practice. 

The Complexities of Care -- Edited by Siobhan Nelson and Suzanne Gordon // For those that aren’t interested in the 400+ pages of Nursing Against the Odds, I recommend this entry in the same vein. This was a much faster read and focuses on the complicated role of “caring” in the institutionalization of nursing. While the overall political position of the writers tend to be much less radical than my own, this more contemporary entry allows readers alike to better understand the social challenges nurses navigate on a a daily basis. Fun fact: I analyzed half of its content in an academic essay where I examined the politics of care and macrosocial structures in the institution of health for a midterm essay in a medical sociology course. 

The Iron Druid Chronicles -- Kevin Hearne // For fans of urban fantasy. 21-(century)-year-old druid Atticus O’Sullivan manages an occult book store in Tempe, AZ. After centuries of hiding, Atticus’ past eventually catches up with him and then some. The series includes 9 novels, 3 novelas, and several short stories within the universe. I highly recommend the audiobook, which is read by Luke Daniels. The book reads at a YA level, but with a more mature tone due to graphic violence (and occasionally gore) and sexual content. 

The Subtle art of Not Giving a Fuck -- Mark Manson // I like nonfiction, but I’m not a big fan of self-help. Which is why I appreciate this book. The Subtle art of Not Giving a Fuck reads less like a preachy life coach and more like a good friend you asked to convince you to get your shit together and start living your life. 

If you care for more, just use the ask button.

Movie recommendations: 

Thor: Ragnarok // I don’t need to explain how great it is to see Tessa Thompson kicking ass. Also, Taika Waititi’s humor is great. 

Black Panther, dir. Ryan Coogler // It’s not really a secret that I love Ryan Coogler’s work, so when I heard that directing Black Panther, I knew I was going to see the movie multiple times. I saw it three times -- twice in theaters while interning at Disney, once on a cross-country flight back home. 

Enchanted, dir. Kevin Lima // While it isn’t as widely advertised in this iteration of my tumblr, I’m a HUGE Alan Menken fan. I’m an even bigger Disney nerd. Like... I go ALL OUT on Disney. Enchanted is a comedic meta commentary that satirizes the Princess and Renaissance Disney eras in a more lighthearted tale. Featuring Amy Adams (a favorite of mine), Patrick Dempsey (meh), James Marsden, Idina Menzel, Susan Sarandon, and cameos from your favorite Disney Princess voice actors.

TV recommendations: 

Brooklyn Nine-Nine // I’m not generally a big fan of IRL police, but I do appreciate a funny and well-written comedy featuring a diverse ensemble cast. Shout-out to the Nine-Nine for having TWO queer characters of color: Captain Raymond Holt (Andre Braugher) and Detective Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz). Catch all five seasons on Hulu and season six on NBC (whenever that starts). 

Community // I was recommended this by a friend who has the same comedic sense as I do. While I think the first season was a bit slow, I do appreciate the humor. Donald Glover and Danny Puti were the main reasons why I watched all six seasons (#sixseasonsandamovie). I loved their onscreen chemistry and their character development. 

The Clone Wars // (aka #sixseasonsandamovie: Star Wars Edition) While it may take some adjustment coming from the live-action films, this animated series expands on the events of The Clone Wars. I found this series particularly useful in parsing out the canon and Legends universe because Lucasfilm was in the process of aquisition by Disney throughout the later part of its production. As a child, I appreciated the well-timed humor and sci-fi action. As an adult, I appreciate the subtle themes and narratives posed in a war that relied upon cloned labor. 

Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Last Airbender: The Legend of Korra // UGH JUST LOOK AT THIS MASTERPIECE THAT NEEDS TO BE TAKEN MORE SERIOUSLY. A:TLA is basically a Chosen One narrative in which our immature hero must rise to the occasion and bring balance to the world by defeating a major imperial power. The Legend of Korra expands on the universe and is set approximately 70 years after the conclusion of A:TLA. While Korra (the heroine) is much farther in her physical journey as the Avatar/Chosen Once, she still has much to learn about the world aroundher and of Republic City. This series focuses more on social and spiritual conflicts in a recently industrialized world. As a viewer, I think Korra is a much needed representation of brown girls in popular media, especially in animation. REALLY I’M JUST HERE FOR THE WORLD BUILDING AND LORE. And honestly, if you’re a writer or even a lover of well-written worlds, check these two series out for great examples of world-building.  Check out creators Mike DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko on tumblr for more of their work!

Music recommendations: 

I have a pretty broad taste in music, so here’s a quick sample of what you’ll find on shuffle when you’re me:

Pay My Rent - DNCE

Trader Sam’s (background music loop for Trader Sam’s Tiki Lounge at both the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, CA and Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort in Orlando, FL)

Shiver Shiver - Walk the Moon

Hard Times - Paramore

Etta James - I’d Rather Be Blind

Christ Stapleton feat. Justin Timberlake - Tennessee Whiskey

Wannabe - Spice Girls

Aquarium, from Camille Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals

Nocturne op. 9 no. 2 by Frederic Chopin (Fun fact: this appears on Bioshock Infinite’s ambient soundtrack and in the following song...)

United States of Eurasia - Muse

We haven’t really gotten into jazz standards or soundtracks either, so /shrug

Coffee, tea, or hot chocolate: Iced cold brew coffee!

Cats or dogs: Dogs if I am not personally responsible for them for more than 48 hours, cats if I am.

I want to live long enough to witness: The end of this bullshit presidential administration, the elimination of undocumented and prison labor, worldwide denuclearization, public beach access for all, institution of universal or single-payer health insurance in the US, the end of my alma mater’s budget crisis

Weird obsessions: Dr. Sandra Lee’s (DrPimplePopper) YouTube Channel, Filipino fusion cuisine, eating raw fish

Tumblr birthday: September 2010, I think. I’ve had my tumblr since high school. 

How many sideblogs: None anymore, but if you’re interested in my academic and professional work, ask me about my pro-blog on Wordpress. 

Random fact about me: I several redundant professional certifications in water rescue and CPR/AED administration.

[happypastelponies]

Analyzing Earth Ponies

Earth ponies are mud horses. They’re uninteresting. They have the weakest abilities out of the 3 races and tribes. For a long time through the history of Friendship is Magic, Earth ponies have had a sort of negative stigma placed upon them by the fanbase, who see this race as being the lowest class. On the other hand, the fans tend to lean to the perception that Pegasi rank in the middle of the class system, with unicorns being the superior of the three.

I’m here to say BUCK THAT!!! And turn everything you guys knew about Earth ponies upside down and inside out.

So what do we know about Earth ponies? While many people in the MLP:FiM fandom have looked at this race from a mere surface level, they can probably tell you that they’re the hardiest of the three races; strong and study like the earth that they’re connected to, and...good farmers? And that’s about it.

But what if it’s not? What if being strong enough to smash boulders into pebbles with their hooves and durable isn’t all there is to the good ol’ Earth pony? We’ve seen in numerous episodes, such as “Cutie Mark Chronicles” and “The Maud Couple” both literal and figurative analogies to Geodes- a plain and unordinary-looking rock on the surface, yet having abundant crystals and gems within their core once they were broken apart. I think that Earth ponies are like these geodes and just not enough people are willing to to truly crack them open and see them for what really lies within.

1: Alchemy

I believe that Earth ponies may, in fact, be the original founders of magic. Now, you may be thinking I’m crazy, but just hear me out. Take a look at creation- the common theory that whether by a Big Bang or divine creation, the earth- our earth- came about through through means of massive, unfathomable forces. Millions of years of microscopic space rock and dust colliding together at full force, and pulling in on each other, fusing, and becoming one giant rock floating through space to become our planet. Where am I going with this? It all most likely started with something small; one microscopic piece of space dust or rock, and elements within that binding throughout millions of years with other debris, and changing into something large over time. A sort of transmutation, if you will.  

And what is known to be the art of transmutation itself? Alchemy. This is a practice that aimed to purify, mature, and perfect certain objects into chrysopoeia. For example, the transmutation of base metals into ‘noble’ metals, such as lead into gold. Earth ponies by nature are the one race most connected to the earth- it’s in their name, and doubtless, in their D.N.A. This is seen in their ability to tend the land so easily, to determine whether soil is fertile enough to grow crops, to tell if a geode is a geode by its exterior alone, to punch through rocks and turn them to dust…..

But let’s look a little deeper. Alchemy is all about transmutation, right? Well, in what do we find the microscopic materials that are needed for elemental transmutation in real life? Earth! It offers the building blocks of transmutation that are most likely needed for earth ponies as well. The planet Earth itself has been transmuting itself- base minerals into ‘noble’ gems, like diamonds, golds, geodes and more, under extreme pressure, intense heat, and a careful selection process of the building blocks of matter long before humans walked its face, and also, as it the case for Earth ponies.

What do we find regarding Earth ponies and the art of transmutation/ alchemy in “Hearth’s Warming Eve” episode? Applejack being shown holding a clump of soil in her hoof and being able to progress the development of a seed into a sprout within mere seconds. The earth, in and of itself, is the ‘great, natural alchemist’, with plants naturally transmuting sunlight and nutrients from the soil into a valuable energy source for themselves; and- as said before, the earth taking rocks and minerals in its layers and transforming them into sought after precious metals and gems. The talents of most other Earth ponies, from what we’ve seen, lies in the field of farming and also manipulating the aging process of the organic lifeforms of their fields. Much like how Avatar’s Earth benders learned the talent from nature itself, such as the mole badgers, this could prove to be the case for Equestria’s Earth ponies being the first to pick up on transmutation from the earth.

2: The father founders of magic?

Since I already brought up the art of transmutation through alchemy through the earth, and by extension- Earth ponies, we know that alchemy, at its core….is nothing more than chemistry. Chemistry, at its core, is nothing more than science. This is extremely telling, because ironically, while pretty much every fan theorist and analysis found in the FiM throws Earth ponies into the mud (pun intended), they continually hold unicorns at a much higher regard. But let’s look at unicorns for a second. What connection do they have with alchemy, i.e, science? Everything!

In Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, the very earliest that we see of Twilight’s teachings in the studies of magic is “Amending Fences”, where she’s in a classroom with Moondancer, showcasing just how much she knows of the building blocks of the Periodic Table of Elements. From her dialogue, we learn than substances such as sodium chloride exist in Equestria, as they do here on earth. It’s of no mere coincidence that Unicorns study chemistry in Canterlot, where they also study magic. A Youtuber by the name of Cavatina theorized that younger unicorns are taught to study science (basic alchemy transmutation) before they learn magic. This is most likely due to safety reasons, if magic in itself is nothing more than combining elements and compounds that exist in the ponies themselves or in their enviorns, and being able to channel them properly through a conductor- such as a horn.

If magic is nothing more than the combination of elements within the self and the world around them, that the very youngest unicorns learn and advance from there, then perhaps….just maybe…..Earth ponies could, in act, be called the originators of magic. Perhaps not in the more advanced form that higher leveled unicorns have polished and practiced the craft, though. But if Earth ponies have been transmuting the elements of earth and their environs, before any unicorn ever had abilities of any sort, then it wouldn’t be too farfetched to assume that the base level of what Earth ponies could do by way of elemental reconfiguration and chemical bonding is being picked up and taught to unicorns. Being a race who hold themselves ‘holier than thou’ for millennia, it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that they would’ve taken the base magic acquired and learned from Earth ponies, and just pushed it to its limit, which led to the crafting of “spells”.

3: Spiritual

Alchemy- the art of transmutation from an esoteric and Hermetic standpoint, is fundamentally spiritual. Zosimos of Panopolis was one of the first alchemists to highlight the spiritual nature of the alchemical quest, symbolic of a religious regeneration of the human soul. How does the spiritual connect to Earth ponies?

From a religious, Christian viewpoint, one would draw the conclusion to make the case that it was divine will for the sentient creatures born of the earth- that being humans to have been made a little lower than the angels; crowned with God’s glory and honor (Psalms 8:5), have in subjection the lesser creatures of the land, and that their (human’s) purpose, after being created and put in a garden of God’s own creation (Genesis 2:8), was to tend/cultivate the land and extend its borders (Genesis 2:15). I think this is significant as to why most Earth ponies have a job that makes use of their talents in performing that task in Equestria, and also showing that from as far back as “Hearth’s Warming Eve”, this one race was responsible for growing and distributing all of the food to the other races order to keep them from going extinct.

In addition, in Genesis 3:8 shows that humans once had a close fellowship with the spiritually divine (God) while in the Edenic garden that was His, and direct access to His presence, as spoken of when He would ‘walk’ about in during the breezy part of the day.

Could this not be the case with Earth ponies? It seems all too coincidental for this race to be traditionally farmers and caretakers of the land, and basically have in subjection the races of unicorns and pegasi who depend on them for food lest they go extinct; much like how humans, by divine order, were tasked with the job of tending God’s gardens, maintaining the earth, and having the lesser ranked creatures to them in subjection and taken care of.

Furthermore, in delving deeper on the topic of the spiritual aspects and connection of and to Earth ponies, one need only look at the finest example, which is Tree Hugger.  While this pony is looked at as a parody of Hippies by the FiM fans, and just as overlooked and disregarded as the earth pony race as a whole, I have no doubt that this one pony is the open book that we need to truly understand what Earth ponies are capable of.

I bring it up in greater detail here: https://happypastelponies.tumblr.com/post/172160703223/past-lives-and-present-possibilities, but in short, TH’s frequent mention of chakras and energy leads me to believe that, in spite of her appearance, mannerisms, and speech, she has been able to tap into the greatest ability that can be found within Equestria, which is the link to the spiritual, the azoth as it is known in alchemy. I believe that this is something that only Earth ponies would be able to obtain and have access to; though with great difficulty.

It could be that perhaps Pinkie Pie, Maud (and Cheese Sandwich) have a limited access to the azoth, given what we’ve seen of her abilities in her inherent ‘Pinkie/ Cheese/ Maud sense’ and awareness of other dimensions that she can gain access to, through, but it comes and goes, as it was said in “Feeling Pinkie Keen”.

In conclusion, though this is all pretty much speculative, I believe that Earth ponies are not to be looked down upon, and possess more abilities than we are made aware of. Perhaps they may be the highest race of the three tribes; perhaps higher than the Alicorns, even! We may not know everything that they’re truly capable of, nor do we have to, but the show has dropped breadcrumbs for us to take and interpret however we choose. Don’t give up on the earth ponies and take them at mere surface value. After all, at the very least, they were able to keep two entire races from vanishing off the face of the earth during turbulent times and threat of an eternal ice age!

See Also: Ascending to Earth pony would be the Avatar State? https://happypastelponies.tumblr.com/post/172772457998/mlp-g5-alicorn-ascending-to-earth-pony-would-be

Past Lives and Present Possibilities https://happypastelponies.tumblr.com/post/172160703223/past-lives-and-present-possibilities