listen! strange koi swimming in ponds distributing moon powers is no basis for a system of government! supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not some sort of a farcical aquatic ceremony!
the collective amnesia over sokka actually being pretty grumpy and serious all the time in the show is actually crazy ? why am i seeing people act like he was just some guy who was there to make jokes and keep everyone smiling meanwhile he was running that group like the navy like he used to have schedules planned and he was the only one who ever gaf about food and resources or tried to get a job to feed them 😭 like man you're thinking about AANG 😭
And the Chicago Cubs will beat every team in the league, and the Tampa Bay Bucs will make it all the way to January and I will love you again…I will love you, like I used to.
Another thing about ATLA that never ceases to work me up is how dirty the show did Hama. She appears in a single episode and confronts us with one of the most politically and humanly devastating histories in the series. She gives the only (!!!) testimony of the Fire Nation's state campaign to eliminate Southern waterbending and emerges as one of the richest arcs in the series, at least in potential, but it remains unrealized: cultural annihilation, abduction, torture and incarceration, ingenuity under absolute deprivation, escape, and survivorship in enemy territory as a diaspora of one. However, at the end of the day, she is a crackling victim who passes on bloodbending like a curse. The episode concludes with Fire Nation citizens dragging her away in chains, emphasizing that they'll lock her away indefinitely, basically never seeing day or moonlight again, reproducing the very trauma that forced the conditions on her under which Hama developed bloodbending.
The episode doesn't really ask us to understand bloodbending as an invention born from torture and genocidal violence, but primarily as a horror "Come to the Dark Side, Katara"-test because the reveal is directly linked to the abducted Fire Nation villagers. We don't even bother about Hama's motivation beyond "They deserve the same" (as if what Hama did was in any way symmetrical or proportionate. As if they want me to believe this old woman who can only bloodbend during the full moon could reproduce the carceral torture environment specifically designed to exterminate her bending lineage. This is not a reasonable "both sides are bad" situation.)
The Fire Nation removes water, community, bodily autonomy, hope, and any ordinary means of escape. Hama still feels the charge of the full moon every month, studies and experiments for years to find power in the one remaining source available to her: the water inside living bodies. She invents a technique in a place optimized against waterbenders and perfects it to the point where she can control the fine motor skills in another one's hand to open the cage that holds her. As far as we know, she doesn't even kill the guards when she walks out. Bloodbending is horrifying, but it is also an astonishing act of ingenuity. The Fire Nation reduces her to helpless flesh, and she weaponizes flesh itself against her torturers and murderers of her people.
We don't spend any time on what bloodbending meant for Hama because the succession of events structures the reveal entirely through the judgment of the Fire Nation citizens and Katara's guilt. I think Hama deserved more ambiguity (compare it with how much grace and depth the story gives Iroh, who cracked jokes about burning Ba Sing Se to the ground, laid seige on the capital for almost two years straight, which certainly starved the poorest people of the population first, and is still allowed to return as liberator, leading the charge and is the one burning the Fire Nation banner) and Katara deserved to feel more conflicted about bloodbending: both disturbed and mesmerized. Bloodbending is born from the Fire Nation's machinery of extermination, which makes it unquestionably a technology of resistance, power, and dignity.
The narrative never asks what the Fire Nation made, what justice could look like for someone like Hama, or what Katara owes to a survivor from her destroyed tradition. It asks whether Katara can defeat the scary old woman and agonize over learning that skill. When it comes to metalbending or lightningbending, it mostly gets framed as extraordinary achievement. Bloodbending is terrifying and intrusive, yes, but so was what its creator had to endure. The technique is inseparable from the brutality of the Fire Nation's annihilation of the Southern waterbenders. The show should've sat with the immense political and ethical weight it created itself, instead of making it evil and resolving the episode with the abhorrent picture of the elderly prisoner of war being dragged away by the people who destroyed her culture with false moral high ground and pseudo-vindication.
Edit: Here's a follow-up if you liked this post so far.
Piper McLean (The Heroes of Olympus / Riordanverse) vs. Maya Fey (Ace Attorney)
Piper McLean
Maya Fey
Voting ended onJul 3
Propaganda below the cut:
Piper McLean:
fandom HATES her for being mildly sometimes annoying. they act like shes killed puppies when her greatest crime is being a girl and a bit annoying. fandom literally adores a man who's actually hurt innocent children but dog piles her for being a 'pick me' just because she is unhappy with the gender roles assigned to her EVEN THOUGH SHE DOES NOT WANT TO BE PICKEDD!!!!!!
Shes my favourite girl ever she's iconic, she steals cars, she's lovely, and she's one of the very few indigenous reps in popular kids books.
when my 7th grade class was reading the percy jackson books everyone hated piper but little 12 year old me LOVED her and i'm in super hell forever because fandom hates her too.
Maya Fey:
she is infantilized so frequently it's actually crazy. she is a minor (17) in ONLY the first game she appears in. she is in 3 other games where she is 18, 19, and fucking 28. she is a whole adult and has been for ages!! why are we treating her like a child!! in addition she is frequently featured in fics about the most popular m/m pairing (narumitsu) as a wingwoman/cheerleader for the men. this wouldn't be a huge problem if she showed up in like. any other circumstance. but she doesn't and is reduced to the Competent Girl Who Can Get The Gay Men Together (which is funny because to put her in that role you have to mischaracterize her pretty damn badly!)
maya fey is the best girl in the world and more than phoenix's quirky teenage assistant!! which everybody would know if they paid attention to her arc about her self-worth issues and her role within her family that spans the first three aa games!! she's strong and kind and stubborn and the sort of person who loves and trusts with everything she's got!!
Veth Brenatto (Critical Role) vs. Kali Prasad (Stranger Things)
Veth Brenatto
Kali Prasad
Voting ended onJun 29
Veth Brenatto painted by Ari
Propaganda below the cut:
Kali Prasad:
Got hated on for being a "bad influence" to El and not being supportive enough of her for the fandom's tastes. Also, her return in season 5 was met with suspicion and people assuming she would betray El and the others when that turned out not to be the case. The fact that she as a Brown girl has gotten more hate and less sympathy than the white villain, Henry Creel, is disappointing but not surprising.
Girl went through the same trauma as El with being experimented on and was then recaptured, saw her friends killed, and had her blood forcibly extracted out of her. I don't exactly blame her for wanting to die so the pain could end. Sure it's kinda messed up to try to convince El to do the same, but she never forces her to go through with ending herself and even dies trying to help out El with her plans. Even with her messiness and manipulative behavior, she really does care for El at the heart of it all. She deserved better from the show and the fandom.
Veth Brenatto:
Treated as mom of fandom favourite male character (Caleb Widogast) without any kind of interiority or interests of her own. Also treated as a joke character with some transmisogynist overtones (she's played by a male actor (actual play, this is fairly standard) and people are very weird about it).
They hate to see an unconventionally attractive and eventually fat brown woman played by a man. Veth is routinely excluded from/minimized in fanworks (ex. art about "the girls" which includes every other main female character). She is rarely treated as a serious character in analysis or shipping. She is relegated to the role of mother for her closest friend despite being younger than him, and having a complex relationship with him which includes romantic feelings at least on her end.
Veth collects buttons despite getting bullied for it her whole childhood. She's power-hungry. She's torn between the life she wants and the one she thinks she should want. She's the dead mother trope. She's an alcoholic. She will flirt with anyone. She hates herself. She's codependent with a guy she met in jail. Everyone needs to rotate her in their minds now!!
Before it was revealed she was a mother, it was all super infantilizing - eeew she's just a little girl. Afterwards it became all "oh she's the team mom!" especially towards a character she has canonical feelings for. (bc he's a white boy they ship with other people so of course his closest relationship (with Veth) can't possibly have romantic undertones even when they are canonically stated). Also a whole lot of bullshit about calling her a shitty person and a shitty mother for continuing to travel with her adventuring party instead of going home to be a housewife.
She's badass af. Also she's hilarious. She's a master alchemist but doesn't believe there are other planets. She has a tragic backstory worthy of a thousand fics. She's an allegory for working mothers, and an allegory for weird girls, and an allegory for transness. She's short, fat, and sexy as hell. I love her.
she's one of the most complicated pcs they've ever had who is played with consistent biases and motivations who has the craziest fucking backstory reveal ever where [spoilers for the entire campaign!!!] after she's first introduced as a lovable 'little goblin girl' who the fandom had no problem shoving into the 'devious but ultimately well meaning girl who doesn't know better' archetype alongside her older, more world-weary 'father figure', it's slowly revealed that 1) she isn't a little girl at all and sees the 'older', 'sadder' man she's inseparable from not as a father but instead closer to a son 2) she's ridiculously horny all the time but also seemingly yearning for a boy from her past and a life lived in a different body 3) wait no she doesn't exactly see caleb as her son. i mean she does but its way more complicated and fucked than all that. she's using him as a stand in for both a son AND a husband, and he's using her a stand in for his own parents AND his former lovers 4) yeah so actually she was a fully grown halfling woman with a husband and son who got put into a body that isn't her own as a punishment after protecting both of them from goblins, which is why she's terrified of water (something previously played as a joke) AND why she hates goblins (something previously played as simple self-hatred). 5) once they turn her back into a halfling it's revealed that all the kleptomania and the weird voice and her general insanity actually had nothing to do with being a goblin and she was just like that even as a weird halfling child who presumably made mud soup and got bullied for being a freak. anyway as this character arc progressed the fandom started losing interest as soon as they couldn't portray her as disaster-daughter, and now that she's fat, grown, and a mother people fully do not care about her despite her dynamic with caleb remaining fucking crazy and fascinating til the very end. there are obvious parallels to being trans baked into the premise of her arc but people don't really have much to say about that. she's so far the only major pc that's an entirely different gender from the player and a lot of the praise people have is exclusively for the comedy of early goblin nott and not any of the more serious aspects of her arc later on. i would say she's by far the second most morally complicated member of the bunch (beat out only by her son-lover-brother-friend) but often she's reduced to either comedic relief or just 'mother' and so that aspect never really gets explored. i know there ARE veth fans out there i know but i just wish she was more widely appreciated in the same way as caleb is for her dramatic ass life and i wish people would focus more on their dynamic instead of just on the more romantic shippy caleb relationships. ALSO!! even while her goblin form was constantly described as off-putting and terrifying and disgusting people drew her almost exclusively as cutesy in a way im sure they wouldnt have done for a boy
man she's fucking awesome like idk what to say that i havent said above. she spends most of the story being physically GROSS she has big yellow teeth she eats like an animal she loves to kill people. then she gets back to her normal self of dark-skinned fat woman who's described as not particularly attractive and generally pretty weird. by which i mean she's hot as fuck. she never stops being outrageously horny all while she's got a full husband waiting for her back home. she justifies this to herself somewhat but it's clear this is a morally questionable action and she just dgaf lmfao. she's headstrong and completely insane and genuinely STRANGE like she is fucking weird!! in a way female characters dont tend to get to be. and of course her dynamic with caleb is something i could talk about for years and years. it's such a fun dissection of the 'sad father and feisty daughter' that doesn't ever contradict itself, just lets the audience (and other players!) make assumptions that later get disproved. a large part of her arc centers around choosing whether to settle down or not and she doesn't even end up settling down! arguably the one character who had the strongest foundation for going back to nurture a family by the end and she doesnt! or she does, but it's clear that everything she's gone through has given her a taste of something she isn't going to be able to live without, and it's simply not feasible for her to go back to her life of housewife anymore. she loves her husband but feels confined by her relationship with him and the story both of them with endless empathy. she CAN choose both by the end, it isn't family or career, it's both. she has love and adventure. she doesn't have to be there for her son 24/7. she literally gets the deadbeat father treatment where she's worried that she's gonna have to go back to raise her kid. she's literally a deadbeat mom. and the solution is not to become Just a mother but just to get like. a work-life balance. she gets to have both and she isn't a villain for wanting both. she's just a normal woman. who is completely insane for unrelated reasons. everyone talk more about veth brenatto
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