Sir/Madame/Variations thereupon, this is the RP blog for an evil slutty Darklighter original character. The āMorality in Fandomā party is the next blog over.
Damon WolfĀ is an indie Darklighter original character for The WBāsĀ CharmedĀ (1998), with a verse for The CWāsĀ CharmedĀ (2018). He was originally established in March 2019. Revamped 29 January 2023.
Heavily headcanon based, with influences from the 1998 show and 1999 - 2008 tie-in novels. The 2010s ebook tie-ins + the Season 9 & 10 comics areĀ notĀ considered canon for this blog. This blog uses Beta Editor.
Mun/Muse are over 25 years of age. Penned by L.Ā Read at your own risk.Ā This muse is dangerous. Read rules before following/interacting.
Google DocĀ | RP'ing with Damon 101 | RP'ing with L 101 | Rules
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Biography | Character Study | Headcanons | Bedcanon | Verses
Reference posts: Darklighters | The Underworld & Hierarchy of Evil | Darklighter Origins | Charmed 1998 vs Charmed 2018 Darklighters | German Halloween Traditions | Northern Low Saxon dialect | v. Charmed 2018 PSA
every episode of bill nye the science guy is available to stream and/or download for free from the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/billnyethescienceguythecompleteseries-07-28-2021
Being a young adult is so strange. You enter a coffee shop. The 20 year old girl waiting behind you cried all night because she just came to a new city for university and she feels so alone. That 27 year old guy over there works a job he is overqualified for, he lives with his parents and wants to move out but doesn't know what to do about it. That one 24 year old dude already has a car, a house, and a job waiting for him once he graduates thanks to his dad's connections. The 26 year old barista couldn't complete his higher education because he has to work and take care of his family. The 28 year old girl sitting next to you has no friends to go out with so she is texting her mother. That couple (both 25 years old) are married and the girl is pregnant. The 29 year old writing something on her laptop has realized that she chose the wrong major so she is trying to start all over. We are not alone in this, but we are actually so alone. Do you feel me
It's very funny to me that the original 1998 Charmed still airs on reruns to this very day (on TNT and some other channels, at least) but it's like the 2018 reboot has dropped off the face of the earth save for it being on Netflix, lmao. I don't even know if it made it to DVD after season 1.
2018 Charmed doesn't even really have that much of an active online fandom, and the cast all wiped it from their social media profiles immediately after it was cancelled. (Which is extremely telling to me.)
That, plus the fact we still have Charmed 1998 panels and such at ComicCon in 2026 but there's absolutely nothing for the reboot 4+ years after its cancellation.
I think the most active section of the 2018 Charmed fandom is on Reddit, and even then... 1) it's not updated all that often; 2) most of the posts, AFAIK, are still complaints about the writing or comparisons to the OG show. Or focusing entirely on Abigael instead of the 3 Latina witches who are that universe's actual Charmed Ones.
If I were a murderer, and I'd meticulously planned a murder, and then I turned up at the place to do the murder and found that world-famous-murder-solver Hercule Poirot was also there, I would simply not do the murder.
āIām probably the least emotional of the group. Itās always been my virtue and my failing that I see the clear path from A to Z without the distraction of moral considerations. I donāt want to say Iām ruthless, Iām not. But I have the ability. I can see the ruthless way clearly. I have to sort of add the morality back into the equation after the fact.ā
ā Marco, Book #54: The Beginning, pg. 39 (by K.A. Applegate)
āPeople donāt understand the word ruthless. They think it means āmean.ā Itās not about being mean. Itās about seeing the bright, clear line that leads from A to B. The line that goes from motive to means. Beginning to end. Itās about seeing that bright, clear line and not caring about anything but the beautiful fact that you can see the solution. Not caring about anything else but the perfection of it.ā
- Marco, Book #30: The Reunion, pg. 71 (by K.A. Applegate)
There's this paradox between A.ang and Zuko's philosophies of harm reduction/non-violence that the narrative pretty clearly wants us to take A.ang's side on but honestly? This will make people mad but without a Lion Turtle Ex Machina to save the day so that A.ang doesn't have to make any tough decisions, Zuko was right and his stance was the one that held the sanctity of life in higher regard.
Aa.ng's stance was that he couldn't bring himself to kill the Fire Lord because "he's still a human being" regardless of the wider consequences of leaving the Fire Lord alive, knowing that the Fire Lord wanted to rain Nuclear Armageddon down on the Earth Kingdom and burn millions of people alive.
To Zuko it was the world's easiest Trolley Problem. You either don't pull the lever and allow millions of people to be burned alive, or you pull the lever and kill the guy trying to nuke the planet.
Zuko looked at the situation about to unfold and resolutely decided that they needed to stop it by any means necessary, including violence, even if that meant helping kill his own father. The most clear cut "lesser of two evils" situation the world has ever seen.
Because in real life, violence is NOT never the answer, sometimes it's actually the only correct answer, and in this hypothetical, being hesitant was actually quite selfish because it meant playing with the lives of millions of people and having a philosophical debate on whether or not it's morally acceptable to use defensive violence to stop mass murder when it's meant to be literally his divinely ordained job to protect the world by any means necessary including violence.
Like the trolley is barrelling down the tracks and Aa.ng is standing next to the lever and debating whether or not it's morally correct to pull it and divert it away from the millions of Earth Kingdom citizens and towards the guy who tied them all to the tracks in the first place, meanwhile the Earth Kingdom citizens are screaming and crying begging for him to do something and he's like "eeueggghhhhhhh but he's still a human being and I saw his baby picture. š„ŗ"
I'm aware this was a Nickelodeon show so they had to find a workaround to the hero killing a guy even though it's a show that centers around a war (and why still I fantasize about there one day being a reboot that Bryke are uninvolved in and that is not constrained by needing to be kept PG), but even if we accept that A.ang was handed a pass and killing didn't end up being necessary, no one could've possibly known that that was an option and based on all of the information they had, Zuko was still right to be crashing out at A.ang for dragging his feet on whether or not he'd kill Ozai.
Because Zuko had his priorities straight, he valued the lives of the millions of innocent people in the Earth Kingdom over his genocidal dictator father's life while Aan.g was still unsure about it, willing to risk all of those people's lives for the sake of his own squeamishness at the idea of killing someone despite the fact he'd already reasonably killed dozens of people without having to know their names, faces, or watch them die.
The sort of sanctity of life philosophy that Zuko was espousing is the kind that accepts the hard truths of life, that sometimes doing the Right Thing is unpleasant but that it has to be stomached, it has to be braved for the greater good even if it makes us uncomfortable.
This might seem like a non sequitur but hear me out. As someone with a background education in environmental studies and a vegetarian of 6 years, this is an area where people who know me IRL find my opinions to be somewhat contradictory, but they're really not when you take harm reduction into account. True environmentalism CANNOT be pacifistic and committed to non-killing, because nature is not pacifistic. Nature cooperates just as much if not more than it competes with itself, nature seeks balance, and life cannot exist without death to balance it.
Though I might be committed to not eating animals, though I might feel my ire rise every time I see the forests being eaten by machines, I also understand the grey areas and wiggly lines present within the philosophy of ecology. If you want to protect the ecosphere, you have to get comfortable with the idea of cutting down sick trees, of culling invasive species, of hunting animals whose other natural predators have been extirpated, and of lighting some controlled burns. Environmentalism isn't always pretty, and sometimes it looks like the opposite of what the general public would assume it is.
Sometimes the greater good feels mean and gruesome, sometimes public safety and environmental safety means capturing a wild animal, euthanizing it, and decapitating it to dissect its brain and test for rabies. Sometimes it means mass-culling feral cats when there's not enough resources to rescue all of them and the population has gotten out of control because otherwise it means allowing the local bird, reptile, amphibian, and small mammal populations to be hunted to extinction. And I say that as someone who loves cats and would prefer to see all of them rescued and neutered and placed in loving homes, because I also have the maturity to understand that that's not always possible and my hurt feelings at the idea of feral cats being culled are not more important than the ecosphere, and protecting the greater good means making hard decisions.
Zuko's philosophy is to swallow the discomfort and do what needs to be done to protect the greater good. He'd be the type of environmentalist overseeing controlled burns, culling invasive species, and rightly rolling his eyes at the rebranding of pleather to "vegan leather" and going on rants about how buying real leather is the truly eco-friendly option and second-hand leather is the most eco-friendly and vegetarian-friendly, while A.ang would be the type of person who thinks he's an environmentalist but is anti-all-hunting and wears plastic "leather" that will end up in a landfill in a year instead of animal byproducts that will last a lifetime.
Aa.,ng's non-violent philosophy wants to have its cake and eat it too, wants to save innocent people without having to hurt the ones threatening them. Zuko's philosophy is harm reduction that acknowledges that some violence is necessary and that the greater good often means doing things that are unpleasant.
I don't care who the narrative would have us believe is right, I can see with my own eyeballs and logic that Zuko valued life more than his own complicated feelings. It doesn't matter who espoused non-violence because valuing non-violence is not the same as valuing life, and sometimes it can even mean the opposite.
I am definitely going to add on to this post with a comparison to Animorphs (sorry, OP, if you're not an Animorphs fan), as someone who grew up reading Animorphs in elementary school (and watching its TV adaptation on VHS) roughly around the time A:TLA was first airing on TV. (And is currently rereading Animorphs while also starting an A:TLA rewatch, but that is beside the point.)
Putting this under a cut, because it's probably going to get long.
A quick (so-to-speak) rundown on Animorphs, for those of you who never read them:
Originally published from 1996 - 2001. Total of 54 main books + 10 spin-offs, bringing the total up to 64 books (though you can skip the two Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style Alternamorphs books). In-series timeline for the main series runs from 1997 - 2000, with a chunk of the final book (#54: The Beginning) skipping ahead roughly 3 years to 2003.
Five human kids (Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel, and Tobias) are granted the power to morph into any animal they touch by an alien (Andalite Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul) who crash-landed in an abandoned construction site while walking home from the mall. They're later joined by said alien's younger brother Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill (aka Ax). Together the six of them fight a secret invasion of Earth by the parasitic alien species known as Yeerks.
It's a major deconstruction of a lot of the same themes that crop up in Power Rangers, since War Is Hell is in effect from Book 1. The Animorphs quickly learn that they cannot trust anyone: the cops, their teachers, their parents, the assistant/vice principal of their school, any siblings they may have. Anybody could be a Controller. Jake finds out in book 1 that his older brother, Tom, is one of them: a Controller, a slave to the Yeerk in his brain. Marco learns in Book 5 that his mother is host to Visser One, original leader of the Yeerk invasion of Earth.
Tobias is trapped in red-tailed hawk morph at the end of the first book. If this was A:TLA or Power Rangers, Elfangor would likely have been the quirky yet experienced mentor or something (like Iroh to Zuko). But because this is Animorphs, he's eaten alive by his arch-enemy, Visser Three: the only Andalite-Controller in the galaxy, and thus the only Yeerk with the power to morph. The kids all have PTSD very early on in the series. Tobias tries to commit suicide in book 3 (and also struggles with his male hawk body's instinct to mate with a female red-tailed hawk).
Early books set up that Yeerks = evil bad guys, Andalites = good guys. Except... later books turn that on its head, because Animorphs is all about shades of gray and how there are no good choices or good/bad guys in war. We later learn that there are Yeerks who refuse to take an unwilling host (and/or find the infestation process in itself completely traumatic), and the Andalite military in general are quite fond of genocide as a solution in the war. (Also, the kids have to hold off the Yeerk invasion for three years because the Andalite high command didn't think the situation on Earth was that dire.)
The Animorphs are 13 at the start of the series. By the start of #54 The Beginning, when the series ends, they are 16 (and roughly 18/19 during the time skip). Humanity's only hope are 5 teenagers + an Andalite aristh (cadet) who's the equivalent of a teenager himself, who cannot drive and are not even of drafting/voting age.
Jake has probably committed war crimes. Rachel gradually loses herself to the joy of battle and cannot see herself returning to a normal life after the war (spoilers: she's killed in the final book). Cassie starts out as the empath, the peacekeeper, the moral compass, their animal expert... and becomes so skilled at reading people that she successfully manipulates David (the team's brief seventh Animorph + traitor) into a fate worse than death after he's tried murdering them all. Her parents are veterinarians, she loves animals, but her faith is shattered when she's forced to kill a termite queen while on a mission and reflects that the color of nature isn't green, it's blood-red. She's torn out her enemy's throats with her bare teeth (in wolf morph) and then angsts about it. As the Drode calls her: "Cassie. The killer with a conscience. Kill them, then cry over them, that's our Cassie."
Marco? He's the jokester, the group comedian... and a ruthless tactician. He comes up with a plan to murder his own mother to "free" her from the Yeerk in her head and very nearly sees it through to completion, because at that point all he can see is the "clear line" from A to B and he has to factor the morality back in after the fact.
As for Tobias... before he became an Animorph, his life sucked. Shunted back and forth between an abusive aunt and uncle on each respective coast, disappeared mom (who later shows up alive and well, albeit blind and amnesiac), disappeared dad. Turns out the human man he thought was his father who walked out on them wasn't actually his dad, and his real father was Elfangor, the Andalite who gave him and his friends their morphing powers. It's highly ambiguous whether he trapped himself in red-tailed hawk morph on purpose or not. Later regains his morphing power, but if he returned to human form permanently he would be out of the fight and unable to morph.
By the end of the series, they are all completely shattered and shells of their former selves. Cassie is the only one who manages to adjust and move on, but even she still struggles with what she had to do during the Yeerk-Andalite-human war.
(This isn't even getting into the Auxillary Animorphs, the Yeerk Peace Movement, the number of times the Andalites have used biochemical warfare to commit genocide to prevent the Yeerks from taking a planet, the final arc of the series, the David trilogy, etc.)
Fan backlash to the series finale was so bad, that K.A. Applegate wrote this letter taking them to task. The Beginning was published 1 June 2001. Take three guesses as to what happened months later in 2001.
To bring this back to Avatar: The Last Airbender and OP's points about Aang and Zuko's stance re: Ozai and ending the war...
Honestly, I think part of what frustrates me about rewatching A:TLA and Aang's philosophy re: Fire Lord Ozai despite the fact he knows Ozai is a genocidal dictator and the Gaang are currently fighting a guerilla war whenever they encounter Fire Nation soldiers is that I also grew up reading Animorphs at the same I was originally watching A:TLA back in 2005 - 2008.
Like OP said
Aa.ng's stance was that he couldn't bring himself to kill the Fire Lord because "he's still a human being" regardless of the wider consequences of leaving the Fire Lord alive, knowing that the Fire Lord wanted to rain Nuclear Armageddon down on the Earth Kingdom and burn millions of people alive.
To Zuko it was the world's easiest Trolley Problem. You either don't pull the lever and allow millions of people to be burned alive, or you pull the lever and kill the guy trying to nuke the planet.
Zuko looked at the situation about to unfold and resolutely decided that they needed to stop it by any means necessary, including violence, even if that meant helping kill his own father. The most clear cut "lesser of two evils" situation the world has ever seen.
Because in real life, violence is NOT never the answer, sometimes it's actually the only correct answer, and in this hypothetical, being hesitant was actually quite selfish because it meant playing with the lives of millions of people and having a philosophical debate on whether or not it's morally acceptable to use defensive violence to stop mass murder when it's meant to be literally his divinely ordained job to protect the world by any means necessary including violence.
Like the trolley is barrelling down the tracks and Aa.ng is standing next to the lever and debating whether or not it's morally correct to pull it and divert it away from the millions of Earth Kingdom citizens and towards the guy who tied them all to the tracks in the first place, meanwhile the Earth Kingdom citizens are screaming and crying begging for him to do something and he's like "eeueggghhhhhhh but he's still a human being and I saw his baby picture. š„ŗ"
I'm aware this was a Nickelodeon show so they had to find a workaround to the hero killing a guy even though it's a show that centers around a war (and why still I fantasize about there one day being a reboot that Bryke are uninvolved in and that is not constrained by needing to be kept PG), but even if we accept that A.ang was handed a pass and killing didn't end up being necessary, no one could've possibly known that that was an option and based on all of the information they had, Zuko was still right to be crashing out at A.ang for dragging his feet on whether or not he'd kill Ozai.
Because Zuko had his priorities straight, he valued the lives of the millions of innocent people in the Earth Kingdom over his genocidal dictator father's life while Aan.g was still unsure about it, willing to risk all of those people's lives for the sake of his own squeamishness at the idea of killing someone despite the fact he'd already reasonably killed dozens of people without having to know their names, faces, or watch them die.
The Animorphs are all roughly the same age that Aang was throughout the series, and they are forced to grapple with their increasingly morally grey actions throughout the war. Initially they refuse to kill human-Controllers, only knocking them unconscious. They don't morph sentient beings without permission. Hork-Bajir-Controllers and Taxxon-Controllers, however? Fair game to kill when in morph. (And they later learn that even the Yeerks are not all evil and there are major shades of gray in war, same as how the Andalite military are not necessarily good.)
Cassie is forced to kill a termite queen during a mission while also in termite morph, and she freaks out so badly about killing a bug that she nearly gives away their location when they're on a stealth mission. After, back home in her bed, her narration gives us this:
I closed my eyes, then opened them quickly.
How could it be? How could I remember what that chamber looked like, what the termite queen looked like when I'd had no eyes? But still, I remembered it all. I saw the chamber dug from the rotted wood by hundreds of workers. And I saw the huge queen.
I felt my pincers.
I hadn't just destroyed her. I had destroyed the entire colony. I had done it to save myself and my friends.
I wanted to throw up. But I would have had to get out of bed to run to the bathroom. And I felt like I never wanted to leave that bed again.
I love animals. I've been raised all my life around them. I love nature. But what did I really know about it?
I have been more animals than many people ever see in a lifetime. I have flown with the wings of an osprey. I've raced through the ocean in the body of a dolphin. I've seen the world through the eyes of an owl at night, and smelled the wind with all the keen senses of a wolf. I've flown upside down and backward in the body of a fly. Sometimes I go out into the far fields at night and become a horse and run through the grass.
And everything I've been, every animal, is either killer or killed.
In a million, million battles all around the world, on every continent, in every square inch of space, there was killing. From the great cats in Africa that cold-bloodedly search out the young and weak gazelles, to the terrible wars that are fought out in anthills and termite colonies.
All of nature was at war.
And, at the top of all that destruction, humans killed each other as well as other species, and now those same people have been enslaved and destroyed by the Yeerks.
Nature at its finest. Cute, cuddly animals who slaughtered to live. The color of nature wasn't green. It was red. Bloodred.
I realized tears were running down my cheeks and soaking my pillow. I would have cried out loud, but I didn't want Rachel to wake up. I would have screamed but my parents would have come running. And what could I have told them? Lies. More lies. Because in my world, I, too, was prey. The Yeerks were hunting me.
āAnimorphs #9: The Secret by K.A. Applegate, pg. 100 - 101
In the prequel novel The Andalite Chronicles, we have this scene:
<Yeerks!> I [Elfangor] said.
<There must be thousands! Tens of thousands!> Arbron said.
<I suspected this might be the case,> Alloran said. <These are Yeerks being transported to the Taxxon world. They're here to get bodies. Hosts. Each of these will be given a Taxxon.>
<What do we do with them?> I asked.
<We seal the bridge then open the outer hatch,> Alloran said calmly.
It took me a few seconds to realize what he was saying. If we opened the outer hatch while we were still in space, the vacuum would suck everything out. Out into the airless cold. The Yeerks would die almost instantly.
<Prince Alloran, we can't just kill them all,> I said. I looked closely at him to see if maybe he had been joking.
His eyes were cold. <Aristh Elfangor, I give the orders. You obey the orders.>
<But they're helpless,> I protested.
<They are Yeerks. And this is war. Would you rather wait till they have Taxxon bodies?>
I didn't know what to say. I looked at Arbron. He kept his face carefully expressionless.
<We . . . we can't do this,> I said. <It's wrong. They are our prisoners. We can't! It would be murder!>
<Be careful what you accuse me of, Aristh Elfangor,> Alloran said harshly. <You're a child, so I'll forgive your impertinence. This time. But you are here to learn, not to question orders. And one of the things you'll learn, my idealistic aristh, is that war is not about striking brave poses and playing the hero. War is about killing.>
āAnimorphs: The Andalite Chronicles by K.A. Applegate, pg. 78-79
Animorphs was a children's 90s literature series, and because of the wacky covers parents didn't really check the content. Applegate was pushing them out at a rate of roughly one book per month (with the help of ghostwriters toward the middle of the series), and so Scholastic didn't really care about the actual text.
So... yeah, what seems initially about a cool sci-fi series about kids turning into animals to fight an alien invasion very quickly turns into a story about how War is Hell.
(It's also hilarious due to comedic moments throughout, but that's another post entirely.)
When it came to depicting war and how it affects everyone involved, Applegate did not fuck around and did not talk down to her audience, even though she was writing for kids.
So Aang suddenly refusing to kill Ozai in the final third of A:TLA, despite knowing he as the Avatar has to end the war and he'd apparently never thought about how he was going to do so, seriously rubs me the wrong way. Especially when he's so holier-than-thou about his Air Nomad morals... while being very hypocritical when stating he's never used his powers to take a life. Aang has killed people on-screen more than once, Avatar State or not, and rarely did he ever have moral qualms about it (aside from the occasional nightmare or flashback early on in Book 2).
Like... if you're going to write a cartoon that's a war story featuring child soldiers as the protagonists, have even the main antagonist's own son telling the hero that his father should be killed (because they're also trying to stage a coup and install Zuko on the throne as Fire Lord at that point), then what is even the point of not following through on "War is Hell and you have to make hard choices in war to dispose of a genocidal dictator"? Just so the creators' self-insert character can (as OP said) have his cake and eat it, too? End the war without having the death of the Main Bad Guy on his conscious? And reward him by literally giving him the girl he's been crushing on the whole show?
Miss me with that.
To quote K.A. Applegate's letter to fans:
Wars donāt end happily. Not ever. Often relationships that were central during war, dissolve during peace. Some people who were brave and fearless in war are unable to handle peace, feel disconnected and confused. Other times people in war make the move to peace very easily. Always people die in wars. And always people are left shattered by the loss of loved ones.
