The Dark Side of Kawaii

My name is Andrew and I do shit sometimes.

[ashjafari]

[loveamongthesailors]

ahhh “lying”…. one of the oldest tricks in the book. aside from “bashing someone over the head with a rock”

[mens-rights-activia]

*At the club*

The dj: if you don’t got no money take your broke ass home

Me:

[liberalsarecool]

We must reframe the narratives/dialog.

#LanguageMatters

[newtkins]

what do you think would happen if a man was injected all types of viruses and diseases at once

[newtkins]

[catchymemes]

[funnytwittertweets]

[throwbackblr]

[nitewrighter]

Commissioning artists really makes you feel like a renaissance noble. Like you’ll get an email that just says “Hey sorry some things came up but I’m working on your piece and here’s a WIP” and suddenly you’re wearing sumptuous velvets and eating grapes on a reclining couch like “Ohoho! Take as long as you need, my Orpheus! My riches and time are a paltry price to pay to bring your beauty to the world! I am a ~Patron of the Arts!~”

[nekkoara]

[pangolin-404]

I have so many thoughts that they all cancel each other out and I come up with a net 0 in the end

[carnationinstantbutch]

[marisatomay]

love to purchase items but at what cost

[icantwritegood]

[semislutera-deactivated20230303]

[anthropophagiie]

[gudthot-deactivated20191207]

ridiculous 

[lightersmash]

She committed a crime omfg

[captain-starskull]

Now THIS is quality television.

[memewhore]

[40ouncesandamule]

Texas gave up that land so they could keep slavery:

“When Texas sought to enter the Union in 1845 as a slave state, federal law in the United States, based on the Missouri Compromise, prohibited slavery north of 36°30' parallel north. Under the Compromise of 1850, Texas surrendered its lands north of 36°30' latitude.”

[taxchurchesfundhealthcare]

Tell me more about how critical race theory shouldn’t be taught in school.

I am a grown ass man and I just learned about this 5 minutes ago.  Fuck everything about trying to hide the sins of our past.

[theotheristhedoctor]

Ok minor detail but ...

So I noticed in A:TLA, and it’s carried over in LoK, that Airbenders always seem to have an advantage in a fight. And at first, it felt like plot armour, particularly in A:TLA.

But when Aang fought Bumi, he lost most of that advantage. And I realised that this wasn’t just plot armour. Someone had sat and worked it out: nobody has had to fight Airbenders for generations. 

None of the other nations have had to train to face them, or practised sparring with them, or anything. Apart from Bumi, no bender in the show has ever even met an airbender before Aang comes along. And in LoK, for the most part people still haven’t. We never see fights between those who have (for e.g. we never see Tenzin and Lin fight); when Korra and Tenzin use airbending, its a unique fighting style that people aren’t trained to manage.

It’s a really small detail, and it fundamentally works to give the heroes an advantage (and make up for Aang’s young age and lack of combat experience), but I love how it’s an advantage in combat for completely logical reasons.

The detail in these shows is amazing. 

[sindri42]

You can see the same principle in play whenever somebody fights somebody who uses a completely unfamiliar style. Combustion benders and lavabenders aren’t straight up more powerful, but they’re pretty much always something you haven’t dealt with which presents unique challenges. That red lotus lady with no arms is just a perfectly ordinary waterbender, but using forms and styles nobody else has seen before. Jet routinely smacks around benders and soldiers, but loses hard to the first person he met who had actually studied diverse styles of swordplay. When Toph invents metalbending, nobody can deal with that, but seventy years later the counters are pretty well known among people who might have to fight the cops.

And it’s why Azula, a genius prodigy who has thought long and hard about how to counter every kind of magic and martial arts out there, keeps getting messed up by a kid with a boomerang.

[ninjaotta]

it’s also a detail from the second ever episode

aang straight up says to the fire nation guards on zuko’s ship “you’ve probably never fought an airbender before”, because he in-universe figures out that, if what everyone around him is saying is true, and airbenders have been extinct for a century (or at least have gone to ground enough to make people think that) then he is a totally unknown figure in anyone’s calculations

this has been brought up before but it’s also one of the reasons why hama is so thrown in her fight with katara - waterbending is about energy exchange, keeping things flowing, throwing your opponent’s power back at them and we see katara and hama do this in their fight. however, when katara is faced with a powerful blast from hama, she stands her ground and blows it apart:

[image ID: a gif of katara in the puppetmaster. she is a teenage girl with dark skin and hair and blue eyes, wearing a red outfit. she turns and throws her hand out, stopping a blast of water and turning it into a huge shield. the background is a dark forest. end image ID]

why do i bring this up?

because it’s a move - and a mindset - influenced by earthbending, which hama has never faced (she went from the south pole, to prison, to the fire nation). it’s an indication not only of katara’s skill and power, but also how she’s learned from her travels, and from toph

[toughtink]

one of my favorite details of atla is how the main characters’ fighting styles adapt as they take on new enemies and make new friends with other bending styles. iroh straight up tells zuko about how he developed a technique for redirecting lightning by studying waterbenders, but if you watch closely especially in the last season, there’s a lot of this sort of thing happening unspoken with the gaang, using the bending forms of other elements like katara does above. it really shows the strength in differences and diversity coming up against a fascist regime that wants everyone to conform.

[biglawbear]

Look at Korra metal bending here

It’s completely different than anything we’ve seen from other metal benders, who bend metal with sharp movements like the derivative of earth bending that it is

But Korra is fluid. She is bending metal like it’s water. Because she is a water bender. And she is the first person in history to be able to bend both metal and water and so she is able to combine these styles into one and move seamlessly between them. This shows so beautifully how the Avatar is the embodiment of all bending

[ironbite4]

Every time I think this show has shown me all it can….it gives me more.