Smile, Kid, Just Like You're Supposed To

Abby. 21. NJ/MA.

[amortizing]

I want to make you happy.

[carys-the-ninth]

"let me put this object some place obvious and inconvenient so im forced to deal with it" (grows around it like a tree root around a rock)

[rabbitindisguise]

#baby i can ignore elephants in the room in ways you cannot imagine.

[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.

[misogynistcatgirl]

I know we are all like "people in caveman times would drill holes in their head to relieve headaches" andwe go oh that's so stupid that's so dumb but like. then I get a headache and I'm like.ooooh I get it I get it. Grug prepare the drill.

[bullied]

once you start wearing big t-shirts you never go back to the ones that fit

[honeypleasejustkillme]

mfs say “i’m fine” then detach themselves from everyone in their lives for weeks. that’s me, i’m mfs

[horrrifiction]

yes my feelings are valid but i don't want them

[schuylerpeck]

I don’t want to work a 9-5, I want to go hiking and be in love

[plants-evermore]

i want a heart shaped locket and someone to put in it

[9710144]

@ geloyconcepcion on Instagram

[deadithurts]

andrew garfield saying, “i hope this grief stays with me because it’s all the unexpressed love that i didn’t get to tell her” about his mothers passing is so gut wrenchingly beautiful because we rarely talk about the love we want to express but can’t, not because you’re not brave enough to say it out loud but because they’re not here to listen to it anymore. calling grief the love you never had the chance to share makes it less of a burden and more of something you want to keep and not something terrible you want to move on from. i love love how everything about grief always comes down to “what is grief if not love persevering?”

[clawsfangs]

the rush of validation i experience when the nurse looks at my arm and says “oh you have good veins” like yes my veins are so luscious and juicy stop or you’re gonna make my dick hard

[clawsfangs]

[banefullybewildered]

i’m sorry but this is the funniest thing ever

[measureformeasure]

shakespeare characters having weird reactions to deaths: macbeth / hamlet / julius caesar

[macklesufficient]

sorry to be pedantic outside of the tags but i love these as exhibits a b and c of why the “shakespeare is meant to be performed” cliche is real; on the page they look wild but actors know how to read the embedded stage directions

two of these examples can’t be shared lines of iambic pentameter (both gertrude’s line and brutus’ are already rushed and irregular at eleven syllables, so laertes and cassius both get their full ten beats for two or three words) and one of them doesn’t have to be (macduff and malcolm’s lines add up to ten beats indicating that it’s shared but no one will call the scansion cops on you if you split it into two and divvy up the extra ten syllables between them, which imo is the more playable option)

remember that verse is symphonic and that those extra syllables are notes in the orchestration of the scene— they have to go somewhere, either into beats of rest or sound. there’s a lot of ways to score any of these moments but one possibile notation for the first is

MACD: your royal father’s murdered.

(rest/ rest/ rest/ rest/ rest/)

MAL: oh.

(rest / rest / rest/ rest/ rest/) ...

by whom?

all that silence affords the director a moment to let a lightning-fast scene (the entire cast pouring onstage in ones and twos, yelling over each other at varying levels of authenticity) come to a screeching halt, and the severity of the situation set in. for the actor it’s playable as all hell, and ultimately very human: the kind of raw shock that makes you ask stupid questions. you get the same thing with laertes. tbh i’ve always found “drowned? (rest / rest /) oh. (rest / rest / rest / rest/ rest /) .....where?” to be utterly goddamn devastating in how realistic it is, bc what else can you say to that? if someone told you with no warning that your sister drowned, what else would come out of your mouth in the moment but something stupid and mundane? oh. ..........where did it happen?

the other notable similarity in these three moments is the use of un-words: two ‘o’s and a ‘ha’ (they aren’t meant to be pronounced exactly like “Oh” or “Ha”; traditionally shakespearean un-words are performed as unarticulated sounds, sighs, groans, exhalations etc). un-words leap out to the actor because it is a character rendered speechless. i made a post a few weeks ago about how big of a deal it is when people written by william shakespeare dont have words for what they’re experiencing/when the pain is so big that even in a metanarrative universe where you are only the words you speak you are forced to admit that something is unspeakable, and every “o” or “ha” or “ah” etc is a moment of this horror, this defeat at the hands of your own medium

it’s a rich moment for actors because in classical text it’s frowned upon to act “outside” of the line (to waste vocal qualities on things that aren’t words, ie to take a pause from speaking your richly layered monologue to let out a pained exhale. “act on the line” says your director, smacking you on the knuckles with a copy of freeing shakespeare’s voice), it’s diva-y and amateurish to take more syllables than you’re given. but when you’re given the space of ten beats for “ha portia”, who will dare call you a scene hog for stretching that “ha” into five notes of agonized, wordless noise?

in the same way that lear’s “howl howl howl” is very much not just the word ‘howl’ said three times these moments demand full, shattering vulnerability from the actor, a dive into the place in the body where pain lives. maybe laertes and malcolm really do say “oh.”, quiet and childlike, or maybe that ‘o’ is a stand-in for the all-air sound that shakes out of you when you get punched in the lungs and try to talk through it, or for that deep animal groan you heard that made you think what was that before you realized it was coming out of your own throat

anyway you get what i mean. you wouldn’t look at a blueprint and say you saw the house, you wouldn’t read the sheet music and say you heard the symphony, etc

[ravens-play-exy-too]

i saw the words “ur not the first person in your lineage to be queer” and it’s rocking me to my core. how many generations down the line did one of my ancestors feel the way i did, feel differently than i did and so damn queerly it was a crime? how many of us were there? did they have hope? did they find peace? i don’t know. at the very least, maybe i am proof their identity was never wasted. reincarnated.

[ts-parallels]

[grumpquoteoftheday]

[marisatomay]

can’t wait for spotify wrapped to tell me that i’ve listened to the same three songs all year but in a fun powerpoint graphics kind of way