letícia @liampotter - Tumblr Blog

How it genuinely feels to still be reading fan fictions from fandoms I’ve been in since I was 12

STOP PUTTING YOUR OC UNDER “X READER”!!!!! I DONT WANT TO READ YOUR STINKY LOVE STORY, *I* WANT TO BE THE LOVE STORY!!!!

abigail

unfortunately i do think i am in fact doomed forever but at least there’s movies and music and idk probably some other things too

istascha-deactivated20260222

my body is a machine that turns normal situations into psychological horror

perriaeyjeve

monchursouls

🌾🌾🌾

Harvesting my wheat

rat-in-the-grain

Hehehehehe

monchursouls

Can I fucking help you?

sasuke-offical

my senior english teacher told me that any scene with a woman in a cornfield in every piece of literature ever is about her journey to womanhood/pleasuring herself in the field and i just.... believed her

What

What

i know this isn't the reguar theme of this blog but i need to share it somewhere because today someone called my local fire department because they found

a horse

fjordfolk

and not only was it a not-dead horse, they dug it up and it was

a lil muddy, mostly

rabbithaver

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

curious as to whether ao3 had an uptick in traffic yesterday...

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

delighted to learn there is an increase in ao3 traffic corresponding annually to christmas, thanksgiving etc. truly the "meaning of the holidays" is about reading porn to cope with being stuck indoors with relatives

meangreenspaceman

man I sure love that character I wish the writers did too

0l0x

2018 Grinch has no edge. He’s got no bite. He’s not even that much of an asshole. He’s just a sassy gay furry with unusually nice teeth despite his famous theme song declaring otherwise.

1966 Grinch? Now that was a mean, scary bastard. He was a crusty old fuck who hated society so much that he only came off his shitty frozen mountain to commit crimes and terrorism out of spite.

Bennyhoo Cumberland Grinch comes down from his mountain to buy groceries.

You can round the edges off a character to make them more “relatable” or whatever, but you also run the risk of losing what defined them in the first place. The end result is bland and generic.

2018 Grinch is a reflection of modern society’s rejection of real character flaws in the interest of being “unproblematic” and in this essay i will

lovinglystar

What was your opinion on the Jim Carrey grinch?

cottagesmasher

Jim Carrey Grinch said bitch, ate glass and threw a whole child in the garbage. He is an absolute champ and the only rightful heir to the throne.

milquetoastism

e-e-e-s-the-avatar

The Blue Spirit putting out firebending with a bucket of water is the absolute funniest thing ever done in avatar combat. It just is.

thequantumqueer

katara: *kicks zuko’s ass without even blinking* zuko:

finding-flight

I literally just watched this episode, and I’m sorry, but there’s one thing funnier:

Zuko couldn’t speak during this whole fight/escape in case someone recognized his voice. Can you imagine the frustration he must have felt having to go through an entire fight without yelling? Zuko???

sweetiepie08

Especially while dealing with Aang’s shenanigans?!?!?!

One of my favorite parts of rewatching the episode is imagining everything that must have been going through Zuko’s head during that escape.

Aang: Wait! My friends need to suck on those frogs!

Zuko, trying not yell out of anger and confusion:

art-and-writing-knox-me-down

It gets funnier when you think that he could absolutely, no problem go through a battle without yelling once, as seen here and yet chooses to be a dramatic gay and holler at the top of his lungs at every opportunity.

That says a lot about how he firebends vs how he fights with the dao blades.

He actually can’t, at this point, fight without yelling if he’s using firebending. In The Firebending Masters, he says he’s been relying on anger and rage to fuel his bending, so yeah, in every firebending fight, he’s drawing on rage and hyping that up by yelling. Someone has pointed out that after he finds the original source of firebending, he stops yelling all the time - I haven’t checked that personally but it does seem accurate.

But he doesn’t need to draw on fury to firebend when he’s the Blue Spirit. He can fight in total silence when he’s working with a weapon he’s more in touch with, when he doesn’t need to draw on hate or anger to fuel it.

flameraven

I am SO curious where he learned to fight with the swords. I can’t imagine he got much training in martial weapons as a kid – he’s ROYALTY, he’s a firebender, and the focus we see on them practicing forms from a young age (and Zuko being expected to do an Agni Kai at 13!) make me think it’s likely there would have been a lot of disdain for something as pedestrian as swords. Also– @atlaculture didn’t you do something on how the split swords are a peasant weapon?

Seems like something he must have picked up after his exile, but he’s so prideful and so obsessed with “proving himself” to Ozai, I can’t imagine he’d dare to experiment with that on his own. Maybe Iroh introduced it to him? Practicing sword forms or sparring would have been a good way for him to build back muscle after what had to be a long convalescence from the burn, but without the trauma of firebending again so soon.

(You can’t convince me Zuko didn’t have some pyrophobia after the Agni Kai, and probably a heaping dose of shame along with it, because he’s the prince of the Fire Nation, he’s a fire bender, how pathetic is it for him to be afraid of fire? And yet he has to suppress a flinch every time fire gets too close, especially near his face)

atlaculture

Yup! Zuko’s dual swords are for civilian use and called niuweidao, meaning “oxtail sabers”. Historically, these sword were relatively cheap to acquire, due to their thin blades typically being made of low-quality metal that was easy to mass produce:

https://www.tumblr.com/atlaculture/718240438095593472/cultural-weapons-fire-nation-swords-pt-2?source=share

The consequence of them basically being the McDonalds of swords is that they were popular with all different kinds of poor people. The most interesting ones being… theatre troupes! Because these swords were relatively affordable, they were often used for stage and street performances. (And because the tropes of theatre carry into modern cinema and TV, you also see the niuweidao overrepresented in most kung fu-inspired media as well.)

Anyways, I bring this up because Zuko is very much a theatre kid, so maybe his sword skills actually come from observing actors using the sword and imitating them? Better yet, maybe his mother secretly taught him to use the niuweidao to boost his self-esteem? After all, she is a former theatre actress, according to the comics. It would certainly explain why it’s a skill he possesses but not Azula/Ozai/Iroh.

It would also explain why Zuko thought he could get away with hanging them on his wall as decorations. It would be like decorating your room with a Phantom of the Opera mask.

flameraven

I don’t read the comics, so now I’m wondering how on Earth Ozai married an actress! Someone so obsessed with lineage and legacy is not someone I would expect to marry down like that. Maybe Nobility were allowed to have hobbies like that in the Fire Nation? Although it seems like entertainers don’t have the best reputation given what we see of Ty Lee and the circus…

atlaculture

Without spoiling too much, Azulon forced Ursa to marry Ozai, because she’s the granddaughter of Roku and he believed she would give the royal family powerful heirs. Before that, she was just a local actress in her small town.

lizardlicks

The comics also revealed that Zuko did in fact train with Piandao himself

When exactly he started or how long he trained is never with Piandao is never addressed. Fanon theorizes that Zuko may have started his training pretty early in, on assumption that he was a non-bender since the sages predicted he wouldn’t be a firebender, and he was presumably a late bloomer (at least when compared to the expectations of the royal family).

atlaculture

For anyone wondering where the “Zuko was trained by Piandao” trivia came from. This short comic, called “Swordbending”, was published in Nickelodeon Comics Club and was later compiled into “The Lost Adventures” Avatar books.

I’m on the fence over whether I take this as canon or not. For one, It wasn’t written by any of the series’ main writers. I don’t mind Piandao being Zuko’s teacher, but I really like the idea of Ursa being the one to have taught her son. It would tie back to Zuko’s ongoing duality theming. For most of the series, his firebending is fueled by anger because everything about it goes back to his feelings of inadequacy and his father’s abuse. But when he’s dual wielding, he’s incredibly cool headed. Maybe it’s because he relates it back to time spent with his mother and her positive encouragement. Plus, it would match the rest of his Blue Spirit design, which has other references to his mother.

atlaculture

#zuko could have two teachers tbh#stage combat and actual combat have different priorities and techniques#learning one can absolutely give you an edge for the other but they aren’t 1:1#and i can’t call to mind any evidence that ursa was an assassin or anything—imo she could defend herself but her real skill is showmanship#tbh i feel like it fits the themes of the narrative—ursa trains zuko as much as she knows how to#but it’s mostly a showy style that doesn’t hold up to more intense combat situations so he builds on it without her

@falconfate

I agree. While I think Ursa taught Zuko the basics and showed him some really flashy moves, I think his combat abilities were really refined during his banishment. Like I mentioned earlier, Zuko’s swords were historically popular among the lower levels of society, such as actors and criminals/rebels. Zuko spent three years on a ship full of sailors and probably spent a lot of time docked in seedy port cities where pirates hung out. He basically got to experience the full spectrum of what dual broadswords (niuweidao) were capable of.

Anyways, enjoy Michelle Yeoh rocking the dual broadswords (niuweidao) against Zhang Ziyi’s single straight blade (jian).