#like. a whole ass decade. if it weren't for Real Life Events there's a good chance that i would've moved on from crassus to someone else

[sforzesco]

crassus is the man who lined the via appia with crucified slaves. why did you have to make me like him

alright, so I don't actually make anyone feel one way or another about crassus.

the thing about crassus is that he's unusual even for the unusual era that he lived in, and that makes him compelling. the other thing about crassus is that even though he commits horrific acts of violence, he's not actually behaving worse than any of his other contemporaries. there's a lot of violence happening, and it's all kind of awful. caesar commits a genocide, and he's still the special guy to a lot of historians who probably would say that committing genocide is bad, actually, and you shouldn't do it.

he's not even behaving particularly badly by roman standards, since his crucifixion of the slaves along the via appia falls in line with roman ideals of what type of violence is acceptable, which is it's own kind of upsetting in a broader context of state and imperialist violence.

it's fine to have complicated or contradictory feelings about him, you don't even have to like him to sympathize with aspects of him or his life if you don't want to. you can actively dislike everything he's ever done and find him compelling because he's like, a guy, he did stuff during an interesting period of time, and a lot of it is objectively interesting and weird.

there's something in how rome did not spiral into successive civil wars and with massive body counts while he and pompey held joint power. there is something else in how he was the guy who brought back decimation and came out of it with a morale boost. he loved his sons. he crucified an appalling amount of people who suffered under roman slavery. pompey took credit for it, and somehow that strikes me as it's own repulsive violence.

I like crassus as much as I dislike him! I contain contradictory multitudes. it's fine. so did he. I contain no contradictory multitudes about caesar tho, which is a kind of contradiction as well. get out of the way brutus, I'll stab him myself.

[lightningarmour]

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this, it seems like such an odd assortment of movies to make. I'm trying to determine some kind of narrative or thematic through-line here and I don't really get what they're going for?

I guess the only real thing is the elemental theme. Earth, Fire, Water. So if they had the idea that they want to do a trilogy of movies and each one is like built around one of the cardinal elements of the show, then are they just picking characters at random who correspond to each element to be the focal point? In which case, I can see them doing Kyoshi, but then why Zuko and Korra?

If they are wanting to tell some kind of overarching narrative, I don't see what the connective tissue between Kyoshi and the other two are. There's potential for a Zuko movie to tie in with Korra, sure, but not all three unless they're pulling something out of their asses.

I'm entirely guessing at this point that at some point in the future they want to do another Avatar series to follow Legend of Korra, a proper TV show with multiple seasons and all that. I have to imagine that if they weren't greenlit for another season but are for a film trilogy, then they'd use this as the medium to tell the story of the next Avatar. Since they don't want to do new material, these movies have to just be stories that don't have any major impact on the canon.

Of the three, a Kyoshi movie is the most interesting to me because if we accept that we will be getting no new story that furthers the world of Avatar, then the best we can hope for is a cool action movie with a serviceable story. Kyoshi is a fan fave, we already know a decent bunch about her life and adventures, so it's probably pretty easy to just do a movie telling the story of her life. Inconsequential but cool.

Zuko confuses me as a protagonist. In part because he has, arguably the most significant and important character arc of the entire Last Airbender series. We follow him from villain to ally throughout the entire show, I'm not sure what more they can really get into with him. Judging entirely by the preview image, this movie will be about him as Firelord? So maybe we can get some character moments of him struggling to live up to the role of leader, facing the enormous challenge of steering the fire nation in a new direction. But where's the action? Where's the adventure? Does he have to stop an attempted coup or something? This reminds me a lot of Star Trek Picard where you are taking a single character from an ensemble cast and trying to focus on them when their entire reason for having a story to tell is tied to the other members of the ensemble. So I don't believe for a second that we won't be seeing the Gaang in this movie. How do you focus on Zuko without bringing the others into the fold? At which point it's like, why not just make a "where are they now" movie about the entire cast of characters? I also wonder if they will use this at all to explore some of the like, early days of Republic City and shit, like be kind of a bridge between TLA and LOK.

Which brings us to Korra. They're literally only doing this movie for fanservice so they can have Korra and Asami finally kiss on-screen and make a big fucking deal about what a triumph it is for LGBTQ representation or whatever and all the nerds who cried about it for the last decade will pay to see it six times. Now that that is out of the way, I am the absolute least interested in a Korra movie because, like Zuko, she had an entire fucking television series about her where we saw her whole ass growth and development as a character, which unlike Zuko, kind of sucked. This movie, unlike the other two could potentially be the first new material that actually progresses the timeline and continuity of the Avatar world, as it will undoubtedly take place after the events of the series. I won't hide the fact that I don't really like Legend of Korra. Those motherfuckers had four seasons to try and tell a good story with the character and they just couldn't pull it off. So the prospect of another bland story about a character I don't particularly give a shit about just sounds lame.

So again I scratch my head and wonder what lead to these choices. I guess the simple answer is that there was no theme at all. The studio said give us three avatar movies and they said okay who are some characters we can use and just decided on three that are unconnected in any way. But why? If you know you're getting a trilogy, why not tell a big story, why tell three individual stories in isolation? If it is a kind of anthology series not tied together narratively, why not make all three as a thematic exploration, like have all three be about past avatars or something. Give us a movie about the one Avatar's wife getting her Face stolen by Koh or something.

I'll try an keep an open mind about this, who knows maybe they'll whip, but for now I'm perplexed at the state of the Avatar franchise.