#i hate d&d for making that shit a thing

[glorybeat]

i don’t know if this has been debated before(probably has), but can we talk about how the reasons as to why some people wanted brienne with tormund were all pretty much deeply misogynistic

[seyaryminamoto]

Hello! Long time no see :) hope all is well!

Not sure if you’re still taking Q&A’s, but I was curious about your opinion in regard to this newest addition in the ATLA live action casting for toph. They have opted with making her “more feminine”. I have seen your interpretation of toph and it was very well executed all the way around. From her friendships and admirations, to her romance and personal struggles/goals. It was well rounded and very in character. That being said, do you think making her more feminine will be an issue? Would adding femininity, -in your opinion- take away from her accomplishments as a character ? Would it ruin what she stands for and the social standards she went against? Or could this be a not so serious variable that affects Toph as an individual? This isn’t counting any other changes the creators have/will make ofc.) I look forward to your answer whenever you have a chance.

Thank you for these latest chapters btw, they have been a true delight! Best of luck to you in your future works. XO - a fan

Hello there! I have a lot of stuff to answer and it's been piling on, but yeah, I've been terribly busy lately, so I'm sorry for that :( but here's your answer, and I'll keep it as... concise as I can make it. Haha... ha. It's me, brevity is not in my nature.

Usually, with ATLA's liveaction, I've been able to trace the reasoning behind their choices. Some, of course, are completely ridiculous and can't be justified as anything but fanservice (looking at you, 41st division), but with several others, while the effectiveness of the changes can be questionable, I can trace where they're coming from and why they're trying to do that.

I have struggled to make sense out of why Toph would suddenly need to be less of a tomboy and more feminine. I have a couple of theories right now: one of them is that they believe it would be culturally unlikely for a highborn girl to be too much of a tomboy for believability's sake. While I could, perhaps, concede on this on SOME level... I also find myself thinking on many modern Korean TV series I've watched, where even if the story takes place in the Joseon era, the female leads might even crossdress as male in order to have a stronger role in society, thus, they can be depicted as... not all that feminine? Not COMPLETELY, usually, because there always needs to be some level of femininity to sell the perfect romance, apparently... but they're willing to provide the characters with different facets of personality that make femininity a backdrop, rather than the core of the character.

If this is what they're going for with Toph, then I guess our Blind Bandit's going to be K-Drama-ized. Sort of. I'm not entirely sure whether that will make her believable as a character at all when you consider what her role was like throughout Book 2, unfortunately, but it's, as usual, a case of reaching your own conclusions when we see it live.

The second option is one I find a little more outrageous: the show may be looking to disregard a lot of "character stereotypes" from the 2000's. The erasure of Sokka's early sexism most likely comes from this logic (the bad writing around the rest of his character, unfortunately, makes it a lot harder to love him even if his egalitarian view of society should make him more likeable, weird self-own there...), it's an attempt to "modernize" the story and show us the character as something other than your stereotypical 2000's male cartoon character who masks his insecurities behind sexism. And I will say, in my eyes, the logic of "modernizing" a story is the very reason why remakes are supposed to exist: the issue comes when the people creating these remakes somehow fail to hit the mark and their new version winds up being less genuine and more shallow than the original (see most of Disney's liveaction remakes, ofc). I don't think ATLA's liveaction is necessarily doing EVERYTHING wrong, but while the changes can have their logic, in this instance it would be really hard to argue that the logic sustains itself, because...

I don't know who on earth finds tomboy characters offensive, but if such people do exist? I hope they step on a lego.

Tomboy characters can be great representation and validation for girls who (like me) weren't all that gender-conforming. It could even help some people make sense of their own gender dysphoria! All of which is very modern and forward thinking and not at all stereotypical of the 2000's because nobody in that era was creating these characters for those purposes. But upon removing Toph's "tomboy" status in order to turn her into a more "traditional girl", it leads me to think that Mai's NOT going to be a goth girl because "that's no longer such a common personality type, 20 years later, so its dated and needs to be removed", and Ty Lee is suddenly going to be written as an erudite because a carefree girl who doesn't seem to be all that intellectually inclined (note that she CAN be depicted as smart in her original characterization, it's merely that it's clear her interests don't lie in knowledge or so, she's a physical, spiritual kind of person, not bookish by any means) would be offensive and enforcing the idea that feminine girls are stupid! All of which would, of course, turn them into entirely different characters.

Toph was a great tomboy, a lot of people loved her for it, and a lot of people liked that she could be this while also being blind. It's possible that the liveaction people think that tomboy + blind are one too many traits and she needs to be nerfed (...???) in order to handle her better? I don't even know. While I can't say for sure how bad the result will be once this version of the show releases, I'm not very confident that this change will help her character in any way. I actually think Katara ended up having a curious arc in Book 1's liveaction, if not what her fans wanted, and I don't mind a lot of the changes they gave Aang. Zuko... eh, I will never love him, that much is obvious, but I appreciated that he seemed to take his mission and his honor a lot more seriously than in the show, where he seemed to think that sailing everywhere to find the Avatar was enough to get results even before Aang broke out of the iceberg (the fact that he had a BOOK here where he wrote things down was such a nice change! I was caught off guard completely by the notion that Zuko can write, let alone investigate things! :'D).

But this Toph change honestly seems to lean more towards the Sokka change... in the sense that on paper MAYBE they have their reasons and yet in practice it could just result in a character being completely derailed from its purpose and crippled on a characterization level, which then gets overcompensated with... uh... unnecessary convoluted matters like "my dad doesn't approve of me, my life is useless, this is where all my insecurities come from :((((", for instance.

Time will tell and I guess we'll have to watch it to see whether it works or not... but unless they leaked this information to gauge how to calibrate this change based on fan reaction? I'm not sure this is going to be remotely as agreeable a change as the liveaction's creators might have hoped it was.

Addressing your specific questions: a more feminine Toph will definitely need a wholly different character construction. Her clashes with Katara are bound to lean towards classism now ("I'm highborn, you're a peasant, why would you expect me to set up your tent? You should be the one setting up mine, lesser being"), which won't make her any more agreeable as a character, as long as they do retain some of the story beats from Book 2, ofc. Her training of Aang will definitely be weird because Toph was supposed to be the embodiment of earth, so in tune with her element that she's basically a rock, or metal once she develops that one. And worth noting, she develops metalbending by punching stuff: this isn't very feminine :'D I'm not entirely sure how they intend to recreate these scenes if her character will be fundamentally altered.

I do think that, unless the tomboy side is replaced by something even more impressive (and I can't really think of something), this change won't be very agreeable for me. A great deal of what draws people to characters like Toph is their personality and their willingness to go against the norm. She does this by being a tomboy and by being blind but embracing her condition rather than bemoaning how sad she is about it. And the issue is, considering Toph's background, the only things I can see them replacing the tomboyish behavior with, in order to obtain similar results, is... making her a social snob. Which people won't like. I, at least, can't imagine anyone enjoying that switch. Otherwise? She'll just be a cute, chirpy girl who is perfectly complacent and compliant with everything, meaning there will be no conflict with her character and all issues between her and the Gaang, while shortlived in canon, will be rendered non-existent altogether here.

So... yeah, I'm not exactly hyped, if still slightly curious as to what exactly they're planning to do to her character. It does remind me of Sokka's changes too, because... I don't really hate that he wasn't sexist. But I disliked the writing around him so much that the removal of sexism legit did nothing to improve him, in my eyes (I won't say the lack of sexism made him worse, though, it was the REST of the writing that did that). As a flaw for his character that I didn't really care for, it's weird that its removal didn't help my view of their Sokka in the least, so I am admittedly wary that a personality trait I DID like, Toph's tomboyish demeanor, will get nerfed or deleted outright... and it's hard to believe this can be an improvement for her. We'll have to wait and see.

Also? Thank you very much for your kind words regarding how I characterized Toph <3 I actually got used to Toph fans not being very happy with how I wrote her since she was so very aggressive and bold at the start instead of having softer sides all along, but that's why you write very long complicated stories! To flesh things out as you go along rather than since day one x'D Along with that, an older Toph whose life grievances festered for about 7 extra years, and who never had the Gaang's influence, sounded like one hell of a molotov cocktail of a character to me, so I really enjoyed working with her based on this premise. So glad you've enjoyed her <3 and really happy to hear you've enjoyed the newest chapters too! Finally a bit of deserved respite, haha, be it for you guys or for our main dorks <3

[dukeofthomas]

I will forever maintain that Jason would've been fine and Not a vigilante without Bruce making him Robin

[kavehayati]

Chappel Roan saying she’s sad she’s demisexual and then there’s me being aroace as a whole like don’t you think I’m even more sad 😭

[snekdood]

wish i could slap the apathy out of trans channers

[dootznbootz]

I fucking hate those colds where you just have fucking fog for brains >:(

[impossible-rat-babies]

I haven’t bothered to look into how to fix it, but bc eyrie’s face is asym now their old fangs don’t work

[mcalhenwrites]

Writing Name the Frogs has made "pumpkin" the creepiest endearment.

[lys-jeorge]

.

[thesearchforbluejello]

I fundamentally do not understand this show. The Dominion War was RIGHT THERE. Like, RIGHT. THERE. Why did we need some whack Romulus-blew-up backstory when the federation was already decimated by the war?? A follow up on the fallout of that and how the ceding of territory, the betrayal by allies, and the xenophobia of threats from both within and outside would have been SO much more interesting to me.

And they're so busy pulling half developed plotlines out of thin air that they're not even pounding in their anchor points for it all. Like, case in point, Jay looking for Icheb's cortical node. SEVEN HAS IT. IT IS LITERALLY IN SEVEN'S FUCKING HEAD. Like, okay fine easter egg? Maybe? But a major plot point isn't exactly an Easter egg?? Like obviously Beyer knows a shitload about Voyager, so at least one of them must be aware of that, so I assume it's implied... but not everyone has seen every Trek and that is from one specific Voyager episode, and Seven had the perfect opportunity to rub that in Jay's face... And are we not going to talk about Seven becoming a Ranger which is HUGELY antithetical to where she was at in Voyager? Because the fact that she became an individual on a ship that was what, 1/3 Maquis? Um, that's a super fucking important fact? Love that for her, but Christ alive nail. these. plot points. home.

idk I guess these two are nitpicks, but I have so many more and just don't feel like writing a novel expounding upon what I perceive as their many (MANY) failures in writing this show. But this show is just full of those moments and I don't understand their choices. Easter eggs only work when there's actually something semi coherent to hide them in (hence why most of M*rvel's fail nowadays, just saying). This feels almost as incoherent as Renegades, and I am SOOOOO very sorry to be actually saying that because woooooof that is not a compliment. Like... it's the Romulans, it's the androids, it's the Borg. It feels like whatever unholy combination is happening with Applebee's and iHop right now. Like... Okay I guess? But it's just a weird combination and very unnecessary. Just fucking pick one and go from there.

I do however need like a lot more ex-Borg bonding that was such a good moment okay thanks bye

[amandabe11man]

so me and my friend are onto season 4 of X-files now and we got to the csm-centric episode, right. and when he put the sniper rifle up from the window at the start I was like "whoa there. jfk assassination much?"-- and then the flashback starts and wouldn't you fucking know it, csm was the one who killed jfk??

this made me joke about how "what is he, the dark version of forrest gump or something? lmao" (ie. being present at a bunch of historical happenings), and then it seems like I was right because after that, he killed martin luther king too... aND TH E N towards the end, they make a fuckin forrest gump reference???

guys I think I'm finally becoming psychic

[fictionallyinparadise]

I love having f/os who are in a Rough Canon Source because that means I can make my s/i be incredibly badass and obliterate any threats against the darlings <3

[arcadequeerz]

Sometimes I am reminded just how many people on this website r joyless fucks.

[t0ska-luvletters]

miss my boy </3 ive been sillying all day today so ive not been NEAR as clingy as i normally am but ive literally been yapping about how much i want him here all day :( augh trying SO HARD not to spam him and flood his inbox with the same stuff