[strawbearrymilk]

A poster design for one of my favorite horror games, silent hill 2! Inspired by the ending rebirth. :^)

[fols-eli]

[thecollectibles]

Avatar: The Last Airbender by Flesh.png

[element-of-change]

Fanart - The Four Elements Specialized

by Ctreuse109 [x] [x] [x] [x]

Interesting how the first three elements exclusively feature specialized benders (you can even see Zuko in the background for the Lightningbending art, since we only ever knew him to redirect lightning not conjure it) while only three of the five in the Airbender set have displayed any enhanced spiritual powers akin to Jinora’s explicit specialization of Airbending, spirit projection. Aang has done something similar many times during his journey, and Tenzin was able to project his inner enlightenment out into the Fog of Lost Souls in order to dissipate it and save his family.

Just posting all of these here with credit because I find them stunning and I haven’t seen this set around yet.

[ngoziu]

Aang! ⭐

[jwirthdreams]

The many faces of Prince Zuko.

I got a bit carried away.

[tadpole-art]

Katara in Inuit inspired clothing! I wanted to take inspiration from the references I looked at while still making it fit into the ATLA universe 💕

[vicholas]

The Inescapable Whiteness of AVATAR: THE LEGEND OF KORRA, and its Uncomfortable Implications

“Why is Aang now the Statue of Liberty? Is this show set in New York now?”

(…) But I keep coming back to how The Legend of Korra takes this opportunity to imagine a future without European and American colonisation and imperialism and give us nothing but that.

And that leaves a very foul aftertaste. To suggest that Americana is the inevitable future of all worlds. That is no other possibility for modernity and progress. That westernisation is inevitable even in fantasy worlds without a “West.”

The Southern Water Tribe’s aggressive industrialisation, exploitation of their environment and creating pollution is very much part of this “inevitability of progress” theme. It’s very uncomfortable given how the Water Tribe is based on indigenous cultures (especially the Inuit-Yupik culture). In the real world these are very much the people resisting imperialism, especially ecological imperialism (which they do in The Last Airbender), and thus to cast them as the polluting villains implies that given the opportunity these cultures would be “as bad” as the West, that this is how “everyone” is.

It universalises something that just isn’t universal.

At the same time, there is no lasting legacy of Fire Nation imperialism and colonialism from the age of Last Airbender. Despite being primarily set in the United Republic, which was a Fire Nation colony that didn’t want to simply be transferred back to Earth Kingdom rule after the war (having developed something of a hybrid cultural identity in the hundred years). This is all told in the comics and only passingly referenced in the show itself, but none of the characters carry old grudges. There is no obvious disparity in power within the city that is explored or articulated. When it comes to conflict within the city, it’s all about the Equalists, who want all benders to be done away with, not just fire benders.

And that just doesn’t ring true to me. The whole arc of Republic City rejecting Earth Kingdom rule after a hundred years of being a Fire Nation colony sounds very familiar to me, as someone from Hong Kong. Colonialism shapes a place very fundamentally. The legacy of that doesn’t just go away in seventy years.

I know seventy years sounds like a long time, but it is as far away as WWII is to us now. The scars of the occupation are still very present in east asian communities. Every other east asian person I know has a parent or grandparent who has not forgotten about the war. My father refuses to buy anything Japanese made. If nothing else, you would think there might be a memorial to those who have been lost in those wars.

But no, that would spoil the “being America” aesthetic.(…)

[vomara]

people in the atla fandom really forget about aang's anger, huh. they reduce his personality to careless joy, and they reduce his choices to pure pacifism and naiveté, when his behavior is not so two dimensional. aang has a bit of anger near his core, a product of grief, and his choices and behavior are all made despite this anger. he chooses to liberate himself from it. he chooses to be joyful, he chooses to be a pacifist. he chooses kindness and he does so even when he knows that the world will not approve, and it takes incredible internal strength to do so.

[irresistible-revolution]

#one of the lessons of age is choosing to behave kindly despite your sorrow.#it is one that aang has mastered long before many other members of the gaang.#he is exceptionally emotionally mature and i love him for that...

[anime-world360]

The feels….

[irresistible-revolution]

thinking about atla thematics as usual and fascinated by how many fans insist they wanted aang to “grow up” more at the end of the series without considering how one of the show’s major themes is the terrible ways war and imperialism rob people of their childhoods. one of aang’s major gifts to every single character is restoring a piece of their lost or stolen or brutalized childhood. aang reminds katara there’s still joy in the world, and fuels her hope. he brings wonder to sokka’s life with his flying bison. he sees zuko not as a terrifying enemy but as a boy he might have been friends with and had fun with, he offers toph a way out of her repressive home to have the adventures she’d been longing for, and all these characters rise to fulfill their destinies through honoring their inner child - the parts of themselves that are hopeful, kind, gentle, fierce, innocent, deserving of protection - and breaking the cycles of violence and abuse that interrupted their childhoods. azula was convinced she had no need for her inner child, and killed aang in cold blood in ba sing se, after which she slowly but surely lost everything she cared about, including her sense of self. and finally, aang shows ozai mercy, thematically reminding the latter that the children he tried to kill and brutalize are a force capable of rising above petty violence, and reshaping the world. you could even argue that the original rupture in the mythos was when both sozin and the air nation sought to rob a child of their right to childhood - sozin by hunting a child, the air nomads by hastening aang out of his childhood so he could help them - and that balance is restored when aang, who represents the world’s lost gentleness and mercy, and upholds values that a war torn world regards as “childish” and “immature”, manages to end the war with a gesture that honors those values and affirms everyone’s right to a safe and loving childhood, to a life free of violence.

[pixelatedfrog-deactivated202009]

how long have I been out

[devinellekurtz]

Sokka & Yue

[jwirthdreams]

The Last Agni Kai+ process

[the-firenation-gellary]

My mind still trying to fathom how Mai and Aang get along

[rozunderpressure]

You know when you’re writing something and then you get to these two characters that are very different, but have no reason for conflict and one is very friendly… They almost always end up in some sort of odd friendship, so this didn’t surprise me, weirdly as it may seem. XD

[death-g-reaper]

It seems to me that Mai dislikes boredom and insincerity, and Aang is very sincere and fun

[aras-dg-archive]

I feel like Aang is one of the few people who can get Mai to laugh (and it pisses Sokka off immensely)

[penguinsledding]

Mai’s best friend is TY LEE, the bubbliest character in the show. Of course she’d like Aang.

[loveable-korrasami]

wait but i love the idea of sokka failing miserably to make mai laugh but then aang just sneezes and goes flying backwards or some shit and she just loses it

[avatarwindboy]

Mai also loves Zuko, and Aang is very close with Zuko, so I think she appreciates that.

Also Aang saved her baby brother

It’s all very sweet really

[avatrashh]

Aang is like Ty Lee but doesn’t hug her of course she loves him

[ariezabeth]

I have a lot of feelings about the tales of Ba Sing Se 💔

[lullabyknell]

If someone wants a really good example of the importance of justice in fiction, then Avatar: The Last Airbender did it really well. 

See, audiences are obsessed with justice and fairness in stories. They want the characters they like (the protagonists, usually) to win and for the villain to get their comeuppance. Stories get more complicated and really interesting when they question what justice actually is and what it means for characters to get what they deserve. Should the characters get what they want? Or what they need? If the characters haven’t “earned” it, should they get anything at all? If, at the end of a story, a character has gotten neither what they wanted or what they needed, why not? 

A:TLA covers justice a lot, in many different ways. There’s Hei Bai’s forest, Jet and the Freedom Fighters, Monk Gyatso’s skeleton, Avatar Kyoshi and Conqueror Chin, the Ocean Spirit’s revenge on Zhao, what happened to Katara and Sokka’s mother, Hama of the Southern Water Tribe, Iroh’s past as the Dragon of the West, Zuko’s suffering versus his sins, Iroh and Zuko’s rejection of the Fire Nation’s war and their efforts towards peace, and so on. 

A:TLA’s finale is especially well done because traditional story justice expects Aang to kill Ozai for everything the Fire Nation has done. The characters in the story expect Aang to kill Ozai. It would be long-awaited justice for the world. Ozai is responsible for the deaths and suffering of thousands of people in his time as Fire Lord; it can’t be argued that he doesn’t have a lot coming for him. 

But Aang doesn’t kill Ozai. 

And it still works, because at that point in the story, it’s not about what Ozai deserves, it’s about what Aang deserves. Aang is a 12-year-old boy who has the fate of the world on his shoulders, the last member of a pacifist culture that’s been essentially wiped from the face of the planet, and he doesn’t want to kill anyone. It’s justice for Aang, the last airbender, not to have to kill Ozai.  

Whether or not the audience believes Ozai deserves to die, whether or not the audience believes Ozai’s death was the “right” course of action, they can still at least be somewhat satisfied that Aang is satisfied with this end.