#one day i'll have to write about the mako & azula parallels too.

[jade-of-mourning]

ACTIVELY PASSING AWAY!!!

the post you linked is actually the exact one I remembered?? yeah. I don’t have extensive thoughts on it either but I’m so happy you helped me find it again!! :)

I’m just gonna plop the little coherence I have of bending-related strangeness (not quite body horror) here:

firebenders, given their emotions often fuel their bending, cry fire/embers on occasion, trigger the ozone-feel of lightning when intensely afraid, etc. this makes more sense in my head but the idea of bending sources being more. physically linked to the bender is. sooo. and earthbenders thrive from their connection to the earth so I propose: earthbenders are always a little bit filthy, there’s always a little dirt somewhere, because the lack of it is psychologically agonizing. earthbenders from the 100 yr war with scars filled in with tightly packed earth. save me earthbenders with scars filled in with tightly packed earth.* earthbenders learning to bend each other from scar-fillings like a funky little earthbender-specific modified bloodbending,,, waterbenders having literal water filling their lungs because they move with the tide, the tide moves with them, within them, a cohesive, cohabiting unit. airbenders who compact air with each breath to be lighter, more connected to every sound and smell and sight carried on the breeze but separated from it all the same.

*I also have mako+bolin thoughts about that. so remember how I was yapping abt how mako (and bolin, by extension, would be physically realllyy fucked up? mako’s not technically an earthbender, but,,, ek genes,, and the brothers having matching creepy ass scars that freak the krew out a little bit but none of them really talk abt it,,,

yeah so that’s my thoughts on that!!

however I’m not done with you yet. I have au thoughts (again, to whose surprise?) so I’m kind off mentally ill about parallels in atla/tlok, sooo,, azula and mako.

I SOUND INSANE BUT HEAR ME OUT‼️‼️

so azula is known for her insaneee poker face despite years of repressed trauma and childhood emotional abuse, right. well. guess who else doesn’t express emotions visibly and is cosplaying a normal person over years of fighting for his life. ding-ding-ding, you guessed it, mako!

so, so hear me out here. mako directly paralleling something azula said/did (“you can laugh. it’s funny,” for example) a couple times. but then. but then.

this is where the au part comes in. something happens. maybe kill bolin, idk. (JUST READ THAT BACK WHAT AM I ON 😭🙏🏼) but mako gets the breakdown experience,,,

maybe shove zuko’s oldass in there as a bonus. bring in katara. have a blast, do whatever. but like he has to be sedated cause he’s just. losing it man. like sobbing and screaming and everything cause he spent so long doing everything to make sure bolin was okay (she spent so long doing everything to make sure she didn’t become like zuko) but here it is, all crumbling before him (he shouldn’t have been able to run that fast, it all crumbled before her) and he is absolutely powerless (what lightning can she summon chained up to a gutter? there is only so far her roars will reach, and they know to get out of range.)

I’m in my teen angst era rn and mako will in fact be enjoying the brunt of it. thanks for listening to my little rants and rambles :))

🐌

oh no way! i'm glad i could help you :P continuing beneath cut —

pressing the internal save button in my head on your thoughts on bending body horror. it's good. would eat hmm…

okay but when you translate it over to characters who make my brain turn,,, how did you know that it would intensify my opinions on the subject by 100x fdhkjghbdfjkshbjgdf personally i like mako & bolin to be not only internally fucked up, but also externally fucked up too!

ALSO I LOVE AZULA & MAKO PARALLELS. they are the two lightningbenders who looked at the concept of "lightning requires absence of emotion and peace of mind" and went yup, i'm going to dissociate the fuck out of life's collective traumas and use that to zap some shit up. there's this one edit somewhere out there on mako & azula doing the same feats in their respective shows which, if i were the type to engage in discourse, i would whip out to showcase that mako is not an incompetent firebender lol. but really — they're both firebender prodigies who were exploited and used by their respective mentors/figures of greater power. they both put on masks of feigned indifference because it's the sort of shit that enabled them to survive all these years in their vastly different but similarly dangerous environments. they're the pragmatists in comparison to their brothers and they do what it takes to reach where they must, with a learned apathy for those who get knocked down in the process.

so yeah! azula/mako parallels actually give me life, as do mako/katara parallels. (adding to the reasons as to why mako would've made a better girl, but i digress.)

ALSO mako paralleling shit azula said is actually so funny what i might have to casually incorporate that into the avatar!mako au sob dfjshkghjfdshjhhh

also jfc mako's breakdown would be brutal. that is not pretty shit. that would not be pretty. in fact it's so un-pretty that i think i'm going to write it (granted, maybe to a less explicit degree and without the whole dead bolin thing because it's canon compliant, but you bet your ass that rose beds & gasoline veins is going to delve into that deconstruction of everything mako's spent his entire life perceiving to be the point of his existence). anyway i love this au conceptually and you are so big brain for thinking it up. love your casual writing style too :)

until next time, snailon!